Chosen Successor

Blinded

Unbearable heat surrounded your body. Unlike the sheer cold from the previous portal Bill opened to the Nightmare Realm, the temperature never resisted, never cooled for even a second. Bright lights flash behind your eyelids that were snapped shut, and your voice was shot from having screamed for far too long.

The hand in yours, you realize, is not Bill's. Five fingers were warmly wrapped around your hand in a tight embrace, and the skin felt much too soft to belong to Bill. It filled you with fear. You had no inkling of where you where or where you were going, and every time you peeked an eyelid open, you were blinded by the flashing lights.

And with Bill not at your side, you worry. Did he also get sucked into the tear? Or was he sitting in his seat, eating the bowl of hashbrowns. Would he care that you were gone...? You two were a unit now! From the moment you tried to run up the stairs of the basement and he flattened them, claiming you two were to be joined at the hip, it was just the two of you.

But now it was just you.

Like traversing a dark cave with little sound, monsters around the corner, the faint bone crunching in the distance coupled with the foul smell. He was there that time, though. Perhaps not physically, but he was there. Now, he wasn't. You were truly away from him, ripped from his dimension and hurling into the unknowns with a stranger at your side.

The flashing colors becomes brighter, noises around you become louder, and the hand around yours gets tighter. You brace yourself, unsure and scared of what was happening.

Until it stops. The color behind your eyelids turns dark and the noises cease. The faint cackling of a fire sounded in the distance, and the heat remained. Gravity shifts, what once was zero gravity becomes heavier than on Earth and your thrown to the ground with reckless abandonment. Your leg coming into contact with the stone of the ground makes you cry out and slowly roll to your side. A blood outline of your leg left on the ground.

The stranger beside you gasps and stands up- struggling for a moment from the heavy gravity- and rushes to see your leg.

It was the woman from before. Her brown hair was now disheveled and the headband that was once on her head is no where to be seen, but she doesn't mind, not when you're groaning in pain, on the verge of passing out from shock.

The sound of a walkie-talkie clicks.

"Mabel to Dipper. Check the map, let me know where I am." She sounds frantic, but you can't focus well. "Me and another human got sucked into a rip, let me know how to get out, stat!"

She clips the walkie-talkie back onto her belt and lifts her sweater, revealing a bedazzled fanny-pack with cloud designs. It looks familiar, and you strain to remember from where, but it escapes you. The pain was making your head cloudy. The woman rips open the pack and digs around the small thing, the sound of bells clinking together and an electronic voice repeating, "yeah-ye-ye-yeah!"

The stupidity of it all makes you weakly chuckle. Your leg may be on fire, but as Bill had said, "ya' can't be picky!" If the woman helping you had chewed gum in her bag, then so be it. She was helping you and that was all you cared about.

"Hey, hey! I'm Mabel, and you're in good hands!" She pulls out a can from her bag, the hand coming out with jewels and stickers. The can shakes in her grasp, the little marble inside clanking around the tin and mixing the settled contents.

"This miiiight sting for a bit. Be strong for me, random stranger I have no idea about!" She positions the can above your injured leg, but gasps and puts the can away, putting her hand in her bag once more and pulling out a different can. "Whoops, haha, you wouldn't happen to want a glittery leg, would you?"