[Excuse my spelling, as it has been years since I saw this show, and I've never actually seen official spellings for several of these character's names.]
Started out as a Bonkers fan fiction, but will include other "Disney Afternoon" shows later as well.
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It was past eight when Janet finally finished the last of her work, scrubbing and tidying the labs to shining perfection. The fifty-six year old woman had found employment twenty years ago at DuPrave industries under the current president, Lilth DuPrave's, father. Wiping back a drop of sweat from her brow, she packed up her mop and broom and returned them to the storage closet.
Twenty long years… if the much rumored round of layoffs went through, what would be left for her? She'd never finished college and her only skills and benefits came from her seniority at her position. Which, it seemed, as exactly the reason they wanted to put her neck on the chopping block. Youths coming in didn't need as much medication and could be more easily coerced into an HMO than older, medication-dependent worn down bodies like her own.
A small skittering sound caught her attention. Thinking fast, in a split second she brought her heavy boot down on the white tile floor. One, two, three, four, there, she'd got it. Disgusting little beasts, cockroaches, she thought to herself as she wiped black bug goo off the bottom of her shoe. Served no purpose at all in the world.
Shortly after the lights went out, a silver cockroach slid out from beneath one of the counters. The bug crawled across the floor, moving in a highly directed fashion from its hiding place, up the side of a research table, and across the glittering surface of a mirror.
Moonlight coming in through the security-bared windows illuminated the mirror, turning it a silvery-blue everywhere except the one black spot marred by the presence of the cockroach.
The cockroach had other things on its mind, however, than whether or not it was pretty. Slowly, it moved across the mirror, leaving an unnatural path of a slimy wet substance where it crawled.
Around nine-p.m. a design began to emerge from the silver of the mirror, cast in white by the substance dripped from the oddly behaving cockroach.
Around midnight, an arm and head emerged from the surface of the looking glass.
~
"So what do you think, Miranda? Could a toon be responsible?"
"Why are you asking me?" she asked, looking up at Denis from her work desk. Miranda Wright was one of two officers assigned to the Hollywood branch of the LAPD. She was an athletic, medium-tall blonde with sparkling, crisp blue eyes. Her name was no coincidence; her late father had been a police officer himself and an avid fan of humorous names.
Her partner, on the other hand, was a short and rather fuzzy orange and black spotted bobcat named Bonkers. Although anyone watching the two of them work wouldn't have known it, he was actually the "senior" partner when it came to the Toon Division. His previous partner, a rotund little man by the name of Lucky, had gotten a prime position with the FBI, taking off for Washington D.C. to complete training.
Miranda had been assigned to keeping the volatile little toon under control. For as little as their immediate supervisor, an sergeant with the strangely appropriate last name of Grating liked it, he was really the only reason Toon Division was capable of getting things done. And in a city as full of unemployed toons as Hollywood, maintaining a resemblance of order was important.
"No sign of forced entry anywhere, and that place is loaded with security equipment. It would have taken a Mission Impossible style genius to avoid all the laser eyes and break all the password-protected access codes on the doors."
"Sounds like an inside job to me," Miranda answered, shaking her head as she dragged her fingers through her impossibly straight, shoulder-length hair. "Not something that I'd immediately pin on a toon."
"I was just thinking a toon could do that whole 'zip zip' flattening the body thing and get under the doors, you know, and we're supposed to follow up on every lead."
Miranda smiled at him, looking up from the papers. "You don't give up easily, do you?"
"Of course not. That's how I got you to finally agree to go out with me in the first place," the blue-eyed brunette grinned, leaning over to give her a quick peck on the cheek. "Will you at least ask your partner what he thinks?"
"When he gets back from the attack of the mutant lunch, I will."
"Mutant lunch?"
Miranda laughed slightly, feeling bad because she knew she was laughing at the expense of her partner's pain. "I told him not to eat fruit he found in the back of an office refrigerator, but he never listens."
"Hey, am I giving you a ride home?"
Miranda paused, looking uncertain. "You won't forget this time, will you?"
Denis took her pale hand in his own rough, tanned hand. "I know this is hard on you, but I'm up for a big promotion in my division, and to prove I'm the right man for it I have to put in a little extra work here and there. I'm sorry I haven't been giving you the time you deserve, but think of the raise I'll get if I get the job. Then I can finally buy you…"
"A ring. I know. You've been promising so long your lines sound rehearsed," she answered, trying not to sound disgruntled but finding herself a bad actress. Embarrassed, she took her eyes off Denis to look over the evidence photographs in the envelope. She couldn't honestly tell if it looked like forced entry or not, as the police had been in and out of the doors themselves multiple times since the photographs were taken, had not the doors already been opened for the sheer sake of the evidence photography.
"Miranda…" Denis whimpered in the background.
"You're forgiven, just don't forget," she muttered, engrossed in glossy images of a moment captured in time.
"I won't!" Denis called. She heard his shoes stomping up the crumbling, plaster-dust-coated stairway leading out of the Toon Division's basement "office." The truth was, they'd been shoved in the only office no one wanted simply so they were out of sight and of mind when the less-than-receptive mayor came to visit. That, and no one in the department honestly took them seriously, despite their impressive arrest rate.
Miranda studied the photographs of the office. Immaculate counters dominated by experimental equipment occupied most of the room, with a window on one wall, a shelving unit on a second wall, and a row of desks along the third visible wall. In fact, the only thing that looked out of place in the entire room were the empty spaces of paint that was slightly darker than the sun-faded paint around them.
These spaces, Denis had told her, were where computers with millions of dollars worth of research information on them had previously sat. These computers were the obvious target of the robbery, as nothing else had even been so much as overturned.
"Or are they the target?" Miranda wondered aloud, tapping the eraser of her pencil against the photocopies. Something didn't seem right about it. What kind of criminal broke into a lab filled with high-value research supplies and drugs that would be worth their weight in gold on the street, only to take only one specific set of items?
She flipped over to the next photograph. The shelving wall and the desk wall were still visible, but the fourth wall had changed. It now contained a sink and a mirror. Must have been taken from the other end of the room, Miranda thought with a shrug.
Some kind of filmy substance seemed to have been spread in a smeary white mess across the front of the mirror. It looked almost like some kind of soap-scum residue to her. Funny, Miranda thought. The rest of the lab was cleaned almost obsessively. Why would the window be covered in soap slime residue? Was it the burglar's calling card?
But she was getting off topic, she realized. It wasn't her job to solve the crime, simply give it a once over and see if there were any indications that a toon had committed the robbery. Sure, soap scum all over the mirror seemed more a toon criminal's calling card than a human's, but good luck selling that to a jury.
No visible paint marks on the bottom of the door, she noted. Sometimes larger toons would leave paint smears on objects they'd forced their oversized bodies to squeeze under. None of the liquid containing vials had been spilled, so if it had been a toon it hadn't been a clumsy one.
Bonkers suddenly bounced in, gripping her around the neck and knocking her nearly face-first into her desk. It was only through her amazing reflexes that she managed to keep her cherry soda from tipping over, soaking the evidence files as well as the general papers lying all over her desk. Grating would NOT have been a very happy person about that at all. If the incident told her anything, however, it was that if a toon had robbed the labs, it hadn't been a toon anything like Bonkers.
"I thought you had a tummy ache," Miranda chided, swinging him around in front of her.
"I did, but I'm better now," he grinned, bouncing in her lap.
Miranda laughed and shook her head, feeling her spirits lift slightly. Bonkers seemed to have that effect on human adults as well as children, a wonderful trait to possess in anyone, let alone a toon. "What am I going to do with you?" she asked.
"Buy me chocolate bon-bons?" he answered innocently, his eyes gleaming brightly as they looked into hers. He honestly seemed to expect that his request would be met.
"Sorry, B, I don't have any bon-bons right now. All I have is a pile of scattered photographs and a bunch of files to finish before I sleep."
"I'm sorry to hear that," the toon chimed, his voice overly spunky. "I'm going to go see what's up upstairs."
"Hold it!" Miranda said, grabbing him by his golf club like ears. "The correct answer is 'Gee, Miranda, that's a lot of work to get done! What can I do to help you?"
"But I'd only do it wrong, and then you'd have to redo it anyway, so isn't not helping you the best way I can help you?" Bonkers quickly replied, his black-brown eyes innocent of any knowledge that he was trying to pull a fast one on her.
Miranda sighed and shooed him away with a well-manicured hand. "When you're right, you're right. Just try not to bug the guys too much. Oh, and here," she said, rapidly stuffing Denis' photos back in the manila envelope. "Take this back to Denis, tell him I didn't see what he was looking for."
"Take this to Denis, tell him the sea is under the floor. Got it!" Bonkers cried enthusiastically, racing up the stairs quickly enough to leave a little puff of smoke trailing behind him. Too quickly, in fact, for Miranda to correct him. Oh well, she though as she shrugged her shoulders and pressed the black ball-point pen to the forms in front her. Denis will hopefully understand what I intended Bonkers to say. He's used to him.
Miranda settled her chin on her fingers. She'd never, ever trusted Lilith DuPrave, who despite trying to have her killed and numerous other crimes kept slipping out of any sort of long prison stay. It was possible the computers had been "stolen" as an inside job, to keep certain information from legally having to go public. It was certainly a possibility. Perhaps she'd bring it up to Denis on the ride home, if the possibility hadn't already occurred to him.
As Miranda returned to her paperwork, she didn't notice the silver cockroach intensely watching her from a crack in the ceiling.
~
To be Continued… (With or without reviews)