Chapter Text
Once upon a time, in a small town named Homanburg, there was a 2-pound fluffy yellow duck named Quackity. He lived with a loving owner who fed him scrambled eggs for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, and bouillabaisse, cheese, and crackers for dinner. Served with water on the side, of course. Every day, the little duckling will go on walks and get endless attention. Even the dogs on the streets bark and wag their tail to no avail as all the people’s attention was one one singular being: Quackity and his fluffy yellow feathers.
Unfortunately, that’s an extremely unrealistic story of a fluffy yellow duck. Presumably from a fairy tale. Real life doesn’t really work that way. Instead, the harsh reality was that nobody really cared for a fluffy yellow duck. Not anybody in Homanburg anyways. They were too busy with their own life, each very important in each person’s own view. So, real life for Quackity might sound more like this:
There was a 2-pound fluffy yellow duck named Quackity. He lived with a loving owner who only fed him dried crusts of duck-friendly bread, once a day, ever since an evil human who wore white being told them that little ducklings like him shouldn’t eat three meals a day. Like, what the hell man? Quackity was perfectly fine with getting pampered with food. Anyways, who cares what the evil human being in white clothes said? Well, apparently his owner did.
And no matter how much Quackity stomped his little orange feet, or quacked in protest, he watched as his actions go in vain, and his rations every day got smaller and smaller.
When he went out for daily walks, he wasn’t fawned over, or praised with attention. Instead, every morning, he watched person after person walk away, carrying their black boxes or rectangular screens, not sparing as much as a glance at him. No matter how much Quackity wiggled his little tail, or quacked at the top of his lungs, nobody would sit down next to him and pet him. Or even sit down and tell him their life story. He would happily listen, mostly for the head rubs though. But NO. They never did.
The dogs walking by all seemed to mock him, wagging their tails happily as person after person stopped from their very important walking to pat their heads or give them a little back scratch. Even the feral cats, whose only attention from humans were the humans shooing them off the benches, seemed to stick their tongues out at him.
After nearly a year of facing the same treatment, one meal a day, no attention from humans, and not even getting cheese and crackers as a reward for not pulling the electric plug for one day, Quackity was fed up. He stood in a resolution that he would no longer face the same treatment. An entire twelve months of suffering with lack of good food, affection, and more good food, Quackity just HAD to do something about it.
It was that night, when the little duck was cuddled in a little ball on the sofa, waiting for his owner to come home from the place they disappeared to for eight hours every day, to feed him the boring bread, that he knew exactly what to do. If you were there that day, it would seem as if a light bulb had lit up above the duck’s fluffy yellow head. Quackity was going to run away from home. For good. In this mission of his, he was going to find an owner who was actually going to feed him scrambled eggs for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, bouillabaisse and cheese and crackers for dinner.
Quackity was very pleased with this new resolution. So pleased, in fact, that when his owner came home and fed him dry, duck-safe bread for the three millionth time, for once Quackity wasn’t thinking of how terrible and dry the bread tasted. Instead, this time Quackity was thinking of all the food he would be able to eat after he ran away.