"Outatime" - Chapter Nine

            It was a moderately quiet Saturday morning in Hill Valley when Heinz Doofenshmirtz and his accomplice, Yokai, arrived via time portal. It opened in the shadowed portion of an empty alley between a drug store and a gas station. No one witnessed their emergence, which was adequate for Yokai.

            “November 8th, 1985,” Heinz said as he looked on the town square just across from their alley. He breathed in the 1980s air, coughing roughly afterwards. “Smells as bad as I remember,” he gagged.

            “You’re wasting time!” Yokai barked.

            “Am I really?” Heinz balked. “I mean, we are time travelers. We got all the time we want.”

            “It doesn’t work like that! Any mistakes we make here and now cannot be undone, not without the risk of running into our past selves! That’s why it’s imperative that you find Emma Brown’s time machine before November 12th at 10:04pm.”

            “Why am I the only one doing the legwork here? What’re you gonna be doing?”

            “That is my business and none of yours.”

            Heinz huffed. “Alright, fine. At least tell me why we need Emma Brown’s time machine when we have a perfectly good ‘Time-inator’ that brought us here.”

            “I don’t want a time machine…I want the time machine. Brown’s DeLorean is the key to all of time itself – the very pinnacle of the continuum!”

            Struck by Yokai’s intense phrasing, Doofenshmirtz was more than convinced.

            The mad inventor set off on his mission, while Yokai disappeared back through the time portal. Just as soon as Heinz stepped out of the alley, he bumped into a pedestrian – a busty, short-haired young brunette in a karate gi, accompanied by a pack of weasels. Unfortunately, she was drinking a purple slushie at the time, leaving a big purple stain on her karate gi.

            Fuming over the accident, she grabbed Heinz by the collar of his lab coat and aimed her fist for his face. “Hope you’re on your way to the pharmacy, ‘cause you’re gonna need a lot of medicine after I’m done with ya!” she threatened.

            “No! No! I’m sorry! Totally my fault!” Heinz pleaded. “I can pay you back! See?” He pulled a hundred-dollar bill out from his wallet, flashing it to the young brunette and her weasel friends, their eyes filled with dollar signs.

            “A hundred smackers?!” exclaimed the weasel in the light pink double-breasted zoot suit. “Can you imagine what we could do with that much dough, Tiff?!”

            “I dunno, but I can imagine quite a bit,” Tiff (the brunette) said.

            Heinz forgot how much $100 was worth in 1985. He still had another crisp hundred in his wallet. In that moment, a devilish idea struck him. Sensing evil intentions within Tiff and her weasel buddies, he offered, “How’d you kids like to make another $100?” Those dollar signs in their eyes got even bigger.

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            The past three days in 1985 Hill Valley had been an educational experience for Marty and the Flynn-Fletcher brothers. They spent the majority of the time working with Linda for her performance that Saturday afternoon at the Century Café. Linda’s confidence seemed to have grown over the course of time, just as Marty and the boys hoped it would.

            They were just about to leave the Brown residence to meet up with Linda at the café, before Lewis suddenly intercepted. “Marty,” he beckoned. “Something’s been up with Mom.”

            “What is it?” Marty asked, her concern for Emma suspending their departure.

            She followed Lewis into Emma’s lab, a.k.a. the garage. Emma spent a lot of the past three days cooped up there, working tirelessly on her plan for sending Marty and the boys back to 2025. She didn’t even look like the glamorous woman they first met those few nights ago; she started to look more like her future counterpart with her unkempt hair and dirtied clothes, which consisted of a formerly white undershirt and a blue mechanic jumpsuit – the upper portion tied around her waist.

            When Marty and the boys came to the garage, they found her sitting on the hood of the partially covered DeLorean, holding Marty’s smartphone close to her wearied face. Marty wondered where it had been lately.

            “deGrasse’s still in there! I have to check on him!”

            “No, wait, Doc!”

            Those were the voices Marty and the boys heard from recorded footage that Emma played back several times on the phone. They were the voices of Marty herself and Emma’s 2025 counterpart, shortly before the latter was murdered. “She’s been watching just that part since last night,” Lewis informed, keeping his voice down to a whisper. “What happened after that? It just cuts off from there.”

            Lewis’s curiosity was as justified as Emma’s. They were owed an explanation.

            “Hey, Doc?” Marty spoke up, announcing their presence in the garage.

            Emma jolted immediately once she heard Marty’s voice. “Oh! Marty! I didn’t even hear you come in.” She jumped off the DeLorean, handing Marty’s phone back to her. “I was just, uh, admiring your video-phone device. It’s quite fascinating.” Her jitteriness was evident in her address. Clearly, she was intrigued by what she had seen in the video but couldn’t bring herself to discuss it.

            Marty, on the other hand, knew it needed to be. “Look, Doc, there’s something Phineas, Ferb, and I didn’t tell you about the night we recorded this—”

            “I don’t want to discuss, Marty!” Emma snapped.

            “But you don’t understand—”

            “No, I do understand! If I know too much about my own future, I could endanger my own existence, just as you all have endangered yours!”

            Marty frowned at this logic. “It’s not the same thing! Your future’s—!”

            “Marty,” Phineas stepped in with a calm breath. “Just let it go.”

            Much as she didn’t want to, Marty realized what Phineas was trying to get her to comprehend. Emma’s mind was made up and no one – not even Marty – was going to make her see reason. “Alright…fine,” she consented. “You made your point.”

            “Now then,” Emma proceeded, leading the youths to a crude plywood tabletop model of Hill Valley town square. “I spent the last couple of nights working on this. Please excuse the crudity of this model, I didn’t have time to build it to scale or to paint it.” She gestured to a nail attached to a piece of wood with a watch strapped around it – Marty and the boys figured it represented the Clock Tower.

            “We put a lightning rod on the clock tower and run some industrial strength electrical cable from the rod, across the street.” Emma then brought out a red remote-controlled racecar with a wire sticking straight up from the back and a hook on the top. “Meanwhile, we’ve outfitted the DeLorean with a big hook directly connected to the Flux Capacitor…”

            Phineas had noticed a similar rig on the actual DeLorean. “So that’s what that is!”

            “Affirmative,” Emma nodded before continuing, “At the calculated moment, you start off from down the street driving toward the cable accelerating to eighty-eight miles per hour. According to that flyer you gave me, at 10:04pm, the lightning will strike the clock tower, sending 1.21 Jigowatts into the Flux Capacitor and returning all of you back to 2025!”

            “Good deal, Doc,” Marty approved.

            “So now,” Emma began again, holding the remote control to the racecar. “Who’s gonna be the driver?”

            Phineas started to reach for the controller, but it was quickly seized by Marty. “Since I’m the only one whose legs reach the pedals, I’ll be the one driving,” she stated.

            “I knew we should’ve brought the controller with us from 2025,” Phineas sulked.

            Marty took position at one end of the model from an area of town that faced in the direction of the clock tower. Emma stood near the “lightning rod” with a stripped wire plugged into the AC outlet. As soon as she told Marty to go, Marty operated the RC car to speed toward the strung wire. Emma touched the live wire to the nail just as the RC car snagged the cable.

            POP! Sparks flew and the RC car caught on fire, flying off the table.

            Emma managed to put it out with an available fire extinguisher before it could’ve done any further damage. She afterwards gazed on Marty and the boys, whose faces were as white as ghosts. “Never fear. I’ll handle the lightning; you kids take care of young Miss Flynn.”

            “Young Miss Flynn?” a mesmerized Marty uttered. She only then realized what Doc had said once she snapped out of the trance she was put into and exclaimed, “We’re supposed to meet up with her at the café!” He urged Phineas and Ferb to follow her out. “We’ll see you guys later!”

            “Hold up!” Lewis called. “I’m comin’ with you!”

            Emma was glad to see him hanging out with their time-traveling houseguests. It was difficult for her to see him stuck in the house every day, playing Nintendo or watching television, when he wasn’t doing his own inventing every now and then. And even though Marty, Phineas, and Ferb would only have been there in 1985 for a few more days, they were the best friends Lewis ever made.

            Alone in the garage, Emma noticed Marty’s smartphone left near the model.

            The unbearable urge to watch that video again returned.