Chapter Text
“This is really good Stan,” Dipper said before taking another bite of the dinner Stan had made.
Stan gave a one-armed shrug. “It’s nothing special. Just browned some meat then poured a can of sauce over it, then poured that over some noodles.”
“Hey, it tastes good, and nothing’s burned or undercooked. It doesn’t matter how easy it was to make, that’s still a success in my book.” Dipper said.
“You know, you wouldn’t burn so much stuff if you didn’t keep getting distracted writing stuff down in one of your nerd notebooks when you cook,” Stan pointed out.
“I can’t control when inspiration strikes.”
“Uh-huh.” Ford used to say the exact same kind of things, and Stan hadn’t been impressed by his excuses either.
He twirled his fork in the spaghetti and took another bite. Dipper was right about it being good, mostly. It definitely wasn’t bad, better than a lot of the diner and fast food he’d eaten and a lot cheaper, but it wasn’t… Well, it wasn’t good, like go outta your way to compliment it kind of good. It was fine, but the flavor was just… boring. “It’s not nearly as good as what Ma used to make.”
“That’s not really a fair comparison,” Dipper said. “Your mom has been cooking for your family decades, and her mom was probably teaching her how before that; that’s a lot of practice. You’ve only been cooking for… what, about a month now? But if you did want to get better at it, we can find you some cookbooks and you can start experimenting around in the kitchen. Maybe you’ll even figure out what that squiggly tool is for.”
“I’m telling you, it’s some kind of torture device.”
“A torture device that a seventy-year old lady was keeping in her kitchen?” Dipper asked skeptically.
“You saw those dolls she was keeping in here; that lady has gotta be into all kinds of creepy shit. I’ll bet she’s putting voodoo curses on the nurses at the old folks’ home right now,” Stan said.
Dipper glanced over his shoulder at the now empty shelf and shuddered. “You might be right about that. So, should I expect your culinary experiments in the near future?”
“Nah, I ain’t got time for that.” Stan wasn’t having to work seven days a week to keep a roof over his head and food in his stomach anymore, but he was still out working every day. He had to if he ever wanted to make millions. All day every day he was out either selling merchandise or sometimes buying it. Then when he came home at night he and Dipper still spent time talking about business stuff and Stan had to work on his numbers – figuring out profits and losses, what products were selling well and what weren’t, keeping an eye on if his prices were right, figuring out if he should be spending more or less on advertising – plus even though he wasn’t a neat freak or anything, Stan still felt like he had to spend some time doing his part to help keep the place clean. With all that, he barely had enough time to cook regular meals; he definitely didn’t have time to spend on trying to get better if he was already doing okay.
Dipper was frowning at him now. “Did you want me to learn to cook better?” Stan asked. Maybe he didn’t have time for it, but if that’s what Dipper wanted, he would make time. Stan still owed Dipper for everything he’d done for him.
“No, only if you wanted to,” Dipper said easily. “I was just thinking… tomorrow is your slow day right?”
“Yeah, Thursdays are always pretty light for customers. People are a lot more willing to buy stuff right after payday than right before it,” Stan said.
“Great. Do you think you could take tomorrow afternoon off then, maybe come back home around two? There’s something I want your help with.”
“You got something new for one of our products?” Stan asked. Ever since that first StanVac, Dipper had always made a point about showing Stan exactly what he was doing to fix up the products. Stan might have thought Dipper would have wanted to keep him as far away from that as possible, but he guessed Dipper knew Stan wasn’t going to use that knowledge to try to cut him out. If nothing else Stan didn’t have the time to fix everything up himself. Plus Dipper had made a pretty good point about how the better Stan understood his products, the better he could do at selling them.
“No, it’s something else,” Dipper said.
Stan blinked. “You want me to help you with some of your science stuff?” Not the project Stan assumed; Dipper was pretty secretive about that. But he had other stuff he worked on, probably because he seemed to be having trouble finding all the parts and equipment he needed for his main project. Unless that’s what he wanted Stan’s help with – he wanted to talk Stan through some of the stuff he needed to see if Stan had better luck turning it up than Dipper was having.
“Not exactly. You’ll see tomorrow. You can take the afternoon off, can’t you?” Dipper asked.
“Yeah, sure if you need me,” Stan agreed. He didn’t love the idea of missing out on any chances to earn more money, but if Dipper needed him, then that was that.
So the next morning Stan got up early so he could knock out his meetings with his suppliers and squeeze in a little door-to-door time before heading back home. He got back about fifteen minutes before two; that way he figured he could scarf some lunch real quick before he helped Dipper with whatever it was.
Walking in Stan was expecting Dipper to have a bunch of stuff set up on the dining table. He usually was pretty good about keeping his stuff up in his study, but Stan figured since Dipper was getting his help he’d want to bring all that downstairs. So the piles and piles of paperwork everywhere weren’t a surprise. The game board with all the elaborately carved figurines and the oddly-shaped dice the multiple decks of cards on the other hand…
“You’re here early. I haven’t finished making the nachos yet,” Dipper said as he sprinkled liberal handfuls of grated cheese over a plate of tortilla chips.
“What the hell is all this?” Stan asked. He picked up a card off the top of one of the decks and flipped it over. It had a picture of some armor on it and read “Gygax’s Mythical Chainmail; AC -700.” Whatever that meant.
“It’s only the best game of all time: Dungeons, Dungeons, and More Dungeons! I got us the advanced edition, but don’t worry if you’ve never played before; I am happy to walk you through everyth – wait no, don’t look at that.” Dipper came rushing out of the kitchen to pull the drawing of some kind of map out of Stan’s hands. “That is for Probabilitor’s eyes only. Oh, that’s me. Your character sheet is, ah…” Dipper shuffled through some of the piles, then snatched one sheet and handed it to Stan, “here! I went ahead and made your character for you. I figured you’d rather just get started with the game and flesh out the details of your personality and backstory later.”
“Grunewald Dragonforge,” Stan read. So that was a name. “What you needed me for was to play this nerd game with you?”
“Of course! You can’t play this game with just one person. It’s best with five or six people, but we can still have a lot of fun with just two. It’s been ages since I’ve had anyone to play with and I know you’re going to love it.”
Stan had some serious doubts about that. Honestly, he was pretty sure he ought to be refusing to play any game involving this much graph paper on principle. But Dipper just looked so freaking excited. Of everything in the world that he could be asking Stan to do for him, this seemed like a pretty dumb choice to Stan, but he was asking. “Alright, I’ll play one round.”
“Great!” Dipper said, looking like Stan had agreed to just give him a million bucks, not play some dumb game. “Why don’t you go ahead and familiarize yourself with Grunewald while I finish up these nachos, and then we can get started.”
“The door slowly creaks open. The sound you’ve been following gets louder, like wind gusting through a giant pair of bellows. You peer into the gloom and slowly a great, glowing eye opens. That’s when you realize what the noise is: it’s the sound of the monster breathing. And that’s probably where we should stop for the night.”
Stan gave a small jerk of surprise. “What? No we can’t stop there; I gotta fight the monster!”
Dipper chuckled. “See, I told you this game was fun,” he said. “But we really do need to stop. It’s past midnight.”
Stan blinked confusedly up at the kitchen clock. When had it gotten so late? Heck, when had it gotten to be nighttime at all? Never mind; didn’t matter. “I’ll just be tired tomorrow. We gotta keep going. I’m this close to saving Princess Stupidname.”
“Princess Unattainabelle,” Dipper corrected. “And not to spoil the story, but we’re not even close to the end yet. This is only the first dungeon; there’s lots more to go. I figured if you liked it today, we could get a normal session going every Thursday afternoon and evening.”
Stan’s first instinct was to want to say yes. This wasn’t the way he had hoped for it, but he and Grunewald were having adventures together and finding treasure and there was going to be a babe at the end of it here. He wanted to say yes, but… “I can’t take every Thursday off work.”
“Stan, you work seven days a week, every week,” Dipper said.
“So do you.”
“My work is also my hobby,” Dipper countered. “And I do other things with my time. Like playing DD&MD with you.”
“Look, this game is surprisingly not terrible, but it ain’t making me a millionaire either. That’s what I gotta be working on right now.” It was the only idea he had to make things up to Ford right now: make millions and then tell Ford he was sorry about the science fair project, so here was the money to make hundreds more way better projects and to bribe that stupid school into letting him in.
“And you’ll get there. You’re clever, resourceful, driven, charismatic. I have no doubt you can accomplish anything you really want to, and if becoming a millionaire is it, then I’m sure you will. Just not if you burn yourself out first.”
“I…” Dipper was just looking at him, and he was so fucking earnest, and Stan didn’t know how to deal with this. Two months ago Stan had been basically homeless with no prospects. Four months ago he’d overheard his school principal, who Stan got called into see so often it felt like he talked to him more than his own dad sometimes, tell his parents Stan wasn’t good for anything better than scraping barnacles off the salt water taffy stand. And now Dipper… “You really think that.”
“Yes, obviously,” Dipper said and he was just so. Fucking. Earnest.
Fuck it. Dipper was way smarter than that dumbass principal anyway. “Okay,” Stan said, though he couldn’t quite meet Dipper’s eyes when he said it. “We can play again next week.”