Understanding Doofenshmirtz; A Tragedy in One Action.
"Not so far as the Kuiper Belt, I don't think, but it'll definitely reach Mars."
The words rang terrifyingly in Xanatos' ears. While Xanatos firmly believed that any man could change the world with enough effort, changes affecting physics on a global scale were firmly the province of magic in his mind.
It was clear that he had
vastly underestimated Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz. To a degree it didn't matter if the man was insanely competent or just insanely lucky; what mattered was the results. Heinz Doofenshirtz had gone from an illegal immigrant peddling bratwurst on a cart to... arguably the single most powerful human in existence in under 30 years. What's more he did it intentionally.
Xanatos recalled the the mental profile he had drawn up of the good doctor before meeting him for the first time. Brilliant in his field, but gullible, stuck in his ways, and unaware of how the world really works. Bad with people too. It was a logical conclusion for a man who held hundreds of patents for devices that Xanatos could have easily used to make a fortune had he had even 5 of them, and yet who was in truth not even a mildly successful CEO before he declared himself "ruler of the Tri-state area" and renamed it Doofania. A tri-state area that he didn't even rule completely!
He seemed harmless, a gullible fool easy enough to manipulate to his own ends but recent events...
No. Harmless was not a word that you could use to describe Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz. And as to his gullibility...
Xanatos took a deep breath. Did it really matter
what you believed about people's intentions if you had the power to rewrite fundamental portions of reality at your fingertips?
His key mistake was in thinking of Dr. Doofenshmirtz as a lunatic. He knew how it had happened. He had looked at the man's assets and his progress towards what Xanatos himself thought of as success and Xanatos had viewed the wide gap between the two as proof that Dr. Doofenshmirtz was failing at his goals; that he was a talented man constantly sabotaged by his own neuroses and limitations.
He let out a mirthless chuckle.
Even if that was the case, it clearly wasn't the entire portrait, and after recent events Xanatos was fairly certain that he had misjudged the man completely.
He'd had a private detective follow up on the man's history, trying to understand his motivations. A task that should have been made trivially easy by the man's tendency to explain at length every single trivial setback and trauma he had ever suffered to anyone that paid even the slightest attention to him. The man was an open book and yet he was
still frustratingly impenetrable
.
Xanatos thought he had understood the man. An emotionally abusive family. A distant father. Running away from home to become a self-made man. He saw shades of himself in Dr. Doofenshmirtz. A sort of twisted mirror where he had succumbed to his baser emotions and sabotaged himself in the process. He'd thought himself Doofenshmirtz's superior.
Now taking a closer look, Xanatos realized that he was wrong. He was not a better version of Doofenshmirtz. He wasn't
any version of Doofenshmirtz. The 'evil' scientist's upbringing was so completely divorced from any human baseline that Xanatos couldn't think of any human on earth that might be similar.
Being part of an abusive family was tragic of course, but not especially uncommon. The pattern of the scapegoat and the golden child was as relateable as it was tragic, but the formative incidents that made it up were baffling. Being forced to wear "hand me up" Girl's clothing, his mother's love being inexplicably tied to success at Kickball, celebrating his birthdays alone, being disowned by his parents. Those were all abusive moments in his 'backstory' that Xanatos could understand the effects of. Emotional immaturity, a need for control, self-sufficiency, and alienation from his peer group were all the obvious outcomes and they manifested in Doofenshmirtz exactly like Xanatos had theorized they would.
He'd decided to appear as a kindred soul, a friendly face to a man starved for human interaction. He'd presented himself as a man tolerant of the doctor's flaws and social blunders whom Dr. Doofenshmirtz could confide in; a mentor of sorts, who could show him the wider world that he had stepped into in a way that could maximize Xanatos' own gains with very little resources invested. All this was done with the goal of gaining leverage on a powerful piece on the board that was lacking guidance, and whom Xanatos could thereby lead around to his own aims.
Xanatos snorted at the sheer hubris in his thought process.
It had certainly worked, to a point. Doofenshmirtz considered him a friend... At least, Xanatos supposed he did. Xanatos was in a wildly better position now than he would have been otherwise. The man's help at the auction was one thing, but without his unasked for assistance with thwarting Demona's plans Xanatos, if not all mankind would have likely perished. And without his continued friendship, Doofenshmirtz would have never revealed his own effects on probability, leaving Xanatos hopelessly unprepared for the lunacy that was about to strike.
Xanatos knew his own plans would likely not be bothered much. He tended to leave nothing to chance and undertake actions where every last outcome led to his own inevitable victory. Any risk-taking on his part was an illusion. Should the 'risks' he took fail he always had backup plans in place to make sure that even in the failure conditions of his plans he always came out ahead. But those plans were all devised under a fundamental theory that the world worked the way the world worked. His underlying assumptions were based on risks that were calculable, where the failure states could be foreseen. When the odds underlying those assumptions were drastically transformed, that changed his calculations immensely. Not only were casual risks he was running now no longer casual, but other actions that he had put off due to the lack of a payoff suddenly became both much more lucrative and much more attractive.
Xanatos was forced to admit to himself that his basic assumptions about the man were wildly off.
He assumed that Dr. Doofenshmirtz was naïve for openly declaring his rebellion, that he would be stomped on by the government at the first chance and that there was no way he could keep his territory. He'd thought that Doofenshmirtz was playing the same game that they all were; that he was merely an overenthusiastic CEO that through reckless foolhardiness risked the careful masquerade that they all upheld to not just his own detriment, but to the detriment of all such would-be 'kings' across the country.
He had been wildly off base. Doofenshmirtz didn't care about money at all. He didn't care for the sort of subtle controls and puppetry that Xanatos enjoyed. He didn't even
really seem to care about political power.
Doofenshmirtz cared about
something. The man was certainly driven. But whatever he cared about it wasn't something that Xanatos could give him.
At one point Xanatos had thought that Doofenshmirtz abhorred the status quo. That he wanted revenge on a world that had wronged him. That he wanted to tear down the structures of power and understanding for his own benefit. But that was wrong too. Doofenshmirtz saw the value in the masquerade and had not just agreed to uphold it but had both personally fought and sent his aid to do so to Xanatos in a situation that even Xanatos didn't realize he needed such aid. Yet for all that Doofenshmirtz upheld the masquerade over all, he clearly didn't care about using it for his own benefit. He wasn't following Xanatos' own lead, seeking supernatural artifacts and contacts for aid in controlling the mundane world. Xanatos was no longer sure that Doofenshmirtz cared about the mundane world
at all.
Even the cover story that Doofenshmirtz's agents had presented him with was baffling. They claimed that they were in his city seeking a deposed magical princess refugee. He believed the cover story to some extent. Janna Ordonia
clearly cared about her friend. As did the literal demon that she accompanied. But the cover story was also obviously just that; because Janna had admitted that Dr. Doofenshmirtz had
sent her to New York, to the Mercenary that Xanatos was in the process of recruiting, in order to find Star Butterfly.
It was a transparent cover-up of the doctor's real motives. Especially frustrating because
Doofenshmirtz was the one that had given him the prophecy that had tipped him off to Demona's plans in the first place! Xanatos knew that he himself frequently cloaked his true motives in other more comprehensible motives for the purpose of manipulation. He could certainly recognize when the same exact trick was rather transparently
being pulled on him! And yet...
knowing that Doofenshmirtz had ulterior motives brought him no closer at all to understanding what those motives
were!
Initially Xanatos had dismissed much of Doofenshmirtz's backstory as the nonsensical ramblings of a habitual liar. His claims of being raised by ocelots in Drusselstein were bad enough given that Ocelots were not at all native to the Eastern European country; but being forced to be a lawn gnome?
Neither of his parents attending his own birth? They were transparent lies to the point that Xanatos had not even thought that he would need to fact check them.
Except that they weren't lies. Xanatos wasn't even completely convinced that Doofenshmirtz knew
how to lie! Which would neatly explain why the man openly declared himself ruler of the tri-state area; but left so many other questions about the man infuriatingly unanswered that Xanatos was almost on the verge of tearing his own hair out in frustration!
The story of his birth had led Xanatos down some strange paths. At one point he had wondered whether time travel involved. It would certainly explain a lot if Doofenshmirtz' reality breaking technology were relics from the future that he possessed as a time traveler.
Thankfully Xanatos had found an explanation that made sense. The palpable relief that Xanatos felt upon discovering that at least some of of Doofenshmirtz's nonsensical ramblings had normal explanations was both real and strangely intense for Xanatos.
Doofenshmirtz wasn't lying. Neither of his parents
had been there for his birth, as far as the doctor knew. But he wasn't a baby that had just miraculously appeared out of nowhere either.
The truth was actually fairly straightforward; Dr. Doofenshmirtz wasn't Roger Doofenshmirtz's brother. He was his
half-brother; the product of an affair his father had shortly after getting married. A fact that neatly explained his mother's lack of love, as well as his father's distance and the man's baffling decision to get a dog and name him "Only Son." His real mother died in childbirth, which was yet another trauma in Dr. Doofenshmirtz's life that thankfully he did not know about. Certainly Xanatos was not going to tell him.
Not that the explicability of this fact made Doofenshmirtz's formative years any less baffling.
How do you predict the behavior of a man whose formative years were spent in part being raised by Central American wildlife!?
Certainly his lack of social awareness stemmed in part from his background. Xanatos wasn't entirely convinced that Dr. Doofenshmirtz realized that
he was the reason that his brother Roger came to Danville. Roger certainly hadn't been exiled from his family like Dr. Doofenshmirtz had. And yet the man ended up in America anyway, in the same town that his brother resided in.
Doofenshmirtz was so divorced from the norm of human perspective that understanding his motives was likely an impossible endeavor. Not that that meant that Xanatos didn't have to try. if anything Doofenshmirtz's power meant that he needed to try
harder.
The man cared for family at least. Sort of. he was on good terms with his Ex, which was actually somewhat remarkable on its own. And he cared deeply about his daughter and her safety. But he was also a man that, from all accounts that Xanatos could find, continually plotted against his brother, attempting to steal his power and successes.
Xanatos had thought that that was where Doofenshmirtz's drive to claim the tri-state area as his own had arisen from, but according to the investigation he had paid to have done, that explanation wasn't just wrong, it was entirely
backwards. Doofenshmirtz had started planning to rule the tri-state area long before his brother had landed in the United States. Roger had become Mayor because he looked up to his brother and had admired his ambitions, not the other way around.
The man was baffling!
He clearly knew about the supernatural, but he focused on involving himself in interdimensional wars rather than on earth. He was completely disengaged from the small picture. Except that that wasn't true either because the main paid amazing attention to petty details and slights, personally recruiting promising talent with absolutely no rhyme or reason to his actions that Xanatos could discern!
Xanatos wasn't even certain that Dr. Doofenshmirtz knew how his company was run!
He needed insight into the Doctor's thought processes. He needed to establish a baseline of how the man would react, because as friendly as Dr. Doofenshmirtz was right now, if his investigation had taught him anything it was that the man was also amazingly petty and repaid even the most arcane of slights with elaborate far reaching plots powered by science that defied the laws of physics.
Xanatos looked at the book in front of him. "Inator your way to success." It was written 12 years ago, right after he had formed Doofenshmirtz Evil Incorporated.
He opened the book to the first page.
Hey! I'm Doctor Heinz Doofenshmirtz and welcome to my book on Inatoring your way to Success! I don't know why you bought this book.
Maybe you're a loser who's been sleeping in his car? Or a crazy person saving all their toenails in a jar? There may be many reasons that you might need my advice. Well, you're in Luck! I'm the guy who'll give you all the answers!
All you need to do is succumb to every last impulsive urge and solve all your problems with Inators! I call it, 'The Inator method' and now, with my help, you too can learn to Inator your way to Success!
Xanatos groaned. It was going to be a very long night.