deercountry | 002: I'll lure you like a landslide

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002: I'll lure you like a landslide

Who: Closed log for the Pines Family
What: Mabel runs afoul of a blood blister and hits beasthood on the spot. Fortunately, she has three familial blood bonds with people who love her very much, all of whom will do damn near anything for family.
When: Some convenient time earlyish in the month
Where: Out in the woods between Gaze and the sea + Dreamscapes

Content Warnings: Gross blood blister stuff, body horror relating to a young teen hitting abrupt beasthood, beast violence, attempted emotional manipulation which quite frankly isn't going to work very well, paleblood dreamscape nonsense

Mabel does not typically cut through the trees during her frequent forays to the ocean. It's far safer to use the lamps, and she is well aware of this. But after months and months of bitter chill and gloom, the sense of spring waking everything up hits her hard, and she just can't help but wander in. She tells herself she just wants to gather up some of the weird fruits and things that are growing in strange places, and bring them home for science reasons. Then she passes the Sanguine Station and its lamp and tells herself she's already made it halfway there, and may as well walk the rest of the way. And then, then she spots a blood blister, big and bulbous and absolutely not something you can mistake for a fruit.

Unfortunately, Mabel is exactly the sort of person who finds gross things and immediately pokes them with a stick.

The ensuing explosion is foul enough that Mabel cannot even bring herself to find it neat, and she doesn't really have time to anyway. Even if the rest of her family isn't paying much attention to their bonds, Mabel's emotions in the next several moments are intense enough to be distracting -- her overall cheerful mood and gentle curiosity twisting abruptly into shock and alarm, which only increases as the pollution around her pulls and her whole body begins to contort itself. Prone to corruption, she's used to the itch of her canine teeth lengthening; now, all of her teeth elongate at once, and so does her entire face. Her hands curl into fists without her telling them too, flesh and bone fusing together into sharp, sharp hooves, and she loses her balance entirely and falls right over as various bits of her skeleton decide they want to be aimed in different directions than before. But even with all that, her fear only lasts a few moments before it's replaced by a horrible, manic sort of glee, and laying in a blood bath in the middle of the woods, laughter bubbles up in Mabel's throat.

She is someone who finds beauty in everything. What's happening is scary and it hurts, but it's so cool. Her ears are crawling to a different part of her head and it's so cool, and she can feel the strength permeating her limbs as they settle, and isn't it just amazing that they're in a place where bodies can do this? Isn't it amazing to be one thing and then be something else, and know it's happening?

While the other Pines gather themselves together to come after her, Mabel spends some time frolicking around in her new body. Having a go at running at full speed only sends her crashing directly into a tree, but the arrival of other beasts distracts her, and she discovers with a certain smugness that her new hooves are ideal for chopping up fleshy things. She feels good and powerful and beautiful, and she knows if anyone were to see her they would be full of awe and terror, and Mabel loves that for herself, honestly. Eventually she comes across a stray pond, brackish and poisonous and just the right size for the cutest and greatest kelpie in all the land, and settles happily into it. The feel of her through the blood bond now is decidedly predatory.

Perhaps someone or something shall come close to her pond to investigate. Perhaps, when they do, she shall eat them.

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An advantage the other Pines have here is that Mabel is doing exactly nothing to try and conceal herself. When Dipper transformed last December, he was sneaky and conniving, ready to do all sorts of rude and stealthy things to get his way. Mabel is also of a mind to be very rude, but she wants to be found. She wants anyone who strays too close to be unable to resist coming even closer, and to that end she will be terribly easy to track down.

The problem, they'll find, is that certain vileblood qualities Mabel hasn't sorted out how to use as a human are working overdrive in beasthood. For all that her blood has been pleasantly unpoisonous this month, at least as a kelpie, her ability to cause disorientation remains -- and it's not necessarily an unpleasant sensation, which makes it even more dangerous. The closer they get to Mabel's pond, the worse it will be.

It hits Dipper hard. He doesn't even remember what he was doing before when it tears through him, leaving a rippling shock wave in it's wake that seeps deep in his heart. His blood soaks it up, like it did many things of an emotional nature, and he's left shaken and distraught as he tries to pull himself to his feet and run.

Dipper trips, slams into the door frame of their bedroom, and the world spins around him, shifting into something different. He smells sulfur and bogwater, feels the pull on his legs as if sloshing through a marsh. Everything is green and dense and there's this feeling of poison and miasma. He shouts, takes another step, and the house is back. More panicked than ever, he runs down the hall.

His foot catches an uneven board and the world shifts once again. Twisted trees and black vines with thorns as sharp as daggers. A sinister, gleeful laugh rings out and Dipper dives away from something in his periphery that he knows meant him harm.

He plummets down the stairs with in a thunderous racket, screaming. It doesn't even stop him, really. If his uncles catch it happening, he's only on the ground for a moment before he is dragging himself back up, terrified tears staining his face.

"Mabel- Mabel!"

Hearing chaotic thudding and the sounds of someone colliding with various pieces of furniture isn't exactly an unusual thing when you live with Dipper Pines, and even him tumbling down the stairs doesn't merit that much comment. The boy is impressively graceless even by the standards of this family. Even so, hearing him scream from upstairs, where he has been unattended and unobserved for several hours now, sends a visceral and awful sort of fear lancing through Ford, flinging him back to his first October in Deerington as surely as if he'd been transported there directly.

He's on his feet in an instant and at the foot of the stairs only a moment later, reaching out to help pull Dipper to his feet. No signs of injuries (aside from whatever he might have gotten from his trip down the stairs), which actually makes his distress even more alarming. Especially considering:

"I don't-- Mabel's not with you?"

Dipper grabs onto Ford like a vice grip, despite how chaotic and panicked his movements are otherwise. He can't decide if he wants to pull out of his grasp, or if he desperately needs his support. He's in a fucking state.

"No- No, she's-! She needs help," He manages to choke out, between what feels like a heart attack. The ground beneath his feet shifts again, and the smell of horrible swamp water fills his nose. "Somethings wrong. Something's really wrong!"

Ford knows better than to try to force someone who's panicking to hold still, but Dipper's current flailing state is pretty untenable. So he does the next best thing and hauls Dipper upright, setting him down firmly on his own two feet.

"Dipper, focus." Ford has seen enough in Trench - and enough of Dipper in Trench - to recognize that this degree of panic when there's apparently nothing wrong in the immediate area probably has something to do with his Paleblood powers. That's good for them, but only if Dipper calms down enough to relay what he's managed to gather. "If Mabel is in trouble then we'll help her - but I need you to tell me what know first so we can find her, alright?"

Being picked up and then put back down on solid ground does a lot to snap him out of it. He finds himself more or less in the waking world again, even if some of him still felt out of sync with everything else. It's a weird feeling, dreamlike and yet somehow between two realms. It reminded him a lot of the Dream, the way his powers were sometimes.

He latches onto Ford's voice and takes a deep, shaking breath. He does it one more time, and he manages to even out.

"O-Okay. Okay."

He grabs a hold of Ford's arms and closes his eyes again. There's a more pointed shift in the air around them. Things grey out, reality dips, and the world crumbles away leaving them standing in a swamp. It's eerie and still until something dark materializes out of the corner of their eyes, something with cruel eyes that lets out a vicious, joyful laugh.

Dipper lets go with a gasp, and the house fades back in. He's pale and looking like he might start to panic again.

"Corruption- She's- what happened to me in December!"

Ford tries to not let it bother him but there's something inherently disquieting about the way Dipper's powers work, the fade to gray that precedes reality itself flaking away around them. It's hard to not see Dipper's dreamwalking, or Stan's blue fire, or his own ability to distort gravity and reality, and not think of Bill when he does.

But this time it's easy to push aside. Dipper might be pulling them into a projection just like Bill might have, but this time it's working to their advantage. He looks around at the swamp, gaze sharp and mind alert for details. They're in a swamp, he can see, but not a swamp that he's familiar with. Which doesn't necessarily meant it's not a normal swamp, but Ford has gotten very familiar with Trench in the six months since their arrival.

Corruption pretty much just seals that assumption. At the house fades back in Ford lapses into thought.

"Dipper. I don't know where that swamp is, but it's not anywhere in Trench."

He doesn't like the idea of asking, but they don't have much choice.

"Could you use your dreamwalking to pinpoint her location?"

It's very clever of Dipper, to twist his paleblood powers around his bonds with the rest of his family in an attempt to allow them all to pull her out. The problem is that the dreamscape is something she and Dipper have been practicing together, and while Mabel isn't usually as readily able to manipulate it as she was her Mabeland bubble, the sheer amount of rampant corruption it took to twist her into a kelpie seeps into the dreamscape itself and twists it, too.

Mabeland was a horrific pile of vivid colors and 80's synth pop on endless repeat. This new bubble, under Mabel's influence, looks rather more like something out of a Tim Burton movie, accompanied of course by the appropriate Danny Elfman soundtrack. Once she finds the slightest weakness in Dipper's hold over the place, she pushes, and the end result is much the same as Mabeland, actually. Her family is split up within the dream, and each of them find themselves in a tempting scenario crafted especially for them courtesy of Mabel's subconscious.

Of course it will be Dipper who understands immediately just how far Mabel has gone. After all, he's been building this dreamscape for the two of them with Mabel's involvement, their natural tendency to be in sync as twins allowing her to manipulate the setting if and only if Dipper is the one who builds it. Her fingerprints are all over the place here -- and now, they are smudged, corruption pouring into the dream as an echo of the way it currently runs through Mabel's entire everything. It's not unlike the moment in Mabeland when Dipper began to catch on and go his own way, only to have the various characters in the landscape around him twist into something wicked and threatening.

Except, weirdly, these new changes feel less likely to be anything that would lash out. In Mabeland, she was subconsciously trying to protect herself. Here, in her beast form, she is much more interested in playing with her food.

It starts out simple enough -- Dipper finds himself in a wooded area, homey in the same way the trees surrounding the Mystery Shack became familiar and beloved over the summer they spent there, despite the weird aesthetic. There is a path for Dipper to follow. At the end of that path, there is a tower, a grand stone thing with ivy growing all up the sides and a big medieval door. It extends high enough that the bulk of it is lost in the treetops, and two things are obvious: This is Mabel's idea of a magic wizard tower, and also, she wants her brother to investigate it.

The path behind him disappears, to ensure that he does. And, when Dipper gets close enough, he will discover a plaque on the door. The plaque has an engraving in fancy swirling text:

D. Pines
Magic & Mystery
Professional Ghost Harasser

Dipper is deeply in tune with the very nature of this place for all the reasons stated above. He knows the minute he activated his powers that something had gone ...not wrong, exactly, but topsy-turvey. Twisted. It wasn't what he was banking on to happen, but it did tell him something important.

Whatever was happening to Mabel, she was definitely still in there. He could still reach her. He just needed to play her game for a while longer and try to draw her out. Sort through whatever strange stage she'd built to try and lure him, and keep his wits about him. He made it through Mabeland once, he could do it again.

Of course, this time, Mabel was just as ready for his stubborn bullshit as he was ready for her temptuous whims.

The tower was a nice touch, though, he'll give her that. He walks up to the door, putting his hand on the plaque. He quirks a small smile, shaking his head.

"Nice try, Mabel, but you're going to have to try harder than that."

With that, he opens the door.

The scene that Mabel builds for Stan is, at first, a little lackluster, in that when the setting shifts him away from the others, he finds himself simply walking through an average Trench street. Certainly a few tell-tale signs of Mabel are there -- even as a beast she just can't bear to leave everything black and gloomy, and there are a few shocks of color strewn across surfaces here and there, like the iridescence of an oil slick. Still, she's complained about Trench's aesthetic and her personal mission to improve upon it several times since they've arrived, so the fact that she'd leave it as much like it is seems a little weird.

Her reasoning becomes clearer once Stan rounds a corner. Just a little ways up, the Murder Hut shines so hard it actively sparkles against the rest of Trench, smugly ostentatious.

When Stan enters the building, he'll find it's not the Murder Hut he built, the one he's accustomed to. Rather, it's grown and expanded into a proper museum -- but not a boring museum like Mabel used to get carted off to on school trips. A cool museum, with architecture that looks like it came out of an Escher painting in some spots, the better to hide exhibits in cool places. Many of the classics Stan currently keeps grace the front of the museum, welcoming as old friends, and the creations only get wilder and wilder the further in he goes. They're skeleton versions of the kinds of things Stan has seen on the more concerning pages of Mabel's sketchbook, up to and including a weird fish thing with multiple arms jutting out in all directions. The floor is marble and looks as though it imitates darkblood, deep spooky black with glimmering red shot through it. The gold accents on the fixtures around the exhibits shine, meticulously polished.

But where Mabel's real care has gone is in dreaming up NPCs for Stan to play with. No sooner has he finished taking the place in than he's bombarded by Trenchies, several of them kids, eager to see not the museum, but him. The exhibits are great and all, but Stan will understand instinctively through the dream that he himself is a crucial part of the show, and the part that makes it truly successful. Through his coldblood, he can make some of his creatures spit fire or lightning at his whim. Through darkblood glyphs provided by Ford, he can saunter up the upside-down staircases as he rants about his exhibits and make it look completely natural. In Mabel's vision, her Grunkle Stan is not a conman but a showman, and the things he can think up and do are held properly in awe.

It's touching. Truly.

Outside of love and appreciation for his niece, however, Stan isn't taken in by it for a second. Mabel is cunning in her way, but she is also a teenaged girl. Stan is old enough to be cunning in ways she has no hope of understanding yet, and even before they arrived in Trench, he was good enough at dreamscapes like this to lure an eldritch dream demon unsuspecting to his death within Stan's own mind. Smiling fondly, Stan waves his hands at the NPCs until they simmer down, promising them an extra special tour he absolutely isn't going to give. Then he moseys off to where he knows there to be an intercom -- did Mabel install an intercom? If she didn't, there's one there now -- and his voice rings out through the museum, and the whole dream at large.

"Hey, Ford. Where're you at?"

Ford is the Pines that Mabel is still having some trouble wrapping her head around. It's not that she doesn't love him. She does. It's not that she thinks he might not love them. He's been coming out of his shell little by little since they came to Trench, and if Mabel had any doubts left, the fact that he was willing to make a blood bond with all three of them last month erased them -- Ford has a metal plate in his head explicitly to keep other people out of it, and if he didn't want a supernatural emotional connection to his family, there's simply no way they could have gotten him to agree to it. No, the problem is that she doesn't know him very well, still. He's the nerdy one who likes Dipper stuff, mysterious and missing for decades, and while Mabel and Ford are able to share more of their own passions with one another than they used to be, she just doesn't have a true and proper read on him yet.

To that end, there's no distinct entry into the scene that Mabel builds for him. He walks along in the weird, weird woods for a time, only to walk into a clearing that looks just like his basement lab as Mabel remembers it from the few times she's dared to invade it. When he turns around the forest is gone and he's fully enclosed in the lab, perfectly familiar, save for two crucial differences.

There are windows on either side of the doorway out, and sunlight is streaming in through those windows. Sort of. Sunlight inasmuch as Trench has sunlight. And also, there are noises. Mechanical, clunking, occasionally wheezing noises that sound suspiciously reminiscent of the roving castle in one of Mabel's favorite movies from home, Wail's Meandering Fortress.

The interesting thing about experience with the mindscape is that it doesn't necessarily mean you'll always notice that you're dreaming. Ford is aware in a semi-lucid sort of way that what he's seeing and experiencing isn't normal, but it fails to consciously register as something he should be concerned about - not even when the environment morphs and fluctuates around him in a distinctly dream-like fashion, or when he notices the sunlit windows on either side of the laboratory entrance.

Instead his attention is caught by the mechanical clunking emanating from the... walls? From above him? For a moment he's reminded of Fiddleford and his proclivity towards machinery, but Fiddleford isn't here. Even if he suddenly is, he hasn't been here nearly so long as to have converted the entire household into some sort of mechanical nightmare. So then what's the source, and why is there something familiar about it?

He strides forward, straight past the doorway and towards the stairs that will lead him up and, presumably, into the main part of the house.

Eventually, of course, in true Gravity Falls style, they win.

How? By way of the unconditional love of family, and also, rampant destruction.

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002: I'll lure you like a landslide

Mabel Quest

lets GO

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Dreamscapes

For Dipper

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For Stan: Plotted thread summarized with player permission!

For Ford

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Finale