An Evolved Sense of Justice

by dobanochi

A raccoon PI seeking asylum finds himself in Z-Town, he encounters a trailblazing hare police officer who's grown frustrated with her work and a fox who quit the force after an existential crisis - but didn't have a backup plan. As a strange new threat comes upon the city, the three must solve the question: how do you help save the world when you can hardly help yourself?

1. Back on the Streets

*A.N.* Hello everybody, today, June 8th, 2021 [later on FFnet because I have to request the fandom], is a happy day: a video game I've been anticipating for a while now, iBackbone/i, has finally been fully released. And to celebrate, I decided to release the first chapter of this crossover fic I've been brainstorming for a few months now. They say crossovers are always tough sells to readers, and I see why, but I have to assume that anybody who's a fan of one of these properties would surely enjoy the other.

I won't bombard you with too many notes up top, so just to make one necessary declaration: I couldn't resist setting this in the same universe as my other fics, but I made a point to make sure this can stand on its own. That said, it follows the events of a one-shot I wrote last summer; that fic is NOT required reading, and you can probably gather what it was about in this first chapter or two. As for any scant references to things that don't seem canon, those will be references to my main project, don't sweat it if you don't get them. (And I like to deconstruct tropes and concepts anyway, so I will not be a canon purist.)

Alright, that's enough for now, on with the show:

Chapter One: "Back on the Streets"

Riiiiing…

"..."

Riiiiing…

"..."

Riiiii- Bip!

"...Why, good evening, sir."

"I was starting to think, I didn't have this woman pegged as the kind who'd try to call someone and run away from the phone before they could call back."

"Well, you also hadn't had me pegged as the kind of woman who'd want to work with a raccoon."

"Because I don't expect anybody to want to work with a raccoon. Keep your expectations low and you can only be pleasantly surprised. And you've left me pleasantly surprised."

"But I'd just plugged my phone in and I was about to go take a shower before bed. I figured you're a very to-the-point guy, if you tried to call me again and I still didn't answer, you'd probably leave me a voicemail with everything you needed to tell me."

"If you were anybody else, I would have done that the first time."

"I'm just that special, huh?"

"You let a stripe work with you, didn't ya?"

"I may have. So tell me, where are you calling me from with this new number?"

"Motel 6 about thirty minutes out of Portland, in a little town at the edge of civilization."

"Hm, what's the name of the town?"

"...Wilsonville."

"...I guess I really am that special to you, huh?"

"The name wasn't the sole reason I stopped here. I saw the signs on the highway saying the exits were getting further and further apart. This was probably the last exit before Redneckistan; looking at a map in the Yellow Book in my room, it looks like I was right. But I took the name as a good omen."

"... Couldn't help but hear in there that you said 'stopped here'. Implying you're going somewhere further."

"Ah, I should have expected nothing less from an expert investigator than for you to sniff out clues I didn't even realize I was leaving."

"...Must I pry?"

"...Portland just wasn't working out."

"Howard, you only gave it, what, three weeks?"

"That was three weeks of absolutely no bites on any cases whatsoever. Believe me, I'm not happy to be giving up on another city this soon, but I've only got four more months to play with until I either need to legally get the hell out of the States or get an extension - and they're not gonna give me an extension. I already wasted two months - I really should have cut my losses in Seattle sooner."

"And I'm glad you're being careful but I'm really feeling like you're playing a little too conservatively with your time. You've got to give things at least a little time to take root. How are you sure your stay can't get extended?"

"Because there's a decent chance they'll find out that I've been here to look for freelance work without a work visa, which I can't get because they don't give work visas to freelancers. Ya gotta have a company sponsor you. And they'd probably find out about that because, kills me to say it, but an entire country's government is probably a better detective than I am - at least when they try to be."

"I know you don't want to, but have you even considered reaching out to some PI agencies? Just to see if they'd hire you if you wanted to? Any agency worth their tails would take you in a heartbeat after the case you cracked up here."

"The case we cracked up there."

"No, that only works if you tried laying claim to the whole operation first before I cut in to take my due credit. But me saying it was all you was me trying to boost your confidence."

"...You know what would really boost my confidence?"

"I know you're going to tell me."

"...If I had my partner in crime down here with me."

"...You know I can't do that."

"I know you can't do it on an emotional level but on paper, you have to admit it would work out quite nicely. You find a job at a paper somewhere, get sponsorship for your own visa, pop some questions, pull some strings, and get me a visa too."

"...Coming home is always an option, Howard."

"Now you know I can't do that."

"Hey, sure, some people up here might not like you because you blew the cover off the Bloodworths and a whole lot of their friends, but most people up here don't even know who you are."

"..."

"...That… that wasn't supposed to be a jab at you."

"No, no, it wasn't, just… hmm… I'm trying to think of a polite way to tell you that I think you're just wrong about the situation. It's not just a few people, there's a criminal underground all across the country that wants me dead up there. And if they do decide to mess with me, the police won't help me out because the VPD's still bitter that I did their job better than they could and all the other departments in the country are gonna have their back, so maybe I could still make a living solving basic stuff, but at this point, is it even worth the trouble-?"

"Howard. Howard. Calm down."

"...Did I really sound uncalm just now?"

"To anybody else, you wouldn't have, but I've been around you enough. I know the subtle signs of you starting to panic."

"..."

"You're a good man, Howard. You don't deserve to feel panicked."

"...Renee… if I go back to Canada, I'm a dead man. I believe this to be true."

"If that's what you believe, I can't tell you you're wrong."

"If they catch me, they'll make a coonskin cap out of me - and you remember what the Bloodworths did to their victims, so you know I'm probably not that far off."

"Well for what it's worth, I haven't been having any trouble with thugs or mobsters or anyone like that."

"Because you're smart enough to have kept your nose out of that world since we solved the case. You came, you saw, you conquered… and you left without giving them a reason to think you'd be back."

"Um… I mean… maybe? But then they'd still want revenge on me, wouldn't they?"

"...I don't wanna worry you, but I'm thinking there's still a nonzero chance someone might be plotting something."

"...And there's a nonzero chance I'll fall down the stairs and break my neck tomorrow. You could absolutely be right and I'll stay cautious, but for my own sanity, I can't live in fear. That wouldn't be helpful to anybody."

"...And yeah, I could absolutely just be paranoid. But hey… my paranoia's saved my ass a few times. If not for my paranoia, I might've dawdled around in The Bite looking for more clues and then I would've gotten caught and turned into stew… or whatever they were serving people as. Me and my paranoia have had such good times together - can't turn my back on her now, can I?"

"...That wasn't paranoia that saved you, that was common sense."

"..."

"How are you feeling now?"

"I'm feeling like I bit off more than I can chew."

"Well isn't that some poignant wordplay?"

"Hm?"

"..."

"...Oh! Alright, 'Bite' pun…"

"Sorry, Howie, I had to lighten the mood somehow."

"And I appreciate it, but… hmm, I could go on for an hour about all the things going through my head, but… I think I can sum it up pretty well like this:..."

"I'm listening."

"...I asked for this. I specifically recall thinking that I needed a case that would put me on the map. I guess I should have been more specific, because… well, I'm sure on some people's maps."

"Fame is a blessing and a curse, I guess."

"Sounds about right."

"...Where you headed next?"

"...You know what? I think they gave me a room facing the highway. Let's let the road tell me where I'm going."

"...Alright."

"...Yup, I can see the sign from my window. 'I-5 South, towards Salem, Eugene… and Zootopia'. Well, one of those three cities sounds promising."

"Yeah, I've heard Eugene, Oregon is beautiful this time of year."

"Heh…"

"But seriously… hey, maybe I'm the one who's being paranoid now, but if what I've heard about that city is true, I'd feel safer in a city where the mafia may or may not be out for me than I would in Zootopia. So I'll tell you now, I'm not going to join you there."

"Wait, what have you heard about Zootopia that's so bad?"

"...That city really hates foxes."

"...Well… if that is indeed the case… I can definitely understand why that would be a deal-breaker for you. But I've got to say, I've heard that they don't hate you guys any more than they hate… any other carnivore species. Which includes yours truly, so I also have a vested interest in the rumors being overblown."

"Yeah, but your people's ancestors didn't specifically hunt and eat other mammals, you guys just sort of… ate what you found-"

"Arguably, we still do."

"-so you're in the gray area."

"Gray with black and white highlights."

"Because you're all just so fashionable."

"...Well… I can't let a little prejudice scare me away, can I?"

"No, but if they do give you more trouble than it's worth, nobody would call you weak for choosing not to put up with it."

"Hey, that's the exact same logic I used to justify my decision to get the hell out of Vancouver where nobody trusts me anymore."

"...Touché, good sir."

"And if it's nothing worse than the 'trash panda' comments I got back home, I can handle it."

"...Well… if that's where you must go to seek your fortune, I won't stop you."

"You can always come and join me."

"And you can always come back to Vancouver."

"...This is true."

"...Oh, Howard… we could have had such a damned good time together."

"You really think so, huh?"

"...What? No appreciation for Hammingway? Or let me guess, you only ever cared to read Sherlock Holmes."

"Why read fiction when reality is so much more interesting?"

"Because sometimes it can give you ideas to make reality even more interesting."

"...It can…"

"...We really could have had a damn good time if you didn't feel like you needed to flee the country."

"...I think we still can."

-IllI-

One of the downsides of knowing everybody is that everybody knows you, too. So when you make a mistake, everyone's gonna find out about it.

...Alright, maybe that was a bit of a dramatic opening. Because his decision to quit the force wasn't a mistake in and of itself, but his… way of going about it left something to be desired. It was a rash decision made amidst a flurry of emotions and while he still thought it was the right decision overall… yeah, he couldn't deny that he could have handled it better.

Like an exit strategy. Any exit strategy. Some mammals in his life told him that he should have waited until he had another job lined up before quitting; others said he should have raised hell within the force and demanded change and accountability, at which point his rabblerousing would have yielded one of two true outcomes: either he gets someone to listen to him, or they'd fire him so he could at least collect unemployment. But nah, pshaw, he'd quit on the spot with absolutely no safety net.

Because what are you supposed to do in a situation like the one he was in? How do you react when confronted with the fact that - to a lot of the mammals you've spent the majority of your life rubbing shoulders with, not even bad people, just people who didn't have the luxury of being able to follow the law - how do you deal with the fact that so many of them think you just joined the oppressor? You can tell yourself not to care what others think, but when they all have the same opinion about you, maybe it's something to consider.

Of course… now you had the police loyalists who thought he had been brainwashed by anarchists and hated him for quitting the force. Plus the actual, honest-to-God anarchists and other individuals of similar social politics who still hated him for joining in the first place and weren't going to forgive him just for changing his mind. Okay, now toss in the mammals who still thought he was a scumbag from his life before he even joined the Boys in Blue, add half a cup of people who didn't really have a strong opinion about the ethics of modern American policing but still thought he was a coward for quitting, sprinkle on a little bit of mammals who still just didn't super-duper care for foxes… and congratulations, you've just maximized the number of people in this godforsaken town who didn't like him.

But there were those who supported his decision, and those who disagreed with it but still accepted it, so not everybody hated him, far from it. But since he knew damn-near everyone in this town - and those he didn't know surely by this point knew of him - it sure seemed like every citizen in this city had a strong and specific opinion of him.

"Hey, I know you!"

And this could be one of them now. A moose with an excited smile on his face was staring at him from a few dozen feet down the platform.

Nick returned a friendly smile and hoped for the best. "Ah, so you do!"

"Yeah!" the moose replied enthusiastically before his expression gradually started to sour. "You're the guy whose picture is in the dictionary next to the word pussy!"

Welp, that solved that mystery.

"Well, just like they say, you are what you eat!" A crass comeback to be sure, but you have to fight vulgarities with vulgarities. It was rule number one of the streets: he wouldn't get anywhere with this guy if he didn't speak his language. Hopefully it wouldn't get to the point that he'd have to say that there was surely a reason why this moose was a dick.

But for all Nick's attempts to take the insult in stride, the moose beat him at his own game. "Yeah!" he scoffed. "I'm sure that's the closest you're ever gonna get to eating that cottontail, ain't it, ya bloodthirsty little pervert?"

Ooh, classy one there, guy. But you know what? That was the remark that made the lightbulb click: Nick remembered who this was. Former Officer Steve Beardsley. Former because he got busted for stealing from stores both on and off duty, the moose having assumed - correctly - that nobody would have the balls to accuse someone wearing an officer's uniform of shoplifting. The only reason he ever got caught was because in Nick's wake, about a couple dozen other officers around the city quit too - a small number in a force of hundreds, but a bigger number than Nick or anybody else was expecting - and one of them had the cojones to whistleblow on his way out. To the force's credit, they listened, but nevertheless, this particular moose now had a tangible reason to hold a vendetta against this particular fox.

Nick kept playing along; hostility was best saved as a last resort. "Oh, you know it, bud! Thank God those bunnies are into carrots and not asparagus, am I right?"

Beardsley, however, was done trying to even be passive-aggressively jocular. He was just openly glaring down at the little red fox.

Nick was pondering. This guy was just up and staring at him, so he couldn't ignore him. Should he use even bluer material?

"Plus, y'know what they say about prey girls," he continued, "they give better head because their teeth aren't as sharp!"

No response. That line almost always got at least a chuckle when Nick was trying to take control of a situation where someone was goofing on his and her relationship. But they say you can tell when someone truly hates you because you'll never, ever be able to make them laugh.

"...How's it going, Steve?"

"How do you think it's going!? I'm just as unemployable as you are!"

"Well, hey, man, why don't you start your own business?" Just play nice, responding in anger would just make it end badly for everyone. "I can help you get the ball rolling if you've got an idea!"

Oh, the moose had an idea alright.

P'too!

"Shut the fuck up, will ya!?" Beardsley grumbled. "You really think I'd want your help!?"

Nick glanced down at the sudden moisture on his shirt. Okay, screw it, playing nice wasn't working with this dude.

"C'mon, Steve, you were a cop too, you know just as well as I do that spitting on people is a misdemeanor!"

"You know what else I know?" said the moose as he leaned over the fox to literally and figuratively belittle him. "Not a single cop in this city is gonna have your back! Or-! Heh, you know what? Excuse me! ...One cop in this city has your back! One! And none of the rest of them have her back, so that's as good as zero!" His point made, the moose walked away to find a more comfortable spot on the platform.

Nick had no reason to seek further conflict, so he let him go. But suffice it to say that the existence of cops like Beardsley was one reason among many why he would never regret his decision to leave the force.

With no disrespect to the Chief, of course. Chief Buy-One-Get-One always encouraged and recognized good cops on his force, and when anti-police sentiment was spreading like wildfire, the Chief did his best with what he had. But he struggled when confronted with the fact that he didn't have as much as the thought. He could fire all the shitty cops he wanted, and he fired plenty, but that didn't make good cops magically materialize out of the ether. And with vacancies to be filled, especially at a time when policing in America had very bad PR, it seemed the only ones interested were those who wanted in for the wrong reasons.

A few pillars down the Bulley Street ZTA platform, a haggard old cheetah was playing an acoustic guitar with his instrument case on the ground for donations. He was performing a down-tempo cover of an already low-energy song.

Carmeliiiiiitaaaaa,

Hooold me tiiighterrrrr,

I thiiink III'm, siinkiiin', dowwwn,

And I'm aaall struuung ouuut onnn herrrrroiiiiin,

On the ouuu-ou-ou-outskiiirts ooof tooown...

Perhaps not the most publicly-accessible song, but Nick could appreciate a good tune.

But honestly, for Nick, he would never say that most of the cops on the force were bad cops - it was that most of them weren't trying hard enough to be good. For so many of them, this was just a job - a customer service job, no less. They were the customer service branch of the federal government, answering to the general public requesting of them to do such bothersome tasks as enforcing laws, and they would begrudgingly do it, except for when they slacked off whenever they could, and just like other service workers, sometimes one of them flipped the fuck out and took their frustrations out on those they were supposed to serve (of course, putting it that way makes the comparison sound unfair to service workers). To most of the department, it wasn't an opportunity to do good nor an excuse to abuse power for evil; it was merely a paycheck with government-gig benefits.

It was easy for him to forget that because the two of them had regularly been put with the other cops who actively wanted to be good, the ones who applied themselves at their jobs and got promoted to doing interesting things and working on interesting cases. He rarely interacted with the silent majority who just got assigned to mundane beats and assignments, such "good" work as fining homeless people or ticketing drivers who can't afford to get their dead headlight replaced yet or cracking down on a family in a blighted neighborhood who had lied about their address to put their kids in a better school.

It really did seem like most cops played the lawful neutral role to a T, and sometimes that came at the expense of those for whom being compliant with the law was a privilege beyond their grasp. Those officers either didn't know or didn't care that most crime wasn't committed out of malice or greed, but out of desperation. And he just didn't want to be involved in that anymore.

"Excuse me, sir," said a voice down the platform, "you have a performance permit?" It wasn't a friendly tone.

Well, speak of the devil.

The cheetah looked spooked as the zebra officer accosted him.

"Performance permit?"

The zebra simply pointed to a placard on an adjacent pillar with a stick figure of an ambiguous bipedal creature playing a guitar, with tiny text below declaring that you had to have a permit to perform on a ZTA subway platform and had to have it prominently displayed at all times.

"You didn't see the sign?" asked the cop.

"Oh, I'm sorry, Officer, I didn't know, I'll pack up-"

"A permit costs ten dollars at the ZTA main office, did you not have ten dollars?"

"This is my first time doing this, I never paid attention to the signs, I just thought people set up shop down here and started jamming-!"

"So you decided to do some panhandling for fun?"

"...You call this panhandling?"

"You were singing about being on heroin. Are you on heroin, sir?" He was asking aggressively, but he was still calling the cheetah 'sir' - which actually kind of made it sound even more aggressive.

"What!? Oh, no, Officer, I'm too old for that kid stuff-"

"Are you suggesting you're under the influence of other, more 'mature' drugs?"

"Uh-"

"Sir, are you under the influence of controlled substances?"

"Pardon me, Officer…"

The zebra whipped around and looked down to see a smirking fox.

"Can I help you, sir?" The zebra knew exactly who Nick was but wasn't going to grant him the ego boost of feeling recognized.

And after consulting the officer's badge for a refresher, Nick remembered who this zebra was as well. Shawn Liner, guy whose personality was as colorful as his black and white stripes. The few times Nick had met him, Liner had seemed like one of those guys who was quiet not because he was shy but because he didn't think being actively friendly was worth the energy.

"Officer… Leaner, is it? You see, Officer, I actually just saw him carrying his guitar and I asked him to play a song for me. Totally spur-of-the-moment. He was too polite to say no, don't fault him for that!"

Liner wasn't buying it. "I saw you standing forty, fifty feet away from him."

Nick scoffed playfully. "Hey, I can't hog all this good music to myself, now can I?" he said with a smile and a shrug.

Still nothing. "Then name the song he was playing just now if you requested it."

"Oh, it's called 'Carmelita' by a little-known musician named John Furlong!" the fox answered confidently. Yeah, no, that was a blind guess, he didn't have a clue what that song was called nor who sang it, and he was hoping Liner didn't either.

Liner shook his head. "Got the title right, not the singer."

"Aw, maybe we've just heard different artists perform the same song, you and me-"

That was when the cheetah held up a paw. "It's alright, Mr. Wilde," said this man who Nick was fairly certain he'd never met in his life. "He caught me fair and square."

Well, that did it. Admission of guilt. Nothing Nick could do to bail him out now.

...Actually, wait, hold up, there was one last thing he could say:

"C'mon, Officer, it's a victimless crime! He's not hurting anybody!"

But the zebra was already scribbling out a citation. "Wilder, mind your own business, huh? You're not as helpful as you think you are."

And that was what separated cops like Nick - and like her - from a cop like Liner. She and Nick gave a shit to give a shit. But they were far outnumbered by cops who were constipated in their compassion. While the two of them sought to serve their public, it often seemed like much of the rest of them sought to serve nothing and nobody besides their own apathy. It was true what they said: the worst evil was done not by those who consciously chose to be evil, but by those who had never consciously chosen to be good.

"It's Wilde, by the way," said the fox, knowing damn well that the zebra knew. "Like Oscar, not like Laura Ingalls. There's no 'R'."

"There's an 'R' in 'retarded'!" jeered a voice. "Which you are!"

Nick glanced in the direction of the voice. Well whaddya know, it was Beardsley again. The Bulley Street station sure was living up to its name.

So Nick turned back to Liner. "I can't imagine you're gonna use your authority to tell him not to call people that."

The officer didn't even look at him. "Nnnope."

Nick couldn't have protested even if he wanted to; the train was pulling into the station, and the platform was soon deafeningly loud.

...And for the record, you'd be far from the first to tell him he should have stuck with the job and used his power to not only protect his public but also to help those for whom following the law was an unattainable luxury. Can't afford a new headlight? Escort them to an AutoZone and buy them one. Can't get out of the cycle of homelessness? Take them to a resale store to get them some cheap new duds, then the unemployment office, then a shelter. Can't get their kid into a decent school district without forging some documents? Well, um, uh… well, shit, shy of personally petitioning the board of education for a more equal distribution of resources, at least help that family cover their tracks better.

And if you were to tell him he should have done that, he'd tell you in a heartbeat that he did. And he did it with her. And their specific goal was to inspire other cops to do the same. It worked a little bit… but not as much as they'd hoped it would in half a decade. And he only had so much patience for a goal that wasn't even his.

And that had been another contributing factor: joining the police simply hadn't been his dream. He'd merely borrowed it for lack of a dream of his own.

When she'd handed him that job application, he went along with it for two reasons: she'd convinced him he could do good with his life like he'd always wanted to do; and she'd convinced him that even if nobody else did, she'd be there to provide him with a sense of belonging like he'd always wanted. And for a while, it was pretty cool. But then at a certain point it dawned upon him: he'd switched gears from a life society had written for him… to a life she had written for him. A better place than before, certainly, but he eventually came to realize he wasn't quite in the driver's seat - if anything, he'd had more autonomy when he was out roaming the streets.

He'd done the gender-flipped equivalent to a girl falling head-over-heels for a guy and following wherever he'd lead her; he couldn't expect her to do such a thing for him, so he couldn't put himself through that.

But still, that poor girl. She said at the time of his decision that she accepted it and she seemed to believe him when he said that he'd still support her in the force - and he wasn't lying - but she was still clearly taking it at least a little bit personally. She felt like she'd failed to reform him on top of the sense of abandonment Nick knew she'd go through but told himself dealing with that was better than continuing a false life.

And she was probably still pissed about how he'd used one of her proudest non-Nighthowler-case related moments as evidence of cops doing bad things for good reasons. When she joined the force they'd had her working as a meter maid, and to prove that she was a can-doer with admirable work ethic, she proceeded to double her ticket quota in half a day; so she didn't much care for when he pointed out on the day that he quit that she maaay have screwed over a lot of people over a very minor infraction, at least twice as many as they were making her screw over. Out of all those motorists, at least one must have had trouble paying their bills with this fine added to their debt, probably a few mammals; it was a statistical guarantee. And as they say, if the penalty for breaking a law is a flat fine, then in practice the law only applies to those who actually have to worry about money. He remembered her telling him that a little hippopotamus child, translating from Swahili or Congolese French or something, who had told her that their mommy wanted her dead; at the time, he'd felt bad for laughing at that, but now he felt bad because… honestly, he sided with the hippo lady over her.

But if she felt conflicted about that, there were still plenty of mammals in his life who told him plainly that it was a mistake of his to forgive her so fast after she'd gone full racist at the press conference, and he still had absolutely no idea how to feel about that. So there, they were both even.

He stuck beside her - emotionally if not physically - even as the going got tougher. And heaven knows there were still a lot of people who didn't approve of their relationship. Ah, the things he did for love…

"Hey, bunny-fucker!"

He snapped his head to the right. He couldn't help it. It was a reflex at this point.

And the gaggle of teenage boys halfway down the subway car - some rams, some goats, some pigs - cackled and pointed as he'd taken their bait hook, line, and sinker.

"I told you he'd look!"

They kept laughing for what seemed like an eternity after that, but they didn't bother him any more after that. They'd gotten what they wanted and they were satisfied. The old "make someone acknowledge an embarrassing moniker" trick, a classic. For all he knew, these boys didn't even consciously harbor any hatred against interspecies couples and just wanted to fuck with him - but fuck with him they did.

Before everything went to hell, he was gonna propose to her. Like, he hadn't had a specific time and place kicked out or anything, but he'd been brainstorming. He'd been looking at rings and devising ways to sneakily figure out the circumference of her finger. But then last year happened and he leapt before he looked and now he hadn't had a steady job since. And you don't propose to a girl when you're a bum with no job and no prospects. And you definitely don't propose to a girl who you can't confidently say loves you like she used to.

In an emergency, he could always go back to his old ways, but he was very hesitant to declare a state of emergency lest she think he was completely relapsing. There were a lot of terms for who he used to be: conman was the most common, but there was also fleecer, fraudster, snake-oil salesman was an old-school one and so was huckster, cheater, biller, bridge-seller, shark, mountebank was a fancy one he'd heard once, schemer, scammer, swindler, shyster, sneaky-looking motherfucker and shifty-eyed son of a bitch. All ways of saying that he engaged (and excelled in) legitimately illegitimate business, because in his mind that was all the world had to offer him.

Her personal favorite word for him was hustler, though. She knew all the synonyms and chose to use none of them. He was her little red hustler. Part of it was his mistake, when they'd first met he'd used the word "hustle" invariably to describe his craft. But as much as she hated him when they first met, she eventually came around to find a certain charm in his survivalist ways, kind of like he was a loveable rogue, and since she knew him as the fox who hustled, that's what stuck.

It was a happy accident that almost immediately after they decided they liked each other, hustling entered the popular vocabulary as a word to describe someone with killer determination and laudable work ethic. (Jeez, it's almost like the world forgot that Hustler was already the name of a porno mag, arguably the most graphic one on the market, but okay, whatever, I guess we're doing this.) And that only made her love that word even more: he had hustled so hard these last few years to become a better man, and she was so goddamn proud of him.

Until he threw it all away, of course. That goes without saying. But God, thankfully she only met him when she did, because slinging popsicles (or rather his patent-pending Pawpsicles) was far and away the most G-rated thing he'd ever done for money, an idea he'd stolen years ago from his kid brother no less. He'd been dealing these frozen treats since shortly after he arrived in this city, but if she'd met him when he was, say, her age when they'd met, there would have been a good chance she'd have encountered him also engaged in more R-rated business.

...Hm? Oh yeah, that. That was another hustle of sorts: to make himself seem more compelling to those he interacted with (because every connection is an important connection), he kinda-sorta had a large majority of the people in this city who knew him under the impression that he'd lived here his whole life. He had specific names and addresses of former schools and childhood residences ready to go if someone were to ask. An elaborate lie he'd come up with when he realized that people in this city would trust his judgment more if they thought he was a Zootopia lifer rather than someone who was once a naïve kid fresh off the Greyhound bus.

Depending on your definition of growing up though, you could still say he grew up there. He spent his childhood on the opposite coast, yes, but after leaving home early and meandering across two dozen cities in a vaguely westward direction, he arrived in the metropolis in the southwest corner of Oregon, and he still did a lot more growing up after that. He certainly grew up a lot after meeting her.

And one thing was for sure: when she became the first person in this city who he told about how those psychopathic prey kids had beaten and muzzled him when he was a boy, nothing in that was a lie. He hadn't embellished a single detail.

True, this city had a lot more issues with predator/prey relations than most other places in the country did; back home (and nearly everywhere else he'd been) the old-school kind of bigotry about where your people were from was far more common, but not in Zootopia. Oh, no, no, mammals here were too smart and compassionate to fall for that ignorant prejudice… but because they were smart and well-educated, and they knew their history and biology, they had much fewer qualms about being skeptical of carnivorous species since, hey, there was an actual evolutionary precedent to express distrust of them and feel justified in doing so, right? Hell, if anything, at least some of the people in this town seemed to think it was a morally righteous hatred to avenge the ancient ancestors. Nick always felt like such a right-wing whackjob when he described the situation here as progressive prejudice, but… was that an incorrect assessment? (Hey, he was the guy who people were already calling a far-left nutbag, they couldn't also accuse him of being a proto-fascist "progressives are the real racists" maniac, too.)

Suffice it to say that he'd dealt with anti-fox racism before arriving in this city, because every species privately has their own opinions of other species, but it was turned up to eleven here. And yet he'd found the best business success of his life on the streets of this city; he couldn't give it up, so he sucked it up. Thank God the people in this town were starting to cool it with the aggression these last few years, in no small part thanks to his and her efforts.

...Wait, did he say "people"? Individuals in this town would look at him funny for using that word instead of "mammals". He'd been in this city for nearly twenty years and he was still liable to forget that the common speech in this town was very eccentric and politically-correct. Here they almost always used "mammal" and "mammals" instead of "person" and "people" whereas the rest of the English-speaking world used those terms more or less interchangeably; the rationale was that "people" sort of implied homogeneity in a population while "mammals" celebrated species diversity and still acknowledged that one thing we did have in common was that we weren't born in eggs. And to be fair, "mammals" did make sense as a more gender-neutral term for things like "fire mammal" and "congressmammal" and "vehicular mammalslaughter".

Same thing with "paw" versus "hand". Disregard that some mammals didn't have paws, but it was the word of choice here to acknowledge that once not all too long ago, we were all walking around on all fours like beasts before we evolved - together. And "predator and prey" was the preferred nomenclature over "carnivore and herbivore" because Jesus Christ, this city just wanted to go out of its way to choose loaded words and hostile language. Therefore he identified as a predator - the same word used to describe date-rapists and child molesters and Nashville hockey players, but the strange mammals in this city had still brought themselves to buy this predator's crappy Pawpsicles and such for over a decade, so he didn't have much room to complain.

He still slipped up every so often and used the words they'd use back east, but it happened so infrequently that nobody ever put the pieces together. Honestly, his origin story was a lie that most anybody could have seen through if they just stopped and looked for the clues - similar to how his driver's license listed his height as four feet even when in reality he was fudging the number by about four or five inches. Hey, in his defense, he was a helluva lot closer to four feet in shoes - which basically nobody in this city wore because everyone here understood that our feet were designed to be walked with barefoot (uh, bare-paw) and that the materials we made shoes out of weren't good for the environment anyway. Point stands though, he didn't know whether he was just that good at lying or if he was simply surrounded by idiots, but whatever worked, worked.

"This… is Buckingham," said the robotic voice on the train's PA system. "Doors open on the left… at Buckingham."

Nick got off the train and walked up the escalator to street level. He had some pep in his step as he did, but not because he was excited or eager. He just wanted to get home already - even if that was a place where he was constantly reminded that she was paying for most of the expenses because he couldn't. He wasn't insecure about her making more money than him in the abstract, but he had to assume that her patience with him was wearing thin.

So, what was his dream then? Well, in a perfect world, he would have had that figured out long ago before he felt the need to jump ship. He had it narrowed down a little bit: he wanted to do something with his life that made the world a better place in some capacity - like he thought policing would before he acquired a more nuanced opinion about that - aaand… that was as far as he'd gotten. So he definitely knew he didn't want to resign to some soulless corporate gig or go back into sales. Anything beyond that was up in the air.

Medicine or nursing? In theory not a bad idea, but he'd always been more of an "English and History" kid in school rather than a "Science and Math" kid, so he didn't necessarily have the scientific acumen to relearn biology from scratch nor the mathematical acumen to know how he'd ever repay the student loan debt if he went to college.

Firefighting? Oh, good heavens, no. He may have been a loveable rogue but he wasn't a freaking action hero like that ridiculously gifted British dude he'd met through his baby brother; Nick was a mere mortal and he was well within his rights to say that he didn't feel comfortable running into burning buildings for a living. Besides, some of the "ACAB" set would likely think he was an idiot for quitting the police just to join a profession that was tightly betwixt with the police.

Okay, how about cutting out any semblance of subtlety and just applying to work for some sort of mammalitarian organization? Hell, even a desk job would be tolerable if he was working for some sort of worthwhile charity. Mkay, so about that… he'd tried pursuing those avenues, but they all wanted skills. And Nick had skills, but he didn't have the skills they were looking for; with his background, he'd only qualify for their "marketing" positions (read: "sitting in a call center or standing on the street bugging the shit out of people for donations and probably undoing any goodwill the people would have had toward the cause due to sheer annoyance"). Truly a fate worse than unemployment.

And if this begs the question of why he didn't just lie and say he had more skills? Because this was Nick Wilde; everyone already knew who he was. They might not have known everything about him, but they knew enough to fill in the blanks with educated guesses and draw a strong assumption about him from there. The idea had started to cross his mind that he may have been too famous (or infamous) in this town and he might have just had to move out of town and hit the reset button, go where no one knew his name.

And he'd seriously considered looking into straight up joining the Peace Corps. Take him as far away from this infernal city as he could get. But if he left the entire Western Hemisphere while she stayed behind, there was no way their relationship was going to survive that. Absolutely no way in heaven nor hell. If he did, it could very well prove to be their final goodbye.

If he didn't care about her, he wouldn't have stopped at the Safeway on the walk home to buy her some carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, and other vegetables for dinner; she'd be working late that night again and wouldn't have time to run to the store, so he might as well go pick her something up. Not like he had anything better to do with his day.

Through his innumerable connections, he'd had plenty of offers for work, but they weren't what he was looking for: selling stuff, selling stuff, unarmed security, selling stuff, selling stuff, morgue janitor, selling stuff, selling stuff, armed security, selling stuff, selling stuff, unskilled laborer, restaurant server, fast food worker, rideshare/food delivery/Amazon Prime driver, male escort, pyramid scheme, and selling stuff. Nothing that would provide him a sense of fulfillment, and nothing that would make the world a better place. Of course, he was approaching a year of not having a permanent position, and many would say the best way he could make the world a better place was by sucking it up, getting whatever job he could, and ceasing to be a leech on society.

In his defense, he'd briefly had a somewhat fulfilling gig back in the fall. It had been an election year and it was peak campaign season, and he scored a temporary job encouraging people to vote for a new state law that would lower taxes for all but the richest six percent of Oregonians. He was supposed to be supervising the people who were going door-to-door rather than doing it himself, but since those employees were often troublingly unreliable, he found himself ringing a lot of bells - a particularly interesting situation since he already knew a lot of the people on his list, and he found out the hard way that he had greatly misjudged a lot of their personal politics.

The tax law failed miserably on Election Day, largely thanks to the opposition campaign outright lying about it in their ads, but you know what? Nick felt good for having at least tried his hand at something that would help common people and stick it to the establishment he'd made a point to turn his back on. He'd had a brief text chat about it with his brother's British friend and that guy had certainly approved of the stand for class justice.

The experience may not have been a success on paper, but it had given Nick some much-needed hope that there was something out there he could do that would tangibly make the world a better place without any moral quandaries. Hey, should he go into politics himself? Run for public office? Oh, pfft, of course, everyone knows how politics are completely free of corruption. Naturally.

He was scanning his items at the self-checkout when he couldn't help but overhear a woman shushing her daughter.

"Kara! Be quiet!"

The little coyote girl got very bashful very quickly as her mother went back to scanning her items - but not all of her items. Groceries, basic necessities, a good chunk of which weren't even name-brand. Once again, it clearly wasn't greed, it was desperation.

And in her desperation, she was looking around to see who could see her. She was making it bad and obvious; she must have been a rookie at this. Evidently nobody told her that the cameras on the self-checkout stations weren't pointed at the scanning spot, but at your face, keeping an eye out for the look of somebody who knew they were breaking the rules; nobody had told this coyote woman that the key tenet of being sneaky was confidence.

She and Nick locked eyes for just a moment; she looked ashamed.

Then Nick looked at the self-scan attendant on duty, a buffalo. If this buffalo had been looking at him, then they weren't anymore, because they were headed straight toward the coyotes.

Time to think fast.

"Oh, excuse me! Excuse me!" he beckoned the employee. "Could you give me a hand over here?"

The buffalo looked surprised, but obliged to come over and help the gentleman in green, giving a side-eye to the coyote as they did.

"Can I help you, sir?" The buffalo's name-tag read "GINA".

"I'm sure hoping you can! So I'm having trouble scanning these carrots…" Nick swiped the bundle across the scanner a few times, demonstrating that nothing was registering. "...I just can't figure it out!"

"Sir, you have to put the carrots on the glass. It doubles as a scale."

"Oh, but I don't want my carrots to get dirty!"

You could see by the look on Gina's face that she clearly thought that she was dealing with a stupid person.

"Well, there's no other way to do it, sir."

"Don't you guys have a plastic bag I could lay down over it? Or you know what! How 'bout you guys start providing little rolls of wax paper for us? Maybe it'll weigh a little more, but hey! It'll be worth a couple extra pennies!"

"Honestly, sir, you're just expected to wash your produce before you use it."

Nick could see in his periphery that the coyote woman was starting to grab up her bags.

"You know what!?" he exclaimed with a little gasp. "I hadn't even thought of that! Washing them! Genius!"

The buffalo looked like she was about to roll her eyes before remembering he could still see her, so she stopped rolling them halfway around and pretended to look at something off to her right - precisely where the coyote, still looking anxious, was about to walk past them.

"Oh, oh!" Nick piped up again. "You mentioned putting them on the scale, but they still don't have any barcodes or anything on them! How on earth do you scan them that way?"

Gina gestured for Nick to fork over the carrots, he handed them over, she put them on the scale and pressed what seemed like fifty buttons in five seconds; she probably had all the produce codes long-since memorized. She tossed the carrots in a plastic bag and was about to walk away before Nick stopped her again.

"Well, wait, hold on!" he pleaded. "You did that so fast, I couldn't catch what you did! Could you show me how to do it with my tomatoes?"

By the time the employee had painstakingly rung up all of Nick's produce in what was supposed to be the self-checkout lane, the coyote and her daughter were nowhere to be seen. All for the best; he couldn't expect her to stick around and give him a thank-you when she had to skedaddle. He was satisfied enough with a job well done.

Now you see, if he were still a cop, that was exactly the kind of stuff he couldn't pull. He couldn't play the "stealing necessities from a wealthy corporation when you genuinely can't afford to pay is okay" card, and he definitely couldn't just tell the employees to their faces that they should let her go. If she were shoplifting from a small mom-and-pop store where the owners and operators might actually tangibly suffer from lost sales of stolen goods, or if she was helping herself to frivolous things or taking a ridiculously large and obvious quantity of stuff, then he wouldn't have been quite as cool with it. But this coyote woman was only taking the bare necessities of life, and still paying for most of it, from a big company that in all likelihood would never notice or be in any way disadvantaged by it - not unlike what his own parents had done at Food Lion and Harris Teeter when he was a kid before they finally broke into the middle class around the time he turned ten. If he were still a cop, he wouldn't have had the autonomy to act upon his evolved sense of justice. He'd have had to address the woman, and he'd have loathed every minute of it.

(And offering to pay for her groceries might fly once or twice but he couldn't do it for every poor person he encountered because jeez, groceries were expensive, especially here on the West Coast. A box of crackers cost, like, seven bucks in this city, what the hell? Few could afford to be that generous.)

So what was he going to do next? He didn't know yet. He knew he wanted to do something where he had the autonomy to follow his heart and do good by his own personal idea of good; sometimes that might coincide with the law, sometimes it might not. (Not to suggest he and she had totally followed the SOP when they cracked The Case, which they didn't, and they both knew they'd be pushing their luck to play that fast and loose with the rules as cops ever again.) He definitely didn't wish to take it as far as his little brother's older friend who had damn near gotten himself deported back to England for the chaos he sewed back in Delaware; Nick was well aware of how much of a mess that had all devolved into. But he certainly would have loved to have as much sheer freedom as that crazy lanky fox and his crew had had.

He walked with his bags along the side of the store, along a row of shopping carts and under the concrete overhang. Since he wasn't in the mood to make eye contact with passing strangers, he kept his gaze upon his environment, and that's when he saw the flyer.

LOOKING FOR A NEW CAREER?

PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR TRAINING

PAID + COMMISSION

WILL HELP SET UP YOUR OWN PRIVATE FIRM

FOR MY CREDENTIALS AND QUALIFICATIONS

GOOGLE "HOWARD LOTOR VANCOUVER"

And at the bottom of the sheet were fingers of paper with a name and phone number on them for mammals to tear off.

Anybody else might have seen this and written it off as a scam - and indeed, none of the tabs of paper had been pulled yet - but as a former card-carrying scammer himself, Nick could tell this wasn't a simple case of a ripoff artist getting sloppy. This clearly reeked of a self-employed businessman getting desperate - another feeling Nick recognized all too well. And this Howard guy must have known this all sounded fishy because he outright told people to search him up online to see that he was legit (evidently nobody had told this new kid in the block that big corporations got tax deductions for doing business in the city under different names that would celebrate mammalian diversity, so he should have instructed them to Zoogle him) - which, hey, good for him for being self-aware that this was a strange proposition, but honestly it just came across as a lack of confidence. And as a PI who surely must have done a lot of sneaking around, old boy Lotor ought to have known the importance of confidence.

Speaking of confidence… you know, you could categorize more or less every sapient creature into one of four categories:

-Group 1: Individuals who had flaws, fears, and insecurities that overpowered them and everybody else could see them;

-Group 2: Individuals who had flaws, fears, and insecurities but were very good at hiding them - and consequently not a single other person knew about them because one of those flaws, fears, and insecurities was an insatiable need to have people think they had none;

-Group 3: Individuals who genuinely had no flaws, fears, nor insecurities, often due to clinical sociopathy, narcissism, or simply being freaking delusional (sometimes mammals deep in Group 2 could pass for Group 3); and

-Group 4: Individuals who had flaws, fears, and insecurities but had a healthy relationship with them, often hiding them not out of fear of being found out but out of understanding that the situation rarely calls for them to be out in the open, then being willing and able to share them with people they trust when the time is right, and having the ability to work on their flaws, fears, and insecurities while still acknowledging that they would always have some flaws, fears, and insecurities, as having flaws, fears, and insecurities was an inextricable part of the mammalian experience. This was the group you wanted to be in.

Nick had spent the longest time in Group 2 before meeting her, whereupon he found the strength to graduate to Group 4. Now he was afraid that his subconscious mind was trying to drive him back into Group 2 while actually putting him in Group 1. Because he was still trying to project the same self-confidence as he always had when he was a man of the streets, but for one reason or another, these days people clearly just weren't buying it. What's the point of believing in yourself if everyone else treats you like you don't?

And the God's truth was he was afraid. He was terrified that he was running out of time to figure his life out. He wasn't old by any stretch of the imagination, but he'd just turned thirty-eight that January; even by the most generous definitions of the word, he was nearly out of time when he could reasonably call himself 'young'. Hell, in a year's time, he'd be the same age as Homer Simpson, a pop-culture portrait of middle-aged mediocrity with no feasible way out. (And he was well aware that as an Xennial in a world coming into the grasp of Gen Z, making a mental analogy with a Simpsons reference probably just aged him even more.) He didn't want to panic, because he knew that would accomplish nothing, but the downside of knowing everybody is that you wind up knowing a lot of people whose lives took a downturn once and just never, ever got any better - and you know damn well that that could happen to you.

He would have much rather had these epiphanies that he wanted to be a good person and do it in his own way earlier than he did, but he was also grateful that they didn't come even later. And especially grateful that they had even come at all. Some mammals don't even get so lucky as to choose who they want to be, let alone figure out who to be and how to become them.

And for these reasons and more, he pulled a tab off. Might as well keep his options open. Hey, solving mysteries and cracking cases was far and away the most enjoyable part of his time on the force, wasn't it? If this was legit, this could prove to be all the cool parts about being a cop with none of the hang-ups. And if it wasn't legit and it turned out to be some serial killer's trap, well, at least that ought to make for an interesting story.

It was a classic dilemma: you know you're not where you're supposed to be but you don't know where you are supposed to be, and you know you can't stay put but you don't want to move for the sake of moving lest you move in the wrong direction, further from where you're supposed to be. But despite feeling desperately lost, Nick had an inkling that this private eye idea could lead him somewhere toward the right direction, even if it wasn't the correct final destination itself, and he was gonna gamble on that hunch.

You know, they say that the key tenet of true self-confidence is an undying core belief that even when you fail, you'll still be okay. In many ways, he was objectively not okay right now, but hey, he was alive and healthy, wasn't he? Maybe he just wasn't done with this one long instance of failure, and once he finally figured out a way to end it, then maybe he'd feel okay again. He wasn't as sure of it as he used to be, but he had a funny feeling he was gonna come out on the other side of this alright. Especially if he got to keep going through this with the companionship of the one cop he supported unconditionally and who - he was pretty sure - supported him unconditionally as well.

*A.N.* And we're off to the races. One last note: Howard and Renee as seen here were based on what I gathered from them in the free playable demo, as that's all I had to work with before today. By the next time we see them, I'll have played the game and I'll have made any necessary adjustments accordingly (though I do think I got a good handle on them if I do say so myself). Peace and love. -Doby