The new girl in Gravity Falls; by Joona Irene

The Mystery Hack

By Joona Irene

"So...this is the Mystery Hack?" I asked, examining the building. It seemed slumped on one side. Big red letters spelled 'Mystery Hack' with an extra space missing in front of the H. An S was lying on the roof... "Oh so it's Mystery Shack, not Hack. Okay." There were intricate windows, one was stained glass. A gift shop, some kind of living quarters stuffed in the back, and a large plastic totem pole was in the front yard.
"Yup! Home sweet home!" Mabel said, grabbing my arm. "C'mon, we'll show you inside!" She pulled hard and I had to remember to let her strength lead me. I was pretty strong but I had to act weaker for the general public. Dipper followed us in.
"This is the gift shop." Dipper said, gesturing. "That's Wendy; she works here." He pointed to a red head sitting at the cash register with her feet on the counter. She waved.
"What up?" she asked. I waved back.
"The ceiling." I replied, smiling. She laughed.
"I've never heard that one before! Who's the girl Mabel?"
"She's Lilac! She's new here!" Mabel replied, giving me a squeeze. "We're gonna hang!" she exclaimed. I just grinned.
"So what exactly is the Mystery Ha- I mean Shack. What...is it?" I asked Wendy.
"It's tourist trap." She said, glancing at her magazine. I didn't change my face; instead I nodded like I understood. But I didn't. I knew what a tourist was and I knew what a trap was. But together? This place didn't look like a human slaughterhouse, much less a place to catch humans. I'd figure it out later.
"So uh, this is the gift shop. Where we sell...gifts...hahh." Dipper said awkwardly. I blinked and smiled at him, hoping to ease his nerves about me. I was still a stranger to him, after all. I know I looked his age and everything, but I knew that meeting new people could be scary for some. For some reason though, smiling didn't help.
"Hey, where's Soos?" Dipper asked suddenly, looking around. Mabel looked too, but Wendy didn't look up from her reading material.
"He's in the attic." She replied.
"Lilac, you've just GOT to meet Soos!" Mabel pulled me towards an employee's only sign. Through the door I saw the living quarters I suspected earlier. We went up a set of stairs and into the attic.
"Hey Soos?" Dipper called out.
"In here!" I heard somebody say from the room in front of us. We entered. Inside was a man...baby...no, a man, on a step ladder fixing a light bulb. He was wearing a large green shirt with a painted on question mark and a brown ball cap.
"Are you Soos?" I asked.
"That's me!" he said, tipping his hat a bit.
"He's the coolest guy ever! Handy-man, bus driver, laser tag champion, he's a King of Earth!" Mabel looked at him with awe.
"Aw, I dunno about that dudes." Soos smiled. "You guys battle monsters, like, every day. You're pretty cool too." he turned to me. "So are you new here? Need something fixed?"
"I'm Lilac." I said, offering my hand. He shook it.
"Nice to meet you Lilac." he said.
Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted movement. I glanced over to see a triangular aura, mid-air.

I can see auras. It's part of what I am. Aura's are a physical representation of energy that a living thing produces. It comes off things looking like translucent smoke. If it was alive, it gave off this thin layer of colored smoke. Nothing else could see it but me, and every color was a different attribute. Another thing about aura's was that the number of colors depended on the complexity of the being. For example, plants are very simple life forms. They only have one color, and because all plants are basically the same, the color is the same. Blue, for trusting. Plants have to trust the universe to take care of them, otherwise, they'd die. So they trust the earth to provide nutrients, the rain to provide growth, and the sun to shine down and let them produce their sugar for food. Humans are different. They have two colors, each combination depending on the human. Some animals have two, some have one. Dolphins, for example, have two colors, but sea stars only have one.
Even Dipper and Mabel have aura's. It comes off them like a steam outline, slowly drifting off and away from their shoulders and ligaments. Soos too. Dipper's aura was a yellow with deep blue. Kind and brave-good people always had this kind of combination. But children, as I've found, sometimes change their aura's when they're still young. Mabel's aura was a light green with purple spots. Cheerful and creative. That much was very obvious. And for Soos, he had a dark red color with pink stripes. Weaker-willed with sensitiveness. He was good too.
That's the thing about auras; I've come to learn that they separate the good people from the bad. If I ever saw a person with a black aura, or even with light purple in their color combination, I'd stay away.
And this triangle thing, a perfect isosceles, had three colors. And one of them was light purple.
I knew it wasn't a person. It just floated there, mid-air, an aura coming off some triangular thing. I've never heard of three colors before, and it wasn't moving at all. It just hung there and watched. The strangest part was I could only see the aura, and not the living thing itself, so I had no idea what it looked like.

"It was nice meeting you guys." I said, trying to ignore the strange presence.