Duckvember is here! … and I start with exactly zero ducks. GOD I’m good at this. I’m saying egg counts. Because it’s a convenient excuse.

Gonna spend a lot of this month laying out Tesla’s backstory so Megs is going to be an honorary duck for the next 30 days. Cause it’s kinda hard for me to draw Tesla stuff without one of her daddies.

To clarify, she is not hatching in this picture. That lovely little birthmark was given to her during a misguided attempt by Megavolt to inject his DNA into something organic to see what would happen. This plus a whole lot of electricity ended in some rather explosive results (he’s not a biologist, ok? Leave him alone).

No, Megs is not a monster who would experiment on a baby. He was told by Quackerjack that it was an unfertilized egg (which he bought even though it’s freakishly huge to be unfertilized) that he just happened to find and that Megavolt could do whatever he wanted with it. This apparently translated to “hey, make a mutant freak egg!” The whole thing probably would have killed Tesla if Quackerjack didn’t have a last minute change of heart when he realizes he just basically told Megavolt that he could fry his baby, and he steps in to take half the shock of the whole experiment. No, Quackerjack is not a monster either. Just an overgrown child who is trying to deal with the fact that he now has a child of his own that came from the only time he ever cheated on Megavolt.

Stay with me here because I haven’t fully fleshed this part out yet, but assuming that Quackerjack did go all bat shit like in the comics, it would take a while for him to get back to normal. During that time, things were pretty strained between him and Megavolt which lead Quackerjack to spending a lot of time with a crazed fan he met during his time away from the Fearsome Five. She was obsessed with him, but after getting pregnant things got a little too real. For Quackerjack, it was just upsetting that he actually went so far as to sleep with her, and he didn’t know anything about the pregnancy.

Shortly after she was laid, Tesla was abandoned on Quackerjack’s doorstep by her mother with a note that basically said: “this is yours, I don’t want it, no givesies backsies.” This throws him into a total denial moment that resulted in unhatched baby experiment gone wrong. In the end, Megavolt forgives Quackerjack for being a moron and accepts the egg as his own (which at that point she kinda is because he mutated her into being somewhat genetically his).

As an egg, Tesla hated being held by anyone but Megavolt, which basically convinces Quackerjack that the egg hates him for being a bad dad. In reality, she doesn’t want to be away from Megavolt because she now needs a steady flow of electricity to keep her warm. This is exhausting to rat daddy because she is constantly draining him, but it takes them awhile to figure this out. For the first month or so, Megs is constantly on egg duty which is very draining, but Quackerjack can’t be there all the time so he leaves Megavolt a lot of little sticky notes remind him to take care of his own basic needs. I’m pretty sure the only thing he actually knows how to make is cookies.

Also, headcanon Quackerjack has super girly handwriting. Nothing will convince me otherwise.