A/N: Just a very short story revolving around the Mysterious Force, because who doesn't like a good status quo maintaining cryptic cosmic phenomenon? The Force is notoriously slippery and difficult to pin down, but it's nonetheless fun to write about. Plus, if you ever need something inexplicable to happen in a story, then Mysterious Force! Because, why not?

Takes place sometime between Chapter 17 and the Epilogue of my previous story, which is why a few things (about Candace, specifically) may seem slightly different.

"Okay" Candace said, "So you can mark that one off." She wiped her forehead and took a quick drink from the water bottle in her hand. The hot summer sun beat down overhead, and the slight breeze didn't do much to help the oppressive heat baking in the air.

"Hm" Phineas replied, scribbling on a clipboard. "So, a new car, even with only today's technologies, is still enough to activate it." He looked up for second. "Alright, it's time for the next one. An old car, from several years ago. Then it's onto brand-new bicycle. Ferb, you finished building it yet?"

Ferb gave a thumbs-up, and pressed a red button on a remote in his hand. Machinery whirled into action, and the garage door slid up, revealing a rusty old clunker sitting inside.

"And have you made any progress figuring out where they go?" Candace asked. Phineas shook his head.

"It seems that we aren't meant to know." he said. "Normally, all kinds of strange coincidences carries the stuff off, but if we put any sort of a tracking device on it, then it's always a beam from the sky, which completely vaporizes it."

"So what happened to the new car?" she asked.

"Beam" Phineas replied. "Turned it into bread, then a swarm of birds flew down an ate it."

"Well, okay." she said. Reaching into her pocket, she pulled out her phone, and pressed the 'Redial' button.

"Hey, Mom." she said into the phone. "You in position again?"

"I am" came the answer over the line. "Though this is getting very monotonous, I've gotta say." Candace smiled and shook her head.

"I know" she said. "I know. But don't worry. We're already halfway through the list. It won't be much longer now."

"It's alright" her mother assured her. "I just had thought you'd grown out of these crazy stories back when you were fifteen. Why the sudden relapse now?"

"It's what we wanted to do today" Candace repeated. "Trying to nail down the Force. It was Phineas's idea. Just, hang on for a bit longer, okay?"

"I can handle it" she answered. "I suppose that if my three practically adult children are telling me that there's something there, then I should give them the benefit of the doubt."

"Alright, Mom. I'll be there to get you in a few seconds."

"See you then."

Candace hung up and slid the phone back into her pocket.

"Alright!" she announced. "I'm ready to go. Let's get this done."

"Sounds good." Phineas said. He sat the clipboard down the plastic table sitting in front of him and pressed a button on the small recorder resting there.

"Test run number thirty-three" he said. "Old car." He looked up and gave Candace a thumbs-up.

That was her cue. Turning, she swung open the wooden gate and began the short jog down to the end of the road, where her mother was waiting, leaning against the stop sign on the intersection.

"Hey Mom" she said. "Alright, you've got to see what Phineas and Ferb and I are doing!"

Linda Flynn-Fletcher smiled and shook her head.

"Lead the way." she replied.

Candace turned and the two of them began walking back. She kept eye on the sky, trying to see if any stray magnetic helicopters or flocks of birds or alien saucers were waiting behind the clouds to strike. Hm. Nothing. Well, the Mysterious Force was nothing if not unpredictable, so that meant almost less than nothing.

Sure enough, upon rounding the corner, the backyard was noticeably missing any sign of the rusty old car that her brothers had built so recently.

"Okay" Linda said. "Once again, I see nothing. Is that bad?"

"No, don't worry" Candace said. "Eventually we'll get it."

Her mother sighed slightly.

"Guess I should go back to the end of the street?" she said.

"That'd be great." Candace replied. "And thanks again for all this help."

"Mm hmm" Linda said, turning around and disappearing down the sidewalk.

"Alright, Phineas" she said, turning to face her brother. "There's another one down."

"Yup." he replied, scribbling intently on his clipboard. Looking up, he flashed her a smile. "So the old car was still too abnormal. Time for the new bike. Ferb?"

Ferb flipped up his welders mask, and whiffed away a white cloth to reveal a brand new bicycle that'd he just finished.

"Perfect" Candace said. "And how did the old car disappear?"

"We tried tracking it again" Phineas answered. "We used your suggestion of a laser guided relay system too, as well as using a camera to film it."

"And?" Candace said, interested.

"Nothing" Phineas responded with a shrug of his shoulders. "A beam - it was orange this time - came down vaporized the car. It refracted off the ground and got the relay system and the camera too."

"My relay system!" Candace lamented. "That took me all morning to build. Well, that sucks. Were you able to track the beam's trajectory at least?"

"No" Phineas said. "Well, sort of. It seems to a similar pattern: the beams come from outer space, so we trace the trajectory and find that it was reflected from a satellite dish, which seems to happen an awful lot, so the original source is lost."

"Well, let's keep at it." Candace replied. "I had no idea the Force was this sensitive."

"Test thirty-four" Phineas said in his recorder. "New bicycle." He flashed a thumbs up, and Candace turned and once again began the short trek down to the end of the street.

This long string of tests wasn't turning out to be nearly as interesting as she'd thought it might on this morning when Phineas had announced: "Candace, Ferb, I know what we're gonna do today!"

But screw the monotony! It had been almost seven years since Candace had suddenly ceased attempting to bust her brothers, and the Mysterious Force had still intervened, day after day, summer after winter, year after year, to remove her and her brother's inventions before Linda could lay eyes on them. It even took the liberty to freaking get rid of things that it deemed 'abnormal', which had led to a host of problems. When Candace had finally gotten her drivers license, for instance, the Force had deemed it worthy of removal when she attempted to show it to her mother, which had not been fun - and had a direct influence on just why her younger brothers had managed to get ahold of their licenses before the Force had let her keep hers. That hadn't as huge a deal as it might sound: for the most part she could easily get around the lack of a license with the old 'remote control' trick.

But still, she couldn't go through the rest of her life at the mercy of the Force. If it was going to be around forever, and if reasons how it worked were destined to never be found, then she at least wanted the reasons why. Then at least she would know what not to do, to avoid triggering the Force.

You would think that with all the physics-warping technology readily accessible to Candace and her brothers, this sort of determination would be easily fulfilled. But no, the Force would never make it that easy. There had been an attempt to use a Quantum Dilator to slow the passage of time to make the Force's actions easier to observe, only for them to discover that the Force could function uninhibited by the limitations of physical time. Even straight-up time travel had proved unsuccessful in predicting the actions of the wily cosmic phenomena. It seemed as if it existed outside of causality in general, which certainly didn't help their cause.

So it had boiled down to this: making a lengthy series of projects in the order of ever-decreasing abnormality. The list was long, having started with a roller coaster to the moon (which was cool, by the way) and gradually spiraling down and down the scale of complexity from rocket ships to regular ships to to cars to the bicycle that was being tested currently.

The Force was only a small piece of all the things that Candace's life uniquely her own, and even she had come to admit that, yes, it could be a convenient way to get rid of things you didn't want anymore. (Not actual trash, of course. The Force would never activate for something like that. Instead, it would get rid of things like the quantum tunnel launchers that Candace and Phineas and Ferb had built yesterday.)

Still, though the Force had its moments of usefulness, it was more of annoyance than anything. But, like all longstanding annoyances, it had pretty much faded into the background for her, taking up it's place beside her lactose intolerance and allergy to parsnips as 'just a thing' that she'd have to deal with for the rest of her life. No point in agonizing over things you couldn't change anyway, right? That was what Phineas said anyway. Candace agreed in principle, although sometimes found herself unable to act accordingly. Still, she'd not ever really thought of actually trying to examine the Force through the lens of the highly advanced and often reality-warping science that she and her brothers had been doing for years.

Up until this morning, however, when Phineas had brought it up in conversation, sparking the big idea that they were in the midst of even now.

It now occurred to Candace that they were more or less treating the Force like some great cosmic target, just randomly hurling stuff at it to see what stuck. But with all the more advanced ways of observing it having broken down, this was all that was left. Well, it was certainly straight to the point, even if it did require an awful lot of walking. One of those quantum tunnel launchers from yesterday would be quite nice right about now.

"Hey, Mom" Candace said. "Hello again. You've got to come see what Phineas and Ferb and I are doing."

"Alright" Linda Flynn-Fletcher replied, stretching and standing up straight. "Let's go see it. What is it this time?"

"A bike" Candace said matter-of-factly. "Not nearly as impressive as the rocket ship or even the actual ship, but it's something we built. Now the question is merely if the Force will let you see it."

"Yes. The force. Well, lead on."

Candace could tell by the tone of her mother's reply that she was skeptical. Well, unlike Buford's skepticism (seriously, how could that man still not believe in spaceships!?) her mother's was at least well-deserved. After all, that was what the Force was all about. Keeping the air of normalcy permanently undisturbed, at least from Linda's point of view.

She led the way up the driveway towards the backyard. Swinging open the small fence gate, she waited patiently for her mother's reaction.

"Hmm" Linda said. "Well, what do you know? There's a bike here after all. It looks pretty nice too. I didn't know you guys had an interest in building things."

Candace pumped her fist in the air.

"Yes!" she exclaimed. "Finally!" They'd discovered the lower boundary of the Force after no less than a hour and half of trial and error. Was there a higher boundary? Well, she hadn't seen one yet. But they did generally live by the goal to make each day better than the past, so maybe one day.

"Awesome!" Phineas cheered, smiling broadly. He made a few notes on his clipboard and turned to Candace.

"So" he began, "It ignored the bicycle. I'd take that to mean that anything of equal or less abnormality to this bike will be left alone. So it would probably ignore, say, a normal toilet, but not that Automatic Toilet Waste Disposal Beam we built last week."

"I hated that thing anyway" Candace replied. "It was good idea, but it felt so violating to use."

"I mean, it was using a swarm of nanobots to physically enter the colon and vaporize solid body waste. So it kinda makes sense that felt that way. But I agree, it was a definite turn-off for me too."

"Okay, that just sounds disgusting" Linda cut in to say. "But I've seen the bike, so is there anything else you'll need me for? I still do have some errands I'd like to run and chores I'd like to do before tomorrow."

"Well, it was supposed to help decrease the amount of time you waste in the bathroom; which it did, by an average of nearly ninety-seven percent." Candace explained. Her mother shook her head and raised one hand, clearly indicating that she wanted no more explanation.

"No, we're good, Mom" Phineas said. "Thanks for all your help. We can handle the rest from here."

"Okay then" Linda said with a smile "Well, I guess I'll let you three get to whatever it is you've been doing out here for all these years." She turned and disappeared into the house through the sliding glass door.

"So how about that, hm?" Candace said once they were alone. "There's a lower limit to the Force's sensitivity. And it's a bike!"

Ferb turned to her with a highly expressive look. I wonder if the limit is determined situationally, or if it's static.

"That's true" she returned. "Well, when Phineas and I got that house, Mom could see it no problem. And that was way bigger than a bike."

"But" Phineas said, finishing the thought, "In that situation, it was perfectly normal for her to see a house. After all, when she hears about a house, she probably pictures a normal house, and that house was pretty normal at first."

"So the Force is more like a highly sensitive independent weirdness sensor." Candace mused.

"That's what it seems like" Phineas continued. "And it fits the evidence. Think about it. The Force took away the moon roller coaster because it's pretty weird for three people to build something like that. But three people putting together a bicycle? That's nowhere near as unusual."

"And that explains why at first it kept taking my driver's license" she said. "At first, it was pretty weird. I mean, I struggled with driving for ages, so it was quite strange for me to have finally gotten one. But after a while, Mom saw that I'd improved my driving, and the idea that I might have gotten a license wasn't so weird. And voila! the Force let me keep the license."

She paused for a moment to think about the possible implications of such a thing, if it were indeed as true as it seemed to be.

"Well" Phineas said after a moment of silence, "If this is true, then at some point in the future it should start letting her see our inventions. After all, if we carry forwards with our current plans for the future, eventually our inventions should become commonplace. And when that happens, they'll no longer be weird, and then the Force should begin letting her see them."

"That's true" Candace agreed. "And the more I think about, the more it makes sense. I mean - you guys remember our very second time traveling trip? I was able show twenty years older Mom the time machine then, without the Force intervening at all. Which must mean that in twenty years or so, that sort of stuff must be considered 'ordinary'. Ordinary enough for the Force, at least."

"That was an alternate future" Phineas warned. "A lot's changed since that trip, so I don't know if I'd base much confidence on that one."

"But it's still a good example." she insisted. "And I don't see much reason for that particular facet of the future have changed. It's really only been me that changed a lot since then anyway."

"And the fact that spoons - I'm sorry, scoops, were just reinvented last year by that fellow in Germany doesn't seem to indicate any other changes?"

"Okay" Candace admitted, "So there was more than just me. But still, scoops and capris and oranges and toothpicks and turkey basters and elastic suspenders and tigers and ... " She paused and laughed for a moment. "So it has changed a lot, I guess" she relented. "Still."

Phineas smiled.

"I'm just messing with you." he said. "Don't worry. The Force'll mellow with time, I'm sure. Everything does. As the general level of technology of the world increases, and more and more advanced stuff becomes normalized, it'll start letting her see more and more. At least, in theory. It kinda seems like science ... doesn't really apply to the Force like you would expect."

"Which is pretty much what I said." she echoed. "Though in significantly fewer words."

"The more the merrier, I always say" Phineas said. "Works with both people and words."

Candace smiled. Well, this had been enlightening, at least to a small degree. And it did offer some prospect of relief in the future. Although she'd pretty grown accustomed to the Force's constant hijinks, the idea was by no means repulsive.

"And until that time" Phineas continued, "I suppose that the best way to prepare for possible actions of the Force is to simply be warned that it'll likely get rid of anything more abnormal than a bicycle - if Mom should happen to see it."

"Which is basically what I've been doing for my entire life" Candace replied. "It's just habit by now, really."

The sliding glass door on the back of the house slid open and Linda Flynn-Fletcher leaned out of the doorway.

"Are my children too old to still want some pie?" she asked. "It just came out of the oven."

"Now, Mom" Phineas said, "You know that no matter how old we get, your pie is always good - for me at least. Though I think everyone else would agree with me on that."

Candace nodded. That was indeed true.

Linda smiled a strangely sad-looking smile for a moment.

"I still can't believe how much time has passed" she said. "Oh, you all get in here then. Don't let the pie get cold."

Candace followed her brothers from the backyard into the house, already able to smell the scent of the pie drifting through the air. She paused for just one moment to cast a glance on the backyard that been host to so many childhood adventures - and a few more recent ones.

The bicycle was gone.

The End