When I was a young pup, I was completely in love with the idea of justice.

It comes with being a bat. It's pretty deep in our culture that we have to serve the others and keep them safe. If you ever were to sit down and read some of the books we read to our pups, you would find that most of them deal either with migration, or with protecting mice, voles, dormice, rats, squirrels, you name it. We have a deep-seated identity as guardians, and most of the other small animals think of us that way.

But when we move up to larger animals - mustelids and up, really - they start to see us differently. They are scared of us. We are symbols of something spooky that visits you at night. And you know what, if you're a little history savvy, there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for that. Back in the olden days, bats would regularly make lives miserable for any large animal that pissed all over the smalls. You dig up a mouse warren or made a few squirrel families homeless because you wanted to build yourself a barn? Bats would take revenge at night, sabotage your building, steal your food, and generally terrorize you until you apologized. Kill any of the small folk in the process of that barn raising? Expect to lose a few children of your own, quietly poisoned so that one day, one of them just don't wake up. Did you quietly raze a rat nest, figuring no one would notice or care? Gear up for a plague to hit your town. Apparently, ungulates still have "if I should die before I wake" as part of their evening prayer. That's our ancestors' fault.

So yeah, big folks find us hella scary. I get that. We have a fucking spooky past, and bats in the old days did a lot to perpetuate that because it was useful back then. I mean, old-timey bat formal wear includes painting a big skull on your face for fuck sake. But our ancestors probably didn't ever foresee all of us animals living together in one big happy city, right alongside each other out in the open. And today, that spooky image is giving us a shitton of problems.

Take me, for example. Like I said, I think all bats grow up thinking we're gonna protect the small. I remember flying out of the Noc one day, somewhere down on the southwest side. I was in my rebellious young pup phase, and wanted to finally see why my parents were so adamant that I never fly there. It's a pred-heavy neighborhood. Didn't matter to me at the time - like I said, young pup who didn't know better. I was so sure that the pred-prey thing was a bullshit divide that could be overcome in an afternoon if we all just talked to each other. Looking back, I want to reach out and wing myself upside the head.

Anyway. It took me all of half an hour to find someone dealing drugs in a parking lot somewhere, and milliseconds for me to decide that I should stick my nose in and report it, like a good citizen. It took them all of two minutes to spot me. They had a baboon sittin on a fire escape with one of those mosquito swipers - it looks like a little squash racket, only it has electrified strings. The street name for them is "bat racket," go figure. He swatted me out of the air and through an open window in the other building. I landed straight into the living room of a weasel family, who proceeded to slap my numb ass around like a toy for breaking into their apartment. They then unceremoniously threw me out the window. I landed in a dumpster in the alley, which was now devoid of people seeing as the drug deal was long done and they presumably considered me dead.

When I was done throwing up - electricity does a number on us, and the dumpster didn't help - I flew back to the Noc and didn't speak to my parents or siblings for almost a day. My mom worked out what had happened from speaking to my friends, and finally went into my roost and sat me down to explain some realities to me.

Turns out my experience is pretty much standard for young bats, give or take some details and injuries. All young bats think they can make a difference in this city, and they always get up and try at least once, and they are almost always immediately swatted out of the air by mammals who have no patience for nosy snitches. Sometimes the story goes one step further, the bat makes it out and reports it to the police, only to find out that absolutely nobody in the police will believe an eye witness report if it comes from a bat. We're considered untrustworthy, y'see. We make spurious claims. We report people to get back at them for slights. We have poor vision and mistake identities easily. There's a hundred different excuses for why, and I'm sure every bat you meet can rattle off a different list, but when it comes right down to it, it all ends up in the same statement that they all think but never say:

You are more evil than what you are reporting.

As you might imagine, some bats are real bitter about that. I was one of them. Still am, to some extent. There's a reason so few bats ever take jobs outside of the Noc. We don't want to deal with the wispering, the stares, the fear responses. There's a running joke among the bats that we're the only species that know what the fight-or-flight response looks like in every single animal.

Thing is, that sort of shit gets to you eventually. Young bats like me, we grow up with a slight niggling in the back of our minds where we wonder whether we really are monsters. So we take jobs where we help people, as a result. Emergency responders down in the Noc are almost entirely rats and bats. Rats do the heavy lifting, bats get in and out anywhere we are needed. I was an EMT for a while, myself. Won't lie, I did the training mainly because I wanted to prove to the people up top that I wasn't a monster - I wanted to be admired for my service. Kama-zotz, I was so fucking young back then.

I made it my mission get transfered up top. There's a special division in the ZFR that has bats make speedy deliveries of medicine around the city. It's a glorified currier position, and way below my training, but it was all they would give me. I took it, figuring I could probably get promoted later once I'd proven myself. My mentor back then, a grizzled old vesper, told me not to. Said I'd regret it, and that they'd never actually let me help anyone who was in real trouble. I blew her off, because why the hell wouldn't they? Trouble was trouble. I couldn't shift a horse into a safe position, sure, but I could induce vomiting or pinch a blood vessel in any animal, regardless of size. And I could talk to people and calm them down. I was crisis trained. Of course I could be useful. Why would the perpetually-understaffed ZFR let a competent mammal waste away as a pill currier?

I figured it out after about three months on the job. Turns out, they didn't trust me around blood.

Desmodus don't even drink blood any more, we drink enriched coconut milk and bugmeal slurpees. It didn't matter in the slightest. They didn't want to tempt me by having me around blood all day. That's actually what one of my supervisors said to me, like I'm some kind of fucking alcoholic. He even said it like he was being kind. I think he genuinely thought he was.

I'm an animal that can damn near see the veins running under the skin of anyone I look at. I can give you a measure of core body temperature to within a few degrees accuracy in seconds. I can even smell blood types, and most blood-born pathogens, well enough that I can tell them apart. Tetanus smells like cookies and rust. Gangrene smells like rotten grapes. Staphilococcus smells like pretzels and spoiled mouse milk.

It didn't matter in the slightest. I'm a vampire bat. A parasite. I drink blood. I spread plagues and kill people in their sleep if I'm angry. In the name of progress, they'd let me in the core and let me be useful with my wings. But nobody would let me near anyone who was in actual trouble. And they genuinely, in their heart of hearts, thought it was for my own good that they torpedoed my career.

I quit that same day.

I was too proud to admit failure and return to the Noc, even though my family would have welcomed me back. They would have supported me if I'd asked - in fact, they called me an idiot repeatedly for saying no. But I wanted to make it in the way they did it up top. I wanted to be a part of what we have up here - the cross-species community with all those animals that used to fear me. I swear I genuinely believed in the Zootopian dream.

So I took a currier job, which was the only non-emergency response field I had any experience in. You'd be surprised how common that career trajectory is. Bats make good mail men. It's a hell of a lot quicker for a bat to deliver your rush mail or small packages than it is to have them taken from A to B on street level. And if you know anything about crime, you'll know it took about a week before a well-dressed black rat approached me to deliver a special package that I wasn't allowed to look in or ask questions about.

I wasn't stupid. I knew what I did was illegal. But I was so disillusioned at that point that I didn't care that I was breaking the law. Dealing with angry customers for any amount of time will quickly beat the last vestiges of faith in animal kind out of you, I assure you - and that goes double if you're one of the marginalized species. I thought, shit, this city is so eager to declare me a monster, it's not like I can lower people's opinion of me any further than it already is. And I needed the money. Roost space up top is hard to find, and the ones that rent out to desmodus are rarer still. Plus, you wouldn't believe how expensive a can of coconut milk suddenly becomes when a vampire bat wants to buy it.

I also needed it because I couldn't work all the time. I had to dedicate some of my hours to community service; more specifically, finding a type of community service that people would fucking let me do. Through one of my legit currier jobs, I got in touch with a wellfare organization that did outreach for the city's homeless population, and they needed people to seek out the homeless and check on them, make sure they hadn't wandered into the wrong biome and died from exposure, make sure there wasn't a disease spreading among one of the homeless communities, that sort of thing. I was perfect for that job, and actually enjoyed it. The homeless folks were no nicer to me than anybody else was, but at least I got to make a difference, and I got to use a bit of my damn EMT training. Most of the homeless were preds, 'phibs and reptiles, which shouldn't surprise you in the slightest.

Meanwhile, the drugs I was running were mainly stuff that would have an effect on ungulates and ursines, which somehow made it more acceptable to me. At that point in my life, I saw those species mainly in terms of how quickly they would take a swipe at me, and the very best of them, in my opinon, were the ones who got up to leave when they saw me. So it didn't matter that I was helping them poison themselves. As far as I was concerned, if a few of them died off, I was doing Zootopia a favour. I was fairly open about this belief, and with my somewhat... aggressive interpretation of what social justice was supposed to mean. I got to talking with one of my mysterious handlers about it at some point. He asked me some pointed questions about which species I wanted to die off, and I told him none of them, they all deserve to live, and well, they should just get the hammer until they learn to do so without shitting all over everyone they were living with. And apparently that was the right thing to say, because the next time I was supposed to receive a package for delivery, a spectral bat showed up at my door instead.

You gotta understand, spectres are like royalty in the bat community. In the old days, they were trained from birth as a kind of combined priest and warrior caste that would enforce religious law, until they quietly gave up that power in modern times and took a backseat when democracy became the norm. Velvet revolution. But they still have a ton of power and respect.

So when I got up off the floor and got over the fact that a spectral was asking to roost with me, she introduced herself as Cacuango. She told me that my story was common enough that they perked up whenever they heard about someone who fit into the pattern that I had fallen into. Qualified individual came from the Noc and tried to make it in the broader Zootopia, only to get a hard dose of reality. Took shit jobs, try to scrape by, try to still make a difference, but slowly becoming more and more bitter and more and more extreme. She told me that the patern was so predictable that she could even tell me exactly how the story continued. I would deliver worse and worse stuff, develop a more an more extreme hate for all species around me, until one day, I would deliver something that someone would try to kill me for. If I survived, I would either quit crime or continue. If I quit, I would swiftly become homeless, because I had no other marketable skills in Zootopia, and my disposition wouldn't allow me to go back to working the legal shit jobs - and neither would the mob. Best case, I would return to my family as a broken shell of a bat and try to start my life over in the Noc. If I didn't quit, the mobsters would push me to become a criminal full time, and I would become yet another blip in the Zootopian crime statistic - either as a convict when I got caught, or as a corpse when I screwed up.

She let me digest that for a while. I remember hanging next to her in silence for almost half an hour while she let me think. I don't think I would have taken that message from just anybody, but it carried so much weight when it came from her. I asked her if there was a third option. She told me yes, yes there was.

Zootopia has a problem with the small animals. It's a problem that's as old as animal kind, and it'll be a problem still when we all die. The smallest officer in the Zootopian Police Department at time of writing is a cottontail rabbit. What exactly is she supposed to do when a rat kills a mouse in its apartment? How, precisely, is she supposed to investigate a crime scene that she can't physically enter? How is she supposed to go door to door, when she can't even enter the tunnels under the city where most of us live?

Crime among the smalls is almost never reported as a result. People know it's useless. The faith among rodents in the police is so jaw-droppingly low, you wouldn't believe it. So they gather in small enclaves. They move into a building, buying every single apartment and turning them into rodent-sized dwellings so that basically nobody other than rodents can even come inside. They then hire private guard contractors to watch for trouble, making their little gated communities safe for rodents and basically nobody else.

Now, if you have some sense, you're probably wondering how they can afford all this. I mean, you get enough hard-working rodents to club together and you can put some real money on the table, sure, but not enough to buy an apartment block in inner city Zootopia. Or for that matter, making Little Rodentia a reality. If you think about it, rodents almost never have high-paying jobs. They rarely ever have university degrees, either. Neither do bats. We don't value intellectual pursuit, and generally consider it pointless to even try. We also have kinda short lifespans, so studying twelve years to become a doctor is more of a commitment for a mouse than it is for a monkey. As a result, the small folk are poor, uneducated, and mainly do menial jobs or skilled manual labour.

So where is all the money coming from?

The word was out of my mouth before Cacuango even had time to say it. The mob.

The mafia has a very, very tight grip on property and social services down in the Noc, but up in Zootopia proper, their power is damn near absolute. Rodents barely bother to pay tax to the city, paying it instead directly into the coffers of the Cosa Nostra. Cacuango opened my eyes to it, explaining how it all worked. Zootopia couldn't protect the smalls, so they found a different place to buy their protection. Most rodent communities knew damn well that the mafia were a bunch of brutal killers, but it didn't matter. It was the only kind of protection they could trust to show up when they called. And so, the deal with the devil was made, and the smalls had been in the grip of a continuous crime wave for almost a hundred years, with the city being utterly powerless to stop it. Every time the ZPD tried to make inroads, it was halted. You know the rasons as well as I do:

"There is no need for a Little Rodentia task force - they are handling it on their own, and what would you do, hire a rat as a cop? Psh! Yeah, right! They would be crooked by the end of the first week!"

"How could harmless little mice actually pose a serious threat? I mean come on! They're mice! What would they do, run away really aggressively?"

"Listen, I realize that we're supposed to be progressive here, but making a task force to handle bat informants is just asking for crazy liars to line up and force the ZPD to wade through spurrious nonsense; I mean you know what bats are like."

Argument after argument that the bigoted old dipshits have been using for years to keep us down has been turned into weapons that the mafia is using to systematically dismantle every single effort to do something about the problem, and by now, it's so entrenched that we don't even question it any more. Cacuango was telling me nothing I didn't already know, but somehow, I always just thought of it as life. The bigs didn't care, so we had to take care of ourselves. That's why we had such enormous families - our clans were our social safety net, because we didn't have the government one to fall back on. I'd never questioned it either.

She wondered aloud if I could guess what she was about to ask me. I told her I desperately hoped that she was about to ask me if I wanted to help her do something about it. Because otherwise, I was going to do something myself. She smiled. Apparently, that had been the correct answer.