Chapter Seven: Welcome to the Loony Bin

Back at the spaceship, the Incubators had their paws full. The spaceship had landed now that the Incubators had been revealed to the world, so much more of them were out and about then there had been the other day. Some had left to integrate into Zootopian society, but the rest worked on their overall goal of saving their homeworld. What that meant differed for each one of them, but they all had something to contribute.

In the case of Blue-40, once he'd returned here from Mister Wilde's apartment, he was in charge of keeping the power-generating machine in peak condition. While both it and its sister machine, which generated the raw materials it needed, had been tossed about during their journey here, both remained relatively unscathed. Thus, all he needed to do was make sure nothing flared up or started doing something uncanny.

If that happened, things could go really wrong, really fast.

Fortunately, the machine was durable enough to take a lot worse than what it had been through, meaning no fixes had been needed. Now all he cared about was that the machine processed what it had to properly.

Several other Incubators watched the machine alongside him, those being Yellow-14, Purple-77, and Red-205. Each of them paced the machine in a slow circle, as if to protect it from hostile invaders. None showed up, though, so they kept at their circle, listening for any strange sounds and looking for any defects.

Then, his thoughts went flying out the window as an Incubator almost screamed into his head. "Hey! I found us a place we can move!"

A slight pause, then someone else responded. "And who is this?"

"I am Black-110, and I'm still exploring the area," Black-110 replied. "There's this enormous building not too far away from here, it looks abandoned. I haven't seen anyone enter or exit for several hours, but it's far closer to other beings of this world than where we are now."

Blue-40 responded to that personally. "In which direction, and how far?"

"Towards the sunset, and not very," came the reply. "If the problem is you're wondering how to move the machines there, don't worry. Even if you can't use the spaceship for some reason, the journey is rather simple."

Then came another pause before Blue-40 stepped in to handle it. "Can you relay that to Red-160? He currently is residing with Mister Wilde, maybe he'll know something about it that we don't."

"Will do," Black-110 said. Following that, there was no more focused conversation, just the omnipresent buzz of a dozen Incubators holding conversations all at once, nothing ever holding focus for more than a second or two.

Blue-40 returned to his duty, idly wondering what nonsense Mister Wilde and Red-160 were up to.

Incubators tended to have minimal interest in movies, particularly these kinds of movies, but that was what Mister Wilde was watching, so Red-160 watched it alongside him. Sure, he regarded Mister Wilde with a puzzled look every time he laughed and an even stranger one forced its way out when he shed a few tears close to the movie's conclusion, but he watched the whole thing anyway.

As soon as the credits started rolling, Mister Wilde reached for the remote and pressed a button, causing the television to flick off. "Well, I don't know about you, but I've had enough for one night, I'm going to get some sleep."

Red-160 moved to respond, but got cut off by another Incubator's voice blaring in his ear. "Red-160, can you hear me?"

"Of course," Red-160 replied. "What do you need me for?"

"We need information from Mister Wilde," the voice replied. "We wish to move into a large building nearby that appears to be unoccupied. However, we do not want any more of our kind to be arrested, so we figured Mister Wilde might have critical information we currently lack."

"I will obtain that information," Red-160 said, looking for Mister Wilde only to realize he'd left the room and entered the bedroom.

The light was still on, so he felt safe trying to talk again. "Mister Wilde? I have a question for you."

He noticed Mister Wilde jerk his head toward him in a sudden motion, a reaction he appeared to be attempting to stifle to minimal effect. "No worries, five minutes less sleep won't kill me. Fire away."

"Our question is simple," Red-160 said. "Near our landing spot, there appears to be a large building that seems rather empty. It appears to be empty, but we want to know that for sure before we attempt to move in. Is there anything about that building we should know?"

"Wait," Mister Wilde said. "How did you get to this building?"

"I'll have to ask that," Red-160 said, before reconnecting with the Incubators back at the spaceship to do just that. "He would like to know how we arrived at the building."

"This is Black-110, I can answer," Black-110 replied. "I saw this weird tunnel while exploring the area, the building just happened to be visible at the other end."

"Thank you," Red-160 said before turning to Mister Wilde. "It was at the end of a tunnel."

Mister Wilde stiffened. He took several deep breaths, in and out, in and out. Then, and only then, did he start responding once more. "That does happen to be an unoccupied building. However, I'm not really sure if moving there is such a good idea. Everyone here has rather unpleasant memories of the place, and I'm not sure if you want to tie yourselves to those."

"How we are seen is irrelevant, Mister Wilde," Red-160 said. "We don't intend to stay long. Furthermore, we have no reason to care about such matters, nor do we have the means to."

Mister Wilde just shook his head. "If that's not a problem, go right ahead. I'll make sure everyone else knows about it."

Red-160 nodded assent, relaying assurances to the others as he did. Then, he watched as Mister Wilde crawled under the covers and turned out the lights, asleep in what felt like seconds. Red-160 curled up, not necessarily out of a need to sleep but more out of a desire for some rest.

The others would probably complete the move overnight, meaning they'd be ready to start their research by tomorrow.

Just like that, everything was falling into place.

The next morning, Chief Bogo entered the bullpen just in time to witness a scene of total chaos.

While a handful of officers appeared to be sitting silently, Officer Hopps most prominent among them, everyone else appeared to be involved in the same hushed argument with each other, hissing and snarling at each other like ill-tempered children, which happened to be something he'd called them more than once. Not wanting any distractions in the room, as soon as he got to his desk on the far end of the room, he banged one hoof on it as loudly as possible, which led to the room silencing in a hurry, even if the cross-room glares didn't fade away.

Giving them all as stern a look as he could muster, he said, "Officers, what the hell is this nonsense about?"

Judy appeared to do the honors there. "Sir, the Incubators seem to have moved into Cliffside Asylum."

That caught him off-guard, although he tried to mask it the best he could by launching straight into assignments. Nothing out of the ordinary there; a few officers to the shady restaurant that remained under investigation, a few undercover officers in various parts of Zootopia, and the rest on patrol routes. Once they left the room, however, he raced straight back to his desk to grab his phone, knowing he needed to call Mayor Lionheart once more. Sure, he doubted anyone was going to be developing on the place anytime soon, but there had to be someplace less unsettling they could stay, right?

This time, the call went straight through to Lionheart. "Chief Bogo! Always a pleasure."

"I apologize, but we have no time for pleasantries, Mayor," Bogo said. "I've got another update on the whole Incubator situation, and this one's a doozy. Unless our officers have been fed misinformation somehow, which I wouldn't rule out, the Incubators appear to have taken up residence in Cliffside Asylum."

A pause, then more speech. "Honestly, I fail to see the problem there. It's just sitting there. No companies are willing to touch it after the… incident, and it's far enough out of the way that we can safely prevent unwanted mammals from trying to enter."

For the most part, he was right. Ever since the place had gone down in infamy for hosting the initial wave of savage predators, any company who might have otherwise bought the place or at least the property it was built on refused to touch it with a ten-foot pole. Furthermore, apart from urban explorers and the occasional band of reckless teenagers, no one set foot anywhere near the place if they could help it. Too many bad superstitions.

Nevertheless, Bogo stifled a groan, his right hoof scratching lines into his desk. "Are you sure there's nowhere less creepy? Apologies for saying this, but they're freaky enough as it is, adding onto that is really unnecessary."

"I could look, but I doubt it. Empty places to live are rare as it is around here," Lionheart replied. "I'll get back to you if I find somewhere we can place them."

"Thanks for your help," Bogo said, and that ended the call.

Following that, he threw himself into his duties for the day, trying in vain to free his mind from the supernatural. He communicated with all the patrolling officers at least three times each, only needing to dispatch a group twice: once to handle a domestic disturbance and the other to scatter a group of skateboarders blocking a major road. He filed some mindless paperwork, checking several other officers' work for mistakes along the way. Then, just like that, the clock displayed noon on the dot. Before he could even leave his chair, however, his cell phone buzzed with a text.

Initially, he assumed it had come from his wife, given the time of day, but to his surprise, it came from Officer Higgins, reading, "See me in the Jam Cam room, you really need to see this."

Even if it was supposed to be his lunch break, Bogo still felt uneasy leaving his officers without anyone to issue orders, so he didn't come right away. Instead, he painstakingly sent back the message, "Can't leave, need to make sure someone's at the helm."

"I can cover for you," the response came back. "It'll only be a few minutes."

Chief Bogo finished the chain. "Then do it, and I'll see whatever you want me to."

That ended things. It didn't take long for Higgins to burst into the room, appearing ready to take on the world, if only for a few minutes.

"It's already set up," he said. "You just need to watch a few minutes' worth of footage. It's from Cliffside, last night."

That piqued Bogo's interest, if not necessarily in a good way. As he hurried over to the Jam Cam room, he ran through every possible scenario that made this relevant: Incubators committing crimes on their way in, the Incubators getting attacked, an Incubator being kidnapped, the Incubators kidnapping another mammal… the list went on, and most of its contents were not pretty.

The Jam Cam room was a dark, quiet place, for officers didn't need footage from these cameras often, and even when they did, they knew what to look for and how to find it, so they never stayed long. It was sparsely furnished, the only thing in it besides the computer which all the Jam Cams' footage went to was a chair and a light fixture that saw use about once every other month. This time, Bogo was grateful for that, for it meant he was unlikely to be disturbed while seeing whatever the hell had gotten Officer Higgins so frantic.

The time stamp on the screen displayed 2:38 AM that morning, the location stamp Cliffside Asylum, the screen frozen at that moment in time. With bated breath, Bogo found the computer mouse and clicked, causing time to start moving forward again.

For the first couple of seconds, nothing happened. But then, sure enough, the Incubators started arriving.

There were far more of them than Bogo would have imagined, all marching in neat rows. Some pulled what appeared to be machinery covered with some kind of cloth, others were unburdened, but all maintained the same pace, looking straight ahead as they marched toward the asylum under the cover of night. This pseudo-parade continued for several minutes, Bogo watching for anything of interest, but finding nothing.

"Well, Higgins, I'm not sure what you saw, but…" Bogo's train of thought trailed off once he noticed the streak of purple.

The line appeared to be near its end, the flow of Incubators having thinned to a drizzle. However, one of the last groups, towing one of the largest machines he'd seen from them, was the focus.

They moved slower than the others, taking great pains to keep the machine over level ground whenever possible. Two more walked in front of it, the two clusters starting and stopping in tandem as they inched forward. Then, what appeared to be some kind of mistake happened, the machine being dragged over what appeared to be little more than a pebble, rising and falling an infinitesimal amount. The result made itself clear in a burst of something purple releasing from the machine, a ring of the stuff exploding in all directions as the Incubators froze for several seconds. Then, once nothing else came from the machine, they kept inching forward like nothing had happened.

"There you go," Bogo thought. "I'm not sure what that stuff is, but I think that's the point. Based on their reactions, it can't be anything good. Which raises the question, why did they bring it here?"

Maybe one of his other officers could get an answer. While a search warrant was out of the question since he had no evidence the Incubators had been doing anything illegal, maybe he could get answers out of them by just asking. They'd been pretty open so far, he'd just have to hope they'd stay that way.

As the last of the Incubators moved out of the camera's range, he reset the monitor so it showed current footage before ducking back out of the room, ready to bolt down his lunch and return to the line of duty.

However, one question remained burned into his brain.

"Red-160, why are you really here?"