If there was one thing that got on Bad Cop's nerves at the end of the world, it was the dust.
There had always been dust in small amounts before Taco Tuesday, but never in the quantity it existed in now. Something about the Kragle seemed to attract it like a magnet, forming a growing layer of the stuff that coated the city. Water couldn't remove it, and brushing it off was only a temporary solution - eventually it settled again, often somewhere worse than before. Even worse, it meant that he couldn't help but leave a trail wherever he walked.
The Lord Business Bad Cop had worked for would never let Bricksburg fall into this state.
Of course, he would have liked to think the Lord Business he'd worked for wouldn't have left him for dead either, but he only had to take off his helmet to remind him of the man's instability, even then. Hindsight - hah - was 20/20, and he'd paid the price. He'd barely escaped the kragle himself that day and had been avoiding the skeletron patrols ever since, watching as the frozen city grew quieter and dustier. Lord Business had won, and now he was neglecting his prize all together.
Well, except for one place.
The construction site was Lord Business's primary haunt. He arrived with the dawn patrols every morning and lingered for hours, cleaning up specks of dust or rearranging the workers. At first the reason he went there was obvious - the construction site was where the Special had been housed, where he belonged. It didn't seem strange for the man to to visit the symbol of his victory. Then one day Bad Cop had gotten into earshot, and discovered that Lord Business hadn't been gloating over the Special...
...but talking to him.
Bad Cop had admired Lord Business once, sworn his loyalty to him - and here he was, arguing with a dead man as if he could still talk back. He'd watched it go on for minutes before leaving to avoid the evening patrols, and hadn't gone back since. He knew that Lord Business had deteriorated, just as the city had, but to witness just how far he'd fallen... it was disturbing.
Today though, against his better judgement, he was going back.
The morning patrol had come and gone, but the sun had set without the evening patrol, and the lights of Octan Tower were dead on the horizon. He got close enough to the tower to see the army of robots lined up and silent, but didn't risk going any closer. He didn't know what spark of intuition drove him to investigate the construction site, but as he got closer and saw the dust drifting in the glaring spotlights he became confident that he was on the right track. He abandoned stealth for efficiency, kicking up a cloud as he ran. Whatever level of strangeness Lord Business had fallen to, he was going to find out today-
Bad Cop froze in his tracks.
The construction yard was a mess. The equipment, buildings, and even parts of the floor had been torn apart, with bits of stiff, glistening kragle hanging off the free edges. Construction workers and deactivated skeletrons had been tossed about like Bad Cop tossed chairs, and he even found a torn scrap of Lord Business's cape lying on the ground. It was like a storm had come through, but what was the most shocking wasn't what was there, but what wasn't.
The Special was gone.