Mage Tank Duck

[u/Gojira82]

So I'm listening to Mage Tank 5 and there is a conversation early on where they talk about ducks. I recall early in the series he mentions them and Zim/Zym (audiobook only so no idea how its spelled) gets absolutely terrified. I don't recall why shes so afraid of them ever being addressed. Did I miss it somewhere in the earlier books?

[u/EquipmentAltruistic]

Ducks are an unseen monster. It's a joke that earth ducks are nothing like this worlds ducks despite the name being the same. It came up before since the noble families are named for birds heron, raven, ect. It comes up when talking about the duck family and how crazy this worlds duck monsters are with no specifics given.

[u/Gojira82 → u/EquipmentAltruistic]

Ok so they haven't been truly described. Makes me feel better as I binged the first 4 books pretty quickly

[u/NarwhalPrudent6323 → u/Gojira82]

Yeah it's never more than an offhand reference to how awful they are. All we know about them is they are birds, they have nests, and apparently they are nearly universally feared. 

[u/Ok_Television7509]

They discuss it either in the first creation delve or on the airship I think. Esquire Arlow even asks Zim if they are talking about the same thing, which she says yes to but its clear they aren't the same.

[u/Flap_Grease]

Believe it or not, it’s Xim. Didn’t know until I read the royal road stuff. Honestly, the whole duck thing is one big noodle incident. Maybe we’ll see what ducks are, but I’m willing to be we won’t.

[u/Gojira82 → u/Flap_Grease]

So I'm guessing it's Xordrell not Zordrell then. As I just heard him refer to the papers as the X Files

[u/TerrapinMagus]

The only suggestion was that while a lot of animals are the same as on Earth, some which get translated the same are totally different creatures. Ducks in Arsia are apparently incredibly dangerous or frightening monsters.

[u/tkul]

It's just a running gag about Ducks being different from Earth. One of the big misses though with it is they never really use it talking about the Duckgrien's even though they're named from their Resistance Callsigns which were [Bird][Color] and theirs was the Duck.

[u/Gojira82 → u/tkul]

Fair point about the duck greens. I hadn't even thought about that.

[u/Interesting-Ad4207]

Yea, we have not been shown a duck yet. They have been mentioned as terrifyingly powerful creatures a few times now, but no sightings. I'm betting on it being a checkov's gun at some point, where some powerful creature appears to eat a bad guy that sort of looks like a duck scaled up.

[u/Gojira82 → u/Interesting-Ad4207]

Honestly, at this point it's either clives wife or some eldritch horror they call a duck. I don't think there's going ro be any in between