Journal D - The Witches
I’M BACK, BABY!
Sorry, needed to get that out my system. An update: after my encounter with the Chronomerchant by Lake Michigan, I think someone in the Magic Market took exception to me taking records of their business dealings. I was called into some abandoned house on the outskirts of Detroit, ostensibly for a routine ghost-busting, when I was jumped by a gang of vampires. Hired muscle, neon tracksuits and fake tan - the usual stuff.
Some guy in a suit came in, and cast a spell on me that transformed me into a 12-year-old! Then they took my journal and drove off, leaving me stranded in this crumbling suburb. Let me tell you, there’s nothing so humbling as remembering how weak you were when you were a kid. This was pre-Gravity Falls Mason Pines - I could barely climb out the window or run down the street without feeling like my lungs wanted to shrivel up and die, and don’t even get me started on those stupid noodle arms. And people wonder why I started going to the gym.
What’s more, my clothes didn’t change size with me, so I had to wander around tripping up on my own pant legs. I’m sure if Mabel saw this, she’d have squealed in delight at how adorable I was. I suppose that worked to my benefit - pretty soon the cops came to pick me up. I wasn’t worried about this (nope, not worried, definitely not shivering and sweating with pure anxiety, nope nope). I had an ace up my six-sizes-too-big sleeve.
Back when I was 12 for real, my sister and I had a run-in with this witch - she tricked my Grunkle Stan into stealing a cursed watch so she’d claim his hands, all so she could lure him to her cave so she could ask him on a date. She’d done this dozens of times, going from the number of disembodied hands she had. Apparently everyone before Stan would have preferred leaving them behind. We felt kinda sorry for her, so my sister set her up with a new pad and a dating profile.
Turned out her name was Pru Handforth, and she was the oldest member of Gravity Falls’ witch coven. Apparently, back in the 1860s her legs had to be amputated after an accident, and she magically replaced them with a pair of arms. The other two witches in the coven were Eartha Oceana the magic hippie (witches rarely choose ‘normal’ names once they adopt the life of a spellweaver), and Crow Pi, who I remembered used to work at Edgy On Purpose. ...They probably still do. Also proof that you don’t have to be female to be a witch.
Anyway, Pru had put in a good word with the other two; during my summers in Gravity Falls my sister and I ran a few errands for them, like hunting down Eye of Eyebat or taking voice recordings of a Sfinx (yes, with an ‘f’, she was aquatic), so I knew I had a couple favours I could cash in with them. They looked into their connections on Hextsy.net - apparently a friend of theirs called Barley had been scouting around Michigan for artifacts, and there was a dispute between Hextsy and some warlock bigwig over some book he’d tracked down - they were demanding proof it was a magical artefact and not a work of fiction, while he was claiming that it held confidential information and was threatening on taking it to FaeBay.com instead. So not only was this asshole stock market guy trying to sell my journal, he was also trying to pass it off as his own work!
I wish I could say there was a suitably dramatic ending to all this where I bust down the warlock’s front door and froze him with liquid nitrogen or stabbed him right in the phylactery or whatever, but no such luck. Instead Barley just offered to buy the book from him, no questions asked, which he did, and then gave it back to me. Oh yeah, and he reversed that spell on me. So yeah, anyone reading this, keep all this in mind next time you see a witch selling cursed watches, they might just save your life one day.
Oh yeah, and we’re pretty sure that warlock just didn’t want it getting out that he’d sacrificed his former secretary to a demon for his powers. We can’t prove that, but we can prove he tried to rip off Hextsy, so I’ll just wait for the Hidden Court to come down on him.
Finally I wrote another Journal D entry. Didn’t really have a plan for this, just kinda wrote down what popped into my head. This was mostly an excuse to introduce some OCs of mine (technically two of them are canon - Pru is the Hand Witch and Crow is the androgynous goth that briefly appeared in Soos and the Real Girl) and also establish that Barley from Hinny_B’s fic Sunshine at Night exists in this timeline, because he’s awesome. :P Also some more hidden magical-market worldbuilding, I spose. :V













