As Judy walked along the streets of Phoenix, trying to find the city square, she couldn't help but turn the lieutenant colonel's parting words over in her head. "Be careful out there, ensign," Cencerro had said, and then he gestured at the golden torc he wore at his neck, "We do our best to keep Phoenix safe, but until the Wall is repaired these don't work."
He had smiled blandly, and Judy had no idea what the sheep was trying to convey. Certainly it hadn't been a friendly smile; his eyes had remained cold and hard, making the expression seem especially fake. Perhaps he had merely been patronizing her, as though he thought so little of her he felt the need to say the obvious. She had known, before even meeting Nick, that torcs didn't work beyond the Middle Wall, and if she hadn't Nick's removal of his own torc would have only emphasized the point. It was possible, she supposed, that Cencerro was only being cynical about the prospects of ever repairing the Outer Wall completely enough to allow it to work as an alchemical array. From what she had learned in school, the conversion of the Inner and Middle Walls to function as part of the system that made the torcs work had taken the better part of a decade, but she had never learned the details of what had been involved and knew she probably wouldn't have understood them anyway. Nick would probably know, though, and at the thought Judy came to a stop and pressed herself against the nearest building.
She was on one the countless streets that ran diagonally through Phoenix before branching off in another direction, the buildings looming over the street on either side from crazed protrusions that cast shadows and broke up the even glow of the alchemical torches set on poles. She had changed out of her uniform and into simple civilian clothes, and if anyone was paying enough attention to her to notice her City Guard torc they definitely didn't show it. Foot traffic and the occasional carriage rattled past her, and her ears caught the sounds of dozens of passing conversations, from mammals dining on restaurant balconies above her to the gabble and chatter of the mammals pushing themselves through the throngs filling the street itself. Judy was alone, though, and the thought of Nick only brought with it the promise she had made Cencerro. Was Nick up to something? Something involving an attempt to kill the princess?
Judy sighed as she pressed herself thinner up against the wall to let an elephant who had to keep turning and ducking to get down the street get past her without brushing his elaborately brocaded jacket against her face. It wasn't that she found the idea of someone wanting to kill the princess difficult to believe—back home in the Totchli Barony, she had heard more than a few mammals talking darkly about how the royal family had polluted their bloodline by allowing a jaguar in—but the royal palace was supposed to be the most secure location in all of Zootopia. She had only ever seen Captain General Bogo once and had never spoken to him, but his reputation just about approached being legendary. If someone could figure out a way past the most elaborate security measures he could devise, what did it say about that mammal? They'd have to be exceptionally skilled in magic, probably. They'd have to be clever, certainly. They would have to be, in short, someone very much like Nick.
And yet, Judy hadn't mentioned the promise she had made Nick to help him get a book to Cencerro. It had been a lie of omission, but it had still been a lie, the first she had ever told a superior officer. She wanted to believe that he was innocent, that it was just Cencerro's own obvious dislike of the fox making him consider an unlikely possibility. Maybe it was even just Cencerro's way of dismissing her by giving her a meaningless task instead of letting her help with tracking down the blood magicians he had mentioned. Just because Nick was a fox didn't mean that he had to be evil. And yet...
Nick and the lieutenant colonel obviously had some kind of history together, but she hadn't heard either of their sides. Maybe Cencerro did have a legitimate reason to dislike him. And, no matter how much Judy wanted to believe he was innocent, she couldn't put a finger on why. He was, after all, a supremely suspicious mammal. Judy had never even heard of a predator being an alchemist before meeting him, let alone a fox, and he had seemed amazingly skilled at the magic. She did have the most beautiful sabre she had ever seen wrapped in her bedroll in the officer's quarters that Cencerro had assigned her for her stay in Phoenix, and she still had the little golden carrot in her pocket.
Judy dug around in her pocket until her fingers grasped the cool metal of the golden carrot, and as she ran a finger down the smooth surface she realized why she wanted to believe that Cencerro's instincts were wrong. Nick was the first friend she had made since she had left the family farm to join the City Guard. He was surprisingly kind, no matter how much he teased, and he seemed to genuinely enjoy her company. She remembered how he had looked, how he had felt, as she had groomed the beautiful and luxurious fur of his tail; he was—
Judy laughed at herself as she let go of the little ornament, letting it slip back into the depths of her pocket. She was being ridiculous, she told herself; she could do her job and still hope that Nick was innocent. If Nick was what he seemed to be, she could report back to Cencerro that his fears had been completely unfounded and that would be that. Agonizing over the possibilities wouldn't do anything, and Judy turned her attention back to her original goal.
She had left the barracks with the intent of finding the square where she had promised Nick they would meet the following morning and with finding a place that served a decent dinner. After a few days of somewhat wilted rations the idea of fresh produce had her mouth watering; nothing she had eaten since leaving the Tochtli Barony had been quite as fresh as what she had helped her family grow, but surely Phoenix had to grow most of its own food. Although she hadn't had any success yet in finding the square, finding food seemed if anything too easy; after less than ten minutes of walking she had passed nearly a dozen restaurants or street vendors selling food that looked and smelled amazing.
With her newfound resolve to stop worrying over what Nick might or might not be, she eventually chose a particularly cozy-looking restaurant run by a plump and friendly hedgehog who turned out to be only too happy to give her directions to the public square. After a delicious and surprisingly cheap meal of leafy greens, Judy was on her way again, doing her best to follow the complicated series of turns. Eventually, though, she turned a corner and knew that she must have found the right place.
Like much of the layout of Phoenix that she had seen so far, the square looked as though it had been created by someone randomly drawing straight lines through the wedge-shaped piece of land that the town occupied; it wasn't actually a square at all. Instead, it was an irregular pentagon, with one particularly long side and not so much as a single right angle. Compared to the heart of Zootopia, where all the streets around the royal palace that stood at the heart of the city-state fell into symmetrical concentric perfection for more than a quarter mile, it was ugly and chaotic and suggested a complete lack of planning.
Despite it, or perhaps because of it, Phoenix's main city square was a riot of activity that put everything else Judy had seen so far to shame. The space was the size of two or three city blocks, a large fountain at what was more or less the center, and a bit more than half of the square was taken up with a wild variety vendors selling anything and everything Judy could imagine. The stalls themselves varied in size incredibly, and while they were all set up neatly enough Judy could see no rhyme or reason to how they were laid out. An enormous hippo who looked to be made of pure muscle had a portable forge and a grindstone that he was using to sharpen a knife for a wolf who was only tiny in comparison to the tinker. In the space next to him, nearly completely dwarfed by the hippo's forge, was an otter scribing a letter for a pig and shooting dirty looks at the hippo whenever the sparks from the grindstone shot toward her. Some of the stalls had tents set up, the fabric glowing from within from the light of alchemical torches, and others were set atop elaborate rugs or simply the bare stone of the street. Mammals milled about, some patiently waiting their turn for the vendor they wanted to buy something from to be free and others engaged in shouting matches as to who would be next that looked almost as though they would devolve into brawls.
There had to be two or three hundred vendors, and the noise was incredible, everything from vendors loudly disparaging the quality of their competitors to urchins promising to hold a place in line for a nominal fee. As Judy wandered about, taking care not to be stepped on or step on someone smaller than she was, she thought that the service the young and dirty mammals promised seemed worthwhile; some of the vendors had lines with dozens of mammals in them although the sun had already set. Judy couldn't actually see the vendor with the longest line, but they stuck out in a rather gaudy fashion from not just their immediate neighbors but the entire square.
While some of the tents that the vendors had were particularly elaborate, like miniature castles made of cloth complete with jauntily waving banners, one stall had what looked like a golden tower filling the space. It rose three stories above the ground, tapering to a sharp point, taller even than a stall set up by a giraffe selling something that smelled dangerously alcoholic, and looked to be actually made seamlessly of pure gold polished to a mirror shine. The light of the various alchemical torches other vendors had set up bounced off it, emphasizing its faceted perfection, and Judy wasn't surprised to see that above the doorway there was the ouroboros symbol of the Alchemist Guild worked in gold and set with diamonds. That, she supposed, would be Nick's competition for the bid he planned on putting in, and if she hadn't already seen him demonstrate his skill she might have thought he had absolutely no chance of winning it.
The golden tower certainly seemed impressive enough, but whether it had taken more skill or effort to make than Nick's sabre she couldn't even guess at; for all she knew Nick's demonstration of skill in their sparring match might be as impressive to whoever had made the gaudy tower as the tower itself seemed to be to the mammals waiting to enter. A squirrel dressed in blue robes sparingly embroidered with arcane symbols in copper, a highly polished bronze torc at his neck with an oversized golden ouroboros symbol set on it, was walking back and forth near the tower, and in a surprisingly loud voice considering his diminutive size was promising the miracles of alchemy his master could perform. If the young squirrel, who had to be an apprentice, could be believed, his master could cure anything short of death itself and craft any item that a mammal could imagine.
Compared to how the few alchemists Judy had seen in Zootopia's heart had acted, almost as though they thought they were above other mammals and to so much as interact with them was beneath their dignity, it was surprising to see an alchemist behaving just like any other vendor. Judy had seen fair day vendors in the Tochtli Barony who had been more reserved, but she supposed it was just another part of how Phoenix was different. It seemed almost as though the mammals were less reserved, more freely willing to jostle past each other when they knew that their torcs couldn't cause injury, and as a result they were louder and bolder.
Whatever the cause, though, the square was still loud and packed with mammals, and Judy had begun to turn around to make her way back to the barracks for the night when she caught a glimpse of a familiar shade of red. At first she thought she had mistaken the coloring of a passing tigress, but then she briefly saw Nick working his way through the crowd, moving with a clear sense of purpose as he looked up and down the aisles.
Judy remembered that he had mentioned that Phoenix's central market divided its spaces by lot and realized that he must be looking for something specific but didn't know exactly where it would be. She did her best to creep after him as carefully as she could to avoid being spotted; it seemed to be the perfect opportunity to keep her promise to Cencerro. She told herself that whatever he was looking for as he moved through the crowd of mammals with a grace that she couldn't help but admire would be perfectly innocent, although it was hard to imagine what he could search for that would be particularly incriminating. At last, though, he stopped in front of a stall that even with her lack of expectations Judy found surprising.
It was one of the plainer and smaller spots, especially compared to the more elaborate displays like the one the Alchemist Guild had put up; there wasn't even a rug on the ground, let alone a tent. Instead, there was just a golden eagle somewhat larger than Judy was, blinders over its head and a series of leads tying it down, and a little shrew Judy at first almost didn't see. The shrew looked to be female; she was a bit plump, but that might have just been emphasized by what she was wearing. Her clothes, a spectacularly iridescent set of a tight-fitting tunic and equally tight trousers that both looked to be made of fish skin, complete with a little cap and a set of goggles pushed up on her forehead, made it obvious that she had to be a messenger. The surrounding crowd had been too loud for Judy to hear how Nick's conversation with the shrew started, but when he had hunkered down and delicately offered her a single finger to shake she had instead enthusiastically thrown herself at it and squeezed it into a hug, her long muzzle going almost past the next finger. Clearly someone he knew, then, but Judy was at a complete loss for why Nick would want or need a messenger, and her confusion only grew once she had crept close enough to hear what they were saying.
"—doing well," Nick finished, and the little shrew laughed in a voice that was just as shrill and high-pitched as Judy had expected.
"Whattabout you? Whattaya doin' in Phoenix?" she asked, waving one delicate little paw dismissively, and although Judy couldn't be sure since she was watching from next to a fruit seller some ten feet away she thought the little shrew had painted her minuscule nails a vivid blue.
Judy couldn't quite place the shrew's accent, which was rather strong, but she pushed the thought aside to focus on Nick's response.
"Oh, keeping busy," Nick said, "Hoping to kill two birds with one stone—no offense to Tonaltzintli, of course."
He delicately rubbed the eagle's head, and the bird leaned into it, curling its neck affectionately against Nick's arm. The shrew giggled. "None taken. He likes ya, ya know," she said.
Nick glanced down briefly at the eagle's wicked beak, which was in Judy's mind getting dangerously close to the soft skin of his belly, and smiled. "I have that effect, I'm told," he said.
"Daddy liked ya too," the shrew replied, and Judy got the sense that she was carefully gauging Nick for how he would respond.
Nick sighed. "Could things have gone better?" he said, "Yes, yes they could. But—"
"I know what he asked ya for," the shrew interrupted, so quietly Judy almost couldn't make it out, "Could ya do it, Nicky?"
"Why don't you tell me?" Nick asked, flashing her a brilliant smile, and he pulled something out of a pocket that was so small and so dark that at first Judy couldn't see it against the fur of Nick's paw.
Even once it caught the light right, it didn't look to be all that remarkable; it was a minuscule bag of dark cloth. When he delicately gave it to the shrew, though, she handled it as though it was the most precious treasure that any mammal had ever crafted. She peeked inside, and while Judy couldn't see the contents herself and couldn't be entirely sure, she thought that whatever Nick had given the shrew glowed with its own light. "Oh, Nicky!" the shrew said, and her little eyes were glistening with tears, "Ya really did it! Praise the gods, ya did it!"
She threw herself at his paw again, wrapping her tiny arms around one finger, and her little body was wracked with sobs. Nick coughed; Judy had expected him to bask in the shrew's praise, but he almost seemed embarrassed by the attention. The shrew choked out her thanks between what could only be tears of joy, and Judy found herself more than a little uncomfortable watching the scene. Still, she couldn't help but wonder what Nick had given the shrew and how they knew each other. Judy supposed the bag could have contained minuscule coins; she had learned in the academy that some criminals favored the money minted for the use of Zootopia's smallest citizens because it made it easier to transport quantities worth large sums. The bag hadn't looked like it had been filled enough to contain a fortune, though, but Judy wasn't sure what could have been in it that Nick could have made. And what had the shrew and Nick meant about her father? Could—"Hey, rabbit!" a voice interrupted her thoughts, and Judy almost leaped in surprise as she whirled around.
The mammal addressing her was the marmot running the fruit stand she had hidden behind, and a scowl darkened his features. "You gonna buy anything or not, huh? You can't loiter 'round here, you know," he said, and his voice seemed to rise in both pitch and volume as he jabbed one stubby little finger in her direction.
Judy, trying not to call any more attention to herself, quickly apologized and hastily pulled a pawful of coins out. She wasn't quite sure what she said; she might have said that all the fruit looked so good she had needed some time to decide, and by the time she slapped down the coins in exchange for an assortment of fruit that actually looked quite tasty the marmot's annoyance had given way to a self-satisfied manner. The entire exchange couldn't have taken more than a couple minutes, but when she turned back around her heart sank. Just as she had feared, the shrew and the eagle—and Nick—were gone.
Author's Notes:
I figure that Judy's near total ignorance of how torcs work is pretty realistic; although most people can use cars, computers, and phones I think most people would be at a total loss to explain even the basics of how they actually function, let alone the specific details. I figure that, in a world of magic, there's no reason it'd be any different.
A tinker was a real, although currently essentially obsolete, profession for people who repaired houseware. It's also the origin of the word "tinkering" to mean to adjust something.
Universal literacy is a fairly modern development, explaining why someone can support themselves simply writing letters; in a time before everyone could do so for themselves, simply being able to read and write was an incredibly useful skill.
Golden eagles are popularly linked to the sport of falconry, and are commonly regarded as extremely effective, albeit difficult to handle, hunters. The golden eagle is also the bird depicted on Mexico's flag, a reference to a legend that the Aztec people would know where to build a city when they saw an eating a rattlesnake over a lake. Legend has it that present-day Mexico City, built on the same site as Tenochtitlan, is this city. This legend may be a result of misinterpretation of Aztec codices; as has been previously mentioned in my author's notes a lot of information about the Aztecs was lost during the Spanish conquest.
Golden eagles can be pretty large, with wingspans of up to 7 feet 8 inches (2.34 meters), and carrying a shrew would be absolutely no problem for one; golden eagles typically prey on hares, rabbits, and similarly sized mammals, but have been known to go after prey as large as deer.
Tonaltzintli is the Nahuatl word for sun, which seemed an appropriate name for a golden eagle. I imagine birds in this series might be somewhat more domesticated than they are in real life, considering that they would pose a much greater risk to citizens of Zootopia than they would to humans, but would conversely also be possible to ride.
As previously discussed, coins in this setting are a fiat currency rather than having their value tied to the amount of precious metal in them, so it doesn't seem unreasonable for criminals to favor the smallest possible coins for moving large sums. Depending on how money works in the movie, perhaps something similar is done; I can't imagine mice using the same size paper money Judy uses to pay for Nick's pawpsicle.
As always, thanks for reading! I'd love to know what you thought, if you're so inclined to leave a comment.