Prologue

The Negaverse. Three years before Darkwing…

"It's no use, Negaduck has won…"

The speaker's two companions stared at him with almost identical bleak looks. It was darkness of the hidden underground hideout, which, due to its owner's eccentricities, was littered with both lethal and non-lethal toys. The darkness, however, was not prevalent enough to hide the miserable expressions of the three who had fled there. Even though one of the rather downcast heroes in question was wearing a rather silly jester's hat, and the other was a liquefied dog, the speaker could still tell that his words had an effect on the two.

Megavolt sighed and walked away from the two of them. Okay, it was more of a limp, due to the fact that he had not only had his leg had been gashed from the business end of Negaduck's beloved chainsaw, but the fact that Liquidator, the idiot, had collided with him, shorting him out and draining his energy. Dragging himself over to a huge toy block, Megavolt poked at it from a safe distance with his finger, hoping that Quackerjack hadn't done anything strange to it. The weird duck's hideout made Megavolt edgy, if only because it was hard to tell which toy was made to entertain children and which was meant to explode in your face. Fortunately it seemed the block was harmless, if overly large, and Megavolt gratefully sat on it.

He shook his head. He thought they could have beaten that horrible Negaduck by working together, but it had all turned out wrong! He was injured and shorted out, and forced to flee to the domain of an insane, if friendly, toymaker. There had been no choice. His own lighthouse was too far away, and the Liquidator had no secret hideout, he just merged with the nearest available water source. As for the fourth member, Bushroot...

But Megavolt didn't want to think about that.

And speaking of said toymaker, Quackerjack actually had gotten off worse than Megavolt. Megavolt could tell from the way Quackerjack was holding his arm that it was broken; to say nothing of the smell of singed feathers. That too had be in part Liquidator's fault, seeing how the electricity from Megavolt's shorting out had hit Quackerjack. The fact that Liquidator had saved the two of them from death was the only reason Megavolt was not angrier at him.

If only they had been able to help Bushroot…

Megavolt winched as his treacherous mind started to dwell on the fourth member of their supposed team. Bushroot was now the latest in a long line of people that had died at Negaduck's hand, including…wait, who were they again? Megavolt hated his poor memory. He reached into his pocket and brought out a small black covered diary, the latest in a long line of them. He loved his little diaries, the only things that kept his bad memory from being an even bigger hindrance. If he had been born a bit more scatterbrained or a bit less organized he might not have even thought of it. He actually owned two different types, the black covered ones and the white covers. The whites were normal diaries, but the black ones were special.

Megavolt flicked the diary open to the first few pages, the pages he used to keep the most important information. This information was always copied in every diary, so that no matter which one he read Megavolt would always remember.

Negaduck's Victims

It was a simple, but telling title. A list of the people that Negaduck had killed. Every time there was a newscast, or a suspicious obituary, or anything else that Megavolt could confirm as one of Negaduck's crimes the rat would pull out the death diary and scribble the name, age, and what that monster had done to them.

Megavolt sighed. Though he kept a record it was rare that Megavolt had witnessed Negaduck in action. He hated it. Megavolt pulled out a pencil and scribbled: Reginald Bushroot. He paused. How old had Bushroot been? Megavolt didn't know. He shrugged and moved on. Killed by chainsaw in the West St. Canard Bank while trying to hold back Negaduck from killing us. Sliced to small bits. Megavolt's hands were shaking as he wrote the last few lines.

Something yellow wiggled in Megavolt's peripheral vision. He looked up and saw that Quackerjack and wandered over and was shaking that banana puppet of his in Megavolt's face. The sight of the odd thing wiped a good portion of what he had been doing from Megavolt's mind.

"What's going on, John?" Quackerjack said using the odd high voice he used to make Mr. Banana Brain "talk". Megavolt wondered if he did that to be funny, or if the duck actually thought the doll was alive. It was one of the many creepy things that duck did, and Megavolt didn't like it. He thought that Quackerjack was pretty unstable, and that worried him a lot. Okay, so Megavolt himself wasn't exactly the sanity poster child, but that didn't change the fact that Quackerjack was just plain scary, especially for a guy who claimed to love children and whose purported goal was to make people happy.

Megavolt gaped at the doll, not sure what to do or say. In that moment of inattention Quackerjack snatched the diary, somehow using his injured arm, out of Megavolt's hand. The strange duck scanned the page and instantly the goofy bucktoothed grin vanished, replaced by something much more sober and downright haunted. Megavolt, who had never seen Quackerjack express anything other than mad cheeriness and insane rage, found himself more upset by this look then any of the other ones. It was downright horrible to see. Megavolt watched as Quackerjack flipped through the diary, as if looking for something. He apparently found what he wanted near the middle of the pages.

"Forty two." Quackerjack gave the diary back to Megavolt, who was now totally baffled.

"What?" He asked.

Quackerjack shook his head, the little bells on his jester hat jingling in an almost sad manner, as if they were picking up his mood "William Quacker wasn't forty when he died. He was forty two."

Megavolt looked down at the page. Right there at the top was: William Quacker Sr. Forty. 'Heart attack' in Quackerjack mansion. Further investigation confirmed poisoning. Covered up by S.H.U.S.H. A spark of realization entered Megavolt's mind. He knew that Quackerjack, their Quackerjack, had taken on his alias after Quackerjack Toys had failed one and half years ago with the explosion of the Children's Toy Museum. This museum's grand opening had been an explosive disaster. He knew that Whiffle Boy Industries, the video game company affiliated with Quackerjack Toys, had also failed at this time. Megavolt knew that, shortly after Negaduck's attacks on the companies, their employees, their owners, and their property, their Quackerjack, the duck that used toy themed weaponry to attempt to fight crime, had appeared. Megavolt had assumed that Quackerjack had been an employee, or at the very least a loyal fan, of the toy company. Now, with the strange, unfamiliar expression on the mad duck's face, Megavolt wondered.

"We've all lost someone to him, haven't we?" Megavolt said sadly, looking back down at his book.

Liquidator, who was looking down at the floor, simply nodded. The shame of what had happened, what his ineptitude had caused, was hurting him more than any physical wound that Negaduck might have inflicted. Quackerjack, on the other hand, hadn't apparently heard Megavolt, as he was now quietly talking to that banana doll of his, completely lost to the world.

Megavolt's eyes went back to his diary. He opened it, to the front, at the names that were, if not burning in his failing mind, were burning his heart.

After all, Megavolt had been born the same night that Negaduck had been, and was there for the first in a long line of terrible tragedies.