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thekytchensynk · 3 years

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Choices (Fictober Prompt 11)

Prompt number: 11

Fanfiction Fandom: Ducktales

Rating: G

Warnings: No Warnings

Read this story on AO3

Gyro paced.

When Mr. McDuck, holder of the pursestrings, had determined that “Gizmoduck” was the “hero” that Duckberg needed, Gyro hadn’t agreed, but he had agreed, if you take the difference. The idea itself? Pure madness. The thought that some half-baked intern in a mechanical utility suit would somehow many the city safer rather than in far more danger struck him as the same sort of fairy tale nonsense that led to children staying up late at night enthusiastically waiting for some allegedly benevolent creature to break into their homes and leave free items, as though there would be no strings attached to THAT down the line.

But while Mr. McDuck and Gyro were on the same wavelength regarding the jolly fat man, they were not seeing eye to eye on the superhero thing. And since Gyro didn’t hate the idea of … ugh … Gizmoduck enough to potentially jeopardize access to his benefactor, he’d gritted his beak and tried to sound enthusiastic about it.

He liked to think he’d done a good job.

But the idea of actually managing the day-to-day nonsense of a superhero had turned out more complicated and irritating than he’d even imagined. For instance, despite being an intern with Gyro himself, the pilot of the suit wasn’t really a mechanical sort of thinker -- he could do passably well with wiring or a circuit board, but there was far more of a chemistry and physics bent in that one. Which meant while he could patch up the suit, and even make changes to it, he wasn’t as comfortable in that world as he was wearing the darn thing.

Which left it all to Gyro, of course. And did anyone think about that? Did anyone thank him? No, of course not. That wasn’t the flashy bit, why should anyone care if the suit was working well when Duckburg needed it?

And that was only the beginning.

There were the letters. Because people allegedly didn’t know where Gizmoduck lived (a fact Gyro assumed had to be a lie, the guy couldn’t keep the secret from literal children), they sent letters for him to McDuck Enterprises, since it publicly sponsored him. And the corporation wisely wanted nothing to do with them, so what did it do? It sent them here, to his place of work, where they were nothing more than a processed-pulp annoyance. Thank you for helping me cross the street, Gizmoduck! Thank you for finding my puppy, Gizmoduck! Thank you for swooping in to grab the gunman holding those kids hostage, ending the incident without any injuries Gizmoduck! A parade of saccharine paper waste.

And then there were nights like tonight. When Mr. McDuck and his family had hared off to some obscure corner of the world chasing money or mysticism, and some weather-based villain or something had attacked city hall (Seriously, there were so many weather baddies at this point, Gyro didn’t even bother learning names).

Gyro got notification on his phone whenever the suit started activating its more combat-oriented functions. Because combat functions meant combat. And combat meant the suit getting damaged.

And that meant Gyro up late repairing the darn thing, because if he let the city’s superhero fall into disrepair while Mr. McDuck was away … well, neither he nor his expensive invention ideas wanted to think what would happen after that.

The feed was mostly audio and a series of indicators showing the integrity of various systems -- power, the bigger weapons systems, propulsion, core movement, pie filling levels, etc. Mostly, watching them felt about like watching UV-protective resin coating dry. Sometimes he tinkered while he watched, but sometimes?

Sometimes he paced.

Tonight was one of those nights. The weather guy had attacked after a city council meeting about the curriculum in the Duckburg City Public Schools. Apparently he wanted meteorology to be a full year of study for every class in the fifth grade, and when the city council refused to vote on it (because the school board and not the city council would be the ones voting on a curriculum, Gyro assumed), he had decided to throw a tantrum and was holding the council, two reporters and everyone who’d shown up for the meeting hostage with an overly excited lightning storm.

The reason he’d chosen to pace instead of tinker this evening was that all the lightning was wreaking absolute havoc on the wifi that was beaming all this data back to the lab. He had the readouts on one of the larger displays, and the audio feed piping in through the lab speakers, but every once in a while the inane banter between hero and villain would break up in an absolutely ear-splitting burst of static. The sound invariably made Gyro jump, then he’d hop over, checking the readout and waiting for the feed to stabilize. And each time, it would come up -- power dropping but at an expected rate, pie filling holding steady, movement systems at ninety-five percent with some limited movement in the left shoulder which had been injured, as far as Gyro could tell, when Gizmoduck had dived to save someone from a blast of lightning. Nothing to be worried about. They just had to wait it out because getting hit by lightning was perhaps one of the worst things for the suit to handle.

Gyro paced.

“Professor Gearloose?” came a voice over the comm -- not the loud, self-assured tones of Gizmoduck, but the quieter, more urgent ones Gyro was more familiar with.

“Intern,” Gyro said by way of reply, expecting his word -- and tone -- to be picked up by the mics in the lab.

“I think something’s going on.”

“Things have been going on for almost an hour,” Gyro replied, unimpressed. “You should know, you were there.”

“No, I mean … something else.”

As he said this, Gyro finally picked up on a few facts. First, this marked the first time tonight the comm had been used for communication, not just monitoring the sounds at the scene. Second, it sounded like the intern was trying to keep his voice low.

And third? Well, even underwater, Gyro finally noticed the pickup in lightning activity. Echoes of lightning bolts were even making themselves seen all the way down here. It looked almost like a strobe light going off up there.

“What?” Gyro said, doing his best not to sound irritated or impatient despite being both of those things at the moment.

“He’s building up for something big. I don’t know, it’s looking apocalyptic up here. I think he’s going to try to take out the whole building with some sort of supercharged lightning bolt!”

“What makes you think…” Then Gyro’s mind wandered back over the past hour of ranting he’d half-heard from this weather villain and he answered his own question. “He told you that, didn’t he?”

“He did, but I didn’t think he actually had the power. Take out some of the brickwork, maybe, but he wasn’t showing anything like enough power to bring down a building.”

“What changed?”

“He pulled something out of the storm generator he’s using, and everything started ramping up.

“Describe it.” And as the intern did, Gyro’s suspicion quickly switched to certainty. Some sort of limiter. He’d put something similar in his own weather changing device before Mr. McDuck shut that avenue of study down. The problem was the limiter also acted as a regulator, and without it, the machine would cycle into ever-higher levels of power until…

“He absolutely can take down city hall with that machine,” Gyro said, urgency building in his chest like a physical pressure. “If that thing is allowed to continue, it might take out the whole surrounding block with it.”

“The whole … oh no, what am I going to do, what am I going to do?” The intern was clearly not talking to him anymore.

Not being directly addressed had never stopped Gyro before. “You need to get out of there,” he said. “Get the people and get out of there.”

“I can’t!” he hissed back. “There are too many. Not just in City Hall, but in most of the buildings around here, people got trapped by the fight. There have to be a hundred that I can see from here, and … I’ll just have to move it”

“What, through the streets?” Gyro asked, trying to emphasize just how terrible an idea this was. “It’s going to follow you. All you’ll be doing is picking a new spot for the guy to destroy.”

“If I fly-”

“You’ll just speed up the process,” Gyro said, frustrated that his intern didn’t understand the workings of a weather machine just because he’d never build or worked on one before. “It’s like magnets, the closer the machine is to the storm, the sooner that mega-bolt is going to come down.”

A pause. Then, “But it’ll stop at the machine, right?”

“Of course it’ll…” Gyro realized what he was unintentionally condoning in the middle and threw the brakes on hard. “Wait, wait, you can’t do that. The suit can’t handle it.”

“The city can’t handle it,” the intern came back quietly. And he was right.

Gyro tried to think. “The body of the suit should be able to take a lot of the load,” he said, voice dropping into a clinical tone, words coming fast. “But this isn’t like a normal lightning bolt. Do you have time to bond anything to it that could work as a static wick of sorts?”

“There’s no time,” he said. “And I don’t have a properly conductive bonding agent anyway.”

“Then how about-”

“There’s no time,” he repeated, and the sounds in the background shifted. He could hear the copter blades in the background, and the weather guy shouting in unintelligible rage.

“That suit is tied into your brain,” Gyro practically shouted. Why wasn’t he listening? “If you throw yourself directly into Thor’s temper tantrum, then-”

“Dr. Gearloose, you worked on this suit dozens of times,” the intern said.

“Yes, so you should listen to me when I say-”

“I think it’s stronger than you think it is. I think you underestimate your work. “I think I’m going to be safe.”

“You idiot intern, you-”

KA-BOOM. The sound of lightning striking the suit and the machine and the intern lanced deafeningly through the lab, so loud that it made Gyro jump, startled, and left his ears ringing.

The volume made the silence that followed all the worse.

“Intern?” Gyro asked into the quiet, even though a strike like that had to have taken out the systems. It might have kicked to auxiliary for a safe landing, but communications would be gone. The readouts from the suit had gone dark.

So Gyro paced.

Two hours later, the elevator started up. Gyro looked up from where he was working over the suit’s blueprints to see the doors pop open and reveal his intern, a little worse for wear and lugging that familiar duffle bag. The guy’s eyes roved over the lab before landing on the invetor.

“Dr. Gearloose!”

He sounded entirely too chipper. Gyro carefully tucked the blueprints into a waterproof sleeve and stood up. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing!” The intern sounded super enthusiastic about that answer. “The cops said I should go to the ambulance, but … hahaha no.” He started giggling, and for a moment, Gyro wondered if he’d spent the last two hours out getting drunk. If that were the case he wouldn’t have to fire the guy, he;d have to make sure he met with an accident before Mr. McDuck came back instead because Gyro was not going to put up with being left here, alone, wonder if-

“I told you so,” Fenton said, grinning at Gyro. “The lightning didn’t get to my brain. The suit handled it fine! Well.” He paused, then corrected himself. “Not fine. Like a blackout, too much light then everything goes dark and whoooosh, down I went.” He simulated the descent with one hand, like a child. When his palm impacted the work table, he almost knocked himself off balance.

Gyro blinked. “The auxiliary didn’t auto-loose the parachute?”

The intern squinted at him, mouthing the word parachute like someone who’d never heard the word before. Then his eyes lit up. “Oh! Yeah, the parachute happened. But then it caught on one of the gargoyles and riiiiiip.” He really drew the sound effect out. “The last bit was fast. Really fast. Bumped my head.” He giggled again, one hand going to the side of his head.

Where, Gyro could now see, a bit of dried blood crusted among the feathers.

“You gave yourself a concussion?” Gyro demanded.

“Teeechnically the ground gave it to me,” The intern corrected him. “But it caught me, so I can’t be too mad.”

“Come on. We need to get you to a hospital. Now.” Gyro said, walking over and turning him back toward the door.

The intern followed him unsteadily but with clear determination. “Right,” he said. “Hey, did you know you build in a breaker? Up there?” He tapped at the air where the Gizmoduck helmet would normally have been.

“I what?”

“It disengaged when the surge came,” the intern told him with the severity of a child explaining a very serious diorama of toys. “Disconnected from my brain. Just as the lightning hit. You don’t remember?”

And now, suddenly, he did. He’d put that in almost as an afterthought -- a clearly forgotten afterthought. But once the intern said the suit had been rewired to use an organic processor … well, all those thoughts of things going wrong had swirled in his head, and he had spent an afternoon putting together a couple different prototypes. Testing. Installing the best. Forgetting about it. Worried about literally nothing.

Well, not worried. He hadn’t been worried. Of course not.

“Let’s go,” he said, ignoring the fact that they were both already in the elevator. He hated that the night was about to become a lot longer while he got the concussed idiot medical care, to make sure his brain wasn’t leaking out the side of his head.

But one thing for sure. He was absolutely done pacing for tonight.

#fictober20 #11 #ducktales #fanfic #gyro gearloose

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