Dipper Pines (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
captainbuzzkill) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ya_assemble2014-09-11 12:59 am
captainbuzzkill) wrote in ya_assemble2014-09-11 12:59 am
Entry tags:
[LN]
The twins burst onto the scene in the cave (what was a cave even doing in this state?) like two tiny wrecking balls of protectiveness. The Mystery Twins were on the case and they weren't going to let their friends get eaten by a stupid monster, especially after they'd been snatched up right under their noses.
Kevin and Allayna were in a cage of some kind of black stone or metal, clinging to each other and looking terrified, as the shadowy figure of the Jersey Devil lurked behind them, goat legs, horns, and all.
"Let go of those kids, you unholy spawn of New Jersey!" Dipper cried out, using the worst insult he could think of.
Kevin and Allayna were in a cage of some kind of black stone or metal, clinging to each other and looking terrified, as the shadowy figure of the Jersey Devil lurked behind them, goat legs, horns, and all.
"Let go of those kids, you unholy spawn of New Jersey!" Dipper cried out, using the worst insult he could think of.
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She pointed behind the Jersey Devil.
"Ohmygosh! It's a distraction!"
When the shadowy monster turned around with a "huhhh?" to look, several small, pointy-hatted, pointy-tooth gnomes all tackled its face at once, screeching in their garbled gnome tongue and sending the Jersey Devil reeling with bewilderment and a newly displaced center of gravity.
Mabel charged the cage. "I don't know how to get it open!"
She could summon Kraz and Xyler, but they were a lot better at morale-boosting power ballads than they were at lockpicking.
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He found the page.
"There! A spell to turn darkness into glass. The cage is dark, right? I think it works on anything dark!"
Shadow was shadow.
He started to chant, the gnomes mercifully giving them some time.
"Eratummusor benet murtiv ni tibis nart, amrofcah bussudilos ixerid amrof douq tsecoh te, mecul dasirbenet, rutet irri arbmu!"
For a moment, he feared it wouldn't work, but then they heard a crystalline sound and a large chunk of the cage turned into fragile spun glass.
"Yes, it worked! Okay, move as far back as you can!" Dipper said to Allayna and Kevin, and they drew back into the back of the cage. He shattered the glass bars with his book and gestured for them to come out. Fortunately their sneakers were probably thick enough to protect their feet from the glass shards.
"Come on, hurry!"
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Unfortunately, the gnomes had their limits as far as being distracting went. With a roar, the Jersey Devil flung most of them aside, where they exploded in bright rainbow puffs of glitter and swirled back to Mabel. Freed, the monster that had made New Jersey a slight fraction more hellish roared at the escaping kids and charged.
"Aoshima!"
The beefy dolphin appeared, and Mabel all but shoved Allayna into it. "Dipper! Distraction Plan Bravo Otherone!"
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He turned some pages in the book.
"Fm'latgh n'ghft! Nnn-nyth shogg-syha'h! Fm'latgh n'ghft! Nnn-nyth shogg-syha'h! Fm'latgh n'ghft! Nnn-nyth shogg-syha'h!"
A ball of light appeared in front of him and started to emit an alarming high-pitched noise.
"Allayna, Kevin, don't look back!"
By now Mabel knew better than to look at one of the blinding light bombs but they didn't. Despite snooping around with them, they'd never seen the twins in action as they fought against the fearlings or other gribblies they'd already run into. Dipper closed his eyes and despite it he could still see the light under his eyelids as the bomb went off. The Jersey Devil apparently hadn't been smart enough to close its eyes because hideous screeching filled the cave.
Except that screeching didn't sound like just one voice, it sounded like many voices screaming as one...
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The beefy dolphin zoomed into the night with the children on its back, safely out of range of the flash.
When Mabel opened her eyes, a thousand eyes opened back at her.
"I don't think I can make that many distractions!" she yelled, as the wall of dispersed fearlings that had been the Jersey Devil massed together in a seething, yellow-eyed wall.
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The little light spell was fading fast and he needed light to work.
There was no way to get to the door because the fearlings were now crowding around the entrance, blocking it. They had to put up some barriers where they could both be shielded as they tried to wipe the fearlings out. If they managed to pick enough of them off, they might be able to break through the barrier at the door and escape.
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Mabel was, generally, up to the task of keeping fearlings at bay. But keeping Aoshima material enough to fly the other kids to safety sapped her strength. The farther away the dolphin flew, the less power Mabel had to work with.
She punched holes in the fearlings, but every hole her kittens blasted open was quickly filled in again.
With a shout, Mabel surrounded herself and her brother with rainbow light, her hair blowing upwards in an invisible wind.
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Then he got out the can of spraypaint and put a more powerful seal on the floor around them. They stood in the center of it as the fearlings whipped around them like a tornado, trying to press in at the salt barrier.
The salt started smoking and sizzling as their dark power helped them burn through it.
"Okay, now we have to hit them with everything we've got! If we thin them out enough we can make a break for the door! Start doing all the damage you can while I look through the book for something more offensive."
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"Dipper! I don't think I can keep this up much longer!"
If she had anything to give, she was already giving it, and Aoshima was getting farther and farther away.
"Just hurry okay?"
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He kept flipping furiously, then started to get panicked, his voice cracking. "I don't have that many figured out yet! All the good ones are really hard and I don't have enough of them translated!"
But there had to be something.
"Wait! I found one! It's a spell that makes a myth temporarily more powerful! But this looks way out of my league," he said plaintively. The panicked expression on his face gave way to a determined one. "But I've got to try!"
"ςυορετό σσιρεπ ςυοτ ιενάκ αν αιγ υομ όκιδ ιανίε ιτ, ό ιε σώδ αν ιακ οθύμ ολλά ανέ εσ ιεσάτφ , ατρόπ ήτχ ιονα νητ όπα ασέμ ςασ ομόρδ οτ ετίερβ, υομ ήγυ αρκ νητ ιεύοκα ασέμ ημανύΔ!"
His eyes took on an eerie glow, illuminating the book so that Mabel didn't have to provide him light to keep reading. She would soon feel herself start to fill to the brim with more power and overflow, having it nearly explode out of her in a shower of warmth and happiness like the ultimate sugar rush.
And just in time at that, given the salt circle burned through. The fearlings pressed against the paint circle now, causing the yellow paint to start to brown and bubble, filling the cave with the acrid stench of burning paint.
Locked into the spell, Dipper kept chanting it over and over. The thread of power in between them was delicate as a spider's web and something he had to put all of himself into to make it work.
"ςυορετό σσιρεπ ςυοτ ιενάκ αν αιγ υομ όκιδ ιανίε ιτ, ό ιε σώδ αν ιακ οθύμ ολλά ανέ εσ ιεσάτφ , ατρόπ ήτχ ιονα νητ όπα ασέμ ςασ ομόρδ οτ ετίερβ, υομ ήγυ αρκ νητ ιεύοκα ασέμ ημανύΔ!"
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"SUCK ON HAPPINESS, SHADOW PEOPLE!"
Mabel's rainbow tower of light exploded into a rainbow mushroom cloud of pure delight and devastation. Delivastation. Devalight? Devalight.
Mabel rose gently from the ground, beaming from ear to ear, as synth music obliterated the sound of the fearlings' screeches. Kraz and Xyler played their neon-hued drums and keytaur as Mabel spun gently like a disco ball, rainbow beams of pure girlpower blasting from the sequins on her sweater.
She glanced down just in time to see Dipper's ears start to bleed.
"Aaaug!" the synth music screeched to a discordant halt. "Dipper! Dipper stop!"
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The spell got away from him, pulled out of his already tenuous grasp. The problem with this particular spell - the warning he'd yet to translate - was that the person or myth that used it had to believe in their own power to wield it and have the will to hold onto that belief.
Or else it started to feed, a half-living thing trying to become a whole idea, a whole living thing - a myth all its own, even though it never could. But the fact it was incomplete only made it hungrier.
Dipper didn't have the will or the confidence and what he did feel, protective instinct, self-sacrifice - the inherent belief that his sister's safety was worth his life - made it easier for the spell to suck him dry.
Blood started to drip eerily from his ears, his nose, and from his glowing eyes, making it clear why there had already been little brown droplet stains on the spell's page - the blood of past wielders.
He held onto the book with a death grip, knuckles white, the spells using his own desire to help his sister to make him do it, but now Mabel would even see the white threads of power coming out of the book, tying his hands to it, wrapping around his arms until they cut into his skin to make it even harder for him to let go.
He wasn't going to be able to stop on his own.
"ςυορετό σσιρεπ ςυοτ ιενάκ - augh -" He dropped to his knees. "- αν αιγ υομ όκιδ ιανίε ιτ, ό ιε σώδ αν ιακ οθύμ ολλά ανέ εσ ιεσάτφ , ατρόπ ήτχ ιονα νητ όπα ασέμ ςασ ομόρδ οτ ετίερβ, υομ ήγυ αρκ νητ ιεύοκα ασέμ ημανύΔ!"
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"Dipper! Dipper stop!"
She forced her way back down to the ground with swimming motions and slapped the book out of his hands. Or tried to - Dipper's grip was stronger than ever, or maybe the spell's grip was too strong on him.
The fearlings prowled at the edge of the light as Mabel grabbed the book and wrestled it from her brother's grip. It didn't occur to her to worry that the fearlings would close in on them as soon as the spell was broken. Losing Dipper was much scarier than fearlings.
"C'mon! Let go!"
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Finally separated from it, he collapsed the rest of the way to the ground.
Blinking blood of his eyes, he looked up at his sister blearily, his voice weak as a kitten, as he said, "Mabel?"
He looked at the shadows beyond through a red haze, watching as they surged and rallied once more.
"You shouldn't - you shouldn't've -"
This was pretty dire and he knew that might have been their - her - only chance.
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Mabel still glowed with power, but she was wavering now, the light dimming, Kraz and Xyler gone, and Mabel herself was shaking at the knees.
"That book is way creepier than your old one. And you know, I think I might have weakened them."
She looked up to see the fearlings, unbroken, flashing toothy, yellow grins at the edge of her remaining glow, like sharks ready to rush at a bait ball.
"Or, you know, maybe not."
Her grip on Dipper's shoulders turned into something a bit more like a hug as she looked at the fearlings waiting to strike.
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Story of his soon to be very short life.
The paint was burning and bubbling as he leaned against his sister, staring out at the fearlings with a terrified expression on his face
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The fearlings rushed in.
And collided with a solid wall of ice as a protective sphere formed around the twins.
Mabel looked up, her breath misting in the sudden cold. "Dipper, what did you do?" she asked in awe. The ice sphere was sudden, beautiful, and perfect. The fearlings crashed into it, but couldn't get through. In a moment, their attempts to crash through even stopped.
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"I didn't do anything." He crawled closer to it, pressing a hand against it, as if to make sure it was something solid and real.
It was freezing cold, ice out of nowhere.
Then he squinted his eyes and tried to peer through the ice.
"I think there are people in here besides us."
Sure enough the ice thudded as something was thrown against it, and Dipper let out a little "bwah!" and crawled back to Mabel's side. For just a moment they caught a glimpse of a silhouette of someone with long spindly arms and legs pressed against the ice sphere, before it launched off.
They heard a muffled voice through the ice, one that sounded a bit like a teenager's, "Nico, the ice isn't going to hold for long! Do you have any light spells up your sleeve?"
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Nico Minoru was really, really starting to hate caves. The Fearlings she already hated, but they at least gave her bad memories to power her spells. Caves were just annoying and dark and full of too many $#%&ing crevasses.
She pursed her lips and blew on the green crystal in the center of the circular part of her Staff, causing it to sputter to life, illuminating the cave with a slowly brightening glow.
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Bunny fought equally well in the dark and in the light, but it was always nice to see the shadows pushed back.
He whipped a boomerang in a curving arc around the ice sphere, clearing a way through the fearling mass with a concussive bomb. Backed against the ice, he caught his boomerang on the rebound and pushed the ring of fearlings back farther from the protected kids.
"Oi, Jack, get the other side, willya?"
He threw his boomerang again in a 360, cutting a swathe in the fearlings surrounding the sphere.
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Totally his pleasure.
The cave was filled with the crystalline sound of ice materializing and shattering the fearlings to dust. Between himself and the other two myths, the swirling back mass was gone.
"Why don't we introduce ourselves to the kids, huh?"
The ice sphere melted away, bring himself, Bunny, and Nico into view.
"Hey there, you two, I know you're probably really confused right now -"
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"It's them! Mabel, run!"
Dipper was up on his feet, book clutched under one arm, the other hand already dragging his sister to her feet to run with him.
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"It's all right, we're here to -"
"-Kitten fist!"
Bunny rarely had his guard up around kids - even ones with magical powers - so he took the pink, glittery punch of spirit-kitten right to the face. He tumbled, yelling and swiping the kitten aside as the kids ran past him.
Unlike the kitten that had bowled Jack over, the one clawing Bunny's face didn't immediately vanish. The kitten might have been cute and tiny, and Bunny might have been tall and intimidating, but he was still a rabbit, and the kitten, cute and cuddly as it was, was still a cat. With a secret lion buried deep down in its heart, that thought of rabbits as prey much more easily than it did of people.
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J'onn admittedly was... Not sure what to think of these new folks. They were obviously not on the side of the strange black creatures, but they also had startled the kids. So erring on the side of caution was the order of the day. He'd do a mind-sweep, but in the name of keeping his cover, he refrained on the off chance they might pick up on it.
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You know what, Nico is just going to leave them to the cat. They're big boys, they can handle a stupid cat, the kids are more important. The last time someone ran screaming from them, they'd run right into Pitch Black; and Nico wasn't likely to get another chance to dazzle him again after their first meeting.
"Hamster Ball!", Nico called out, plunging them all into darkness (stupid one-spell-at-a-time limit) and capturing the two kids in a giant glittery pink hamster ball that should hopefully get wedged in the rocks long before the kids made it to the mouth of the cave.
"We're not going to hurt you!" she shouted after them. "Call off your cats!"
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That was all they got as Mabel and Dipper hamster-balled towards the entrances of the cave. It was much less of a detriment than Nico had thought, since of the two of them were apparently unconsciously coordinating their movements.
Twinbrain, man.
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He managed to push the spectral kitten off him, successfully enough that it swirled away with a mew to return to Mabel.
In the hundreds of years he'd been alive, Bunny thought he'd smelled everything this planet had to offer, so the fact that this cat smelled, underneath the cat, UTTERLY unfamiliar raised his hackles right back.
"I dunno what you are, but you're not just a cat," he said, flaring his nostrils wide to commit the scent to memory, loud enough that the Pines Twins, even running away, had to hear. They deserved to know that a cat following them around was not what it seemed. "What are you?"
Bunny stared down the not-cat, both boomerangs at the ready.
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Once Bunny pegs his not-being-an-actual-cat-ness, he stops, then speaks, keeping his appearance.
"...I am not of this world, in more ways than one. I am J'onn J'onzz, of the Justice League. I have been trying to ascertain why I was brought to this world, as well as keep watch out for these children, who I believe may also be in the same situation I am. And yes, I am not a feline."
He pauses, letting that sink in, before shifting to his usual appearance.
"I will hear you all out, but I request you try to refrain from startling the children further," he adds, then glances to the twins. "I will not allow them to harm you two, but I cannot turn down the chance to speak with those who can see me and seem to know things."
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"Talking cat!" she shouted, happily.
Then, "Ahh! Not a cat! NOT A CAT!" as the cat shapeshifted into . . . a not-so-little green man? "Mr Fluffles, why?"
SHE'D LET HIM SLEEP ON HER SWEATER.
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But hey, at least the hamster ball wasn't heading quite so gracefully for the exit anymore
"Because adults barely trust us to pick out our own clothes, much less make decisions on whether or not we want to be babysat," she answered the girl's wail of anguish.
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Dipper stood there in the hamster bubble, utterly bewildered as to how he should act on this new knowledge.
"I have never been more torn between running for my life and asking an alien questions about being an alien than I am right now in this moment," he declared. "This is the first time I've ever met an alien but it still stands."
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"I apologize for my deception, Mabel. This sort of reaction is why I took the form, of...ah, 'Mr. Fluffles'. I needed to investigate things of this world in a way in which I would not stand out, as well as keep an eye on you two considering the things you were planning to do and only intervene if necessary."
He pauses.
"Honesty would have been ideal, and I could have handled this better. I will not deny that."
Dipper gets a glance and a nod. "I am from Mars."
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Then he realized it was over the shoulders of children reading comics, perched on the couches of families that didn't see him, watching Saturday morning cartoons...
"You're Justice League." He smiled the kind of smile that came of remembering those early days, of kids perched outside the news shops voraciously reading. Before the Comics Code Authority nonsense and the Senate hearings. "When was it, when was it...the 1950s, I think. Fifty-six? Fifty-seven? That's the earliest I remember seeing you show up."
His knowledge of media wasn't the most consistent when he'd picked up most of it reading and watching over other people's shoulders and spent far more time playing than watching TV or reading the news.
Still, some things were so ubiquitous that he hadn't had to watch or read consistently to know they existed. The big DC heroes were one of them.
"He's one of us, guys," he said to Nico and Bunny. "A superhero, too. Right up there with Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Big Red Cheese. Same universe as them - well one of 'em anyway. There's like a million adaptations."
He turned to J'onn and held up a hand, "I know what I'm saying makes no sense and it's very long story - and I promise we can explain everything - but we need to take care of the kids first and keep them from running off. We're here to help them, so..." He turned to Dipper and Mabel. "We can explain everything to you two, too, if you'll let us. Why you're here, what happened to change you..."
He knelt down and put his staff down, holding up his hands disarmingly, his expression gentle as he knelt and edged a little closer. Not to come after them but to try to engage them. Up close he was not a big scary monster with cold eyes, he was just a boy with sparkling ones that were as sharp as ice but warm at the same time.
"I know you're afraid. The fearlings have been after you - they come after me too, since I'm technically still a kid even if I'm a magical spirit one. I don't know if they did something to make you afraid of us or if you're just scared in general, but they are very good at tricking kids into being afraid of whatever they want them to be afraid of so they can't get help. Grown ups that can help them, places that they're safe - whatever makes it easiest for them to catch them."
He shook his head. "You said 'it's them' like you knew us but for us? This is the first time we've ever met you. So whatever you've seen, whatever's happened to you, that wasn't us. And I think they might have tried to make it seem like us so that you'd run away when we found you and came to help. They're enemies of ours, too, and they knew we'd be trying to find and help you as soon as we knew you were here."
The way he reeked of gentleness and concern was pretty much a gift, one that came of centuries of being around children. He projected "protective, trustworthy big brother" like nobody's business.
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He took a deep breath, schooling his offense without taking his eyes off the alien. His only response to the explanation and Jack's recognition was to relax his grip on his boomerangs slightly and stand up a little straighter.
Jack gave off "trusty big brother" like he was made to be one, but the immediate impression Bunny left was "I will go to war for you."
Not as approachable, but a far cry from the shadows that had mimicked both of them.