Many hours of steady work had slipped by into the past.

Other Phineas had long since returned from wherever he'd gone after his and Four's children had left for home. And, slowly but surely, progress was being made. Despite what it had seemed like at first, there was a pattern to the gashes and weak points scattered throughout the spacetime continuum. The method to the madness emerged slowly, but it did emerge.

A new chart matching the new pattern of the flux movement patterns had been drawn up, and the new wavelength charted and tracked to an accuracy of less than a single graviton's width in error bars.

The weakened continuum structure was making the whole process extremely fiddly. No one seemed to know exactly what had happened to weaken the continuum to such an unprecedented degree… but they were getting it done regardless of that fact.

It was rather tedious, no lie, but it was also rather important that they take their time to baby the injured continuum - getting back home wouldn't be very useful if they accidentally tore the fabric of reality to such a great degree that the entire multiverse began collapsing on itself, permanently tearing the entire thing to shreds. Well… perhaps not the entire thing - the spacetime continuum really was unfathomably enormous. But definitely their local dimensional subcluster. Which… wasn't much better, since dimensions outside the subcluster were likely to be vastly different from the ones on the inside.

And given how different those ones on the inside could still be, Candace Three was fairly sure she didn't want to risk having to flee to a dimension beyond the subcluster because they'd accidentally annihilated their homes in a disaster the likes of the which the multiverse had never seen before.

It'd be akin to having to go live in the apartment block across the street because you'd set off a box full of dynamite inside your own block. People tended to have this idea of the spacetime continuum as this grand construct so mighty and powerful that it could never be affected, when the truth was… it was much more fragile than all that. If you had the right materials and know-how, there wasn't much stopping you.

All that aside however, progress was nonetheless being made. And speaking of progress…

"I found a way around the vaporization point when the wavelength peaks on the y-spectrum," Candace Three spoke aloud. "We can harness the accelerated subspace harmonic to reinforce the console against graviton resistance - which should let us bypass even that extreme with relative safety."

There was a moment of silence as Other Phineas peeked over her shoulder. "And how much fabric will it tear?"

"Still can't get it under twelve," she replied. "But it's at 14.226 now, which is the best option by far right now."

"Well…"

"I know, I know, it needs to be under twelve." She shook her head and half-smiled. "I'm working on it."

"In any case," he returned. "I've been checking various materials against the sort of conditions they'll need to withstand for extended periods in the flux space between dimensions. I've settled on these graphene sheets - they've pulled consistently good results in my testing and according to calculations, should be stable enough for at least three hundred dimensional jumps before needing maintenance."

"Sounds perfect," she replied, standing up and stretching.

"Pretty much," he noted. "The one thing I've got here is that buckypaper actually can outperform the graphene - but only under conditions of low graviton resistance. The graphene can handle it, though, but they tear a lot more of the fabric while doing so."

Candace Three raised an eyebrow. "How much more?"

"Not, like, an absolute ton," he replied. "Just around 1.7253-ish but… every fractional point counts when it's gonna be adding up over multiple trips."

"True." She shrugged. "Maybe we ought to trade jobs for a bit. You know, fresh eyes and all that."

"Perhaps." He nodded slightly. "Actually, though, I had something else I wanted to talk to you about." Then silence - so long and awkward that Candace Three turned to look at him questioningly. Other Phineas may not have been her own brother, but he was rather similar enough that it was kind of off-putting to hear him being - and thus feeling - awkward.

"What is it?"

He hesitated. "You know how a few hours ago I went to go grab the capacitor from that side office?" She nodded slightly, a bit confused, and he continued. "Yeah. Well, I, uh, I ran into Candace Seven when I went in there too."

Candace rolled her eyes, but couldn't quite stifle the feeling of nervousness that crept up inside the pit of her stomach. It really was annoying - before she'd known about where exactly Seven had come from, she'd been annoyed by her, aggravated by her constant complaining, and puzzled by her insistence on everything being Phineas' and Ferb's fault.

And all of that had also worked to make Candace Three wonder if, for the first time in her life, she'd actually found someone who was crazier than her… not in just one or two facets either, but actually overall just more… insane than she was. Which hope, of course, had been promptly dashed to pieces by the revelation that Candace Seven actually was her… a quantum duplicate, an anomalous fragment from a timeline that had apparently been averted some time ago.

That had… not been fun to find out. Candace Three knew - and had known for some time - of what she technically had the ability to do inside her. She had seen with her own eyes exactly to what lengths it was possible for her to go if she let herself. And seeing yet another of version of herself for whom the elevator didn't go all the way to the top… well, it hadn't been very reassuring.

And even now, she couldn't help but feel like she had to assure Other Phineas that whatever Seven had said wasn't true - as if he might somehow hold Seven's insults and general sour demeanor against Three herself, as if he might hold her responsible. It was a stupid worry… she knew that Seven was no more her than was Four. They were the same person by technicality only, like identical twins might be - but that technicality was nonetheless a very important one.

"What'd she do?" Three asked nervously, hoping it wasn't it anything too bad. Somehow the whole issue with Seven just felt… different now. Three was really hoping she could get over this soon, because unlike a lot of her worries, she really hated this one and wanted it gone .

"Well…" Other Phineas hesitated. "She said some… unpleasant stuff." He reached up to scratch behind his ear. "Said that, you know, she didn't like me very much."

Candace frowned. She was about ninety-five percent sure that she was being lied to by now… if there was one thing her brother could not do, it was lie. At least not effectively - his nervous tics were simply too obvious (and apparently ingrained in subconscious habit) to allow that. But she also wasn't sure that she wanted to know the truth, either - ignorance was bliss, right? It was probably better that she not know, anyway. She'd already heard Seven let some nasty things out of her mouth, and if Other Phineas didn't want to tell her, then it was probably for the best.

"Anyway," he continued, clearing his throat. "I was just, you know, wondering… if you might know anything about why she… doesn't like me?"

"No!" Candace Three exclaimed, probably a bit too hastily. "I mean… how would I know? We're - we're completely different. Surely - surely you can see that."

"Three…" he shook his head. "I know that . I'm not blaming you for it. I know how alternate timelines and such work."

Candace kicked her feet idly against the baseboard of the desk. "I know. I know, I just… it's kinda freaky all the same. I mean… she is me. Before our timelines diverged, there was no 'me'... just her. I mean, I know that's not really how it works, but that's how it feels, kinda."

Other Phineas smiled. "She's an anomaly, Three. She was never 'you' at all - just what you could have turned into. You never had to turn into her, and knowing what I do of you, I don't think you ever would have, either. Even so, she didn't even give you that choice - and made sure of that by doing… something that would anomalize her. Time travel - something to do with her own past, I guess, since that's where anomalies come from."

"I know that," Three protested, feeling sheepish. Hearing it confirmed from an outside source had helped somewhat, she supposed. Maybe this was just one of those things that took time, or something. "It just feels weird anyway." She shook her head. "But I was being honest before, too… I don'tknow why she's so against you and Ferb."

"I suppose you wouldn't." Other Phineas looked thoughtful for a second. "She would have had to have changed her own past to such a degree that her time-traveling trip to change whatever would not have happened in the first place." He frowned. "I don't really know what Candace might travel back in time to change. And given the, uh, the difference between your and her mindsets, I rather doubt you would either."

Candace Three shrugged. "I have no idea." She hadn't really done much time-traveling in her day, really, aside from one panic-trip long ago when she'd been freaking out over Jeremy Johnson breaking up with her. No, come to think of it, there had been that time with the T-Rex, too. And… and that one other time, too - the time she'd met her… met her future self?

Wait a second… when had that been again? She couldn't remember it that clearly (it had been over two decades ago now), but she was pretty sure that they hadn't gone too far into the future. She scrunched her face and tried to recall as many details of the faraway time as she could manage. She'd seen… Phineas and Ferb messing with the museum time machine again. And had hopped on board and taken a ride in the future - twenty years into the future, right? But, wait… twenty years into the future from then was…

... was last year .

And Candace Three could remember the last year much more clearly. Clearly enough to know to for sure that she had not seen a time machine, nor interacted with a version of herself from the distant past. And yet, her memory of the trip did in fact indicate that she'd met her own future self. And if she was now that future self, and hadn't interacted with her past self in that way… well, there was only one explanation.

"You know what?" She suddenly spoke up again. "I… still don't know why she doesn't like you. But I think I may remember where she came from. Because now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure I may have seen more than one alternate future as a kid."

Other Phineas raised one eyebrow expectantly. "What do you mean?"

"It was a long time ago," she started. "So I don't remember a massive amount of it, but, well - a long time ago, I got into a time machine and visited the future and ran into my future self. It was in the summer of 2017. Which I remember because that was the last year I really… 'busted', so to speak. Anyway, from that day in 2017, we traveled twenty years into the future - to last year. And I met with and talked to my future self. And also my future daughter, now that I think about it, though I can't remember very much of her ." Not much at all, although the more she tried, the more she got the impression that her daughter was much different from the Amanda Flynn that she'd seen in what she was now pretty much sure was an alternate future.

Of course, if she was right, then, based on what Seven had said… that hadn't been Amanda Flynn at all, but Amanda Johnson , which was… an interesting thought. A future version of herself had actually managed to marry Jeremy Johnson? Honestly, it somewhat helped to explain why she was so moody and grouchy all the time - she hadn't always had Phineas around to help her through rough patches in his own way like Three had always had. It didn't explain why exactly she was so against him, though… that was something that Candace Three couldn't really think of a way to explain.

"Oh," Other Phineas replied. "And even though that twenty years came and went last year - you didn't interact with a version of yourself from the past last year. Which means you were visiting an alternate future."

"Exactly." She nodded. "From what I understand, at least." She paused for a moment. "So, I guess… I guess Seven would be - would be that me from that alternate future that I saw? Strange… I remember the future me as being way taller and, you know, just more in a 'loom over me' sort of way. But I guess I was a kid then, so that's probably why." She stopped to think for a moment. "And when she traveled back through time and met me, it ended up providing me with a scenario that was never in her own past… therefore, I couldn't have made the exact choices that were necessary to become her - to lead up to her future - because I wasn't faced with the same choices that she was - I had entirely different ones presented to me."

"Well, yes," Other Phineas said, nodding. "That would be how temporal anomalies are created. Or at least one of the ways."

"I know," Candace Three said. "But it's weird to think about - you know, that I may have met her before. As a kid… and now we're the same age. And obviously that's because she time traveled back to meet me - well, probably not to meet me - but the point still stands."

"Fair enough," he conceded. "I can see how that would be off-putting, yeah."

"Mmm hmm." She nodded, drumming her fingers idly on the edge. "That… still doesn't explain why she doesn't like you, though… I mean, she's always talking about you're to fault for everything? I don't really know if that extends to the whole 'temporal anomaly' aspect of things, though." That was odd thought… but she supposed it would be decent reason to not like someone?

Of course, it didn't exactly fit, either, given what it would imply about Candace Seven's brothers. Even though they were from a different timeline, and could be completely different from even Candace Three's brothers… she still found it hard to picture any version of Phineas and Ferb in the light that Seven had constantly been painting them. It wasn't technically impossible , she supposed. With a large enough sample size, any outrageous thing is apt to happen - and this would be outrageous indeed. Especially considering Phineas and Ferb were… well, so far they'd seemed to be the closest thing to an interdimensional constant that Three had seen.

And not even necessarily about inventing , since apparently that was also something that could vary from dimension to dimension. But just their… personalities in general. It seemed to be a rather hard-and-fast rule, at least based on the Candaces she'd talked very much too, that no matter where you went, Phineas and Ferb were just… themselves. Perhaps with variances based on their surroundings, but they were still always generally the same happy-go-lucky, carefree, creative sort of people who would never hurt a fly.

(Incidentally, their lack of inclination to hurt flies in particular was something had once come into play in Candace Three's own life as well.)

That Seven's brothers were not … well, that was something that Candace Three found rather difficult to believe, even if she supposed that there was nothing explicitly preventing it from being true.

"How strange," Other Phineas mused. "I suppose that might be true? I hadn't really thought of it before, but I do suppose that anomalization, by its very definition, must be a terrible thing to experience."

"I… guess so?" Candace lowered her eyebrows in thought. Yeah, that was probably true. When something became an anomaly, it was flat-out erased from existence. Completely and entirely, except minus the actual erasal. All memory of the object, all effects the object might have once had would be gone.

…yikes. That would be pretty bad, yeah. This sort of thing was why you didn't mess with your own past, really - it was just asking for disaster. And turning into a leftover timeline fragment because the spacetime continuum needed to avert a paradox was definitely a disaster of sorts.

It would comparable to faking your own death, Candace Three supposed. Only with becoming an anomaly, it was a one-time choice… and if you chose to act in such a way that would turn you into a temporal anomaly, then there was pretty much no going back. Sometimes issues with anomalies could be resolved - but those times were few and very far between, and were all related to non-sentient anomalies - non living objects anomalized in one way or another. When dealing with living creatures, trying to get your past self to exactly redo what you had done… was basically impossible, not just because people were stubborn, but because when you originally did those things, you hadn't had someone telling you what to do.

And it was little details that made all the difference, really, especially when allowed to accumulate over ten or twenty years. And those long stretches of time you had to wait to see the difference could easily be jumped past in an instant with a time machine, making the difference seem very different indeed.

"It's certainly possible," Other Phineas agreed. "I actually wish I'd thought of it before, I… I'm pretty sure it was my fault for making her mad by poking so close to a… sensitive subject."

"I highly doubt that." Three rolled her eyes. "For Seven, sometimes I think 'mad' is like her default mood. I don't think I've ever seen her in even a halfway-decent mood."

"Still," he replied firmly. "Someone's got to be there for her. She's an anomaly, Three… she has no one . At least, she had no one. Before now."

"That is… admirable." It was also something she could totally see Phineas thinking, no matter what the odds of success were. This wasn't science… this was dealing with a woman who'd declared in no uncertain terms that she wanted nothing to do with Phineas and Ferb, who was depending on them solely for their help getting back home and nothing more. She was worse than Five in some ways, and Candace Three had already lost her temper on Five just minutes after they'd met for the first time. "Good luck, I guess. She still in that room?"

"I don't know." He frowned. "And I probably ought to wait until tomorrow anyway… it's getting late and I promised Candace I would go home tonight. I mean, I hate to leave things… hanging in the air, but that can't really be helped. Don't want to start something I wouldn't be able to finish."

"Fair enough." Candace Three wasn't quite so sure why he seemed so concerned over Seven all of the sudden - Seven'd clearly informed everyone that she wasn't fond of him many times over. "Wait, you're going home?"

He nodded emphatically. "Yes, indeed. I'm sorry if you-"

"No, no, no," she hastily clarified. "That's fine with me - great even. We'll finally get some peace and quiet from Two." Of all the Candaces, Two was not one that Candace Three found herself missing very often.

"Oh, yeah, that…" Other Phineas grimaced. "...will not be fun. But I have a feeling that she won't take 'no' for an answer anyway." He sighed slightly. "It's fine. If she wants to come and sleep on the couch or whatever, more power to her, I guess. I wish I could get her to… wind down, somehow, but I don't know if that's even possible anymore."

"Tell me about it," Candace Three muttered by way of reply. Candace Two had been under her skin ever since that one accident in the non-dimension. It was like the woman couldn't forgive just one minor thing. Well, perhaps 'minor' wasn't the right word… but come on! It was ridiculous now. 'Can't afford mistakes', her rear. Mistakes were a part of life. They'd lived, hadn't they? And it wasn't like Three was even wanting Two to forget about it (although that would have been nice), but at least to quit holding it against her.

She tried to exhale in an at least somewhat longsuffering manner, but failed and the breath came out as an exasperated huff instead. Whatever - she needed to find something to get her mind off Two, off Seven, off her other selves, really.

They weren't all bad (Six, for example, was quite pleasant, if strange herself) but most of them were from such different worlds that it was tiring to talk to them. And in the case of, say, Candace Five, probably not worth the effort. It was a shame to think about it, really - interacting with spatio-temporal duplicates of yourself was cool . But although the concept was cool, it neglected to include the fact that those duplicates were all different people. Occasionally very different, with very different views on very different things.

She turned back and collected up the papers on the desk, packing them into a neat little stack, then looked at Other Phineas again. "I'm going to get ahold of that capacitor pack of yours and start charging it up, if you don't mind. I think I should step away from the logistics until I can clear my head a bit with some of this hands-on stuff you've got going on over here."

"Alright." He gestured over another desk pushed into the far corner of laboratory area. "It's over there in that box. Gonna help with structural design or what?"

She shrugged. "Whatever." He nodded, and she paced across the length of the floor to the box he'd indicated.

It was rather awkwardly shaped, so instead of trying to move the whole thing, she decided to to cut it open and carry over only the capacitor. That would probably be easier, if not by much. Of course, it depended on how much of the box was machine and how much was space stuffed with packing peanuts.

There was a closet next to the desk, and as she was poking around, looking for a knife or pair of scissors or blowtorch or some sort of implement for cutting through and into the box, she pulled the door open. Her eyebrows rose slightly when she what was inside. Well, here was a blast from the past that she hadn't quite expected to get here, of all places.

She turned to call to Other Phineas over her shoulder. "You guys have a Neural Information Transfer headset piece in here?" She raised one eyebrow, eyeing the thick black cable sprouting from the top part of the headset's dome, snaking off to end in an oddly-shaped cable jack that was most likely designed to be plugged into the other headset - the receiving end. Or possibly sending end, if this was the receiving end, she supposed.

"What?" Other Phineas paused in the middle of doing… whatever it was that he was doing over there. She couldn't quite see him behind the skeleton of the dimension-hopping vehicle that was coming together in the middle of the lab's floor. He poked his head around one side of the prototype machine. "NIT helmets? We do? Where?"

"What on earth do you use them for?" Three continued, a bit confused. Neural Information Transfer was a nifty little technology, and rather fun to play with, but you couldn't really transfer enough information to be really useful … if you were expecting to transfer an entire book's worth of information or something into your head so you didn't have to read it, well, all you'd really get was an electric shock and a bad hair day for a good while after. The neuron structures inside your brain were not made to receive information by having it beamed directly into your skull, and trying to do it anyway would rapidly devolve into 'not fun' mode. She knew that all too well.

Other Phineas walked across the room and looked inside the closet. For a second, he seemed puzzled, but then a look of comprehension spread across his face.

"That's not an information transfer headset." He paused. "Well, I mean, it kinda is? But not in the way you're thinking of, I'm sure. It transfers information, sure, but it doesn't actually try to write it into your brain - it interfaces with your sensory lobes when brain activity is at its lowest to induce a dreamlike state, and uses a special data array to project the conscious mind into, well, basically into someone else's dreams - though it wouldn't be an actual dream so much as a dream like state of… partial lucidity."

"That's… pretty nifty."

He nodded. "Yeah, it is. Plus, that's not even the coolest part."

"Oh?"

"The best part of the thing is that it's connected to - well, it's not connected to it right now , but that's beside the point - it can be connected to a spatio-temporal projection manifold capable of transmitting the signals interdimensionally. With next to no spacetime tearing either - I found a neat way of harnessing natural flux wave instability to basically 'pull' the signal with it, which is actually really great."

"That is… really cool," Candace Three replied wonderingly. "It's like an interdimensional mind swapping device - except you restricted the power level to that of a lucid trance, so nothing is actually swapped … you just get to talk to someone. Like telepathy, or something." She was reminded of that mind swapping device her brothers had built once, a long time ago, when those hostile aliens had taken over their bodies. (And also the time her mind had gotten swapped with Perry's, but that was more of a side-effect that resulted from using beta-particle based teleportation on more than one living creature simultaneously. Not really an intention of design.) That mind swapping device had been nifty, but it had also been far larger and bulkier than this one looked. And probably vastly less efficient, too, if she had to guess without asking Other Phineas about energy expenditure.

"Ahh… yes," Other Phineas said. "That is exactly what I did. You know, eventually."

"How do you find a target in another dimension, though?" she replied. "I mean, if you're not actually ripping spacetime, then you can't see if you're going to contact someone? I guess you could just keep firing it randomly until you hit someone, but that seems like a waste of power." She furrowed her brow in thought. "Hang on, I can figure this one out. A… miniature spacetime rift? No, that would defeat the whole purpose of doing this without ripping spacetime anyway."

"No, it's much simpler than all that, actually," Other Phineas replied. "It takes a snapshot of your quantum-ion trace and genetic makeup and uses that as template when being pulled through spacetime by the flow of the flux. Obviously it won't find you specifically, but I figured out a way to get it to do a 'fuzzy match', more or less, where it just looks for something close - specifically, your counterpart in another dimension, who, although different, would still be the only trace and makeup close enough to lock the device and open a channel for your minds to establish connection."

Candace Three facepalmed. "That's … that's genius. I wish I'd thought of that. Now I feel silly."

"Of course, it does require that the person on the receiving end be sleeping - because it uses their mind as the 'docking station', so to speak… and neural activity has to be at a minimum or else it'll block the signal."

She nodded. "Makes sense." Just then, an idea popped into her head that made her eyes grow wide. Wait, no, she probably shouldn't get too excited about this. She had just heard him explain its method of targeting, and it sounded strongly as if it would only really be able to find spatio-temporal duplicates, which wouldn't help at all, because Candace Four was already here. Well, somewhere around here. Either way… stay pessimistic and you'll always either be proven right or pleasantly surprised? That wasn't a good way to live either, Candace knew, but she really didn't want to get her hopes up too high for no reason. "Say… you don't think you could fire this thing up and use it to, you know, find somebody in my dimension? You know, for me to talk to? Like, you know, Phineas - my brother, I mean?"

Other Phineas paused mid-stride as he was walking away. "I… don't think so? Your brother is, well, your brother, not you. We can definitely try, but I'm pretty sure your and his genetic makeup will be too different for the machine to be able to find him." He paused, eyeing her face. "But we can try if you want. It - it might be good to take a short break anyway."

"No, no," she protested. "I mean, it would just be a waste of time if it's not going to work. I… can wait."

"Well, you never know." He grinned. "I've never actually tried using it make contact with a person with a completely different genetic makeup before. It'll be neat… running off just your quantum-ion trace, I guess? We'll have to try to find out."

Candace Three hesitated. She really shouldn't get her hopes up. It was just asking to be disappointed, really, and yet… oh, screw it. If there was even a chance it would work, she wanted to take it - she had to take it. She knew that she was safe, and steadily getting closer to having a working method of getting home, but Phineas didn't… and oh, how he must be worrying. And the kids, too. If this might work - if it had a chance of working, she at least had to try, right? "Alright," she said aloud. "Let's do this."

Other Phineas nodded, and turned on his heel, walking back to the closet. "Sounds good to me. I didn't think you were going to say 'no' anyway, really." He picked up the headset and set it on top of the nearby desk. "I'll go wheel the big manifold out. Here, you can sit in this chair and put this thing on."

She nodded and sat down on the chair he'd pointed out, then reached out and picked up the headset, putting it on and tightening the straps snugly under her chin. The inside of the headset was padded, but it still rested somewhat heavily on her head.

"Alright," Other Phineas remarked again, reappearing behind her. She glanced at him and raised her eyebrows slightly at the large, wheeled console that he'd pushed in front of him.

It was covered in all sorts of dials and all manner of flashing lights aplenty. When he picked up the end of the large cable protruding from the headset and pushed it firmly into the appropriate receptacle on the console, the headset began humming and making her head feel a little tingly. Well, that was probably to be expected... this was going to be closely interacting with delicate brain functions which was not something she would probably have trusted many people to do.

"I've got a reading on your quantum-ion trace," he said. "And your genetics, too. Hafta tone down that part. We will… see how this goes."

"So how is this going to work, exactly?" Three asked as he fiddled with a keyboard protruding from the console. "What do I have to do? Anything?"

"Oh, right," he mumbled to himself. Speaking louder, he continued. "It's not hard - I'll walk you through it. So, you wanna just sit back, and relax, and close your eyes."

"Got it." Candace Three took a deep breath and let it out slowly, leaning back. The weird feeling in the back of her head became stronger, but she decided to resist the urge to scratch it and stay still."

"I'm turning up the power a bit," he said. "I've never connected to anyone from your dimension before, so it might take a bit longer to map a route. And the fact that we're using your genetics even though there's no one else in your dimension with your genetics - and I've got the device set to maximum fuzziness - twenty percent - which is as wide a net as I can realistically cast." He paused for a moment, and she heard a beeping noise or two. "Now, just try to, like, reach out, or something."

She nodded. It couldn't be that hard, right? What was she supposed to be doing - concentrating on reaching her brother's mind, or something? Focus on a memory of him, maybe? She didn't exactly know if any of that would work or not.

"I think we're getting close," he noted. "I'm going to give it a little more power. As long as your brother's asleep right now, this will be our best shot. Concentrate on reaching out to him."

Ha! She'd known she was supposed to concentrate on something. That was, like, how these things worked, right? So… focus on Phineas. Uh… okay? She pictured him in her mind. And his toolbox, because he would never go far without it. (Seriously, she swore that he would have taken that thing in the bed with them if she'd let him.) And perhaps what they'd been doing together before she'd fallen into the non-dimension? Taking down the Ferris Wheel together, yeah. The tingling grew stronger as she tried her best to reach into the black void behind her eyelids. Well, it wasn't guaranteed to work, was it?

"I can't believe it," she heard Other Phineas say distantly, as if he was on the other end of a long tunnel. "We've made…" his voice trailed away.

"Phineas?" she asked. "We've made wha-" She stopped, awkwardly, when she realized that her voice, too, was weirdly echoey… as if she was standing in a big open field. Wait a second…

She opened one eye and took a peek at her surroundings, then opened both wide in shock. The laboratory all around, the heavy headset on her head, the sensation of the chair she was sitting on - were all gone. Instead, she was standing in the middle of a wide open grassy plain. The sky was deep blue, and the grass was fairly tall and really quite soft. It was like a dreamland.

Well, correction. It was a dreamland. Technically.

"We made it!" she shouted, listening to her voice echo and wondering if Other Phineas could hear her. Probably not. Not that she should be calling to him anyway… she should be calling to her own brother. He had to be around here somewhere, right? Well, a casual glance around didn't reveal him to be anywhere. Okay, then… uh, what next exactly? She probably should have asked Other Phineas for more advice on how this thing worked, exactly.

Just as she was thinking that however, a most peculiar thing happened - the sky turned green. And not 'sky before a storm green' no, a bright neon green. And then it was pink. And then orange. And then yellow. And then white. And then red. And it flashed back and forth between all the colors of the rainbow with incredible speed.

"This is incredible!" she heard a distant voice shout, distorted weirdly by echoes. Wait, was that Phineas' voice? It didn't sound exactly like his… it was higher pitched, as if it was a girl's voice? But maybe dreamland had an effect on that. It didn't matter either way. She started hurrying across the grass in the direction of the voice.

"I'm actually having a lucid dream!" it came again. "I always wanted to have one of these and now I am and I can do whatever I want! Oh, oh, oh, I want to fly!"

All at once, the grassy ground dropped away from Candace at a frightening pace, leaving her hanging effortlessly in the sky. She momentarily froze in terror - but didn't fall, instead remaining suspended in the air for no other apparent reason than that she could.

"Hey!" she shouted, awkwardly half-swimming through the air. "Phineas!"

"Can I make it night?" It was suddenly night. "I can! Oh, oh, can I make it… Mars?" … and now they were on Mars. Okay, this was getting out of hand. "Can I make a taco?" Well, nothing happened that Candace could see- "A giant taco?"

-all of the sudden, an enormous taco manifested out of nowhere, landing on the Martian topsoil with an enormous banging noise, kicking up massive clouds of-

"Get out of here, dust! I want a clean giant taco."

-no clouds of dust.

But whatever. Candace had finally made it close enough to Phineas that she could make his features out more clearly - now he would be able to communicate with her and stop having dreams about giant tacos on Mars. "Phineas!" She called out. "I nee…" her voice trailed away.

"Mom?"

Candace gaped wide-eyed and open-mouthed. "Amanda? What are you doing here?"

Her daughter frowned slightly. "In my lucid dream? I mean… I'm supposed to be here, aren't I?" She paused for a second. "Wait… did I create you too? Or - or did my subconscious create you because you've been missing and no one can find you?"

"No, you didn't create me , I'm actually-"

"Disappear!"

Candace raised one eyebrow and Amanda grinned sheepishly. "So I didn't create you after all. You… uh, want some giant taco?" She snapped her fingers and the taco disappeared from behind her. "Actually, since this is a dream, I guess wasting time eating would be pointless. But, wait…" She frowned. "if you're actually here … well, where are you, anyway? I mean, your actual body - because, you know, no one's been able to find you since Wednesday. And how are you getting into my dream?"

Candace grinned slightly at the barrage of questions. "It is actually me ," she replied. "And I do know I've been missing - I fell into a spacetime rift and got trapped in another dimension and there's a machine there that can bridge dimensions to establish mental contact by projecting the sender into the receiver's… lucid dreams."

"You're in another dimension ?" Amanda echoed. "No wonder Xavier and me couldn't find you on Mars or planet Meap or the milkshake bar or any of those other planets. We even got Meap to look for you, but I guess he won't find anything either, then?"

"No, no he won't." Candace paused for a second. "I have no idea how I ended up in your head… the machine's supposed to work on a combo of quantum-ion tracking and genetic matchups and I was trying to reach Phineas but…"

"I don't even know if Dad's asleep," Amanda said. "When I went to bed, he was still on planet Meap talking to the High Council. About getting them to help us find you - 'cause we've been everywhere ." She raised her eyebrows. "We were even planning on going to go into Nowheresville tomorrow looking for you, I mean, Dad guessed you were probably there after the temporal memory disassociation wore off." She shrugged. "But if you said your machine was based on genetics? It would probably go after me anyway."

Candace thought about that for a second. Oh, well, yeah - she hadn't thought of that. The coefficient of inbreeding and all that… Amanda possessed far more genetic material in common with her than Phineas did, due to the… consanguineous nature of Candace and her brother's relationship. It should have been obvious, really, she didn't know how it had slipped past her. "That's true," she said aloud. "I wonder if Other Phineas thought about that. I know I didn't."

"'Other Phineas'?" Amanda's eyes widened slightly. "There's another version of Dad in your - in the dimension you're in? Whoa… that's cool. Is there anyone else? Another you - or a me, even?"

Candace half-smiled. "Yes and yes. There's another version of everyone here, in fact, there's lots of mes in specific because of…" she paused. "...no one seems to know why, actually - we haven't really figured it out yet. But either way, that's not important."

"But it's so cool !" Amanda repeated. "Wait a second, since this is my dream, does that mean I can be as tall as you?" She snapped her fingers again and all of the sudden, Candace found herself looking her daughter directly in the eyes. "Hey, this is neat!"

"I'm sure it is," Candace drawled. "But seriously, listen to me for a second."

"I could never get any growth serums to work," Amanda replied. "I don't know why… it's like the entire universe has been treated with growth serum and now everything's immune to it or something." She shook her head and shrank down to normal size again. "What is it?"

Candace took a deep breath. "Look, when you wake up, I need you to tell your father - and your brother and your uncle and his family and the Meapian Council, I guess? and whoever else is worried about me - that I'm okay. I'm in another dimension, yes, but I'm safe and sound, and what's more, I'm working on a way to get back home. Everything's fine , and I… I miss you all so much, but I'm fine, really. There's no need to worry about me."

Amanda nodded solemnly, which was an unusual look on her. "Is there anything we can do to help you get home? Like, I don't know… perforate spacetime or something?"

"No, you can't do that," Candace replied. "The spacetime continuum's being a pain because it's all beat up for some reason, so we're being careful to design our return method to cause the least amount of spatio-temporal flux disturbance as possible."

"Graphene sheets!"

"Yes, graphene sheets. But seriously - can you do that for me?"

The twelve-year-old girl nodded again. "I can." She hesitated. "I've been worried too, Mom. Scared, even, I - I mean, no one could find you and our memories were all temporally disassociated and - and you know."

Candace felt her heart melt and knelt down, trying to hug her daughter, only to be vastly disappointed when her arms went straight through as if she was a hologram. Well, such were the limitations of mental contact, apparently. She chuckled awkwardly and did a weird hugging-the-air thing that was sort of okay? But hardly enough, even though it would just have to do.

"I - I don't know how much longer I can stay," Candace finally said, standing back up. "I really should get back to work on getting home to you guys. It shouldn't take too much longer… I mean, it's already been like three days. A few more days is my guess at that."

"I lit the garage on fire by accident today," Amanda said, nodding slowly. "I was trying to see if I could crank more speed out of our rocketship and I accidentally set off the engine when it was pointed at the garage wall. Xavier put it out, but there's another huge black splotch on there."

"What's one more?" Candace shrugged. "As long as everyone's okay." She smiled and shook her head. "Look, I really ought to go… not only because I have work to do, but because you need to wake up and tell everybody that I'm okay. Alright?"

The girl nodded. "Wait - before you go, check this out!" She waved her hands in the air dramatically, and all of the sudden, they were standing in the middle of their living room.

The sudden sight of a scene so familiar after far too long without it caught Candace off guard. She blinked rapidly and nodded. "It's nice - it is your lucid dream after all… you can do whatever you want."

"I know, right?" Amanda grinned widely. "Of course, most of this stuff I could do anyway. But in here, it's free! And we don't even have to montage, because it's here instantly."

"Don't even have to montage," Candace agreed. She snapped her fingers, trying to will something into existence, but nothing happened. "Eh. Guess it is projecting me into your dream, after all."

"You have no power here!" Amanda joked.

Candace rolled her eyes. "Seriously, though, I should probably go. I… have no idea how to go, actually." She frowned. Well… this was an unexpected obstacle. Should she just… think about disconnecting? Try to wake herself up? Try to yell again and see if Other Phineas could hear her? A combination of all three?

"Well, we are in my dream," Amanda said. "So if I wake up, then you'll have nowhere to be, and your consciousness should snap back into your body? And since this is a lucid dream, that'll be no problem at all."

"Alright," Candace agreed. "Let's do it, then. Uh… bye, I suppose. See you later? Something like that."

Amanda raised her hand but paused for a moment before doing anything. "Bye, Mom. I'll see you later - love you."

"I love you too." Candace awkwardly waved her hand through the air where her daughter's body was, trying to simulate patting her on the shoulder and probably failing.

"You look funny doing that," Amanda commented, grinning widely. She snapped her fingers. "I wanna wake up."

All at once, the world went black.

-well, it did for about half a second, before Candace sat forwards with a jolt, again feeling the weight of the headset on the top her head and the tightness of the straps beneath her chin, the chair beneath her body, and the subtle humming on the console next to her.

"Well?" Other Phineas asked. "Did it work? How'd it go? Did you make contact with him?"

"I…" Candace paused for a moment to unfasten the chin straps and pull the headset off, setting it down on her lap. "It did work, although I didn't make contact with Phineas ." Which was… well, she really would have loved to have been able to reach her brother directly, but her daughter was just as well. At least now, they wouldn't be worrying so much about her, right? That was the important thing.

Other Phineas frowned slightly. "Then who'd you make contact with?"

"The one person in my dimension who shares the most genetic material with me," she answered. "Our daughter."

"Oh…" He blinked. "You know, I don't know how I didn't realize that would happen." He shrugged, flicking some switches to turn off the machine. "At least it worked - at least you made contact, right?"

"Indeed." Candace stood up stretched. "And I found out that they lit our garage on fire. But everyone's fine."

"I'm… sorry?"

"Eh." Candace shrugged. "We really ought to tear it down and rebuild a new one anyway. It's no big deal - the house is fireproof."

Other Phineas pushed the console along the floor, back against the far wall of the laboratory again. "At least their minds can be more at ease now," he said. "Which was the whole point."

"Yeah. And I managed to catch them before they tried to track me down through the non-dimension, which is definitely a good thing." She paused. "Also, Amanda suggests graphene sheets for the vehicle that's going to get us home."

He raised his eyebrows and smiled slightly. "Well, while you were under, I was drawing up blueprints for a machine to hybridize those with the other material I mentioned. If my rough calculations are correct, then this should be the one."

"That's awesome." She exhaled heavily. "Now I just have to get on the ball and hammer out these last few equations, and we can finish the prototype and start conducting field tests on it."

"Exactly." He nodded. "And from there, well, it's home or bust, I guess."

"Nah." Candace shook her head. "Just 'home', really. There's no other option - at least not any that I'm willing to accept."

Other Phineas nodded, turning to wave slightly in the direction of the stairwell door across the room as Candace Four pushed it open and stepped into the basement. "You know, I know exactly how you feel."

Four waved back, smiling, and crossed the basement floor until she was within the lab floor area. "Hey, Phineas. How are you?" She paused, eyeing the headset resting on the chair behind them. "Three. You guys were messing with the mind transmitter again?"

"Hey yourself," Other Phineas replied. "Yes, yes we were. Three got in touch with her… daughter, actually."

Candace Three saw Four raise her eyebrows slightly. "I did," she confirmed. "It was a bit weird. But also very neat, and, honestly, at least now they'll know to not worry about me. Or at least not as much. And Phineas can stop bargaining with the Meapian High Council to get their help finding me, because apparently that's a thing he's doing." She paused. It wasn't a bad idea, honestly, although the High Council was notoriously set in their ways and rarely able to be swayed. "I was mostly just glad to be able to hear, well, not really a 'familiar' voice, since I've been hearing familiar voices all day, including Amanda's, but it was still great to have a chance to talk with our firecracker." She reached down and patted the metal dome of the headset. "This thing is actually really handy. I like it a lot."

"It's… certainly an interesting device," Four replied, raising an eyebrow. "You know, that's the same one that made me switch places with Five last year."

Candace Three glanced over at Other Phineas. "It is? Huh, I… should probably have figured that out, I suppose. It is within the capabilities of the technology, after all."

"It is," Other Phineas agreed. "But I've basically reworked the whole thing from scratch since then, and gone through every reasonable effort to make sure that doesn't happen again." He paused for a moment, counting beneath his breath. "With all the new safety measures in place, the chance of actually accidentally swapping minds with the person you contact is a mere 0.0000015673 percent - you know, one out of every… about one and half trillion."

"I suppose that's a better safety rate than just about anything else in the world we put our trust in," Candace Three replied. "So I guess it's good enough for me."

"Anyway," Four remarked. "It's getting late now… probably about time to head home, don't you think?"

Other Phineas glanced at Candace Three, then at the desks with the blueprints and plans scattered about on them, then at the large analog clock hanging on the wall. "You're right. I'll be coming with you, then - you'll be alright down here by yourself?"

"Sure," Three replied. "Goodnight, I guess."

"'Night," Four said, turning and heading out the door, followed by Other Phineas who waved briefly at her before letting the stairwell door swing shut behind them.

Candace Three set back down on the desk chair and sighed slightly. At least for now, until Other Phineas returned in the morning, the building would be Candace Two-free. That was a good thing - there was nothing like walking to your bedroom and getting accosted as if you were a space invader or something. Which, in a way of thinking about it, Candace Six was kind of… she wasn't really 'invading', but she was from space. Which sort of fit the bill.

She should probably be heading to bed herself soon anyway - staying up too late would probably just make her more tired in the morning and she didn't want that. She was not a morning person by any means already - staying up as late as they had last night was just asking for trouble.

Besides, at least tonight she could rest easy (well, easier) knowing that her family was… less worried. They knew she was safe now, knew that there was no present harm to her wellbeing or bodily safety. Unless you believed Candace Two, there wasn't, at least.

But no one believed Candace Two.