Darkly Dawns the Divergence
Prologue
The editor flicked through his e-mails seeing nothing but more demands for Darkwing stories. It figured. Years after he'd been taken off the initial project of the duck writing his fill-the-gap stories, Disney had rebooted the old Ducktales show and that had led to the inevitable demand for a Darkwing Duck reboot and more fans wanting to know what the "real" Duck was like.
And that was why his cartoony client was currently occupying his office, complaning about how he'd been neglected all these years. Granted, the duck hadn't even been aware of the passage of time until someone had told him.
Well, at least they got him there at all. The Disney people had said something about Darkwing appearing on their new series, and how that might affect the duck's appearance or make him a different character entirely. The editor had hoped that would be the case, since the duck was...a bit hard to deal with. He was mildly disappointed when the duck had arrived normally.
"So, what do you want me to write this time?" The duck demanded irritably.
"Your first episode," the editor told him.
"What?"
"They want to know what the first episode of your series was like. Someone found out that the way your pilot episode went was apparently not how things went in your universe. They wrote the original pilot, then the Disney people got that cut up so it'd only be two episodes long, so the bosses want you to write how things really went."
"But they start out the same way. Do you really want me to write the first episode verbatim until that point?"
"No, you can start from where they start to diverge. That won't be quite as hard, will it?"
The duck grunted, thoughtfully rubbing his beak. "Okay, but I'd better get something big out of it. A new TV show or something."
The editor cleared his throat awkwardly. "Yeah, about that..."
Author's Note: Sorry about taking my own sweet time to come up with another Darkwing fic. My inner muse keeps giving me inspiration from other fandoms.
Anyway, the good part about having a job at a library is that it gives me plenty of time to write. I've got this incredibly long document of fics, fic fragments, and fic ideas. I've also got a tendency to exercise my creative skills by coming up with good "what-if" scenarios. In this case, it was "What if Darkwing missed the Morse code trap?" And it kinda snowballed from there into my own take on the original DWD pilot. I'm kind of tempted to write my own take on the first part, but as it is I'm content with the second.
And while I'm on the subject, it's looking like there's a very real possibility that the show will be rebooted in real life, too. I'm hoping that comes true.