My apologies for taking so long (over a month, in fact). JrRangerScout was a hard proofreader to replace, but I did find someone. Say hello to chapter 23, proofed by Hawktooth and Warrior27.
On another note, I got to post this on the exact anniversary of Zootopia's debut. Happy Zootopia Day!
"Not one single thing's gone right today, and now The Amazing Spider-Man is reduced to sneaking around - for his shoes!"
Spider-Man, Spectacular Spider-Man Episode 1
Judy made her way down the street, glancing at a slip of paper in her paw as she did so as if looking for an address. Her eyes passed over crooked mailboxes, boarded-up windows, peeling paint; pretty much everything one would expect to see in some post-apocalyptic movie. The houses were every bit as inauspicious as one would expect to find in a place with such an unpleasant reputation. I can't believe anyone would live here, she thought. Then she wondered how many did so because they had no other place to go, and how many lived there to prey on the former category.
Nick came from the opposite direction, wearing a set of earbuds like what Judy and Catano had worn before. His shirt also sported one of the 'buttonhole cameras' as he had taken to thinking of them.
Catano sat in a van some distance away, monitoring their progress. A concealed pistol sat in her lap with a rifle close by, ready to use if any mammal should pose a threat to Nick. She would have preferred to watch Judy's back too, but the lay of the land didn't give her a discreet spot with direct sight on both of them. Thus, though the fox annoyed her, his lack of a badge made him top priority.
Judy briefly glanced at the house to which they had been directed, then concentrated on her ears for a moment. Hearing wasn't the only advantage they offered; they also made great sensors of wind direction.
Everything's going well so far, she thought. In her disguise, it would have taken either face-recognition software or her parents to recognize her. She had daubed several parts of her fur with black makeup to alter her appearance, and she walked with a slight limp that made her look considerably feebler than she was. Sporting a pair of glasses and a squint as if the prescription were out of date, she drummed her 'good' foot in a show of frustration.
Her path took her around a corner, where she drew a glance from Nick as if he were surprised to see a rabbit in that part of the city. She was just coming up to a row of bushes when the scrap of paper flew from her grasp.
"Oh!" she cried, grabbing for it. It fluttered away from her fingertips like a butterfly, then flew into the nearby bushes just as planned with her in hot pursuit. In a moment, her cottonball tail had vanished in the untrimmed shrubbery.
Nick sent a text to Catano. So far, so good. :)
Catano's voice came through his earbuds in the weary, irritated tone which had come to be her norm when addressing Nick. "Was the smiley really necessary?"
The fox considered replying, It was; 100%, but the seriousness of what Judy was presently doing swayed his mind the other way. Instead, he settled for a simple Yep and spared a second to enjoy the barely audible groan from Catano. Based on his lengthy experience getting on mammals' nerves, he guessed that she had tried to cage it in by clamping her teeth.
Inside the bushes, Judy recovered the paper and rolled up her pant leg briefly to pull out a pawful of pens. They had been Nick's idea, strategically inserted just behind her knee to make a realistically uncomfortable limp. Maneuvering further in, she deposited them and her glasses in a small pile and proceeded to crawl resolutely towards the house. This time, she took care to jostle the bushes as little as possible.
Lowering her head to get a clear view while at the same time making herself less visible, she examined the house from behind. According to the phone call, the mammal – an elderly panda who had lived nearby since before the neighborhood had gone downhill and refused to move out on principle – had seen mammals going into and out of this untenanted home on occasion quite often in the past. She had not thought anything of it, but on a return from a recent trip to the doctor's she had seen someone just coming out of the house dash away as if afraid to be spotted. Whoever it was had dropped something uncannily like the blue spheres which citizens were being told to look out for.
Alas, Judy saw no blue spheres and no other clues to speak of. The windows had been blacked out with paint and in some cases boarded over, and there was no sign of life anywhere.
Slipping off her own mini-camera, Judy held it to give Catano a look at the house. With her other paw, she laboriously texted, Looks clear to me.
Agonizing seconds passed before Catano answered. "Same here, but be careful- wait, is that a camera?"
Judy had seen the object in question, and put down the mini-cam to text a reply. No, just a birdhouse shaped like a camera. I've seen them before. Her younger brother Jordy had a peculiar hobby of making such birdhouses and strategically placing them to mess with mammals' heads. It had been funny for a while, but he'd flown too close to the sun when he put one outside their parents' bedroom window. After the punishment that netted him, Judy had almost felt sorry for him.
"Alright. That loose plywood over the basement window looks like your best chance to get in."
Judy had to hand it to Catano; she hadn't spotted that entrance in person, and Catano was looking at it on her iPhone screen. The cheetah might be cranky, but she knew her stuff.
"Wilde, proceed to the front."
It drove Judy nearly crazy waiting until the signal was given. It was a risky move for Nick, but if he knocked on the front door, anyone inside would have their attention drawn away from the back. Meanwhile, he would hopefully know anyone inside well enough to talk his way around them - or at least be fast enough to get away. She busied herself by stowing her phone and re-attaching her camera.
"Go," came the command from Catano.
Judy shot across the lawn like a rocket, slipping in among some overturned trash cans. She glanced all around. There was still no sign that she had been observed.
"Hopps," Catano relayed, "Wilde says it looks like no one's home. Be careful anyway."
Judy texted back in the affirmative, then darted over to the loose panel and ducked into its cover.
Rather than slip in right away, the bunny officer crouched there, texting an update and then staring into the inky depths of the basement to let her eyes adjust. Nick had warned her that it wasn't unusual for houses in this neighborhood to have decoy entrances, nail boards, and so on to deter or damage would-be intruders.
A search revealed, by way of security, only a nail board down below and an otherwise empty space more the size of a closet than a proper room. Carefully thrusting herself out past the board, she hit the floor on bent legs and stuck a silent landing. Scanning around, she failed to detect anything of particular interest. No laboratory equipment of any kind, and not even a whiff of Night Howlers. There was, however, a scent of musk and sweat and... Ugh. She didn't know what the last thing was, but it smelled pret-ty bad in her opinion.
Her last text had advised Callie to expect no further updates for the time being, as the lit screen would throw off her night vision – such as it was. Wish we could have sent Nick in, she mused, though she vowed never to voice that thought out loud. Assuming she got through this unscathed, he would probably pepper her with jokes and snickers about 'the poor blind bunny wandering in the dark.' She crept towards the door, put an ear to it, and convinced herself that there were no sounds coming from the other side or lights leaking around the edges. Jumping up to turn the doorknob and giving a light push, she slipped back to the shelter of the wall and eased it silently open.
The main basement was darker still, and she considered using the flashlight on her phone. However, if someone came down while she was poking around, she would want to be able to disappear as quickly and fluidly as possible. Dousing the light and forcing her eyes to adjust to a basement strange to her and known to her foes would both slow her down, so she chose to endure a brief nuisance and be ready in a pinch. Once she had satisfied herself that she was secure, she could use the light and take some pictures as evidence.
As her pupils dilated still more, she realized that the room in which she now found herself contained a number of small gas tanks. She stifled a gasp, remembering that the gun used by Bellwether had been fueled with pressurized gas.
I've got to find more, she thought.
Working her way around the basement, she discovered the stairs... and a sight that made her stop.
There was a light – very faint but definitely there – coming from under the door at the top. Steeling her nerves and moving with the wariness for which her species was perhaps best known, she eased her way up the stairs and gently opened the door.
For an empty house, it was a bigger mess than all her brothers' rooms put together. Strange structures were scattered around, resembling blanket forts made out of scrap wood, tarps, cinder blocks, and just about any other material one might find in a scrap pile or junk yard. Here and there were strange bottles made of metal and painted black. Everywhere there were small spatters of many colors, with blue and orange being the most prevalent and red being the only one absent. Through it all, the smell at which she had wrinkled her nose before grew stronger... and suddenly very familiar. It was an atrocious smell of strong vegetable extracts – too strong for even a rabbit's liking – which called her back to her training at the academy.
"Oh, SWEET CHEESE AND CRACKERS!" she shouted, no longer caring whether anyone heard or not.
"Hopps, keep it down!" ordered Catano through her earbud.
Judy, now free to speak, skipped sending a text. "False alarm, Catano," she reported, her voice carrying through a wireless mic on her person. "This isn't a Night Howler Lab. Some kids turned this place into a paintball course!"
Nick made a point to sit in the far corner of the cruiser from Judy, despite the barrier isolating the back seat, as they rode home. The doe practically had smoke coming out of her ears, especially after Nick had observed that in that neighborhood, the kids' antics rated right next to jaywalking. Trying to make an arrest would just be the punchline to a bad joke.
In another part of town, a vixen sat staring at her computer screen as it played a music video for the hundred-fifty-first time that day. The video showed a pack of canids playing instruments under pouring rain while a system of pyrotechnic jets threw fingers of fire into the air behind them. The canines all wore black shirts – sleeveless or short-sleeved – and the water drenched their fur and made their forms glisten in the firelight.
The video had, actually, been a masterpiece of budgeted special effects. The rain came from a collection of sprinklers borrowed from neighbors and cropped out of the shots. The instruments were in fact dummies except for the drum set. To create the official video for their hit song, Hero, Taelia had worked with Xavier, Isabelle, and Ellen to pull off the special effects, recorded the visual part, and spliced in a studio recording of the band later.
Alas, Taelia was not watching the video just for fun. Slowing it down at one point, she studied the flames and then clicked to another window, where representations of the flames stood out against a black backdrop.
"Come on," she murmured to herself after a zoom-in proved that the flames were still not up to specs. This was the highest-def recording they had; she had to be able to coax some better quality out of it than that.
The stage on which they would perform – whenever and wherever that was to be – would almost certainly not have sprinklers for anything but fire prevention. Even if it had ornamental ones, playing their electrical instruments in a downpour would be insane on several levels. Since the concert was to be indoors, actual pyrotechnics were also out.
The good news – at least for the fire part – was that the plan was to have a large screen at the back of the stage, whereupon visual effects might be supplied. The bad news was that Taelia had to find some way to make the recordings of the band's pyrotechnics fit a screen that large without losing their sharpness. By fiddling around with filters and settings, she had managed to improve the quality a good deal. However, there was a limit to how much any image could be refined by that method, and if she hadn't reached the limit yet she was definitely pushing it and herself. That and staring at the screen for so long was starting to give her a headache, multiplied over again by the fact that she had no clue of her deadline.
I just wish we knew when the concert was supposed to be rescheduled for! she thought impatiently. Her brother had been planning to bring his family to come see her perform. Her parents were hoping to come if they could (it was doubtful, but she had promised to save tickets for them). Alas, that was all based on the concert's pre-set date. According to the latest from Xavier, the organizers were having a meeting right about that time to decide the matter... and the outlook wasn't promising.
Massaging her forehead with the thumb and two foremost fingers of one paw, she leaned back and pulled away from her monitor. I need a break, she thought.
Her gaze fell on the phone at her desk, and she took in a deep breath and let it out. I wonder what Nick's up to, she thought. If she couldn't know what was going on with the concert plans, at least she could distract herself with something passably useful. She'd always found that a quick talk brightened her day – and usually the other mammal's day too. He might even know something about the business with that 'Obearon' creep the news had been on about since the attack.
She picked up the phone and sent off a message.
In the cruiser, Catano's ears pricked at the sound of a generic phone chime. "Nick, is that you?"
"Yeah, hold up a sec." He fished out the device. "Oh, it's from Taelia," he reported. His voice had the kind of tone in which someone might say, 'Oh, I found a granola bar' if they were adrift in a life raft with no supplies save for food, of which they had more than they wanted.
"Girlfriend?" asked Catano disinterestedly.
Nick shook his head. "Nah, just someone I met. I'll just, uh, answer her later."
Judy got the feeling that Nick was trying to avoid adding to her unpleasant mood by injecting a totally irrelevant bit of levity. "Go ahead," she urged, speaking more cheerfully than she felt. "It's not like it'll get in the way of anything."
Catano's eyes flicked to Judy, as if she were thinking of suggesting that they should discuss what to do once they got back to the precinct. She let it slide, however, and occupied herself with thinking it over privately.
"Remember," she advised Nick, "you're not allowed to discuss the case with anyone outside the ZPD."
"He knows that," Judy carped in her friend's defense.
Nick bit his lip, keeping quiet about the matter as he read Taelia's message. 'What's up?'
'Not much,' he admitted. 'Why do you ask?'
'Mostly bored,' answered she honestly. 'I was wondering if you knew anything about this Obearon guy who nailed the Community Center.'
The fox felt a chill down his spine, then shook it off. The story was all over the news; of course someone had caught the codename, and who wouldn't be curious about it? 'Nothing worth mentioning,' he answered. 'Guy's trying to make trouble, I guess.'
'Got any friends in the ZPD who could clear things up?'
Nick shrugged off the sense of being scrutinized. 'They're all over it, I'm sure, but I don't think they're going to discuss it much with a civilian. Loose lips sink ships, right?'
He could almost see her shrug in reply. 'Yeah, I guess I should have realized that. I just needed a break from getting things ready for the concert.'
'I thought the concert was off until they figured out what to do about it,' texted Nick, confused.
'It is, but we still have to be ready. Besides, in about a week I'm supposed to start freelancing again, so I'll need to have everything for Vixen ready to go.'
That made sense.
'But,' she continued, 'I needed a break and thought I'd text you.'
He chuckled a little at that. It was nice to know that, even with police work dealing him a raw hand, he could still hold a female's attention well enough. 'Mission accomplished.'
'Yeah. Speaking of missions, how's it going getting into the ZPD?'
Nick frowned at that. He started to tap in, 'Not so great,' then reconsidered. 'Not much I can discuss. Trade secrets, you know?'
She sent back a smiley face. 'What, like being an agent or something?'
'Yeah, kind of like that.'
'Okay, Double-O-Savage,' Taelia answered, throwing in a wink. 'I'll let you get back to your trade secrets while I grapple with the dastardly menace of computer graphics.'
The joke was actually worth a chuckle. 'OK. Oh, any word on the concert?'
':( Nope. Big-wigs are trying to sort that out now. X said they'll let him know and he'll tell us.'
Nick frowned and texted back a quick, 'Hang in there,' capped off with a smile and a 'ttyl.' He had to admit, the situation cut through his usual indifference. He had, as a rule, avoided getting too concerned with current events except where he could make some green off of them. This time, though, it was for something he and his new friends at the ZPD had risked their necks over. That made it... well, kind of personal.
Plus, the frown Taelia had sent brought with it a too-clear mental image of what she must look like at the moment; probably tired, anxious, and a little short on sleep.
Kind of like Mom did the last time I saw her, he thought guiltily.
"You okay, Nick?"
Judy's voice pulled him out of his thoughts, and he quickly assumed the neutral-with-a-dash-of-cheerful demeanor he always put on when he'd been pulled out of somber thoughts. It was a time-mastered look; just enough to seem relaxed without overplaying the part. "Oh, yeah," he affirmed, stretching and then pocketing his phone. "Taelia's just busy getting ready for a concert."
"Let me guess," Catano ventured. "The one yesterday's attack stopped dead in its tracks?"
Nick bit his lip. "Uh, yeah. That one. It's not stopped, just, uh... up in the air."
Judy looked back at him anxiously. With everything else going on, she had forgotten Nick's mentioning that Taelia and her band would be involved.
"Well then," said Catano in a perfectly level tone, "we'd better do our part and bring in Obearon."
At this remark – optimistic by the cheetah's standards – Judy decided to pick up the ball. "You're right," she agreed, drumming up her enthusiasm. "The sooner we get the paperwork on this call out of the way, the sooner we can get back to real leads."
They were, at that point, only a minute away from HQ, and as they walked in Judy even mustered the nerve to wave to Clawhauser – except that Clawhauser wasn't there. In his usual place was Officer Wolfard, looking bored out of his skull with one arm propped on the table and the paw thereof supporting his head.
"Wait, what happened to Ben?" asked Nick even as Judy and Catano stopped and looked in confusion.
Judy was the first to seek an answer, dashing forward and making a jump to catch the edge of the desk like a chin-up bar. "What are you doing here?" she asked anxiously.
Wolfard blinked at her sudden appearance, having apparently not even noticed her approach. "Oh, hi Judy. Ben had some kind of problem an hour ago, so they called me off patrol to cover for him. Lucky me," he added sourly, drumming his claws on the desk.
Nick glanced up at Catano for a reaction, supposing she had known the chubby cheetah the longest. She had her lips drawn in and, though Nick's angle of vision hid her face, he had the feeling her brow was furrowed. It was, perhaps, the most expressive he'd seen her yet. She also seemed to relax a fraction when Judy's question of whether it was serious or not was met with an, "I don't think so."
"Well," said Catano, "we've got things to do. Come on, you two."
As they departed, Wolfard raised a paw to stall them. "Hey, does the name Poisson mean anything to you guys? I thought I'd heard it being talked about it around here."
The trio looked at one another in surprise at this apropos query. "Well, it does just so happen that a skunk by that name pranked me at my apartment the other day," Judy fumed as Nick paused to check an alert from his phone. He went to hit "Ignore," but his thumb slipped and landed on "View." He instinctively moved to close the message, but the words on the screen froze his brain and his thumb in the middle. In under a second his face flashed from confusion to disbelief. Another second brought him around to resignation, lowering his eyelids and pulling down his ears as his tail swished in marked displeasure.
Well, he thought, that's typical – in a very annoyingly unexpected kind of way.
Unaware of Nick's surprise discovery, the three officers continued their discussion of Poisson. "Two days ago," Catano corrected, to Judy's annoyance. "And she's one of the mammals of interest we've been assigned to investigate."
"I thought so," said the wolf. "Her name just came up in the news. Let's see..." He turned to the laptop in front of him, tapped the touch pad and keys a couple of times, and nodded. "Yeah, here we go." He gently spun the device around to show them a video clip. As it played, Catano took a knee to let Judy hop up and get a better view.
As the story unfolded, Judy gaped. Catano's eyes widened. Nick was still staring at his phone, but finally managed to snap out of it.
"Carrots, I think you'll want to see... this." He stopped, now staring transfixed at the news story on the screen. His ears fell back in dismay, for in his rapid train of thought he had hoped that maybe they could take care of Taelia's message discreetly
Their investigation had just gotten considerably more complicated.
More complicated? Okay, that can't be good. What's up with Poisson, and why did I throw in another false alarm?
I'll answer the second one for the moment: no, seeing Judy fail does not make me feel better about my own sad, miserable life – especially since my life's not really sad or miserable most of the time. However, I realized that there was a danger of events flowing too fast for the time table I had in mind (if you look over previous chapters, there's a clue as to what that time table is), and I also realized that a lot of police investigations do involve false leads and alarms, particularly when they have to deal with panicked civilians and deliberate misdirection. In addition, I remembered reading some years ago about abandoned houses being used illegally for paintball, and I had always wanted to use that in a story. So, mission accomplished.
The security tricks referenced in this chapter, by the way, are also drawn from reality. I have seen fake camera birdhouses and hope to build one myself when I have the time. Fake entrances are a nod to the Winchester Mansion (not a fan of the spookhouse part, but I love almost anything cleverly built), and boards with nails or screws jutting upward are a common way to keep bears out of cabins.
Judy's methods of disguising herself are drawn from various sources. The pens in her pant leg, for example, are a takeoff of the old trick of altering one's stride and tracks by putting a small rock in one's shoe, which obviously would not work so well for her in its original form. Pens would be less effective (burrs would be more suitable, but harder to find on short notice), but better than nothing and probably passable if they could be lodged in a tender area such as the back of the knee. They would also make handy, if crude, defensive weapons in a pinch.
The music video Taelia was tinkering with is directly based on the song 'Hero' by Skillet. I included that as an Easter Egg already (when Taelia brought Nick to band practice), so I won't list it with this chapter's Easter Eggs. I will, however, recommend watching said video. Not only is it a great song with solid lyrics, but it's done up as a pretty good tribute to First Responders.
Guest Reviews:
Guest: Yep. I think Chief Bogo is going to regret his doubts about making Nick an officer. His knack for getting into places will be very key to the story, I assure you.
Guest: Oh, sí, Nick está muy loco; loco como un zorro.
And on a minor note, Hawktooth realized I've been misspelling Wolfard's name as Wolford. So I'll be going back and fixing that.
Easter Eggs
Greek Mythology
Superman
You might have also noticed a nod to Jordy, Judy's... spirited little brother from my other Zootopia storyline, "Fox Dens and Rabbit Trails," also known (so far anyway) as the "Christmas in Bunnyburrow" set. The birdhouse thing struck me as completely up his alley.
