What if Pacifica had obeyed her parents? One-shot, horror. All characters belong to Alex Hirsch, not me.

Panic Room

It had been over twenty-one hours since the doors of the Panic Room were shut. Pacifica had spent them going over and over the final moments and her shameful decision.

The house had been overgrown with vines and plants, the animal trophies roamed the woods as if alive. Worse of all, the guests had become human-shaped shrubs. Including Dipper, frozen in a silent scream with his hands upraised, the last form he would ever take.

"A forest of death, a lesson learned. And now the Northwest manor will burn!" chanted the Lumberjack Ghost.

The Ghost raised his arms, and the fire in the fireplace exploded into a column of flame. It engulfed the wall behind it, causing the family portrait on the wall to begin to char. The Ghost gave a booming laugh.

"Hey, ugly!" Pacifica had called. "Over here! You want me to let in the townsfolk? 'Cause I'll do it! Just change everyone back!"

"You wish to prove yourself? Pull that lever and open the grand gate to the town! Fulfill your ancestors' promise!" said the Ghost.

Pacifica reached for the lever. As she did, a trapdoor in floor opened and her parents looked out.

"Pacifica Elise Northwest! Stop this instant!" said Preston Northwest, her father. "We can't let the town see us like this! We have a reputation to uphold! Now come into the Panic Room. There's enough mini-sandwiches and oxygen to last you, me, and a butler a full week."

He whispered, "We'll eat the butler!"

Pacifica looked at Dipper's wooden statue, and reached for the lever.

"You dare to disobey us?" asked Preston Northwest. He rang the bell.

A lifetime of Pavlov conditioning and fear of exposing the family to shame fought with her recent epiphany about how evil they all were. She didn't want to be another link in the world's worst chain.

But she was. She turned from the lever and dived for the Panic Room, whispering, "Sorry, Dipper."

The trapdoor slammed shut and locked. Outside they could hear the howling of the Ghost and the crackling of flames.

"Don't worry," said her father. "This room is fireproof."

"And ghost-proof," said her mother. "I had it enchanted."

"Sir, I think we may have miscalculated," said the butler. "When you said there would be enough air for yourself, Pacifica, and myself for a week, you failed to account for your wife."

"I didn't miscalculate," said Preston. "I simply didn't account for you."

Before the butler could react, Mrs. Northwest stabbed him from behind.

"What are we going to do now?" asked Pacifica.

"Wait it out," said her father.

"But will the Ghost ever go away? Won't it just wait out there for us forever?" asked Pacifica.

"We're expecting something to change," said her mother, but she refused to explain further.

Pacifica had not eaten any of the fresh butler meat. She couldn't even bring herself to touch the mini-sandwiches. She had spent the last day crying over Dipper, going over and over the final moments...

There was a brilliant flash of blue light that penetrated even this sealed room. There was a scream from the Ghost, then silence.

Pacifica's parents smiled.

"It's time," said Preston Northwest. "We can go out now."

They opened the door to the ruin of the house. Charred stumps stood where the guests had been. Pacifica didn't want to look at the place where Dipper had been, but her eyes seemed to move by themselves to stare at his stump. She couldn't look away. She had done this, by failing to stand up to her parents.

The world turned gray around them and a yellow triangle with a single eye appeared, wearing a bow tie and a top hat.

"Well, well, what a mess! I love it," said the being. "We haven't met in person, but I'm glad to see my two worshipers, Preston and Gloria Northwest. My name's Bill Cipher."

Her parents bowed down before the being, and forced Pacifica to her knees beside them.

"Master, we have an offering for you," said Preston Northwest.

"Ah yes, the Llama," said Bill. "Thanks a bunch!"

"What?" said Pacifica. "Me? An offering?"

"This is the moment you were raised for, dear," said her mother. "We knew a new order of things was coming, and we will be rewarded for helping to bring it about. You are our contribution."

"About that reward..." said Bill. "I would have, but you took out two symbols on the Wheel that I require."

He gestured, and a cap with a blue pine tree, like Dipper's, appeared on Preston's head.

Preston felt it, and said, "A common baseball cap! How gauche!"

With another gesture, Gloria Northwest was wearing a bright magenta sweater with a yellow star on it, a star with a rainbow tail.

"How tacky!" said Gloria. "I wouldn't be caught dead in this thing."

"Sorry, but you have no choice about that," said Bill. "You actually did me a favor, since Pine Tree and Shooting Star were the only two people who had the slightest chance of stopping me. But now you have to take their places on the Wheel."

The Northwest parents screamed and turned to run, and so did Pacifica an instant later. But Bill grew larger, and his arms and legs morphed into the eight legs of a giant spider. His tie turned red and twisted around, becoming the hourglass marking of a Black Widow spider. A black hole opened in his face and out came webs, which wrapped themselves around Pacifica and her parents and turned them into helpless bundles.

Pacifica fainted, and when she woke she could see through the webbing covering her face that she was in a standing circle of ten bundles with webs connecting them, each with a glowing blue mark around the stomach level, each with a symbol on it. She couldn't make out who all the people were inside, but to her left was the Shooting Star, her mother. Going around the circle from there was a Heart, a pair of Glasses, a Question Mark, a bag of Ice, a strange Crescent, a Pine Tree, a Star with an eye in it, and a six-fingered Hand.

In the center of the webs was the Bill Spider, with web lines radiating out in every direction to the ten positions on the Wheel. Above and behind the Wheel, Pacifica could see a glowing triangular object, swirling with energy, sucking in air.

"Welcome to the ritual that will usher in the Apocalypse, a reign of terror by nightmares that will engulf this world," said Bill. "The take-over ritual requires a fresh generation of ten hex spiders, born on this earth, to lead the way. That's only the beginning of the horrors to follow, of course. You lucky people have been chosen as the incubating hosts. While you were unconscious I injected each of you with a spider egg. In the next couple of days the spiders will hatch and slowly devour you from the inside. This will be fun for me to watch. Pain is hilarious."

Pacifica tried to struggle free, but she was bound completely immobile and gagged so that she couldn't utter a sound. There was a stinging pain near her stomach, a pain that she knew was only going to get worse.

Dipper and Mabel had been the only two people who might have saved the world from this, and her cowardly decision had doomed them. Now Pacifica was doomed too, and she knew she deserved it. She and her family would die in this place, their final Panic Room.