#phantomfalls

The girl’s eyes widened as she took in the opportunity to talk fashion with her Grunkle, only to quickly die down as she took in the sight and realized that Stan was wearing a suit jacket completely identical to every other suit she had ever seen the man wear. Her chance to dress her family up properly had passed by before she was even aware of it.

“Grunkle Stan, that suit’s just as old and ratty as all of your other suits.” And there came Dipper, always the first to point out something to pop everyone’s bubble. “I mean, it already has what looks to be a … moldy cheese stain?… and everything!”

“Geez, kid, do you always have to be such downer?” Grunkle Stan’s eyes followed where his prepubescent nephew was pointing, rolling his eyes along the way as he saw only immaculate, if slightly worn from the difficult getaway last night, clothing. “Besides, I just got this baby last night, there’s no way it already had a… HOT BELGIAN PANCAKES THIS THING’S ALREADY STAINED!”

Sure enough, right on the lap, just above where an immaculate gentleman would drape his napkin (leaving it in quite the uncomfortable position given the slight yellow tinge to the mark), was a sizable white dot with small patches of green that could only come from the finest, stinkiest cheese.

“MASTERS!” Shaking his fist in the air, Stan sworn he would have vengeance.

“Who’s Masters?” Mabel asked with her fork halfway to her mouth, her face in the small innocent pout she maintained no matter how inappropriately frustrated Grunkle Stan got.

“Ehh, just the snobby old rich guy I steal all of my suits from. The guy has the best combo: good style and bad security. And I respect that, by breaking into his house on a semi-regular basis. But I expected better than this! Vladdie’s supposed to be the creme de la cream or whatever that rich people slang is, not the cheese of the crop who gets perfectly bad cheese all over a perfectly good suit!”

But Dipper was already off in his own little mystery world, “Vladdie… Masters… wait, you don’t mean that the guy you stole this suit from is the Vlad Masters, like the eighth richest man in the world!”

“Yeah, that guy. Money McStainedPants.”

Dipper’s shocked face widened into a look of horror. “But Grunkle Stan, you don’t understand! Vlad Masters has more mysterious conspiracies surrounding him than any other person in the world! No one knows how he made his first million, and everyone who’s ever crossed him just mysteriously disappears! I read about him all over the internet back home and even did my school project on him!”

Mabel snickered. “Even the teacher called you a nerd.”

“Just because I care about the subject doesn’t mean that the teacher can impose a 50 page limit after the assignment is due.”

“Pfft. The homework was ‘write a paragraph about someone you look up to.’”

“Just because the man’s an elusive high-functioning sociopath doesn’t mean I can’t write about one of the ‘Most Successful Men on Earth’ for my report! And I’ve told you a dozen times there are grammatically correct ways to tie together multiple trains of thought into a single paragraph!”

Stan leaned over the back of an empty chair as he reveled in his children’s mockery. “So the man’s incredible rich, greedy, and hated by the masses but grudgingly respected because he’s rich. I can look up to that. Still gonna rob him blind tonight while he’s sleeping.”

Mabel turned. “But Grunkle Stan, you’re missing the entire point! Are you saying you steal all of the suits you wear while running the Shack?”

Stan paused in thought. “Yeah. High quality con- business attire doesn’t come cheap.”

“So you’re saying you’ve never owned a suit of your own?” Her eyes widened with pooled tears at the horrifying thought.

“Ehh, they’re mine once I take them, but I guess not.”

Mabel’s eyes glistened -with either cartoonish tears or stray glitter, it was always hard to tell with her. “Oh Grunkle Stan, you poor thing! Suits aren’t meant to be stolen, they’re meant to be made! With LOVE! You wait just one second I’m gonna go grab my knitting needles!”

Stan reached his arm out over the table and grabbed his hyperactive niece by the collar before she could run away. Dangling her in the air (as her choking breath faintly cried “betrayed by my own sweater!”) her guardian sighed. 

“Look kid, you know I love it when you make me clothing. Hell, I wear that fuzzy… hairy” he cringed, “… Grunkle sweater you made me all the time!” He shot a glare at Dipper as the young boy snickered at the lie, but seeing that Mabel was already calming down  the men silenty agreed to a truce to keep her happy. “But while sweaters are one thing, suits are an entirely different ballpark. They’re the hallmark of a man, they have to have a certain level of fineness and pizzazz in order to help a guy like me run a Mystery Shack like this, and yarn just doesn’t cut it, kid. Maybe if we had silk or something nice and high quality to make it, but that stuff’s expensive, and you’re not quite old enough to go on one of your Grunkle’s supply runs yet.”

He set Mabel down, and ran his hand through his hair as his niece just stared silently at the floor. Kneeling down with his hand on her shoulder, he coughed before comforting her, “I appreciate the gesture, but for now we’re just going to have to work with what we have.”

Grunkle Stan smiled with affection for his niece as she looked him in the eye and walked into his arms for a hug. “Work with what we have… Grunkle Stan you’re a genius!” Ripping his suit jacket right off of him (somehow without breaking their hug), Mabel ran up the stairs to the attic before her guardian could stop her. “You wait right there Grunkle Stan! You’ll have the bestest, most personalized suit ever before you know it!”

Stan stood as he looked after her, turning to see Dipper’s apologetic expression before running another hand through his thinning hair. “Kid’s certainly got a personality. Wait… Hey! I need that to run the Shack today!”

“The stain’s even more obvious without the jacket.” Dipper noted as he put his and Mabel’s plate in the sink before passing his Grunkle and going back up the stairs to get ready for whatever adventure was to come. Stan looked down at his pants to see them crowned with its moldy cheesy glory.

“KIDS!”

Later that night, Stanford Pines had all too easy a time sneaking into Vlad Masters’s mansion. But little did he know that the only reason there was no angry owner waiting for him as he had feared (he had never been dumb enough to break in to his house two nights in a row, but desperate times called for desperate measures), was because said owner was currently returning the favor.

Vlad Plasmius smirked to himself as he phased through the walls of the so-called Mystery Shack. A quick invisible patrol revealed that the only people present in the house were two sleeping children.

Pity, he was looking forward to overshadowing the thief to teach him never to steal from Vladimir Masters again, but they obviously couldn’t have done it. The girl was immediately out, and young boy was far too small and noodley to fit into any of his suits.

Passing unnoticed into the closet of the master bedroom, Plasmius all too easily found what he was looking for. The suit was hanging in the center of the closet, everything else shoved away as if it was a prized possession (which, given the quality of the wearable balls of yarn that surrounded it, Vlad would’ve been offended otherwise).

He brought his hands together in one of his favorite gestures, the steepling fingers making a triangle in what Daniel called his ‘evil plotting pose’. Not that much strategy was needed here, even the D-student Daniel is now could have pulled this off.

“You made it far too easy this time, Pines.”

He floated away and had been back in Wisconsin for hours before any of the house’s occupants woke up or returned, and therefore missed his chance at seeing revenge as the young girl broke down crying at the sight of the empty closet. 

“My expert handcrafting besmirched. besmirched!”

Vlad Masters was wearing that very suit the next time Danny stormed into his mansion, angrily yelling and screaming about whatever evil machinations had just come to light.

It wasn’t that Vlad wasn’t the mastermind behind whatever evil scheme Danny was dealing with (he definitely was), it’s simply that he had set up so many long-term plans to kill Jack and trap Danny into becoming his son that the man simply couldn’t tell which one was coming to early fruition from the general raging Danny was doing about his living room.

“-and while I was busy fighting off skulker those vultures came out of nowhere and started pecking at my Dad! …” Ahh, so it was that one. Vlad leaned back in his comfortable chair as he recalculated his future plans. That one was a longshot anyway.

“And the entire lab was covered in ectoplasmic goo for a week! Including Mom’s jumpsuit!” Vlad jumped to attention at the statement, causing Danny (who was currently flying about as Phantom as he was too on-guard to transform and too frustrated to form his legs and pace like a normal person -add evil pacing to the list of etiquette lessons the boy needed) to scowl. “And you weren’t even listening until you heard something that made you think more perverted thoughts about my mom!”

“I know you well enough to know what you’re talking about, Little Badger.” Vlad waved his hand through the air before impersonating the teen, “Blah blah blah schoolwork is hard because I play videogames rather than study but I’m going to blame it on ghosts! I’m idiotically loyal to my stupid arrogant father rather than just saying yes to the man who can offer me everything in the world yet instead I continue to call him a Fruit Loop and bother him at his house in the middle of the night taking advantage of the fact that he cares about me too much to kick me out and sleep like a normal person and on top of that I insistently mail him booklets about adopting cats that is NOT! FUNNY!”

Vlad coughed politely and looked up from his ranting to see said teenage boy hovering in front of him with his mouth wide open.

“Oh close your mouth Daniel you’ll catch flies in it.”

There was a tense minute of silence as Danny hovered in the exact same position, the only movement being the closing of his mouth and the flipping of pages as Vlad read up on the Packers in Sports Illustrated.

“Umm… Vlad?”

“Yes, my boy?”

“Your suit has a stain on it.”

“I KNOW THE SUIT HAS A BLOODY STAIN ON IT!”

Danny’s mouth shut again as Vlad eventually calmed down and went back to the magazine.

Finishing the article Vlad looked up from his reading and sighed upon seeing the boy had yet to leave. Funny, normally he dashed off to be back with his ‘real family’ as soon as he was done with his latest rant. “Is there something you’re waiting for, Daniel? Or are you just trying to bore to becoming a full ghost?”

Danny sighed, and twidled his thumbs in a way that made Vlad think of his comforting ‘evil plotting pose.’ “Look, Vlad, have you ever considered the possibility of being… nice to my family and I? Like, I guess I wouldn’t mind hanging around here from time to time if you weren’t always being such a fruit loop.”

Vlad narrowed his eyes at the teen in front of him, looking for the trick. “Would you renounce your father?”

“Vlad! No creepy trying to kill my family!”

Vlad steepled his fingers again, “well I apologize then dear boy, but I’m not just about to give up on having one of the three things I want most in the world because you ask nicely.” He threw his arms out in another sarcastic gesture, “I am, in fact, a villain as you are so fond of calling it, and I’m not about to give up so Jack can invite me over to rub you and Maddie in my face during a silly little tea party or something!” 

The man twiddled his fingers in a mocking showman gesture at the thought of a tea party. He had expected the motion to set off some form of sarcastic response from the boy, but wasn’t prepared for it to explode.

No, it literally exploded like a bomb. A glitter bomb to be precise.

Little did Vlad know that while Stan Pines had helped himself to another new (and this time unstained) suit, the one Plasmius had taken in return had been tampered with by the man’s untamable niece. Hoping to make something with even more “fineness and pizzazz” to help her Grunkle show off the attractions in the Mystery Shack (and give a distraction as he robbed the tourists blind) the young girl had eagerly ‘personalized’ the suit to match her Grunkle’s personality as Mabel envisioned it. 

Meaning lots and lots of glitter. But grumpy attack glitter. Glitter that exploded in a very irate Vlad Masters’s face.

When Vlad managed to get the burning substance out of his eyes the only thing he could see was his entire immaculate living room covered in bright rainbow glitter. The only thing unscathed was Daniel, who had turned himself intangible by reflex and was currently rolling in midair laughing.

It took Vlad phasing the offending glitter off of him to calm the boy down.

“Oh man, Vlad! You should’ve seen your face! You looked even more like a Fruit Loop!”

Vlad slammed his fist into the couch, strong enough to send vibrations throughout the entire mansion. “PINES!”

The impact caused the ceiling to shake, dislodging some of the glitter that had been caught by the hanging chandalier and bringing it raining down on the room’s occupants. Danny, already in ghost form, simply turned intangible and laughed as the human Vlad was once again covered with the substance.

“Oh, Vlad?”

“What. Is. It. Boy?”