Hello, everybody, and welcome to the next entry of my personal A-Z Darkwing fanfic challenge. As for those who have been following my other story, Zenith, no, I have not forgotten about it, but, well, let's just say, my entire backup went down the drains, so I have to rewrite a great amount of the story.
To pass the time, here's a shorter, darker story, which I hope you like.
Enjoy, and don't forget to R&R!
Disclaimer: I don't own one single bit in this, except for the plot. All rights are Tad Jones and Disney, without any financial profit whatsoever
Warnings: T for some graphic details and character death
Summary: A scheme by the Fearsome Five leads to a tragic loss, which affects the entire Darkwing family. How will they cope?
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Beryllium Flowers
At the age of nine, Gosalyn Waddlemeyer met her hero and foster father Darkwing Duck.
Only a quarter year later, she made her debut as Quiverwing Quack, much to her father's dismay. He did agree to let her help him on one more case, but that had been purely coincidental.
At the age of ten, her father finally decided to properly tutor her into becoming a crime fighter.
At the age of fourteen, Darkwing officially introduced Quiverwing Quack as his protégée, Launchpad still retaining his position as the vigilante's sidekick and partner.
On her sixteenth birthday, Drake declared, he could send her out on missions with her mother, Morgana Mallard-Macawber, as backup.
At the age of eighteen, Quiverwing was working solo.
Five month to her nineteenth birthday, she lost her father in battle.
Two years later, Darkwing Duck returned to the scene.
And took revenge.
Prologue
It was a trap.
They knew it, even before Negaduck had finished his speech on national TV.
Eight hundred billion dollars, or he would sell the key codes for the launch missiles to the highest bidder.
The amount of the ransom was so ridiculously high, everybody knew that it was but a farce. It was not as if Negaduck could have used them to actually control or even launch the missiles. By themselves, the codes were but a jumble of useless algorithms.
However, in the wrong hands and according mainframe -such as F. . had at their dispense -they meant not only complete supremacy over the country, but a global threat as well.
And now all this power nested in the hand of a nefarious criminal master mind in the shape of a pen drive barely the size of an eraser.
It had been his ultimate tour de force.
For years, Negaduck had observed and spied on the military base, using the powers of the other Fearsome Five to gather all the required information.
Be it Liquidator hiding in a water cooler, the indoor pool or the major's aquarium, Bushroot manipulating the trees and shrubs freckled across the camp as spies or Megavolt using his molecular structure disruptor to use the wiring of the building as his personal highway into every mainframe; Negaduck had made certain that not one thing happening on the base escaped his watchful eye.
He had still committed the occasional caper, but always made sure to make it back safe and sound. Really, his crimes were more of a diverting means.
Quackerjack, however, had been the main provider; committing bank robberies and stealing foods and goods for his teammates -as they were.
They had established their subterranean hideout on the outskirts of , next to a tower pole. The electromagnetic field surrounding it scrambled all in- and outgoing signals, making them save from scanners or drones. Even the transport system had been under earth; parallel to the canalisation, Liquidator had smoothed out a tunnel, which Quackerjack's living dentures had created.
About an acre in size, the entire complex had been littered with sensors, which had been calibrated to the biorhythms of the Fearsome Five. Anyone who did not adjust to the settings would have fallen prone to Quackerjack's devious traps.
Painstakingly, quietly, with an ungodly amount of patience, the Fearsome Five had dismantled layer for layer the secrets of the military base, until they had known every single member, from the General to the apprentice of the maintenance crew, on an intimate basis.
Exercise schedules, secret meetings, every little movement had been observed and recorded; the blueprints of the entire compound copied and swapped into the villains' hard drives.
Finally, after nigh on six years, they leapt into action.
Bushroot used a devious pine to attack the chief engineer and head of security, stealing the targeting codes from this one's very hand.
Needless to say, the entire national defence department ground to a halt; without these codes, without the exe files to start the various trajectory re-calculators and spoiler elevator controllers, the missiles were useless. Of course, backups and such existed, but without the chief engineer's clearing, who was currently in a coma, there was only so much the defence department could do.
Even if they had changed all the codes, it would have taken weeks, if not months, to rewrite the entire mass of programs.
Time they didn't have, seeing as two days later the Fearsome Five made their ransom call.
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And there we go; a little hokey, I admit, but it's just setting the mood for the rest. Chapter one should be up in a couple of days, so stay tuned