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Stan had seen skeletons before, humanoid and otherwise, and they’d never particularly rattled him. He wasn’t a fan of dead bodies by any means, but unlike the living, they were nice and predictable. Skeletons usually didn’t expose you in the middle of a heist or get you run out of town, and for that reason, he tolerated them just fine.
But there was something about this one that unsettled him, in a way that had to be all in his head, yet still set his hands shaking and his heart racing. It was as if he’d just woken up from a nightmare, still shaken and panicked but having already forgotten what he’d been so afraid of.
Stan never felt like this when he saw the dead. He didn’t understand…
Maybe… maybe it was just something about how the body had seemed to almost lurk in the shadows, how they’d nearly passed it by completely before Dipper had noticed it and pointed it out. Maybe it was something about how the skeleton still wore a pair of black-rimmed glasses that concealed its eyes, or how it was cloaked in a long brown coat, one that had somehow avoided being decomposed like the body and its other clothes. Or maybe it was the offness of the hands that curled protectively around a red, rectangular item in its lap — an offness that, Stan realized, was due to the extra fingers.
Dipper approached the skeleton slowly and reverently, as if expecting it to spring to life, and laid a hand on the item it cradled. He grimaced, as if some shock had coursed through him, but his expression relaxed a moment later, and he pulled out a heavy-looking tome, bound in red leather and with the image of a six-fingered hand emblazoned on the cover.
Even Stan — who was by far the least magical person in the room, no contest — could tell there was something up about that book. As Dipper cautiously began to flip through the pages, he could feel magical energy radiating off of it in waves, making his stomach churn and and his hands grow sweaty…
“It’s all spells,” Dipper reported after a moment or two of perusing. “And a lot of different types, too. Conjuration, alchemy, evocation…”
He lowered his voice to a near-whisper. “It looks like even some necromancy…”
“And the actual book’s gotta be magic too, right?” Mabel asked. “What happened there when you grabbed it?”
“I don’t know, it was weird. It felt like it was… resisting me? Deciding whether it wanted to let me take it or not? I know how dumb this sounds, but it felt… sentient.”
He let out a small, sheepish laugh. “It might have just been my imagination, though; I —”
The book slammed shut beneath his hands, and he jumped.
“Oh, wow! You sure are a magic book with some real attitude, aren’t you?” Mabel asked it. “Can you do something like that again?”
The book didn’t oblige, lying perfectly still. Waddles waddled up towards it and gave it a sniff, and Dipper yanked it away. “Hey, this isn’t for you! It could be cursed, for all we know.”
“Come one, Dipper, Waddles knows that books are friends and not food! He’s a well-learned gentleman!” Mabel crouched down to give her pig a pat on the head, but almost as soon as she’d laid her right hand on the ground, she grimaced and lifted it back up. Even in the cave’s dim light, Stan could make out the thick layer of dust coating it.
All three of them turned to look where the skeleton had once been, but now the trenchcoat and glasses rested upon a pile of fine gray ash and crumbled bones, having silently spilled out across the cave floor after the removal of the book.
***
A year passes — and then some.
***
“This place has always thrived because of… well, what else? Advertising. We’ve got a few consistent channels — surely you received a brochure in the mail, or saw our billboards, or met someone drawn here by a beam of magical light. Those are just a few tools of the trade, and they served us well during our residency here —”
A smile was creeping across Edward’s face, making less effort with every moment to conceal its sadistic delight.
“But Stanley, I’m sure you know the most successful type of advertising, don’t you?”
“Word of mouth,” Stan instantly replied.
Edward went silent for a moment, as his controlled grin morphed into a wide smile of bared teeth. Next to him, Lydia’s expression mirrored her brother’s.
“Stanley, you landed on ‘Skull’ in the last round, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. Why do you —”
“Bad luck.”
Edward tilted his hand ever so slightly, just enough for the Animus Bell to let out an eerie, distorted ring, and Stan instantly felt like the weight of a fully-loaded wagon had struck him in the gut.
The force hurtled him backwards and sent a numbness rushing down his limbs, freezing up all his fingers. The color seeped out of his vision in the blink of an eye, leaving him to stare at the grayscale back of his own body as it stumbled away from the twins, threatening to collapse to the floor — and then caught itself.
“You know,” Stan’s own voice declared, “this place is really starting to grow on me. I think I’m gonna go tell everyone I see about the great deal we got here.”
“Kids?” Stan yelled. “That’s not me! I didn’t say that!”
But his words made no sound no matter how loud he screamed, and Dipper and Mabel’s eyes stayed fixed on Stan’s corporeal form with twin looks of horror.
“Uh, yeah! Sure!” Mabel managed to choke out. “But can we, you know, actually get our prize before we leave? We sure worked hard for that Animus Bell, didn’t we?”
“We sure did, wonderful niece Mabel who I love!” Edward replied from within Stan’s body. His spectral form flickered behind Stan for just a moment, and Lydia appeared by his side, still in the form of an elf. “How about this: I take the bell, and you two can stay here for the rest of eternity — except you’ll get to live! How’s that for an offer?”
“Let them go, you bastard!” Stan roared, and reached out to try to strike at the liches even though he knew he couldn’t hurt them — but instead, he found himself drifting backwards, pulled away from the platform and towards the roof by a force that felt like it was tugging at his heart itself, dragging his soul away no matter how hard he fought, how desperately he tried to reach towards Dipper and Mabel —
He managed to turn himself around, and a hundred yellow-eyed creatures instantly scurried out of sight, but he hardly noticed them. His eyes, his incorporeal form, his entire being — they were drawn to one singular feature of the ethereal plane, a giant X-shaped rift that glowed blue at its boundaries, but led to what seemed like an endless sea of pure midnight black.
Even Stan could piece together what this was — a portal to the astral plane. And if he was drifting into it, that meant he was dying.
For a moment, Dipper thought it was his own hands that were involuntarily shaking in fear — and they easily might have been shaking after all, because he didn’t know if he’d ever felt this afraid and helpless before in his life — but when he looked down, he saw the Journal practically shuddering, as if trying to break out of his tight, panicked grip. He let his fingers relax just slightly, and the Journal immediately fell to the ground right in front of him and flipped open its cover open. Sparks of red electricity lept between the pages as they turned all of their own accord, finally coming to a rest on…
“Magic Jar.” A spell to project your soul out of your own body, and possess another being.
Dipper took a deep breath, and wrapped his fingers around a gemstone in his pocket with one hand while raising his wand with the other.
“Here’s a fucking offer for you,” he growled to the liches. “How about I take my uncle back?”
Mabel cried out as Dipper’s eyes went blank and his body toppled to the ground, but she must have noticed the page the Journal lay open to, because after just a few seconds her panic subsided, and she placed herself between Dipper’s body and the liches, hands crackling with sparks of magic. Dipper took just a moment to breathe a spectral sigh of relief that she’d gotten the message, and began to fly towards Stan —
Except, he could see two Stans now, one corporeal but possessed and the other just a flickering light being drawn towards an inky black sea, towards a portal to a collapsing afterlife. There was no real choice here — he flew towards Stan’s soul as fast as he could, and grabbed ahold of his hand.
Stan’s momentum yanked him forwards, and they nearly both went flying into the rift, but somehow, Dipper brought them both to a halt. Even in his disembodied form, his arms burned with the exertion — but he barely noticed, because all he could think was that Stan was okay. They were going to save him. Stan would be okay.
Stan himself just stared at Dipper with wide eyes, first in shock but then in panic. What if you fall in too?
Dipper smiled, and reached to grab Stan with his other arm. I won’t. I promise.
He didn’t know where the confidence came from, but he felt more certain of it than anything else in the world — except maybe the fact that he and Stan weren’t alone.
The two of them stayed at a stalemate with the astral plane for a few more seconds, no longer falling towards it but unable to fully break away from its pull, and on the other side of the rift, Dipper could see tendrils of blue lightning practically raining down from the sky to strike the tar-like surface of the water. There wasn’t a single deceased soul in sight — just a dark and unrelenting storm, lit by raging bolts of blue.
Somewhere deep within that storm, a single slit-pupiled eye grew wide with glee.
In front of Mabel, the two perplexed-looking liches began to step towards her, but the Journal let out a burst of red electricity, and they recoiled. It slowly flipped open to a new page, then fell perfectly still, and Mabel read the spell it displayed:
“Planar Binding.”
Eyes glowing white and hands surrounded by pink sparks, Mabel turned her back to the liches and lowered her vision into the ethereal plane. It was gray, and harsh, and unfamiliar — Dipper had always been the one who would experiment with dimensional magic, not her — but there were also two figures that she’d recognize anywhere, and she reached out to them with every ounce of warmth and strength she had.
As they pulled away from the rift ever so slowly, Dipper and Stan saw the ethereal plane light up with color. Two bright pink spectral arms stretched out towards them, grabbing one of them in each hand and guiding them back towards the platform where Mabel stood, beaming with relief. The Journal lay at her feet, depleted of energy but just as relieved as her.
***
A lich slowly and deliberately paced around a small room, skeletal six-fingered hands crossed behind his back. Sheets of light brown paper hung from the ceiling like curtains, all of them covered in anxiously scribbled calculations and diagrams — of the Bureau, of the planar system, of the journal he was trapped in. It shouldn’t have been hard to escape from a room with paper for walls, but no matter how many pages he tore down, he always found more sheets behind them to take their place, and the size of his prison never seemed to grow.
Now more than ever, he berated himself — this was no one’s fault but his own. He’d been experimenting with ways to trap a being that had no physical form, but he’d completely forgotten to consider what happened to him whenever he died — more than a little ironic, given how much concentration he would have to put into maintaining his lich form in those early years, how simultaneously fascinated and fearful he’d been of the idea of becoming pure magic. He should have known better, and now who knew what price his family would pay?
Above him, a golden hand cut a translucent window through the red leather ceiling, and through it he could see the telltale flying sparks of a magical duel. He wished desperately, so desperately, that he could help, but he’d already expended so much energy showing the kids the spells and keeping their tormentors at bay while they saved Stan — a worthy cause, for sure, but one that had left him completely exhausted and useless. He would just have to hope they could finish the fight on their own…
A particularly bright flash went off outside, and all of a sudden, the Journal came to life in a way Ford hadn’t felt in years. This was not the way it activated when recording an enemy’s spells, or absorbing their wand — no, this was what happened when a being that made of pure magic down to its very essence was defeated. This was something that hadn’t happened since Ford himself had been trapped here — the complete and total absorption of a lich.
A gust of wind struck him in the face as the pages opened, sucking in a fashionably dressed elf who toppled to the ground right before Ford. He looked disheveled and disoriented, but not afraid.
Not yet, Ford thought to himself himself, as sparks of electricity leapt between his fingers.
“W-who are you?” Edward stammered. “What is this place?”
“Are you the one,” Ford asked with a controlled voice and a tight smile, “who’s been hurting my family out there?”
Edward didn’t answer. “Where are we? How did I get here? How did you get here?”
Ford would never be sure if it was the already-beginning absorption of Edward’s magic, or the sheer rage he felt towards the man who’d possessed his brother, or some combination of both that gave him the surge of energy he felt at that moment — but as he rose up off the brown paper floor, electricity surging through him, there was one thing that he was certain of: he was going to drain this lich of every drop of magic making up that ridiculously gaudy spectral form, and then, one way or another, he and his family were finally going to have a talk.
***
The Journal tumbled across the floor and slammed violently into the ground like it had been pinned down by some invisible force, shooting off more tendrils of lightning that Stan had ever seen it emit before. Lydia tried to grab hold of it, as if hoping she could pry it open to free her brother, but it smacked her in the face, and her form spasmed for a moment as the lightning coursed through it, briefly revealing her true black-cloaked appearance.
Then it thumped to the floor again and opened wide, pages flipping by in a blur as it spat out a charred-looking Edward. He locked eyes — wide, terrified eyes — with his sister, and rasped:
“Remember how dangerous we got, back when we were so desperate to save our little brother?”
Lydia cried out and rushed to his side, but as she grabbed ahold of his arm, he crumbled away, leaving her nothing but a handful of ash.
“I guess we really needed each other after all…” she murmured softly, and her eyes lit up with grey flames. Without a single word, she pointed a finger at Stan’s unconscious body on the runway, and a storm of black magic descended.
Stan instinctively raised one hand to cover nonexistent eyes, and pulled Dipper and Mabel close to him with the other. The wind nearly tossed him away from the kids, but after what felt like minutes but must have been less, the roaring of the storm died down and his vision began to clear…
“Oh no,” he heard Mabel gasp.
Lydia was gone, and so was Stan’s body. His possessions were all strewn about the room, seemingly intact, but his human form was nowhere to be seen — and he couldn’t even bring himself to grieve for it. It was horrible, he knew, but for some reason he was suddenly overwhelmed with gratitude, with relief, that he would never again have to see his own face reflected in a mirror.
For just a second, he let out the first few notes of a bitter laugh before catching himself and turning to face the twins, who were staring at him with almost the same level of horror as when Edward had possessed his body.
“Sorry,” he began. “I don’t know what got into me —”
He heard a thump below him, and looked down to find the Journal at his feet. The waves of energy radiating off of it felt more powerful than ever, and it was open to a page Stan had never seen before: a blank page.
Dipper and Mabel stepped back as red sparks danced across the paper, but Stan didn’t move — couldn’t move.
He’s looking at the Journal — no, not the journal. The one Stan’s seeing now has a number written over the hand emblem, and it’s drifting in a tank of viscous-looking fluid as a thin, glowing tentacle slowly wraps around it —
Suddenly back in reality as quickly as he’d been jolted out of it, he fell to his knees. In front of him, he saw the Journal’s red sparks subside — but not without leaving behind a mark. Three short words had been carefully singed onto the page:
ARE YOU OK?
Before Stan could answer, he was somewhere else again.
He’s lying in a field and staring up at the sky, and the side of his jaw hurts like hell. He can tell by the length of his hair that he’s pretty young, and he can tell without having any idea how that there’s someone else lying down next to him, just a few feet away and facing the same direction.
“Are you okay?” that someone asks, and Stan realizes he’s remembered this day before, but every other time he’s thought back to it, the stranger’s voice has been hopelessly garbled by static.
“‘Course I am,” he replies. “Who would there be to always have your back if I wasn’t?”
The other voice chuckles. “Thanks for standing up for me, Stanley.”
They lie there for a few more minutes, just long enough for Stan to notice something else the static has left untouched this time. It’s the two-sunned, light purple sky.
And then he was back.
“I think so,” he answered the Journal. “I… well, I ain’t dead, at least.”
I’M GLAD, it wrote beneath its question. Then it flipped to a new page, and began another message:
HARD TO EXPLAIN RIGHT NOW
PLEASE TRUST ME
OK?
Around them, the remnants of Wonderland went up in black smoke and other competitors began to stumble out of their rooms, but Stan hardly noticed.
“Yeah,” he told the Journal. “I trust you.”
TURN OFF STONES OF FARSPEECH
Dipper and Mabel looked reluctant, but Stan nodded, and they did as the Journal said.
The next message was spread across two pages, and Stan quickly realized it wasn’t truly a message, but a crude drawing. When it was about halfway complete, Dipper gasped. “Isn’t that the Bureau of the Blind Eye?”
The sparks crackled more vigorously for a moment, as if to say Yes. As the map reached completion, an arrow appeared in Fiddleford’s office, pointing to an attached hallway that Stan had never been down.
HERE WE FIND THE ANSWERS YOU DESERVE
***
There’s a knock on the door of Stan’s quarters, and after eighty-two years of living with the same six people on the same ship, he can instantly tell two things about the person waiting outside: one, that it’s Ford, and two, that he’s nervous about something.
“Come in, Sixer,” he calls out, and Ford makes his way inside.
“I have a… weird favor to ask,” he begins.
“With you, that’s every favor,” Stan replies, and Ford smiles sadly.
“This one is weird even by my standards, I’m afraid,” he explains. “And… it’s very important. I’ve been researching some new types of magic — some potentially very dangerous types, I’ll be the first to admit — and trying to develop, well… a sort of failsafe, I suppose. A safety net, to ensure there’s never a cycle where we all die before Bill finds us.”
Stan sighs. He doesn’t like the sound of any of that — doesn’t like the sound of new, dangerous magic, doesn’t like the sound of messing with life and death even more than they already have — but just one glance at the stubborn, determined look in Ford’s eyes tells him that he doesn’t have a chance of convincing his brother otherwise.
“Well, I’m not gonna lie, whatever you’re planning is probably gonna scare the shit outta me, but it sounds like it’s for a noble goal and all. What’s the favor?”
Ford tries to hide it, but Stan can tell that he lets out a sigh of relief.
“I need you to help me have the best day ever…”
***
Stan was thrown backwards into the barricade of furniture pushed up against the door, and his newly cloned body ached as he struggled to get to his feet again. His assailant — one of several shadowy humanoid figures, all of them devoid of color except for their sickly yellow eyes and the cold blue flames that wreathed their hands — turned away from him and faced Mabel, who bravely stood her ground alongside Waddles as a dozen of the shadows advanced towards her.
Time slowed down to an agonizing crawl, and Stan could tell there was no way he’d make it to Mabel’s side fast enough to help her. And it wasn’t just Mabel — the rest of the room’s occupants were in equally dire straits. Wendy was holding her ground against two robotic-looking shadows, but had backed into a corner, while Candy stood over an injured Grenda, desperately launching bolts of lightning that grew weaker with each volley. Fiddleford had expanded his barrier spell to protect Soos, but it seemed to sap all of his energy and concentration, and his eyes were completely unfocused as he gazed out at the battle unfolding in front of him.
And Dipper — poor Dipper was lying limp on the ground next to Stan, clinging to consciousness and having let go of…
The Journal.
It tumbled end over end, and rolled to Stan’s side with a familiar determination. Just like he had many so times before throughout the last year, Stan could make out his own face reflected in the golden hand emblem —
Except this time, he recognized it. This time, he remembered.
Stan ripped the Journal in half down its spine, and the room exploded.
Sheets of paper went flying — so many more sheets than the Journal could have possibly contained, so many more pages and so many more spells — and they swirled around the column of blue fire in the center of the room, encircling it and climbing higher and higher and higher still until they reached the storm above. It was a tornado of knowledge, a cyclone formed from all the extensive magical experience of one very old, very brilliant, very angry —
author
scientist
wizard
necromancer
lich
friend
uncle
brother
— who had been imprisoned for so long, alone for so long, unable to protect his family for so long, and was now finally seizing the chance take matters into his own six-fingered hands once again.
Starting from the bottom of the column and racing upwards like a lit fuse, the spells began to ignite. Fireworks of a hundred different colors and elements consumed Bill’s flames — bolts of yellow lightning and plumes of red fire, downpours of sizzling acid and spears of silvery ice, dark clouds of necromantic energy and plagues of swarming insects — all forming one beautiful symphony of magical energy, a display of spellcasting brilliance that Stan had dearly missed fighting alongside. Papers swirled around him too, he realized, as well as around the other Bureau members, but these pages only gave off a soft, warm light, healing their wounds and shielding them from the biting winds that surged throughout the room.
The spells consolidated together into a single column of crackling red electricity, a beam that shot straight up as it intensified, burning away at the clouds of Bill’s storm — and then it was gone, and in its place in the center of the room floated a skeletal figure, trench coat billowing in the wind and sparks leaping off his glasses.
He turned to face Stan, and for just a moment, the image of his living human face flickered around his skull, smile wide and eyes teary with relief.
“Good to see you in one piece, Stanley,” Ford told him, and Stan nearly cried, because even despite all the necromancy and affronts against nature that had brought them here, his brother’s voice still sounded exactly how he remembered it.
He heard Candy and Grenda — the only two people in the room not to have been in the IPRE — gasp with surprise and confusion.
“What? Who is that?” Candy asked, and Stan smiled.
“The Author of the Journal — my brother.”