Well, here is the first installment of my rewrite of Transcend, now TAU canon-compliant. It's a bit shorter, but it won't take me as long to get chapters up hopefully.

1: Don't Panic

It had started off as a normal enough day.

Dipper had been going over each page of the Journal with the black light, searching the text for anything that might help him find the author – he still hadn't given up on that, despite the shapeshifter's ominous warning, and it couldn't hurt to try sparking McGucket's memory, right?

There were, of course, some pages he'd been over before – the Author's hideout, the zombie cure, and others – and a few pages covered top-to-bottom in code that Dipper had set aside for later. But he read through the rest.

The more he learned about Gravity Falls, the more that he found there was to learn. Especially in the invisible ink, the Author made casual references to things Dipper hadn't even known existed – future-seeing crystal balls, binding circles, a coven of witches in the high mountains surrounding the town. He'd probably written about them in another Journal, 1 or 2, which of course Dipper didn't have.

But there were also a few pages that resembled the normal ink pages, too – just a quick overview of a creature or a place. And it was on one of those pages that Dipper found the description of the cave.

Apparently the place was a paradox – bigger on the inside than the outside, set inside a boulder the size of a two-story home but stretching on for thousands of feet. The whole place seemed to be a fountain of supernatural activity – bats born in the cave were twisted, deformed things with two heads or twelve eyes or any look except the one usually attributed to bats. There was a moss that only grew in the caves essential to cooling spells, which the magic users of Gravity Falls would regularly come to collect. But what had drawn Dipper's attention were the geodes.

Apparently the things grew in clusters, like grapes, and when you cracked them open, they were filled with some weird purple crystal that was hard as anything – as long as you didn't touch it. Once the crystal was touched by human hands, it crumbled to a dust that, when mixed with a couple other things that were a bit more pedestrian, would help you sleep. You'd go out like a light, wake up fully refreshed, and, best of all, you wouldn't dream.

For Dipper, who'd been paranoid of seeing Bill in his sleep ever since the dream demon had possessed his body, and who'd been having nightmares about the other creatures of Gravity Falls since long before then, it was almost too good to be true. It had seemed to be that way for the Author, too – apparently overdosing or using it for three consecutive nights would result in some pretty nasty side effects, but not sleeping well one night in three was far better than not sleeping well every night.

He hadn't been stupid, though. He'd taken Mabel and Wendy and Soos along with him. They'd made it out of far worse things than some stupid cave before. They'd be fine.

"Ok, guys, it shouldn't be much farther now," he said, looking up from the Journal page at his surroundings. The black light he was using for the invisible ink made the centipedes skittering up and down the walls glow bright pink, which the Author had said meant the geodes were close. Weird, sure, but more than believable for Gravity Falls.

Dipper continued walking into the cave, illuminating the way ahead with a flashlight, and – yes! He could see the geodes up ahead!

He jumped down the two-foot drop in the cave floor, with Wendy following suit. Soos was backing up a bit to get a running start – "How far do you think I can jump, doods?" – and Mabel scrambled her way down. Her foot landed on a less-than-solid rock . . .

"Ouch!"

"Mabel, are you okay?" Dipper asked, rushing over to where his sister was now crumpled slightly on the floor. She perked up.

"I'm okay," she said, without her usual level of cheer. "Just a bit scratched up is all."

She paused and looked at the ground of the cave, near where her hands had landed.

"Hey, what's this thing carved into the rock here?"

As she pushed herself to her feet, the others gathered closer to take a look at whatever had caught her eye.

Carved into the rock floor of the cave was a weird symbol: a five-pointed star with an eye in the middle.

"Huh, wonder what this is doing here," Dipper said. "I don't think the Journal mentioned this, but I could swear I've seen it before…"

He flipped open the Journal to the page about the cave and clicked the blacklight on. The invisible ink appeared, glowing purple, but there was no sign of anything related to the star.

"Hey, I know where that's from!" Mabel said. "It's the star symbol-thing Gideon has on top of the Tent of Telepathy! And his cape. And like, his hamster cage." She shudders. "Gideon."

"Okay, so this is Gideon's symbol, and it was put here fairly recently, since the Author didn't know about it—but why? Why would Gideon carve this into the floor of some random paradox-cave?"

"Dude, Gideon's nuts," Wendy offered. "There's no way of knowing why he'd do something like that. It seems harmless enough—might as well leave good enough alone, right?"

"I don't know about that…" Dipper said, but Mabel interrupted before he could say anything else.

"C'mon, bro-bro, Gideon's in prison—there's not much he can do from there. I'm sure it's fine. Now let's get those geodes you wanted and get out of here: this cave is kinda starting to creep me out."

Dipper poked at the edge of the carved symbol with the toe of his sneaker. There seemed to maybe be some dried leaves wedged into the carving, but nothing obviously bad about it.

"Dude, you can always come back once you've had a chance to sleep on it," Wendy said.

"You're right," he admitted. "Let's get the geodes and worry about this later."

The next day, after blacking out for about eight hours after taking the geode dust and waking up more well-rested than he could remember being, Dipper took another look through the Journal for any clues about the purpose of the symbol carved in the cave.

It turned out that even though Gideon hadn't even been born when the Journal was written, the star symbol appeared in there a few times. Not as many times as Bill's image, for sure, but enough for it to not be a one-time thing. The Author never really explained what it was, though.

What really worried Dipper was that one of the few places the symbol appeared was on one of Bill's pages, as one of the symbols in the strange wheel surrounding him.

Dipper shuddered a bit as he remembered his trip into Grunkle Stan's mind, when Bill had referred to him, Soos and Mabel as symbols from the wheel. Question Mark, Shooting Star, Pine Tree. It had seemed almost random at the time, because while he was wearing his pine tree hat (and Soos was wearing his question mark shirt), Mabel hadn't been wearing anything with a shooting star at the time. She did have that one sweater, though, and Bill had related them to the symbols on his wheel by the symbols that he'd seen them wearing.

Did that make Gideon Eye-Star? Star-Eye?

Dipper sighed. There were already so many mysteries in Gravity Falls, and a new one had just fallen into his lap. He reluctantly got up and walked to what Mabel had taken to calling his 'conspiracy board'. He pinned up a thread connecting Bill and Gideon, and scrawled a quick 'Symbol connection?' note to pin up next to it.

Still, Gideon's star symbol being carved in a cave didn't connect him to Bill any more than it made sense by itself. For all he knew, the symbol was something that someone else visiting the cave had carved; maybe some kind of magic symbol one of the witches gathering geodes had put in place in the years since the Author had been writing the Journal. Unfortunately, that was one of the drawbacks to the Journal: there was no mention of more modern things, like the characters from Fight Fighters being able to leave the game, so Dipper was left to make his own calls on anything that could have happened in the last thirty years or so.

So he decided that was all it was—some kind of symbol magic users knew, that Gideon must have copied out of Journal 2 back when he still had it, and that some unrelated person had carved into the cave at some point.

Still, he shouldn't lose track of it, so he wrote a quick note about the symbol and a sketch of it in the margins of the page about the cave. He didn't have invisible ink to write it in, but that wasn't much of a concern anyway.

Significantly less worried than he had been, Dipper shut the Journal and went to go find Mabel.

The Pines family had been driving into town when they were passed on the left by a cop car going well above the speed limit and flashing its lights. The wail of sirens filled the air as Grunkle Stan instinctively stepped on the gas, ready to outrun the cops that experience had taught him were coming for his arrest. He faltered, however, as a bat bigger than the El Diablo itself appeared, swooping and diving towards the cop car.

Underneath the wailing of sirens, Dipper and Mabel could make out Sheriff Blubs and Deputy Derland screaming at the top of their lungs.

"Whoa!" Mabel said, pressing her head against the window to get a better look as the cop car zoomed further ahead. "Giant bat!"

"What?" Dipper asked with disbelief in his voice, mostly out of habit. He'd seen the bat, of course—even Stan had seen it, cataracts and all. He pulled the Journal out from its spot tucked inside his vest and leafed through it. He could have sworn he'd seen something about giant bats in here before—

And there it was! Dipper started reading the page aloud.

"Giant Vampire Bats: with a wingspan of easily ten feet or more, these bats seem to have a hunger for blood proportional to their size. Once they select an animal as prey, they chase it as long as they need to until they can swoop down to pick it up in their massive claws to be carried off and sucked dry of blood!"

Dipper grimaced. The cops may have been condescending and downright terrible at their jobs, but that didn't mean they deserved to die.

"Grunkle Stan, you have to follow that cop car!" Dipper shouted. There had to be some way to defeat the bat in the Journal, and he'd taken on worse before. It wasn't often that the supernatural landed right in front of the twins without at least one of them seeking it out, but it didn't mean they could just sit by and watch while the bat devoured the cops.

"A role reversal! I like it!" Grunkle Stan replied, gunning the car's engine to catch up with the speeding cops.

"How do you like being chased, huh, suckers?" he screamed out the driver's side window.

Meanwhile, Dipper pulled out the blacklight from the inside pocket of his vest and shone it over the page, hoping to see a weakness.

The word 'Vampire' in the page title had been scratched out and replaced with fruit, and there was new information scrawled over what was written in regular ink.

While the giant bats resemble vampire bats, they actually eat fruit and vegetable matter as opposed to blood. They are still highly dangerous, and will carry off and kill animals to fertilize the soil in their favorite places to eat.

The bats are highly sensitive to pain, especially in their wings and ears. One good attack to either of these fragile areas can be enough to drive them off, but make sure your attack is powerful: once the bats have suffered one attack, they will not likely allow you to make another.

So that was it, then. If he could get in one good attack to the bat's wings, or ears, then it should fly off.

Of course, if it didn't, it wouldn't just be the cops that were in danger, but Dipper didn't want to think about that. He'd taken down the multi-bear, after all; he was sure he could land at least one good hit to the bat's giant wings.

"Mabel," Dipper said. "We gotta attack the bat's wings."

"I am on it, bro-bro," Mabel said, pulling out her grappling hook from inside her sweater, where it had been—strapped in? held in a secret pocket?—Dipper didn't really want or need to know.

Mabel rolled down the car window and leaned out, taking aim at the bat and shooting—only for the hook to be swept back with the momentum of the car and clang uselessly onto the pavement.

"Okay, looks like the grappling hook is out," Dipper mused as Mabel retracted the metal hook back to the base of the gun. The police officers surely had weapons, but they weren't thinking clearly enough to use them on the bat, and they were driving too fast to even possibly get into their car to grab their weapons to use. Until the cops stopped going crazy, they were going to remain in danger, but how could he get them to even stop the car?

Turned out he didn't need to, as the bat ripped the top off of the cop car, then made a lunge that Sheriff Blubs barely dodged and ripped out the gear shift, sticking the car in neutral.

As the car rolled to a stop, it bumped into a church on the outskirts of Gravity Falls, splintering the siding and stopping completely. The bat, somehow oblivious to the church, also smacked into the side of the building, then fell to the ground, stunned. Blubs and Derland took that opportunity to crawl out of the car through the new hole in the roof, then ran into the church.

Stan slammed on the brakes out of instinct.

"What do I do here? What just happened?" Stan asked.

"We have to help them! C'mon!" Dipper yelled, throwing open the door to the car. Mabel jumped out of the other side and ran into the church after Dipper.

Inside, they found Derland and Blubs huddled under a table, hugging each other and crying. As the door fell shut behind them, they could already hear the enormous bat clawing at it, trying to get to the police officers.

"What're we gonna do?" Derland asked. "That bat won't leave us alone!"

As Blubs tried to reassure Derland, Dipper and Mabel looked back at the door. It was shaking under the bat's attacks, and as they watched, one of its claws poked a hole through the wood.

"Okay, so we have to attack the bat before it can get to us—do you guys have any weapons with you?" Dipper said, turning to ask the policemen. Blubs pulled himself together long enough to answer.

"Of course we do. What kind of police force would we be if we didn't?" he asked, pulling out a taser and a nightstick from his belt and offering them to the twins. "Don't think they'll be much help against that thing, though."

"Well, the nightstick might not be—" because Dipper couldn't imagine throwing it with enough force from a distance or getting close enough to seriously hurt the bat with it "—but we might be able to use the taser." He took it from Blub's outstretched hand and took a look at it.

"We'll need a direct line of sight, though, and I don't want to wait for it to come barreling through the door."

"Why don't we go up to the tower thingy, then?" Mabel asked.

"Tower . . . thingy?"

"Yeah, the place with the bell and junk. It's open, so you could get at the bat. Just get him to follow you up there, and poof! Problem solved!"

"Mabel, that's brilliant!" Dipper said. "All we need to do is get the police up there, and the bat will follow! Then we just tase his wings, and—"

"Poof!" the twins said in unison.

Outside, in the car, Stan had given up on trying to make sense of what he should be doing. The bat wasn't attacking him yet, and the twins seemed to be safe enough inside, so no reason to change that.

Instead, he turned up the radio and leaned his seat back, trying to relax.

Trying not to worry about the twins.

It wasn't really working.

It hadn't taken that much, really, to convince the policemen to go along with their plan. At least, not once the bat had popped out a knot in the wood of the door and made a hole the size of Blubs' head.

They'd climbed the stairs up to the top floor of the church, then to the bell tower, with the bat banging against the walls outside the whole time, so they knew it was following them.

Dipper tightened his grip on the taser. They would have one shot at this.

"Mabel, you're the one best with the grappling hook—I think you should be the one to hit the bat," Dipper said, holding out the taser to his sister. Mabel's gaze, however, was fixed on the view out the nearest window, and . . . was she shaking?

"You know, there's really not that much space up there, and you're the paranormal dork, so you should do it," Mabel said, her voice quivering.

"O. . .kay?" Dipper said. He wasn't really sure what Mabel's deal was.

The bat suddenly appeared in front of the window, hanging from the siding. One of its eyes peered through the glass, and it spotted the police officers huddled near the stairs. It had to be now.

"Okay, let's do it!" Dipper shouted, and herded the police officers up the stairs to the bell tower. The bat noticed the movement and launched itself off the building, disappearing from sight.

Dipper raced up the twisting, narrow stairs as fast as he could after the cops, trying to keep ahold of the taser now that his palms were slick with sweat. This was all on him.

The cops burst out onto the bell tower, with Dipper right behind them, only to find the bat already hovering near the platform, waiting.

They panicked, grabbing each other and beginning to cry as the bat swooped nearer, but Dipper ran forward and thrust the taser out in front of him, hitting the button to charge it with electric current and sending a strong current directly to the bat's wing closest to him.

The bat shrieked, a deafening noise, and hovered in place, backing up a bit and seeming to gather itself. Before it could recover, though, Dipper rushed forward to the solid railing around the bell tower and thrust the taser at the bat again, scaring it into backing off.

There was a flash of light from below, and the bat screeched and flew off into the forest.

"Huh. That went even better than I expected," Dipper mused.

It turned out the flash of light had come from a camera. Specifically, the camera of a reporter from Gravity Falls' more reputable paper that had driven after the cop car to see what was going on.

The reporter had wanted to interview him afterward, and he happily complied. He might not have had as many hopes of becoming famous for his work with the supernatural anymore, but that didn't mean he was going to turn down an opportunity for it when it was offered to him.

Plus, with the Society of the Blind Eye gone, it was better to get the townspeople of Gravity Falls reacquainted with the supernatural before they were facing it head-on themselves.

But he didn't go straight back to the Shack afterwards, or even to the diner for celebratory pancakes. Instead, he climbed back up the bell tower.

He'd spotted something odd while he was up there, but only a glimpse, so he wanted to check it out more. And with a little searching, he found it again.

A clearing in the forest, perfectly circular.

There was no way it was natural, and there was nothing in the Journal that suggested it would be dangerous, so Dipper and Mabel (who had more-or-less recovered from her panic brought on by the height) set out to find the clearing and investigate.

It was a bit farther into the woods than it looked from the bell tower, but the twins still found it easily enough. It looked like any other clearing in the forest at first glance, except for being perfectly circular. There was a clump of rocks in the middle of the clearing, grass and other plants between the rocks and the trees. But Dipper looked closer, and he could see the rotting remains of tree stumps in the grass. Someone had made the clearing.

"Mabel, look!" he said, pointing at the remainders of the stumps.

"Whoah!" she said. "What kind of magical doohickery are these?"

"They're not—I think. They're just tree stumps," Dipper said. "But it means that someone, or something, made this clearing."

"Why do you think they did it?" Mabel asked, wandering over towards the rock clump in the center of the clearing.

"That's what I'm not sure about," Dipper said. "The lumberjacks wouldn't cut such a perfect circle in the forest, even if they cut down all the trees in an area, so it might have been something more supernatural . . ."

As he reached for the Journal to take another look to see what might have done this, Mabel gasped.

"Dipper, come over here and see this!" she said, focused on something in the cluster of rocks.

Dipper ran over and looked where his sister was pointing.

Carved in the rock was a six-fingered hand.

A second symbol carved in rock, about the same size, within only a few days? It was too odd to be coincidence. Something was going on, probably something to do with the Author, since one of the symbols was the same as the one on the cover of the Journals.

The twins hurried back to Grunkle Stan, who drove them all back to the Shack while grumbling about how long they'd taken on their 'nature walk'.

Back in the Shack, Dipper snagged one of the town maps of Gravity Falls and ran it upstairs, pinning it open on a blankish space on his corkboard. He flipped through the Journal to find the location of the cave again, then stuck a pin where they'd found the carving of Gideon's symbol. The he found the church on the map and stuck a pin around where the hand symbol had been, and quickly doodled each of the symbols next to the pins.

Now it was time to see what the Journal had to say about this.

"Nothing, nothing," Dipper muttered to himself, flipping through pages while holding the blacklight up. Mabel sat on the edge of her bed, watching him and knitting at the same time.

And then there was Bill's page. Dipper took a closer look at it than he usually did, spotting Gideon's star symbol in the wheel around Bill, and then the six-fingered hand.

And didn't that look familiar.

The way they were right next to each other, the arc they were at, looked just like the circle around Bill.

And if that was true, then there was a good chance that the other symbols were spread around the outside of town too. Dipper grabbed a handful of pins and stuck them in the map, about where each of the eight remaining symbols would be.

It wasn't a sure thing yet, honestly. But if it was . . .

Dipper glanced back at Bill's page again, scanning the part that explained that the wheel around Bill on the page could be used to summon him to the physical plane, with the right intent put behind it. If Bill, or someone working with him, was going to make a summoning circle this big, it'd have incredible power behind it. Maybe even enough to bring Bill to the physical plane for good.

Dipper shuddered. He hated to think what the demon would do if he could influence the material world and use his powers in it.

They'd have to stop him . . . but how?