Two finales in one night? ULTIMATE CLIMAX MODE ACTIVATE. So much duck, so little time, am I right?

Art by Yours Truly
Story by  WolfgoneWide

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“Well,” Darkwing said with a certain amount of smugness to his tone, “it looks like we’ve saved the unsuspecting citizens of St. Canard from yet another terrible fat- I mean, fate.”

The police had turned up to take Brock away. For once, Darkwing hadn’t felt the urge to grab the limelight- at least, not until he was presentable again. Both of the officers in question looked rotund enough to have been past customers of the criminal coon- and, more importantly from DW’s perspective, each of them was still bigger than he currently was.

“Take him away, boys!”

The pair of law-enforcers scratched their heads over the two-dimensional tanuki, who seemed laminated onto the tarmac like a particularly strange piece of modern art. That is, until you noticed his eyes looking around. Finally, one of them found a spatula amongst the broken bakery’s bric-a-brac and used it to lever Brock out of the extremely shallow crater that he left in the road beneath him, like a silhouette.

“Y’see, Brock?” Darkwing smirked as the two officers fought to keep the paper-thin procyonine from flopping back to the ground. “Giving up crime’s good for you- you’ve gotten MUCH thinner in two minutes flat.”

“This… isn’t… OVER, Dumbwing!” Brock grated out through his flattened snout. He currently resembled a very bad old-style computer-game sprite. “I’ll get myself out of this… somehow! And when I do, I’ll be coming for you! You AND your stupid steamroller of a sidekick!” He shook with rage, literally, and accidentally slipped from the grip of the officer who was holding him up like a piece of washing. “Ack!” He fluttered to the floor and lay there in a helplessly crumpled heap.

“Gee,” one corpulent cop said, scratching his head under his uniform cap. “What’re we supposed to do with this one? Mail him to the St. Canard Penitentiary?”

“…Hey, I know!” The other suddenly snapped his plump fingers in inspiration.

“…Ok, this is great and all,” the first one commented as they carried Brock to their patrol car, the still-protesting perpetrator rolled up on their shoulders like a Tanuki tube of wicked wallpaper. “But what’re going to do when we get to the POLICE STATION? Won’t he just slip through the bars n’ all?”

“A few minutes with a tyre-pump ought to do the trick,” Darkwing commented, buffing his fingernails on the front of his roll-neck sweater- which was struggling to contain more than his chest at that moment. “Maybe MORE than a few minutes,” he amended spitefully, tugging on his top in a vain attempt to get it to cover his embarrassingly big belly. “Then you could set him to work in the kitchens.” He grinned. “That ought to slow the other inmates down some.”

“I’ll be BACK!” the rolled-up raccoon threatened flatly. “Just you WEIGHT and see, Dumbwing! I’m gonna FLATTEN this city! And I’ll be using you AND Large-pad to do it!”

“Oh, officers?” Darkwing called sweetly after the retreating procession, his innocent tone belying the vindictive grin on his beak. “See if you can find your prisoner a pair of pants while you’re booking him!”

“No!” Brock wailed, “Not the PANTS! Anything but the- mphh!” The cops slammed the trunk of their patrol car, the furled felon stowed inside. They got in- the suspension sinking beneath their combined weight- and drove off.

“It just goes to show- the bigger they are, the harder they fall,” Darkwing summed up smugly to himself. Dusting his hands down, he turned around, only to take a sudden jump backwards. His sidekick had snuck up behind him. Somehow…

“Launchpad!? What the- are you STILL eating?!” The previous satisfaction in Darkwing’s tone was quickly drowned out by the more familiar trio of shock, disbelief and growing, impotent fury. Fortunately, when enraged his voice carried quite far.

“Uh, gee DW,” Launchpad replied from on high, somewhat indistinctly through a full beak. “You said I should find a place to put Brock’s leftovers. Somewhere where no-one could get their hands on them, you said.” His finished his mouthful with a satisfied gulp. “Well, I found somewhere!”

“That’s NOT what I… gnahhhh…!” His exasperation reaching impressive new heights, Darkwing dragged a hand down his forehead and seemed to try to wrench his own beak off.

Still sitting in the ruins of the Bad Bakery, Launchpad was now St. Canard’s very own Mt. Quackmore. Towering over his surroundings like a giant, he had also grown even more gigantically FAT. During his ‘jail-break’ his stomach had swollen into the surrounding parking lot, whilst his backside had filled the footprint of the bakery itself. Somehow, his stupendous size hadn’t stopped him getting his hands on the last of Brock’s evil edibles, and thanks to that last ‘snack’ his belly was beginning to burgeon beyond the confines of the lot, and threatening to impede traffic. Standing there in front of him, Darkwing was confronted by a feathery white bulging cliff of blubber for almost as far as he could see in every direction. Another ‘gulp’ signified Launchpad scoffing a final payload of pastries, and that monstrous mountainous middle rolled another foot or so towards him with an answering ‘glorp’, like an out-of-control bounce-house. On top of this gargantuan gut sat the vast, bulging airships that Launchpad’s chest had become, threatening to eclipse his comparatively tiny head, only separated from the rest of his behemoth bulk by a tyre of flab to mark the last known location of his neck. A humungously chubby pair of cheeks wobbled either side of his beak and pushed out beyond it, seeming to swell even more burstingly-big as Brock’s baking had its final effects. At his very summit perched a comically tiny flying hat and goggles, red forelock poking out from under it. None of Launchpad’s other clothes had survived his latest epic expansion. The only positive side was that there were now an awful lot of feathers to cover his modesty.

To Darkwing’s mind his sidekick now resembled the Stay Puff’d Marshmallow Duck- one who was well and truly Puff’d. It would be a miracle if he could still move. Actually, Darkwing though it miraculous Launchpad could even lift his arms right now, just about distinguishable from the rest of the white landmark as vast, doughy tyres of feathery duck-flab. They now certainly couldn’t reach past his own personal horizon, which at least might stop him snacking. Launchpad’s legs were mostly buried beneath the ziggurat of zaftigosity that his body had blimped into, but Darkwing could just see enough of the outer curves of Launchpad’s ‘rudder’ to realise that this situation was even more pear-shaped than he’d feared. He could only hope that nobody on his sidekick’s far side had a camera to hand- at least nobody would be able to recognise who he was from that angle.

“Hey, don’t sweat it, DW,” Launchpad said, quite indecently cheerful for a duck who’d gone from powerfully-built to one the size of a power-station. “Just a few more couldn’t hurt, right? And I was kinda peckish!” He smacked his beak, then tried to peer down at his pint-sized hero and mentor. In the end he had to settle for shrugging. “So, uh, what now, DW?”

“Now, Launchpad, we start working on getting you back into shape!”

Against all evildoers’ conventions, Brock didn’t seem to have prepared an antidote for what he’d done to Launchpad- to both of them. So undoing it was down to pure, unadulterated willpower. Fortunately, DW had enough of that for both of them.

“That means exercise, Large-pad. Lots and lots and lots of exercise!” Darkwing started jogging on the spot to prove his point, then hurriedly changed his mind. “A… A.S… A.P.!” He wheezed.

“Uh… gee,” Launchpad said, unenthusiastically. “Can’t I have lunch, first?”

Fuming, Darkwing made to poke the Godzilla-sized gut in front of him, then thought better of it as it wobbled menacingly above him. He settled for folding his arms and tapping one foot instead.

“I said A.S.A.P., Launchpad. That means Right. Now!”

Darkwing’s webbed foot stuck to something soft. Blinking, he looked down and lifted his foot to find a pastry sitting there that had somehow escaped the all-consuming food-vacuum that Launchpad had grown into. There was a rrrrumble. It came from DW’s stomach.

“Well,” he conceded, picking it up and examining his find. It smelled delicious. “After we’ve finished making sure there aren’t any of these still laying around. We’ve got a duty to protect St. Canard, after all!”

And just one couldn’t hurt, could it..?