#duck boy

Crackling Balls

Yes, I still remember my old family friendly characters lol Posted earlier on https://www.patreon.com/joaopereiracreations https://subscribestar.adult/joao-pereira-creations

Hi Milk! Thanks for the ask! Sorry for getting to this late. I also apologize for not having more tmbs content yet (I'll get there. Eventually). But since you asked me about Duck Boy (Daniel Jacobi), I thought I'd give you an update and some stuff that involves him specifically.

😭 angst or sad WIP snippet

Here's a snippet of Duck Boy talking about his best friend's death that I plan to publish soon:

"[...] She should be the one who’s here, but she’s not. I am. And it’s unfair, because I…I’m not like her. I can’t make up for all the bad stuff I did, because there was never anything good about what I did. I was the guy that blew stuff up. I destroyed things, and…people. Relationships. You can’t get any good out of that. [...]"

😔published lines or a section of a fic that was super sad, angsty, or difficult to write?

Now here is the official Duck Boy update. (DO NOT READ IF YOU DON'T WANT SPOILERS). As you may recall from my last post, Duck Boy really screwed things up and refused to see the light. However, he does eventually come to the light in about the most chaotic way you possibly could (my reaction here for the wolf359 fans). To make a long story short, imagine the Curtain and Garrison divorce drama but 1000x worse than that. That's what happens with Jacobi and his boss, Kepler (aka Whiskey Boy). You see, he decides that since the opposing crew killed Alana Maxwell, his best friend, and Kepler put her in danger, it's only reasonable to threaten to blow up the entire ship and everyone on it (including himself) unless Minkowski (the person who shot Maxwell) agrees to shoot Kepler in the head. Kepler is completely shocked by this (I believe his exact words were "how could he? After all we've been through...") which...I don't even have time to detail how much of a loser Kepler is and how horribly he treated Jacobi, (especially by his behavior at his best friend's funeral) but he makes Duck Boy look like a saint. His surprise at this betrayal is completely unwarranted and entirely unjustified. Anyway, they get divorced and Jacobi eventually decides against killing everyone, forgives Minkowski and himself for the role he played in people's deaths, including Alana's, and finally starts acting like a good guy. But then the real bad guys show up, and a bunch of stuff happens but basically, Kepler has a sudden breakthrough, realizes he's been a complete fool, and realizes the only way he can protect Jacobi, Minkowski, and the rest of the crew and humanity is by pretending to be a bad guy who betrayed all of them, and then surprising the bad guys and sacrificing himself without telling anyone about it. Jacobi never finds out what he did (he begged Kepler to join him, but Kepler refused to make his performance believable and though Jacobi does go back to try to find Kepler in the aftermath, he can't and realizes he probably died).

Now, for my fic, I include a scene of Jacobi discovering the truth about how Kepler died and what he did for them. This also plays off a quote from the podcast where Kepler tells the crew that none of them really know him because the real Warren Kepler "died" in order to have this job. Here is a snippet from that. I was a little weird to write this because of how much time I spent not liking these two characters, but redemption arcs always make me happy when they're genuine, so here we go:

Once they had left, Jacobi sighed and looked up at the screen. He stared at it for a long while, not really moving or saying anything, letting what he’d just seen wash over him.

He’d known it was more than likely that Kepler was dead. He’d known when he’d searched and been unable to find him. No one else reported any sighting of him, so how he died was a mystery that Jacobi thought might be better left unanswered given the last exchanged he’d had with his former boss.

But at least he had the truth now.

Jacobi continued to sit in silence, letting the emotions roll over him. Though it was hard to tell exactly what emotion he felt in the moment. Kepler’s death didn’t exactly cause him grief (particularly because Jacobi remembered very well that way Kepler had acted at Alana’s funeral not to mention everything else he’d done), but it certainly didn’t make Jacobi feel particularly joyful. The man on the tape, whoever he was, the real Warren Kepler, the one who hadn’t destroyed himself giving everything to his job, the man who could make jokes as he waited to be thrown out of an airlock because he knew he’d saved what mattered… Jacobi would have liked to have known that man. Maybe he’d seen glimpses of him from time to time, but that wasn’t the same as knowing him.

He lost $13,000 in an internet scam, he (presumably) lost the respect and love of his family after that accident at his first job, he was blacklisted from the only job he ever had, he got recruited to the evil murder organization by Kepler (who honestly kind of took advantage of the fact that Jacobi and Maxwell were isolated from their families and support systems but that’s a post for another day), then he lost his faith in the one person and company that pulled him out of unemployment and despair when following their orders led to the death of his best friend (Maxwell), then he loses his free will for a bit, and eventually he loses Klein and Kepler as well.