Thanks a bunch to everyone who reviewed Chapter One. I'm glad you took an interest in this fic.
And, totally random and off-topic, I know, but who besides me is dying for the new P&F movie? Just heard the new duet with Slash for it, and it made me all the more impatient...
Anyways, not what you came here for, right? hehe
Chapter Two
"Can you build a radio, Ferb?" Baljeet was asking for the twelfth time in the past thirty minutes, as he, Sarah, Rob, and Mike paced at different paths in the Cycle Control Center.
Ferb rolled out from beneath a broken machine, a wrench in one hand and some indefinable, handmade tool in the other. He shook his head once at Baljeet, narrow shoulders shrugging faintly with the unspoken answer that the wreckage Doofenshmirtz's newts had left behind was too great for even him to conquer.
Baljeet moaned, loudly, burying his face in his hands.
"Oh, we are doomed…doomed, I tell you! Why, oh why did I ever agree to come to this tropical pitfall? I should have known it would all end in tears!"
And with that, he began to sob uncontrollably.
Ferb rose from the ground and replaced his tools into his pockets, where they were safely stored, practically invisible. He did not speak, but moved to stand beside his Indian friend so that he was not quite touching him, but was close enough to offer his own peculiar brand of comfort. It did not help Baljeet's hysterics, much to the misfortune of all present.
"Hey there," Rob drawled, throwing a whole fish he'd found in the freezer within the resort over his shoulder and waving a broken chair leg at Baljeet (he had insisted upon collecting firewood, even while Mike was insisting it would be useless since they were destined to die within seven hours), "Indiana, could you please stop your yapping? You'll scare away the firewood."
"You can't scare away firewood, Rob," Sarah told him.
"Baljeet could," he countered, tossing the fish down on a still-hot machine and poking it with the chair leg.
Baljeet sniveled louder.
Ferb inhaled and removed his cell phone from his pocket, scrolling down the list of names until he reached the one he'd been trying for the past two hours. His finger hovered over the "Call" button beneath Phineas' name again, and then he glanced up past the picture of himself and his brother (the one taken by Isabella, with Phineas holding a detailed draft of an invention design and Ferb holding the completed invention) and looked to the top of the screen. "No service" still stood out in bold, unpromising letters.
He replaced it back into his trouser pocket beside the steel-cutting device Phineas had designed for him years before and kept his gaze dolefully to the floor for a few moments before looking up again at his companions.
"There is no way to restart the power, either," Sarah was saying, as she struggled to read the symbols on a broken and flickering screen nearby, "not with the countdown started."
"That's what I've been saying for the past two hours," bellowed Mike unhelpfully, as he sank into a shadowed corner, clutching the tiny stuffed bear he'd pulled out of his pocket an hour before (at least, the bear was tiny in comparison to him).
Ferb narrowed his eyes suddenly, and without warning, his four colleagues heard his low, arresting English voice for the very first time.
"Do you hear that?"
Baljeet's wailing halted immediately, Rob stopped poking the limp fish with his stick, Mike pulled his face from where it was pressed into his teddy in an attempt to hide, and Sarah turned around with surprised eyes.
Exactly three seconds later, a hoard of laser-shooting newts the size of plates exploded into the Cycle Control Center.
Everyone screamed—except Ferb, of course.
Isabella was just making herself comfortable, shifting against the pillows on the soft seat of their private jet—sent with compliments by Phineas' employer, the head of BiRo Enterprises. (BiRo was short for "Big Robots," a name which Phineas had said several times since the day he was hired as a designer he would change immediately to something at least three notches higher on the imagination scale, should he ever become CEO. Isabella hoped this would be a reality someday.)
She had just settled into the comfy seat and shut her eyes for a short nap when a sharp BeepBeepBeep pulled her violently from her dozing.
She looked around to see that Phineas, who was seated directly beside her, had removed his tweaked GPS—which was, in actuality, a broken Global Positioning System he had restored entirely with his own gears and programs—and was clicking away at its screen, his thick, orange brows knitted together pensively.
"What's wrong, Phineas?" she asked, concerned at the shadow across his boyishly handsome face.
"Ferb loaded the coordinates for his destination into this thing," he answered, not looking up from the GPS. "He wanted me to check the energy output for the Bendita Isla; he thought it would be interesting for me."
"So?" She shifted around to face him.
"So…I'm seeing an island, for sure. But no energy output."
"Maybe it's a different island," she suggested.
He shook his head, flame waves bouncing.
"The upcoming coordinates are the ones Ferb gave me, and Ferb is never wrong," he said darkly.
"So?" she asked again.
"So…I don't understand why there would be no energy being emitted, if this is supposed to be a robotic island, and all that."
She was quiet, unable to provide an answer to that.
On impulse, Phineas removed his cell phone from his jacket pocket.
"What cha doing?" questioned Isabella. "We're not supposed to have cell phones out on the jet, are we?"
"No, but it'll just be for a minute," he assured her. "I just want to call Ferb and see what's going on."
She nodded agreeably.
Phineas dialed and held the phone to his ear for several minutes, before placing it down again.
"Huh," was his comment.
"What?" she urged.
"It's saying that it can't go through. But that's weird, because Ferb fixed up his cell so that it would work practically anywhere."
"What does that mean?"
He twisted his lips thoughtfully for a moment, before responding,
"I don't know."
Before she could ask "What cha doing?" he had leapt up and was calling to the pilot.
"Ted! Hey, Ted! Can you land on this island up ahead? Yeah—just a short detour. Won't be long—promise."
At the same time, a sleeping platypus was being lifted from his comfortable chair in Phineas' apartment. He remained slumbering, purring quietly with contentment, even when he slid all the way down a long, worn metallic shaft and into a much less comfortable chair before a vast screen.
On the screen, an aged man with fake white hair and an even more fake mustache appeared.
"Agent P!"
The small aquatic mammal did not start as most probably would have—used to the treatment as he was—but instead, he opened one brown eye with a wavering tolerance for his long-time superior.
"Agent P," Major Monogram looked exceedingly relieved, "I'm so glad we reached you."
Perry quirked an eyebrow in a way no other agent of the organization could.
Major Monogram had the decency to look awkward.
"Right." He cleared his throat. "Well, we have an emergency, Agent P."
Perry rolled his eyes.
"Apparently," Major Monogram continued as though he hadn't seen it, "when you destroyed Doofenshmirtz's Newtinator, something went very wrong. This is footage we received from the Doof's ship six and a half minutes ago."
The screen crackled, and the image was replaced with a fuzzier one of what Perry immediately recognized as the inside of his nemesis' old aircraft. Doofenshmirtz himself was in the picture, but appeared to be even more madcap than usual, half-covered, as he was, in enormous newts—all of which appeared to be chewing through his outdated, white lab coat as though it were a thin leaf.
"Hello!" Doofenshmirtz, whose nails-on-a-chalkboard voice had only increased in unpleasantness with age, shouted even as he was yanked out of the shot by the relentless amphibians; he was using one hand to move the camera so that it followed him, while the other arm was waving wildly in the air in an attempt to throw off the creatures.
This only seemed to make them hang on all the tighter.
"Major Monogram!" Doofenshmirtz continued to call craggily. "Are you there? Hello!"
There was a crash somewhere in the background. The wall behind him appeared to be wiggling, but a closer look revealed hundreds of steadily-growing newts climbing desperately all over everything.
"Well, this is a little awkward," the evil scientist admitted uncomfortably—or at least as uncomfortable as is possible for one covered in slimy newts. "I know you've already sent Perry the Platypus to foil my evil scheme for today, but I've run into a bit of unexpected trouble with my Newtinator."
He released a sharp exclamation of uneasy laughter, which turned to a cry of pain as one of the larger newts took hard hold of his index finger.
"The newts have…erm…grown," he stammered, as he hopped around on one foot, shaking both his arm and his taken leg, "and the laser-eye thing I gave them is not helping the problem. I think they might also be getting smarter….It is sort of obvious that I am needing a bit of backup," he shouted now, sounding quite desperate, as he wriggled his hand to free it from the persistent mouth.
Gradually, the amphibians began to grow larger and larger, overpowering the mad German until he was slowly collapsing, his ever-wild eyes poking from his oddly-shaped head as it looked like he was being engulfed by a sea of ridiculously enormous newts.
As Doofenshmirtz's gurgling screams died out beneath the waves of newts, one large newt, looking unnaturally alert and intelligent, leapt in front of the camera. He reared back one slick fist and punched forward, blacking out the scene.
"In the past five minutes," Major Monogram stated matter-of-factly as he reappeared, "this Doof-made phenomenon has reached massive proportions. Since who-knows-how-many newts had already been released upon the Bendita Isla, which you went to earlier—remember, Agent P?"
Perry blinked forbearingly.
"Well, we fear that it could progress and do an untold amount of damage to this expensive, new island. This, plus we have reason to believe there may be at least three people left on the island with these mutated newts—one of whom just happens to be a member of your assigned family, Ferb Fletcher."
Perry's entire demeanor changed immediately, his face sharpening with attention and eyes clouding with concern.
"You've got to put a stop to this, Agent P," Monogram instructed him.
Without wasting another moment, Perry leapt to his feet—his back feet, that is—and grabbed his beloved hat from somewhere above, placing it decidedly upon his head and grabbing the fastest jet pack lent to him from the agency.
Not only was Dr. Doofenshmirtz in danger, but Ferb as well, this time. Doofenshmirtz's being in peril was enough for him to worry; after all, the bond between an evil scientist and his nemesis is not one which can be easily replaced. Ferb's life at risk, however, made it twice as personal to him.
Perry put the jets on full-throttle for Bendita Isla.
To be continued
