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See, y’ain’t dumb, no matter what anybody tries to tell ya. You can read and write, and sure, maybe you can’t do that fancy calculeen — callust? — whatever, the stuff that uses Greek letters because they ran out of regular numbers, you never learned it, but you can do enough real math to tell when you can buy a bag of calories and when you’ve gotta pretend to be interested in the samples at the supermarket. You may not know what the difference between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars was, although you’re pretty sure the only real difference was whose freedoms were being fought over and probably there was money involved, but you’re smart enough to know there’s no such thing as a civil war and while the so-called War on Drugs is bullshit, there's profit to be made off all this moral panic. It’s garbage: while you’re out here busting your balls, ol’ Fordsy’s probably living off grant money by now, nice roof over his head and not enough sense to feed himself. He’s got a brain the size of a planet, but with his head in the stars, what’s the point?
Nah, Stanley Pines ain’t stupid. Only by comparison.
The upsell game ain’t the greatest. Takes money to make money, and you might be good at making junk look pretty, but making it work? That’s 50/50. Maybe 60/40 these days — cos it ain’t hard to figure out how stuff works mechanically — but first you gotta find junk that’s fixable. Manufacture is expensive, so mostly you stick to things you can make in your downtime. Sham Total was a pretty sweet gig, except for the part where it turned people blue. Who wouldn’t want to be blue? It’s better than being chalky, which is occasionally your color when you’re too broke to eat enough.
Somehow, nobody accepted that as a legitimate excuse. Everyone’s a damn critic.
You’re sitting on the bed of a motel, which you sprung for because it’s a nightmare outside — you never made it to Phoenix for the winter like you planned, both front tires on the Stanmobile got slashed and you had to replace ‘em, and it’s been one thing after another keeping you in this stinkhole of a town in Michigan, Missouri, Minnesota, whatever, the state probably starts with an M, things are running together as you stretch your meals out longer and longer — when you get the postcard. Stanford’s wily when he wants to be, but it’s strange that he managed to find you in the middle of M— whatever.
Ain’t no skin off your nose. Radio silence for more than a decade, over a dumb mistake you made when you were a teenager, more than a decade of roaming state to state, chewing your way out of a damn car, in and out of various prisons, slowly losing your identity doing anything and everything you could think of to keep food in your belly — and your brother, now, with no warning, wants you to drop everything and come to Podunk, Oregon to help him.
You almost choose not to.
Y’ain’t got much to drop, and in fact this is an opportunity to shake Rico like a bad cold, but how would Stanford know that? As far as he’s concerned, you could have a life. Maybe a wife and kids...well, no, he knows better than that, at least, even Carla McCorkle never got to you in that way, but you could have something. Thing is, though, you have nothing except the Stanmobile, pocket lint, and vague plans to crash in Phoenix, or maybe Bullhead, until winter blows over. You’re up to do a couple of lifts for the cash to get you to Oregon, and then…
...And then, who knows. You’ve missed your brother. Maybe this is what it’ll take to get the Pines twins back together.
Honestly? You have no idea why people go on and on about nerds being special. This calculwhatsis is taking forever to stick, but the way parts of it fit into what Stanford’s notes call pandimensional and pantemporal physics kinda reminds you of counting cards, especially when you and Jane McGill teamed up with Ace Lundgreen and got yourselves kicked out of the Flamingo. Patterns, codes...it’s more of a game than a classroom exercise, except there’s no purpose, and there’s no winner.
What good’s being smart ever done anybody in the real world? Would Stanford have been able to sell Stan-Vacs any better than you if he’d slapped some fancy equation on the side? Your brother used all of his smarts to build a great big suck-machine and got himself trapped in another dimension. You’d never be dumb enough to do that.
The problem is —
The problem is, you ain’t Stanford Pines, no matter how solid your alibi is. Your brother, notably, cut Mom and Dad out of his life sometime between going off to college and leaving the dimension, so they won’t be showing up and ruining your plans, and obviously Stanford was a friendless shut-in, but that means you got no resources you can lean on. You’re on your own, which in theory is great, but in practice means you gotta do all of this on your own, with one single piece of a three-piece puzzle to guide you. If it were anything else, not even you would take those odds. He had better appreciate what you’re doing for him. It’s more than just fancy math. You’re giving up the opportunity to just steal his life.
After all, you run a respectable business with a lab in the basement spooky enough to reconcile the nerdiness of Old Stanford Pines with...whatever you are now. You could reconnect with Mom and Dad, explain that you got a “surgery” to correct “your” polydactyly. You could be something. This is the chance of a lifetime, and you’re blowing it for some asshole who didn’t even bother to check if you messed up his high school project on purpose.
Didn’t you used to be a con artist? Sweet Moses. The person gettin’ screwed over here is you.
Decades of research and stable housing have changed the way you think — somewhat — but Mabel and Mason complicate things in a new way.
Mason — though he likes to be called Dipper, which, all right, you’ve heard weirder — is acceptably oblivious, even if he is uncomfortably similar to Stanford. He runs all over Gravity Falls chasing eyeball bats or pixies or whatever else catches his eye, and that’s dangerous and stupid, but he’s a kid, and his creepy crush on Wendy keeps him just as occupied.
Mabel, though, for all her weirdness, is freakishly perceptive about the most unexpected things. She reminds you of yourself when you were a kid: excitable, energetic, outclassed intellectually by an insufferable nerd (who still has yet to learn that brains don’t always make you smart, and smarts don’t always make you a good person, and being an elitist jackass doesn’t make you any friends, and being a misunderstood loner isn’t some tragic backstory), but unlike you, she makes friends wherever she goes. She likes you. She’s convinced her brother to like you.
And you, despite yourself, love Mabel and Dipper. Suddenly, “family bonding” isn’t just an opportunity to use them for sketchy unpaid labor in hopes that they’ll have an unpleasant time and go home early, but an opportunity to have fun with your family.
(You don’t even know Shermy. How bad are these kids’ parents fighting that they’d reach out to a random unknown relative and put their prepubescent children on a bus across state lines?)
Things’re gonna change when that portal opens. The funny thing is, you can almost see a future where you just...don’t do it. You give up. You dedicate the rest of your years, which can’t be very many by now after the life you lived, to your family, and when you die, you take Stanford Pines with you. It should be an easy choice. You’re a selfish sonofabitch, and you spent your youth protecting Stanford from bullies, and what did he give you in return? Not a damn thing except survivor’s guilt. This is your life. Your family. You built this. But…
But that future will never happen. You love your brother, too, even though he doesn’t love you, and that? It’s like the rest of the trash you tried to fix — it sucks more than anything.