Early Presents - Ducktales Secret Santa 2018
"SLEEPOVER!"
"Sleepover? Who's coming over?"
"No one, it's just gonna be us!"
Three sets of skeptical eyes landed on Webby. The boys had been having a rather peaceful, lazy evening in their shared room when she'd burst in with the announcement.
"Isn't that...basically what we do every night?" Huey questioned, his finger marking his spot in his Junior Woodchucks' Guidebook while he shrugged his other hand in the air.
"Maybe what you guys do," Webby retorted, before bringing her hand up to motion to herself. "But I'm in my own separate room by the end of the night. So come on! Granny said that as long as we stay away from the Christmas tree and the decorations, we can take over pretty much the entire downstairs!" She clapped her hands twice as if to say, "Get to it!" then raced out of view from the doorway.
There was silence as the triplets looked at each other from across the room–Huey from where he'd been reading on his bed to Louie, who'd been skimming over the Ottoman Empire website at their desk, to Dewey, who'd been hunched over a pile of paper all day with a set of markers working on who-knows-what. After a second, they all shrugged one-by-one, signifying their willingness to join in on Webby's fun. It's not like they were going to do anything else that night.
Within minutes, the three of them were standing in the entryway to the living room downstairs, their jaws dropped and their willingness transformed into something way beyond eagerness. A buffet table of snacks and sodas lined the far wall besides an old-fashioned popcorn machine, and at least three stacks of movies and video games rested in between the four bean bags that had mysteriously replaced the couch. There was some epic music seemingly pouring into every downstairs room, and nestled on top of each bean bag was a new 7800-series dart blaster–the latest and greatest in the line.
"Merry early Christmas!" Webby proclaimed as she squeezed in between the boys, wrapping her arms as far as she could around their shoulders.
"Webby, what is all this?" Dewey asked in as much awe as he could manage, as his face was squished against Louie's from Webby's sudden hug.
"An early Christmas present from Granny and me!" With a final squeeze, she let them go and walked forward into the room, raising her arms as she spun about. "Since Uncle Scrooge is out at some holiday party tonight, and you guys didn't have any plans tonight anyway, Granny helped me put together the ultimate sleepover so we could test these bad boys out," she explained, patting her own dart blaster.
The triplets ran excitedly into the room, and together the four of them opened up their dart blasters. Webby was the first to finish setting hers up, her hands swiftly loading each dart with the grace of a seasoned expert. As she turned around to start explaining the details of the evening, her blaster cradled in a carrying position, she was surprised to have the air knocked out of her as Huey, Dewey, and Louie tackled her into a group hug, all four of them landing on her bean bag from the momentum.
"Thank you, Webby," Dewey said, with Huey and Louie echoing his sentiment.
After the initial shock wore off, Webby returned the hug with an internal squeal of glee. This moment alone made the past week of planning and secret-keeping worth it, and she savored each second of it.
As they all stood back up and grabbed their blasters, Louie asked, "So, what's the plan?"
Webby tilted her head forward, a sinister grin winding its way onto her face. "The plan, dear Louie, is to survive." She would've chuckled at the way Louie's face drained of color, had she not been trying to keep up her serious demeanor. "The stakes? Last duck standing gets to choose the first movie we watch and the first video game we play. The rules? Only to stay away from Uncle Scrooge's rooms and the Christmas decorations. Otherwise, everything inside and outside on the first floor is fair game. No teams, and no safe zones."
Before any of them could protest the lack of safe zones, she continued. "You have until the end of the next song to establish a base camp as your starting point. After that, it's–" Here, she cocked her blaster for dramatic effect. "–game on. GO!"
She sprinted out of the living room, Louie and Dewey hot on her tail while Huey went in the other direction. Louie split off in his own direction after the foyer, and Dewey in his after the first hallway.
Webby already knew where her base camp was going to be; she'd had it scouted out for three days now. Deep in the depths of Scrooge's Wing of Secr-garage was a particular configuration of old storage boxes that, to her surprise, had a pocket of space between them, creating a natural fort that was easy enough for her to flip into, but virtually undetectable to the passing eye from the outside. Base camps were not immune to open fire, but with this location, she had nothing to fear in regards to that.
After checking her base over, Webby paced outside it, waiting for the song thumping through the speakers to end before she raced off, eager to put distance between herself and her base before anyone could find her near it. And eager to find her first victim.
Aside from the extra adrenaline rush, that was one thing to be said about the music: it gave everyone an equal tactical advantage. No one could hear each other coming, unless they made a loud noise. It heightened the senses. It heightened the element of surprise.
Still, Webby moved as deftly as possible throughout the mansion, her feet lighter than feathers as she peeked out from corners before somersaulting behind furniture. She made it all the way back to the hallway outside the foyer before she caught any movement: a flash of green hoodie heading for the back door.
"Oh no you don't," she whispered to herself.
In one quick motion, she leapt out from her hiding spot behind an end table and shot Louie with two darts, one to each shoulder blade. He stumbled to the ground out of surprise, and Webby quickly picked up her darts before leaping over him, reaching the back door first. But before she could open the door, a single dart flew past her face and stuck to the glass pane. She barely saw Dewey's reflection in it as she yanked the door open and bounded down the steps to the backyard.
The moon was full and bright up above, providing ample lighting to see, but not necessarily be seen. It made the light dusting of snow on the ground look ethereal, like a true winter wonderland. The three ducks made their way outside and ran about without a care in the world, with Huey soon joining them once he realized where they were. They were all still in it to win it as they ducked behind trees and dodged darts with leaps behind shrubbery, but the cold air added a sense of wonder and joy to the game, a sense that left them laughing and taunting each other between shots.
They were the Duck family, and the night was theirs.
Until Huey tripped inexplicably, that is.
His sharp cry of pain led Webby to believe that one of his brothers had gotten in a really good shot, but when she reached the row of bushes he was hidden behind to assess the situation (and possibly gain a few more points), she saw no one but him, and no stray darts either. Only Huey wincing as he rubbed his leg, and the end of a bone sticking out of the ground.
All thoughts of the game immediately abandoned, Webby immediately knelt down beside Huey and called out for Dewey and Louie to join them. The other two rounded into view with blasters blazing, but Webby simply batted the darts away until they took in the situation.
"Huey! Are you okay?" Dewey asked as he and his brother joined the other two on the ground.
Louie looked between Huey and the bone. "What happened?"
After a moment to gather himself, Huey opened his eyes and nodded towards the bone. "I was just running and...I tripped on that." He moved his hands to reveal a scraped-up knee that was sure to bruise. "I'll be fine, but that is just plain creepy."
Webby left his side to inspect the bone. The end was big and knobby, and the rest of it seemed to extend far into the ground. A femur, if she were to guess at first glance. She knelt down and dug away at the dirt surrounding it, then, with some wiggling and prying, she pulled it clean from the ground. Yep, it was a femur alright.
"Guys, look!" she exclaimed as she turned back to the boys with the bone resting in her palms. Louie immediately flinched back, appalled by the sudden presence of an unearthed limb in his face.
"What the quack was that doing there?" Dewey questioned as he helped Huey sit up straighter.
Webby turned the bone over in her hands. "I don't know, but look: the part that was underground is covered in a pretty thick layer of dried mud. It must've been there for years. Maybe even decades."
"Uh...maybe we should show this to Mrs. Beakley?" Louie suggested.
"Uh-uh, we need to investigate this. Look!" She pointed towards the ground a few feet away from them. "Footprints."
Indeed, there beneath the light layer of snow that had gathered were a set of footprints, hardened by time and an average, unassuming size. They trailed towards the bone's resting place from who knew where on Scrooge's estate.
Webby slid a sly smile towards the triplets. "Boys, I believe our plans for the evening just changed."
"Aw, but I was winning the game!" Dewey lamented, his chin dropping to his chest in begrudging forfeit as the other three rolled their eyes at him.
After Huey insisted that he would be okay long enough for a quick adventure, the group got up and began backtracking the prints. They traveled further and further into the woods behind McDuck Manor, traversing slopes and tree trunks alike. They had all brought their dart blasters along, just in case, with Webby carrying hers in one hand and the femur in the other.
Eventually, the tracks led them to a thicket of bushes near the corner of the property line, with two trees towering in front like sentinels. The branches of the bushes looked quite old and worn out, with no foliage to be seen anywhere. It was as if Scrooge's groundskeeper hadn't touched this area in ages.
The tracks disappeared beneath the wood, and Webby crept forward to poke away at some of the branches with the bone to see where they led. To the group's surprise, they found a wooden cellar door. Its handles were weathered with rust and a splintered hole had been punched through the center of it.
"Riiiight, so...get Beakley now?" Louie insisted again, looking hopefully between his siblings, only to be disappointed when they shushed him and kept moving forward to enter the cellar. "Ugh, fine. But I so get to choose the first movie then when we get back."
"No, you don't," Dewey answered without missing a beat, leaving Louie to groan in protest.
One of the new features that made the 7800 blasters so brilliant was the addition of a 2-mode targeting light–one normal light mode, one night-vision mode. The four of them each turned on the normal light on their blaster once they realized there was absolutely no light in the cellar aside from the moonlight pouring in from above.
What the light revealed left chills running down their spines.
The cellar looked like a cross between a medieval dungeon and a vampire's lair. The walls were made of stone and a small hallway followed from the bottom of the stairs, with two heavy wooden doors lining the walls on either side, and a single door at the very end of the hallway. Aside from an old table with a cabinet on top of it next to the stairs, there was nothing but cobwebs and doors.
"This place looks like it was built before Scrooge got here," Huey observed, swiping a finger across the layer of dust on the table.
"All it's missing are the torches," Louie joked.
Webby ignored them both. Something felt off about this place, aside from the obvious. Surely she would've stumbled across it herself in all the years she had lived here, if not some sort of record of it in the archives. Did Scrooge even know about this place? Did her Granny? Or Duckworth?
"I think we should split up," she declared amid a chorus of "huh?!" and "are you crazy?" from the boys. She turned toward them, shaking her head. "Just for a minute. We'll each take a room along the hallway and see what's in them, and whoever finishes first can start in on the room at the end. We can get out of here quicker that way."
The three of them looked dubiously between each other before nodding one by one in reluctant agreement.
With the plan in place, they each took a door: Webby and Dewey the doors to the immediate left and right of the door at the end, and Huey and Louie the doors closer to the staircase.
Webby's door took some extra pushing to get it to open, but she eventually did, immediately bringing her blaster and the bone up to ward off any sudden danger. Yet a cursory glance around the room revealed nothing of interest. It was small, and almost looked like a storage shed. There was a bench off to one side, and a half-empty wall of tools on the far side. Nothing more than some tools, some rope, some rusty hedge clippers. Maybe this used to be Scrooge's gardener's tool shed in the early days of McDuck Manor, simply abandoned to sands of time?
A scream pierced through Webby's thoughts, and she raced out of the room to find Dewey and Huey looking back frantically at her, before they all turned towards the room at the end of the hall, its door wide open.
"LOUIE!"
The three of them rushed inside the final room, nearly tripping over each other as they waved the lights on their blasters around until they landed on Louie, who was curled up in a catatonic ball next to the door, his face frozen in sheer terror.
"What's wrong?" Huey asked him as he dropped to his side. He got no response, which prompted Webby and Dewey to look around the room with their blasters for the answer.
Webby was the first to find it.
"Uh, guys?"
Dewey gathered by her side and shined his light alongside hers so Huey could see it as well.
There, leaning against the opposite wall with its limbs sprawled out on the ground, was a duck's skeleton. Its entire left leg was missing from the hip down, and Webby gasped in shock as she dropped the femur in her hand with a thud.
The skeleton had a snapped noose hanging loosely around its neck, and it was dressed. Derby hat, brown coat, and red sweater. Cracked spectacles. Faded and decayed, but unmistakable.
No one dared to read the marker above the remains out loud, yet neither source of light could seem to stray away from it:
HERE RESTS SCROOGE MCDUCK
1867 - 1967
"Guys, h-have we been living with...a ghost?"
Happy Holidays to epos-da-cookie on tumblr! I was your Ducktales secret santa! Request was for a gift centered around the (platonic) relationship between the Duck triplets and Webby. This was a lot of fun to write, especially after noticing that you like skeletons! ;P