"Man! I see you've been busy. When did you link up to the teleportation network anyway?"
"This afternoon, while you guys were ... gone."
"Oh. You didn't have to do that, you know. We would've been glad to do it for you, if you asked us."
"Nah, it's okay. I didn't mind - it didn't take that long." Candace re-adjusted her sling, attempting to shift its weight to a different spot on her shoulder. Phineas noted the movement.
"You want an anti-grav device for that?" he asked. Now, that was a good idea. She hadn't even thought of it.
"That would be great - but I can make it." Phineas paused momentarily.
"Yes, yes you can. While you do that, Ferb and I will work on the new and improved space-time ripper, although I suppose that it would be more apt to call it a slicer now." He turned to Ferb, who was standing next to the Molecular Re-atomizer.
"Let's get this show on the road." Candace watched as Ferb fired up the small machine, printing out the stack of supplies they needed. Titanium, tungsten, polonium, carbon, copper, and sheets of various other materials were soon stacked neatly on the floor. Phineas picked up the toolbox lying on the ground and handed out the contents.
The three of them set to work, welding and soldering and wiring and programming and screwing screws and fastening bolts and setting up containment canisters for the lethally radioactive polonium. The polonium-powered cold fusion reactor would provide enough power to slice across the surface of the curvature of the continuum, breaching the protective barrier of the conceptually curved tube of space-time. Without the exceedingly high radiant energy emitted from Pizzazium Infinionite's unique internal structure, there was no way to excite gravitron frequency high enough to directly peirce the continuum, but like Phineas had pointed out, a simple cold fusion generator would be enough power to get back into reality if they took the long route.
The oxymoronic statement she had just made was not lost on her either. Simple cold fusion generator. Right - a technology that alone in itself had eluded teams of highly-trained scientists for decades was simple. Even as she used her single hand to seal the conduit circuits, however, it really did seem simple to her - a fact which was both really cool and really scary at the same time.
She kept working, not allowing her thoughts to come in the way. They were to close now for her to sit around with her head up in the clouds. Her brothers were silent as they knelt on the floor next to her, intently assembling the parts of the machine closer to them. As they all worked, the piles of raw materials were gradually hammered and melted and fastened into a finished product. A shiny six-foot base supported a thick podium, to the top of which was attached a large box with a cone protruding from the top. A antenna stuck straight from the top of cone, almost scraping against the ceiling of the warehouse. Three screens graced the sides of the box, flickering on and off with static as Ferb wired up the interior. From atop a stepladder, Phineas carefully calibrated the angle of the cone and antenna, being doubly sure to make certain they were in the correct position. Candace fastened the tubing connecting the machine to the cold fusion generator, adjusting coolant and heating element levels as necessary when the temperature of the nuclear material on the inside rose up and down.
"Testing 1...2...3..." Phineas said, pressing down a the singular button the side of the creation. Electrical sparks crackled in the dry air, making Candace's hair stand up on end. She reached out and touched the metal screwdriver on the floor, and let out a small wince at the jolt upon doing so.
"Testing 1...2...3..." The antenna glowed dimly, and the screens on the box-like section filled with complex quantum-physical expressions.
"Testing 1...2...3..." A quiet humming emanated from the cold fusion generator as it underwent the consecutively larger demands for power.
Phineas climbed down the from the step ladder and turned to the both of them.
"I think it's ready for the first field test!" he announced. "Let's get this thing outside." Together, the three of them got behind it and pushed it out of the door of the storage warehouse, and onto the soft grass outside.
"We should have put wheels on this thing" Candace grunted.
"Yeah" Phineas agreed. "We had a hand-held tractor beam for moving heavy stuff like this, but I don't where it went." Ferb said nothing, of course, but he nodded, giving his assent silently.
It was mostly a moot point - there was no specific place the thing was supposed to be anyway, Candace thought. She assumed that Phineas had merely wanted it outside in the odd case it exploded, which was fair enough. Once they had pushed it about thirty or forty feet from the building, they stopped. It was as good a place as any.
"Alright" Candace said, "Let's see if this works."
"It will" Phineas's voice suddenly took on a worrying tone. "It will." He cleared his throat and smiled at her. "I'm sure of it." Deciding to not push the matter any farther, she waited silently as Ferb rapidly tapped the screens, programming last minute instructions into the device. Normally she'd have had full confidence that whatever her brothers built would work, but after all, there was a junkyard filled with thousands upon thousands of rejected machines here, and they weren't there because they had succeeded.
Ferb stepped back from the device and waved at her to come over.
"You can do the honors" Phineas said, translating Ferb's silent gaze for her. Candace grinned despite herself.
"Thanks, guys. If it explodes, I guess two broken bones can't be any worse than one."
"Oh!" Phineas interjected. "That's right. You were going to make an anti-grav for your cast. Did you have time to do that?" She shook her head.
"I will, I will - but I just really want to get home right now." It would have taken her all of fifteen minutes to assemble one, and yet the idea of waiting fifteen more minutes in this place seemed an eternity to long. It was kind of odd - being in the non-dimension must have really distorted how you percieve time. Only an hour earlier, she had realized that almost ten hours had passed in what seemed like minutes, and now the idea of spending minutes more here was what seemed like hours.
Phineas seemed about to speak, but Ferb placed a hand on his shoulder, and the two of them shared a look she could not interpret, which seemed to put a stop to whatever he had been about to say. A moment of silence passed, and Candace suddenly became determined to end it.
"Here goes nothing - and everything." she said, turning to the button. Reaching forward with her good hand, she firmly depressed it. Almost instantly, a change ran through the machine. The polonium fusion reactor hummed a bit louder as it sped up its own internal working to handle the unprecedented new request for power. She could almost see the electricity pulsing through the wiring connecting the reactor to the base of the machine. Sparks of static electricity arced through the air around them, causing everyone's hair to stand on end this time. The antenna glowed dimly again, in a faint shade of purple, and the cone-shaped projection device vibrated slightly. Then - for just a second - the machine was still, all sound and motion ceasing. The moment of stillness was soon gone. The the antenna waggled back and forth, making that weird noise that happens when you shake the end of a long, thin, piece of metal. A purple beam shot from tip of it, and loud screeching noise tore through the air. Candace instantly recognized it - how could she not? It was the sound of space and time being torn asunder, a sound like no other in the multiverse. A sound that would probably haunt her nightmares for the rest of her life.
The stream of purple light curved over and dove straight into the ground. The grass around it rose up and down as if caught in the clutches of an earthquake. Then it fell inwards - as an oval hole was torn in the ground, growing in size until it was almost ten feet wide. When Candace leaned over and looked into the hole, she saw ... mist. White mist, and loads of it. The hole into reality led into huge bank of mist. But it didn't matter! It was a hole back to reality. Maybe not their plane of reality, but it was a plane of reality. Wasn't that good enough? Well, no, but it was definitely a good stepping stone.
"Alright!" Phineas cheered. "It works! I just wonder what slice of the multiverse it opened into?"
He stepped over to the edge of the hole and carefully stuck his hand into the white mist.
"It's kinda wet feeling" he said after a moment, "Like, I don't know, air after a rainstorm or something." Candace followed him to the hole and ran her fingers through the mist. Water droplets collected on her hand as she did so, not enough to make it feel wet, but definitely a shade of dampness. It was a cool kind of moisture - not cold, just cool without being sticky.
"We should throw something in to see where the ground is" she said.
"That's an excellent idea." Phineas pulled a small brightly-colored stick-like object from his pocket and tossed into the mist. They listened quietly as the thing dissappeared, but no sound could be heard. Phineas's brow furrowed slightly, and he produced another.
This time, however, he also pulled out a lighter and lit the end of of on fire.
"Do you always keep firework rockets in your pockets?" Candace asked. "That doesn't seem safe."
"With our special rockets, it is." he replied. He pointed the tip of the rocket down into the mist, and let go. A loud swooshing noise came from the rocket, and a trail of blue and red sparks followed it as it propelled itself down through the mist. Once again, they listened. The noise of the rocket faded out gradually, eventually becoming inaudible. Around thirty seconds later, the mist bank flashed with bright red and blue light. Roughly six or seven seconds after that, the high-pitched crackling noise of a firework explosion echoed from far away to their ears.
"Hmm" Phineas intoned to himself. Oh! Candace knew what he was doing. Hang on, she could figure this out before he did. So, judging by it's size, the firework had most likely been a six-inch rocket, which travels at a top speed of about 140 miles an hour. She assumed that the rocket had not detonated until hit the ground - which would have made that about thirty seconds later. So, thirty seconds of traveling at 140 miles an hour would have covered about uh... one point two miles, and there's 5,280 feet in a mile so that would be roughly...
"It's roughly 6,700 feet to the ground" Phineas said. Dang. She had been so close.
"That's ... a long way." she replied.
"It most certainly is."
"You know" Ferb said from behind them, prompting them both to immediately turn around,"That's the approximate height of most lower cloud banks."
"You're right!" Phineas exclaimed. "I'll bet you that's what this is."
Candace raised one eyebrow.
"So this white mist is just a cloud - I can see that. But then how on earth did our portal open up so high the sky?"
Phineas shrugged. "That isn't our plane of reality of down there. It's another one - symptomatic of us traveling kind of parallel to the quantum energy flow instead of perpendicular to it."
"Well, I knew that, but it's still kind of inconvenient."
Phineas nodded. "It certainly is. But still, it's better than like, in the middle of the ocean or wherever."
"Do you think there's land down there or water?"
Phineas paused for a second before answering. "I'd assume land. I don't think the rocket would have exploded if it was water."
"So I guess we need to build some sort of flying or floating thing to help get us down there? You know, in one piece. Last time I tried to shimmy down a rope through a temporal portal, well, bad things happened."
Phineas laughed. "Don't worry. There won't be any ropes. In fact, I think we've already got the perfect tool for the job."
"Then what are we waiting for?" Candace asked.
"Hang on, sis. We need to pack up - since it isn't our plane of reality we need to prepare for whatever we might find down there."
Candace couldn't really think of any good rebuttal to that point.
"Alright, I guess. But let's hurry! What can I do to help?"
Phineas pulled out his phone and tapped the screen several times. "First, we have to get the plane. It's at the teleporter matrix exit located three exits to the north of the skyscraper."
Candace pulled out her own phone and opened up the matrix interface. "Okay" she replied. "I'll see you there." She pressed the on-screen button, and purple light glowed brightly around her. The next thing she knew - she was standing in front of an object covered in a sheet. Phineas and Ferb were there too - arriving at more or less the same time as her.
Eyeing the object under the sheet, she had more than a few doubts about its usefulness.
"Uh" she asked, "How is the Statue of Liberty going to help us fly? Did you like, put rockets on it?"
Phineas looked at the sheet and seemed somewhat surprised it.
"That's kind of strange. Ferb, what do you think the odds of that are?" he said. Instead of answering, Ferb stepped forwards and, in a single motion, slid the sheet off the object and onto the ground. The white fabric settled to the floor, revealing not a statue, but a small white plane that strangely enough looked nothing at all like the Statue of Liberty. It was white, and red letters stenciled along the side read: Sun Beater 3001.
"Ta da!" Phineas said, throwing up hands. "I'm sure that you remember the rather gloomy fate of the three-thousandth sun beater. Well, this one is better!" Ferb gave a thumbs up and smiled, then jumped up and grabbed onto the right wing of the little plane, which rocked under his weight.
"Most importantly" Phineas continued, "The wings stay attached much better. Actually, everything stays attached much better."
"Well, I guess that's good" Candace replied.
"You bet it is. This version is powered by a cold-fusion operated rocket engine, which gives it a top speed of about 1200 miles an hour. That's pretty slow, but still fast enough to be deserving of it's name." Ferb pulled himself up on top of the wing and slid open the domed cockpit.
"And don't worry, Candace. There were no celebrity cameos for you to miss during this particular project - unless you count the food robots." Candace rolled her eyes.
"Oh, that's a relief. So, what all you are planning pack in there?"
"Not much. Just some food and water, and supplies for a dimensional plane transporter. We are gonna take everything required to build one, so that the only thing we need in the other plane of reality is Pizzazium Infinionite. Once we get that, we will be good to go."
"Alright then. Let's do this thing. I'm ready to be gone."
"As are we all." From inside the cockpit, Ferb did something that made a small flight of stairs unfold from the side of the plane, making an easy ramp up the seats on the interior. Candace followed Phineas as he bounded up the steps.
"Strap in!" Phineas said, retracting the stairs, closing the glass dome and sealing the cockpit. He sat in the front seat and press the engine starter button. Almost instantly, the rocket engine mounted on the back of the plane trembled and began emitting a soft blue glow. He grabbed the joystick and drove the plane across ground, careful to not hit anything, until they had crossed the length the little city and had arrived outside the Molecular Re-Atomizer's warehouse again. Once there, he opened the cockpit and jumped up.
"Let's pack this bad boy."
'Packing' was pretty easy, what with the Molecular Re-Atomizer and all. Candace used it print out more stacks of raw materials, and Phineas and Ferb neatly stacked them in the back of plane. The whole process took no longer than ten minutes, and yet by the time they were done, there were enough supplies in the plane to sustain the three of them for weeks and weeks. Just as they were finishing, a beeping noise started coming from the Re-Atomizer. It was running out of base material to rip apart and reassemble.
"Well" Candace said to herself, "Guess no one will ever to refill it. It'll just sit here in this warehouse and beep for all of eternity."
"Candace!" Phineas yelled from the plane waiting outside, "That's everything we'll need. Come on, let's get out of here!" The words were like music to her ears. Almost knocking over the Re-atomizer in her haste, she ran from warehouse to the plane.
"Hang on" she said, pausing in front of him. Something weird had been in the warehouse this last time, something she didn't recall seeing in there before. "Did you want to take the giant floating baby head that was in the warehouse too?"
"What? There was a giant floating ... that's funny. Did you make it?" She shook her head.
"Well, I sure didn't. I don't think we'll need it anyway."
"Whatever you say" she replied, starting to walk past him.
"Here" Phineas stopped her, pressing a little bottle into her hand. "For emergencies." She glanced down. It was just a stereotypical dark reddish-orange medicine bottle, and was labeled 'Aminomethylbenzoic acid'.
"Phineas" she said, "When have I ever carried around coagulant for emergencies? You know its not that big of a thing to worry about. Literally every year at my checkup the doctor says by the time I began bleeding bad enough for it kick in, I'd already be in trouble from blood loss alone." The statement was kind of a contradiction to the fainting spell from just a few days ago, but a few days ago there had also been a wild card - time travel, which was bound to throw things off a bit.
"I know" he replied. " But we are traveling to another plane of reality, which is something we've never done before, and so I though better safe than sorry. Besides, it's not like that your getting special treatment. Ferb is bringing an aid kit that's packed with pretty much everything."
"First aid kit?" she asked.
"No - just aid. With the stuff inside it, you could set a broken bone or treat a bacterial infection or perform open-heart surgery."
She eyed Phineas for moment, hunting for signs of jest.
"Okay" she eventually relented, tucking the bottle into her pocket, where it barely fit next to her phone and the box from the Martians and the strange note that apparently had come from nowhere. Candace sat down in one of the seats of the plane and strapped herself in.
"Alright, Ferb, Candace" Phineas said from the front seat, "Be ready for a bit of turbulence as we re-enter reality. You guys ready?"
"Yup." she replied. Ferb gave a thumbs up.
"Then lets go!" Phineas placed his hand on the throttle and slowly gave the engine more power, causing the plane to begin rolling across the ground. He turned the plane around until it was lined up with the hole in the ground, which was still filled with the white mist that they had determined must have been clouds.
"Hang on tight!" he said, as the plane rolled towards it. The wheel under the nose slid into the hole, causing the plane to jerk downwards at a frightening angle. Candace grabbed onto the arm of her seat with her good hand. As the back wheels of the plane continued pushing forwards, it grew more and more steep until it was almost vertical.
"And here we gooooooo...!" Phineas exclaimed, suddenly pushing the throttle up to max. The engine roared behind them, and the plane more swiftly rolled forwards, until the weight hanging off the hole was too much, and the whole thing went tumbling in. Almost instantly, Candace went from having to brace herself to keep herself in her seat to being thrust back against it. The plane plunged downwards, popping out of the bottom of the mist bank. It revealed a scene that could not have been more beautiful. There was green grass ,and blue sky, and the sun! It was there, bright and warm and yellow, shedding its brilliant light over everything in view. And, stretching out on the ground below them - was a city! Buildings were sprawled about, and roads snaked here and there, looking so small from so far up in the sky.
Phineas pulled back on the joystick, and the plane righted itself. Gradually, the insane force pushing her into the seat lessened, and Candace was able to sit forward and look out the window. It was all just so amazing. Even though she knew this place wasn't home, that it was an entirely different plane of existence, it was still so familiar looking she couldn't help but feel closer to home.
"Did you feel that?" Phineas asked.
"Feel what?"
"Well, you can't actually feel it exactly, but I meant the changing of the space-time continuum."
"What?"
"We were outside of space and time - so the continuum acted as if we had never existed. Now -" Candace knew where he was going and finished the sentence for him.
"-that we are back inside the continuum, it readjusted to allow for our existence again."
"Pretty much."
"Huh" Candace said thoughtfully, "I hope Mom and Dad don't freak too much. They'll remember you guys again. But, you're nowhere to be found." The more she thought about it, the more worrisome the situation seemed. It was just another reason why they had to get home soon.
Phineas looked worried for just a moment.
"The best we can do is try to get home as soon as possible" he said, "And that's what we're doing."
"I know, I know. I just can't help but worry a little." She glanced over at Ferb, who was quietly listening in his seat. He shrugged his shoulders slightly. They were right, and she knew it, but worrying about things was just a part of her nature - part of what made Candace Flynn who she was, for better or for worse.
Up until now, the ride in the Sun Beater 3001 had been remarkably smooth, with barely a hint to the fact that there was a giant rocket engine sticking out of the back it. However, it now began vibrating beneath Candace, shaking just imperceptibly at first, and gently increasing in strength until the whole craft was violently rocking back and forth in the air. A loud roar filled the tiny cabin.
"What is happening?!" she yelled to be heard. Phineas's hands flew over the control panel, rapidly trying to ascertain just what was going on.
"Some kind of weird turbulence patterns!" he yelled back. "I can't seem too-" his voice trailed away. From out of a cloud bank just to the side of them, the front end of massive airliner appeared, bearing down with frightening speed on the tiny aircraft.
"Go down!" Candace shouted, upon seeing the huge airplane. It was easily forty or fifty times larger than the Sun Beater, and the sextuple turbine engines on it's wings was shaking their tiny craft like a leaf. Phineas grabbed ahold of the joystick, and pushed down on it as hard as was humanly possible. The Sun Beater almost immediately began diving down and to the left, veering away from the huge airliner cutting through the air. It was almost enough - but only almost. The right wing of the Sun Beater brushed against the bottom of the larger plane, and was instantly just gone. Smoke billowed from the side of the little plane, leaving a dark trail in the air. Candace's eyes widened in fear.
At the control panel, Phineas was struggling to rapidly spiraling craft under control. The loud beeping noise of an alarm filled cabin. The three of them were once more shoved backwards into their seats as the aircraft began tumbling from the sky.
"I can't keep it in the air!" Phineas shouted. "Make sure you're strapped in, and hang on to your butt!"
"Wha-" Candace began, but the sentence was never finished. Phineas reached to the far end of the control panel, and flipped open a small glass cover that was protecting a single red button. With no hesitation, he slammed his hand down on it. An even louder klaxon began blaring, and oxygen masks tumbled down from the roof. Candace struggled violently with hers, unable to fit it over her face with only one hand. Thankfully, Ferb came to the rescue, putting on his own, and then leaning over and helping her put it on. And it wasn't a moment to soon. With a loud bang, the glass canopy sealing in the cockpit was launched away from the craft, and ear-piercingly loud wailing of the wind as the plane plummeted out of the sky ruined any further chance at communication. What was happening? she thought. Ferb reached over and grabbed ahold of her good hand. With a tremendous noise, the base to which the seats were attached was rocketed away from the failing aircraft. She screamed - but was barely able to hear herself over the tumultuous sounds coming from every direction at once.
Then - it was over. There was a loud rustling, and a snap, and three large, multicolored parachutes exploded from the seating platform that had been ejected so violently from the craft. The three of them were jerked up violently as the parachutes expanded, but the seat belts held securely, and the parachutes absorbed the weight their load. The whistling noise of the wind ceased, and the seats began floating gently, driven before the gentle breeze. Beneath them, the smoking hull of the Sun Beater 3001 continued spiraling downwards, until it slammed into the ground with a astonishingly loud crashing noise. But, up on the seating platform suspended by parachutes, everything was peaceful.
Phineas pulled out his phone and checked something on it. Seeming satisfied, he reached up and pulled off his oxygen mask. Ferb and Candace followed his example.
"Well" Phineas started, "Seems like anything time we try to build one of those, the only thing that's left of it are the seats by the time we land."
"That's not funny" Candace replied. "That was terrifying." Phineas smiled good-naturedly.
"It was" he agreed "Terrifyingly cool! Just think, we rode on top of a rocket for a little bit. How cool is that?" Now that the moment was over, the fear was slowly draining from her, leaving her significantly calmer.
"Okay," she relented at last. "It was a little cool."
"It was way cool" he insisted, laughingly. "But seriously, it does seem like we're always crashing these things."
"And here I thought the time the other one broke apart was because you said your singer friends decided to stand on top the wing, making it snap off before we even got off the ground."
Phineas laughed. "Well, that definitely didn't help, but wasn't the main reason for the break up. A series of rough landings and having to take on extra weight halfway through the trip was what did us in for good." Candace didn't answer. Instead, she just leaned back in her seat and took in her surroundings.
Suspended in mid-air, ever so slowly drifting downwards, everything was peaceful. The sky though, it was so amazing to look at. Even though she'd been in the non-dimension for less than a day, the endless gray fog banks there were so gloomy to look at. It was so great just to be able to look up and see blue sky, and white clouds, and the sun, and birds, and planes - although seeing slightly fewer planes might also have been good a few minutes ago.
"The rift we were able to slice open won't stay open forever" she mused to herself. It would close of its own accord once the space-time continuum self-repaired the damage done to it by the meltdown of the space ripper. Once it had repaired itself, the energy barrier would become once again to strong for a non-pizzazium powered device, even with the whole 'perpendicular slicing' thing. Once it closed, the final trace of that horrid place would be gone. Although, perhaps not forever. It was still a mystery just what had triggered the space-ripper meltdown. Ah, well. As Phineas had said before, sometimes you just have good luck. Candace tapped her fingers on the hard surface of her cast.
"How long do you think it will be until we reach the ground?" she asked after a few more minutes of staring off into space.
Phineas glanced at Ferb, then back at her, and shrugged. "It almost entirely depends on the wind. If it keeps up like this, it could be as little as fifteen minutes. But, we didn't pack a weather controller on the Sun Beater, so it's all kind of up in the air."
She looked over the edge of the platform, studying the city below. The distance to the ground was dramatically shorter now, and the view of the city was much clearer. For a brief moment, chills ran up her spine. The city was an odd juxtaposition of old and new, clean and dirty, decaying and fresh. Towering buildings neatly painted stood in stark contrast to rows and rows of dull, gray, dilapidated buildings. The parts of the city marked by crumbling infrastructure and ancient-looking buildings bore an unsettling similarity to Dystopic Future Danville - and that place was terrible. Thankfully, however, she'd managed to find her brothers, and they were back in reality. That awful future, for both Danville and herself, had been averted. She hoped.
So what was the deal with the city below them? She wondered what it was named, what it was like, and who the people were who lived down there. It was a shame that the first time anyone had ever traveled to another plane of reality would result in them immediately returning home, but there was no desire in her heart to stay. It was a good thing they wouldn't have to. With the supplies on the ... oh.
"Phineas" she said "We lost all the supplies we brought!"
"That's true" he answered, "But don't worry about it. I'm sure we can get the stuff we need in the city. It'll just be a small detour, and we'll be on our way." Candace wished she could share in Phineas's eternal optimism. Suddenly confronted with the fact that they would indeed have to remain in the city for longer than planned, her entire opinion of it changed. The clean, new, fresh parts of it shrunk in comparison to the battered, collapsing stretches. The city now seemed to resemble a war zone, in which only a few select places had managed to avoid total destruction.
What about the people who lived here? What would they be like? Would they be significantly different from Candace, and Phineas, and Ferb? They were from another dimension, after all. Would they speak the same language? Would they want to help?"
A loud scraping noise startled her from her worried thoughts. The platform had brushed against the roof a skyscraper, causing sparks to fly. It banged against the side of the building, and drifted in the other direction. With the buildings now towering around them, Candace's fears were both nullified and strengthened. The state of the buildings around them wasn't nearly as bad as it had seemed from higher in the air. But, at the same time, it was still pretty bad. And worst of all, the streets were completely abandoned. Completely. There weren't even any cars or buses or anything. The banging of the platform against the walls of the buildings as it clattered into them on it's way to the ground echoed through empty streets.
The sheer desolation of the place again reminded her of Dystopic Future Danville. Calm down, she told herself. There was no need to be reminded of that place. This was an entirely different dimension, after all. Maybe in this dimension, the drab gray paint the coated literally everything was a sign on wealth, or something. The idea was feeble even in her own mind, but still helped her calm down a little bit.
With jolt that jerked everyone forwards against their restraining seat belts, the seat platform made contact with ground. The wind in the chutes dragged it a few more feet, tossing up sparks and making a terrible scraping noise, but the parachutes gradually deflated and fluttered down over top of them, the thick heavy fabric covering them like a blanket.
"Alright!" Phineas exclaimed. "Let's get busy."
Candace reached down and slid her fingers across the length of the seat belt until she found the buckle. Pressing the release latch, she felt it go slack. Pushing against the weighty parachute fabric draped over her, she eventually was able to slide out from under it. Stepping off the platform, she was grateful to feel solid ground beneath her feet again. Phineas and Ferb appeared out from under the parachutes as well, and stood next to her.
"So" Phineas began. "First off, I know what we're going to do ... this afternoon!" He paused briefly, as if thinking how to continue. "We know what we need to do. An inter-dimensional transportation device. Now, the math behind it is pretty simple, just mind the forty-third hex character and you'll be good."
"And don't forget to account for quantum shift when calculating frequency requirements" Candace interrupted to input.
"Yes, that too." He smiled at her. "Ferb and I put a transponder in the Sun Beater when we built it, so it shouldn't to hard to track it to the place where it crashed." Ferb pulled out his phone and held it up in the air for a moment. Then he pointed down the street.
"Guess it's that way" Phineas said. "Come on!"
So they set off, walking through the eerily abandoned alleyways and streets still illuminated by the light of the fast-fading afternoon. The streets were completely free of litter, but also free of any sign of life. There were only stunted small plants growing here and there, and everywhere you looked, there were no people to be seen. The drab gray buildings all around appeared to be entirely empty and deserted, and the whole place somewhat resembled a ghost town. None of the windows had lights in them, none of the doors were opened, and walls were unstained by the dirt of human life. Torn posters hung on the walls, but they weren't torn from age - on the contrary, they were quite new-looking. The tears were fresh and clean, as if someone had grabbed the bottom of the poster and forcibly ripped it away from the wall without bothering to pull out the nails securing it. On one of the posters that had a particularly large scrap still remaining, a large orange 'O' glared, as if declaring 'Oranges' or 'Octopi'. Of course, there were neither oranges or octopi anywhere on the streets of the abandoned city, making it doubtful that was what had been actually written on it.
After a few minutes of treading through the streets, they rounded a corner and saw a huge quantity of smoke pouring out of a small two-story building in front of them. Phineas glanced over Ferb's shoulder to steal a glance at his phone screen.
"It's in there" he said. Candace looked over the fairly average size building once more. Even without the GPS tracker, it was fairly obvious that something had impacted the building. They walked up to the main door of the building and gave the knob a try. It yielded easily, swinging inwards to reveal an absolute mess. In the middle of the floor lie the horrifically mangled remains of the Sun Beater illuminated from above by the sunshine that streamed in through the hole in the roof and second story floor that it had torn in it's catastrophic descent. Thankfully, there was no fire, though the amount smoke that was pouring off it warned that one could start any second. The building itself was just as empty on the inside as it had appeared on the outside. The floor was covered in gray tiles, and the walls were painted the same shade of gray.
"Come on!" Phineas said, jarring her from her thoughts. "Let's get the supplies out of the crash before a fire starts." She tried to help - she really did. But even though she was close to twice her younger brother's height, the cast on her arm heavily decreased the amount of things she could lift, and left her feeling somewhat useless. Nevertheless, what supplies could be salvaged from the wreck were relatively quickly extricated from the rubble and stacked neatly in the corner of the room. Not everything could saved - the container full of maple syrup had cracked open and run out all over the ground, and the sheet of silver had been shattered apart by the impact. But the tungsten and the titanium were okay, as was the steel, though it was somewhat scratched up. Why had they even brought a container full of maple syrup in the first place? Candace wondered.
After a while, the dying sunlight mostly exhausted, giving only the most pitiful of light, they had managed to recover everything that was in any shape to recovered. That included salvaging sheets of metal and computer processing chips from inside the Sun Beater itself. They had taken so much away from the wreck that the remaining pile was smaller than the stacks of materials re-appropriated. It was no longer really a wreck anyway, more of a pile of things considered unusable, like shattered glass or leaky pipes or horribly crumpled metal sheets.
"Well" Candace said, leaning against the rocket engine of the Sun Beater, which had been disconnected and carefully repaired for a possible future use, "We should have enough stuff here for a dimensional traveling device, barring Pizzazium Infinionite, of course."
"That's true." Phineas replied. "It was lucky that tungsten cone survived the crash. Now we just need a handful of Pizzazium and we'll be good to go."
"Ugh" Candace sighed. "Finding Pizzazium in this ghost town is gonna be ... " there was an awkward pause. She couldn't say impossible, if anything, the impossible was nowhere nearly as daunting a task. " It's so implausible." She eventually finished.
"Implausible?" Phineas questioned. "That's just impossible with a few extra steps. Besides, we are back in space time now. That means, among other things, that we can build a time machine to help synthesize pizzazium from a Molecular Re-atomizer." The fact made her perk up.
"That's ... true! Well, maybe this won't be half as bad as I thought. Come on, let's build ourselves a time machine."
"That's the spirit!" Phineas cheered. Ferb reached down into the pile of reclaimed parts and produced a box of tools.
With the three of them working together, a time machine would be child's play. As they worked, the already weak sunlight streaming through the hole in the building's roof continued to weaken, until it faded out entirely. Night had fallen in this dimension. It wasn't that big of an issue. Ferb took a handful of minutes to put together a really bright flashlight, and they continued working under the brilliant artificial illumination.
After just a few minutes, they were done. The brand new time machine sat before them, with the Sun Beater 3001 logo still plastered on the side of the metal used to make it. From there, the rest of the process was easy. The Molecular Re-atomizer was remarkably easy to make, and was assembled in just a matter of moments. But it was there that the otherwise foolproof plan hit a snag.
"Uh guys" Candace said, holding up the power cord attached to the Re-atomizer, "Where exactly am I supposed to plug this thing in?" Phineas and Ferb followed her eyes around the room, but no power outlets could be found.
"You know, I hadn't thought of that" Phineas said thoughtfully. "The Re-atomizer sucks up a lot of power. Like a lot. In fact, the whole reason that we never use it to make stuff for ordinary projects is that it would basically black out the entire Tri-State Area in the process of making anything larger than a square yard or two. In fact, it requires roughly twice the amount of energy in any given thing to create one of that given thing."
"What?" Candace questioned. But, the gears of her brain began turning, and the mental math she subconsciously begun doing served only to confirm Phineas's statement.
He continued. "In the non-dimension, we powered the Re-atomizer on fission generators, which gave it power for us to make the concrete and steel we needed. (To make the fission generators, we had to go way old fashioned and power it on steam.) It takes about twelve thousand large-scale fission generators to produce the energy to Re-atomize the material in an average-sized office building over the course of two hours. We had ours hooked up to eighty thousand 2.2 megaton fission generators, which was how it was possible to make so much so quickly. Making pizzazium infinionite, well would take twice the energy of whatever amount you made."
"And the only thing with twice as much energy as X grams of Pizzazium is 2X grams of Pizzazium." Candace finished.
"Well" Ferb put in, "If you took every particle in all the known and unknown universe, and turned each one of those into a full-sized planet Earth, and each particle in each planet was a 3.5 megaton fission generator, then you would be be able to Re-atomize X grams of Pizzazium in approximately 543.32 times X solar hours."
"That's true" Phineas said. "But I don't think that's what we should be aiming to do."
"Then why did we go through the whole process of building this Re-atomizer and time machine anyway?" Candace asked.
"I really don't know. Force of habit, maybe?"
Candace dropped the cord to the ground. "Well that's just great." She sighed. "Where are we gonna get Pizzazium Infinionite from then?" This situation was awfully reminiscent of her troubles with finding materials for a space-time ripper in the first place. Only, now they were in another dimension, one without creepy bald men who said they were 'evil' but nonetheless had loads of pizzazium lying around.
"Don't worry about it" Phineas said.
"What do you mean don't worry about it? I think worrying about it is very justified right now. It's like seven o'clock at night, and here we are, trapped in an alternate dimension, with no way back unless we can somehow get ahold of Pizzazium, which, mind you, is the most least common element of them all."
Her rant didn't seem to phase Phineas, however.
"Don't worry" he repeated. "We have this entire dimension at our disposal! We can just take apart this time machine and put together another plane, although this time we'll avoid naming it Sun Beater, if you know what I mean."
"And fly around randomly, looking for pizzazium? Do you think there's going to be just a huge pile of it lying around out there?"
"Well, there might be, but I wasn't counting on it. What I was more of the mind to do was use the plane to travel around the city, and find some of the people who live here. I'm sure they could give us some information on where we could get ahold of some of the stuff."
Candace didn't reply. Phineas's optimism was infectious, and although the situation seemed rather hopeless, she decided to not to freak out just yet. Worrying was one thing, but full-on panic could wait for a while. After all, when did Phineas and Ferb ever fail to ultimately achieve their goal? They had failed on their way to success before, but she'd never seen them actually fail fail. So, she took a deep breath to calm herself.
"Alright" she finally answered. "Alright." Phineas seemed pleased at her response.
"Well, let's get busy! I know what we're going... Well, I think you get the point by now." She smirked, but knelt down and picked up a screw gun from the ground.
"Let's dismantle us a time machine."
The freshly put-together machine was easily cut up and unscrewed into it's separate parts. The engine was pulled out and rewired to once again propel itself through space rather than time. The new aircraft was far smaller than the Sun Beater, and was more of a hovercraft than a plane anyway, unable to actually fly, per say, but instead capable of hovering a good three feet or so over the ground. The huge rocket engine from the Sun Beater was re-appropriated and attached to the back of the small vehicle, dwarfing the actual craft. Since there was no protective canopy to shield passengers from the noise of the engine, they added several more layers of noise-absorbing insulation to help keep it slightly quieter. Of course, it was never going to completely silent (it was an eight-foot-long rocket engine, after all) but the insulation did help somewhat. The three of them piled on to it, and since there were no seats ( having left the seats behind in the alleyway with the parachutes) they were forced to limit the top speed of the craft to around fifteen miles an hour to avoid issues with falling off.
The rocket hummed beneath the noise canceller and smoothly, the craft lifted off the ground. It was a rather incongruous machine, strongly looking as if they had done nothing more than strap a giant rocket to the back of a sheet of metal held aloft by a thrumming green tube running beneath it. And that was more or less what had been done, although the steering system was a bit more complex than it looked.
The small hovercraft floated gently out the open doors of the building, and into the dark street. There were no streetlights anywhere to be seen, so only the reddish light coming from the rocket's exhaust was any illumination. And just like before, the cold moon looked down on a deserted street, devoid of any human life.
"Hey!"
Almost any human life. The sudden voice, cutting through the otherwise quiet night, was so unexpected that Candace almost fell over it. It had been nearly two days now since she had heard a voice other than her own or her brothers, unless you counted those robots, which she didn't. Ferb, at the steering setup of the hovercraft, rotated it in the air, until they were facing the direction the voice had come from. At the other end of the street, with a flashlight and some kind of long black object to thick around to be anything smaller than a rocket launcher, stood a man. The light of the flashlight shining in her eyes made it hard to tell just what he looked like, but he seemed to be wearing some kind camouflage gear - but it so tattered and torn it looked as if it had come fresh from a war zone. The man continued walking towards them.
"Hey! Who are you? This part of the city is blocked off while we drain the toxic chemical vats from the second and third wings! Don't you know that? You could've been killed being over here. And what the heck is that thing?"
Candace could sense Phineas about to say something, but knew that whatever it was, it probably would be unwise in the current situation. Gushing out with positivity and friendliness wasn't always the best thing to do in strange places. So she jumped in before he could.
"I'm sorry." she said. "I didn't realize - hey!" The man had reached the hovercraft and shined his flashlight directly into her face, temporarily blinding her. Even through the overbearing light, however, she saw his face blanch over with fear.
"I'm sorry sir!" he suddenly said, his voice immediately shifting from 'man in charge' to 'child outside principal's office'. He hastily snuffed out his flashlight, leaving just the rocket engine's soft glow to brighten the street.
"I'm sorry, sir." he apologized again. "I didn't recognize you at first. I was just patrolling like you dispatched me to, and you didn't say that you'd be here, as well, and..." He gritted his teeth and cut himself off. Candace raised one eyebrow. What on earth was he on about?
"Hey" Phineas said from behind her "Do you know where we can get ahold of some Pizzazium Infinionite? Just a few grams." She winced, but the man looked over her brothers and seemed to have no problem with the question.
"I - I'm not sure. There might be some at HQ, I guess, if we scavenged some, but you'd have to ask somebody who works at Salvage for that information."
"O-" Candace reached back with her good arm and grabbed ahold of Phineas's shoulder, and cut him off. The longer they talked with this guy, the more chance they ran of having him notice that they were not whoever he thought they were. The rocket launcher or whatever it was resting on his shoulder would tear up their fragile little hovercraft in an instant, and probably do similarly nasty things to themselves.
"Well, we're just gonna get right out of here now" she said, offering her best smile of innocence. The man's attention snapped back to her, and he reached up and made a crisp salute.
"Yes, sir!" After he moment, he continued. "Will I be seeing you again in this area, sir?"
"Nope." she replied. "We are leaving right now, I promise."
"Yes, sir. I'll be returning to my patrol, then?" It was pronounced as a question, almost as if he was asking Candace's permission.
"Uh" she stumbled over her words. "Uh, yeah. You do that."
"Yes, sir!" he saluted again, and turned away and began striding back down the street where he had come from.
Sinking back down into a sitting position on the floating metal platform, she heaved a huge breath of relief.
Ferb turned back to the control panel without a word, and the hovercraft began smoothly drifting in the opposite direction the man had gone.
"That was kind of odd" Phineas said at last.
"It was close" she made a point of saying. "I have a feeling that if he hadn't got the idea I was somebody who I'm not, then that would have gone much differently."
"Who did he mistake you for?" Phineas wondered. "He called you 'sir'. Maybe he thought you were his boss." She had a short chuckle.
"Maybe. Just be glad he got as confused as he did. I would say that the darkness obscured my face, but he shined that flashlight right in my eyes, so I don't know what happened in his head."
"Who knows? We got lucky."
Candace settled back, leaning against the pile of boxes containing the dimensional plane transporter parts. It had been a really, really long day, with one to many near-death experiences. She let out a yawn, and stared up the sky, dotted with millions of tiny, twinkling stars. It was always the same, wasn't it? No matter where you traveled, the night sky would always be the same. Well, not exactly the same, but the point remained. People in general were so small compared to the vastness of the multiverse. Maybe Phineas and Ferb's approach to life was right after all. Why should you get upset over bad things happening, when even the worst case scenario was just a speck of dust in the grand scheme of things? Sleepiness dragged her down into it's grasp. After all that had happened, she was just a teenager, and like everyone else, needed some sleep.
No doubt Phineas and Ferb were equally tired, but that fact was soon lost into the oblivion.
With a sudden start, Linda Flynn-Fletcher sat bolt upright in bed. It was well past midnight, and even the crickets outside had long since gone to sleep. But her intuition was telling her something was wrong, even in the depths of the peaceful night. Something was very wrong. Turning slightly in the bed, she shook awake her unwilling husband.
"Lawrence, listen, wake up!"
"Hmm rmmm mm?" he mumbled, not entirely awakened yet.
"Lawrence," she said, voice clouding over with fear, "Where are our children?"