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"Stop touching me," Dipper mumbles into his pillow, waking up just enough to be grossed out by the wetness of the pillowcase where he's been drooling into it, or maybe chewing on it in his sleep.
"I'm not touching you," Mabel says from across the room, sounding like she's facedown in her own pillow, or maybe facedown against Waddles's plump side.
"If you're not— then who—" She's not having a sleepover; Grunkle Stan never bothers to come upstairs, preferring to holler for them if he needs them. When Dipper wakes up a tiny bit more, he yanks his feet away from whoever or whatever was poking at his soles, flipping over with his eyes already wide and one hand reaching for anything near enough to use as a weapon, closing around the everpresent journal. It's not much of a weapon to use against the Author himself, though.
"Shhh," Grunkle Ford shushes him, one finger over his lips that have a hint of a smile on them, "come outside with me, I want to show you something." Oh, right. Dipper's still getting used to the new-old member of the Pines family inhabiting the Mystery Shack, but the fact that he didn't remember to number Ford among the list of people who might be poking him still makes Dipper flush.
"What is it?" Dipper whispers. Ford just shakes his head and motions for him to follow before heading down the stairs. When Dipper casts a glance across the room, he finds Mabel curled up with her back toward him in a posture that is totally unlike her usual sleeping sprawl, clearly shunning him without saying a word. He chews on his lip for just a second before he slides out of bed and shoves his bare feet into his sneakers to see what Ford has to show him.
Ford's waiting for him in the arch of the front door, backlit by some eerie glow that makes will-o-the-wisp lights dance across the lenses of his glasses. "You ever seen the Northern Lights?" he asks.
"Once," Dipper says, brows knitting, "is that what this is?"
"Kind of," Ford says, wobbling his hand back and forth. "That's what it starts as, but Gravity Falls does some weird stuff to it. Come and see."
They don't venture past the porch, though Dipper goes as far as the steps, blinking up into the sky and rubbing his eyes like maybe it's an artifact of a dream. Ford leans against a post and scribbles something into a book much smaller and less impressive-looking than the journal Dipper had absentmindedly tucked under his arm before coming downstairs.
The Northern Lights that Dipper had seen before had been faint, shimmery curtains of blue and green. The lights of Gravity Falls are red, orange, purple, not sweet and restful colors at all, and the shapes they assume are nothing so gauzy and undefined: Dipper sees the echo of a pterodactyl, a spectral violet multibear, the shades of a pile of gnomes moving in and out of larger shapes, none of them reacting to the unmatched twins watching from the shadow of the porch roof. "Whoa," he breathes, "are they... are they ghosts? Like... non-hostile ghosts?"
"Unclear," Ford says, one thick brow arching over his glasses. "Why, have you killed any of these things?"
"I mean, not me personally," Dipper says, watching the gnomes with the most suspicion of the lot of weird creatures given shape by the twisted aurora. "But. Yeah. Might know of some that are no longer among the living."
"Huh," Ford says, and writes furiously for a moment.
"But they're not dangerous?"
"Ehhh, they haven't attacked us, that doesn't make them not dangerous."
For some reason, Dipper thinks about Mabel, curled up in her bed, thinks about how she'd react to these weird apparitions with her usual volume and boisterousness, thinks about how she's not dangerous until she decides to attack, and what pushes her into that decision. The scarlet shade of the pterodactyl swoops, and so does Dipper's stomach. He doesn't like keeping secrets from his twin, doesn't like doing cool things without her there too, but this seems like it's going to have to be both of those things at once unless the tenuous peace of the night shatters.
He sits on the steps, knees pulled up to his chest and arms around his legs, watching the mysterious lights above the broken sign of the Mystery Shack and wondering what made them, why these shapes, why these colors, why this place, why now, why them, what next. After an hour or so, the aurora ghosts wobble and dissolve into wisps, dissipating into the gradually lightening sky.
Ford grins when Dipper looks at him, waving his little book. "Want to compare notes?"
"I didn't take any," Dipper admits, embarrassed that he didn't think to do so when he was so lost in his own thoughts.
"Turn of phrase," Ford says, "I know you didn't, but another set of eyes rarely hurts to clarify data. I'm going to make coffee, are you allowed to have that yet?"
"Yes," Dipper lies, and follows his great-uncle back into the Mystery Shack, tucking all of his worries away for another time so he doesn't spoil the opportunity to help fact-check the Author's work in real time.