Gravity Rises (S3)

MV: Part Fifteen

Camille Pines lay back on the bed in her hotel room with a deep sigh. She felt so useless. And anxious, and panicked. Not a good combination.

"Good night, honey," said her husband, Samuel, from the other side of the bed. He was already half asleep.

"Good night," she whispered back.

She lay there in the darkness. The pillow was uncomfortable: overly fluffy, with no neck support. Camille usually brought her own firm pillow to hotels, but she hadn't thought to bring it this time. She and her husband had jumped in the car on Saturday as soon as Jesús Ribera had called them with the terrible news. They'd driven all day to get to Oregon, only to find exactly what Soos had described: an empty crater. No trees, no animals, no Mason, no Mabel.

Camille's children had disappeared.

There was nothing Camille and Sam could do here. Nothing at all. It had been four days since they'd arrived, and nothing had happened. The crater was now swarmed with reporters and scientists — everyone trying to figure out what had happened, everyone concerned about the people who had disappeared — but no progress had been made.

Camille and Sam weren't the only ones worried about family members. An elderly woman named Dr. Eleanor Pleasure spent most of her time with the scientists, grilling them on what they were doing to bring her precious granddaughter back to her. And just today, Sam had run into a distraught young woman named Grace Prewitt. He had tried to comfort her as she told him about how she needed to find her brother, but it was hard to comfort someone when you had the same worries as they did.

Had Stanford done something? Sam described his uncle as a paranormal researcher, but Camille had dismissed that as either a misplaced obsession or a selling point for tourists. She vaguely believed in a higher power of some sort, but she'd never believed in magic or the supernatural. So when she'd seen the crater for herself. . . when she'd discovered that the entire town of Gravity Rises had disappeared, as if it had never existed. . .

She was already anxious enough without an existential crisis on top of that. But one of her theories was that Stanford's paranormal research was somehow responsible for the town disappearing.

If you watched the news, it seemed everyone in the country had a theory for what had happened. Undetected meteor, said astronomists. Freak seismic activity, said geologists. God's judgment, said religious fanatics. What her children would be judged so harshly for, Camille had no idea. They weren't perfect, but they were good children with kind hearts.

She missed them so much.

The twins' vacation was only supposed to last a week and a half. Now they had been gone for two weeks, and Camille got more anxious for them by the second. They were supposed to be home four days ago; school had started two days ago. Where were they? What had happened to them? Would Camille ever see them again?

A light snore from Samuel told her that he was asleep. Part of her resented him for that. How can you sleep? she wanted to scream at him. How can you sleep when our babies are gone? But she didn't say that, because she knew he was doing the right thing. They couldn't do anything to help Mason and Mabel, so they should take care of themselves while they worried.

Useless.

Camille realized there were tears on her face. Those had been appearing out of nowhere a lot the past few days. She'd almost stopped noticing them.

She rolled onto her side and let the tears drain from her eyes.

~~~~~

Dipper woke up shivering. As he slept, Marigold had covered him and Ford with her wing to help them stay warm, but they were still on the cold ground outside in the middle of winter.