Meanwhile, in Phineas and Ferb's room, Perry was indeed off sulking. He was getting seriously annoyed with the way Candace treated him. She regarded him as 'smelly' and 'bland', shut him out of the house once (and only because he accidentally tripped her!), and now she interrupted one of his only free moments with the boys.
However, speaking of free moments, his were almost up. He checked his wristwatch and saw that it was a few minutes before the scheduled mission call- but today he was feeling impatient. Without waiting for the watch to beep, signaling his need to get down to the lair, he crept up onto Ferb's bed surreptitiously and pulled a book off of his shelf. The book shelf opened up and the bed slid out into the center of the room, revealing a chute behind the bed- and a few fallen books, which Perry set back on the shelves hurriedly before jumping into the lair entrance. Behind him, the bed-entrance sealed itself up immediately. For a moment, all was still- and then a book fell off the shelf.
A few minutes later in the lair, Perry had just arrived via slide- a very squeaky slide. As he took his seat in front of the telescreen, Perry wondered when the slide waxing guy was going to return from vacation- if he ever did at all. That guy had been gone as long as Perry had been in the Agency, it seemed. Just then, Perry's watch beeped loudly, and Major Monogram's face appeared on the face of the watch, looking serious as usual.
"Agent P, it's time to report to the- oh," he stopped when he noticed that Perry was already in the lair. "You're already there…uh, just a second. Carl!"
"Hold on, sir," called Carl's high, nasally voice from off-screen. Perry waited for a moment, in which there sounded several beeping noises from the watch. Then, the image transferred from the watch screen to the telescreen, signaling that Monogram was ready to give him his mission. Perry saluted crisply and turned the watch off.
"Good morning, Agent P," said Monogram, shuffling through a few papers as he spoke. "Okay, here's the scoop on Doofenshmirtz. He's going to an evil mixer today, and we think he's going to bring his newest invention with him. We need you to infiltrate that party and get some information on what's going on. Good luck, Agent P."
Perry nodded and dashed out of the chair, headed for his hovercraft. However, he stopped in his tracks halfway there and frowned. A flying, platypus-shaped car wasn't exactly low key. He would need something more…surreptitious.
And after a few minutes of thought, he found just the thing.
Back in the backyard, Phineas and Ferb were hard at work on Ferb's laptop.
"All right, I think we're done," Phineas announced in satisfaction. "This questionnaire should help us find out why Candace is so stressed out today. It addresses all the preconceived issues, and by the style of her handwriting, we can analyze just how stressed out she is. Then we can figure out how to calm her down again!"
Ferb responded by pressing a button on the computer which began to shake for a moment. Then the questionnaire was fed out of a printer at the bottom of the keyboard. Ferb picked it up, checked to see whether it had printed right, and gave the thumbs up.
"Excellent!" said Phineas happily. "All we have to do is give it to Candace."
If only he knew just how hard that would be.
A few moments later, he and Ferb had gone up to Candace's room, whose door was ajar just a crack. Inside, Candace could be seen on her bed, looking through a scrapbook with pictures of Jeremy in it. However, it didn't seem to be cheering her up. She still looked rather distressed, and was muttering to herself angrily.
"Not even two o' clock, and my activity for the day is over," she muttered. "When will they learn to do normal things, like playing in the mud, or doing video games, or-"
"Making stress questionnaires?"
Candace perked up at the sound of Phineas' voice, then glared at them from where they stood in the doorway, Phineas looking happy as always and Ferb holding a sheet of paper.
"What are you doing in my room?" she shouted. Phineas didn't even flinch.
"Well, Ferb and I have been wondering why you're so stressed out," said Phineas, patting Ferb on the shoulder. "So we wrote this questionnaire that-"
"No, you know what? I don't care what you're doing here. I just want to be alone!" Candace fumed, leaving her bed to push the boys roughly out the door.
"Oh, but Candace-" started Phineas, holding up a finger, but Candace cut him off.
"No buts, just leave me alone!" she said vehemently, slamming the door in their wake. As soon as it closed, quick, hard footsteps could be heard from inside, and then the squeak of the bed springs. Phineas listened for a moment to the sound of flipping scrapbook pages, then turned to Ferb with a half disappointed, half determined expression.
"Well, Ferb," he said, "I don't think that worked. But we have to keep trying!"
Ferb nodded. He cared about Candace, too, and he didn't want to intrude on her privacy, but this was to be done for her own good. Phineas thought for a moment.
Finally, he snapped his fingers. "I've got it," he said.
Candace was just getting to the good part of her scrapbook (some especially funny pictures she had taken while Jeremy was on duty at Mr. Slushy Burger) when there was a scratching noise at her door. At first, she didn't mind at all, but it persisted for several minutes to the point that she could not possibly ignore it anymore. She growled psychotically and glanced around wildly for the source of the noise, which turned out to be a simple sheet of paper being squeezed under the door. Without even pausing to see what it was, she stomped over to the door, shoved the paper back out into the hallway, and seized a few books to block up the space underneath the door. Then she stormed back over to her bed, picked up the Jeremy scrapbook, and resumed her contemplation of it.
Outside in the hall, Phineas and Ferb looked disappointed to see that Candace had blocked up her door. Even more discouraging was the fact that Ferb now had a paper cut.
"Well, we can't stop there," said Phineas confidently. "Ferb, let's get a band aid for that paper cut. And after that…" suddenly, his face lit up. "I know what we should try next!"
Fifteen minutes later, Candace had reached one of her favorite parts of the scrapbook- the picture that Ferb had taken of her and Jeremy. Both their faces looked ridiculous, and while she wasn't pleased with her own appearance, she giggled every time she saw Jeremy's. However, her small moment of happiness died quickly when she remembered the day the picture had been taken- a disaster of a bust in which she had been split in two by her brothers' stupid machine. She growled angrily for a moment as she remembered the humiliation of trying and failing to show herself to Mom, in a sense.
However, in the midst of her recollections, there was a thudding noise outside her window and she whipped around to stare at it. There, perched just over the sill, was the top rung of a ladder, and being held up temptingly by Phineas' small hand was…
"Not that stupid paper again!" Candace shouted angrily.
"Come on, Candace!" came Phineas' little voice from below the window. "Pretty pl-"
"No pretty pleases!" said Candace furiously. "Go away!" and she roughly shoved her brother's hand out of the way to shut the window. Phineas wobbled on the ladder for a minute, then regained his balance and sighed.
"Another failed attempt," he murmured disappointedly. He climbed back down to stand next to Ferb, who had been holding the ladder steady for him. Ferb gave Phineas an inquisitorial glance, and his brother shook his head to signal that it hadn't worked. Together, they carried the ladder back to the garage and deposited it beside their dad's tools; if they didn't, he would wonder where it had gone.
After setting the ladder back in the garage, Phineas turned to Ferb with a determined face.
"Ferb, we've tried the frontal approach and the window approach," he stated. "Maybe we should try something a little more…I don't know…" he smiled slyly. "Unconventional."
Ferb gave one of those half-smiles that Phineas saw so often and nodded.
In Candace's room, the fifteen-year-old was busy trying to find another way to spend her time, aside from obsessing over the boys. Currently, she was flipping through a magazine, reading various articles that jumped out at her. As she pushed aside an ad for a new TV drama (Love and Various Explosions), she noticed an article whose title seized her attention immediately- Obsessions and How to Get Over Them.
"I could totally use this," she muttered to herself, half sulky and half interested. But just as she was about to start reading it, there was a noise from her closet. Candace groaned. It was probably her clothes hangers falling off again; one of them had been doing that lately. However, when she went to inspect just which fallen hanger it was, she found something quite different- Phineas and Ferb, climbing up through a hole in her closet floor, carrying blowtorches and wearing welding masks. Candace shrieked, half in fright and half in exasperation. The boys recoiled a bit, and Phineas raised his welding mask to speak.
"Sorry, Candace," he said apologetically. "We didn't mean to scare you."
"Is this about your stupid question-thingy?" said Candace in a shaky but angry voice.
"Well, yes-" started Phineas, but Candace cut him off.
"Then fix that hole and go away!" she yelled, and she slammed the closet door on them. However, moments later, there was another noise, this time from the trash can. Suddenly, the can slid aside and another hole opened in the floor beneath it. Ferb popped out, holding the questionnaire up as if to ask whether she had changed her mind.
"NO!" shouted Candace furiously. "No questions! No brothers! No NOTHING!"
And she roughly pushed his head back through the hole, closed up the panel, and slid the trashcan back over it, putting a tall stack of books in it to hold it down.
"Oh, Candace, are you throwing those out?"
"AAAH!" Candace screamed loudly, whipping around to see her brothers standing in the middle of her room. She began to sputter in horror. "But you were just- and I saw- why, you!-" then she stopped abruptly and glared at them. "How do you keep getting in?"
Phineas and Ferb exchanged significant glances, then turned to Candace, suddenly stony-faced. "Sorry, Candace. Our sponsor would prefer to keep that under wraps."
Candace growled psychotically in response, causing Phineas to flinch a little.
"Uh, we just wanted to get a clear response about the questionnaire," he said, a little unnerved. Candace snorted angrily and seized the questionnaire he held.
"You want a clear response? I'll give you a clear response!" she fumed.
And without further ado, she ripped the paper to shreds promptly.
Phineas stared, wide eyed and seemingly shocked. Then he looked up at Ferb for help.
"A simple 'no' would have sufficed," stated Ferb plainly.
"NO!" yelled Candace forcefully, and the two boys dashed out of her room as fast as they could go, heading down the stairs with no regard to their mother's frequent statements about not running in the house. Suddenly, the room was silent.
Candace stared at her doorway for a moment, then stared at her feet. Maybe she had been a little hard on them. They were only her little brothers, after all, and if they cared to tell on her to Mom as she had attempted to do to them so many times, she knew that her mother wouldn't have anything nice to say about it. With a sigh, she concluded that an apology would be in order, and she headed down the hall to deliver it.