"-so they're sending him to space on account of how the guys they were *going* to send blew up in some kind of freak lab accident," Mabel chattered on as her fingers worked the needles between them. Her eyes never wandered from her work, even as she tilted her head and nodded towards the laptop screen. "Which means I won't get to give him this fox cardigan I was planning to give him for his birthday."

"Fascinating," her Grunkle Ford said. "I've been trying to get into contact with the head of the taskforce regarding my own plans for utilizing the ancient alien technology residing beneath the valley of Gravity Falls to warp straight to Tau Ceti instead of flying there through real spacetime, but this 'Eva Stratt' keeps rejecting my calls on the basis that the Project needs 'reliable equipment' with 'thousands of man-hours of testing' put into them and I tried to tell her that if you're sending your astronauts to their deaths you might as well have a little fun with it and experiment with wormholes, but-" he made a noncommittal sound; there was the dual slap of hands hitting a table in defeat.

"I mean, she has a point," Dipper called out, working on some kind of model project involving the Petrova Line. "It's already a long shot- why risk anything more than you have to?"

"She wouldn't have to risk anything if she just looked at my designs for a mono-dimensional worm hole generator-" the old man started again, clearly incensed.

"Question," came a forth voice from Grunkle Ford's side. Stan's head and shoulders popped into the background, an apron decorated with some witty catchphrase or another on his front, "Did you tell her how you know you can prove it?"

"I, well-" Ford stammered, "What do you expect me to tell them, exactly?"

"Definitely not that you got the idea from a space demon," Grunkle Stan said, "But probably something that'll convince 'em you're not a nut. Maybe some pictures, I dunno. I'm not a nerd."

"You literally rebuilt the inter-dimensional portal in my basement with a third of the notes," Grunkle Ford scoffed.

"You did do that," Mabel agreed.

"Sounds like a pretty big nerd thing to do," Dipper nodded along.

"I'm disowning all of you," Grunkle Stan turned back to what he'd been doing, black smoke drifting lazily into the air behind Ford.

"Regardless, I'm planning on doing some research and potential refurbishment myself with Fiddleford when we reach town," the old man folded his fingers together and leaned forward with an excited smile. "Obviously I'm not going to sit on the sidelines while the Earth freezes over, but would you two like to accompany Stanley and myself when we make the trip? It should only take a week. Maybe a month, tops, if the reason for Tau Ceti's lack of dimming is complex in nature."

Portraits of my gf (@illrae) and I that I did!!!