PaF - Fatetrapped 54

It didn't take long to find the others once Phineas enabled the paradox sniffer. Both Ferb and his dream self were inside some sort of interdimensional bubble full of... ghosts? Ferb's explanation wasn't very clear, and Candace suspected that he didn't understand either. Perry was floating in an eerily empty area of the void, and they found Dr Doofenshmirtz on what seemed to be Derse's moon. But the coordinates were nowhere near Derse, or any part of the game.

According to Phineas, it was another game, attached to a completely different universe. There were a lot, he said, scattered throughout paradox space. Uncountably many. They didn't see any of the players during their brief stop, but Doofenshmirtz apparently had.

Candace didn't really want hang around and sightsee. They had their own game to get back to. She was sure whoever was playing this one had it under control. Nothing was exploding, as far as she could see.

"Hey, guess what?" said Dr Doofenshmirtz, as soon as they were out of the other game's incipisphere. "I found out what a meowrail is!"

Perry rolled his eyes at him. It was obviously something they'd argued about. They argued about everything, according to Ferb, which Candace didn't really understand. It was Perry, right? The platypus? Who didn't talk?

Doofenshmirtz slumped into a chair and said "You know, I am never, ever doing that again."

"If we're lucky, we won't have to," said Phineas. He almost sounded tired.

"What exactly was 'that'?" asked Candace. She was the one who'd saved them, in the end. She deserved to be told what was going on.

"You know how when you're about to die, your life kind of flashes before your eyes?" said Doofenshmirtz, waving a hand in front of his face.

"Yeah, of course," said Candace. She'd never personally experienced it during any of her near-death experiences, but it probably happened to someone. Somewhere.

"Well, it wasn't really like that," said Doofenshmirtz. "It was more like... whatever the opposite of a flash is. A long, long... exposure."

Candace thought she understood. "You remembered everything that ever happened to you." She didn't know much about Doofenshmirtz's past, but she'd heard enough to understand why he might not want to go through all that again. Odd that Phineas seemed to feel the same way, though.

"Not exactly," said Phineas. "Uh... Do you know what a Scratch is?"

"Pocketing the cue ball in pool," said Candace, who was getting sick of all the unexplained jargon.

"No--" said Phineas.

"Actually..." said Ferb.

They looked at each other for a second, then Phineas went on. "Well, in game terms, it means resetting the game. And also... the entire universe the game was played in."

Candace said "Go on..." She didn't like the sound of this. This was how they were going fix everything? She didn't want to be reset. She'd put way too much effort into her life, and so had a lot of her friends.

"Well, that's the idea, but it involves scratching an artifact on the hero of Time's planet, and the kids don't have a hero of Time..." Phineas continued.

"But we did!" Doofenshmirtz put in, grinning.

"What?" said Candace to Doofenshmirtz. "When did you ever play the game? I mean, okay, Phineas and Ferb played it in that freaky alternate reality where I was their mom, but when did you do it?" It was beginning to seem like it was more unusual not to have played the game, like some kind of world ending Farmville, or whatever people played now. It had been a while since she'd kept track.

"Before the Scratch!" said Doofenshmirtz, like it was obvious. "I was the Bard of Doom!"

Candace just narrowed her eyes at him. She'd had enough of this.

Phineas tried to explain. "You know how we were all sent to Earth on meteorites?" he said.

Candace narrowed her eyes at him instead, then nodded.

"The meteorites landed at different times before the Scratch. For me and Ferb and your kids, it was just like the alternate reality!"

"Okay..." said Candace slowly. So it was another alternate reality where her kids were her brothers and her brothers were her kids. She could handle it. "And Dr Doofenshmirtz landed at the same time?"

"And the twins landed in the 60s!" Phineas agreed. "So did Alicia, more or less."

Candace thought she got it. "So... you three played the game, and reset it. I mean 'Scratched' it." She made the most exaggerated quotation fingers she could without the use of special equipment. "And that's what you were dreaming about?"

"And Monobrow," said Doofenshmirtz.

"Okay, next question," said Candace. It all made sense so far. "Why did you reset the entire universe?"

"Well..." said Phineas. "It was Dr D's idea..."

Doofenshmirtz looked smug. "I kept telling them we were all doomed, and they didn't listen. I even wrote a song about it!" He cleared his throat.

Phineas cut him off hurriedly. "We couldn't complete the game because we didn't have a Hero of Space, and we couldn't go home because Earth was destroyed by meteors."

"And what made you think resetting would help?" said Candace. If she thought of it as resetting only the game, it was a little easier to think about.

"Before we did it, Ferb edited the game and set the classes for the new players," said Phineas. "We figured if the Earth got destroyed again, and our kids got superpowers, they should at least have superpowers that can fix it."

"So... can they do that?" said Candace. Hal had saved Fred's life, so if the five of them could do the same for eight or nine billion people, or whatever they were up to now... How long would that take them?

"Yeah!" said Phineas. "We just need to tell them how. Ferb?"

Ferb projected a spirograpth onto a nearby blank wall.

"Hey, that's the... That's the same slideshow from the dream!" said Doofenshmirtz. "You've been awake, what ten minutes? Where... Where did you get the time to recreate that?"

Ferb blinked, and clicked through the slides as Phineas explained.

"We needed a hero of Space and a Hero of Void to do the heavy lifting," said Phineas. "Space is nothing without void to separate it. Uh, I guess it is, but would just be a supermassive black hole the mass of the entire universe, or maybe a star, and..." He seemed to realise that he was rambling. "Obviously the heroes of space and void would both have to have active titles. But not too active."

He was talking like Candace had a clue what active titles were. But she could guess, and it probably wasn't that important, so she nodded.

"Space and void would take care of all the matter in the universe," Phineas continued, "but without Heart and Mind, none of the people would have, uh... hearts or mind. Metaphorically speaking. We needed passive titles for those, so the active heroes could channel them."

Candace nodded again. She thought maybe they should be telling that to the kids. They were the ones who were apparently going to restore all the matter in the universe to its original form.

She hoped the kids were still okay.

"Then all we needed was an aspect to bring everyone back to life," said Phineas.

Ferb clicked to a slide that showed three different symbols. One was two wavy lines, one above the other, one looked like a cut with blood dripping from it, and one of them was... some sort of... vine, maybe?

"The most obvious choice was Life," said Phineas, tapping the vine, "but Blood and Breath also have tenous connections with life. We went with an active hero of Breath. We thought it would be the most useful."

"He thought it fit," said Ferb, in a loud whisper.

They began to pass through an asteroid field, which according to the radar was the Veil of their own Incipishere. Candace couldn't help noticing that none of the meteors were moving anymore. Had the Reckoning ended? Or had the kids actually stopped it? They couldn't have.

"Are you sure they can do this, Phineas?" said Candace. "They are just kids, you know. Not exactly saving the world material."

"Candace," said Phineas in a calming tone. "How many times did we save the world when we were their age? They'll be fine!"

Candace had never saved the world at their age, and Phineas and Ferb had only done it once or twice. Still, it was a bit reassuring.

Candace stared out the window as the stripes ahead of them resolved into the Mobius strip of the Battlefield. The first thing she noticed was the Black King, who seemed to just be standing there. She used her telescope app to zoom in.

Xavier was floating in front of him in his new superhero sidekick pajamas. He turned slightly in Candace's direction, and with a start, she saw that he was crying. He never cried.

Xavier yelled something haltingly, and the Black King looked startled, let go of his staff, and shrank down into a human.

"Fred?" said Candace aloud. The Black King was Fred now? What? She knew she'd seen both of them in the same place at the same time. It didn't make any sense for him to be the Black King. It didn't even make sense for him to imitate him. She couldn't see how it would help.

Dr Doofenshmirtz was standing behind her. "I can't wait to find out what happened here!"


Back | First | Next