And we're back with the beginning of a new episode in TID! Thanks to the people who kindly left reviews, comments, kudos, faves etc since the past posting, and thank you to the beta readers on ZAA too!

EPISODE 2: LOTTERIED (ACT 1)

"… and tonight's Zootopian Lottery numbers are…"

A solitary weasel sat in front of a television in a dark room, intently watching as the numbers were drawn. To most, it would have looked like a scene that was repeated in living rooms across Zootopia, but this particular weasel carried an air of knowing, as if he knew what was about to happen.

"Six, fourteen, twenty-six, twenty-seven, forty-one, forty-two…" the weasel whispered to himself.

"Six! Fourteen! Twenty-six! Twenty-Seven! Forty-One! And our final number is… Forty-Two!"

"YES!" the weasel celebrated.

"Don't forget to check your numbers, because one of you might have won the jackpot prize of two million dollars!"

"Oh, don't you worry, I have," the weasel gleefully said. He grabbed a ticket attached to a scrap of paper. The paper was a list of lottery numbers and dates, some of which extended weeks into the future. Four lines had already been crossed out.

"Biggest hustle in all of history, and it's all mine," the weasel grinned maniacally. On the nightstand beside his list of lottery numbers was a small device that almost looked like a tablet, but with two prongs at the top, similar to a taser. The screen displayed one single line.

DESTINATION: Zootopia – January 12, 2017. RETURN DESTINATION: Neo Zootopia - January 12, 2121.

"So, let me get this straight… you want me to investigate somebody… because they're extremely lucky?"

Chief Akida Bogo sat in his office in the recently-repaired Precinct One, in a meeting with representatives from the Zootopian Lottery. Among them was a racoon, a ferret and a wolf. They were there because they had become extremely suspicious of a recent string of wins, claimed by the same weasel. At each claiming, the weasel had said that he was 'just born lucky'.

"Well, that's just it!" the racoon said. "No way somebody is that lucky! It has to be some sort of con!"

"Have you not conducted an investigation yourselves?" Bogo raised an eyebrow.

"We have, but… er…" the ferret trailed off.

"We came up completely short!" the racoon interjected. "Nobody in our offices know this weasel, so they have no way of knowing how our games are fix… er, I mean, drawn."

The wolf shot a death glare at the racoon. Bogo pinched the bridge of his nose.

"So, what you're saying is… you have no evidence to prove it's fraud," Bogo clarified, an eyebrow raised.

"We're saying that we know we're getting ripped off somehow, and we want your guys to figure it out!" the racoon argued. "If they can catch two corrupt mayors and thwart a terrorist cell, then they're the mammals we want to catch him out!"

A knock came at the door to Bogo's office.

"Come in," Bogo's gaze remained on the three representatives. The door creaked open, and in stepped a fox in uniform, his green eyes half-lidded as if he didn't actually care why he was there.

"Wilde," Bogo acknowledged.

"Sorry, Chief, I was just coming up to deliver you our case report. I heard raised voices and wondered what was going on in here," Nick said.

Bogo snorted.

"Can you three give me a moment with my detective?" Bogo asked. "Shouldn't take long."

"Chief! We need this investigated!" the racoon protested. "We're going to wind up bankrupt at this rate!"

"One moment," Bogo repeated insistently. The representatives shuffled out of the room and Bogo closed the door.

"I appreciate the thought, Chief," Nick slyly smirked. "But I'm afraid I only need one love confession."

"Shut your mouth, Wilde," Bogo replied lowly. "You do know who those were?"

"Spokesmammals for the biggest hustle of all time?" Nick answered, drawing a snort of ire from Bogo.

"Are you busy, Wilde?"

"Not right now. This case is all wrapped up."

"Splendid. I want you to investigate this for me."

"Why me, sir?" Nick frowned. "I mean, it's just a case of a guy who got very lucky. And like I said: everybody knows the lottery is a big hustle anyway. So what if somebody figured out how to hustle the hustlers? And anyway, don't they have their own investigators for this sort of thing?"

"Ordinarily, I'd agree and just leave it at that too, but…"

"They drew a blank, and they're insisting," Nick raised an eyebrow.

"They are. And given your rather… unique background, it can't hurt to have it looked at from all angles."

Nick sighed deeply in resignation.

"If it'll make you sleep easier, I'll take a look. No promises I'll find anything, though."

"Usually, trouble finds you, or Hopps," Bogo snorted gruffly.

"Well, I can't deny that," Nick sheepishly grinned. "At least not in Carrots'… erm, Officer Hopps' case. Ah, well… No rest for the wicked, I guess."

A week passed, and despite Nick's efforts, he had yielded no results. Yet, the more he looked into it, the more he became fascinated with what he had found.

The 'lucky' weasel in question was one that nobody knew, except for the landlady who said he had taken up residence in his apartment in Savanna Central five weeks prior. Not even a quick call to Badge had yielded a clue, and she knew a lot of mammals, or could easily find out about those that she didn't know. Being big on conspiracies, she would surely have heard something about this, but even Badge had left Nick disappointed. Nick could find absolutely nothing connecting the weasel to the Zootopian Lottery either. He didn't know anybody there.

A week after his apparent materialising out of thin air, this weasel had won his first lottery. Two million dollars. Not a bad haul at all. It was certainly 'dream come true' money for many mammals. If Nick had ever truly been a hustler in his past, he might have been tempted to try such a thing himself. A 'time hustle' would have been very tempting for the hustler whose life he had helped fabricate.

Clearly, two million dollars was not enough for this weasel. Week after week, and win after win, each garnering more suspicion yet no evidence of foul play whatsoever. Maybe he really was just extremely lucky.

Feeling he had hit a dead end, Nick took a break and headed for Cowsta, figuring that taking some time away from the case might help clear his head. Also: caffeine. That was always a big help.

A tap came at Nick's shoulder as he stood in the queue, and he turned around. Stood just behind him were two mammals he had not seen in a while: a cream-coloured vixen and a hare with stripes across his cheeks and the tips of his ears.

"Well, if it isn't Agent Savage and Sidekick Skye," Nick drawled. "Been a while."

"Sure has," Jack agreed. "Been busy, lately?"

"Oh, you know. Detective work," Nick said. "You? You're not here looking for… the others?"

Nick was referring to the incident several months prior, in which a killer came from the future, pursued by clones of Nick and Judy. Nick had let them go following the capture of the killer in question. They were far away, trying to 'find themselves'.

"Not sure there's much they could tell us anyway," Jack replied. "I'm starting to see that every time we deal with something like this, the future changes again."

"Yep, that sounds about right," Nick nodded. "'Even the smallest stone dropped in a pond can cause a tsunami'…" Nick shook his head. "It's a saying I heard a long time ago. Like the Butterfly effect."

"Yes, I see. So… working on anything?" Jack asked.

"Very weird case," Nick shrugged. "You know the past few weeks, the same weasel has been winning the Zootopia Lottery?"

"I heard something about that, yeah," Jack nodded.

"Well, the guys over there think there's no way anybody's that lucky, so there must be some hustle somewhere… I just can't find it. Unless…"

"Unless what?" Skye asked.

Nick's thoughts returned to his earlier musings about the 'time hustle', and he opened his mouth to speak, but then he suddenly closed his mouth again, seemingly thinking better of voicing his thoughts.

'Bogo, you sly ox,' Nick thought to himself. 'This is what you meant when you mentioned my 'unique background'.'

"What?" Jack frowned.

"Nah. Forget it," Nick shook his head. "Silly thought."

"I'm all ears," Jack encouraged.

"Well, mostly," Nick jibed, earning looks of reproach from both Jack and Skye. "I've just had a thought that… what if somebody's coming back from the future to pull off this hustle? Seems a bit of a clichéd use of time travel, if you ask me. Bit of a climb-down from raging terrorist and insane double-minded killer, but it's possible, I guess. Especially if we're getting futures where time travel becomes easier to accomplish. I might need to think about it from that angle…"

"Well… we can take this one off your paws, if you like," Jack offered. "We… look into these kinds of things now."

"Wait… you do?" Nick raised an eyebrow. He thought about it for a moment. "Of course you do, after our last adventure. Big, super-secret super-special federal agency and all."

Breathing deep, Nick came to a decision.

"You know what? You'd be doing me a big favour," Nick sighed in relief. "Because looking at this from any other angle is just bringing up nada. I'll talk with Chief Bogo about it, see if he'll transfer the case."

Since Bogo had clearly suspected the potential involvement of time travel, and since Nick had hit the end of the line with his own inquiries, Bogo was all-too-happy to pass the case off to Savage's team. All the paperwork had been sent over to the ZIA, and Jack and Skye had gone over everything in there.

"Sure seems like it could be time travel-related," Skye remarked.

"But…" Jack prompted.

"But we can't actually tell without evidence that he's not just some extremely lucky stranger," Skye replied, slightly deflated. She looked to Jack. "You don't believe that, do you?"

"Both Bogo and Wilde suspect it, so I think there's something there," Jack agreed. "I just don't know what. Or why. Why come back just to win the lottery? It's all so…"

"Petty," Skye finished for him.

Jack sighed heavily.

"If only this all came about after the detector was finished," Jack pondered. "Would have made all this a lot easier."

"Hold that thought!" another voice called. Jack and Skye turned to its source. The recently-hired Professor Marina Koyoton stood with a clipboard in her paws, an excited expression on her face.

"Is the device ready?" Jack asked.

"Well, it's ready to be tested, at least!" Koyoton beamed with barely-contained excitement.

"Well, let's take a look," Skye suggested. "And maybe stepping away for a moment will help you see things from a new angle when you get back. Always worked for me when I was repairing cars in the motor pool."

"Worth a shot," Jack conceded. "Let's go."

A spare office had been cleared out for Koyoton to work. When she started, the office had been used as a storage room, filled with boxes of documents which had since been taken down to the Archive. Now, the room was home to a large computer terminal with three screens, in front of a row of servers against one wall. The two peripheral screens displayed testing data while the centre screen showed a map of Zootopia.

"Nice," Jack remarked, impressed.

"It's a bit more sensitive than your old radio method, and that's because it doesn't just track interference along that radio frequency, it looks for magnetic disturbances. Right now, it's tuned to Zootopia only, but when we get this up and running properly, we'll be able to detect things much further afield," Koyoton explained enthusiastically. "Working on this has given me some really good ideas on where to go with other applications too!"

"Let's just see if this thing works first," Jack suggested.

"Right!" Koyoton said. She sat in the chair, swiveled it around to face the machine, and began typing. "So, rather than just sounding a really loud alarm throughout the building, what I've done is program it to send an alarm direct to your phones."

"Our phones?" Jack frowned. "How did you…?"

"Get your numbers? This is a spook agency, right? What sort of mammal working under it would I be if I couldn't figure out how to get your phone number?"

Jack sighed, pawing his forehead in exasperation.

"And here… we… go!" Koyoton typed a command in and hit the enter key. The screens flared to life, and Jack's phone began to vibrate. He fished it from his pocket and read the screen: Anomalous portal reading detected. Co-ordinates…

"Nice," Jack said, showing his phone to Skye and Koyoton.

"Test successful! Now, if I just…" Koyoton said, but then stopped herself upon seeing the screen of Jack's phone. "Hold on… that's not the message it should have sent."

"What do you mean?" Jack frowned. "It seems fine to me."

"It's supposed to send you a message informing you of a system test," Koyoton explained, "but that's the real message. Just hang on a minute, I'm running a quick check…"

A map appeared on the main screen and a small dot appeared on it.

"No, this is definitely working… and it's definitely picking something up," Koyoton said.

"Are you sure this isn't just some kid playing with magnets or something?" Jack asked.

"It's tuned to a very specific magnetic frequency," Koyoton answered. "There's definitely something there. It's faint… maybe a portal that's already closed?"

"Well, that gives us something to go on with regards to our current investigation at least," Skye remarked. "Where is it?"

"Vine and Tujunga," Koyoton replied.

"Oh, great…" Jack deadpanned. "My favourite place in Zootopia."

And that's a wrap for this chapter! I kind of wanted to include a story somewhere about time travel being used for rather petty, almost pedestrian means, and this provided the perfect opportunity to explore that route.

Next time: Jack and Skye continue looking into the 'lucky' weasel.