Disclaimer: I do not own Darkwing Duck, but I decline to comment on the question of whether or not he possesses me.
Warning: My Dark Duck series and most anything else that I write includes vampirism and violence in some form or another. I have no intention of sugar coating all my stuff. Now, if you'll excuse me I'm just about to kill Darkwing Duck. Don't worry though; he'll be right back.
Author post-posting note: This was untidy. I'm cleaning it up. Case closed. End of discussion. Prepare for all new filler scenes, temporal dotted lines, a better descriptive brush-stroke, and lo, possibly even better sentence structure! Fun-fun-fun fun-fun! Well, for me anyway.
Facts and Statistics: The original story concluded at a mere 51,253 words, this story is #7 and the next story in the sequence is #10. That's just how I roll.
DARK DUCK: FOWLed
CHAPTER ONE
PART 1
Just the Beginning...
It didn't matter to Agent Steelbeak of why or how the Fiendish Organisation for World Larceny got the idea of vampires into their heads. The fact of the matter was that his bosses gave him the job of getting F.O.W.L. a vampire makeover and so that's what Steelbeak set out to do.
It was slow going, though. Months had passed before Steelbeak's team had even managed to score their starting vampire. By now, Taurus Bulba's destructive rampage was old news amongst the eggmen ranks and Steelbeak's feathers had pretty well grown back. He'd heard F.O.W.L. had refurbished the mountain lab, but with the word 'compromised' scorched into his memory, Steelbeak had gotten his boys to deck out an old galley in the maritime museum to use instead. This place turned out to be a real crowd pleaser too; the boys could sneak out to the nearby fairground for as much cotton candy and hotdogs as they liked. Steelbeak also felt pretty snug in the hold of this musty wooden dinghy. He had a dozen cannons loaded up with anti-tank rockets manned and ready to fire at his command.
In his favourite white Armani getup, Steelbeak stepped in to the lab to see it the same way he'd left it that morning: the vampire sedated and restrained on the cot over to his left, and a half a dozen eggmen scientists still busy at work in front. With microscopes and other stolen bulky equipment, these guys had been working around the clock for a week trying to isolate the mysterious vampire-making compound.
Steelbeak was feeling the withdrawal symptoms from all this lack of high-performance pretty keenly right about now. He walked up to a metre short of the computer stations, "I hate being the one to nag, boys, but; it's been a week and I got to make a report tonight. Tell me some news … unless you don't feel like getting paid this month."
"Uh, we don't have anything, sir."
"Nothing on how the vampire passes it on?" Steelbeak asked to clarify.
"We can't even find what 'it' is, sir. First we need to isolate the foreign agent before we can figure out how to pass it on."
"F.O.W.L. gave me six of you white coats," Steelbeak declared. "You boys were in on rebuilding Taurus Bulba into a heavy artillery maniac. So why is it I got a feeling like I'm the one who's got to be doing the thinking here?" Steelbeak asked in earnest.
"Boss, are you sure she's really a vampire?"
"She looks just like a regular old postal worker to me."
"Alright, let's recap." Steelbeak gestured back to the woman in the hi-res yellow outfit lying asleep to his right. "How'd we find this here dame?" He looked back at the three white coats standing in the front row.
"Uh ... with anti-postal dogs?"
"Great and so how exactly did we use them to pick her?"
"Coz she won them over."
"Right," Steelbeak agreed.
"But... they get along with you too, boss."
"Coz I'm the one who trained them!" Steelbeak gritted, slapping his face. "Geez, forget the dogs!"
Steelbeak calmed himself and went on, "alright, so then how about how we caught her?"
"Er ..." The white coats looked at each other. "We weren't there."
Steelbeak sighed and turned around to address his blue collar team members, "How did we catch her, boys?"
Answers came from all around.
"Fishing net."
"Taser."
"I've still got rope burn!"
"Hey I'm the one with the broken arm, here!"
"What did you expect with that poncy chloroform?"
"Actually," Steelbeak said casually, turning back to the white coats, "It was the tranquilizer darts that did the trick. You boys know how those work. One dart takes down a duck. Two darts takes down a horse. So d'you want to be explaining to me why it took three of them darts to bring down this plain ordinary postal worker?"
"Huh, so maybe she could be a vampire."
Steelbeak sighed and rubbed his face. "Are you boys telling me you cain't find no vampire chemical or anything under that huge powerful microscope we nicked from Xo?"
"No, er, that is er, no, boss; we can't see nothing."
"Alright, so how about we go back to the book for a moment," Steelbeak reasoned.
"Boss, is this the same book that had us all scouting around graveyards?"
"Hey, is it the book's fault that St Canard's got a cephalopod problem?"
"And a Darkwing Duck problem."
Steelbeak shrugged, "Anyway, the book put us wise to the animal theory, so how about you lay off until I'm done talking here?" He took a breath. "Now, I read that vampires mix their blood to pass it on. So what's the go when you put vamp blood with regular blood?"
The lab coats went to their workbench on the right side of the room and busied themselves for a few minutes with blood samples. Steelbeak checked his watch. He desperately needed to come up with a bone to throw F.O.W.L., the novelty of his anti-postal dogs idea had worn off.
"Hey, boss, check it out!"
Steelbeak peered into the microscope and saw a whole bunch of cells swimming around on the tiny glass sample tray. "What? It all looks the same."
"Yeah, and it wasn't before we mixed up normal blood with the vampire sample."
"Hey, great! So the mixing blood theory does work."
He turned to a regular eggman, "Quandry, go get that old drunk that wandered in here last night."
"Him?"
"Oh, so do you wanna be the first guinea pig instead?" Steelbeak challenged him.
"Uh, no ... not when you put it that way."
Steelbeak turned back to the white coats and watched them setting up a fresh cot. They then wheeled a trolley of their test equipment to the head of it. A few moments later two eggmen carried in the sleeping test subject and put him on the cot. A minute later and the patient went into convulsions.
"What's going wrong?" One of the white coats exclaimed.
"He's not taking it!" The one with the stethoscope answered. "His heart rate's totally whacked!"
"It's some sort of seizure." The first one said.
"Yeah, and who doesn't see that, you numbskull!" The second one threw down the stethoscope.
"Mark!" The first one yelled at him.
"Shut up already, Geoffrey, it's not like I'm blind!" Mark grabbed up the defibrillator pads amongst the stuff on the trolley. The patient jumped with the shot of electricity. The convulsions stopped and the body fell heavily back onto the bed.
"I think you killed him deader, Mark."
"Yeah? No fooling, burrito brain." Mark dropped the pads onto the unit in disgust. He leaned in over the patient for a moment and then straightened back up. "Anaphylaxis-oh what a rotten sodden day. That was freaking scary 'and' we lost him anyway."
"Hey, look on the bright side. Now we got something to chop up to study."
"Genius, Geoffrey," Mark complained, "Why don't you do the chopping?"
"Knock it off, you two, you're giving me a headache." For a moment Steelbeak pinched the bridge between his eyes to clear the building tension. "Take the night off, Mark. Something's telling me you need the break."
"Thanks, boss." Mark looked up at him gratefully, "next sedative dose is at three thirty, and then again at nine thirty. That's something you want to be careful of getting right." Mark added.
"This guy might come back in the meantime and then we'll be on easy street." Steelbeak smiled hopefully.
Mark gazed stonily back at him. "Two hundred bucks says he won't."
Steelbeak recalled the instant convulsive fit that had happened. "Eh ... sounds like a mug's bet."
Mark thumbed back at Geoffrey while facing Steelbeak, "Thick as blazes. Whatever you do, don't leave it up to him." The white coat turned and went up the stairs heading to the deck and the outside world.
Steelbeak turned away from the dead body on the cot. "Uh, could someone get rid of that?" As his henchmen hauled it off, he stepped over to the side of the bed where the vampire post officer lay out for the count, still geared up in her hi-res outfit, three leather belts strapping her down.
"How d'you do it?" Steelbeak contemplated the gently sleeping face and the mussed up strawberry-blonde curls. "The book says you got to swap blood." He looked at the rack of syringes and picked one up. The blood within was infected with vampire DNA. The test samples showed that it readily communicated on a cellular basis. But they couldn't try the same trick on an ordinary person; the effect was a rapid death by poisoning...
Steelbeak paused in his thoughts, his eyes lighting up. "Fetch me my dart gun, would you, fellahs?"
Darkwing Duck eased the brakes on and the Ratcatcher's engine purred to a stop on the street near the riverside fairground. A stray skinny duck in a white coat passed under the bright cool blue light of the maritime museum's admission gates before slipping back into the dimmer lights of the street.
"Hello, what's a doctor doing in dry-dock at this time of night?"
"Oh, good, DW. I thought you were fading out on me, again."
Darkwing looked over at Launchpad McQuack in the side-car. "It's just a matter of focusing on where I am, Launchpad. If I'm focused, my Vespers are focused too, and right now, I'm focused on that suspicious individual." He pointed.
"Then how come your gear's still grey?"
"Launchpad," Darkwing said seriously, "there was just a midnight medic calling in at the maritime museum."
"Maybe he was making a house call, DW?" Launchpad offered, "Some doctors do that."
Darkwing rebutted, "What's he doing, checking out the long-boats for drunken sailors?" The vigilante jumped off the motorcycle, "No, I want to know the real reason he came out here. Come on, Launchpad."
The air around Darkwing and Launchpad was a mixture of salted air from the river over the wall and stale dusty earth from the permanent dry-dock environment they were in. After dodging the spotlights, Darkwing and Launchpad used suction cups to climb up the far side of the galley to peer into a porthole.
"That's F.O.W.L's amoral operative Steelbeak!" Darkwing Duck announced quietly to his companion. "Glad we looked in first. There's probably a ton of them up on the deck above us. And this used to be a warship. I wouldn't put it past Steelbeak to go tinkering with the antiques." On that note, he swapped gas cartridges and fired it up so the payload would land on the deck above them. "Now the authorities can get near this place without having to reenact the battle at Canary Wharf."
"DW, they've got a hostage, too." Launchpad mentioned, drawing Darkwing's attention back to the room on the other side of the porthole.
"Isn't that...?" Darkwing couldn't be too sure, but the prisoner strapped to the cot looked like his friendly neighbourhood post-woman. From his top pocket he dug out his reconfigured hearing aid, pressed it up against the glass and listened in.
Steelbeak was not having so good a time as he usually did on a job. Sure, he liked the power and control being in charge of his own squadron of eggmen gave him, but if his boys couldn't come up with an answer, then neither would he have an answer to give. When it came down to it, this left his head on the chopping block.
A report he had to make, so Steelbeak relayed the results of the latest tests over his cell phone. He could go into more detail, but only if explicitly requested. Don't bore the big guys with the little picture. And boy, this one was microscopic!
"What this vampire thing comes down to is that the boys still cain't figure it out."
"..."
"That's because they're working in conventional science, Steel-o." A familiar dark, echoing voice filled the room, drawing Steelbeak's attention dramatically away from his bosses' reply and setting Steelbeak's feathers on end. None of his eggmen heard or saw this guy coming. Again.
"Ain't you ever heard of knocking, Darkwing? I was having a private conversation here."
"Privacy? For a conversation between a criminal henchman and his evil bosses?" Darkwing replied, appearing behind Steelbeak in a grey and black version of his usual getup. "I don't think so."
"Ah, they know the news ain't great, anyway." The agent pocketed his cell phone so he could deal with his uninvited visitor. "I see you've gone monochrome. I like it," Steelbeak gave a moment to approve the change. Then he issued the standing order. "Get him, boys."
Two eggmen raced at the caped disaster but Darkwing just tossed them into a heap. By this time, the do-gooder's sidekick had come in through a porthole. Launchpad was fighting off another gaggle of Steelbeak's employees ... with annoying success.
"Egad, not again." Steelbeak covered his eyes for a moment. The situation was average, and he pictured the news bulletin.
'Villain's henchmen go down in an embarrassment of feathers while villain narrowly escapes.'
But today, the agent still had an ace to play. Right now, he was packing something more unusual than a semi. It was today's failed test sample in a handy dart gun. Steelbeak considered himself to be a resourceful sort to have configured it into a weapon.
"Check it out, 'drag-wing'. This here ain't no ordinary gun. A single drop of the stuff in this vial ... kills! And most painfully too, as it goes. Now, say goodnight to your friend over there!" Steelbeak aimed at Launchpad and fired the dart gun.
"Launchpad, no!"
It happened exactly as Steelbeak had planned. The greyscale crime fighter sped over and pushed his sidekick out of the way just as Steelbeak fired the weapon. So, instead of hitting Launchpad, the poison-tipped dart hit Darkwing Duck.
"Oh, ma-an," Steelbeak chortled, "you good guy types are so predictable!" He came to gloat triumphantly over Darkwing Duck. In victory, he watched as his enemy collapsed to the floor, the poison penetrating, taking effect.
"I'll ... stop you ..." With that last incorrigible battle statement, Darkwing Duck exhaled heavily and went still.
Steelbeak whooped in joy. "Yo! Christmas has come early, boys!" He couldn't wait to tell headquarters. This success would easily clear two whole months of salary for the lot of them.
Moral/Overview: If a man can look upon a failure and find success in it, then a powerful man he is indeed.
