Chapter 2, everybody! Eeeee I'm so excited! :D And thank you to everyone else who's excited about this too! :D And now is when we see the first glimpse of just why this is a Ducktales crossover...
Not sure about the feasibility of an apple orchard in California/possibly Nevada near buttes and desert, but we had just visited our local orchard when I wrote this, so I had apples on the brain. On a related note, seconds are apples that have blemishes and therefore aren't fit for the grocery store, but are still good to eat—our local orchard sells seconds in big crates to pick through, but they don't fetch as much as the perfect apples (WHOOM-TAH!).
The Maximum Ride novels I had heard about on Tumblr about the same time, which is why they get referenced—I haven't read them yet, but I think I have one I picked up on sale? And the gene cleansers, again, are a reference to Spectacular Spider-Man. Really wish that had gotten a third season….
Also, tried looking up bird migrations to get an idea of the time it would take for these guys to pull a Homeward Bound—yeah, good luck with that, because all the websites I looked at were not helpful. XP And not everybody's trigger-happy in the country, Tadashi….
Angelwings2002, thanks for the review! EEEEE, THANK YOU! I'm glad you love it, I wasn't sure how it would be taken, so I'm glad someone else loves it too. :D
Big Hero 6 © 2014 Disney
Ducktales © 2017 Disney
"For the hundredth time, don't take the good apples, take the seconds! It's bad enough we're stealing as-is, don't impact these people's livelihoods like that!"
Grump glared at him before very pointedly biting another good apple off the tree.
Tadashi groaned, rubbing his face; felt a tugging on his feathers. "What, Nox?"
Thirty-one people, counting himself and Grump the Griffin as he was now called—thirty-one people experimented on and turned into bird-people: ten adults, maybe seven who could be classified as teenagers, and then thirteen children of various ages. With him as the default leader, only because he had been the one to open the cages—not that anyone seemed grateful. He had allowed the raid on the All-Mart warehouse only because they needed clothes and food, and Sue had figured out how to cut and darn and stitch around the new anatomy, but the rest of the time he was concerned with staying ahead of the Sycorax guards and keeping from out-and-out stealing except when absolutely necessary, and it was starting to grate on people's nerves.
And it was a little too much, he decided, to hope that people thrown together by circumstance would immediately band together against adversity, focus on taking care of the kids while he did his best to try to hack into Sycorax's system to at least get some idea of what had happened. The amount of grousing when he had taken the laptop had not quite abated when he pointed out that he needed it to help them.
Now the ball cap he was adjusting wasn't strictly necessary, to be fair, but his head had felt bare without it, and it was calming, at least.
Still tugging—he finally relented and looked down at the skinny little bird-boy—fortunately none of them were Hiro, but this one that he had named Nox felt too similar to how Hiro had been as a little kid for him to be comfortable. Nox, the skinny black-feathered kid he had had to pull bodily out of that prison, who had now apparently decided that Tadashi was the big brother and he was going to glue himself to Tadashi's side no matter what.
Tadashi didn't complain—he could do big-brother, and it was nice to have at least one person who listened to him (Momakase—or 'Kase, as everyone was referring to her—did, but it seemed to be mostly when it suited her).
"Yes, that's a nice rock," he said, looking at the item Nox was holding up for his inspection. "Very—no don't put it in your mouth!"
Which led into the next problem that was occurring with the kids—none of them seemed to be much mentally advanced past toddler or young child in their mentality, despite most of them being physically big enough to pass as school age up to preteen. None of them seemed to talk in anything resembling human language either, despite parroting a word back if you said it to them often enough, and some of them thought screaming was a great way to vocalize.
Nox, meanwhile, seemed to think that most anything should go in his mouth, including things that really shouldn't. It wasn't the first time Tadashi had had to fish something out.
Of course, considering the sallow face and the rest of his rawboned self, Tadashi could guess that part of that habit came from him just plain being hungry.
"Here," he said, putting the rock in his hoodie pocket and scooping Nox up (way too light to be healthy, please be hollow bones or something), wincing a little as his feet grabbed on, claws digging in as he snuggled up against Tadashi's side. "Come on, we'll go get something you can put in your mouth, okay?"
He did a quick head count as he maneuvered over to a full fruiting tree—maybe twenty left of the original thirty-one, and from some of the mutinous looks, that number would be decreasing again soon. Half of the adults gone and three of the teens, splintering off from disagreements with Tadashi's attempts to keep them alive without breaking the law too badly—he didn't like to think about what might have happened to them once they left.
Sue and Beth he could count on to stay, though, and be helpful besides—they both had said they had children of their own (Beth had grandchildren, she had declared proudly, before lamenting the fact that the pictures were probably still in their old prison), were helpful with the thirteen kids. 'Kase was sticking around, as was Grump, surprisingly—Tadashi had honestly been expecting the griffin to be the first to leave. A handful of the teens he could trust too—maybe half of a handful. The rest were…honestly just big question marks.
He shook those dour thoughts from his head, pulled down an apple that looked like it could qualify as a second and handed it to Nox. "Here, see? You can eat this."
Nox took it, turned it over—glanced at Tadashi's face before tucking it in a fold of his oversized sweater.
"No, no—you're allowed to eat this—watch," Tadashi said, taking another apple and showing him before taking a bite, putting a bit more emotion into the please give me strength part of the moment of silence.
Nox considered, finally pulled the apple back out and put it in his mouth, gnawing a little before his teeth broke the skin and sent some of the juice squirting out. Tadashi coughed on a laugh that bubbled out at his expression.
"Hey don't eat too fast," Tadashi told him, putting his apple in his mouth before grabbing another one and moving on. Spot Brittany, one of the fairly decent teens, ease down to the ground next to her.
"So how are we doing?" he asked, once half of the apple was away.
"D'you remember—I don't know if you read these—do you remember the Maximum Ride novels?" she asked, wiping her mouth—valley girl accent twinged a little through her words, she had been wanting to go to SFU before this had happened—"It was one of those series you kept reading and hoping they got better."
"Vaguely."
"Well I want to put out right now that if that's what this is I want off this ride right now."
"Hey, I do too," Tadashi assured her, taking the core away from Nox before handing him the other apple. "Yes you can eat that—I'm hoping that tower over there can give enough of a signal to try again."
Brittany nodded, in a better position to understand what he was wanting to try than most of the others. "You'd better get it this time—I already missed this semester, I don't want to go too long between high school and freshman year."
"I'll do my best."
They had retreated to the nearby canyons and buttes, Tadashi sitting on top of a rock and facing the tower glowing a pale bone in the moonlight, in the hopes of getting a better signal. He had been able to snatch moments where he could charge the device, but the laptop had a finite battery life—he had to work quickly.
Which meant that the kids playing around on happily full stomachs and trying to get him in on it weren't exactly welcome.
"Should have waited until later," he muttered to himself, ignoring the kid pulling on his wing—but later would be morning, and he didn't want to risk someone spotting him up here; the light from the laptop screen was bad enough. And besides, trying to use a laptop screen in broad daylight was…frustrating, to say the least.
"Five minutes, okay guys?" Tadashi asked, looking at the kids tugging on his feathers—the kids, at least, never looked at him with anything other than positivity, sometimes disappointment when he had to reinforce a ruling or told them he couldn't play like right now—now if only they consistently listened…but they were kids, little kids at that, it was too much to expect them to keep more than one thought in their heads at any given time.
Still a tug on one feather—look to see Nox. "Go play with the others."
Nox instead settled against his side, playing with the stones nearby—keep an eye on him to make sure he didn't try to eat anything he shouldn't, try his hand at hacking once more.
Of all the things he did when learning coding, hacking was not on the top of the list—it was wrong, it was illegal, the only possible use it would have would be to get into a computer that needed fixing and resisted all other attempts to get in; hacking Sycorax was honestly beyond him.
But he had to try—for everyone here, for Hiro and Aunt Cass back home, he had to try.
And bite back a frustrated groan when he failed once more.
A huff redirected his attention, saw Grump looking over his shoulder; notice him looking, start vocalizing.
"You know I can't understand you, right?" Tadashi asked, prompting a glare. Nox had looked up though, was making grabby hands at the laptop, pulling it off of Tadashi's lap. "No, hey no this isn't a toy—" Look away at the sound of shrieking. "Webby stop chewing on Louie! Okay fine, but don't break it and don't drop it. Guys—"
No one knew any of the kids, none of the kids shared any of their names, so they were kind of stuck with whatever they decided to call them—Tadashi had done most of it, reflected that he probably shouldn't have named them after Ducktales characters, but he was hoping they'd be placeholder names at best until they got everyone fixed up and back home (and more than a few people had found the selection amusing, at least). Huey, Dewey and Louie were three boys who looked nearly identical but for some slightly varied banding on their wings; Webby and Della were the outgoing girls who were at any time most likely to express their emotions (any and all of them) through screaming; Violet and Lena were the quiet ones who behaved themselves. Mostly.
The rest of them, Mei, Trisha, Taylor, Harry, and Drew, were ones Beth and Sue had named, were young enough that they were ninety-percent fluff and couldn't fly on their own. Grump was the one who ended up having to carry them most days, which did nothing for his mood.
By the time he had the two separated, Sue carting them off to separate boulders for time-outs, Nox had the laptop in his lap in imitation of Tadashi, Grump lying next to him and looking over his shoulder—Tadashi sighed, went back over, wondering just how much damage he had done.
He was surprised when he came over to see the screen, recognized it as showing the inner workings of a company—
"How did you—" he started, having to sit down quickly—Nox didn't seem much brighter than any of the other kids, but this was advanced computer work he shouldn't—
Grump arked something, pointing a claw—Nox held the computer away, hissing and squawking at the griffin—hissing and squawking at Tadashi when he lifted the laptop out of his hands.
"No no it's—I can get it from here I just—how did you get past the firewalls?" Tadashi asked, navigating quickly—feeling sick as he went through several files, realizing that the bird-people were only one horrible set of genetic experiments being run behind a respectable façade—
"How goes this round?" 'Kase said, landing next to them.
"We're in," Tadashi reported. "I don't know how but these two got us in—" lift his arm a bit when Nox tried to take the laptop back—"I'm looking, okay? There's—there's an awful lot that these—these people did…."
'Kase looked excited, ruffling her feathers—this was it, this was what he had been telling people—
Reports of people who had been lifted out of hospitals, picked up off the streets—clones—some people had been cloned—
Check that folder—'Kase had mentioned that she had heard of the cloning, how they were trying to get residual memory into the clones so it would be an exact duplicate, how they had never been able to perfect it—the first clone would be closest, with almost all their memories intact, fuzziness eating away at them, and then it went downhill from number two on.
'Kase suspected it with herself, admitted to him in confidence one day that she knew who she was, really, but that those memories were hazy and sometimes vague. Seeing her full name on file, clicking on the first clone to see it was deceased, clicking on the second one to see a picture of her…she was right.
"Well?" 'Kase asked.
"I found the clone file," he said, glancing up at her—it must have been on his face, because she looked away soon after.
"It wasn't like it was a surprise," she muttered a few minutes later.
By then he had checked through some of the other clone files, keeping an eye on the little timer in the corner that said when the minimum time they'd be aware of the intrusion came—there was one file simply named O, and Grump was surprisingly very high on the clone list.
Nox was there too, surprisingly.
"So you two are related," he said to Grump and Nox. "You'd think you'd get along better."
Grump huffed and looked away, and Nox tried to take the laptop again.
"What, what—fine, here," Tadashi said, moving the laptop a little with the intent of letting Nox see the screen while he worked—Nox surprised him by taking the laptop and typing quite rapidly for someone who had never handled a computer before—he wondered if that was one of those residual memory things, wondered who O was and how much of that life Nox remembered.
"Look for gene cleansers," Tadashi advised, scratching his neck as he watched Nox work, much faster than Tadashi had been—Nox nodded, quick and curt, new windows opening—
Jabbed a finger at the screen suddenly, dark claw-fingernail scraping the screen a little.
Tadashi took the laptop, scanning the information—gene cleansers, a whole supply, and the warehouse they were stored.
Back in San Fransokyo.
"You went real quiet," 'Kase observed.
"We found it," Tadashi breathed. "The gene cleansers—the way to turn us back to normal—they're in a warehouse in San Fransokyo." Memorize the place, scratch it into the dirt—in, out, and then he'd be back to his old life—
He clenched a handful of his hoodie, thinking of his last clear memory before waking up in that horrible lab—the memory of Professor Callaghan with Hiro's microbots, hitting him hard, sending him cracking against the wall and into blackness—Professor Callaghan, his mentor, snapping and doing something insane for no apparent reason—
He had to get back—Hiro was probably in big trouble—that should have been the first thing he did upon getting out but with everything going on and trying to keep everyone together and alive even with them not wanting to—but soon—soon everything would be right again.
Beth and Sue would go back to their families. Brittany would go to SFU like she wanted. They could find the kids' homes, reunite them with the families missing them terribly.
But what about the others?
He wanted to at least make sure 'Kase was off okay—she might not want to stay in San Fransokyo, what with her original living there. Grump would probably be fine—he struck Tadashi as being the sort who was fine by himself, probably sat in his flat drinking tea to classical music and glaring whenever the neighbors made noise. Nox—he couldn't leave Nox on his own, he'd have to come with Tadashi, he was sure Aunt Cass wouldn't mind at all, Hiro might appreciate a younger brother once he got used to the idea—probably be much easier to swallow without the wings and tail and bird feet.
He logged out, shut the computer down, closed the lid and returned the device to his bag—they had figured out where they were about a month ago, and he knew that San Fransokyo was more than a few days' flight north and west. And that was if they dared flying—it was easier, walking was a chore, but there was the risk of being spotted—they'd have to stay far away from the roads, stick to the woods when they reached the forested hills…the big problem would be finding resources along the way, evading people searching for them or trigger-happy people living in the country. And then finding their way into the city and the warehouse and the gene cleansers…maybe just him. Maybe 'Kase too, she said something about being a thief—but this wasn't stealing, this was getting their lives back….
Nox had apparently decided that him putting the laptop away meant playtime was over—he climbed onto Tadashi's lap and curled up tight against him, head snuggled against his shoulder; breathing deeply a few moments later, having dropped off to sleep immediately. Grump had his head rested on his forepaws, glaring out at nothing, ear twitching but otherwise studiously ignoring everyone else. Oh yeah, definitely a loner, probably had his own personal library that no one was allowed to touch without gloves—he coughed out a laugh, thinking of how Fred was with his comics. Honey Lemon, Gogo, Wasabi, everyone…Hiro, Aunt Cass, Baymax….
Soon.
Soon he'd be home.
Even with announcing that they had a way to get back to normal, the people he thought would leave had left when he woke up late afternoon, stretching in the lee of a rocky outcropping that hid him from the sun and anyone flying overhead. Nox was still curled up against him, but he managed to extricate himself and work his way over to where 'Kase was sitting, Grump curled up around her boulder.
"Tom and the others left," he observed once he was close.
She nodded. "Said they were done with following some kid around."
"I didn't ask for this job."
"No, but I didn't want to be the one in charge," she agreed. "David left too."
That was a blow—David had always been quiet, he hadn't been expecting that. "So that's how many left?"
"Even twenty. Three adults counting me, three teens counting you, the kids, and Mr. Grumpy here."
Grump huffed.
Tadashi sighed, shook his head, picked his way around and up to where she was.
"The gene cleansers are in a warehouse in San Fransokyo," he told her quietly. "We can't take twenty people in there for a quiet extraction—not when over half of them are kids. I was hoping you and me could get in there, get the stuff, and get out."
She laughed. "You and me? Seriously?"
He nodded, indicated her arms—he might have had the wings coming out of his back, but hers were part of her arms. "I know exactly what I'm looking for, but I don't have the first clue how to break into a place—you do. And you need your arms free to fly—I don't. We go in, get out, and twenty-four hours later we're back to our old lives."
There was something brittle in her expression. "No, you get to go back to your old life. My old life is still occupied."
The original that she had been cloned from—he wondered if the original was even aware of what had happened. "So…now's a good time to start over," he suggested, adjusting his position—trying to sit with bird legs and a tail was awkward. "I'm sure Aunt Cass wouldn't mind an extra hand in the café." And he was pretty sure she and her had never met. "Or you could go someplace else—go on that one cooking show and yell at Grammercy."
She snorted—looked at Grump when he rumbled something.
"What?" he asked—the kids and 'Kase seemed to understand whatever it was the griffin was saying, even though he and the others never could make any sense of it.
"He says the gene cleansers wouldn't work on clones," she said, ears pinned back, beak drooping.
"We don't know that," Tadashi insisted. "And even if it doesn't work, we'll think of something—I'm not leaving you like this."
She looked at him critically, like he had just dyed his hair and she was judging him harshly for it. "You have a real need to be the hero, don't you?"
He looked her dead in the eye. "Someone has to help."
Grump snorted, but something shifted subtly in 'Kase's expression.
"All right," she sighed. "But when you get yourself killed, don't come running to me."
"Fair enough."