Journey to Fire Mountain
By Sharan McQuack
One evening, after a long day, Mr. McDuck was relaxing in his library, reading a book. He was reading an obscure legend about a volcano whose name loosely translates as "Fire Mountain".
According to legend, somewhere inside the volcano's core lives the Fireblossom,(1) a flower whose leaves can cure all ills. Mr. McDuck tried to dismiss the legend as nonsense and he went to bed.
However that night, he had an unusually vivid dream: he dreamed he found the Fireblossom and got even richer than he is ALREADY. When he woke early next morning, he was determined to make the dream come true.
But as he did some research on Fire Mountain, he almost changed his mind. It was a remarkably dangerous place. It had the bad habit of erupting when you lest expect it. It had clifts and rockslides. It wasn't going to be a picnic and he would need help.
"Who is crazy enough to go with me, but sane enough to be counted on if something- or everything- goes wrong?" Mr. McDuck thought.
He tried to surpress the thought, it was no use. Try as he might to deny it, there was only one answer to that question: Launchpad McQuack! So, Mr. McDuck called Launchpad and Launchpad was there before the echo died.
Launchpad flew them there in a VTOL.
"I can see why you hired me for this job. Nobody else could land up here. (2) Nobody else would be crazy enough to TRY. But, hey, that's why I make the remarkably small bucks, right?" Launchpad joked.
It was a remarkably nasty place to have to land. It usually is, Launchpad is oftener than not required to land in places nobody else could even try to land.
I suppose I can't totally blame Mr. McDuck and others for imaging all kind of "crashes"- and even screaming at Launchpad for nothing due to nerves.
However,if you TELL him to land there and he does successfully, why are you yelling at him because YOU get scared? ( I strongly suspect Launchpad unnerves Mr. McDuck and others on purpose at times, just for the fun of it. And I don't blame him one little bit.)
They headed up the mountain. That part was fairly easy. It was that first step DOWN that was the LULU! But, using ropes, pinions and other equiptment, slowly, carefully, down they went.
They were both carrying backpacks with water, salt (it was HOT down there!), blankets, first aid kits, extra ropes, food and other such essentials, such as sample bags to carry plant samples back with, etc.
"There are time I really hate the fact that I'm a klutz. One wrong move here..." Launchpad mumbled.
"So be careful! YOU have to fly us home!" Mr. McDuck snapped.
"To hear you talk sometimes, somebody might think YOU know how to fly a plane yourself! Not that YOU'D hired somebody to do something you could do yourself. But I'm not supposed to know that you can't drive a car, let alone fly a plane, so I'll just keep my trap shut." Launchpad thought.
"When's the last time this thing erupted?' Launchpad asked.
"Don't even THINK about that! It might HEAR you!" Mr. McDuck said.
" It's not alive. How could it know?" Launchpad asked.
"You ticked off Vulcan once. And he's in charge down here!" Mr. McDuck yelled.
"I ticked off Vulcan? Who was dating his wife?" (3)Launchpad asked.
"Thought you didn't know who Vulcan was?" Mr. McDuck asked.
"That was before I married a Greek mythology nut! Sharan knows quite a bit about that kind of thing and I've picked up a little. Not much, but a little. And I guessed Vulcan had SOMETHING to do with vulcanos because of his name, even before I met her!" Launchpad said.
"Ouch! These rocks are hurting my feet!" Mr. Mc Duck complained.
"Well, maybe if you wore boots instead of those stupid spats..." Launchpad began, but quickly shut up when Mr. McDuck shot him a dirty look.
Luckily, just then they spotted the first fireblossom. The first of PLENTY- fireblossoms were growing as far as the eye could see.
"We can't carry them ALL." Launchpad said.
"I wasn't intending to. According to legend, it's the leaves that have the healing powers. Since each plant has only two leaves and we don't want to kill them, you can pick ONE leaf from as many plants as you can, while I take a few live plants, soil and all, as samples." Mr. McDuck said.
So Launchpad started picking one leaf from each plant while Mr. McDuck carefully, so not to hurt it, dug up a live plant and the soil around it. Mr. McDuck soon had three live samples and Launchpad had quite a number of leaves when they started to get nervous and decided to leave while the leaving was good.
Maybe it was instinct from being in danger so often . Maybe they had heard something or felt vibrations. But soon later, as they climbed up, they heard loud noises and felt the mountain shake and realized it was going to erupt.
"Aaa! I TOLD you it would hear you!" Mr. McDuck said.
Luckily, Launchpad is used to being blamed for EVERYTHING by now, Lord knows.
"Give me your blanket!" Launchpad said.
"Don't tell me you're cold? It's hotter than a pistol down here!" Mr. McDuck said.
" I have an idea that might save us- but I'll need both our blankets for it to work!" Launchpad said.
Mr. McDuck gave him the blanket.
"I hope these blankets really are air-tight like they are supposed to be!" Launchpad said,.
Launchpad held a blanket like it was a bag and let it fill with hot air from the volcano.
When it was full, he tied a rope around it and then tied the rope tight, shutting the "bag" and turning it into a balloon. He did the same with the other blanket and he and Mr. McDuck were heading stright up. Mr. McDuck had to cut away the ropes heading to the TOP of the volcano, Launchpad had forgotten about THAT. (Nobody's perfect.)
"OK, Mr. all-of-the-sudden-I'm-so-smart McQuack, how do we get DOWN?" Mr. McDuck demanded.
"Relax. The hot air inside of these blanket balloons will cool off and let us down after a little while. Meanwhile, I'll just shift my weight to "steer" us as close to the plane as I can manage." Launchpad said.
A little while later, they did come down, a bit faster than either one liked. Neither one was hurt and their samples were safe, so they started for the VTOL before the eruption could begin.
Mr. McDuck complained about how far they where from the plane, until Launchpad pointed out that he had landed them in the closest FLAT area to the VTOL. Every place ELSE in the area was sharp and pointy and they would of gotten hurt. And the flat area where he landed the VTOL was too far away for him to make it, they would of run out of hot air.
By the time they reached the VTOL the volcano was making very scary and very loud noises and was emitting a lot of smoke and making both of them very nervous, so they LEFT.
"We're outta here!" Launchpad said, as he and Mr McDuck heading in the VTOL back to Duckburg.
Mr. McDuck gave the leaves and the live plants to experts for study. Soon they had both good and bad news for him. The leaves could heal many illnesses (Good news), but not ALL of them.
Once, long ago, they might have been able to cure all ills, but pollution had reached even that volcano core and had weaken the plants so they could no longer cure all illnesses. (Forgive this bleeding-heart NY liberal Democrat for saying so, but poisoning the planet we're living on is a DUMB thing to do.)
And the plants would live only on the bottom of their volcano, any place else and sooner or later, they died. (Bad news.) They would try cloning the plants and try to figure out how they cured so maybe they could reproduce the effect and would try to trick the plants into growing elsewhere.
But for now, if Mr . McDuck intend to sell their effect, he'ld have to return to that volcano every so often, which for some weird reason, he was in no hurry to do.
THE END.
(1) Anybody ELSE read the "Chronicles of Narnia" and remember Lucy's cordial, made from Fireflowers from the mountains of the sun that could cure all ills?
(2) Don't waste time telling me about Launchpad's "crashes". I don't believe a word of it.
I don't believe Mr. McDuck is stupid enough to hire an incompetent pilot to fly himself and his heirs around ONCE, never mind over and over again. I don't believe the FAA would of given Launchpad a pilot's licence in the first place, never mind a COMMERCIAL pilot's licence, never mind let him KEEP the licence, IF Disney were telling anything remotely resembling the TRUTH. Sorry. They are "lying, lying, lying"!
These clowns are actually so JEALOUS of a FICTIONAL CHARACTER for being handsome and going places and doing things that they are depreiving Disney of the money it could make selling Launchpad! If that's not crazier than being in love with Launchpad, I don't know what is. (Which is why I absolutely refuse to feel silly about being in love with a cartoon character duck.)
Draw a picture of Launchpad, throw darts at it till you feel better, than write a story favorable to him, then throw darts again if you need to. Or write a nasty story about Launchpad, keep it to YOURSELF, then write a nice story.
Which is what I did with DW- see "What Launchpad did during his summer vacation". I had fun being nasty to DW in the version I KEPT TO MYSELF!
In the version I kept to myself, SHUSH and the cops thought DW was nuts, but SHUSH wasn't above using a loony to catch other loonies, they just hired Launchpad to be DW's "keeper", just in case. (Come to think of it, maybe that's the real explaination of how Alfred got to be Batman's butler- if British Intelligence somehow figured out who Batman is and wanted to keep an eye on him, what better way then to hire a "retired" agent to be his butler?)
When Launchpad went to bail DW out of jail in "Darkly Dawns the Duck"-the cops told Launchpad he couldn't because DW was being held for the shrinks for is why Launchpad "forgot" which was forward and which was reverse on the Ratcatcher. How else could Launchpad spring DW without having to tell DW the cops thought him mad? I apologize if saying that offended any DW fans out there.
And if DW was anyplace as popular as Disney pretends he is, and if I got paid for it, I would of been nicer to him!
3). "Ducktales Valentine"