We’d actually gone into the pet store for a bag of little tennis balls. Technically dog toys, but Severus like to chase them…and then she saw the duck. “His favourite colour is yellow,” she always insists. She’s a bit farsighted and so didn’t see the “I talk!” sticker on the duck’s tummy, and only realized that it was meant to make noise when the cashier attempted to demonstrate. She spent a few seconds whacking the duck against the counter, but it refused to give up its secrets, so a second, less reticent duck was secured instead.
(the I Talk revelation was something of a relief to me, who’d idly poked one of the stuffed fish and inadvertently set off a wave of bubble noises, croaking, bwak-ing and quacking from the others assembled…I had my earplugs in, so I wasn’t…actually certain where the noise was coming from and hoping I wasn’t imagining it)
At this point we probably both knew that the hair-trigger eruption of quacking was going to be more of a bug than a feature, but she accepted the substitution anyway. It quacked when she put it in the bag. It quacked again when we put it in the car, and then when I set it down in the chair. It quacked when Severus nosed it, and somewhat predictably, he fled in terror. Jon and Doris took turns setting the quacking off, all through dinner.
“Alright,” I said, “I’m penciling him in for a routine quackendectomy.”
It’s difficult to convey exactly how loud an irritating this thing is, so I took a video for posterity
(also science) before I wheeled him into the operating theatre:
I had to wear my earplugs while I worked on him because the slightest touch would set the quacking off; in spite of this, every single time it did, I could still hear my mother laughing from the living room.
I’ve had to modify dolls before but I’ll admit that working on one that randomly emits bursts of offended quacking was a new experience…fortunately I wasn’t able to sustain a train of thought long enough to wonder about the ethical implications of cutting up a live patient without benefit of anesthetic 😛
Fortunately the seam down the back was a bit shoddy in comparison to the rest of the stitching, and done in white thread rather than yellow; I was soon able to locate and remove the Quacking Device:
This little fucker right here.
After that it was just a matter of adding some supplementary stuffing and closing the seam again.
I didn’t take a third video of the Quacking Device being unceremoniously thrown to the back of the china hutch, where it briefly continued its muffled quacking behind closed doors before finally falling silent.
Mooncustafer 