Back into business after the latest events with the rogue CPU and Tempest, Paperinik is now focusing his attention on the Ducklair family: Everett and his daughters Juniper and Korinna. Everett has recently tasked Birgit and Boring with an important tasks, which involves delivering a secret component for an important machine with a truck. As PK investigates, Everett has a talk with Juniper about his past and why he had to leave his homeplanet, Corona...
This is the first of the four issues constituting the "final tetralogy".
This Issue contains examples of:
- Ambition Is Evil: Sarifa, Everett's wife, failed to become a queen candidate... so she had two daughters with him so that they could fulfill her dream. This actually put a wedge between them, and pushed him to leave the planet with his daughters to save them.
- Babysitter from Hell: We see that Korinna is overly strict with the children, using her psychic powers to keep them in check, taking their toys away and, in hindsight, raising them as her mother raised her. The last condition of the trope, in a bout of realistic outcomes, is averted, as the children's father sacks her.
- Be the Ball: Birgit uses a special gun to envelope PK in a rubber-like shell which forms a ball, which she promptly kicks in the nearby water.
- Call-Back: The first part of the volume has PK summarizing all his previous encounters with Ducklair and his machinations to Lyonard, trying to find a common denominator.
- Contrived Coinicidence: Fitzroy was on guard the night PK accidentally crashes a whole truck in the mall. This results in everyone believing him to have chased PK away (while the hero simply had better things to do).
- Matriarchy: It's revealed that Corona wwas ruled by a Queen and a parliament of powerful, exclusively female psychics. While the planet is prosperous and highly advanced, the rule is far from perfect.
- Miles Gloriosus: Fitzroy boasts a tad too much about his (non-existant) struggle against PK.
- Origins Episode: Detailing the story of Zardoz/Everett.
- Papa Wolf: Restrained example, when the father of the two children babysit by Korinna sees how strict she is, he calmly but firmly shows her the door.
- Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Korinna and Juniper as toddlers, though their mother tried to warp them even at that age. And as we find out, she succeeded.
- Villainous Breakdown: Sort of, Birgit, who's essentially Everett's Dragon, is left shocked upon learning that the truck she was supposed to guard was empty, meaning that Everett didn't trust her and sent her on a fool's errand deliberately.
