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CodyLabs — Forest of Daggers: Chapter 2
#alien #fanart #fanfiction #ghost #robot #scifi #shapeshifter #gravityfalls #dipperpines #wendyxdipper #wendycorduroy #wendip #seeyounextsummer #forestofdaggers
Published: 2018-07-02 17:41:32 +0000 UTC; Views: 7565; Favourites: 52; Downloads: 4
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Chapter 2: Stranger Tales
"Now we knew we didn’t have long to get out of there, especially since the sled dogs would have been slowed down by the artifacts. But I had to go out and take a few more readings. Just to make sure it was how it seemed…”
The party huddled around the campfire, hanging on every word of Ford’s story. Dipper and Mabel listened with wide eyes, Soos with eyes twice as wide, and Wendy with eyes half as wide. Stan interjected often, whenever some finer point about treasure or babes or brawling needed clarification.
“But it’s like I was saying all along: none of it made any sense!” Ford continued. “The Aztecs didn’t have the means to get all the way to Antarctica, so why was their cursed treasure buried down there? I went off to take some ice layer samples to make sure. But as it turned out: it was all a ruse! While I was off on that wild goose chase, Stan was alone at our camp, and guess who showed up? Guess who buried that treasure for us to find?”
“Jessica Spindlefoot…” Gasped Mabel.
Ford glanced sharply at her. “That’s RIGHT…” He nodded, his voice low. The old adventurer knew just how to angle his head so that the fire reflected off his glasses directly into their eyes. Whenever his story needed that extra flair, he would do so, and dazzle them all over again. It was especially effective on Soos.
In fact, Soos was choking back tears. “That nasty old bounty hunter!” He cried, shaking a right fist and wiping his eyes with his left. “She’d already taken the mutant baby seals from you! What more could she possibly want?!?”
“At first.” Grunkle Stan interjected. “I thought it was just to taunt us one more time with that phony British accent. She got me tied up in the tent, and I thought I was in for a monologue. But when she just kept on walking, I knew she was after the spell book.”
“NO…” Soos gasped.
“Yes.” Ford nodded. “But Stan was more clever than she figured. He managed to loosen his bonds, get to the radio, and call me back to camp. I arrived in time to see her riding off into the sunset on her dogsled. I pulled out my rifle, loaded a single bullet into the chamber, drew a bead, and fired.”
Dipper gasped in excitement. “You shot her?!?”
“I shot the harness of her sled.” Ford smiled.
Mabel gasped in horror. “You shot her dog?!?”
“No.” Ford made his glasses flash again. “Her dogs kept on running, happy as could be. But her sled slowed to a stop, and all she could do was stare at the severed rope, and say some very… Un-British things.”
“Nice.” Wendy said.
“But now here’s the thing.” Ford continued. “Summer and Winter are flipped in the southern hemisphere. We left in September, and got to the Antarctic in October, which is their spring. The ice was thawing then, so we only had a few months of their summer to get inland and conduct our investigations.”
“It was cold.” Stan explained.
“And we were running out of time.” Ford added. “If the ice closed up again, our boat would have been locked in place, and we would have to winter there, eating seals and penguins. Living off the land; the most hostile land on Earth.”
“Like Shackleton’s crew…” Dipper nodded, recalling the books he’d read of the great Antarctic explorers of a past age.
“Exactly.” Ford glanced proudly at his great nephew and tapped his temple. “But the bounty hunter knew that too, and thought that if she attacked us then, she could prevent us ever returning home. You can imagine how pressed we were for time after we dealt with her! The ice was closing up then, we were moving with two sleds and a prisoner in tow, and that’s not even to mention the zombie penguins…”
“Zombie penguins?” Dipper frowned.
“ZOMBIE PENGUINS?!?” Soos gasped.
“That’s what happens when zombies get bitten by penguins.” Mabel smiled.
“Oh for crying out loud.” Wendy rolled her eyes.
“Zombie penguins.” Ford nodded.
“For just a moment then.” Stan laughed. “As those awful beady little glowing eyes and those rotting beaks were circling around us, I thought we were goners. But then Ford unties Jessica to help us fight, and boy could she fight! There were elbows flying, and fists swinging, and bones breaking, and all the little penguins giving their blood-curdling ‘aw-awa-awwwwwkkkk’s… We were standing back to back there for a moment, her and I, and I thought ‘man, this girl is really something. I wonder if things could ever work out between us? Romantically, y’know?’”
Ford glanced at him. “Stan.” He said. “She was a bounty hunter. Sent to steal our secrets and leave us for dead. She was only ‘helping’ us because all our lives were in danger. She tried to backstab us 4 separate times. Remember? Do you remember the quadruple backstab attempts?”
“What, you think she’s too good for me?”
“She’s 23 YEARS too good for you, Stanley.”
“Ah ha! You were counting too, weren’t ya? You old Bachelor!”
“Um… Um… Moving on.” Ford decided.
“I wonder where she is now?” Stan pondered. “Probably still where we left her, chained to that lamppost in Argentina. Unless some fisherman came by who was dumb enough to be fooled by her fake British accent. That sweet, chipper, snarky British accent…”
“Moving ON.” Stanford insisted.
“Oh, all right all right.” Stan nodded. “All right all right… Okay! So! After we made it back North to Argentina, we needed a place to lay low for a while.”
Ford laughed. “So we spent a week in this dirty little coastal town…”
“Wow!” Stan exclaimed, remembering. “I tell you what, you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy! And the coffee wasn’t bad either! We threw caution to the wind and gambled away all of the Aztec gold!”
Ford laughed and put an arm around Stan. “At least they thought we did!” He said, and reached a hand into his pocket. It came out holding a 6-fingered handful of gold coins, which he tossed around the fire. “And that wasn’t even the best part!” He exclaimed.
“Yeah!” Stan said. “There was this gigantic old sailor, as big as your dad, Wendy, but with one eye, one leg, no hair, no habla Ingles, and this beautiful girl under his one arm. Now I mistook this guy for a piece of furniture, as anybody would, so I walked up to this girl and I said—“
“STANLEY!” Ford cleared his throat loudly. “Might. Not. Be the best story. Present company.”
“Uh…” Stan looked around at the present company. His 13-year-old nephew. His 13-year-old niece. A girl. And Soos. “Uh.” He said again. “Antarctica was REALLY cold.”
“Wow.” Soos whispered, drying one final tear. “You make it come alive.”
“Yeah!” Mabel said. “That was an awesome story! I hope we get to meet Jessica Spindlefoot someday!”
“Um…” Ford said.
“Wait, but where did the spell book come from?” Dipper asked. “You just found it? Who wrote it??”
“Hmm?” Ford scratched his head. “Why, Jessica’s long-lost twin sister, of course.”
“SHE HAD A SISTER?” Stan jumped.
Ford’s poker face cracked and broke into a smile, and he started laughing hysterically.
“Waaaaait a miiinute here!” Mabel said. “That seems reeeeally familiar from somewhere.”
“YEAH!” Soos said. “You just made that up! You stole that plot twist straight out of Ducktective!”
Ford laughed. “Guilty, guilty. I’m sorry. It was worth the look on Stan’s face… Anyway… Um…” He put his chin in his hand again, and frowned in thought. “Let’s see… Other stories… Other… Stories… Let’s see… Stan, what did we do in Chile again? Remind me?”
“There was that one warlord.” Stan offered. “And the sugar plantations.”
“Sugar?!?” Mabel said. “On a farm?!? Let’s hear that story!”
“Um…” Dipper spoke up. “Actually, I think Wendy might actually have a story. A story that happened just the other day in fact.”
“Well, don’t let us old men steal all the thunder. Let’s hear it!” Ford kicked back and speared a marshmallow on his knife.
“Sounds good to me!” Stan said, stooping to gather the gold coins that Ford had tossed about. “How’s the digs been back here?”
“Is it a love story?” Mabel asked. “Or a revenge story? Or is it both, like Stan’s?”
As he shoved an entire hotdog in his mouth, Soos rotated his body and turned his full attention on Wendy. “Dude! Wuzzwuhmuhfuhhuv, dude?” He asked past the hotdog, as little pieces of it fell into his lap.
“Uh…” Wendy smiled nervously under her friends’ eager gaze, and ran a finger through her hair. “Yeah. I guess I got a few stories.”
“Come on.” Dipper coaxed her. “Tell everyone! You’re part of the team, or whatever!”
“Honorary Pines family member!” Mabel added. “Like Soos!”
“If you don’t tell.” Soos said, swallowing the hotdog. “I’ve got a really great story too. I call it… Soos’ Really Great Water Heater Story™.”
“Okay, okay.” Wendy said. “So. Hmm… Okay. It all started 4 days ago, when my brothers were watching TV. Usually everything’s fine, even though we’re so far away from the town and all that. But 4 days ago, something was up with the TV. Every couple minutes, they kept getting this weird glitch in the sound, like there was interference or something. Even when the program changed, the same glitch kept on repeating. They asked my dad what was the matter, and so he punched the TV, and then was all like. “Welp. That didn’t fix it. Must be a problem at the station. Nothin’ we can do about it.” So. I thought it was a kind of weird problem for a station to have, so started using an old radio to try and pick out the frequency.”
“Boring!” Mabel said. “That’s like something Dipper would do!”
“Uh.” Wendy looked at Dipper, and suddenly smiled. “Yeah… I guess it is… Um… Anyway, I managed to isolate the signal, even find it on my walkie-talkie. It was transmitting on a broader sort of frequency than normal radio signals, like something totally not-FAA-compliant.”
“Boring!” Mabel said.
“Hey, I did some research, okay?” Wendy said. “I spent all day reading up on radio signals on the internet. I found out how to ‘triangulate’ things too. So I called Lee and Nate and had them stand on hills with their own radios to measure position and whatever. Long story short, I found out that this signal was coming from way off in the middle of nowhere. Off in the woods. I marked the place on my map, and Lee and Nate went home.”
Ford sat forward. “The signal… I think I picked up that same anomaly when I got here last night!” He said. “Dipper said he wanted excitement, so I sent him after it. Dipper, did you ever find the source?”
“Oh no you don’t, Great Uncle Ford.” Dipper smiled and leaned back against a tree. “Wendy’s telling this story now.”
“So. Okay.” Wendy continued. “That was 4 days ago. And I did basically what Dipper did today. I got some supplies together, like, backpack, knife, snacks, and whatever, and I set off into the woods to find the source of the signal. Took me about 4 hours, but I finally heard something off through the trees. Some weird buzzing noise. As I approached, I saw that the source wasn’t anything like what I was expecting. It was some kind of animal, caught in a bear trap. The buzzing was it chewing on the trap, trying to escape. And it was like no animal any of us have ever seen before.”
“A Snadger!” Mabel guessed.
“A laser snail!” Soos gasped.
“A money beetle.” Stan theorized
“A teal platypus maybe?” Ford ventured. “From dimension 35~{? Did you get pictures?”
“Oh, I got better than pictures.” Wendy said, as she reached behind her and removed the crate. But she didn’t open it. She just held it there for them to look at. “But on with the story. I stuck a branch in the bear trap, and pried it open far enough to let this thing escape. And it did. It was barely even injured after all that time in the trap, but it was pretty exhausted from trying to escape, so it just sat there, looking confused.
“I thought to myself: ‘seems harmless, right?’ So I bent down and tried to pick it up. That was… Well, that was a mistake. That was a bad mistake. Which is why I always wear these leather gloves now. Whenever I’m dealing with this thing.” As Wendy put on the gloves now, Dipper noticed for the first time that she had a bandage on one finger. “This thing is fierce.” She continued. “And cunning. And fast. Slippery. I probably chased it around the forest for a good half hour. But fortunately, it doesn’t have the greatest endurance. And although it’s fast for its size, it can’t outrun a grown human. I cornered it against a deadfall, and got close enough to tangle it in my net. I was real careful to stay clear of its mouth as I loaded it into my backpack and started home. Anyway. I’ve kept it in my room for the last few days. Been feeding it. Keeping it alive. It never stopped sending out its radio signal though, which is where Dipper comes in. Earlier today he tracked it to my house, and we’ve been hanging out and playing with it all day.”
“You knew about this and didn’t tell me?!?” Mabel punched Dipper in the shoulder. “You meathead! I love Snadgers!”
“It’s not what you think.” Dipper said, as Wendy set down the metal box and popped the latches. “It’s not a nice thing.”
Wendy reached into the box and removed the robot.
In the firelight, it looked like something from a nightmare. Its plating glistened like silver and gold, its glowing red eyes stood out like embers, and its slowly spinning buzz saws glittered, casting fiery reflections about the huddled faces.
“I’LL CALL HIM JUAN!!” Screeched Mabel. “Can I hold him?!?”
Dipper, Wendy, Stan, Ford, and Soos all looked at her. Dipper rolled his yes.
Wendy blinked. “Okay.” She shrugged, but handed Mabel a pair of gloves.
“Wow.” Ford said, looking at the machine. “Don’t you think we should name it something more vague and ominous? Like ‘The Item’ or something?”
“Nope!” Mabel decided. “He’s Juan now! Aren’t you little darling?!? Yes you are!” Mabel picked Juan up, and cuddled him to her chest. Her chest that wasn’t covered by the gloves.
“MABEL! JUAN HAS SAWS!” Dipper and Wendy yelped in unison.
“But you wouldn’t use them on old aunt Mabel, WOULD YOU?” Mabel asked, hugging it tighter, and petting its antennae. Everybody tensed up, dreading the moment when she’d get the answer to her question.
But for some reason, the moment never came. In fact, Juan actually seemed perfectly placated. It rested its head against Mabel’s chest, and began to make a little humming sound.
“No.” Mabel answered her own question. “No, you wouldn’t bite old aunt Mabel, would you? No you wouldn’t. No you wouldn’t. You’re such a good boy.”
“Why is it NOT attacking you?” Dipper frowned.
“It’s Mabel.” Wendy shrugged. “She has a magic touch. Animals love her.”
“It’s true!” Soos verified. “All the kinds of animals, dude! Dogs, cats, pigs, dudes, plants, people, Soos, robots, everything alive is okay with Mabel.”
“That’s because Aunt Mabel is the only one that ever hugs them!” Mabel declared. “Isn’t that right, little Juan? Yes it is. Oh, you’re such a little gentleman. Mommy Wendy and Daddy Dipper never showed you any love, did they? No they didn’t.”
“Mommy?” Wendy scoffed. “I ain’t its mommy.”
“Daddy?” Dipper scoffed at the same time. “I ain’t its daddy.”
“Gentleman?” Stan scoffed. “Mabel, this is a machine. Since when is it a guy?”
“Since look at him!” Mabel held Juan upside down for a moment to show them.
“Oh.” Dipper said.
“Never noticed that.” Wendy said.
“Welp.” Stan said.
“FASCINATING!” Ford said.
“Dude!” Soos said. “He’s got an ion cannon! Like in Star Wars!”
Everybody went quiet for a moment and looked at Soos. In the silence, Ford pulled out a notebook and jotted something down.
“Um.” Wendy said. “In all seriousness, Mabel, this thing eats metal. I’ve seen nails, screws, those little metal caps that hold erasers to pencils, a matchbox car, even an old phone, all disappear inside this thing. And it uses those saws to do it. Those saws are razor sharp, spin really fast, and eat through iron and steel in a matter of minutes. Did I show you what he did to me?” Wendy took off her glove and held up a finger with a bandage on it. As she unwound the wrapping, she explained. “Never forget.” She said. “Us humans are soft and pink. Which means that to anything else, anything made of metal, we may as well be butter. Skin. Muscle. Tendons. Bone. It’s all nothing to things like him.” The last of the bandage came off, and Wendy showed them the jagged, enormous cut that Juan’s first touch had left.
Even Dipper hadn’t seen this yet. His gut turned.
“MOSES!” Ford exclaimed when he saw the damage. “Are you alright?!?”
“Well yeah. I mean, I know how to dress a wound or whatever.”
“No!” Ford exclaimed. “I mean did you take it in to a professional or anything? A real doctor??”
“Have you met the doctors around here?” Wendy asked. “Last time I went in to see him, he smiled all proudly and said, (and I quote): ‘I can verify that you are indeed injured.’ This is what I have to deal with here.”
“Even so…” Ford scratched his head.
“What?” She chuckled. “Did you have somebody to patch your boo-boos down in the Antarctic? I’m sure ‘zombie penguins’ were perfectly harmless, and I’m sure all the gorgeous bounty hunters just jumped at the opportunity to dotter over you, huh?”
“Well…” Ford scratched his head and looked at Stan. “Help me out here, Stan. Kids can’t just give themselves stitches, can they? Is that okay in this dimension? It isn’t, is it?”
“Welp.” Grunkle Stan grunted, standing up. “Only one thing makes sense to me here, and that’s that this thing eats metal. I’m off to find everything precious to me and lock it up tight.” He turned and started toward the RV.
“You want some Aztec gold?” Mabel asked Juan, holding up one of the Stans’ souvenirs. “Pretty golden coin, Juan? Yes you do!” Juan’s deadly saw apparatus opened up as it looked at the glittering disk.
Stan had almost reached the RV, but managed to turn around and sprint back to the campfire in the time it took Mabel to finish the sentence. “NO!” He cried passionately as he snatched the coin from her.
“Aww! Why not?” Mabel frowned, holding up Juan. “Just look at these adorable pleading eyes! Besides!” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Juaaan is faaaamily nooooow…”
Stan shook his head. “Family or not, this freaky alien robot can’t chow down on my hard-smuggled treasure! I wouldn’t let YOU eat it either!”
“And, if I may.” Ford said. “Logically, the only reason he’s eating metal is to build more onto his body. To grow bigger, or maybe replace material that’s rusted. And if he does that, gold doesn’t seem very healthy, does it? It’s too soft, and too heavy, and it melts too easy. It would make his bones fragile, or worse, whatever he uses to saw down food in his stomach would get dull, and he would stop being able to eat entirely.”
“Besides, these coins are hecka cursed anyway.” Stan added. “Just stealing them was enough to spontaneously throw out my back! I don’t want to THINK about what eating one would do!”
“Ooh. Makes sense.” Dipper nodded. “Wait, what SHOULD we be feeding him then? Are rusty nails okay?”
“Iron? I don’t know. I don’t know.” Ford rested his chin in on six-fingered hand, and frowned down at the machine in Mabel’s arms. “What powers it?” He asked. “Nuclear?”
“Batteries, I think.” Wendy answered. “Those things in his tail unfold into solar panels. Or he can suck on wall sockets. He sniffed those out pretty fast.”
“Never needs to refuel…” Muttered Ford. “It can sustain itself from the environment… Okay. Wendy, this ‘Juan’ thing is fairly important.” He decided. “I need you to show me where you found him. Because this is…” He shook his head. “I’ve honestly never seen anything of the sort. A machine that can eat, forage, and survive like a living creature… Maybe even REPRODUCE… This is a tremendous milestone for both engineering, AI research, and biology. And if there are more of them, or if they get bigger… Well. A lot of people could get hurt. I need to find where this is from, who made it, and why.”
“Yeah dude. I’d be more worried about the ion cannon though.” Soos added.
“Awe, c’mon great uncle Ford!” Mabel elbowed her great uncle. “We can handle this, right? We can return an adorable little robot to its parents. And you’ve been off doing the whatever in Antarctica all year, so you deserve some time off. What have we been doing? Huh? School clubs and homework! That’s what!”
“Wendy axed some monsters…” Dipper muttered.
“Asked them what?” Mabel asked.
“Axed. AXED, Mabel. With an X. Not asked.” Dipper clarified.
“Uh…” Ford wrung his hands together. “Uh… Okay.” He said. “I suppose you have some experience already… So… Ha. Well, who am I kidding? I’m not your parents! I’m just an uncle! You kids keep an eye out, wear gloves, and have fun!”
The Northwest Mansion had big, magnificent oak doors, ornately decorated and absurdly expensive. Just looking at them was enough to make an average person feel intimidated by the power and the exquisite taste of the family that had placed them there. The doors had always stood as a symbol of the family’s separation. They kept the rabble out, they kept the rich high. Untouchable. Superior. Everybody but them had hated those doors.
But as the kids approached the building the next morning, they saw that it wasn’t the Northwest Mansion anymore. It was under new management now, by better men. Now, the oak was in a dump somewhere, and it had been replaced with a pair of even thicker doors made of half-inch steel plating, hydraulically locked and nearly indestructible. They weren’t as pretty, but they were cheaper, they were tougher, and they were better.
But they weren’t intimidating. That’s because there was an unlocked screen door right next to them, and anybody could use that whenever they wanted.
When Dipper, Mabel, and Wendy stepped off their bikes in front of the manor, they used the screen door.
“Visitors!” A scrawny old man greeted them in the mansion’s foyer.
Dipper turned at the sound of the voice and was hit with a moment of cognitive dissonance. This couldn’t be the same man. Could it?
“McGucket?” Dipper asked.
“Whaaaaa?” Mabel asked.
The old man laughed. Wendy laughed.
He adjusted his glasses and rubbed the chin where the gigantic beard had been, and stretched his back experimentally, as if still growing accustomed to walking upright. “Well.” He said. “I’ll reckon I look a sight better, don’t I?”
He was wearing shoes. And a shirt with a collar. And better glasses. For the first time in 30 years, Fiddleford McGucket was actually looking… Respectable.
“McGucket, you look…” Dipper stuttered.
“You look like a MR. McGucket!” Mabel said.
The old man laughed, showing them his teeth, which were still uneven and partially gold. His laugh died off into a squeaky hillbilly cackle, and he smiled.
He was still the same man inside. Every ounce of him was exactly as it was.
Except he was fixed.
“You look like a Dr. McGucket, actually.” Dipper said, and extended his hand. “It’s good to see you like this. Really. It’s good to see you.”
The older man took it, and they shook.
McGucket grinned. “Wull, I’m tickled tah see you too, Mr. Pines.” He said. “You ain’t changed a wink. Except that I ain’t walkin’ hunched anymore, which means that you must’ve gotcherself taller. And yer voice is finally changin’ proper, and yah got a better hat.”
“Heh heh. Thanks.” Dipper smiled.
“Yeah.” Wendy said. “Nice hat. That old one really sucked. Whatever happened to that?”
“Wull I wouldn’t say it sucked but—Huh…?“ McGucket pointed to the blue hat on Wendy’s head. “Hey wait a minute here…”
“Okay, never mind the hat.” Dipper said. “McGucket, we have something to show you.”
“A robot!” Mabel said. “A robot cat named Juan.”
“It’s a really advanced robot.” Dipper said.
“We were wondering if you had anything to do with it.” Wendy said. “Like, we know you don’t USUALLY build anything smaller than a car, but we didn’t know who else could do it.”
“It’s in the box.” Mabel said. “Unless it cut through again.”
“It’s still here.” Wendy shook the box to make sure.
“Wear these.” Dipper gave McGucket the gloves.
“Well, now hold on a minute here, sonny.” He said, taking a step back toward his room. “I didn’t know I’d be working today. Let me change into some new pants.”
“Your pants?” Wendy asked. “What’s wrong with your pants?”
“They’re tiring! I can’t walk and stand for so long without some robotic assistance! I’m old!”
“Robotic assistance? Wait a minute.” Dipper said. “You’re saying that you invented robo-suit exoskeleton pants… Because you get tired.”
“That’s right.”
Dipper blinked. “We love you McGuckett.”
Mabel nodded. “Keep being McGuckett, Mcguckett.”
He returned in a few minutes taking longer strides, as the metal structure over his legs whizzed and whirred.
“That’s that.” He said. “Take note, kids; you’ll be old one day too, you should know the tricks while you’re young. Now come on, then! Let’s head into my shop.” He turned and beckoned them through a humble looking door.
Beyond it, the entire Eastern wing of the manor had been transformed into a workshop. Machines lay on workbenches, slouched against the walls, or hung from the ceiling. Tools, papers, computers, and tiny parts littered every available surface. From hidden speakers, the space was flooded with the sound of Bluegrass.
As they entered this mess, a spring seemed to enter McGucket’s step. He danced through the clutter with familiarity and ease, humming in tune to the music, smiling his golden smile. Dipper realized the man was happy. Years of insanity and evil-mad-scientistness had been stripped away, and he was left with what lay beneath: a peaceful, driven, kind mind. This was the McGucket that always should have been.
“Ah ha!” He cried, after a minute of searching through the clutter. “Here’s a clear spot. Pull up some rusty metal, fellers. And set it down here.”
Wendy did. She popped open the box, reached in, and removed Juan.
The robot kitten stuck out its buzzsaws and hissed when it saw them. It didn’t like being put in a box any more than a normal cat.
“Oh my. Oh me on my.” McGucket watched as Wendy set it on the table.
It hissed again, and turned around in a circle, looking for a way to escape. Seeing none, it finally it decided it was hungry, and poked at some other machine on the workbench. It cut loose a small scrap of metal, and ate it. “Oh MY…” McGucket said again.
Now the robot wasn’t hungry anymore, and it walked back up to Mabel, making a sound not dissimilar to a purr. Mabel said something adoring and picked it up.
McGucket leaned in close. And closer. And closer. Finally Juan reached a foot out and bopped his nose with its tread. “Oh my…” He repeated one more time.
“Yeah.” Dipper said. “So… I’m guessing you don’t recognize this guy? You weren’t the one that built him?”
“Uh…” McGucket left their side, and darted off through the shop, picking up a tool here, and a tool there. He made his way back with a library of tiny instruments, and laid them out on the table. “Could I take that there machine…?” He asked Mabel.
She handed it to him.
McGucket set it down, and began to examine it with the instruments. Scanning. Zapping. Poking. Prodding. He even shoved a screwdriver under the panel on Juan’s shoulder and pried upwards, to look at what lay beneath the plating. It yelped in pain and spun its saws at him. “Oh my…” He repeated again, removing the intrusive tool. “I need to take an X-ray.”
And that’s how it went for about twenty minutes. McGucket ran around the shop with Juan, muttering to himself, and scratching his head, taking tests.
Dipper looked at the pictures from the X-ray.
Beneath Juan’s smooth and hard exterior plating, he was phenomenally complex. Gears, cogs, cams and motors of miniscule size, all stacked perfectly and exactly. Pipes and wires going down smaller than the pictures could show. There were no bolts or screws or rivets or welds holding it together. It was all one coherent piece. It didn’t look like a blueprint. It looked like an anatomy.
McGucket finally finished his tests, returned to the workbench, set Juan down, and put his hands on his hips.
“I ain’t built this.” He said.
“Then who did?” Dipper asked. “The government? Did they use some of your patents? Did you ever invent anything that could… Eat? Reproduce? Or is this some kind of alien machine? Are there aliens?”
“No.” He said. “The government didn’t build this. And no. Aliens didn’t build this. This robit is… Too advanced. Too advanced for me, or for the government, or for aliens. Near as I can figure, this robit is impossible for people. In my whole life, I’ve only ever seen this level of engineering in one other place.”
“Where?”
“Right here.” He held up his hands, and wiggled his fingers. He opened his mouth, and pointed inside it. He pulled up his eyelid, and pointed to his eyeball. “This.” He said, pointing back to Juan. “Is the level of irreducible complexity that doesn’t come from people. This machine, this Juan, is SO good… That, in my professional opinion, it could only have been created by God. Big ‘G’. GOD. I don’t know how, but this robit isn’t a machine. It’s a metal animal. It’s NATURAL.”
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Comments: 4
Hell of a cliffhanger there.
-Just wondering, with the female hunter pursuing the Stans on their adventures, is that a Ducktales nod?
-Gotta love that while everyone else is into the story, Wendy is the only one that doesn’t seem to give a rats ass about it. That’s why we love ya, red!
-Mabel with the Wendip stuffs; immediately thinking that the Wendy and Dipper tale was “a love story” plus the Mommy Wendy/Daddy Dipper comment. If only the real Mabel was like that...
-Speaking of Mabel, quit being a ballbuster and let Wendy tell the story!
-I might have missed this with the previous story (or maybe it’s explained later in this one) but where did Wendy learn to manipulate the radio signals like that? It’s almost Silent Hill-ish in nature
-And to make one last gaming comparison, the mannerisms of Juan makes me think of the creatures from Recore or Horizon Zero Dawn where the robots seem more animal than machine. Still wonder why it didn’t react to Mabel...
Until next time!
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-I haven't seen Ducktales, but I'm sure sexy-evil-lady-with-a-gun is a trope. Tried to be a little over-the-top and ridiculous with the Stan's adventures.
-Maybe a little too over-the-top for Wendy's tastes.
-Mabel's always been a shipper, I think. (Thinking of the plot of Love God, and that scene in the inconveniencing where she shamelessly hollers "GIRLFRIEND!" In the van just to bug Dipper.)
-You can learn a lot of things on the internet. The other day I read the wikipedia article on how to fly a helicopter! You can figure out pretty much anything, I think. It's just a matter of wanting to look. I don't think that was a reference to anything, but I forget.
-I've never played HZD (and never heard of Recore), but the resemblance is definitely there. It didn't attack Mabel because Mabel is Mabel. And everything loves Mabel.
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GASP! It's from Cybertron! 
Okay, Stan and Ford's stories, both in writing and picture, are so well made. I could actually picture Alex and JK reading these lines. And someone better become a field medic so Wendy won't end up looking like Frankenstein's monster before she's 35.
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Ah, yes, Cybertron. A few people have mentioned that, and funny enough, although I drew inspiration for this from a number of sources, transformers was never one of them. In fact, I've never seen a single Transformers movie or episode. So... *shrugs*
That was one of my favorite scenes too. I just imagined an enormous, campy, Indiana-Jones-type adventure full of treasure, babes, mystery, and cliches. The only important thing is that they had fun.
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