“You know what? I can answer my own question,” says Mabel. “Let’s get double rich!”

Dipper shrugs and high-fives her. “So what do we do?” he asks.

“Well, we time-jump back,” says Blendin, “to right before the Time Pirates ran away. We take over their time ship and lives. Then we live a salty life of danger, robbing and looting throughout all time!”

“Sounds good to me!” say the twins as everyone joins hands.

Blendin pulls the time tape. But something’s wrong. The time tape is sparking and hissing, and what’s normally a flash of blue light is red.

After a particularly painful time jump, Blendin and the twins land in a reddish-black desert with strange misty black clouds stretching as far as the eye can see. Foggy muttering figures that are hard to make out stumble around like zombies in the distance.

“What happened? Where are we?” yells Mabel.

“Oh, jeez,” says Blendin. “I forgot that because we were on a time island, out of time sync with any time stream, we couldn’t jump or it would dump us in an inescapable time pocket.”

“A WHAT?” screams Dipper.

“Yeah, I am starting to really regret getting greedy back there. There’s almost a lesson in this…” says Blendin.

Mabel runs up to one of the shadowy figures. “Excuse me, sir or madam, do you know a way out of this purgatory biz?”

The figure looks up beneath a mop of brown hair. It’s Mabel.

“Page fifty-four,” says the strange lifeless Mabel double. “I’m looking for page fifty-four.”

“Page thirty-two…” moans another one. “I have to turn to page thirty-two.”

Dipper and Mabel start grabbing the shadowy figures and turning them around, only to discover that all of them are gaunt, weary clones of themselves.

They see themselves in cowboy outfits, in prison uniforms, versions of themselves from every path of their adventures that ever went wrong.

“Ahhh, what is this place?” asks Dipper.

“It’s worse than I thought,” says Blendin. “We’re in the Land of Malfunctioning Time Lines. In countless universes, you guys went on this journey with me today. A handful of them, probably twelve million, ended in death or getting lost in the time stream or just failing all around. For whatever reason, all those loose time ends gravitate together through the time-verse and wind up here. Like burnt potato chips at the bottom of the bag.”

“You have to get us out of here!” yells Mabel.

Twenty feet away, a different Mabel yells the same thing at a different Blendin.

“Whoof, this didn’t turn out great!” says Blendin. “It’s almost like we’ve reached the…”

“WORST POSSIBLE ENDING,” mutter millions of dreary clones in unison.

“Help!” yells Dipper. “Someone help us!”

His voice is lost in the din of thirty-six million desperate wandering souls.

THE END.