Dib whirled around for eight time in five minutes, and though he could he Six's overdramatic and annoyed sigh, he didn't turn around again until his eyes had scanned over the tree's multiple times. But, as with every other time, he found nothing.

"This monster you're afraid of... could you not just fight it off yourself?" Six asked, and Dib's heard nearly whipped around from the sheer stupidity of it. But he KNOWS he heard a twig snap, so he was watching the forest like a hawk.

"Well, maybe, but maybe not. What if it has..." Dib struggled for a second. "A gun?"

Dib could feel Six's displeasure and he wasn't even looking at her. However, he knew that feeling well.

"It was just an example." Concluding there was nothing in the forest, Dib turned back to his companion. Despite her being a weird fox/cat/dog creature, he could see she was irritated with him. "Besides, I want to catch it, because I really, really can't believe that on this new world of pink people and 'bone dragons' and you, people still don't believe anything I say."

"That 'Dipper' did," Six disagreed, and her tone of voice told Dib exactly what she thought about that. Dib rolled his eyes.

"What, you think we're crazy, huh?" Dib huffed, but Six only shook her head.

"So, what is this monster anyway?" Six asked, avoiding the question. Dib glared at her.

"I told you already!" Dib cried. "Three times!"

"Well, in those three times, the more interesting one was here," Six replied easily, as if she wasn't telling Dib that she didn't care one bit about him. "So now that she's gone to help Ms Fei Fei get more crystals, I might actually listen."

Dib groaned. "I hate you so much."

Kipo clutched at the ground below her, uncontrollably cough all the water her swallowed in her short trip in the river. Well, 'coughing' was perhaps too soft of a word for it. 'Violently hacking' was better.

She stayed like that for a long time, but eventually, she managed to get up, wiping the tears from her eyes. At least she assumed they were tears, after all, she was soaking wet, she couldn't tell the river water from anything else.

When Kipo raised herself into a sitting position, she shook out her head, but it didn't really help much, as it only made the ringing worse. Everything hurt AGAIN, and she'd just felt healed again, too!

"Kipo!" Someone cried, and Kipo was jarred back to the present, looking over to the side to see Luz, Kris and Alice, with Alice and Luz both in the water, and Kris struggling to drag them up.

"Huh? Oh, sorry! I'm coming, I'm coming!"

Quickly, Kipo stood up, and had to grasp a wall by her side as she wobbled, but she got her sense of balance back fast, hurrying over to Alice and pulling her to...

Kipo blinked. Wait, where even where they?

As Kris and Alice helped Luz up, Kipo took a look around their surroundings. They seemed to be on a dock of some sort, all made out of old, decaying wood. With every step, the dock creaked, and with every step the wood seemed to bend under their feet. Half of it seemed to be gone already, based on how the other half of the dock was cut off with splintery, broken off wood at the ends, though it didn't look like it'd take much for this side to break that easily.

Kipo gripped the metal railing by the ledge, suddenly worried.

"Hey, look," Luz suddenly spoke up, seemingly recovered from her coughing fit, though Alice still seemed to be struggling.

Kipo quickly looked away from Alice, focusing on where Luz was pointing, but it didn't take long for Kipo to see what Luz was referring to.

"Oh!" Kipo gasped. The castle was much closer now, seemingly just over this river. It was shrouded in shadow, but even so, it was bigger than it had been before. Kipo's eyes widened. Then that meant, if they just got over this river...

A sudden clatter drew Kipo's attention, and she looked down to find that Kris had somehow found a boat, and was hanging onto it. Kipo blinked, and then looked around to find that the river was full of identical boats. It looked a little creepy to Kipo...

But apparently not to Luz.

"Ooh, lucky, a boat!" she said, and clambered onto it, immediately helping Alice in after. "You're going to drive, Kris? Cool. We'll be over this river in no time!"

Kipo... sincerely doubted that was true, but she didn't argue, instead climbing into the boat as well, and Kris got into the back. A short second later, they were moving, but they didn't immediately to go across the lake, instead, Kris moved them forward, along the dock.

Kipo frowned, and Luz turned around, confused.

"Kris, why aren't we... oh... there's a track... And you can't get out of it?...Oh, ok, then!" Luz turned around, smiling again, but she didn't seem as confident as before. "That's fine, I guess... it's probably going across the lake anyway!"

Kipo's frown only deepened, and she shifted until she was looking over the side of the boat. It was hard to make out in the dark, even for Kipo, but sometimes the moonlight glinted off the track, and Kipo could follow it. She saw that Luz was almost right... it did go in the direction of the castle, but then it stopped, leading into a dark, shadowy house that made Kipo's stomach drop. What monster would be waiting for them in there?!

It was slowly getting closer and closer...

"It's a copycat monster, alright?" Dib sneered. "It's called the Imposter, and it can take the form of anyone and anything, and can smoothly infiltrate any group it wants, feeding off their paranoia and fear while it kills them off one by one. No one ever knows it's there until they're being killed by it, and the only way to find it is a small symbol on its neck."

Dib paused dramatically, but unfortunately, Six seemed unimpressed.

"And you say it's here," she asked, but it wasn't really a question. "Hunting you."

"Well... I'm not one hundred percent certain," Dib corrected sheepishly. "But... weird things have been happening around here, suspicious things."

Six huffed, but Dib only took that as an incentive to continue.

"One time, when Anne and I were talking, she told me that her favourite band was the 'Whites and Pinks', which is a band that makes awful music, but another time, she said it was 'Two Directions', which is a band that doesn't even exist!" Dib told her. Six stared at him, and while she was speechless, it wasn't the awe-struck, 'everything makes sense now' speechless. It was an 'are you serious' speechless, which just made Dib grit his teeth in annoyance.

"That isn't all!" he snapped. "Once, Wirt came by and asked if there was anything he could do to help Kipo, and I told him to get more crystals, but then he never came back! And another time, Fei Fei and I were having a conversation, and I mentioned your stupid explanation, and she suddenly didn't know what I was talking about, even though she'd heard you say it before! And...!... uh...."

Well, technically, that was it. Seemed small when Dib said it all out loud like that. He waited for Six's verdict, but with each passing second that she didn't say anything, he got more and more agitated.

"...Aren't there about a million explanations for all of those things?" Six asked, just when Dib felt he was about to snap.

"No, there isn't!" Dib snapped, just because he was stubborn and now very annoyed. "Well, maybe, but how should I now?! I don't know any of these people at all, which is all the more reason to not trust them. I can't, at least not yet, and maybe not ever. Who knows if they're real or not anyway?"

Six sighed, but she didn't argue with him, instead looking around the forest for any sign of Anne and Fei Fei.

"Yeah, yeah," she said to Dib. "Say, where are those two, anyway? They seemed to have been gone a while, haven't they?"

Dib's blood went cold.

"Oh, look." Alice's voice suddenly sounded out from the darkness, and Kipo jumped, then winced. She had been expecting something to appear, it seemed.

Kipo quickly shook that thought from her head, turning towards Alice, who was pointing at something in front of them. The house, Kipo realized. Oops, she'd forgotten to warn them.

"It's a boathouse," Kipo told them. Might as well inform them now.

"A boathouse?" Luz repeated, confused. She stretched her neck around the side of the boat. "In the middle of the lake? Is there anyway around it?"

Kipo and Luz looked back in sync, just in time to see Kris shake their head.

"Oh..." Luz said, turning back around glumly. "Into the hunted house we go then, I guess."

"it would be nice to have a light," Alice noted, speaking up for the first time in a while, and Luz suddenly brightened.

"Oh, that's right!" Luz said, digging around in her pockets for something. To Kipo's surprise, she brought out a piece of wood by the dock and a piece of paper. Luz placed the paper on the wood, and then did something with her hands. Suddenly, the space was illuminated by a small, flickering flame on top of the wood. Luz held it up proudly, like a torch, and everyone else gaped at it.

"Wh-How-I don't-?!?" Kipo spluttered, and meanwhile, Alice stared at it in wonder and awe.

"Magic," she gasped, and Luz beamed. "Luz, you're a witch!"

"Yep!" she said. "Well, kind of. In the Boiling Isle, I'm a witch in training, and here, I'm Six's apprentice, but these places use two different systems of magic, so technically, I'm two different witches in training."

"That's how it works?" Kipo asked curiously, and Luz shrugged.

"Well, no, but you know what I mean," Luz replied, and, well, no, Kipo didn't, but Alice was nodding, so Luz moved on as if they had both been nodding.

Kipo hoped she'd be able to wheedle more information out of her later, but if Luz was anything like Six's apprentice...

Kipo winced at the thought of the headache that would be.

Luz leaned forward, towards the boathouse, and raised the torch above them, illuminating the walls that quickly swallowed them whole. The four of them gazed at their surroundings as the light bounced off of them. The light wasn't that good, it didn't illuminate the entire building, but it showed enough.

They were surrounding by all sorts of knives, harpoons, traps, fishing robs, and a whole other number of things Kipo couldn't name, despite having being interested in fishing before. The boathouse was cluttered with them, so much so that they seemed to make up and whole wall, and Kipo couldn't even see whatever original wall through all of it. In fact... Kipo glanced up. Huh, they were on the ceiling, too.

"I wonder... what this place used to be used for," Alice said, speaking quietly. Nevertheless, it was way too loud.

"Fishing probably," Kipo guessed. "All kinds of fishing."

"Hey, this stuff looks kind of cool, doesn't it?" Luz leaned even closer to the wall, studying it cheerfully. Kipo winced; it looked like Luz was about to get her head cut off. "Woah, look at the knife! It's the size of the entire wall!"

Kipo chuckled, and opened her mouth to reply.

Chrrk.

Kipo suddenly froze, her ears pricking up as Luz continued prattling, pointing out other cool things on the wall, but Kipo was no longer listening. Had she imagined-

Kr-chrrrk.

No, definitely not. Now worried, Kipo swiveled her head around the building, trying to look into the corners, but Luz's light was throwing off her vision, and she could only see up close things. Like Kris, who seemed to have heard it, too, because they were sitting up straighter, looking around nervously, and so was Alice.

Kipo was starting to get worried.

Sitting up, Kipo reached for Luz's hand. "Luz, I think you should-."

Suddenly, something reached out of the darkness, and grasped Luz's other hand. Kipo froze as a pink cat mask that she would have otherwise thought of as 'cute' loomed out at them. Right now, it looked ominous.

"Ah, hello." The creature said with a pleasant, southern-accented voice that made Kipo shudder. "So, you all are the children who escaped from Hazel, aren't you? Well, ain't that just something, huh. Very impressive."

The cat tilted its head, and it almost looked like it was smiling at them. Distantly, Kipo realized the hand clutching Luz was human.

"Oh, you poor things, you probably thought you were save now, huh?" The cat said, and it almost sounded sympathetic. "You probably thought you were safe now, didn't you? Well, I'm afraid that isn't going to happen. Anyway, my name is Maggie, and I'm going to kill you now."

And with that, Maggie shoved Luz, and the torch, into the water, plunging them all into darkness.

After a couple minutes of Dib not responding, Six glanced at him, and then sighed.

"Oh, what is it now?"

"Anne's missing," Dib hissed. "What if the Imposter got her?!"

"Then she'd fight it off, I'm sure," Six answered tiredly, and if Dib wasn't panicking, he'd hear the slight amusement in her voice. "Do you want to go look for her-?"

Before Six had finished her sentence, Dib was already up, picking up the branch and taking off at a run. It wasn't like he was necessarily worried about Anne, but more so about the Imposter getting away, and Dib losing his new and sudden chance of glory. He could just imagine it now, all their faces, what they'd say, what they'd HAVE to say after they saw he was right.

Unfortunately, that didn't happen. Before Dib could even reach the trees, he ran smack dab right into Anne. The real one unfortunately.

"Oh, hey, Dib," Anne greeted pleasantly. "Grass."

Dib glared at her. "What? You were safe the entire time?! Where the heck were you?!"

"Huh? Oh, right..." Suddenly, Anne looked a little sheepish, and Fei Fei, who had come out of the trees behind her, snuck back into them, as if leaving Anne alone for this conversation. "We, uh... thought the river might be a shortcut, but it went TOO fast so we accidently overshot this place. Whoops. But we hurried back, and we're all fine!"

At the end of Anne's rant, she grinned at Dib, but Dib only looked disappointedly back at her.

"Oh... you're safe?" he asked glumly. Anne's grin suddenly fell.

"What is that supposed to mean?!"