Alright everyone, hold onto your butts because it’s time to introduce the Drift AU. Like “Friends with Tax Benefits”, it’s a slightly modified spin-off AU of… this AU. Fair warning: it comes with 30% more suffering.

Please take this with a grain of salt; this is not anything that will be emphasized on the blog or expanded upon much. It’s more or less a speculation of another what-if, but it’s a bit too dark to keep with the general TAU theme in my opinion.

Bill is stopped and the Transcendence takes place like usual – but this time, Dipper is nowhere to be found. 

The Pines family (as well as their friends) mourn the loss of Dipper, who died in a last ditch effort to keep Bill from ushering an apocalypse. His body is never found, but unlike in the main story, Mabel never finds his “ghost”.

Everyone still has to deal with a post-Transcendence world where the paranormal is commonplace, and new threats are popping up every day. Mabel is never quite the same, having lost what was arguably a piece of herself when her brother died. She returns to Piedmont in a detached sort of haze, only barely beginning to pick up the pieces of her heart years after she’s come to terms with Dipper’s absence. 

Whatever progress she makes is tested however, when she starts noticing odd things happening around her. Things on her desk being rearranged, cryptic dreams, a voice that she swears she barely hears in the dead of night when all is silent. Hair being tugged or flipped in front of her face, scrapbooks falling off off shelves, pens mysteriously breaking. At first, everything is written off as her being paranoid, hopeful even. Some of the things she sees remind her of Dipper to a point that it becomes eerie.

A part of her tries not to think about the possibility of Dipper haunting her as a ghost. She doesn’t want to believe her brother is trapped in purgatory. Besides, there are now plenty of explanations that exist for weird happenings – there are a lot of mischievous creatures that can do things like play pranks.

In high school, when she starts to get some of that old fire back in her, she begins to pick up where the Mystery Twins left off; she becomes a paranormal investigator/adventurer much like she did in the original storyline. Once she starts putting her head back in the game, she starts to realize that it’s not so impossible to think she’s being haunted.

Any attempts to communicate with a would-be ghost only confuses her more. Sometimes the signs she gets point to a classic haunting, possibly poltergeist level. But other times it points to something more sinister, more dangerous.

After a particularly terrifying seance, Mabel starts to question if it’s even a ghost that’s trying to terrorize her. After what happened with Bill, Mabel harbored a healthy fear of demons, and for good reason; they were creatures immediately deemed the most dangerous in the new post-Transcendence world. New ones seemed to pop up every few months, in headlines about summonings gone wrong and grim interviews with paranormal creatures privy to such information.

And in the past few years, no demon was discussed more than Alcor. The pure devastation left in his wake (lives lost, souls devoured, minds tormented) was bad enough, but he also seemed somewhat impervious to binding circles. So would it be possible for him to interact with the physical world?

She shakes the thought off, but continues her search for more information on what could possibly be haunting her, if it’s even possible for demons to do such a thing. Perhaps it’s impossible under normal circumstances… but in theory, demons could be “powered up” over time if given a proper energy source. This leads her to suspect a nearby cult giving demons enough worship to achieve just that.

After weeks of searching, she finally stumbles on a cult just outside Piedmont. Mabel still harbors a sweet temperament, but her anger flares when she realizes these people were willing to put thousands of lives in danger for personal gain. What if they succeeded? Would someone else meet the same fate Dipper did, being killed by a demon? Would more families be torn apart?

Mabel holds little remorse when she storms the cult, wielding a bat and successfully knocking half the cult to their knees – before someone pulls a knife on her.

Unable to move and bleeding out from her stomach, the cult leader continues with the ritual and successfully summons the one demon Mabel prayed wouldn’t appear: Alcor.

The lives of the injured and fallen are used as a bargaining tool for the summoner’s wish of wealth and power. In a horrific spectacle, Alcor easily twists the man’s words so that every life in the room is surrendered to him, which he takes with an enthusiastic and grotesque display of blood-stained claws and fangs. In minutes, everyone is killed and half devoured.

Well, everyone except Mabel.

The mix of shock, fear, and rapid blood loss makes her woozy and unable to concentrate. In her last few moments of consciousness, she hears Alcor offering to save her life. All she can think about is how she can’t die here, she can’t do that to her parents, she has to live on for herself and for her departed brother.

She barely feels his hand encase hers, the blue flames lick her skin.

The next time she wakes hours later in the abandoned warehouse still stained in cultist blood, she realizes with absolute horror that she didn’t just seal a deal with Alcor, but she left it open ended… and he took the most precious thing she had to offer: her soul.

The following weeks are a flurry of terror, knowing that once a demon claims a soul, it’s usually devoured immediately. When Mabel finally hits the point where she can no longer take the suspense, the constant question of what Alcor was planning to do with her, she summons him.

Alcor the Dreambender finally breaks down and reveals to her who he really is, shedding his demonic form to reveal something more human, and horrifically familiar. 

In the six years following the Transcendence, Dipper had made every effort to contact Mabel. For a while she even believed it was him, before she started to conclude she was dealing with a demon rather than a ghost. But by the time Dipper reached a point of power that he could pop into the physical realm at will, he’d already made a name for himself and was deemed infamous by his exploits.

Without Mabel to help solidify his pieces of humanity, he became more demonic than in the main storyline. He’s more unhinged, more comfortable with the ways of his kind. He still harbors enough humanity for Mabel to slowly accept him, but his sympathy has a more definitive line.

The only people he cares about are the people he loves. His family, his  friends. Everyone else is a stranger, someone he wouldn’t think twice about hurting if it seems fun, no matter how innocent the person in question might be.

Once high school is over, he and Mabel move back to Gravity Falls. But everyone – even Mabel – will openly admit that while they love Dipper, they don’t trust him. It’s like working in a lion sanctuary; you can love and care for the lions there, but wouldn’t dare risk going in the enclosure. 

It only takes a handful of bad deals for the residents of Gravity Falls to realize that Dipper will gladly screw them over like any other demon. He only practices moderate restraint with people he likes, but still can still hurt them so long as it’s nothing too terrible. (Pacifica in particular learned this the hard way, with a nasty scar that covers the side of her neck down to her collarbone)

Wendy, already a demon hunter, had the misfortune to meet Dipper as Alcor first. Thus, she probably distrusts him more than any of his friends. 

Mabel still ends up marrying Henry, and thankfully, Dipper takes a liking to him. Which is just about the only thing that saved his life – if Dipper hadn’t gotten attached as quickly as he did, he could have easily deemed him a nuisance to be “taken care” of.

As for the triplets… even they aren’t entirely safe from Dipper, but he’s the gentlest with them. He wouldn’t hurt them for fun, but he has little remorse for conning them in deals (the consequences are still fairly trivial, like losing candy or their voice for a day).

It’s important to keep in mind that while this summary is intended to make the stark contrast of Dipper’s personality, he’s still more of a chaotic-neutral entity. He’s not evil just to be evil, but more like “this is what demons do, and I’m fine with that” type of thinking. The lack of social interaction during those crucial six years really changed him, but he isn’t an entirely different person. He does seem to hang around the Shack a lot less however, opting to “play human” only about half the time.

In addition to having “demonic” episodes like in the main plot, he also has “human” episodes, where he’s more acutely aware of what he’s done and who he’s become. He still isn’t as bad as other demons (he may hurt people more often, but he still refrains from killing innocents… most of the time), but he’s certainly a lot more volatile than he could have turned out.

(I also personally see him getting a lot better after being back around Mabel for a few years, perhaps very close to his canon state. But that’s up to you just how much the presence of loved ones heal him.)