Falling Up 5

"What's going on?" Warren demanded, bringing up his flames in preparation for battle, as he'd just seen a fortune cookie unfold into a golden triangle and pop out arms and legs, pull a top hat and cane from nowhere, and look at him with its single eye and even for a hero in training that was not a normal occurrence.

"Tiger, Tiger, burning bright," the floating yellow demon muttered. "I'm going to call you Tiger," he decided cheerfully.

"We're in a sphere of accelerated time," Dipper told him with a sigh, waving at the way the world around them had turned grey.

"Right you are, Pine Tree," Bill said cheerfully, "and I have some universal maintenance duties for you."

"I'm listening," Dipper said, showing some interest.

"Universal maintenance?" Warren asked.

"Bill sends us to other universes to foil the plans of the bad guys," Mabel explained excitedly. "Plus we get nifty stuff out of the deal."

"Considering you have Tiger with you, I think you'll be able to handle a little firepower," Bill decided.

"Uh oh," Mabel said, looking a bit worried now.

"What's wrong?" Warren asked.

"Since you're with us, Bill's going to give us a tough one," Dipper told him. "Either to take your measure, or to scare you off."

"A little of column A, a little of column B," Bill agreed. "Faint hearts never won a lady a stuffed creature of indeterminate species."

"That makes no sense," Warren said.

Dipper knew what he meant but didn't say anything.

"What Bill says always makes sense," Mabel disagreed. "We just don't know what he's referring to most of the time."

"Ready to go, kids?" Bill asked.

Dipper started getting undressed. "Give me a moment."

"Why are you stripping?" Warren asked.

"When I transform, my clothes don't," Dipper explained as he removed his pants, revealing he was wearing a loin cloth.

Mabel handed him a spear made of bone with a rough chiseled stone head that she pulled out of a pocket much too small for it to fit in.

"Aren't you two in the sidekick's class?" Warren asked, recalling the buzz about the twins around school.

"Hero support has better training," Dipper replied.

"And fewer buttheads," Mabel added.

"You may have a point there," Warren admitted, thinking of some of his classmates.

"On three," Bill said, waving his arm and causing the three to vanish.

The three appeared in a warehouse where two men in costumes were tied to chairs and being beaten by a number of what appeared to be generic mob goons.

Mabel and Dipper didn't hesitate to act. Dipper dove at the group, holding his spear horizontally and knocking most of them off their feet; while Mabel, outlined in bright blue flames, waved an arm, ripping weapons out of hands and sending the goons flying.

Warren rushed to help, grabbing and throwing mobsters into walls hard enough to leave dents. "What the hell happened to 'on three'?" he demanded.

Shots rang out as several mobsters managed to draw their firearms and opened fire on the glowing blue girl, the bullets curving around her. Dipper transformed with an ear splitting roar and bodies started hitting the ground hard enough to bounce.

"All clear!" Mabel called out, waving a hand and sending the last conscious thug into a wall less than a minute after they'd arrived.

"What the fuck?" a young girl in a purple costume yelled, coming out of the shadows, handgun in hand, but pointed at the ground, before a groan from one of the costumed figures had her rushing to untie the one in the black, armored outfit.

"We got injured," Mabel announced as she untied the one wearing a modified green wet suit with yellow edging. "I can't heal this one, too much metal," she said after a moment checking him.

"I'll help him, you get the other," Dipper said as he shrank back down, glaring at the unconscious bodies angrily.

"You guys can heal people?" Warren asked, still on edge from the fight never having been in a real life or death battle before.

"Mabel can, but she has a problem with non-organics inside the body," Dipper explained, ignoring Mabel arguing with the purple girl.

"How about you?" Warren asked, still keeping an eye out for danger.

"When I transform, I heal rapidly. So what I'm going to do is push some of that energy into this guy and let the transformation heal him," Dipper said, laying a hand on the green suited figure's head and heart.

"And that works?" Warren asked.

"In theory," Dipper said as his hands began to glow a faint green color and the green suited figure moaned loudly.

"In theory?" Warren repeated.

"Never tried it before," Dipper replied as the moaning teen started to swell under his hands, rapidly gaining muscles and splitting the sides of his wetsuit but stopping well short of Dipper's usual transformation simply looking like a taller, body builder version of himself.

"Done," Mabel announced, letting the blue flames die out and helping the black armored figure to his feet.

"Ditto," Dipper agreed, collapsing onto the ground.

"What the hell just happened?" the green suited figure asked. "And why is my voice so deep?"

"Holy shit, Kick Ass, you look like you bogarted all the steroids in New York!" the purple girl exclaimed.

"I'll have some of what he's having," the black armored figure said in shock.

Dipper snorted. "Sorry, but I'm fresh out. It'll be at least a day before I can transform myself, much less anyone else."

"I need new clothes," Kick Ass muttered.

"It's temporary," Dipper told him. "You'll eat like a pig for the next couple of days as you slowly return to normal."

"Better than being beaten to death by mobsters," Kick Ass said. "Thanks."

"This is impossible," the black armored figure said. "Super Heroes don't exist."

"Then what are you guys?" Mabel asked confused.

"People trying to be super heroes," Kick Ass explained as the seams on the top half of his costume gave up and fell apart. "But we don't have any powers, and before you showed up I'd have said no one did."

"We aren't locals," Dipper said.

"We noticed," the girl in purple said flatly.

"We saved them, now what?" Warren asked.

"As soon as someone says the number after two we return home," Dipper said tiredly.

"What, three?" the man in black asked, causing the three teens to vanish in a flare of light.

"That was surreal," Kick Ass said.

"Camera," the girl in purple said, bringing up a gun and shooting a web cam that had been broadcasting everything to the world.

0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0

"And we're back," Dipper said as they re-appeared in the restaurant, everything still frozen.

"Your loin cloth is now purple," Mabel told Dipper.

"So it is," Dipper agreed, quickly getting dressed. "You can examine it later."

"Examine it?" Warren asked.

"Psychic gift," Mabel explained. "It takes a couple of seconds, but I can get a decent read off objects and tell you about them. The fact that it changed color means that Bill changed it somehow as a reward."

"Can we start over from the beginning?" Warren asked. "I'm missing a lot of back story here."

Dipper chuckled. "Yeah, I get that. Ok, first things first: Don't say any numbers. I'll explain why later."

"Ok," Warren agreed.

"The floating yellow Dorito was Bill Cypher, a dream demon," Mabel explained. "Our family opposes his goals, though we still aren't sure what they are."

"But didn't we just do a job for him?" Warren asked.

"Yes, we did," Dipper agreed. "Mabel made a deal with him."

"Making deals with demons is a very bad idea, but a dumbass who shall remain nameless summoned Bill and he was free to do whatever he liked until someone made a deal with him," Mabel said.

"Demons are notorious for tricking people and keeping the letter of an agreement while twisting its intent," Dipper said. "But if anyone is a master of outside-the-box thinking, it's Mabel."

"Evil is selfish, so it was easy," Mabel said cheerfully. "Every time Dipper gets a fortune cookie, we are sent to foil the plans of evil that are not in alignment with Bill's. It must be something we are capable of and we must get rewarded fairly for the assignment."

"It also can't be against our morals," Dipper said. "Thus: Bill sends us to other places, hoping we'll get knocked off, but not able to do any more than that. He's been a pretty good sport about it, really."

"How did you get him to agree to that?" Warren asked.

"He said he would agree to any contract I'd care to write up," Mabel said with a grin.

"She wrote 'Blort' as the contract," Dipper said.

"What does 'blort' mean?" Warren asked.

"It means whatever I want it to mean," Mabel said cheerfully. "Bill said it was the most twisted thing he'd ever heard."

"We had to bargain a bit and actually lock down a fair set of rules," Dipper admitted. "But you see the results."

"And the reward was him dyeing your loincloth purple?" Warren asked.

"That just shows he changed it. It's probably been enhanced or something," Dipper explained. "And all three of us got a reward, so check your possessions."

"Book," Mabel noted as she spotted a small leather-bound tome under an empty plate.

"A ring," Warren said, having found a simple silver ring in his pocket.

"Let me see it and I'll tell you what it does," Mabel said, holding out a hand.

Dipper examined the book while Mabel took a reading off the ring, her eyes glowing a solid blue. "It's a book on how to use psychic abilities to boost physical ones," Dipper said. "It's pretty straight forward, considering the subject matter, but it'll take a lot of work to put into practice."

"Ring of fire resistance," Mabel said, handing it back to Warren. "Makes the wearer immune to normal flame and heat, even providing a small amount of protection from magical flames as well."

"I'm already immune to fire," Warren said with a frown.

"I think it's something for your girlfriend to wear," Mabel hinted.

"My- ah," Warren said. "Yeah, that is useful. I always figured I'd have to date a super with similar powers."

"Extra homework, yay," Mabel said as she took the book back from Dipper.

"I'll work with you on it," Dipper promised.

"So anyone nearby gets dragged along with you?" Warren asked.

"No. You probably got dragged along because we consider you one of us, teens unfairly judged for their relatives, who haven't become complete dicks over it," Dipper said.

Warren chuckled. "Thanks. Now how do we return to normal time?"

"Say the number after two," Mabel said. "It's the trigger."

"Three," Dipper said, returning color and sound to the world around them.

"I better get back to work," Warren said. "But next time you go, I wouldn't mind tagging along."

"Will do," Mabel said cheerfully as they went to pay their bill.

0o0o0o0o0o0o0o0

"It's been a week," Kick-Ass said as he bench pressed a quarter of a ton with Hit Girl balancing on the center of the bar. "Wasn't this supposed to wear off?"

"Do you want it to?" Hit Girl asked, looking down at him.

"Not really," he admitted.

"That's not all either," Big Daddy said. "Watch this." Taking a knife, he cut his palm and made a fist. Closing his eyes, he concentrated and a blue light flickered around his fist for a moment before dying out. Opening his fist, he showed the cut was mostly healed.

"Makes me wish I'd gotten the shit kicked out of me too," Hit Girl said in wonder.

"Suddenly the plan to simply walk in and lay waste to DeMarco and all his men doesn't seem so farfetched," Kick Ass said with a grin.

Typing By: Ordieth