Chapter Text
In a void, no one could say why a thing once set in motion should stop anywhere; for why should it stop here rather than here? So that a thing will either be at rest or must be moved ad infinitum.
Unless something more powerful gets in its way…
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Reality was a strange and resilient thing. It could take a beating and still come back from the brink swinging. No place was this so true as Gravity Falls. The quaint little town had been the epicenter of a tear in reality and, only a year later, it had stitched itself back together with nary an eyebat or madness bubble out of place. Even the people had pushed through the weirdness and emerged unscathed.
“Never-mind all that...”
Well, relatively unscathed. To the casual observer Gravity Falls was just a boring town in the middle of nowhere, but a closer look revealed the cracks that had been meticulously glued together. Any time the anomaly would rear its head, the town collectively looked away.
No matter, it wasn't the first town Leaf had passed through that had a problem facing reality. To ignore the obvious was part of the human condition and where money was involved the blind-spot extended even further. That bit of oversight was why she could acquire a lovely old brick building with few follow up questions.
Old logging towns really did have some of her favorite aesthetics. She’d been reluctant to part with her Portland townhouse, but providence called and that had required her to relocate to the tiny nowhere town in the middle of the woods. Still it wasn’t all bad, the building had originally been some sort of hardware store in the distant past with a storeroom on the second floor. In other words…
A loft starter kit.
The back of the store had a wooden structure attached to the building that had been used as a rain shelter to keep equipment dry. The frame itself was made from old, dense redwood that would be illegal to harvest nowadays and had the added bonus of creating a deck space up on the second story. After getting a local contractor to clean up the place, the decrepit brick building had become delightfully rustic. Soon, the exposed brick in her first-floor office space had been scrubbed, and the hardwood floors stained an attractive walnut hue. The light-fixtures were the same industrial lamps as before only dipped in gold paint and with Edison bulbs set in the light socket. Her computer sat upon an equally ancient looking desk that at some point must have been used as a workbench. A wooden sign with fractal burned letters hung over the entrance announcing:
PRISM Business Consulting
No one cared to ask who she was or why anyone in the hick’s end of nowhere would hire a consultant. Then again, nobody ever asked why a consultant would care about distortions in the fabric of spacetime, or fire-breathing manticores, or glass bowls that compelled people to eat nothing but mashed potatoes. Just as well, she didn’t feel much like working for her money.
Instead, Leaf did what she always did: she placed a maneki neko statue in the shop’s window and waited. The lucky cat was carved out of a solid piece of black basalt and polished to a reflective sheen, but its eyes were made of translucent amethyst that glittered in the sunlight as though beckoning the townsfolk to enter.
She didn’t have to wait long before a man wearing a ‘MAYOR’ sash entered. Leaf gave him a bright smile.
Politicians were natural liars and she’d never met one that didn't harbor some secret ambition. They were selfish creatures and did nothing that didn’t benefit them first in some way or another. It came with the territory and it was practically expected, really. However, Mayor Cutebiker turned out to be surprisingly earnest. All he asked for was a way to promote business and tourism in Gravity Falls so the next Pioneer Day could be a success.
Leaf had stared at him wearing that same plastic smile and waiting for the rest of the list but it never came. That was literally all he wanted. She hadn’t expected a challenge, but she had certainly expected something more interesting. Then again, the type of people the maneki attracted weren’t exactly complicated beings with rich inner lives. They were simple people with deep pockets and all of them wanted some variation of the same tired thing: riches, status, the attention daddy never gave, an invitation to the country club’s exclusive sitting room…
She recovered nicely and assured Mayor Cutebiker that she could do all he asked and more. Leaf even knocked off a few zeroes from her usual fee and promised to build and implement a revitalization plan for him. She sent him off with a business card and a copy of their signed agreement. She’d watched him go feeling strangely conflicted. On the one hand, she had severely undercharged him, but on the other politicians usually didn’t tell the truth or asked her to do something so damn wholesome with city funds.
All this goodwill meant was that she was already in the red, and Leaf would have to really stick it to the next guy. Hopefully, Gravity Falls wasn’t full of goody-two shoes asking her to help out with community service. A girl had to eat! Surely there were at least a few rich bastards she could squeeze!
Enter one Preston Northwest with the air of a man accustomed to speaking to the manager to get his way. Finally a bit of luck!
Leaf patiently listened to the man’s incessant boasting and prattling carefully listening to the gaps of truth left by the lies. She’d done her research before coming to Gravity Falls and therefore knew the Northwests were wealthy, but had been a whole heck of a lot wealthier just a few months before. He blustered on belittling her status and demanding to see some sort of references before he would do business with her.
“Mr. Northwest, I assure you I can provide all the references you wish. However, well there’s really no delicate way of putting this, your valuation has dropped fifty points in the last eighteen months. According to public records, Northwest Manor was recently sold in an estate sale for a sum of $8 million. You must understand, a portfolio with a working capital of less than ten is… well… perhaps you would feel more comfortable consulting the financial advisor at your bank’s local branch.”
The shift in the man’s entire demeanor let her know she had struck a nerve.
“I assure you in spite of what these slack jawed yokels may have insinuated. The Northwest fortune-”
“Mr. Northwest, there is a time and a place for appearances, but medicine and finances require trust and honesty. I’m sure you can appreciate someone who can secure you cold hard cash instead of making empty promises. Truth be told Mr. Northwest, you don’t have the money. You lost half of your fortune and had to resort to selling your tangible assets to stay afloat. I can only imagine the amount of credit card debt you’re running now that you are living well beyond your means. You don’t have $8 million dollars in your bank account, do you Mr. Northwest? How much is it then? Seven? Six?”
“FOUR! There’s only $4 million left!” he all but bawled out the number.
“Oh Mr. Northwest…” she tutted as though he had confessed some great sin.
“I don’t know how it happened! We changed absolutely nothing and it’s still falling! Please! I can’t go to the bank like some… some… poor person!”
“Well, I suppose given time you are well on your way to poverty. As I said, you cannot afford me, although,” she paused as though considering her options, “I suppose the Northwest name still has quite a bit of social capital. There may be some wiggle room.”
“Does that mean you will-”
“That depends. I will have to do an assessment to see what I’m getting my firm tangled up in, but if the assessment is promising then perhaps we can talk about making an exception for you.”
“Yes, yes of course!”
She noted how his eyes lit up like a well-trained hound watching a bag of treats. A life of privilege was all about being important enough to coast by as an exception to the rule. Leaf clicked her pen and picked up a notepad.
“Let's start at the beginning. How did you lose all those funds?”
It was strange to watch a grown man fidget in place as though he were all of six years old. “It was a series of poor investments.”
“Can you be more specific? I assure you, I’ve heard it all: stocks, options, bonds, tech unicorns, MLMs, crypto…”
Preston mumbled something under his breath which couldn’t have possibly been right. Leaf stopped and stared at him before he finally cleared his throat and repeated himself.
“Weirdness. It was weirdness bonds.”
Her eyes narrowed and Preston realized they were brown with a strange indigo sheen to them. “Where did you get weirdness bonds, Mr. Northwest.”
“It was during last year’s, erm, incident. But never-mind all that! The point is the money is gone.”
“Now, Mr. Northwest, if I am expected to work with you and restore your fortune, I am going to need honesty. More importantly, I need to know that I can trust you. Now I don’t know how you managed to get your hands on weirdness bonds, but I can’t think of anyone pleasant who peddles in them,” she replied, setting down the notepad. “As part of your assessment, I am only going to ask you this once. Mr. Northwest, who sold you the weirdness bonds?”
Preston swallowed thickly as he glanced about nervously before whispering, “Bill. His name was Bill Cipher.”
Leaf pondered the odd segue long after Preston had left. She had gotten as much as she could out of the man, which unfortunately wasn’t much. He hadn’t been around for most of it and simply considered Bill’s excursion a personal inconvenience.
Bill Cipher.
She hadn’t heard that name in a long time. She’d worked for a lot of global conglomerates before opening up her own consultant firm. No company ever broke into the Fortune 500 list without having a few demon, genie, or yokai wranglers on the payroll, and all of them knew Bill Cipher was blacklisted. The poor saps who were desperate enough to deal with him ended up paranoid millionaires living in shacks up in the mountains and screaming about the trees with eyes; or so the stories went.
In all her years, Leaf couldn’t recall ever having encountered anyone who had seen Bill, much less allowed themselves to be driven mad by him. And yet here he was, in the middle of nowhere, with a trail of broken deals in his wake.
Son of a bitch corn chip tried to break the world without so much as a note.
Her pen idly doodled a triangle on a scratch piece of paper. That would explain the tears in the fabric of space scattered all around the town and the way gravity felt a little crunchy in certain spots. This was going to be a more intensive clean up than she had originally thought.
She drew an unbroken line of concentric circles tightening around the smaller triangle as she pondered Preston’s words. He had mentioned a circle, symbols, and people holding hands: a zodiac wheel. The corners of her mouth twitched into a smile.
If Bill had been defeated by a zodiac wheel, that meant he was sealed and bound somewhere in town. Her pen came down to stab the center of the triangle as though to pop the eye she had forgotten to draw.
Sticks and stones may break your bones and words will then enslave you…
“But first, to business,” she sighed before turning her attention to the Mayor’s project. It shouldn’t take too long to throw something together and set it off on whatever passed for social media feed out here in the sticks. Then there was still the matter of spinning straw into gold for Preston’s fortune. The man could stand to benefit from sitting with his panic and misery for another day, but she’d throw something together for him too.
Where did the time go?
Well she supposed wherever it was allowed to go. It flowed like a river, never still, never stopping and made its own rules. It carried off everything and left nothing but bones in its path. Leaf wasn’t a fan of Time. Granted Time wasn’t too fond of her either, but if they each served their purpose and kept a respectable distance there was space for both of them to thrive. There was no point in animosity between them. In the end, what was Time if not another stony meadow to clamber through; another river to ford.
The bell on her front door clambered announcing a new visitor and interrupting her musings. Belatedly, Leaf realized she had forgotten to remove the maneki from the window. The blasted thing was probably bored and amusing itself by hauling in common randos off the street.
She glanced up but saw no one over the edge of her monitor. Odd. Leaf stood up only to stop short as she saw a little girl with big brown eyes and a mouth full of braces smiling up at her.
“Hi! I’m Mabel and I wanna hire you to find a wife!”
Alright, that was definitely a new request.
Touche maneki. Touche.