When she was seven, Vanessa decided she wanted to be a cop.

She had just gotten over the phase of wanting to be queen of the undead, something her mother had deemed unreasonable and her father had assured her it wouldn't work out, he'd tried (undead armies tend to fall apart quickly, figuratively and literally).

So she began to fantasize about riding a motorcycle downtown, locking up or shooting down bad guys and protecting the good guys. She didn't know what kind of bad guys she would fight. There were the guys who robbed banks and the guys who beat people up on the streets. Then there were people like her father, Heinz Doofenshmirtz, a self-proclaimed evildoer who built weird gadgets and were bent on taking over the world or tristate area or whatever. She wouldn't hurt her father, of course, but she never could pay attention to his musings on evil science, and she just considered that whole lifestyle boring and dangerous. Maybe he'd like her to take out the competition. After all, no one was fightinghim yet.

Her mom didn't even consider him a bad guy in that sense, just not a man she wanted to keep her husband. Somehow she never caught wind of his evil schemes in action, just his occasional ramblings, and now that they'd split up, she barely even heard those. Vanessa still had to every weekend or so, but her mom thought she was just exaggerating or talking about cartoons when she tried to explain what she'd seen her father build.

Vanessa often practiced running around and locking up bad guys, portrayed by her dolls. This unnerved her dad, who'd apparently had some run-ins with the law but affirmed her they were nothing for her to worry about. Sometimes, he tried to play with her, but his idea of how they should play wasn't her idea.

She would chase her dad down, a toy slingshot in her hand because he hated her even playing with fake guns. He never actually hid in a secret lair like she imagined the cool bad guys doing, but out in the open. If he did hide, he would appear before she got a long enough chance to look for him. Then he would tell her his motive for whatever bizarre crime he chose, which Vanessa could never pay attention to due to his vocabulary and tendency to ramble, so she usually shot him in the middle of it and handcuffed him.

"Nessa, sweetie, for once do you think you could let me finish my backstory before you attack me?" he would ask her.
Focused squarely on securing him, Vanessa stated, "On TV, they don't let the bad guy talk about why he did it until the agent can't stop him, and you don't want to trap me."
"Well, I'm not going to trap my own daughter, that's just weird. I am fully against restraining a child under any circumstances."
Vanessa finished handcuffing him, but kept sitting on him, "holding him down" with her fifty-five pound body. Crossing her arms and pouting, she kept complaining. "Also, your plans don't make any sense! Why would the bad guy build something to attract all the staples in the tristate area?"
"Obviously, so nobody can attach legal documents together properly, sending the tristate area into a lawless mess fit for me to take over!" Heinz boldly said.
"Can't they just use paper clips, though? Or pins, or tape?" The confused little girl said.
With a blank look, Heinz admitted, "Oh yeah, I-I didn't think about that. Maybe it's a good thing we had this little run-through."
"Dad, I don't know what kind of bad guy you are, in the game or in real life, but the guys on TV are always a lot tougher to defeat. Not to mention you won't even let me use a toy gun."
"If you get used to holding a toy, you might get a hold of a real gun, or an inator, and zap yourself, and I wouldn't be able to forgive myself."
Vanessa got up, took off her toy cop hat, and walked away. "I'm gonna watch TV now. Thanks for trying."
Lying on the ground, Heinz shouted, "Wait, I'm still trapped in these handcuffs!"
It took him thirty minutes to break free of the plastic restraints.

So Vanessa decided to play on her own, which was fine by her, since she'd never fight her father in real life anyway, and she wanted to make her own stories.