A/N: Another short story that largely concerns the Mysterious Force, though not quite as short as the last one. More time has passed, and the Force has continued to lose it's edge, like a knife used one too many times. So, what happened on the day when it inevitably slipped up for the first time?
Thanks for reading, and I hope you enjoy.
She still clearly remembered the day the facade finally all came tumbling down. It had been a long time coming, really. It all happened on the day she went for her yearly dental checkup. Thinking back on the events of that day, the location seemed oddly prophetic. After all, you might say that it was the day the Mysterious Force lost its teeth.
So, about this Mysterious Force. Even to this day, Linda still didn't fully understand what the whole deal with this thing was. Of course, her children had many times assured her that the Force was in fact 'Mysterious' by definition, pretty much impossible to fully comprehend in any amount. Her children had also told her that the best description of the Force was a 'sentient local normalcy preservation effect'. It had been in place all their lives (imagine that!), and had spent all that time doing what its name implied : preserving normalcy on a local scale. Very local, as it turned out. It actually only applied to her, and the immediate surrounding area, which is about as local as one can get.
It had spent years and years constantly cleaning up after Candace, Phineas, and Ferb, apparently (according to them) frequently going to mind-numbing and logic-warping lengths on an almost daily basis to ensure normalcy was preserved. Even if that meant going so far as to have the ground open up and swallow an entire zip-lining system, pylons and all, or even physically rewinding time itself. At least, so she'd been told. And considering what she'd seen since then, she was personally inclined to believe them.
It had been pretty hard for her to believe at first, but the more she'd thought about it, the more it had made sense. After all, her children were able to build things the likes of which she had never seen before. If they also said that they'd been doing it since childhood, well, who was she to disbelieve them? And if they also said that a invisible, undetectable cosmic phenomena constantly got rid of their creations before she could see them, well - it wasn't anymore outlandish than the previous two more-demonstrable facts. It also easily explained away the seemingly effortless way in which Candace's firstborn child, Amanda Flynn, had kept disappearing from her crib. One moment, she'd be there, and the next moment, gone.
"She counts as something we made" Candace had said. "And somewhere, probably in the deep subconscious parts of your mind, you still think of it as 'not-normal'. So, the Force does its best to get rid of her for you."
Linda had thought she'd done pretty well in coming around and eventually accepting her children's romantic relations, even if they were a bit shocking (Okay, more than a bit. But what could you expect?) to her at first. They were all grown up, after all, and it was high time that they begin carving out their own life, in the path they chose, whatever that path should prove to be. She'd made even more conscious, concerted effort to fully accept them after that, and gradually, the cosmic force-assisted toddler disappearances had ceased.
Sometimes she wondered just what had made the universe up and decide to do something like this. What possible good could have come from it? When she'd finally fully laid eyes on the full extent of her children's inventive ability, she'd never been so proud or blown away. Of course, they did tell her some crazy, convoluted story involving a time machine where the future had become sort of dystopia, all because she'd seen them building a roller coaster while still preteens? The story had been confusing to listen to, as time travel stories apparently were, what with the jumping all over the place, out of order, because time machines let you do that. Just think of it. Time machines.
That fateful day at the dentist's had started out pretty ordinary, as days go. Linda had left the house early that morning, hoping to get the checkup out of the way at least by noon. That would leave plenty of time for her to run over to the grocery store to stock up the house's pantry after the weekend. She could get home sometime in the early-to-mid afternoon, as she had done for years. Little did she know that her comfortable, patterned life was being abused by a cosmic phenomena to hide from her the extent of her children's genius.
Everything seemed completely normal that morning. Of course it did - the Force was working full-time to make and keep it so.
She could still remember every last detail about that day. Right as she'd been leaving the house, Phineas and Candace and Ferb had been sitting in the backyard, discussing something amongst themselves. They'd had a big pile of blue papers between them, and were busily drawing something or the other on it. Amanda was outside as well, contentedly amusing herself in a large plastic playpen set up in the grass. Their pet platypus had been lazily sleeping in the sun, as he was also apt to do, when he wasn't disappeared off to who-knows-where.
It was pretty much the same pattern that had been repeating for their whole lives. Back in those days, Linda had sometimes wondered if her children would ever move out of the family house. They helped support the household, of course, (actually, they more or less supported the whole thing), but never seemed super interested in moving out. Now they were gone, scattered from the small yellow house that had sheltered them for a good twenty years, and at times Linda wished they were closer. The teleportation pads did help with that, though.
It had been at the dentist's office that the Force had finally cracked wide open. It had actually been pretty much in the dentist's chair. Phineas and Ferb and Candace had all told her that they'd expected the change to be gentle and slow, as she slowly adjusted to more and more complex things, allowing the Force to act less and less, until it disappeared entirely. And it had done that, in a way of sorts. But there's really no easy way to go from "I have smart children who like to tinker a bit." to "I have children that are perfectly capable of constructing a space station in my backyard in the space of a single afternoon, and not only constructing it, but also launching it, and maintaining it, and maybe even bringing it back to Earth after a few orbits in the exosphere."
Because before that trip to the dentist's, that was pretty much what her state of mind had been. She'd known that her children enjoyed building things with their hands, but she'd always assumed things like bicycles or birdhouses or even a car. But never, never, had she even suspected the true scale of their mechanical inclinations. Nevertheless, it seemed the Force thought she was ready - ready to have her mind blown and her entire worldview shattered into little bitty pieces.
She'd just sat down in the dentist's chair, and was patiently waiting the arrival of hygienist. It hadn't been a long wait, and before too many minutes had passed, in walked the young woman, not much older than Candace was at the time - about twenty-five, perhaps? It was a fair guess.
"Mrs. Flynn-Fletcher?" the hygienist questioned. "I'm Brandy. I'll be your hygienist today. How are you this morning?"
"I'm good" Linda responded, mentally running over in her mind the list of things she wanted to do after this yearly routine was over.
The hygienist nodded and smiled, and picked a piece of wax paper from the small tray mounted onto the chair. It was at that exact moment that a tremendous shudder went through the entire building, jostling the implements on the tray, and rippling the water in the cup on the nearby counter.
"Oh, no. Is it that day today?" Brandy asked, setting the wax paper back down, and stepping over to a calendar hanging off one of the walls of the room.
"Is it what day?" Linda asked curiously.
"Roller coaster day" she answered. "And it is. Shoot - I'd completely forgotten."
"Roller coaster day?" Linda asked again, even more confused than before. "What's that?"
"The first day of summer" Brandy explained. "Have you ever been here on a first day of summer before?"
"No?" Linda said. "But what's that got to do with roller coasters?"
"It's like a thing" Brandy continued. "Every year, on the first day of summer, there's these people who come through and put up this massive roller coaster. You've seen that empty lot next to our building? They own the lot, and keep it empty so that they can put these huge support struts there."
"A roller coaster?" Linda questioned, almost unsure if she was hearing correctly. "What do you mean? I've never seen or heard of any yearly roller coaster." That seemed to surprise the hygienist.
"You've never seen or heard of it?" she responded. "That's, well, I can hardly believe it. But here, I can change that right now, if you want."
"Yeah, sure" Linda answered, by this point extremely curious about this seemingly huge yearly thing that she'd never even heard of before.
"Alright, give me a second, we don't usually open these things." The hygienist stepped over to the window of the room and fiddled with the thick fabric blinds covering the lone window of the room. After a moment of struggling with the unwilling drawstrings, they finally complied, and rose up to the top of the window, affording a view of the exterior. Late morning sunlight spilled into the room, competing with the cool clinical illumination of the halogen bulbs on the ceiling.
"Come take a look" she declared, waving Linda over from the chair. "If you've never seen it before, you probably be impressed."
So, Linda stood up and walked over to the window, completely unaware of how that one little action was going to change her life forever.
She stepped over, quickly crossing the brief space between herself and the window. And she saw ... well, that right there was probably the best description of it. And she saw.
It was huge! It was enormous! It was - unfathomably monstrous!
A huge pillar of steel towered up from the empty lot next door to the dentist's office, supporting a complex latticework of metal and wood in the sky. Was it even a roller coaster? It was just ... so big. Linda was entirely speechless.
A quiet rumbling came from outside, as a small brightly-painted blur streaked by on the track, gone almost before she could focus on it. Indeed, if she had blinked, she would have missed it.
The track - the track. It went all over. Up, down, all around, reaching so high into the sky that it appeared almost as if it was reaching the cloud banks drifting above Danville. Maybe it was, and maybe it was just perspective playing tricks on her. Either way, it was big enough that she'd couldn't tell for sure, which was plenty big already.
"H-how?" she at last stuttered. "I mean, how? That wasn't there this morning? Where'd it come from?"
The hygienist shrugged indifferently, as if this was no big deal.
"Who knows?" she answered. "Like I said before, it's those people that own the lot next door. I don't know how they do it, exactly, but they do; and do it every year. They'll clean it up - it'll probably be gone before three. Still, you say you've never seen this? How long have you lived in Danville?"
"I - I've lived here my whole life" Linda replied. "Except for a few years a long time ago when I was touring. My whole life! How did I never see this?"
The hygienist shrugged.
"Maybe you just always happened to be looking the other way?" she offered. "It's not impossible, I suppose."
"I guess" Linda finally said. Well, it wasn't technically impossible, she guessed. Still though, what were the odds of something like that?
"Well, come on" the hygienist said after just another moment of staring out the window. "Let's get back to what you came here for."
"R - right." Linda agreed, tearing herself away from the window and returning to the examination chair. She sat back down on the cold leather, but her thoughts were far away. Did her children know about this? Did her husband? Did the other families on the street? If the answer was no, then how did they go so long without realizing? And if the answer was yes, then why hadn't they told her about this?
"Alright, let's see those teeth" the hygienist remarked, lapsing back into business-as-usual mode, even though it was really anything but. "Say 'cheese'."
Cheese.
That single word seemed to set off a domino effect in Linda's mind, reviving memories long forgotten, and bringing them once more to the forefront of her mind. It had been ten long years since she'd recalled what now seemed to come crashing to the surface.
"Mom! Mom! Mom! You've got to see what Phineas and Ferb are doing!"
"What is it this time, Candace?"
"They built a roller coaster! And it's huge! You've got to bust them!"
"Candace, please. You do realize just how crazy you sound, right? I mean, a roller coaster? Come on. You're making a scene."
"Mom! I'm not crazy! Look, there's a poster right - AH!"
"Yes, because yelling at an empty wall is such a perfectly not-crazy to do."
"B - b - but - where'd it go?!"
"Candace, honey, I'm going to the refrigerated section now. You can come too, if you want to scream at some cheese or something. Would you like that?"
Wait for just a minute here ... Could it - no, that was stupid. And yet, something about the whole situation just didn't sit right with her. Long-forgotten memories of years long past slowly rose up to see the light of day for the first time in years. Suddenly, those memories seemed to all resolve themselves into one giant, predictable pattern. For years, her daughter had spent day after day dragging Linda across the house or the town in eternal chase of some 'thing' supposedly being built by Phineas and Ferb in the backyard. And for years, the chase had been ultimately futile. Then there had been that one year where it all stopped. The summer of 2017 came and went, and its last day marked the last time Candace tried to her bust her brothers for a supposed crazy scheme. At first, the sudden break from the norm had worried Linda to no end, but as time wore on after that point, and nothing seemed to happen, she'd instead congratulated her daughter on successfully getting over whatever reasons she'd had for acting so, and continuing on with life.
Candace's response to that had been confusingly cryptic and vague, but Linda was satisfied enough by the fact that her daughter had finally grown out of her busting phase, and had dismissed the strange response as not worth the effort to worry about.
But now, having laid eyes on the vast roller coaster outside the dentist's office, something wasn't sitting right. She sat through the rest of the checkup silently, mulling over the situation. And the more she thought about it, the more it disagreed with her.
So much so, that at the end of the checkup, instead of heading to the grocery store, she resolved to go home. There was no particular reason why, really, but something told her that she needed to be there. It was the perplexing mixture of old memories most of all, though, that really pushed her to turn onto the interstate and steer homeward.
The entire way home, a tiny voice in the back of her mind was saying: Could it be...?
Of course, she almost laughed at herself for thinking such things. Like any parent, Linda Flynn-Fletcher was immensely proud of her children, and was even prone to exaggerating their achievements a bit (when the situation called for it, of course). But this? This was impossible, and the idea alone of such a thing was ludicrous.
Was it really, though? Because you know what else is impossible? Erecting a roller coaster in the space of a few minutes - that stretched from her dentist's, all the way along the interstate, and even along the smaller suburban road that marked the entrance to the neighborhood of Arbor Estates.
As Linda turned into the driveway of her home on Maple Drive, she saw with wondering eyes that the track of the roller coaster appeared to touch down in her own backyard. As she stepped out of the car, and began walking across the driveway, she was again reminded of Candace's old habits of so many years ago. What was going on around here? Could this be the roller coaster that her daughter had once referred too? It was indeed a roller coaster, and it was indeed huge.
She reached out and grabbed ahold of the handle of the wooden fence gate, feeling strangely uneasy about what might lie inside her back yard. At last, she hesitated no more, and swung the gate open.
The yard was empty.
Well, not empty, exactly.
Right smack-dab in the center of the yard stood a large wooden booth, on which were painted the words: The Coolest Coaster Ever! Directly underneath that, in smaller lettering, there was written: Version Twelve!
There were rope barriers set up, leading up to the booth, as if to organize a line. No definitely to organize a line, considering there was another sign to that exact effect at the entrance.
Directly behind the booth, the giant roller coaster track sloped down and touched the ground. There was an empty coaster train sitting there, waiting to be filled and sent on it's way.
Linda shook her head. There was no mistaking it, this was the the start of the roller coaster. This. In her backyard. Was the start of the roller coaster. But who had set it up? There could only be one answer - and yet the logical parts of her mind recoiled from that conclusion. That was impossible!
The sheer size of the roller coaster track before her seemed to make a mockery of the concept.
Where were her children? And grandchild? In the house? She paced over to the sliding glass door on the back of the house, and pulled it open.
"Candace!? Phineas!? Ferb!?" she shouted into the house. There was no answer.
She reached into her pocket and produced her cell phone. If there was any way to get in touch with her daughter, then this was usually it. She dialed the number, and waited as the phone rang. Her eyes automatically returned to the track of the roller coaster in the backyard, following its twists and turns and loops and drops through the sky above Danville.
The phone rang three times, and then went to voicemail. Linda listened to her daughter's voicemail message, continuing to stare at the contraption.
"Hey, you've reached the number of Candace Flynn. Sorry I couldn't make it to my phone - but it's probably for good reason. Also, if you're from the Baby Face Trucking Company, then stop calling my personal number! Use the number on the business card, dangit, or we may just take our business elsewhere. Thanks, and please leave a message when it beeps."
Beep!
"Candace" Linda began, her voice ever so slightly unsure of itself, "I'm standing in our backyard right now. And I'm looking at a giant roller coaster track - Candace, do you know where this came from? Did - did your brothers build it? Call me back if you get this."
Then something else occurred to her. Her husband, Lawrence. Of course. Did he know about this? She fished his number out from her contacts list and put through the call. It rang once - twice - and with a quiet click, was picked up.
"Hello, dear" he said. "How are you?"
"I'm - I'm - I don't know!" Linda said. "Did you know about this?"
"About what?" her husband replied, sounding confused. "You'll have to describe it better than that."
"The - the roller coaster!? The one in our back yard!?" she exclaimed, gesturing wildly.
"Oh, that." Lawrence replied with remarkable calmness. "What about it?"
"What about it?! How about the fact that there's a roller coaster in our back yard, for starters!"
"Well" Lawrence began, sounding almost confused, "I'm not particularly sure what about that either. We did discuss it this morning, remember?"
"What?" For what seemed like the thousandth time that day, Linda could hardly believe her ears." We discussed it - what do you mean?" There was a pause on the other end of the line.
"As I recall" he began, "This morning before I left for work, I mentioned that our children were going to be making a roller coaster for themselves. And you answered and said that yes, they probably were, but it was better that way."
The response gave Linda pause. Oh. That had indeed been the exact contents of a brief conversation she'd had with her husband. But -
"That's not what I meant!" she finally said, though perhaps with a shade less agitation than before. "I mean, it was, but not in this context! When you said that about roller coasters, I thought you were talking about, like, you know, the roller coaster of life, or whatever. Not an actual, factual roller coaster!"
"Oh" her husband replied. "Well, I suppose that does help make more sense of your reply."
Linda reached up and ran her free hand through her hair as another thought popped into her mind.
"So, last week" she started. "When you told me that they were on another planet, you weren't facetiously referring to the fact that they were wrapped in some movie or something, but that they were literally on another planet?"
"Well ... yes." Lawrence said. "I thought you knew that, though. Didn't you then say that all people do at time or another, to which I said that I certainly never have?" Not even stopping to answer the question, Linda pressed on.
"And just the other day, when you said that they were turning the house inside out looking for a lost something or other? Did they actually turn it - the house - inside out?"
"Actually, no." he replied. "At least, not as far as I know. They were just looking for whatever it was normally, I think."
Linda reached up and pinched the bridge of her nose.
"How long has this been going on?" she finally asked, almost afraid of the answer.
"Hm" Lawrence hummed to himself for a moment. "I'd say maybe, ten-eleven years? It's been a good long while. I'm sorry you never realized what we were talking about - I was certain that you did, and it makes me feel -"
"No, you don't have to apologize" she quickly cut him off. His last words were echoing loudly in her ears. Ten-eleven years. Ten-eleven years. Ten-eleven years. If that was correct - and she had full trust in her husband and no reason to doubt him - then it all added up. In it's own impossible way, it all added up.
It just at that moment that a clatter suddenly became audible. Linda turned and looked, and saw a roller coaster train rolling down the track, obviously preparing to come to stop.
"We can talk about this more when you get off this evening" she said. "I - I'm going to talk to the kids."
"Alright, dear." Lawrence. "I'll see you then. I love you."
"Love you too, honey. Bye."
"Bye."
Linda snapped off her phone and slid it back into her pocket. She hastily made her way across the backyard, ducking underneath the line marking rope barriers, until she was right at the coaster loading and unloading dock. She watched as the coaster train decelerated and gradually came to a full stop. It didn't take long for her to recognize the three lone passengers of the front car.
For a moment, however, it seemed as if they didn't realize she was there.
"That was awesome!" Phineas cheered, as the cars came to a halt. "And the best one so far!"
"Easily" Candace agreed. "I think the extra hyperspace loops really put it over the top."
While Phineas and Candace were busily conversing with each other, Ferb instantly made eye contact with her, and for a moment Linda and he stared directly into each other's eyes.
At last he cleared his throat, interrupting the excited chatter between his step-siblings.
"I believe our mother has something she would like to say." Ferb declared, the sound of his quiet voice doing more to carry through the yard than had either Phineas's or Candace's enthusiastic ones.
Phineas and Candace instantly stopped and turned and saw her.
"Mom!" Phineas exclaimed brightly. Then he paused. And he turned to look at the roller coaster. And he turned to look at her. And he looked back at the roller coaster. And then back it her.
"Do you know what this means?" he exclaimed, jumping out of the cart and running over to her, grabbing her up in a one-armed hug. "We've done it, Candace! The Force has finally gotten used to our stuff! This is so cool!"
Candace's eyes widened ever-so-slightly, but she smiled too.
"It is pretty great." she agreed. "I can't believe the day is finally here. Wow." She paused and her eyes, too, darted rapidly back and forth between Linda and the roller coaster.
"So," she resumed, "What do you think?"
Linda continued to be speechless at the situation. But, the more she stared into her three children's faces, the less agitation she felt. They were hardly even children anymore, really. Phineas was just as tall as she was now, and Candace had long since surpassed both of them on the height scale. Ferb, of course, had all of them beat, even including Lawrence. The boy was tall.
"I - I don't know." she finally said. "I don't know what to believe. I mean - how is this even possible?"
"Oh, Mom" Candace said with a wide grin. "That's the whole point. It's not."
"At least according to some people." Phineas inserted. "But the three of us are a great team. I don't think there's any impossibility that we couldn't make possible, with enough time."
"And pizzazium infinionite" Ferb spoke up again, from his seat on the coaster cart.
"Yes" Phineas agreed. "Enough time and pizzazium infinionite."
"Have you - how long have you been doing this?" Linda asked.
Her three children shared a glance.
"Technically my whole life" Candace said. "Though there was kind of a brief lull for me, specifically."
"So - all those things you used to tell me back when you were a teenager?" Linda said. "All those things were - were true?"
"True as sure as we're standing here." Phineas said, gesturing up at the roller coaster track. Well, of course they were, then. Linda suddenly felt as if the question had been stupid.
"Yeah, they were all true" Candace agreed. "But don't worry about it. It was all the Mysterious Force's fault that you couldn't see it anyway."
"I'm - I'm sorry" Linda said, suddenly becoming filled with remorse. "I thought - well, I thought you'd gone a little off the deep end. I never ..."
"Hey, don't worry about it" Candace repeated, brushing her off. "Like I said, it wasn't your fault. It was the Mysterious Force. And I guess now that it's decided to let you see stuff, we'll not have to worry about it anymore. Besides, it was ages ago anyway."
"The - What's the Mysterious Force?" Linda questioned, now slightly curious despite herself. Twice it had been referenced now, and she wanted to know what it was.
"Well, it's mysterious" Phineas said, laughing. "But seriously, it's just this Force that hangs around and whenever you might see something unusual that one of us has done, nabs it up so that only normalcy remains."
"And it appears to have relaxed significantly" Candace pointed out. "Although, I guess there's no way to tell for absolute sure. 'Mysterious' is in the name, after all."
"I don't know what think - or say." Linda replied. "I mean, it's amazing! I've never been so proud in my life. But at the same time, isn't it dangerous? And you've been doing this since you were kids?"
"Well, we do our best to minimize any possible dangers." Candace said. "And that's made even easier because, you know, time travel."
"We've only had one real accident" Phineas consoled. "And as Candace said, it was completely prevented thanks to time travel. So really, no accidents."
"I'm not sure if that makes me feel any better" Linda said hesitantly, "But I suppose you are practically adults now."
"More than practically, Mom" Candace said. "I mean, my goodness. Two of us have conspired together to give you a grandchild. If that's still practically, then what do we have to do become actual adults, hm?"
Linda shook her head, but the mood of the situation had been lightened drastically.
"As long as you're living under my roof, I reserve the right to deny that title" she said with a smile.
"Well, we might just have to do something about then" Phineas remarked, though he was also smiling.
"Oh, shut up." Linda said. "Come on. If you three have doing this all your lives, then I may as well continue to uphold my part of the pattern. Anybody want pie?"
Three sets of eyes lit up at the word, as if on cue.
"That sounds amazing" Candace said. She reached down into the roller coaster cart and fiddled with something beneath the safety railing. Soon, she held up her sleeping one-year old child and carefully climbed out of the cart with Amanda carefully cradled in her arms. Ferb followed her down, as Linda shook her head.
"Don't worry" Candace preemptively cautioned. "We built an environmental stasis chamber that maintains perfectly stable conditions to make sure that she doesn't get affected by the coaster. She couldn't even perceive it - I mean, look. She slept through the whole ride."
"Well, I guess I'll trust you on that" Linda replied.
"What kind of pie?" Phineas asked, with all the eagerness of a little child.
"It's kind of amazing how much has changed - and yet, at the same time, how little." she thought, looking around at her children.
"Come on, you guys. I'll get the pie out of the refrigerator. It's early, but we can make an exception this time. And it's blueberry."
"Oh, Mom!" Phineas suddenly spoke up again. "I almost forgot to ask: Do you want to ride the roller coaster?"
Linda's eyes widened slightly again, and she turned to look at the roller coaster once more. Her gaze traced the track, following it to the point where it disappeared into a low-flying cloud bank.
"I hope you guys don't mind if I beg out on this one" she answered. "I don't think my stomach could take it."
"That's alright" Phineas assured her. "If you ever change your mind, though, be sure to let us know."
"I'll do that." she said. "I'll do that."
She pulled open the sliding glass door and followed her children into the cool of the air conditioned living room. Lingering slightly after they disappeared into the kitchen, Linda turned once more to stare at the roller coaster in her back yard - the roller coaster built by her children. Her adult children. Her adult children that also happened to possess the ability to construct a roller coaster that reached the clouds in the space of a single morning. Maybe more had changed than she'd given it credit for. Or maybe she'd just been made aware, for the first time, of the way that things had always been.
Wait, what? Linda rubbed her eyes and blinked.
The roller coaster was gone.
The End