It was easy to get lost in the manor, especially when she had no reference points. Along with Huey, Webby was attempting to map out the place. She'd discovered that the red-clad triplet was fastidious when it came to organization and planning. Not knowing where things were bothered him; Dewey found exploration an adventure and Louie mostly sat in front of the TV. As a result, Webby had set out with Dewey and Huey, with Dewey offering commentary about the cool things he'd seen around the house. It made Webby giddy, that this whole place was hers to peruse, although she wasn't an heir the way the triplets were.
"...and that's the other bin of Scrooge McDuck," Huey said.
"Yeah, we're not allowed in there," Dewey added.
Louie walked up eating popcorn and offered Webby a piece. She took it and, with his other hand, he raised a Pep to his beak to sip. "Legend has it his really rare artifacts are in there."
"I thought you were watching Ottoman Empire," Huey said conversationally.
"Eh, I got bored," he said with a shrug. "Plus, it's all repeats until February."
"I wonder what's in there…" Dewey said and gave Webby an impish grin. "Wanna find out?"
"Uncle Scrooge was pretty explicit about us not going in there," Huey protested. "If he doesn't want us in there, he must have a pretty good reason."
"How dangerous could it be?" Dewey scoffed. "If it were really dangerous, he wouldn't keep it in the house at all."
"Yeah, but there's a difference between what's dangerous for kids and what's dangerous for adults," Huey argued.
"Exactly," Louie said. He hadn't been following the argument, but he seemed to agree with the spirit of Dewey's case. "We're mature. We can handle it. Let's go in."
"I...I don't know…" Webby said. She gnawed the inside of her beak. Gosalyn would've been all for it and Webby would've been, predictably, the one dragging her heels. The thought of her missing sister made her heart ache and she changed her mind. Sure, Gosalyn had had a lot of bad ideas, but adventuring was a lot more fun than simply sitting around twiddling your thumbs and reading books, waiting for something to happen to you. Better to happen to it instead.
"How often are you going to get an opportunity like this?" Louie argued. "Uncle Donald's locked in the pantry, Uncle Scrooge is out for a business opportunity, and Mrs. B is off somewhere vacuuming or whatever it is she does as a housekeeper."
It was hard for Webby sometimes to reconcile that her foster grandmother had worked as a spy and was now moonlighting as a housekeeper. The two seemed diametrically opposed, considering how prestigious SHUSH made spy work look. Then again, real spies had been covert, placed in strategic positions to overhear things and pull the strings from the inside. Those types of spies had never come to the orphanage.
"Uncle Scrooge wants us to be on our best behavior," Huey shot back. "What kind of example are we giving Webby?"
"She's older than we are," Louie scoffed.
"By a year," Webby agreed, but she'd stopped listening. Instead, she followed Dewey as they crept closer to the bin. She pushed open the door to find that the bin itself consisted of a large warehouse, its entrance behind a locked door that she surmised was there. All she could see was a painting of Scrooge McDuck.
Dewey began searching the area and she paid attention to anything that didn't quite seem to fit. Her eyes snagged on the painting and, distantly, she heard Huey and Louie continue to debate. They hadn't noticed that Dewey and Webby had gone on without them.
Once Webby had secured the door and opened it, she and Dewey slipped away. She pulled the door shut behind her and Dewey rushed off. Rather than accidentally stumble upon something unpleasant, she scrutinized the numbering system. Did it mean anything? Or was it completely random?
"Hey, Webby?" Dewey said. He'd flung caution to the winds and had opened a door at random.
Webby poked her head in over Dewey's arm and her heart clenched. Frozen in time, a figure locked in a magical barrier, a young girl stared back at them. She had a pink streak in her hair and Webby's beak quivered. The girl had her hand extended toward them as if begging for their hope. A shadow at her back shifted back and forth and hissed at their intrusion.
"Wait, there's something here," Dewey said, plucking a small card off a table near the girl. Webby inched into the room with trepidation, her heart in her throat. She could feel her heart pounding and she latched onto Dewey as a solid, living, breathing figure in here. The girl's expression was woebegone and pierced Webby.
"In order to prevent Magica de Spell from enslaving Duckburg and enacting vengeance for being trapped in me lucky dime, I sealed her and her shadow in a magical barrier made of Magica's own spell," Dewey read. "I have not yet figured out how to separate Lena from Magica."
The girl's eyes were moving. Webby jumped back.
"She's alive in there!" Webby cried, dismayed. "We have to break her out!"
"I don't see how…" Dewey pointed out. "If we do, we'll break Magica out too."
"Who is Magica de Spell?" she asked. Though the girl's gaze followed them, nothing else of her moved. Well, no, wait, that wasn't quite true. Her chest rose and fell very slowly, almost as if she were out of sync with them, in her own timestream. What if she weren't frozen so much as locked into another time dimension?
"Beats me," Dewey said. They couldn't approach Lena; the barrier surrounded her and her shadow (though technically it was the other way around, wasn't it?) Webby's heart wrenched. She didn't want to leave the girl here.
"How...how long do you think she's been here?" Dewey asked quietly, horrified.
"Fifteen years," Huey said and the two whirled to discover Louie and Huey had finally joined them. He pointed to the bottom of Dewey's card. "Scrooge and Magica fought on Mount Vesuvius fifteen years ago. When he found out that their fight had brought about Lena, he locked her in a temporal slowdown. She's moving, but it's glacial compared to us."
"He can't keep her in here forever!" Webby exclaimed, likewise unnerved.
"Until Uncle Scrooge figures out a way to separate them, I don't think he has a choice," Huey said.
"It's not her fault that she's like this," Webby argued.
"I'm not saying it is," Huey said. He was studying Lena, who was, in turn, studying them, although it was hard to tell since she barely moved.
"That's rough," Louie said. "Imagine being stuck like that for fifteen years."
"See, this is probably why Uncle Scrooge doesn't want us in here," Huey argued.
"We'll come back for you," Webby promised and Lena's gaze slid, very slowly, back to her. She appeared to be mouthing 'help', but it was taking forever for her beak to form the word. Webby laid her hand against the barrier. It felt like smooth ice beneath her fingers.
"How long do you think it feels like to her?" Webby whispered as they backed out. She hated to leave Lena alone in there, her gaze still haunted Webby, but they could do nothing for the shadow girl at the moment. Webby glanced back at the closed door and felt wretched.
"Hopefully not that long," Dewey murmured and the others nodded their agreement. Webby rolled the friendship bracelet she'd created with Gosalyn around her wrist.
Discovering Lena had put a damper on the occasion. Webby wasn't sure what other horrors awaited them and she wasn't sure she wanted to find out. The boys proceeded away from the door, which Webby cast one last, longing gaze at, and then selected another door. She was half afraid to see what was in front of them.
It was a dreamcatcher. It floated in midair and seemed oddly ominous, or perhaps that was just her impression after having encountered Scrooge's worst enemy trapped within a magical force field.
"I kinda get Magica being trapped, but what's up with the dreamcatcher?" Dewey asked, baffled.
"It's gotta be magic," Louie said.
"We should leave it alone," Huey decided firmly. "Who knows what might happen?"
Webby stepped forward, half wondering whether the dreamcatcher had a clue as to how to free Lena. The air rippled about her and the boys yanked her back as her eyelids grew heavy. Without a word, they rushed away down the hall.
They didn't stop until they reached the main manor again. Webby's heart thudded and she realized now why she hadn't seen any books about magic in the library. Scrooge probably kept them hidden within the other bin to prevent anyone from summoning anything or using magic that was forbidden. But...she was haunted by what she'd already seen. It was impossible to put it from her mind.
Her cell phone was ringing. A couple days ago, Mrs. Beakley had sprung for one for her and she'd promptly given Gosalyn the number. Either thankfully or unthankfully, Gosalyn's story put Lena temporarily out of Webby's mind. When it came to surprises, Gosalyn was quite good at that. It was one of the reasons their headmistress had found her so taxing.
"Keen gear!" Gosalyn exclaimed. She'd flipped a bust on a table beside a couple chairs in Drake Mallard's living room and ended up in Darkwing Duck's secret lair. Excited, she bounced up and down on the balls of her heels. Behind her, Honker was studying the place and muttering things she ignored, mostly about how she shouldn't be here in the first place.
She knew she shouldn't be here. That was the whole point. That was what made this so exciting. There were so many different gadgets and devices she could play with. Plus, Darkwing had a super computer she was itching to get her hands on. No, she probably shouldn't be here. In fact, if she remembered correctly, she had been forbidden from coming here without Darkwing. But what he didn't know wouldn't hurt him, right? Right.
"Why don't we take this baby out for a spin?" Gosalyn asked, heading for the motorcycle.
"Aren't you a little too young to drive?" Honker protested.
"Pfft. I'll just tell them I got my learner's permit," she said and, at his skeptical look, added, "I'm a fast learner?"
"You have to be sixteen to get your permit," he argued.
"And my feet probably won't reach the pedals," she said, but she flung herself into the driver's seat anyway. Sighing, perhaps realizing that it was his fate in life to be dragged along by Gosalyn Mallard, Honker sat in the sidecar. Gosalyn hit a few buttons at random to see what would happen and they raced out of the lair and onto the bridge.
"Shouldn't we be wearing safety equipment? Goggles? A helmet?" Honker asked, his voice difficult to hear over the wind blowing and making her hair fly this way and that.
"Probably," she agreed, deciding not to worry about it unless she went flying over the handlebars. She could reach the pedals, just barely, and driving a motorcycle was a lot harder than riding a bike. For one thing, the weight distribution was different and she was afraid, if she leaned into a turn, she'd flip them both over. The sidecar helped in that regard, as it offered a counterbalance, but it wasn't optimal by any means.
"Gosalyn!" Honker protested. "I really think you ought to…"
He trailed off as they came to a sudden stop. Proud of herself for managing to halt their egress, she almost missed why she'd stopped in the first place. A group of ne'er do wells were robbing St. Canard's First Bank. Could she stop them? Well, maybe if she'd been trained by SHUSH...she'd been pre-trained, if that made sense, but she hadn't received their actual regimen.
Honker yanked her back behind the building before she had a chance to question whether she ought to make her superheroine debut.
"You can't possibly tangle with them," he hissed. "They're four of them versus one of you and they're all adults."
She poked her head back over the wall. What held her attention was not that there was a plant duck, a dog composed of water, a trickster duck, and a mole with electric powers, but the fifth member of the group. Other than his coloration, he looked exactly like Darkwing Duck. She froze.
"That's Negaduck," Honker muttered next to her. "You don't want to mess with him."
She'd grown up in St. Canard, but her exposure to supervillains had been limited. Plus, Negaduck had only started coming around recently, within the last few months. The pictures she'd seen had been in black and white and hadn't done him justice. When he smiled, his mouth was full of sharp, pointy teeth. She'd never seen anything like that, either.
Before she knew what she was doing, she rushed out from behind the wall and Honker groaned. She ignored him. Negaduck's gaze was on their getaway car, but, for a second, it strayed along the street to determine whether there were any witnesses. It snagged on her and then, figuring that Gosalyn posed little to no threat, he shrugged and threw himself behind the driver's seat. He barely waited for the other four to pile in before speeding off.
"I told you not to interfere!" Honker hissed.
"He barely knows I'm alive," she scoffed, brushing off his concern. "Does Darkwing have an evil twin?"
"I...I guess…" Honker said. "I'm not too sure about that either, to tell you the truth."
"The way he looked at me, it was like he recognized me but didn't care," Gosalyn said, frowning. "It was weird."
"Look, it's probably a good idea to leave him alone. He's your dad's problem now, not yours."
Gosalyn's gaze snagged onto the Ratcatcher. She hadn't known it had a kickstand and it had fallen over. A large scratch went from the sidecar along the side of the vehicle. Gosalyn grinned sheepishly.
"Think he'll notice I borrowed his wheels?" she asked innocently.
"Oh, I think so," a familiar voice said behind them and she whirled, discovering Darkwing Duck at her back. The Thunderquack was parked on the street and blocking traffic. Gosalyn's sheepish grin grew and she blushed.
"I was only borrowing it for a few minutes?" Gosalyn suggested.
"And you already dinged the Ratcatcher and scratched the paint!" Darkwing raged. "Didn't I tell you to stay home, young lady?"
"Yeah, but it sounded more like a suggestion…" She offered him her most winsome smile. He didn't fall for it.
"If you're going to stumble upon crime scenes, you're going to need to be trained," he said and then sighed as he realized the getaway car was long gone. "And quit stealing my stuff. Do you know how long it took for me to put the Ratcatcher back together the last time I dinged it?"
He was whining when he said this. "Launchpad took forever to fix the paint job, too."
"Launchpad?" she repeated.
"My sidekick," he said. "Er, well, he's new. He's less my sidekick and more a guy I hired as a mechanic who won't leave my house. He's supposed to work for Scrooge McDuck."
"You mean where Webby's staying?" Gosalyn asked, her interest piqued.
"You mean your friend from the orphanage? Yeah," he said. He propped the Ratcatcher back up and although he looked annoyed, she guessed she wasn't in serious trouble. After all, she had experience telling when adults considered her in deep trouble. To her, this was more like "stop doing this" rather than "you are grounded forever and eternity".
His gaze strayed to Honker.
"Do your parents know you're out here?" he asked.
"My parents think I'm safe at home with Gosalyn," he answered.
Darkwing frowned. Gosalyn hadn't realized that by now, Honker must've put two and two together and realized that Drake Mallard was Darkwing Duck. So much for secret identities. Oops. Judging by the expression on Darkwing's face, he had come to the same conclusion. His eyes flashed at Gosalyn.
"Anyone else you want to tell my secret identity to?" he asked, testy.
"Webby-" she started.
"Webby doesn't count," he said, waving it aside. "If she's part of SHUSH, she's bound to find out. I meant anyone who isn't a secret agent."
"You're a secret agent?" Honker asked.
"Not so secret now," Gosalyn said, snorting.
"All right, come on, come on," he said. "You two can ride in the Thunderquack while I see if I can pick up Negaduck's trail."
"Is he, like, your evil twin?" she asked, unable to help herself.
"You know, I'm not really sure," he said. "But he's nowhere near as handsome or as smart as me."
"Just as arrogant, though," Honker muttered.
"I heard that!" Darkwing objected. "Just for that, you get to hold the hamburger bag when we stop at Hamburger Hippos."
Gosalyn called Webby while she was in the Thunderquack and filled her in. Darkwing only corrected her a couple times-he was more focused on figuring out where the villains had fled to. The problem was that their trail had gone cold.
"Hamburgers?" Launchpad asked and Gosalyn startled, having forgotten that they had had a pilot in the first place. She'd been so absorbed in her phone call.
"Is that Launchpad?" Webby asked. "Mr. McDuck has a message for him. He said to come back or he'll find someone else."
"But Darkwing Duck's my hero!" Launchpad protested, overhearing this. "How can I abandon him in his time of need?"
"Really? You're going with that?" Darkwing said and then sighed. "Oh, well. Can't help what the fans want."
"Or 'fan', singular," Gosalyn muttered.
"Maybe now isn't the best time to talk," Webby demurred.
"I'll call you back later, okay?" Gosalyn promised.
"Okay."
It might've been Gosalyn's imagination, but Webby seemed preoccupied. She wished she could have asked more, but Darkwing had swooped down on a likely building. Too excited to worry about that for the time being, she bounced in her seat. This was just like one of those crime shows. Or the original Darkwing Duck series.