By the time they'd finally arrived at the house, it felt like it'd been hours. It probably had been hours, but there was no way to tell time through the thick cloud coverage above them, with the ran beating down upon them harder by the second. It was straight up miserable, and the creepy house that looked like it was going to fall on them at any second looked like a safe haven.
"Hey..." Norman spoke up, and his voice was thick with exhaustion. "Where'd they go?"
Wirt blinked (it took a long time, but he didn't dwell on that). Norman was right. At this point, they had finally reached the house (it loomed over them, was it bigger than Wirt remembered? Maybe it was just the rain making it seem creepier...), and Dipper had seemingly disappeared, along with Ash, who had run on ahead, intending to relay the message that they were all on their way. Adam frowned.
"They probably went inside the house," Adam said, rolling his eyes. Wirt and Norman relaxed, both a little guilty about letting their imaginations run away with them.
"Oh," Wirt said. "Y-Yeah, that sounds right."
"Sounds like a pretty good idea to me," Norman muttered, and Wirt was just barely able to hear him against the pouring rain. "We should probably get in there, too."
"Probably," Adam agreed as they paused by the front door. But he didn't reach for it, so, eventually, Wirt grasped the doorknob, and tried to turn it.
His hand slipped off, and Wirt frowned. As Norman and Adam gave him odd looks, Wirt grasped the doorknob with both hands to try and turn it again, but the knob didn't move, and once again, Wirt's hands slipped off. Okay, now he was starting to panic. He backed away from the door, wondering what was going on. Hadn't the door been open a couple hours ago?
"What the-?" Wirt stepped back, looking over Adam and Wirt with a worried expression. "It's stuck!"
"Stuck?" Adam's eyebrows furrowed. "Do you mean locked? Why would it be locked?"
"I don't know, it just is!" Wirt cried, and now Norman was starting to look concerned.
"Did Dipper do it?" he asked, but Adam shook his head.
"Why would he?" Adam shot back, but, even though he tried not to show it, Wirt detected a nervous tone in his voice, too. "Maybe it locked accidently. But that shouldn't be a problem for Ash, since, well..."
Adam trailed off, and then shook his head. "You know," he finished lamely, and cupped his hands around his mouth. "Hey, Ash! What's going on?!"
For a minute, nothing happened, and Adam looked ready to try again when suddenly something poked through the door, startling all three of them.
"Gah!" Adam cried, and then he got a good look at the thing, and he groaned, embarrassed. "Hey, Ash."
"Oh, you guys are here now?" Ash asked him. He seemed to be bobbing in midair through the door, and maybe he was.
Wirt had to squint to see him, he was nearly transparent now, and he didn't have any colour in him anymore. Nevertheless, he still looked peppy and full of life despite being... well...
As a thought occurred to him, Wirt glanced sideways at Adam. Was it just his imagination, or was he becoming more and more transparent, just like Ash was? The way Adam looked right now reminded Wirt of how Ash looked in the cave.
That was probably worth worrying about, but for now, Wirt pushed it to the back of his mind as the conversation continued.
"Yeah, we are here now," Adam told him, sounding irritated. "Why is the door locked? Where's Dipper?"
Ash paused for a minute, his expression changing into one of confusion. "Uh... the doors locked?"
Adam raised his eyebrow. "Yes... can you let us in?"
Ash seemed to think for a minute. "Hm... give me a moment."
Ash disappeared, and the three outside exchanged confused glances with each other, but that's all they managed to be before Ash was poking his head out again.
"Just a minute," he told them. "It's so cool in here! Like a mansion!"
"A mansion?!" Wirt repeated, shocked. He didn't remember the house that well, but he was pretty sure 'mansion' was the worst way to describe it. Ash just shrugged.
"I know, I know," he said, and Wirt suddenly felt stupid. Oh, right, Ash used to live here, too, after all. Luckily, Ash didn't seem to take any offense to it. "It's like it's completely changed! Everything's different in here now, it's like it's an alien spaceship! It's cool!"
"You've said," Adam said dryly, but Wirt was still stuck on the 'it's changed!' part.
"What do you mean 'everything's different'?" he asked Ash, and Ash grinned at him, but instead of answering, he just looked up.
"You'll see," he said mysteriously, and as if on cue, a window opened up there, and Dipper leaned out. Adam frowned at him.
"Why didn't you just open this door?" he called up to Dipper, and Dipper shrugged at him.
"I couldn't find it!" he called back. "But here, you can come in with this!"
Before they could ask what the heck Dipper meant by that, he disappeared, and appeared with some kind of rope. Wirt blinked at that, about to tell them that he didn't remember that in there, before he realized that it was a bunch a fabric tied together. Fabric Wirt DID recognize.
"Isn't that the fabric from the couch?" he called up to Dipper, and Dipper titled his head at him.
"I just found this lying around," he told Wirt. "I didn't see any couches."
"...Oh," Wirt wasn't quite sure how to respond to that, but Dipper moved on before he could think too hard about that.
"Here, you can use this to climb up!" Dipper called down to them, lowering the rope down to them. Wirt called it, and then looked back up to Dipper, uncertain.
"This doesn't look safe!" Norman called up to him, and Dipper shook his head.
"Probably, but there's no other way in!" he pointed out, and Norman sighed. He and Wirt glanced at each other.
"Er, you first," Wirt told him quickly before Norman could say anything, and again, Norman sighed.
"Fine," he said. "But next time you go first."
Wirt decided not to respond to that, hopefully if he didn't bring it up, Norman would forget about it.
Grasping onto the 'rope', Norman yanked once, and Dipper nearly fell out of the window.
"Woah-hey!" Dipper cried, and Norman and Adam glared at him.
"You're just going to hang onto it?" Adam yelled up to him.
"You can't pull me up, you'll just fall down," Norman pointed out flatly, and Dipper went red.
"Yeah, yeah," he muttered. "Hold on, I'll go tie this, somewhere. Just wait.
Once again, Dipper disappeared, but he came back quicker this time, giving them a thumbs up. Norman gave Wirt a tired look.
"There's no way this'll hold," he whispered to Wirt, quietly so Dipper couldn't hear them. "At least I won't break my neck on the way down."
"What's taking so long?!" Dipper called down to them, and Wirt got the feeling he had guessed what they were talking about. "Come on!"
Norman gave Wirt a look, and then finally grasped the rope, tugging it once, and when it held, he finally forced himself up, out of the mud and up the rope. It looked exhausting, and hard, but even though it took a long time, Norman eventually got all the way up, with both himself and the rope intact. When he reached the window, Dipper reached out, grabbing his hand. After a slight scuffle where Dipper nearly got pulled out again, Dipper hauled him into safety. After a moment, Dipper poked his head out again.
"Okay, you're good!" Dipper told them. "Who's next?"
Wirt and Adam looked to each other, almost caught in a staring contest before Adam shrugged.
"You go," he said, motioning to the rope.
"Are you sure?" Wirt asked, quickly, and his voice betrayed a hint of worry. "Uh, you can go if you want..."
Adam shook his head. "Nah, I want to try something else instead. Just do it, Wirt. It'll be fine."
Wirt was being promised that a lot recently, but no matter how often he was told, it never really seemed to be true. Nevertheless, he gripped the rope.
"Uh, if you say so..." Wirt said, but he still waited a for a while to see if Adam would change his mind. But when Adam gave him an impatient look, Wirt quickly scrambled to climb up the rope, pulling himself up. It was just as awful as it looked, and within the first couple seconds, Wirt's arms were burning, and it somehow hurt his entire body more then falling from thirty feet did. Wirt almost envied that, actually.
Eventually, Wirt got to the top, and he felt two sets of hands helping him up. He collapsed into the room.
"Oh come on," Norman said, but he sounded amused. Wirt heard him closing the door behind him. "It wasn't that bad."
"It's not that," Wirt mumbled from his faceplant on the ground. "I just tripped."
"And you're still down there for fun?" Dipper teased, and Wirt groaned, reluctantly getting up.
"Yeah, that wasn't bad, I guess," Wirt said, agreeing with what Norman said earlier. "Still awful, though."
"Yeah," Norman sighed. He stared down at his hands, which Wirt suddenly realized very almost completely red, like they'd been dipped in red paint. They were throbbing uncomfortably. "It feels like they broke my hand or something."
Dipper looked over to him, frowning. "Hm... that does look bad, but they'll probably be fine in a couple minutes."
"Probably," Norman agreed, still wincing.
Wirt frowned, and took a look at his own hands. He was suddenly realizing that his entire body hurt... except his hands. His hands were fine, he realized. Fine, and slightly pink. The only thing he'd felt out there was the couch fabric under his hands.
Hm... it looked like that clothe had healed him better than he'd thought.
"So... where even are we?" Norman asked, drawing Wirt's attention away from his hands, and to the room that they were in.
Actually, that was a really good question, because Wirt had never seen this room in his life. It was a medium sized room, but the walls were bizarrely purple and glowing somehow. The ceiling was curved, even though the house they were in didn't have a curved roof, and the light on the roof was a chandelier, but it looked like it was floating, almost.
"I've been wandering around for a while, so I've been making a map, in my head..." Dipper told them, but he looked dejected. "...But the rooms seem to change in here, so it doesn't seem to really matter anyway."
"What are we even looking for, again?" Wirt asked them, trying to remember. It hadn't even been a day, and he'd already forgot again.
"We're looking for the room where I died," Ash answered, poking up from the floor and floating up into the room. Wirt jumped, startled. "It should be around here somewhere."
"Somewhere is the key word there," Adam muttered darkly, floating up from the floor like Ash did. "This place is impossible, I just passed like, three floors."
"You what?!" Wirt cried, but Dipper seemed more interested in something else.
"Oh, Adam, you can float now?" Dipper asked curiously. "And go through walls?"
"I guess," Adam huffed, fully in the room now. "Would've preferred the superhuman strength, but this is fine, too, I guess."
"So, you and Ash can lead us through the house, right?" Norman asked, but Adam's expression didn't look promising.
"We can try..." Ash told them. "But this place is really weird."
"Like I said before, things seem to change here," Dipper explained. He gave Wirt an odd look. "You used to live here, Wirt?"
Wirt thought about that for a second, and then shook his head. "Well... it was different when I lived here."
"You should have seen what is was like when I lived here!" Ash told them. "This house really had a personality; it was like my second best friend!"
"It talked?" Dipper asked him and Ash nodded.
"Sometimes!" he told them, and Wirt was instantly grateful that it didn't do that anymore. He wondered if Kipo ever heard it talk.
"We should probably get moving," Adam thought out loud, they all glanced to him. "It'll take forever to navigate this place, so we should get sooner rather than later."
"Yeah," Dipper agreed, moving forward. "Well, with two people that can go through walls, this'll probably be a little easier."
"We'll see," Adam said, but he didn't sound like he really believed it. Dipper didn't respond to that, though, instead he stepped towards the door, grasping the handle and turning it.
"Well, if you think this room is weird, just wait," he told them. "You haven't seen anything."
With that dramatic speech, Dipper twisted the handle, and pushed open the door, revealing the hallway behind it. And he wasn't lying, Wirt really hadn't seen anything yet.
This entire hallway was an architectural nightmare. Wirt wasn't even sure how it was supposed to stand up on its own; it looked like it'd snap from a feather.
The 'hallway' was curved... ish. They were apparently at the lowest point of it, with the hallway inclining sharply on either side, almost like they were built more like a slide. Well, not really, they were practically vertical. Anyone sliding on that would experience a straight drop to the bottom.
"Well, this hadn't been here before," Dipper sighed. Ash looked around, wide-eyed.
Adam, with an attitude a smidge different from Ash, snorted. "Well, this sure looks fine. Where was your body the last time you saw it, Ash?"
"H-Huh?" Ash asked, tearing his eyes from the hallway. "Oh... um, I don't actually remember. Not sure I'd be much help anyway, though..."
"I remember where it was," Wirt spoke up, but he regretted it as he saw everyone turn to him. He'd just offered to lead the, didn't he?
"Oh, really?" Dipper prompted him. "Uh, where was it?"
"I don't really know," Wirt said, quickly backtracking. "Uh, somewhere downstairs? In an office?"
"Downstairs?" Adam repeated, and he turned to the hallway again, where, again, both options went up.
"Oh, great," Dipper sighed, and after that, there was nothing else to really say. The five of them forced themselves forward and into the hallway.