Lost Boys

Ford opens Pandora's Journal

For a few days, things were a more or less peaceful routine: wake up, eat, dress, raise the anchor, pole their way down the river until sunset (with optional food and/or bathroom breaks), drop the anchor, rest and eat, go to bed, repeat.

While resting and eating, they would talk.

Not so much about the thick, juicy stuff that they really needed to talk about, or a few things that they probably needed to talk about but were unwilling to bring up and therefore disrupt their tentative peace. But their conversations made it easier for them to not feel like strangers or distant acquaintances, and that was something, right?

Often they ended up having scar contests, which so far Stan was winning hands down (Ford suspected it was in part because he had no qualms about exaggerating the stories of how he got his scars-at least, he hoped he was exaggerating, considering how horrifying some of the stories were). Or they would talk about some of their more pleasant adventures in the years they'd been apart, or just play a few rounds of poker using a pack of cards Stan had somehow held onto courtesy of his time in Lottocron 9. It was a somewhat uneasy calm, but better than no calm at all.

********

Then, one night after Stan had gone to bed, Ford finally did something he'd been thinking of doing for a while, but kept not getting around to: he gathered up his journals from where his brother had left them on the floor, and began flipping through them.

Considering they'd spent so long in Stan's possession, they were surprisingly undisturbed. Or rather, Ford's research had been left undisturbed. Here and there he found little notes left in the margins in his brother's untidy scrawl; in his entry about the Plaidypus and not wanting to eat one's eggs, Stan had written, "They're not that bad," for example. His page that first described Fiddleford had "McGucket?" at the bottom with the question mark crossed out in a different color of pen, making Ford suspect that this was when he'd figured out that the crazy hillbilly living in the dump was his old friend and research assistant. He still felt more than a little like slime for treating Fiddleford and his qualms about their project so terribly; hopefully if-when-they got home he could make it up to him.

Another less-than-pleasant reminder of something else Ford had screwed up was one of his final entries, the one where he talked about his brother being just a thief and a charlatan, and said that line about his worth that had hurt him so much when he saw it. Stan had slashed the sentences through with his pen several times, in a way that probably would have torn the paper if it had been less durable. And then he had written something underneath; it had been crossed out afterwards, but Ford thought he could make out that it was along the lines of "Well screw YOU, you stuck-up son of a-"

...Yeah, I probably deserve that.

********

The pages after that were covered in mathematical equations.

Very complex, surprisingly accurate mathematical equations, which had clearly taken a lot of thought and work. Ford, who remembered Stan's grades in high school math, was more than a little surprised. He couldn't help the thought, Maybe he never felt like he had to know this stuff before. And even though part of him felt like he should be annoyed at his twin for using the book he'd made for scratch paper...well, it was unlikely that he'd had many other options, wasn't it?

Page after page was covered with formulae and notes, or design ideas for a gun that could create mini portals, partly based on Ford's design for the disaster in his basement-the blueprints made him realize, sheepishly, that it was Stan himself who had been the creator of Vera. Great, now he was picking up his twin's habit of anthropomorphizing their weaponry.

There was also a collection of Ford's wanted posters inserted here and there in the third journal; they seemed to serve both as bookmarks and-he realized from the different dates and lists of crimes on each of them-a way of keeping track of where he'd been. And, perhaps, an additional method of entertainment, considering that the vast majority of them had been graffitied on.

Stan's drawing skills hadn't improved much since he was ten, but he hadn't let that stop him; he added crazy beards and mustaches, or devil's horns and smoke pouring from Ford's nostrils, or one particularly noteworthy one that had given his face an enormous afro and buck teeth, with a speech bubble reading: "I'm Ford! I sleep with my textbooks! ...Under my pillow, huh huh huh!"

Ford rolled his eyes. Really mature, Stanley.

He quickly turned the page-and paused.

Because he was staring down at a photo of them when they were teens, roughhousing in the boxing ring, carefully pasted into the journal. There was no caption, no markings, no nothing around it.

After staring at it for a long moment, Ford set the book down resolutely.

He retrieved the gluey substance he'd discovered earlier in the cabin; finding that it was still usable, he carefully pasted his own photo in right under Stanley's, making sure that it was symmetrical. He let it dry for a minute, just sitting and examining the two photos, and listening to Stan snore and shuffle around in his hammock.

His first instinct was to assume that was the end of Stan's work in the journal and just go to bed-but curiosity and the fact that there were still plenty of pages left led him to take a peek, just in case. And no, he could see some writing when he turned up a corner of the page, so he flipped to it-

Ford stared with wide eyes at a map which had been neatly copied out across two pages.

Specifically, a map of the castle in the Finger Dimension, showing where the dungeon and the lab were, with little annotations about alternative escape routes and people to potentially contact and things like that.

And it was all in Ford's handwriting.

He was still trying to process this, figure out what it all meant, when he was thrown on his side by the feeling of something big and heavy smashing into the side of the boat.

********

Oh dear.

Oh d-d-d-d-dear dear.