A few years before the summer of 2007

Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated!

Dramatically, a small teal platypus burst (literally) through the door of a large purple and green penthouse in a shower of splinters and broken wood, landing in a crouch with one tiny paw raised off to the side, and his hat tilted at a perfect angle down over his eyes. If you listened closely, you might have heard an accompanying musical sting.

"Ah, Perry the Platypus! What a completely unexpected surprise! And by unexpected, I mean COMPLETELY EXPECTED!"

It wasn't the first time Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz had said something like that since they'd met, and it seemed unlikely to be the last.

Seconds later, in what Agent P suspected was going to be part of the recurring theme from now on, Dr. Doofenshmirtz pressed a tiny control box that was in his hand, and a cage fell down from the ceiling, engulfing him.

"There, see?" Doofenshmirtz gloated. "I even predicted where you were going to stand, so I could set up a perfect trap for you! Not bad, huh?" He hesitated. "Well, I mean, technically it is bad, because that's the point, it's supposed to be bad, but I mean 'not bad' as in it worked right, not 'not bad' as in good or something disgusting like that. ...You get what I mean, right?"

It was all Agent P could do not to roll his eyes, even as he made a mental note to come in through the window next time. It definitely wouldn't do to become too predictable when he was fighting with his archnemesis.

Doofenshmirtz cleared his throat awkwardly after a second and turned toward the large machine sitting in the middle of the room, next to the recliner. It looked like something between a photo booth and a giant blender, decorated with all kinds of lights and wires.

"Oh, what's this? Well, I'll tell you, since you didn't ask! It's a Time Travel-Inator!" He raised his arms dramatically, as if his words were being accompanied by a flash of lightning.

The fact that it was a beautiful, utterly cloudless summer day did nothing to deter his enthusiasm.

"You see, Perry the Platypus, I've had a lot of unhappy backstories in my time-my parents disowned me and sent me to live with ocelots before tricking me into immigrating to America just to get rid of me, I couldn't get people to buy my homemade bratwurst because they were all under the delusion that hotdogs are superior food, I lost a science fair to a baking soda volcano..." He waved a bony hand when he saw how high Agent P's eyebrow was raised. "Don't worry, I'm sure I'll have more time to explain all of those to you one day and everything I just said will make more sense. But the point is, I've had a lot of terrible backstories and abysmal failures that eventually drove me into evil. But recently-"

Suddenly his tone, which had been as bombastic and hammily evil as possible, dropped into something darker, and his bushy eyebrows sunk down over his eyes as his jaw clenched.

Agent P felt a chill of unease run down his spine, something he'd never experienced before in the presence of his nemesis. He didn't think he liked it.

"Recently something far, far worse happened."

"You might not know this, Perry the Platypus, but I'm in the middle of a very messy divorce-" actually, he did know that, having been debriefed about it by O.W.C.A., but there was no need to divulge that information- "and yesterday we were in court to get some details settled, and the question came up about who would get custody of our daughter, Vanessa."

Doofenshmirtz reached into the pocket of his lab coat and produced a large black wallet with "DEW" on the side; for a weird moment Agent P thought he heard a jingle that sounded like "Doofenshmirtz Evil Wallet!" randomly play. His nemesis, however, didn't seem to hear it, and just opened the wallet to show off some photos of a serious-looking, dark-haired little girl.

As he looked at them, Doofenshmirtz's glare faded, replaced with a warm smile. "There she is, my sweet little future harbinger of doom. Isn't she just adorable?" Then his expression returned to that dark glare from before, as he folded the photos back into his wallet. "I wanted to have full custody of her-or even just half the time, so I could see her on a regular basis and, you know, teach her to follow in my evil footsteps one day. But that dummkopf judge decided that just because Charlene has more money than me, and seems more 'emotionally stable,' she's going to have sole custody over her, and I'm only gonna get to see her on weekends and stuff!"

As he spoke, Doofenshmirtz was working himself into more and more of a frenzy-and, Agent P realized with surprise, he didn't just sound angry, or even genuinely evil: he was distraught. It made an uncomfortable feeling squirm in the little platypus's gut.

"So, Perry the Platypus, in order to fix this I have built the Time Travel-Inator, so I can go back to yesterday and change the judge's mind by wearing a proper suit at the court proceedings instead of my labcoat, so he'll think I'm a proper emotionally stable person instead of a 'wackjob pharmacist' like he accused me of being! Ha!"

...Okay, there were...several flaws in that logic-and not just the unethical kind. Perry had no idea where to start in pointing them out, even if he had been capable of speaking, so he just settled with giving Doofenshmirtz a long, flat stare.

Doofenshmirtz put his hands on his hips and glared at him. "Oh, don't look at me like that! Everyone says that first impressions are very important!" Then he tilted his head with a quizzical frown. "...Even though they also say that first impressions are often wrong, don't they? So I'm not sure what to believe, when it really boils down to it-"

Random tangent or not, Perry had decided that enough was enough. While he definitely sympathized with Doofenshmirtz's situation, trying to alter the laws of time and space in order to change the situation was going too far. Especially because knowing him, he'd find some way to accidentally wreak havoc on the timeline.

In a swift movement he finished sawing through the bars with the string of razor dental floss that had been in his hat, and lunged free, before whipping around to smack the man in the face with his tail.

"Seriously, Perry the Platypus?!" Doofenshmirtz demanded as he lunged into battle. "You couldn't just let me have this?! It's got nothing to do with wanting to take over the Tri-State Area, or anything even all that evil unless I use the Time Travel-Inator to instead go back and rewrite the constitution with a special clause that gives the father the right to keep the children in a divorce-say!" His eyes lit up. "That's actually a pretty good idea for how I could-ow!"

And that's exactly why it's a bad idea for you to use that thing. Perry knocked him to the floor, and leaped onto the monitor of the -inator to look for the self-destruct button.

Unbeknownst to him, as he identified and rushed towards it, his little platypus feet hit a series of buttons that changed around the coordinates (which were already programmed) from "Yesterday" to a date at some point in 1972, and one of his webs flipped a switch that changed its intended function from "Transport" to "Retrieve."

And just before he could hit the self-destruct, a pair of large hands grabbed him around the middle and tossed him away, and while he spun around, one of Doofenshmirtz's elbows accidentally smashed into the green "Start" button.

"HA!" Doofenshmirtz crowed triumphantly, "Nice try, Perry the Platypus, but you can't stop me this time-" He noticed that the Time Travel-Inator had started flashing and humming, and the set of lights on top was flashing rapidly on and off. "...Wait, what did you do?"

Seconds later he was knocked almost senseless by another blow to the jaw, and barely managed to grab Perry's tiny arm as he stumbled away from the machine so he could continue to grapple with him and keep him from shutting it down at the same time.

Both of them froze, however, at the loud DING! emitted by the -inator, followed by a loud, terrified yell.

They slowly turned around, still frozen in the act of combat, and saw a teenage boy with a duffle bag curled up on the floor of the -inator, looking like he was two seconds away from having a heart attack.

After a moment Doofenshmirtz said, "...I don't know what I was expecting, but it definitely wasn't that."