"Outatime" - Chapter Fourteen

            Along one corner of the Courthouse Square, a humble farmer started a used cars business. He figured it was in the perfect place – adjacent to the local gas station. However, there was one problem that his wife had no qualms in reminding him, late that summer evening of June 21st, 2025. He just wished she hadn’t done it in front of a group of teenagers across the street, all of whom were filming their squabble on their smartphones.

            “How do you plan on running a used cars lot without any used cars?!” she nagged.

            Sure enough, the farmer (as always) was unprepared for the new business venture, failing to stock with the requisite merchandise. It happened many times before with the bunny farm, a van rental place, a mountain spring water bottling plant, a monkey basketball team, a Biological Oddities Museum, and a dragon-themed amusement park.

            Usually, when this happened, some mysterious force would bring the required stock to the farmer’s establishment; but, with the evening being so quiet and not a cloud in the sky, he doubted a bunch of used cars would just fall out of the sky. Nonetheless, his wife still berated him, “A bunch of used cars aren’t just going to fall out of the sky!”

            And then, suddenly…

            POW! POW! POW!

            They were stunned by a series of sonic booms and a flash of light at the corners of their eyes. The recording teens were taken aback as well, hit with a sharp blast of wind, just as something appeared in view of their videophones, screeching down the street and crashing into the boarded-up movie theater down the block.

            The farmer, his wife, and the teens looked down the street in wide-eyed bewilderment, seeing what appeared to have been a strangely-modified DeLorean backing out of the big hole in front of what used to be the theater. Seeing it, the farmer meekly told his wife, “Well, it didn’t fall from the sky, but it still counts.”

            The DeLorean pulled up near the used car lot. Its exterior was covered in ice, emitting puffs of cold fusion vapor. The driver’s side, gull-wing door opened and a redheaded girl jumped out, surveying her surroundings with the utmost glee. “Yes! We did it! We’re back!”

            The passenger’s side door opened as well, and two boys (one redheaded, the other green-headed) also regarded the late-night atmosphere. “It seems that we have,” the redheaded boy said. “Unless…”

            “Unless what, Phineas?” the girl said to him. “Everything feels like 2025 to me.” She noticed the teens filming them on their phones and waved. “Look! Kids on their iPhones, streaming us! You can’t tell me this isn’t 2025!”

            “I just meant that it feels like we’re here much earlier than we should be.”

            To verify his suspicion, he glanced at the LED clock outside the local bank – the time read “1:24a.m.”

            Phineas frowned. “We’re a whole ten minutes early! Marty, what’d you…?”

            He turned to find her back in the DeLorean, putting the car in forward gear, only for the engine to die again. “No!” she cried in a desperate attempt to turn it over, with minimal success.

            Noting her desperation, Phineas could only figure as to why Marty had put them ten minutes early from their intended destinated time. He moved to confront her, but Marty was already out of the DeLorean, abandoning it – as well as the Flynn-Fletcher brothers – to run on foot in the direction of the mall.

            Phineas saw no point in chasing after her. Instead, he turned to his brother and instructed, “C’mon, Ferb. Let’s fix that problem with the engine like we should’ve from the beginning.”

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            Exhausted yet resolute, Marty’s pace withered as she finally arrived at Twin Pines Mall – a minute shy of the time that she hoped to get there. In her debilitation, she thought the mall’s entrance sign read “Lone Pine Mall,” with a single pine on the logo. But she was too focused on the scene happening at the parking lot to bother with whatever Mandala Effect occurred with the sign.

            She arrived at the moment Doc, along with Marty’s past self and those of Phineas and Ferb, were cornered by the man in the kabuki mask. From her spot near the entrance sign, she gained a new vantage point of the moment, spotting the culprit behind Doc’s disintegration – a maniac pharmacist.

            Unfortunately, Marty was too late to avert the disintegration itself, as it happened exactly as before. Mortified, Marty was left to witness the repeated events – a rerun of her time previous to going back to 1985 – with the kabuki man attempting to destroy the DeLorean before the other Marty, Phineas, and Ferb jumped in and madly speeded throughout the parking lot.

            The kabuki man surfed on his nanobot wave, gaining on the DeLorean as it accelerated until it was enveloped in a blinding white glow and vanished out of 2025. Momentarily losing control of his wave, the kabuki man suffered a painful wipeout, tumbling across the pavement. The pharmacist – and Doc’s murderer – rushed to check on him.

            Seeing this as her chance to go to where Doc’s ashes were, Marty left her post and hid beside the overturned Brown Enterprises multi-step truck. She saw that deGrasse managed to get out of it, safe and unharmed, and kept the hefty Great Dane close by her. She overheard the pharmacist ask his dark associate, “Hey, you O.K. there, buddy? That was a really nasty fall!”

            “Leave me be!” the kabuki man flared.

            “Alright, sheesh!” the pharmacist ridiculed. “That’s what I get for being a good Samaritan for once! This is why I opt for evil!”

            “Do you have any idea what’s just happened?!”

            “Pretty sure I just annihilated a woman, which wasn’t my intention when I fired my Time-inator at her.”

            “Of course not…it was mine. I recalibrated your ‘Inator’ to erase Brown from this point of time. But that young friend of hers will certainly try to alter it with that blasted time machine. We must catch up with her.”

            “I hear ya,” the pharmacist said. “But, without knowing when she went back in time, it’s gonna be like searching for a needle in a temporal haystack.”

            “Then let’s dive in and find it, Doctor,” the kabuki man insisted.

            After that, Marty didn’t hear either of them say another word. Peeping around the corner of the overturned multi-step truck, she saw that both the pharmacist and the kabuki man had disappeared. Alone with deGrasse, she went to the ashes of Doctor Emma Brown, most of which the wind had swept away.

            “Oh, Doc,” Marty tearfully mourned.

            deGrasse whined, also grieving his deceased owner. Marty embraced the canine, imagining how alone he felt with the Doc gone. But she wouldn’t dare abandon him. She owed it to Doc to take good care of deGrasse, no matter how her parents felt about dogs in their house.

            “Marty?”

            She jolted when she heard a familiar voice softly say her name. “Doc?”

            Turning to where she heard it come from, she was surprised to see the elderly scientist standing over her, just the way she was before the disintegration.

            “You’re alive!” Marty happily exclaimed.

            “Well, of course, I’m alive,” Doc smiled.

            “B-But I saw you die – twice!”

            In response to her arrested acceptance of the presumable “miracle,” Doc unzipped the green jumpsuit she had worn that evening and revealed what looked to be a high-tech breastplate with an array of lights and buttons.

            Marty looked on it, amazed as she was confused. “Is that…a bulletproof vest?”

            “It wasn’t designed to stop bullets,” Doc clarified. “It’s a prototype ‘Time Vest,’ meant to transport its wearer two minutes into the future.”

            “So…when that pharmacist dude shot you with his ray…?”

            “Only my radiation suit had fragmented. The rest of me was repositioned where you see me here and now.”

            Complicated as it all was, Marty gradually understood the science of it all.

            Yet there was still one thing she needed to know: “How did you know though? I never got a single opportunity to tell you.”

            Brown smiled, reaching inside the right pocket of her jumpsuit and pulling out Marty’s letter from 1985. Taped back together, it had worn over the last forty years – turning yellow and brittle – but her words were still clear as a bell on the paper. “I figured…what the heck,” Doc chuckled.

            Marty chuckled along with her, taking her friend into her arms and hugging her exactly how she did with Emma’s past self. This time, Emma returned the embrace in earnest, fully understanding the importance of it. Both women hugged for close to a whole minute before they heard a vehicle approaching the area. deGrasse barked excitedly at it, just as three figures stepped out: Phineas, Ferb, and Cornelius.

            “She really is alive!” Phineas exclaimed.

            “Told ya,” Cornelius knowingly smirked. He then asked his mother, “Did you show her the letter?”

            Doc nodded. “I did.”

            Marty scoffed. “I can’t believe you both held onto this secret for forty years!”

            “Hey, who do you think helped her tape it all back together for three straight weeks!” Cornelius jokingly griped.

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            The DeLorean pulled straight up to Marty’s darkened house in the Lyon Estates neighborhood, which Marty was grateful to see just as how she left it – full of houses that, while showing signs of aging, were fully constructed and lived in. Stepping out of the DeLorean, which was a little cramped with Doc, Phineas, Ferb, and deGrasse all sharing the space inside, she took one last look at her friends and asked, “So, is the plan still 30 years ahead in the future?”

            Doc shrugged. “We’ll take it slow at first, but then maybe stop in the 22nd or 23rd century.”

            “Well, good luck to you guys,” Marty said. “And maybe look me up when you get there. I should be 47 by then.”

            Doc sealed this with a wink and a nod. “Sure thing, hon.”

            Closing the passenger side door, Doc and the boys watched Marty disappear into the night as they pulled away from her driveway, backing up enough to go 88mph down the block. “Are we really visiting the 23rd century, Dr. B?”

            Doc smiled as she inputted their Destination Time.

            Phineas and Ferb glanced at the readout, which displayed the year 2999.

            “How ‘bout we go much further, boys?” Brown proposed. “The turn of the 31st century – here we come!”

            On that note, the DeLorean zoomed off, disappearing in a blinding glow.

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            Elsewhere in time and space, the DeLorean’s temporal departure from 2025 was observed by Dakota and his partner, Cavendish, within the Time Bureau headquarters. The year was 2175 and the location was the Danville portion of the Danville-Hill Valley area. The period was home to all walks of life – organic and robotic – with several buildings established on Earth’s soil and others in the skies above.

            The Bureau of Time Travel settled its establishment on Earth.

            “Welp, there they go,” Dakota said of the footage they watched. “A whole 824 years ahead of us…way out of our jurisdiction.”

            “Jurisdiction?” a voice spoke behind the agents, aged beyond time itself yet somehow maintaining a breath of youthful energy. “I do believe Mr. Block arranged for me to oversee the proceedings of your case, gentlemen.”

            “Yes, of course, Doctor Brown,” Cavendish respectfully acknowledged. “Forgive my colleague’s ignorance. It’s a character flaw of his.”

            “Hey!” Dakota retorted. “I have many other flaws, ya know!”

            Ignoring him, Cavendish asked Brown, “What do you propose as our next move?”

            “Well,” Brown regarded, “my female counterpart appears to be following a much different path from mine. I never ventured so far into the future. Let’s continue keeping an eye on her and those two brothers for now…and, more importantly, Dr. Doofenshmirtz and Yokai.”

            “Any idea who that Yokai guy really is?” Dakota asked.

            Brown morbidly shook his head. “If this were my reality, gentlemen, I’d give you my best hypothesis. Alas, there are some mysteries of the multiverse not even I – Doctor Emmett L. Brown – can comprehend.”