Technically, Dipper could get those things out of there no problem, just using his powers. Technically, he’s not in a condition for heavy or complicated thought at the moment.
Henry walks in and sees him fussing with the puzzle ball for all of three seconds before he suddenly opens his mouth way too wide and just eats the whole damn thing in one go, only to look extremely miffed – insulted, even – that even this didn’t let him taste the treats.
Mabel is crying with laughter. She can’t even take pictures anymore at that point because she’s shaking so much they blur.
Okay, okay, so a couple of us mods talked about this and we’ve expanded on it and it’s got so much potential, so here’s some more thoughts:
– Another limitation to this spell is that the memories don’t necessarily all come flooding back, nor can they all be perfectly recalled in chronological order. Oh, maybe it does for some, which is uncomfortable at best and maddening at worst, but for most it’s more like…childhood nostalgia, in a weird way. You remember things almost randomly, or in connection with other things. It’s not exactly controllable, and can often be confusing because you might remember the effect of something but not the cause. (i.e. ‘Wait, why did my past life hate peanut butter? I don’t get it.’)
– Some spellcrafters tried to work this ‘bug’ out and make it easier to control, more complete or whatever, but this tended to just make things worse. Some people got hospitalized due to mental damages caused by the spell. So yeah, in certain areas it is definitely banned, because while not everybody suffered a bad reaction to it, enough did that it couldn’t be considered generally safe. You can still get it on the black market in these areas if you really, really want to…but it’s a hell of a gamble for curiosity’s sake alone.
– ALSO, also, the vast majority of people? They want to know that they were someone important once. Everybody wants to be a reincarnation of, oh I don’t know, a president or a king or a movie star or the like. Nobody wants to pay for this spell just to end up with memories of a mundane life with a 9 to 5 job and a mortgage and paying for life insurance, where the most exciting thing that ever happened was when you took horseback riding lessons that one time and fell off right into a cactus. Dissatisfaction alone could account for both how quickly this spell fell from popular use and potentially also for the major problems caused by ‘overdosing’ as people go back for a second try, so to speak.
– Also, Transcendence era? That’s going to include a huge span of lifetimes. Someone could go ‘who was I when I lived at this time’ only to find out that, for instance, the vast majority of that life passed before the Transcendence even happened – that they were ninety and in a nursing home by that summer, and their days in that historic period were filled with TV reruns and Bingo games and the fact that they really liked rice pudding because they could eat it without dentures. Fairies and dragons and goblins are real, you say? That’s nice, son. Where’s my pudding?
– On the other hand, someone who picked a different time for whatever reason: “I think…at one point…Alcor was my teacher.” “Okay Edgelord McGaryStu.” “No. No I’m serious.” And they’re forever haunted by this because they just can’t remember why this might have been, and they can’t make sense of it at all, just that apparently a past life took a demonology course in university and apparently on the last day of that course this was revealed and it’s all weird impressions and stuff and they don’t think they ever saw the demon again, so just, why???
He totally could if he wanted to, and he maintains this as a stance.
He tells absolutely no one of the time when he and Mable were, technically, around the age of sixteen or so and he deliberately altered his human-ish appearance to include what he thought would be a manly sort of lumberjack scruff (it was the cool thing at the time, at his age, in Gravity Falls, okay?) and it just set Mable off in shrieking laughter for half an hour over breakfast, incited an entire day of Stan commentary, and caused Ford to ask, in sincere but misplaced curiosity, if patchy facial bristles worked as a kind of intimidation tactic among demons, like the morphic mouth feelers on certain species of semi-supernatural fish.
(To those who knew or otherwise found out about this event, he maintains, rather, that it’d turned out to be way too itchy and totally not worth the trouble, and besides which the clean-shaven look tends to be considered professional and sleek in more cultures and situations than not.)
Almost impossibly hard, especially if it has nothing specific it’s aiming for on the other side (i.e. a young Bentley’s accidental foray into Alcor’s mindscape, made possible largely if not almost entirely because of the soul-deep bond between them).
Note the word ‘almost,’ though, because the universe does occasionally tend to surprise, and rare exceptions do happen from time to scattered time.
And, of course, while it is rare indeed for such an exception to come along, it’s even more rare for said exception to leave again, whole and unmarred, because the mindscape is vast, and it can be maddening beyond mortal comprehension, and it is filled with all sorts of…unfriendly…entities.
Unfriendly entities that may regard a wandering mortal consciousness in their domain as something like a chew toy, at best.
Dipper in a really demonic or angry mindset might not fully succumb to yggdrasil, because he has some measure of control over his response to the herb thanks to certain unique circumstances surrounding his nature as a being.
Usually he goes cat-mode only if and when he feels safe and/or comfortable enough to do so. If he’s not feeling that safety or comfort, and if he’s not got anywhere or anyone to go to where he would feel it while the stuff’s still in his system following an encounter with it, then he’d generally shrug the effects off by sheer force of will. Angry will, in this case.
If there’s enough of it, he might have a headache or a case of the woozies, but he’s not going to be mrowling or hissing or slinking around if he really, really doesn’t want to. And a particularly bad-time Alcor probably isn’t going to want to.
Sometimes we do forget this general rule of thumb for the sake of a fic situation though, so I guess if you want to squish it a bit in order to explore the concept, it’d still fit in one way or another.
Well, they’re remembered extremely briefly, for the most part, unless you’re specializing in that area and era and subject matter. Like most people can’t say much about Al Capone aside from the fact that he was a very famous gangster, plus maybe one or two pieces of trivia, the general populace’s knowledge of Don Hank Pines in the future probably isn’t high.
Now, specialists in the realms of history that would include him specifically, that’s another story, and probably a slightly confusing one at that, all due to documentation. In general, the Dinner Crew might get mentions as a whole in newspapers and opinion columns from time to time, as well as online platforms such as social media and news websites, but imagine having to sort through all the fluff and faff to find truths about it. And on the other side of things, there’s Hank Pines, who has birth and death and marriage certificates all proper and in order, and filed his taxes every year and worked in computer programming and whose significant other taught at an elementary school in the area, and all that verified papertrail is so utterly mundane.
As for the rumors about Alcor, it could depend on the sources of those rumors and how many mouths and minds they pass through before being written down in any format. Then it’ll probably depend on what the format is and who is doing the writing and why and whether it can at all be verified to determine whether it’s taken as a historical likelihood as opposed to a kind of runaway intimidation tactic or misunderstanding.
So in short…I’m pretty sure there’ll be plenty in all of this for future historians to argue and throw shade at each other over in series of back-and-forth academic papers.
And/or the numbers just keep changing. Like you measure once, and then measure again to make sure, and you get two different results even though it’s been moments at most between them. You keep trying, and no matter what you just consistently fail to get the same result twice. Maybe if you try again tomorrow you’ll get a repeat…or three. And it’s not like the goat is growing and shrinking before your eyes, at least not visibly, you just…somehow…managed to measure him once at two feet three inches at the shoulder and when you double check you somehow end up measuring three-foot-five. Gompers still only measures so high against your leg. That never changes. But you still can’t use that as a measuring point because you just keep losing the spot in the process of getting the ruler or tape or what have you.
It’s probably a good thing Gompers has never needed vet attention. They wouldn’t know what to do with the scales.
Early on in the AU, Alcor didn’t have near as much sense of “self” as a demon. That’s what caused him to be pulled by Bill’s old circle, because his only tie to a demonic entity was Bill’s residual energy lingering on him.
However, as he gets older, he gains more of a resistance to any calls through Bill’s circle. A demon’s circle is pretty much a forced summon if enough energy is provided. But once Dipper sees himself as a separate demonic entity, different from Bill, those summons are no longer something he’s forced to answer.
He’ll still usually feel a varying degree of influence from it, however. Depending on his emotional state, excess energy, etc. he could feel a vague itching on the back of his head, or a powerful anchor tugging at him; because he’s Alcor now, much more than he is Bill’s residual energy.
(This part of canon can be reasonably squished though to suit plot-specific needs!)
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