Separate Worlds AU

Introduction

Hello, this is @themurphyzone on Tumblr! Also known as cresselia8themoon on AO3!

I'm the author of Separate Worlds, a Gravity Falls AU that's a what-if continuation of A Better World AU from Journal 3! It makes me really happy that people are enjoying this fanfiction from a show I've loved since it first aired in 2012, but since my main blog is becoming a little bloated with other content, I'm going to start placing anything that's related to this fanfic under this name from this point on.

You can still find earlier posts about this fanfic under the tag #separate worlds on @themurphyzone.

Separate Worlds Summary

Thirty years ago, Stan agreed to take Journal 1 somewhere far away by Ford’s desperate request, only to perish at sea. Upon his death, a mysterious power seals his soul within the journal he failed to protect. For many years afterward, the journal continues to drift through the ocean, alone and forgotten by all.

In 2012, Mabel Pines is feeling lost without her twin brother, who’s accepted an internship at the prestigious International Institute of Oddology, run by the famous Stanford Pines. Just when she thinks she’s gonna have to survive public middle school alone, a chance encounter at the pier changes everything.

Meanwhile, Dipper is beyond ecstatic to follow in his great uncle’s footsteps as a paranormal researcher. While he has reservations about leaving Mabel in Piedmont, he can't pass up this educational opportunity. But he’ll soon discover that not everything is as it seems within the Institute and the town of Gravity Falls.

Inspiration

Not What He Seems and A Tale of Two Stans were the episodes that launched thousands of fanfics, theorists, and fanartists, and that's when I really got into AUs where Stan and Ford's meeting went differently, and the consequences that arose from Ford's return and how the Stan twins' fallout affected Dipper and Mabel.

Ford is a character that's steeped with mystery, and no two people will have the same opinion on him if you ask. He's likely the most polarizing cartoon character to come out in the recent decade (other than fellow morally gray figure Rose Quartz), and that makes Journal 3 such a fascinating read.

Ford only appears in-person in the last half of Season 2, so the audience is more likely to hold more sympathetic opinions towards Stanley since we get comparatively more time with him.

But Journal 3 gives us the details of Ford's thoughts, his relationships, his flaws, his life, how he sees the world and his relationship with weirdness-from his own to the anomalies around him to a family he's been disconnected from for decades.

In Tale of Two Stans, Stan refuses Ford's request to take the journal and leave Gravity Falls. So Journal 3 gives us the Better World AU, where a new universe is created because Stan accepted the journal and followed Ford's request to get on a boat and sail to the ends of the earth, where his research will never fall into the wrong hands.

Then Ford goes on to reconcile with Fiddleford, block Bill's access to their dimension with a device that still allows questionably safe usage of the portal for further research, founds the International Institute of Oddology, and finally achieves the fame he's wanted and the fortune his father wanted.

And as for Stan...that's it. There's no further mention of A Better World Stan after he takes the journal and leaves. What he does with it, where he ends up going, how he feels...it's all left up to reader interpretation.

It's been a popular theory that Better World Stan took his own life afterwards, and even the more optimistic interpretations still have Stan sailing the ocean without family for a long time.

And without Stan, the repercussions of his absence from the family can be felt many years later, even from those who may not know he existed at all.

Taking a break from the main story to write the Shermie chapter of Remember Me! This is a side story I've been wanting to do for a while that's about Shermie and the extended Pines family in the 1970s and 1980s.

Shermie hobbled into the cramped apartment, and his own son–a toddler now, began to cry at the sight of him.

The sound rattled his ears, and the heaviness in his chest hurt far worse than the shrapnel piercing his body in Vietnam.

Shermie missed his son’s birth and first four years of life for a war he never wanted to be part of. He didn’t get to see Jacob walk for the first time, say his first word, or look at him with the sort of pure, innocent love only someone who had yet to experience the world could give.

The letter and picture he’d received during a rare moment of downtime at base camp wasn’t enough.

Even Filbrick, for all his faults, had been with his mother to name his sons after birth.

At least Shermie had a name all to himself. Poor Stanford and Stanley Pines were cursed from birth by a man who didn’t have a creative bone in his body.

"Jacob, it’s me. I’m your dad,” Shermie said as softly as he could. He wanted nothing more than to kneel and scoop the boy up, but his leg injury wouldn’t allow him. Jacob stood up on wobbly legs and ran towards the bedroom, abandoning his toy cars on the living room floor while Shermie could only watch.

Summary: Dipper has a nightmare because the author really likes nightmare sequences and I have to give him one at some point. Meanwhile, Ford flounders on what to do with a child that he can barely provide the basics for because he can't even provide the basics for himself.

Chapter 15 Link to AO3

Kicking off the chapter with a nightmare sequence!!!! I love nightmare sequences!

Heavy rain battered Dipper’s body, and he held onto his cap as he ran while the wind threatened to steal it away. The wooden dock underfoot was slippery and uneven, loose boards giving way and plummeting into the unknown after Dipper’s foot barely grazed them. 

The storefronts around him offered no reprieve from the storm. The letters on their signs were jumbled and impossible to read, the doors and windows boarded up with thick planks–sending the very clear message of YOU’RE NOT WELCOME HERE. 

Pier 39 should’ve been bustling with tourists–couples arguing where they should go next for their vacation and kids dragging their parents to all the fun places…except they were all gone. 

No shopkeepers, fishermen, or anyone at all to say they knew a place where Dipper could wait out the storm. 

But even if they offered a reprieve, Dipper knew he couldn’t accept just yet. 

Not until he found Mabel. 

She’d recklessly gone off on her own again. The small, vindictive part of Dipper hoped that getting caught in this storm would finally teach her a lesson about that. 

“Mabel!” he screamed, though he couldn’t make his voice heard above the wind. 

In this AU, Mermando would be disguised as a boy named Fernando Pearl who uses a wheelchair to get around. He wears a magic pearl around his neck that provides a glamour of being human, but his illusionary human legs are useless and he has to use a wheelchair instead. While he can survive out of water in this AU, he does need to hydrate himself constantly alongside using an inhaler to keep his throat moist (everyone just assumes he has asthma and does not know he's actually a merman) and keeps the area around his neck moist with a damp towel under his shirt. His hair is cut much shorter than canon Mermando, and he's constantly nervous and distrustful to everyone, though he eventually warms up to Mabel.

The reason for all this: Fernando Pearl's "mother" is Mabel's new science teacher, named Victoria Pearl, who was educated at the Institute and has since moved on and continued to study cryptids in California. While Ms. Victoria Pearl presents herself as Fernando's mother, she actually captured him at sea while he was swimming with his dolphin friends and dragged him back to the mainland for study.

Namely: She's curious how well merfolk can integrate with humans without being caught, and she hopes to write a thesis and earn her doctorate based off her results, so she treats Fernando like her son in public and like an experiment in private. Her personality would be similar to Mother Gothel in Tangled.

Fernando is terrified of her, and Mabel and the rest of her class find it difficult to keep up with the coursework she's assigned to them because it's much more advanced than what they're used to, a mixture of the Institute's core philosophies and college preparedness of public school.

Because of Fernando's timid demeanor, he's an easy target for bullies, which prompts Mabel to defend him. Fernando admires Mabel's bravery and kindness a lot.

From Mabel's end, she starts hanging out with Fernando because he's the new kid on the block, which means he's never met Dipper before, and this is a new friendship that feels like it's something special for her alone. She even finds him cute, and she won't stop talking Stan's ear off about him.

Stan thinks there's something off about Fernando, but can't put his finger on it, though Mabel just dismisses his concern.

Fernando and Mabel bond, until Fernando eventually reveals the truth of what happened to him and how he's really a merman who wants to escape and go back to the ocean.

Mabel is saddened by this, not wanting another person she cares about to leave her, but she wants Mermando to be happy, so she helps him escape to the ocean. There's a whole chase sequence where Stan gets to be awesome and saves Mabel and Fernando from his mother who doesn't want her son/experiment to escape her clutches.

“Remember me, Though I have to say goodbye. Remember me, Don’t let it make you cry.” Set in the Better World AU. But even though it's better, it still feels like someone's missing. And even though many don't realize it, the absence of one man can leave a void that can't be filled.

This chapter is an outsider alternate POV of Separate Worlds Ch 1: Prologue: Thirty Years Ago, when Stan goes out drinking in an Alaskan bar before setting out to sea. Featuring my OC Paulie the Disgruntled Alaskan Bartender.

Ghost!Stan having to fight off some criminals to protect Mabel and a friend she's trying to help escape from said criminals. Ghost!Stan possessing one of the criminals and beating the shit out of his buddies while Mabel and her friend flee.

This WIP is at about 7300k words right now. Gonna be a longer chapter cause there just really isn't a good place for me to cut it up.

With a sigh, Dipper opened his phone, only to discover that he had a grand total of zero calls from Mabel. Though every text he’d sent went through without error, there was no indication that Mabel read any of them. 

He’d missed several texts from Mom. Looked like they’d all been sent while he’d been on the bus, tapering off after a certain point. He wondered if Dad had a hand in stopping her from blowing up his phone. 

There was nothing about their date night in these messages. Not a single it’s going well or the food is delicious. 

Dipper planned to ask if they’d followed his checklist down to every last bullet point for their date night. With any luck, it should prevent any fighting between them. 

At least Mom and Dad were together for the night. 

Mabel…well, she just had Whiskers for company right now. And he wasn’t exactly someone you could hold a conversation with. 

They’d worked so well together when they captured the ghost of Irene Ashenbury at the beginning of summer, but ever since Ford came down to Piedmont to personally invite Dipper to the Institute, she’d been sullen and difficult to talk to. 

Some summer days had been better than others, where Mabel acted somewhat like her relentless, bubbly self again, but then she’d snap back to being moody. 

Dipper had tried to get Dad’s help on the matter, but he’d been no help. He just chalked it up to hormones causing her mood swings and stocked the pantry with extra chocolate for Mabel. 

Chocolate was a good distraction, but it wasn’t gonna solve the problem. 

And after she almost drowned at Pier 39, she could barely stand being in the same room with Dipper at all, though she’d spent a significant amount of time knitting his birthday sweater. 

That whole incident had been…weird. 

When the local news covered the freak storm, the meteorologists had given some explanation about temperature changes affecting the currents in the Bay Area, but that didn’t seem right to Dipper. None of it explained how or why Mabel had been walking along the pier like she’d been hypnotized, barely aware of the dangerous floodwaters threatening to sweep her out to sea. 

She didn’t respond to Dipper’s shouts. Didn’t take his offer for help. Just stared at him with a blank expression before the ocean blocked her from reaching land, or he would’ve dragged her into the nearest store for shelter. Then the storm disappeared, and Mabel was alive when Dipper was so sure he was gonna be an only child. She’d been cold and soaked to the bone when he hugged her, but Dipper didn’t care as long as he still had a twin to fight over the last slice of pizza with. 

That storm couldn’t have been natural. What if…something had been in the water that day? Cutting off our cell service, putting Mabel into a trance, luring her into the ocean cause she was easy prey? A siren maybe? 

A siren could’ve been behind Mabel’s trance, but Dipper didn’t think they were powerful enough to cause storms and disrupt radio waves. 

One last Soos and Dipper interaction before Soos leaves for the rest of the chapter. So happy I got to squeeze this in somewhere.