Dear Reader:

This is an M rated fanfiction, and there is some very disturbing imagery in this chapter. It is also one I've been looking forward to publishing for a while, and it's stolen the record for my longest chapter! Thank you all for reading, and reviews/critiques would be appreciated.

I really don't want to be like any of those talentless narcissists who get featured on /r/delusionalartists:

Now that that's out of the way, enjoy the chapter!

This is one of the many things that the Wanderer's Vague Recollection of Events has to say on the subject of ZERO:

"Don't. Simply Don't. No really, don't do it.

Do not bother visiting there. Near there, do not go anywhere.

Don't go there for any reason.

Don't go there in any season.

Stay away, even if dared.

Going there, don't even dare.

ZERO is certainly a nasty place.

ZERO shows the worst of the mammal race.

In that world you cannot never tread.

As a pred, you'd be de facto dead.

As a means of suicide, it's rather bad.

And if you end up stuck there, you'll wish that you had.

To make this next silly rhyme scan properly I will need twenty two syllables, oh well.

For one lexicographer, you see, he cited it as his definition of Hell.

Marooned in Zero, a fate worse than death.

(Most people there have really bad breath.)

As a destination it is rather shitty.

Segregation is still a thing in that city.

"Oh, there is just no way it could be that bad," you say. Well:

Another thesaurus says it's the synonym for Hell. Touche.

Trust me, I know a guy who was born there.

An agent called Raymond who has white hair.

11 years he spent, rotting away.

And he left a warning for you and me.

On the subject, he had this to say:

"So miserable, you will be, If you visit world 2-9-3."

END LECTURE.

December, 1998. Somewhere in Happytown, v-293 AKA "ZERO." 11:30 PM.

Nicholas Raymond Wilde sat in the cold, grey, concrete room, sobbing on his bed.

They called it an orphanage, though it was built like a prison, complete with steel bars over the windows.

Hell, his whole world was a prison:

Every second of every day, the government was watching.

The prey were always on guard, ready to summon the police with their tazers and guns at the drop of a hat.

His mother had perished of electrocution, in the days when a birthing exception to the collaring rule was not in place.

They had drafted his father. He was given an ultimatum: die in war or rot in jail. He had chosen to die.

Come to think of it, Nick couldn't blame him. Even at what would have normally been the tender age of 11, he had considered suicide. Then again, there wasn't much difference between living here and rotting in a coffin: one of the older kids (Nick vaguely recalled his name to be Harry) had said that this wasn't life, it was living death.

Every day, little Nick was sent to a school patrolled by armed guards, on a bus with deadbolt doors, and windows that couldn't be opened. And when he wasn't in school, he was either in his cell, or on the streets, hoping he wouldn't get mugged for what little he had.

He had cried himself to sleep many times, now more than ever.

His waking world a never-ending nightmare, his dreams themselves were plagued by delusions of freedom, his own mind tormenting him with things he could never even hope for.

Sometimes chivalry, like the knights of old.

Sometimes adventure, exploring a strange city of white obelisks and skybridges that towered higher than he could see.

Sometimes of carnal lusts and the wonderful stench of caramel and popcorn.

Little Nick had a happy place. Not a room with a fireplace, a bookshelf, a rocking chair, freshly baked cookies, and a soft carpeted floor. To little Nick, most of these material delights were entirely imaginary, and they barely occurred, even in his dreams.

Nick's happy place was a field of wheat. No city, no prey, no police, no chains, no strings, and no school. Just wheat.

And in those dreams, Nick was running. Running away. It was the only thing that made him happy, and it was the one thing he was never able to do in the real world. It used to be a casual jog towards a distant horizon, but in recent months, the outside world had trickled in even to here, the terror of his 12th birthday seeping into every corner of his life. Nowadays, his dreams were always of the field, though it was no longer a happy place.

Often, the field was on fire, the lightning of the beasts in blue who haunted his waking world ruling the realm of his dreams. Nowadays, in his dreams, he was often running for his life. Once, he had tried to hide, but the demon found him all the same. Tall like a tree, spindly like Cthulu's tentacles, and pale like a rotting corpse: Its pinhole eyes sank deep within a mutilated face, its unnatural mouth contorted into the most horrid grin he had ever seen, either in the waking world or in his unhappy place, where the monster dwelt. Its pelt stank of blood, its hands, clawless, like himself, yet deadly. It spoke with the menace of a thousand lies and a million deaths at its hands. It was the voice of the distant past, of a thing that had eaten mammals, a predator of predators, a destroyer of worlds, of which both chomper and prey trembled in fear. Recently, the pale monster had gained the ability to shoot lightning from his fingertips, just as the blue monsters in the waking world would soon ensnare him in their collars, where, much like his dreams, there would be no escape.

In his dreams, it said one thing, over and over: "Dinner time!"

Perhaps it was death itself. Maybe it was a cloud of despair and evil that hung over him in this world. In the unhappy place. In this way, his very existence had almost lost its meaning: When he was awake, he was in everyone's unhappy place: the slums. When he was asleep, he was in his unhappy place: the burning earth.

Hard to tell the difference really.

Burning wheat or the rotting city, this wasn't life. It was living death, and soon, Nick knew, he would really be dead.
In dreams, the pale monster, and in life, the blue monsters, their bloodlusts equally savage.

Once, Nick had the entirety of $10 in his pocket. He was 9 at the time, and a a bully by the name of Gideon had wanted the money.

"Bite me." Nick replied.

Gideon obliged.

Both had been declawed on that very same day, in neighboring rooms: Strapped down to a cold steel gurney, in the bleakest chambers of all. Oh how cruel the blue monsters were! Oh how inescapable the pale monster was, his tentacles of death chasing Nick in his dreams. They always ended in the same way:

He would run, the monster would run faster.

He would look over the shoulder, the monster was right behind him.

He would trip, the monster would close in for the kill.

Sometimes taking the form of a deranged doctor with a bloody scalpel.

Other times he revealed the form of a skeletal hunter, his musket blowing Nick into the dark realm where the souls of the dead were turned to stone and ground to dust.

But tonight, it was different. Normally, he ran down a path through the field of burning wheat, but there on the trail the monster stood, blocking his means of escape. Nick turned to run in the other direction only to be rudely surprised by an enormous brick wall that the monster had somehow built right behind him.

"Time's up, Nicholas...our game has come to an end."

A painful rusty squeal filled the brick chamber, too late he realized it wasn't a wall, but an oven, and that he was inside it. The monster activated his impossible furnace, sending vorticies of flame through the steel grille on which Nick stood. He pounded on the glass, but to no avail. The beast eagerly stared through the window, laughing like an undead hyena.

"Your time is running out, and supper will soon be served!"

Nick was restrained by tentacles of leaping flame. His feet were burned, his fur was singed, his skin drooping over his melting eyes! His entire body contorted in agony, his flesh broiling and boiling in the monster's oven. His bones became brittle and snapped, and Nick collapsed into the pan, while the monster licked his gangrenous lips in sociopathic anticipation. The oven timer went off, and the beast removed Nick's mutilated form from the oven and placed it on a fine china plate.

The beast's knife bisected his leg, and it ravenously devouring his thigh. With his meat cleaver, he pried Nick's chest apart, and ate his liver in but a single bite!
Nick was being vivisected, hacked to bits and eaten by the lovecraftian abomination.

He awoke from his latest nightmare, the monster's words ringing in his uncooked ears: "Tomorrow, I will feast!"
The time was now ~2:00 AM. Tomorrow they would celebrate his 12th birthday. Tomorrow he would have his taming party.

But he didn't want that.

He wanted none of it. He wanted to run away. If this was the world, he wanted to leave it. If this was life, then he wanted to die. To hell with the consequences, this would be his first and final hurrah. Many times he had contemplated running away. Each time he decided not to: It was simply too risky. If he ran, he would either be arrested or killed or starved. But at least he wouldn't be thrown in an oven and eaten, and now more than ever, he was convinced that he simply had no future here.

Nick shared his cell with 3 other cubs. 2 were cool, but one was a tattle-tail sonofabitch, and the only chomper in the entire building who wasn't declawed. Not a bad trade in his opinion: sell your soul and keep your claws. After all, what use was a soul in the ironically named hell that was Zootopia?

Nick had hidden a collection of small metal objects and hairpins from this kid in his mattress, and over the years, he had deduced the art of lockpicking, even now, with his stubby, declawed fingers. He had snuck out before, as a momentary distraction. But each time, he turned back: the outside world was scary, and there was nowhere to go that was any better than here. But now he had no choice.

Except he had been completely and utterly wrong. Sure, Happy Town was really a terrible place, and beyond that, Zootopia was even worse. But there were other places to go, other Zootopias to see. Places where things were better, places where predators could keep their claws, places where there were no blue monsters with collars, and no pale monsters with ovens. Places that Nick would find himself living in, very, very soon. Little Nicholas would never have guessed it beforehand, but looking back, his 12th birthday was one of the single best days of his life, despite the nightmarish start. Today was the day he would vanish into the night. Tonight was the night he would become a legend among the predator children, for he was going to die, both in the way that his friends literally thought he had died, and in the sense that today was the last day of his old life. Today was the day he escaped: From the orphanage, from the city, from the whole fucking world! Today was the day he started running for real. Sometimes away, sometimes towards, but always running.

How amazing it felt to finally do it. To run away! Not at all like the dream, lethargic and slow and fuzzy. This was the real world, where fields were fields and ovens were ovens, where fields could not turn into ovens, and where ovens could not turn into fields. Although, come to think of it, there was no reason at all for the pale monster to turn his oven back into wheat. Nevertheless little Nicholas was running away.

Nick had picked the lock of his cell easy enough. The orphanarium was built like a prison, but it wasn't nearly as tight as one. The security was far more lacking here, and aside from one guard who patrolled the place every half hour, it was more or less silent at night. He had passed just before Nick had awoken, and if Nick hurried, he surmised that he could be on the streets before he noticed the absence.

But now, Nick was in the hall, outside of his cell. He couldn't take to the streets until he got there, and that was easier said than done. He strolled down the hall, releasing the softest of whimpers as he passed the DECLAWING ROOM. But he left that trouble behind him, as the world grew steadily more nightmarish by the second. Now in his waking world too, he was sneaking away, this time from the guard, just like he ran from the pale monster in his dreams.

Only this time, it was real. There was a chance he could outrun the warden, at least for a while, and if he failed, there would be no second chance. No do over. For a brief moment, Nick wondered what would happen if the pale monster met the blue monsters. He almost wanted to climb in a tree and see the fight for himself, but he feared that, rather than rip each other to pieces, they would gang up against him instead, so he decided to keep moving.

He made a left past the washrooms, and then a right, into the stairwell. He descended the two floors, snuck his way out and around another left, and nearly had a heart attack when he heard the guard.

"Hey! Who's there?"

"It was nothing man, quit being so paranoid."

"SHHH! They might hear you."

"And then what? Call the cops? These kids live in fear of the cops! Now do you have my money?"

"Do you have the goods?"

The creature in the hoodie placed a cheap black briefcase on the table, filled to the brim with plastic bags stuffed with crack cocaine. The guard, a deer, grabbed an equally cheap briefcase, this time filled with $20 bills. Real mobsters used $100's, but this guy was an amateur dealer, though he did have an enormous market in the nastier part of town that surrounded the orphanarium, one that used up the coke as fast as he could get it.

Nick, meanwhile, kept moving.

"I swear, someone is here!"

"Fine, if it makes you feel that much better, you can go look for the cops yourself. I'm outta' here."

The creature in the hoodie walked past the spot where Nick had been not even 20 seconds ago. The deer stayed behind, listened for several minutes, and then peeked out a few doors and windows to ensure that there were no cops, and that the evidence didn't need to be flushed.

All the while, buying little Nick more time to get away before his violation of curfew was noticed.

By the time the guard had resumed his patrol, little Nick was timidly walking down one of the many dank and dark spaces between buildings in the bad part of town. The sort of place you couldn't see from the streets, where all the little delinquent sheep went to beat up some pansy for lunch money. Nick himself was often that pansy, and some brat who called herself Dawn was usually the one who threw the hardest punches.

But there were no sheep here now, and even if they were here, Nick had no money for them to steal. It was ~2:10 AM, and the only ones out now were a few cops, some mobsters hiding bodies, one little runaway orphan kid with nothing left to live for, and a rather strange Fox with a very peculiar accent.

By the time the guard had seen Nick's empty bunk, 20 minutes later, Nick was almost 2 miles away, monitoring his school building with morbid interest from afar, at night. He was in an alley between a pharmacy and a recently closed burger joint, pondering the place, and keeping watch for the pale monster. None of his dreams before had been this real, nor had they been this much fun, or so very terrifying, yet even now he expected the thing to pop out at any moment and end it all.

But it never came. Perhaps because this was the real world, where the playing field was a little more balanced. Perhaps little Nick was still sane after all, despite the torment he had endured. And so what if he was insane? This whole world was a crazy place!

All his fears came rushing back with a soft thunk behind him. He paused, and turned, half expecting the monster of his dreams to be waiting there, its dislocated jaw preparing to devour him whole, his snake-like tongue already resting on Nick's shoulder. But no such thing presented itself here, for it was only a red metal box which Nick could have sworn wasn't there 5 minutes ago when he had entered.

He walked back towards it, both because it was deeper in the alley and further away from a not too distant police siren (and there was a nontrivial chance they were looking for him)and because he wanted to see what was in it. The guard had probably called the cops, and he being an uncollared fox of taming age, they wanted him found. Maybe not quite as urgent as an escaped death row inmate or a car-bombing terrorist on the loose, but pretty damn close to it. Little Nick was not the only one to have run away on the eve of their taming: In the city, where there was an average of +400 runaways a year, they had a special police patrol to search for them at all hours and enforce the curfew, in addition to whatever forces they dispatched to find them. Roughly half of the runaways turned themselves in, trading one misery for another, usually starving, shivering, and on the brink of death. A handful ran away from the city itself and vanished into the countryside, only to be arrested later and dragged back to jail. A non-trivial minority, especially in the winter, were found dead. To any sane individual, mass childhood suicide stood out as a problem, but in v-293, they just swept it under the rug, like so many other things. This world was a crazy place.

Nick, however, would not become a statistic: He was about to become a legend, a myth for the orphans, of the one who got away. The fox kit who vanished without a trace!

Nick was rummaging through the red box's contents. Stacks of bills, strange, octahedral metal objects that seemed to be ammo for a strange form of gun, a set of tools, some brand-new, Fox-size men's clothing, and a lollipop, which Little Nick discovered to be...blueberry flavored.

The favorite flavor of its intended recipient.

The older man stood there, staring. How long he had been there, who knows?

"Who are you?" The man asked. Tough, but...different. Everyone else had been cold and hateful. By the silhouette, he was clearly a fox. Yet Nick could see no light from a tame collar. It became clear to him almost immediately that this fox was different, very different, and it took Nick several seconds to identify the tone he was hearing. 'Twas the same tone Finnick had used with him when they first met: Tough facade, with a softer, gooey, warm inside.

"Is this your box?"

"And what makes you think that?" The stranger said.

"Well, it just appeared here, and now, you appear there."

"I didn't exactly appear here...You were too busy rummaging about my box to notice my entrance."

"So you admit it! You were looking for it, weren't you?"

"Suppose I-"

"Hey, sorry about the lollipop. I haven't had one in years." Little Nick interrupted this strangest of foxes.

Little Nick resumed his consumption of the stranger's lollipop.

"Who are you?" The stranger asked.

"Sorry...It's just...so good! So tangy!"

"Whoever you are, you are certainly out late. Where is your house?" They were, or more accurately, would both be in a lot of trouble for the same reason: The collar. Nick had run away on the eve of his taming, and this stranger, who was well past that age, wasn't wearing one at all.

And from the looks of it, he hadn't worn one in years, the fur on his neck was as long and bushy as the fur from anywhere else.

"I don't have one."

Little Nick resumed his incredulous licking.

"So, where are you parents?" The stranger asked.

"I don't have any." Now little Nick was sad. "I ran away from the orphanage."

"And who are you?" OK, he thought. This kid has some street cred. At the very least, he ain't a goody two-shoes.

"Why don't you have a collar?" Clearly this kid required some patience.

"I can't tell you unless you tell me your name."

"And I can't tell you until you tell me why you don't have to wear a collar." Damn, this kid was stubborn.

"And why aren't you wearing one?"

"Well, I'm not of age yet, but my taming party is tommorrow. Did you run away too?"

"I guess you could say that." Little Nick was now convinced that this guy wasn't especially evil, he still didn't completely trust him though. In a convoluted way, both of them had run away, but from entirely different things in entirely different ways. One from responsibility, the other from near certain death.

"So what's your name?"

The older Fox paused for a few seconds, contemplating an answer this little kid could understand.

"Piberius. You can call me Mr. Piberius. Now will you please tell me yours?"

"That's not a real name!"

"Well at least you ain't stupid. No kid, it isn't. My real name would be far more confusing, to you and to everyone else, so I use an alias. It's simpler that way. I mean, if you lived with 20 other people who all had the exact same name as you, you'd devise nicknames to tell each other apart. Same with me. So what is your name? Or should I just call you 'kid,' kid?" Mr. Piberius was hoping this would provoke the kid into spilling his name.

"Nick. Nick Wilde."

Mr. Piberius nearly shit a brick. The literal bastard he had conceived during a 1 night stand a decade ago was staring him in the face, and judging by the fact that this kid was an orphan, this world's John Wilde was probably dead (most of them were, for some unfathomable reason)...and on that note, Mr. Piberius was now very glad that he had met the kid in the darkness, or else little Nick might have confused him for his deceased father. It didn't help that his father and Mr. Piberius shared the same first and last names, and it really didn't help (especially when courts got involved) that the John Wilde who had fathered this kid probably had the same genome, plus or minus a few mutations, as his. Sure, John Wilde was a dead man, had been for years now, but such a minor inconsistency in paperwork could easily be dismissed. Middle names, however, were different. Middle names were unique to a world and its agent, and unless an agent's middle name was "Hitler" or something equally terrible, they would use it as their default alias.

"So, Nick, you ran away from your taming party, did you not?"

"Didn't you?"

And so the moment in which Mr. Piberius had to make a hard choice arrived. Truth, or fiction? Unbelievable fact, or palatable fantasy? Contamination and a kid who knows too much or way too little, or a disappearance and a sketchy ass cover story that would raise more questions than it answered? And of course, there was the moral dimension. He couldn't just leave this kid here, to rot in this hellhole of a world. Not when there was so much more out there!

Mr. Piberius had been mulling it over, but ultimately, the kid had already seen the care-package appear out of thin air. There wasn't anything more that lying could accomplish, nor did he expect to get away with it with this kid, so he told the truth. Maybe not all of it, and probably filtered with at least a little cryptic jargon, but still the truth.

"Well, where I come from, they don't do that."

So much for subtlety.

"No way, you must have! How did you get it off?"

Mr. Piberius pulled out one of the keys from his lockpicking kit.

"Well, this thing has come in handy in a pinch. But I rarely need it."

It was now little Nick's turn to almost shit a brick. Collar keys were illegal for civilians to own, and the government monitored for them like hawks! Although he did not know this, getting caught in illegal possession of a key was a lifetime minimum sentence, and it was often considered an act of terror in it of itself.

"I could sure as hell use it tomorrow."

"Where did you learn that word?" Mr. Piberius wasn't annoyed, just curious. This Nick was not his son.

"Oh, some of the older orphans say stuff like that when the adults aren't looking. Could I borrow that collar key of yours?"

"And why did you run away from the orphanage? From your friends?" Mr. Piberius was not in the mood to give away his treasured lockpick.

"They aren't my friends, most of them anyway."

"So, why did you run?"

"I had a bad dream. Seems kinda silly now." Perhaps in the real world, monsters didn't exist. They were merely evil people. Very evil people.

"And what happened in that dream?"

"A monster threw me in an oven and then ate me for dinner. Now can I have that key?"

Mr. Piberius didn't know what to think. Often, it was just their imaginations, but sometimes, when a Zystopian kid thought they were going to die, there was a good chance they were already doomed. What had really unnerved Piberius, however, was the remark about the oven. Clearly it scared the kid enough to make him run away, yet from the nonchalant way he referred to it now, it was probable that he had had many similar dreams beforehand, all starring that monster...

...If Mr. Piberius was going to take this kid anywhere, it would be to a shrink, who would then probably recommend a plastic-regenerative surgeon to fix the declawed-fingers.

"I think it would be better if I kept it for now..."

At this moment, Nick's head could be accurately described as an early 20th century cubist masterpiece painting depicting a face of utter disappointment. Not that there was enough light to really appreciate it, though. Mr. Piberius, ever the troll, paused before he delivered his final clause.

"...but you could always come with me."

"Really?!"

"Sure. You've got no family, no future, and only a few friends. You're just another worthless pred in their eyes, but elsewhere you could be so much more than that. Where I come from, they don't do taming, and it isn't a party. If you go with me now, I could show you something that's really worth celebrating! You've got nothing to live for here, no reason to stay, and every reason to suspect that you will be dead by morning if you stay, so why not run?"

"To where?"

"For now, leave that part to me. We could go anywhere!"

"Anywhere?"

"Oh more than anywhere, anyanywhere!"

"What are you talking about? 'anyanywhere' ain't even a real word."

"Oh it's more than a word! There are anywheres so far away that "anywhere" don't cut it no more. There are elsewheres so infinitely far away, that if you were to start walking now, you would never get there! Out there, in the real worlds, there are wonders you can't even begin to imagine now, yet they're real all the same! 2-mile-high office buildings, supersonic trains, floating cities and a theme park the size of this county! funhouses, casinos, circuses, predator-prey-equality, and the food! You have not lived until you have dined on properly grilled synthflesh! You think this is all there is, that misery is the only way; but I assure you, there is just so much more out there! So what do you say? Stay here, don the strap of serfdom on your neck, and waste the rest of your existence as a slave? Or follow me to everywhere else, where marvels and freedoms abound almost without limit?"

"But you said I could never get there!"

"By walking! I said that if you were to start walking, you would never get there. But I have a shortcut of sorts, and if we take it, we could be there well before morning."

Mr. Piberius had made up his mind. All in! He was taking the kid and running for it. Even homeless in the Consortium (and already Mr. Piberius had briefly considered short-term adoption), this kid would be better off there than he was here, and that was assuming he didn't die tomorrow if he stayed.

"Can I pack my stuff?"

Even at 11 years, Nick was already developing his sarcastic humor. As entertaining as this strange man's stranger stories were, he didn't really believe them. And how could he? Zystopia was all he had known. Surely this was it. Yet the man did not seem to be lying. He was happy. He had no collar. Only prey were happy. Only the prey had necks untainted by collars. The sheer impossibility of this "Mr. Piberius" forced Nick to reconsider what he thought he knew. Here he was telling impossible stories, yet the bard himself was equally impossible, which is to say, evidence that maybe the whole thing was not impossible after all. So Nick, subconsciously, had decided to humor this lunatic. He had escaped for a final hurrah, and this stranger had brought him more fun right now than his entire 9th year on this earth. The declawing had ruined that year.

"Well, do you have anything to pack?"

Mr. Piberius noticed the cop cars approaching.

"Never mind, there is no time, and you probably have nothing worth packing. We must go, now!"

"Where?"

"Just take my hand, and I'll show you my first wonder:"

The Pocketwatch! It was a small, circular, golden object, as thick as an Altoids tin, and roughly the size of a baseball. Not that Nicky knew what any of that was, or what it meant to people who did. All he cared about was the gold! Even in the nearly non-extant lighting, he could resolve the brazen hues of gold, and Nick had never seen so much of the stuff before in his life! Gold! The pocketwatch was covered in the it. But it wasn't an ordinary pocketwatch: there were far too many brass dials and copper knobs sticking out of it, and when opened, it didn't have a clock in it at all!

"All I have to do, is get a fresh battery..." The real reason why he had come. The reason why the care package had been sent in the first place. The octagonal cartridge was really a powercell for the pocketwatch. Back in those days, they had yet to discover how to cheaply send power through pocket-wormholes, so once in a while, a battery had to be changed.

"Now I will take this battery, put it in this pocketwatch-"

*CLICK!*

"-and with the press of this button, I will take you somewhere...Would you like to do the honors, and take us somewhere else, far, far away from here?"

Nick saw the flashing lights get brighter behind him. He started to cry. His time was running out. Soon the blue monsters would take him to the pale monster, and his game would be over.

"The cops have us cornered, don't they?" Now he was all sad and desperate again, his hopes dashed. They'd be arrested for sure.

Consortium Agent Johnathan Piberius Wilde checked the set co-ordinates on his pocketwatch: V-137. Perfect. He held Nick's hand, and with his left thumb, he pressed the red "go" button. Nick's vision went white as he tumbled into the wormhole, flew through the 12 dimensional void between realities, traveled among the hissing chaos itself, fell through fickle things that were here and there and everything else, and landed in an enormous forest under a crescent moon. No cops, no city, no buildings. Just evergreen trees. Even at 2:35 AM, It was more green than Nick had ever seen in his whole life.

Mr. Piberius turned to face little Nick.

"What cops? All I see are trees."

Nick stood there in awe. This couldn't be real! It mustn't!

But it was! It smelled of pine! PINE!

Nick, like most canids who had spent their entire lives in the city, up until now, felt a powerful urge to urinate on one of the trees.

"Where are we?"

Mr. Piberius, ever a fan of melodramatic showmanship, began to gesticulate wildly with his arms, though in the moonlight the full spectacle of his performance could only be glimpsed.

"I bid you welcome, to elsewhere! In one sense, we are incalculably far away from that godawful city, and yet in another way, we are only a few yards away from that alley. But don't worry, they will never find us here, because they have no idea where to look or even how to look, assuming they knew where to look at all. In fact, where may not even be the right word to describe where we are right now. So where in this world are we? Specifically, we are a few dozen yards away from an old farmhouse, and there I suggest you get some sleep. We've got a bright and wonderful day ahead of us tomorrow, possibly the brightest day of your life so far, and you will want to be ready for it. Shall we adjourn for the night?"

"But I don't want to sleep. That's when the monster comes!"

Mr. Piberius chuckled. "I can guarantee you that whatever sort of telepathic Freddy-Kreuger-wannabe was fucking with you back there, he won't follow you here. Indeed, he can't follow us here...and if he can, then dare I say he is purely a figment of your imagination, and in time, the shrinks will deal with it once and for all."

Nick was starting to like this guy. Most adults didn't say F U C K around kids.

Mr. Piberius began to slowly walk away, seemingly further into the woods. He was doing it intentionally, knowing that Nick would follow him, the least strangest thing he knew, in this all-too-strange land.

"Couldn't he just get on a plane and follow us here?"

Mr. Piberius chuckled to himself as he wondered if this kid would ever get a passing grade in 4th dimensional meta-geometry.

"Oh no, that's not how any of this works. Those 'monsters' of yours are literally on another planet now. No matter how far you walk, you will never set foot on the moon without a spaceship, and without one of these pocketwatches, none of the cops would or even could do so much as lay a finger on you. The truth is much more complicated than that, but you can trust me when I tell you that you really are safe here. Well, actually, this world can be quite dangerous, in a fun way of course, but it's far safer for you than that hellish city."

Nick hesitantly followed Mr. Piberius. Piberius himself had spent many boyhood afternoons here, and although V-137 wasn't exactly the safest place in the multiverse, midievil chivalry and all, it was safer than the Zystopia they had just escaped, and here, at this specific Farmhouse, he could be pretty sure they wouldn't be disturbed. And sure enough, it was there, mostly as he had remembered it. He let himself in and took in the familiar sights of a disused wooden barn with beds of hay on the sides.

"Pick a stall and get some shut-eye."

Mr. Piberius chose the stall on the left that was adjacent to the door. Little Nick followed, subconsciously trying to keep this stranger within arm's reach at all times, lest he run away and leave Nick behind.

"Now now, I do like my elbow room, but I suppose you can sleep here, in that corner."

This latest concern of Mr. Piberius was largely a sarcastic one. The stalls were enormous, and 10 adult foxes could sleep in one without risking anything even remotely gay.

"Thank you."

"...but only for tonight. Tomorrow night, you sleep on your own. If you want to survive out here in the real worlds, you gotta' learn self reliance."

"What do you mean? There's only one world."

Nick sat on the hay. It was surprisingly soft. He laid down and rolled onto his side. A few needles were jabbing here and there, but overall, it was nicer than anything he had ever known. He soon found himself playfully rolling in it, taking in the deep earthy stench of the stuff.

"No, Nick, there are more worlds than you can count, both in the heavens above, and in the void that surrounds us, each one unique in some way. When sunrise comes, I will take you for a tour of this one."

Mr. Piberius curled up into a circle, his stomach facing the ground. By trial and error he had found the best posture for sleeping in these kinds of places, and Nick, after trying several other positions to no avail, found himself copying this stranger.

"And what's in this one?"

"Remember those stories about knights and castles?"

"Like Robin Hood?"

"Funny you should mention him. I know that guy, and if we're lucky, you'll get to meet him tomorrow! Now hush, comrade."

And with that, Mr. Piberius was silent as could be, and Little Nick noticed for the first time the sounds of the crickets. Although he feared the contents of his dreams, the chirping of the crickets invited him into the depths of slumber, and he found himself unable to resist.

That night, he dreamed of his nightmare field again. But it was different this time: The burning wheat had been replaced with ashes, and in the now cloudy daylight that filled the place, the monster was less intimidating than he had once been. But he was still there, the creature with a black hole for a mouth, so Nick hid behind the oven he had been so cruelly melted in last night. He heard footsteps as the creature began to limp around the place.

That's odd, he thought. The monster is limping? He seemed stronger before.

Nick peeked around the corner, and there it was, limping along, looking for its meal.

"Come out come out wherever you are! I know you're around here somewhere!"

Despite the attempt to be threatening, Nick found it anticlimactic. The monster was almost always everywhere at once: always on Nick's tail, ready to pounce. It's demonic thousand-teethed mouth never more than a foot away from Nick, yet here the little fox was, somehow evading this once omnipotent figure. It was staring right at him, yet it couldn't see Nick!

Perhaps Mr. Piberius was right. Maybe I have escaped!

For one of the first times in his life, Nick's developing frontal lobe kicked in, its voice cold and unfamiliar, yet its conclusions solid, its rhetoric inviting. It told him to step out. To get closer. Despite being less than 30 feet in front of the monster, with nothing to obscure himself, the monster somehow could not see him! Perhaps this blindness could be exploited...

"This is no longer funny. Come out now or when I find you, I will throw you back in the oven!"

Even before he had finished talking, Nick's frontal lobe was in overdrive, drafting rebuttals. It was now his turn to speak:

"Oh come on. This really is a disappointment. You were always the one in control, you always knew where I was, you were always the one giving chase. You could literally set this whole field aflame, and now you are resorting to this? You are bluffing. You cannot see me *when I am right in front of you*, and I doubt that you could even light the oven, assuming you could confine me to it, and by the way, I'm pretty sure that you can't do that either. If you really are the big scary monster, then why don't you come and get me?"

It was now thoroughly enraged.

"You need to watch that tongue, boy! You think you can run, but you cannot escape your fate, your purpose."

"Your threats don't scare me. Not anymore. I'd like to see you try. Go on, I dare you: just try to even get close to me in the real world, and get out of my head."

The monster burst into flames. It screamed, it howled, it writhed and it sputtered. Then it was gone.

Good riddance!

"I cant believe-"

"Shut up!"

Raymond got in close, almost too close, and began to whisper. 20 years later, Nicholas Raymond Wilde was stuck in the backseat of a ZPD van, once again miserable. For nearly 2 decades, he had been free, and now, he was trapped. Again.

And like last time, he was planning his next escape.

"They can hear us."

"I can't believe she ditched us like that! Shapeshifting bastard!" Nicky had also been arrested. Georgina, playing the role of the beaver hostage to a T, had been let off scott free. The cops hadn't even checked to see if it was her car, they just assumed so, after her bullshit sob story about being held at gunpoint by 'uncollared savages'.

"No, Mr. Edmus, she didn't ditch us. She's keeping her advantage."

"What the hell are you on about? She told them we were holding her at gunpoint! And to think we were almost-"

"Because she knew that was how she could get away, dipshit! We were ambushed, surrounded! Sure, Georgina has done some really impressive things, be she's not a miracle worker! I mean, what did you want her to do: take on the fuzz and get us all killed? No. We both new immediately that you and I would be captured, but as long as she is free, we still have an ace up our sleeve."

"OK, so assuming she hasn't really ditched us, what the hell do we do?"

"We could always wait. Georgina knows what she's doing, and at most, we'd probably be in jail for no more than a week."

"So, we're going to do nothing? Just bide our time?"

"Do you have a better plan? Remember, as long as she's still out there, we've still got plan B. She's still connected to my pocketwatch, so she knows where I am, and it wouldn't be all that impossible for her to compromise the security systems of whatever penetentiary they might throw us in. We could always try to escape, but that would only increase our chances of dying at the hands of a trigger-happy policeman with a vendetta to fan."

I HAVE YOU NOW, YOU LITTLE SHIT!

Raymond knew that voice.

No! That's impossible!

It belonged to a little man in his head.

I TOLD YOU BEFORE, YOU CANNOT ESCAPE YOUR DESTINY!

Well, more of a monster. A big, scary, mammal-eating monster, who had been silenced for decades. As he recalled his nightmares from one flashback to another, it all began to make sense. He'd studied them at the academy. He'd know people who were sent in to kill them. He'd poured over every case file, fascinated by them, and yet he never made the connection until now.

His imaginary friend, the ghost from ZERO, it wasn't a ghost at all. It was an omnipredator, very real, and very, very dangerous.

"Change of plans...We have to leave. We have to leave now!"

"Hold on, didn't you just say we should stay put."

"Well, something's changed...We're being chased by something far worse than a policeman."

"What?"

"We're being hunted by an omnipred."

"And what the hell is that supposed to mean?" Nicky was starting to think Raymond was crazy. Not for the first time either.

"You know all that bullshit they spout, about how predators like us used to eat the prey? This thing, it actually does it, only he doesn't confine himself to rabbits. He is a predator of predators, a child of the forgotten genus, and 20 years ago, I was his next meal, that is, until I escaped."

"And how the fuck do I know any of these 'omnipreds' even exist?"

Raymond's face grew more morbid by the second.

"Myself, and many others, have seen the damage firsthand. For the most part, they've been extinct for millenia, but once in a blue moon, a straggler comes out of the woodwork, and then, agents like me, but with much bigger guns, are sent in to kill it. I know a Jackrabbit who was in a cleanup operation, and he told me that even without the telepathy, he'd wager that a single omnipred is far more dangerous than an entire Zystopian ZPD precinct. It's a nearly unstoppable beast that can read your thoughts and mind-control and entire city, and he'll devour anyone who gets in his way, or anyone he fancies will make for a tasty meal."

"And why the hell didn't you do anything about it earlier?"

Raymond was really starting to panic.

"Because, until now, I thought this specific omnipred was dead."

"You know this guy?" Nicky was sarcastic, if only to mask his own growing dread.

"He used to fuck with me in my dreams, when I was a child; slowly driving me insane, so that, when the time to feast drew near, I would be unable to fight back. Only I escaped that world, and they sent a small army to hunt it down and kill it. Somehow, it not only survived, but it gained the ability to travel from that world to this one...and now it wants to find the relay...and it knows that's where I want to...so it...oh shit!"

The monster read Raymond's mind. It knew where the relay was, and what it did. For nearly a thousand years, it had been stuck between these two worlds, and it saw its chance to escape. And to conquer.

Raymond's right hand, which had been surgically augmented to dislocate every joint on command, was emitting some rather nasty sounding clicking. It squirmed its way out of the cuffs, and dangled from Raymond's wrist like a corpse from a noose. With many more disgruntling clicks, and quite a few grimaces from Raymond, the hand regained its normal shape, and reached into his trenchcoat.

Once again, Raymond spoke into his pocketwatch.

"Georgina?"

"Raymond, what's wrong now?" Even the android could sense the worry in his voice.

"Forget about plan B. We have far greater worries now. My counterpart and I are being...hunted...by a T5-omnipred."

"Raymond, are you-"

"We've tried to kill this one before, it's file #672 in the omnipred database. Officially listed as escaped."

"I see."

"Georgina, forget about the mission, and forget about us. Protect the relay at all costs! If we're lucky, we'll meet you there, and if not..."

"Raymond, you are in police custody, how are you planning on escaping?"

"I may be forced to take some drastic measures...I may not be able to contact you again. just get to the relay, and whatever you do, don't let any of them in."

"Understood."

"Goodbye, Georgina."

They sat in the van, Raymond contemplating what would surely be his most desperate move yet.

Nicky broke the silence. "So what do we do?"

"Well, it knows we're here, it remembers me, and one way or the other, I don't think we'll be alive long enough for plan B to come into effect."

"How so, we'll just be dragged off to jail? Nothing safer than several feet of concrete and steel bars, right?" Nicky underestimated the beast's power, political and otherwise.

"Oh no, that's the other thing: The few omnipreds that have survived this long are clever, cunning, powerful and extremely manipulative. It's almost certainly in the government, probably at the top of the chain, calling all the shots. Pretty soon, this van is going to turn around, and we're gonna go straight to him. No prison, no trial, just death."

"What do you mean?"

"Isn't it obvious? Zystopias do not exist by themselves: they are unstable, self-destructing, and require a truly enormous evil in their cores to survive. Usually, it's some sociopathic politician with an insatiable appetite for power, or a centuries old conspiracy concerned only with the maintenance of the status quo, usually lead by the monster itself, revealing its existence only to a chosen few. It's how they've survived for this long, this one has probably been doing it for at least 100 years. Maybe 2."

Raymond was wrong by orders of magnitude. The beast had been trapped here for a very long time, and was as desperate to escape as they were.

"So how do we get out of here?"

"We can't just pick the lock and run for it."

"Why not?" OK, Nicky should have known the answer to this one. Maybe he was also starting to panic. Raymond couldn't blame him.

"Judy Hopps, fastest runner on the force, is driving this thing. Remember? She'd know the door was open before we even got out, we wouldn't stand a chance!"

"When you were talking to her, you said something about desperate measures. What did you mean?"

"Remember the teleporter I used to get us out of that jail?"

"You said we have no power for that."

"I do...but it might not work, if it did, it would only work once and it would compromise the pocketwatch. If the other relays weren't hogged, I would've just mashed the panic button the moment we found a decent place in the city to hide for a few minutes, but they seem to be clogged for the foreseeable future. These things ran off of batteries, you know, but more recently, they figured out how to beam power through a pocket-wormhole. I could hack into the mainframe, instruct it to send over a few billion gigawatts, and use the power to drive the teleporter gun. In doing so, however, the wormhole would snap shut, and the pocketwatch would be rendered useless, which would mean the relay, which the omnipred is desperately trying to find, our only means of escaping this world. Either we're screwed now, or we screw ourselves over later."

For once, Nicky was the voice of reason. "Do we have a choice?"

"Nope."

They were planning something. Chompers who talked on the way to the slammer always did.

However, Judy couldn't quite make out what they were saying, perhaps because they were whispering. Nevertheless, they were planning something, and she made a mental note to have her gun drawn and ready when her partner opened the door.

Up until the homicide, Nicholas E. Wilde had been little more than a dime-a-dozen small time petty criminal. Certainly one of the smallest fish in the sea.

The same could not be said of his companion. Already, she knew he'd be a handful.

Her first guess was that he was Nicholas' brother, given the uncanny resemblance they shared, aside from the white mohawk the strange Fox wore. There was only one problem: Nicholas was an only child. And the more she thought of it, the deeper the impossibilities went.

He had somehow clipped Nicholas' collar. One might assume this detail was trivial, until they considered the fact that in order to install such a (very illegal) device, one had to have a means of getting the collar off, and to do that, one needed a key.

Having this key made Nicholas' unnamed companion a very dangerous man, right up there with mass murderers, serial prison escapees, Mafia godfathers, and terrorists.

That was the other thing about him that made no sense to Judy: Such a big fish compared to Nicholas, yet he had somehow evaded and eluded the ZPD entirely. No files, no incident, no mugshots, nothing. Judging by the fully grown fur below his dummy collar (this last detail only made Judy that much more afraid of him, as there was nothing to stop him from going savage at any moment), he had been out of it for months, doing god-knows what underneath the ZPD's radar. Judy began to speculate over how long this guy had been slinking through the underground, and shuddered at the thought.

Not that we'd really need an investigation. Simply being in possession of a collar key is enough to put that guy behind bars for life.

Of course, he didn't even try to resist. The same man who had broken someone else out of a high security prison and hijacked cars frequently enough to actually do a half decent job of keeping the hostage quiet, the rogue chomper who rarely wore even a dummy collar, perhaps having never been tamed at all, somehow just nonchalantly climbed into the police van. Another sign that he was planning something.

"Hey Buckey, 'ya think that rogue we got is gonna' to try to escape?"

"I'm surprised he hasn't already, the way they're hamming it up back there."

Their drive back the slammer was rudely interrupted by a railroad crossing, lights flashing, signalling the approach of one of the many trains that went into the city.

The horn alerted Raymond, who had just finished tightening the last screw...

Judy opened the small window that allowed her to monitor her begrudging passengers.

"Will you two shut-"

Then she saw the thing Raymond had been working on:

Bits of wire and solder were strewn about the floor. Both pairs of handcuffs laid in the corner, copiously wrapped in noise absorbing tape. Clever. The gun itself had the tarnished pocketwatch strapped to it like a Siamese twin, the black box that supplied it with power now hissing angrily as it began the anti-mass transfer.

As the oncoming freight train blared its horn, the device's coolant line ruptured, flooding the chamber in fog that might have been toxic.

"Well, I'm afraid that's our cue. We've a train to catch."

There was a loud pop, a flash of light, and a very harsh ~60hz buzzing that permeated the entire vehicle.

And then it was over. The two foxes were gone! On her watch!

Well, that's a wrap!

Don't you just love a good cliffhanger?