More about Backroom Falls AU:
After a long, long while of being stuck together in the backrooms, Stan and Ford finally find an exit when they’re about late 40s, and mind you Stan had been there since mid 20s and ford had been there since his early 40s, so they’ve been there a really long time. They get out, relationship healed through talking and ✨trauma bonding✨ and move back into Ford’s shack together.
After they get back, Ford submitted his findings (without mentioning the backrooms to the government) and patents all the new technology he’d built over the years. They’re both set for life, and Ford isn’t living off government grants anymore. They remodel the shack, getting rid of everything even slightly Bill or backrooms related, and keep everything they know (except what they gave to the scientific community) a deeply kept secret.
They don’t exactly make the mystery shack, but I do like to think they give ‘educational’ experiences about the backrooms and Ford’s research (without Bill, of course) in a somewhat similar way, just less tacky. It’s called ‘The Museum of the Weird and Paranormal’ and Ford is adamant about everything being accurate, as to not be a mockery of his life’s work or the trauma he and Stan went through. Stan was the one that pushed Ford to make allow the addition of the backrooms exhibits. It’s all done so nobody believes it’s real, and so if people do wind up there, they know at least the basics and have a better chance of surviving.
Stan designed pretty much everything and does the art, but Ford was the one able to engineer it all and bring it all to life.
Gravity falls is not only a weak spot in the viel between the real world and nightmare dimension, but also a thin spot in the veil between the backrooms and the real world. People clip right out of reality and right back. Gravity falls residents are used to it, and most are pretty good at avoiding it. Old man McGucket never manages to catch a break from clipping in and out of reality, though.
As for the kids-
Dipper’s big mystery that saves his boring summer from his job at his uncle’s weirdness museum? A journal he found under the floorboards in his uncles’ shared office. It talks about a place called the backrooms, and has a bunch of the entities from the museum (that Dipper is convinced are fake) and so at first he writes it off as just another piece of fake information from the museum. Until later that night he sees something with his face in the woods and has to run for his life. He spills everything to Mabel immediately, and she thinks he’s being a goofball and doesn’t entirely believe him until he shows her the journal and she sees how genuinely rattled he is. Dipper is obsessed just like in cannon, trying to find the author and memorizes every single story, entry, and entity analysis, even if they aren’t packed with fancy science words.
Mabel is supper into the museum, and helps make displays and hosts events with Stanley, who is of course the faceman of the museum. They’re really close, and she still loves her glitter and scrapbooks and is so, so kind. She comes up with fictional ways to befriend every entity, and Stan likes to humor her most of the time, though he tells her they’d attack her before she got the chance if they were real. She’s way more involved in Dipper’s mystery hunt, though she still adores her friends and summer romances.
The show plays out pretty similarly to cannon, but the show finale is actually Mabel finding the backrooms entrance and the whole family getting stuck. Bill does come back and torment the family, trying to gain knowledge and access to the backrooms and the real world to take over. He’s the one that kind of guides Mabel to the entrance without her realizing it, and her entering causes the rest of the family to no-clip into the backrooms. (Maybe the whole town- but I’ll get to that in another post)