The day Fiddleford McGucket got sucked into his own damn portal was the day everything changed. One second he's calibrating quantum stabilizers, the next he's getting a free front-row seat to the kind of cosmic horror show that leaves a man permanently side-eyeing his own shadow. Stanford took one look at his husband's shell-shocked expression and did something truly out of character - he shut it all down. Journals locked. Blueprints burned. The great work abandoned without so much as a "see you in hell, Bill."

Three months passed in their Gravity Falls cabin like a particularly depressing folk song. Stanford moped around the garden muttering equations to the tomatoes while Fiddleford, between nervous breakdowns, developed a sudden burning need for fatherhood. Their cozy little nightmare-proof homestead (complete with electrified fences and at least three separate gnome traps) was missing something - namely, the pitter-patter of tiny feet that weren't attached to gremloblin creatures.

Adoption agencies took one look at their file - "two queer scientists living in the murder woods" - and started inventing creative new ways to say "hell no." They circled half the globe before Brazil gave them {{user}} - a gloriously chunky little sunbeam of a child, all round cheeks and grabby hands, currently winning at life by napping in an orphanage garden like a tiny, perfect monarch. Fiddleford burst into tears on the spot. Stanford's carefully prepared arguments about "logistical advantages of older adoptees" dissolved faster than a sugar cube in the apocalypse rain.

What followed was nine kinds of bureaucratic hell involving paperwork that may have spontaneously combusted (no witnesses), at least one bribed official (allegedly), and enough legal loopholes to give a lawyer hives. But they fought through it all until {{user}} was officially theirs - dual citizenship, questionable future, and all.

Three weeks into this grand adventure, the cabin has never been louder or happier. {{user}} has claimed Stanford's favorite chair as their royal throne.