So I have to apologise for the unannounced, unexpected month-and-a-half hiatus. I found out by trial and error (mostly error) that I can’t consistently update two longfics while also consistently working on a novel. I’m going to finish this and Imbalance, but after that, I’m planning to take a step back from fic to focus more on my original fiction. I hope you’ll check out @katesummervsthemultiverse if you’re interested in what I’ve been getting up to!
I’m also on AO3 as MaryPSue!
…
The first thing that caught the eye, entering Gravity Falls, were the cliffs.
It had been true in 2012 and it was true now, a little over a thousand years later. The valley in which the town nestled sloped gently downwards, only to abruptly terminate in a towering wall of rock. The cliffs loomed over the valley like enormous sentinels, keeping watch over everything that lay before them. One of the huge outcroppings of bare stone that hung over the valley had lost its top, a chunk of rock almost the size of the town itself sliding off and crashing into the base of the opposite cliff, but the distinctive UFO shape could still be made out, if you knew what you were looking for.
Gravity Falls had changed too much, and not at all.
When Ian woke up, the other side of the bed was empty.
The covers were all rumpled and pushed down to the foot of the bed, the blue light on the coffeemaker was on, and the window was forced wider than it had been last night, wide enough to blow the curtains out into the room like a couple of very ugly snot-green-damask ghosts. Somehow, it was still unbearably hot in the room.
Ian patted the mattress beside him, but it was only about as warm as the rest of the room. He couldn’t tell how long Mira must have been up before he was.
“This is gonna cost you more than just one bag of candy-coated chocolate-covered peanuts, you know.”
“Mmhm,” Mira agreed, barely listening. She’d lived in the Pacific Northwest her whole life, only a few hundred miles from the place where she was standing. Heck, she remembered family vacations in the Redwood National Forest, in the eerie underwater hush of a forest as old as the world. But somehow, nothing had prepared her for Gravity Falls.
Mira picked the phone up on the fourth ring, plugging it into the wall port to bring the call up on the TV’s screen and toggling the camera to ‘off’. She was in no state to be seen by anyone, especially not the photo-perfect Rosa Darling, who had probably never gotten a giant stress zit on her chin in her life.
Reincarnation Blues (95,096 words, published April 2, 2015, completed September 26, 2015)
This fic was the product of an idea that absolutely would not leave me alone. I’ve mentioned before that originally Rosa was the centre of the piece, with Ian as a supporting player and partner in crime in her bid to take over the world by being adorable and popular. Rosa Darling, Taylor Swift’s Evil Twin, crawled fully-formed out of the first time I heard Delta Rae’s ‘I Will Never Die’, at least two months before I ever wrote a word of Reincarnation Blues.
Thank you! I made kind of an aesthetic board as a cover for the playlist I made for her, here. Her style is meant to be something of a clash between cutesy retro chic and punk. Think gothabilly, pastel pinup dresses, combat boots, denim vests and jackets covered in patches and buttons and studs, ripped fishnets, red lipstick, and always, always, a tall blonde fauxhawk.
Are there any r!Gideons? I haven’t been able to find any
If there aren’t, we need some
Maybe an r!gideon who ends up with an r!mizar which Alcor doesn’t like (because that’s just weird) and he tries to set her/him up with the current r!henry, but mizar ends up with the r!gideon anyway
Rosa is definitely still around! When the girls start coming along, she declares herself their godmother (despite neither Ian or Mira being particularly religious) and makes it her mission to spoil the shit out of them. She and Dipper totally compete to give the best gifts, it’s hilarious.
Dipper gets informed in no uncertain terms that if he shows up once on the honeymoon he will regret it for the rest of his long, long existence. He takes this warning to heart, and tries to come by only during daylight hours/as previously arranged/when summoned for at least, like, two weeks afterwards. He’s not particularly good at it.
Mira worries about stagnating once they are married, especially since she and Ian are both so busy with their own creative projects, so she makes it her mission to find interesting things for them to do together for ‘married people dates’. Ian gets really into it too, though his suggestions aren’t always met with unconditional delight. Any time they’re starting to feel like they’re getting into a rut, they draw a ‘date’ from the jar by the door, pack up, and go. This is part of how they ended up taking a swing-dancing lesson together, and is also why they’ve both learned to make cheese.
Man, I love the idea of expressing a character’s personality through association with an animal, and I love the things you can do with an associated animal that’s also that character’s soul, but I definitely feel some sort of way about daemons settling, and it’s occurring to me just now that I also feel some sort of way about the idea that settled adults can safely be severed from their daemons with no ill effects save for docility and compliance, while it literally kills children. You are not nearly so subtle as I thought you at age twelve, Mr. Pullman. (Then again, at age twelve, I completely failed to recognise any sort of religious allegory in the Chronicles of Narnia, so maybe I was just a particularly obtuse little kid.)
Rosa’s daemon is a satinette pigeon named Queenie. Sun-mi’s is a magpie that she calls Hildegard, mostly because she can. She has another name, but Sun-mi doesn’t like to share it. (When she was born, they thought she was one of those rare people whose daemon was the same sex as they were. They were right, but not in the way they expected.)
Mira’s daemon, to her endless amusement and frustration, is a rabbit – but not just any rabbit, one of those enormous rabbits that weighs as much as a person. She calls him Flopsy.
Bob’s real name is Metallah. Ian used to not use it because it was a mouthful and he likes to tease her (as she likes to tease him right back). Now, he doesn’t use it because of Connotations. And because it’s a mouthful. Besides, Bob is just such a Bob.
Alcor doesn’t have one.
It occurs to me that I had three out of four of these people rename their own daemons (and Rosa’s is debatable).
I stand by that, I think, especially for RB. If anyone is going to name your literal soul, it should be you.
Something that probably happens a little after the events of Reincarnation Blues. Thanks as always to @seiya234 for fact-checking, beta-reading, and cheerleading!
The sound of a sharp rap on the apartment door broke Ian out of his stupor. He grabbed the remote, stabbing vaguely at the buttons as the light from the television flickered mutely over the living room floor. When had it gotten so dark?
He must have found the right button, because the prerecorded laugh track froze along with the action. Fake smiles strained across virtual actors’ faces for an instant before Ian switched to the channel for the peephole, his heart hammering like a fist beating against his ribcage from inside. The world that had faded to a dull background roar suddenly seemed sharp-edged and too full of shadows. It wasn’t – but it could be – he still had – dreams, fragments – and if Alcor had missed something in his head, then couldn’t somone else’s have been missed altogether, couldn’t someone else have put the pieces together and realised –
But it wasn’t a government agent whose unimpressed face stared back at Ian from the peephole camera feed. A jolt tore through him, like a full body scare chord, when Rosa pursed her lips and said directly into the camera, “Beale?”
“Don’t call me that,” Ian snapped, before realising she couldn’t hear him.
Rosa went on talking, her face distorted slightly by the fishbowl lens. “Mira says you ain’t been takin’ your meds.”
backup 