Staggering along the sidewalk with a
bottle of Chardonnay in hand, her makeup running after an hour of sobbing, Emma
returned home to her mansion with the hope of forgetting one disaster of an
evening. Her date stood her up, leaving her to sit alone at Rocky’s Pizzeria,
downing one glass after another.
The second she walked through the
front door, she was welcomed by an overenergetic Lewis. “Hey, Mom! Hey, Mom!
Hey, Mom!” he yelled, rapidly jumping up and down like he was on a sugar rush.
“Can Marty, Phineas, and Ferb stay here? Like forever?”
Emma could barely focus on him.
“Lewis…honey…I’ve had a really rough night. Can’t this wait ‘til morning?” She
slithered out of her fur coat, letting it drop into a fuzzy heap on the floor.
She noticed Marty, Phineas, and Ferb standing not too far behind Lewis,
reminded of the babysitters she hired for the night. “Oh, right…um…here ya go.”
She reached into her purse and handed a twenty-dollar bill over to Marty.
“Thank you for your service.”
Marty looked at the crisp twenty-dollar
bill, which she would’ve imagined to be a pretty sizable reward for babysitting
in 1985. But that was beside the reason she, Phineas, and Ferb were there.
“Doc, listen,” she began to tell the wavering Emma, only to stop and see how
much of a mess she was. “What happened to you anyway? You got back a whole lot
earlier than you said you would.”
“Honey, do yourself a favor,” Emma
hiccupped. “Never go into dating.”
Going off that morose advice, Marty had
a good idea what happened to Emma.
“Hey, Mom,” Lewis once again beckoned.
“Marty, Phineas, and Ferb told me the gnarliest thing: they’re from the
future!”
“Oh, Lewis…” Emma groaned. “They
were just having a little fun with you.”
“It’s true, Doc,” Marty spoke up,
catching Emma off guard as her bloodshot eyes leered questionably towards the
teenage redhead. “We came here in a time machine that you invented. And
now, we need your help to get back to the year 2025.”
Emma continued staring at Marty for
a long minute…and then she rushed over to the nearest trashcan, vomiting into
it. It wasn’t exactly the reaction neither Marty nor the boys expected. Soon
after all the contents within her stomach were regurgitated into the trashcan,
Emma cleaned the puke off her lips and told Marty, “Get off my property right
now.”
“Doc, I’m telling you the truth!”
Marty snapped. “You’re the only one who knows how your time machine works!”
“I never…” Emma stopped for a brief
second to hurl, thinking she had more to barf out. Luckily, it was just a false
alarm. “I never invented any time machine, kid! Now, kindly leave before I…”
Without warning, Marty shoved her smartphone
in Emma’s face.
Emma found herself staring at a
photo on the future device that had Marty standing with Phineas, Ferb, and a
long-necked girl inside some sort of family entertainment center. Marty was
happily sipping on a green-colored beverage, presumably soda, while Phineas and
Ferb stood aside, exchanging in a brotherly high-five. The long-necked girl was
behind Marty, smiling; of course, one off-putting detail Emma noticed about her
was the bizarre hairstyle.
“That’s a terrible mullet she has,”
Emma disapproved.
“Never mind the photo, Doc!” Marty
griped. “Look at what I’m showing it on! When was the last time you’ve seen
anyone in 1985 carrying one of these, huh?”
“What? The fancy, oversized
Viewfinder? How much did ya pay for that toy?”
Marty’s patience wore thin with the
boozy scientist. “I’m telling the truth, Doc! You gotta believe me!”
“O.K., Future Girl,” Emma scoffed.
“How ‘bout providing me with some future insight? By the year 2018, who will be
President of the United States?”
Marty smirked from the easy
question. “Donald Trump.”
Emma immediately burst with
laughter. “Donald Trump?! Seriously?! Who’s Vice President – Hugh Hefner?!” She
stood up from her hunched position over the trashcan, hostilely advancing on
Marty, Phineas, and Ferb. “And I suppose Ivana Trump is the First Lady! And Ron
Jeremy is the Secretary of Defense!”
In her ranting, Emma backed Marty
and the boys right out through the front door and onto the porch. “Doc, wait a
sec! You gotta listen!” Marty pleaded.
“I’ve heard enough jokes for one
night, young lady! Good night and good riddance!”
While looking at Emma’s shouting
face of disbelief, Marty detected something that she wished she had sooner. Just
as Emma furiously shut the door, Marty stuck her foot in to keep it pried open,
at the painful risk of the door slamming right into the foot itself.
Thankfully, her Nikes cushioned much of the blow.
“The bruise!” she bellowed. “That
bruise on your head!”
Emma froze for a brief moment,
lightly touching the area above her right eyebrow. It was the one part of her
face that was heavily applied with contour. She then defiantly told Marty, “I
don’t have a single bruise on my face, kid!”
“Yes, you do! You just contoured it!”
Marty indicated. “You told me the whole story about it. You were standing on
the toilet, hanging your clock, when you fell and hit your head. When you came
to, Lewis found you lying there, staring up at the ceiling and mumbling to
yourself. You said, ‘I got it!’ And that’s when you came up with the idea for
the Flux Capacitor, which makes time travel possible.”
Emma froze again, much longer this
time, hearing Marty’s spot-on recap of her “eureka” moment, which had only
occurred earlier that morning for the drunken scientist – who sobered up rather
suddenly.
After a few seconds of standing
frozen in stunned silence, Emma fainted.
Marty and the boys looked down at
her unconscious body, curiously.
“A
fall like that is certain to evoke another brilliant idea,” Ferb
observed.
---------------------------
As soon as Emma regained her
senses, she drove everyone out in her 1978 AMC Pacer D/L Wagon to the
countryside, specifically the construction site for Marty’s future
neighborhood. They stopped at the Lyon Estates billboard. Marty and the boys
led Emma and Lewis behind where the DeLorean time machine was stashed beneath
piles and piles of bushes.
Emma and Lewis were in awe as they
gazed on the fully-functional Flux Capacitor within the time machine, looking
exactly as how Emma drew it in her specs that morning. “It works…It works!” she
cried out in immense jubilation. “I finally invent something that works,
Lewis!”
“You really did it, Mom!” Lewis
congratulated her.
Cutting their celebration short,
they hitched the DeLorean behind Emma’s Wagon, covered it with a tarp, and
returned it back to the mansion’s garage. Curious to know more about the
functions of the future technological achievement, Marty and the Flynn-Fletcher
brothers showed Emma and Lewis the footage recorded on Marty’s phone of the
experiment.
“Oh, my!” a mortified Emma exclaimed
once she got a look at her 2025 counterpart on the recording. “I look so
ancient!”
“You look like Great Aunt Vera!”
Lewis equated, much to his mother’s chagrin.
Moving past the shock of seeing her
older self, Emma focused her attention on Marty’s smartphone, which she
perceived with more genuine fascination in her sober frame of mind. “Such a
magnificent device – a phone that’s also a camera, a calculator, a computer, and
a TV, all in one! You sure Bill Gates isn’t the president in 2025?”
They continued watching the footage
until the 2025 Emma Brown said something on the recording that caused her 1985
self to fly into panic.
“1.21 JIGOWATTS?!?!”
It was enough to make her flee back
into the mansion and into her study, plopping herself onto her couch and
curling into a fetal position. Marty and the boys caught up with her, confused
as to why she was so alarmed. “What is a jigowatt anyway?” Marty asked.
“All we need is a little plutonium,”
Phineas said.
Emma sat up on the couch, looking
incredulously at Phineas. “A little plutonium?! Do you have any idea how
dangerous it is to get plutonium in 1985? I’m sure you kids learned about the
nuclear arms race in whatever schools they have in 2025!”
“I think you guys are stuck here,”
Lewis told the time travelers.
“Well, we can’t be stuck
here,” Phineas negated.
“That’s right – we got lives in
2025,” Marty said. “Phineas has a girlfriend waiting for him!”
Phineas raised an eyebrow. “I do?”
“Is she cute?” Emma asked with a
smile, her interest held on the topic.
“She’s the sweetest lil’ thing, Doc.
Her name’s Isabella.” Marty brought up a photo on her phone of a dark-haired
girl with a large pink bow in her hair.
“Isabella?” Phineas reacted
doubtingly. “She’s just a friend, Marty.”
Seeing the photo only made Emma feel
worse about her inability to help the time travelers. “Marty, honey, I’m so
sorry…but unless one of us has the guts to break into a government-sanctioned
military base, the only other power source capable of generating 1.21 jigowatts
of electricity is a bolt of lightning.”
Those last few words sparked an idea
in Marty. “Say that again?”
“A bolt of lightning,” Emma
repeated. “The only thing about it is that you never know when or where it’s
ever gonna strike.”
Marty reached into her rear jeans
pocket, retrieving a folded piece of paper that she kept tucked in there for
the longest time. She unfolded the paper and handed it over to Emma. “We do
now,” she told her.
Noticing the paper she gave to Emma,
Phineas asked in wide-eyed astonishment, “Wait…isn’t that Baljeet’s flier?”
Emma glanced over the flier, seeing
that it depicted a historical event in 1985 that had yet to happen: a bolt of
lightning struck the courthouse clock tower on the night of November 12, 1985.
Reveled by this information, Emma exclaimed, “Eureka! It says here that the
lightning is gonna strike the tower at precisely 10:04p.m., next Tuesday night!”
“We could harness the lightning and
channel it into the Flux Capacitor!” Lewis surmised. “That should be enough to
get Marty, Phineas, and Ferb home!”
“Exactly!” Emma concurred. “Next
Tuesday night, we’re sending them...”
“Yes! Now we’re talkin’!” Marty
cheered. “Tuesday sounds good. We could spend a week here in 1985. Lewis can
show us around some of the great hangout spots. Maybe we can—”
“No!” Emma immediately disallowed.
“Marty, listen to me. For as long as you three are here in 1985, you cannot
– must not – leave this house or talk to anybody. Anything you do here
could have serious consequences to future events. Do you understand me?”
Marty frowned. “Well, that would’ve
been important to know sooner!”
“Why?” Lewis asked. “Who else did
you guys talk to today before us?”
“Just Marty’s dad and my mom,”
Phineas shrugged. “But that couldn’t have—”
“Great Scott!” Emma cried, grabbing
the sides of her head as she mentally recalled a miniscule detail from earlier
that now carried great importance to the current discussion. “Marty, lemme see
that picture you showed me before – the one of that long-necked girl with the
weird mullet.”
“You mean Candace?” Phineas
identified. “She never had a mullet – not that we know of.”
“That only further concerns my
theory,” Emma said, just as Marty handed her phone over to her with the picture
in question on display. Glancing at Candace again, she alerted the youths,
“Just as I thought! Look at Candace!”
Marty and the boys saw what she did:
Candace’s head was completely gone!
“Where did it go?” Marty asked.
“It’s like it’s been photoshopped out.”
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