This is definitely not what I'd call a good series of events. First, I'm told by my middle-aged son that I killed myself, second, there's a crazy ewe after us, third, how the heck is this whole thing possible, and fourth, last, but most definitely not least- where am I?

Rhinovicz took a swing at Nick, a swing that sent him him sprawling to the floor, out cold. Seeing that, I charged him; everyone else followed suit, snarling and growling, biting down on the rhinoceros as hard as we could in an effort to save our hides, quite literally in this case. Though, as I'm coming to learn, this Bellwether ewe doesn't go down easily.

No ****, Furlock. That's obvious, just look at this mess! Me trying to save everyone- look what good that did us. Getting beaten senseless by a rhino. What a killjoy. And as if that wasn't bad enough, I can't just regain consciousness right side up, nooooo, I have to be chained to the ceiling upside-down! What fun! (I think you can see where my son gets his sense of sarcasm from.)

And to make matters worse, look who's coming, Lieutenant Hopps! Oh, crap. This isn't going to be pleasant.

"Well, well, look what we have here. Must've been a real rough party, huh?"

"Your sarcasm is duly noted, Hopps. Now, if you wouldn't mind-" I rattled the shackles holding me to the wall- "I'm getting somewhat light-headed here."

"Bad news, buster. You see, when an agent goes rogue, well, the ZIA tends to notice, so, Agent- or should I say ex-Agent-Wilde?"

"How the hell did you get that info? Savage had me fired over a decade ago, and I'm pretty sure only the Mayor is privy to those files. Now, are you going to let me down from here or not?"

"If you'll answer a question for me, Agent, maybe, just maybe, I'll consider that possibility. But consider this," she said, gesturing to her hip holster. "If the thought that you're lying to me comes even into the back of my mind, oh, ho, ho, it'll be obituary time. No, scratch that. It won't be. Did I mention how much I love fox pelts?"

"You're a sick psychopath, Hopps."

"I believe the correct term is 'high-functioning sociopath.'"

"No, that's Furlock. You're just nuts. Now...Let! Me! Down!"

"Maybe it's the dumb bunny in me, Agent Wilde, but I'd love to." She pulls her knife- oh, sweet cheese, that thing's huge- and points it at me. Then, with one quick flick of her wrist, severs the chains that hold me down from the wall, leaving me, well…


I'm not in the same cell as my dad, but I can still hear his words. I've been listening, straining my already battered sense of hearing to catch any noise in the block. It's been deathly silent for days. My stomach wouldn't stop growling for a week, but it's since gone silent. At least they're giving me water, I'm not sure about the rest.

What I am sure of is the fact that I'm locked in a six-by-eight concrete box with half-inch slats on the door that I've heard our jailers euphemistically call 'windows.' Windows? Ha! If those things are windows, I'm Robin Hood!

Hrm...Robin Hood. Say, there's an idea. But then I hear a few snippets of conversation: "...Agent Wilde, but I'd love to."

You know how when you go to the supermarket to buy some fruit, you check the melons by wrapping your knuckles against them, and if they're ripe, you hear this hollow thud? My father's head made for a perfectly ripe melon.

Foxes protect one another something fierce, and hearing the abuse my dad's been getting, all while being locked up in here.

Sweet Karma, what on Earth did I do to deserve this? But "Agent Wilde?" He can't mean my dad, can he? But then if not him, who else?

Foxes can't really howl, per se, but what they can do is whine. Normally, we try to keep it under control, but not now, not with all this!

I quit!


"So, Lieutenant Hopps, any progress?"

"None, Ma'am," I said. "Unfortunately for him, I suppose."

"You suppose correctly, Lieutenant. Hopps, do you know why you, and you alone, have earned my favor?"

"No, Mayor Bellwether, please, enlighten me."

"Gladly, my dear. You surely remember Gideon Grey."

"How could I forget, Mayor? He's the reason we're all here. I've wondered about that moment for years."

"Wondered what, Lieutenant? Not feeling any regrets, are we?"

"No, Mayor." I shook my head. I'll never let on, but I am. I've regretted that day ever since. If I slip up and show that I do care, you just have to look at the wall above her desk. Who knew a ewe could be so predatory?

Well, there's a saying here in the department. Whenever an officer is reprimanded, you'll always hear them mutter "Oh, mutton chops" before they report to the mayor's office. In this city, the police chiefs are only figureheads. Dawn Bellwether has the real power.

If an officer's 'crime,' per se, is serious enough (and it doesn't take much to be considered serious), that officer won't come back from the Mayor's, and she'll have a new wall ornament the next day. That's what she means by "favor." It means she won't have my head on her wall. In fact, I'm the only mammal to have survived more than a month in the ZPD.

"What was that, Lieutenant? I couldn't hear you..."

"No, Mayor!" I shouted. "Can you hear me now?"

"That's better, Hopps. Now listen up, and you'd sure as hell better make sure that you do this right, or you'll be muttering 'mutton chops' too. There's trouble brewing, trouble that's not my doing."

"I'm glad to know some of it's not."

"Knock the attitude, Hopps. I've let it fly for years, but I've finally had enough! At 0900 hours tomorrow, you are to report to the prison and collect the prisoners. You may not believe them, Hopps, but I've this sneaking suspicion that they're being honest."

"As you wish, Mayor Bellwether."

"Very good. Dismissed."


What could they know that Hopps doesn't? Well, I'm glad you asked.

See, here's the thing. You remember when I said that Wilde was going down at last?

But wait just a cotton-pickin' minute! Wasn't that from the other version of 2021?

Yes and no.

See, here's the thing. Yes, there are two 2021s, but there's only one little ol' me. Isn't that wonderful?

No? I thought you liked me. Oh, well. Just let me explain.

See, most mammals think they know how time works. Well, guess what- they don't. They think time's a straight line, unbending and unbreakable. It's not, as we all now know.

In both versions of the future, Zootopia has become, thanks to me, quite the opposite of what it once was. In the "original version," I was working behind the scenes. When Hopps and Wilde died, or at least, appeared to have died, that was the perfect time for me to step in. But of course, I had to get out first. That was the hardest part, and it was a piece of cake. First, I coded a virus into the system that overloaded the servers in a DOS attack. Don't ask me why Savage even let me onto the computers, he knows I majored in computer science.

I signed on as a computer tech- apparently, prisoners need jobs, and through oversight that I suspect was somehow purposeful, I managed to hack the system, request a day pass, and it was off to the barber's from there. I stole fur dye and gave myself a makeover.

Next, use the day pass, and don't show back up. Again, through some colossal oversight, I got away scot free. Money beckons to most Zootopian elected officials, not least of all the mayor, who, with a few hundred thousand zoolars, let me be "Mayor For The Day."

Scot free then, scot free now. But there came trouble, in the form of those blasted fuzzballs in blue, Nicholas Wilde and Judith Hopps.

If you'd told them three years ago that their simple request for time off would result in this mess, they'd laugh in your face. You see, Chief Bogo, of Precinct One, feels that vacation time, any at all, is unnecessary, and so he doesn't allow any. That policy, combined with six straight months of beat work, is enough to exhaust anyone. Cops for Precinct One work an average of 126 hours a week- 18 hours every day, all week. The rest of the city has a workweek that has a maximum of 75 hours a week.

Yeah, that's a bit much. As Mayor, I only worked the standard workweek of forty hours a week, so over three times that a week for just a beat cop? Yikes!

Well, when they put their plan into action, I made sure that their bullets were swapped for real ones. I don't think Savage realized what he was getting into, but I also don't think that he could have been underprepared at a better time.

So what's really going on here? I know it has something to do with the eldest Wilde child, Luke. He didn't go into the prison, and yet I saw him leave.

Whatever the case may be, from that point on, time split, both forward and backward, to allow for his existence at the 'correct' moment in time. From there, reality diverged, the path in which Luke was born overtaking the previous reality. Instead of Gideon Grey having scratched Judy, she managed to talk him down. She traded blow for blow, though, instead of the trouble ending there, with that one kick, Gideon made up for it in silent punishment, tripping her every time she went past him in the hallways. Such abuse, coupled with the fact that the school's administration did nothing to help her, drove her to pursue criminal justice for college.

Now, the universe needs to be balanced, and saving Judy, albeit, being tripped every day for the next nine years is a rough way to make up for it. However, in talking Gideon down, she also managed to do something no one else had been able to do before. Charles Grey, Gideon's father, was a big believer in the expression "you reap what you sow," only in a crooked way. He would wind the kid up, throwing jests at his son until poor Gideon snapped and came after him, then punish him for acting out. As his mama was dead, a car accident having claimed her life five years prior, hurt was the only world Gideon knew, and he took that hurt out on poor Judy.

So when Gideon was talked out of hurting Judith Hopps, he broke. He saw that he "didn't want to do this no more," as he put it. The culinary arts had always been a passion of his, and he turned to those with a passion, climbing the ladder out of podunk (not Podunk, that's in Deerbrooke County) little Bunnyburrow to become a renowned chef, owner of the fanciest restaurants in the city.

As I said before, the universe needs balance, and with all that extra pain that Gideon had left behind, that anger fell on someone else, or rather, several someones- Pack 914, Nick's Junior Ranger Scout group. You and I know the story of Nick being muzzled, and afterwards, giving up on mammality and becoming the con artist that Judy would sweep up off the street to chase after me, only at the time, they didn't know it was me that they were chasing.

Anyways, instead of that muzzling like you and I know, they beat the poor kit senseless and left him to die in the street, only living because his mother went looking for him when he didn't come home on time. But that beating beat something else out of that kit, too- his drive to fight. Not his fight, mind you. His fight, his desire to keep going, that turned into a raging bonfire after that night. But his desire to fight, for revenge, he just didn't have that in him anymore. What that desire once was metamorphosed into a desire for something else, something along the same lines but not quite the same. That angry flame flickered into a desire for justice instead.

He hadn't known what he wanted to do with himself, become a tailor like his father, perhaps. A tailor like his father, who, because Nick stayed in school, didn't become a druggie like before. And with his father's life, his mother never committed suicide in grief. Both parents lived, and their love only served to fuel his desire to, as Judy Hopps would put it some nine years later, "make the world a better place!" and in this kit's mind, what better way to do it than to pursue criminal justice?

This move would result in his rendezvous with a college-aged Judy Hopps over a decade later, a move that would result in the birth of their first son, Luke, while Judy was still in college. Nick may have been salutatorian of his class, but "foxes are the spawn of the devil," in society's eyes. As a result, Nick worked for his father's shop for three years, saving every cent in order to go.

This timeline, where Nick was successful in school, where he met Judy Hopps ahead of schedule, overtook the timeline where they met when Nick was a con artist. One little thing different, and a whole different world came out of it. Now, going the other way, when Judy was scratched- in the other future, Judy was knocked down by Gideon, Bonnie Hopps seriously overreacted, blowing the poor fox's brains out, along with those of his parents, too.

In this timeline, Judy became hell-bent on revenge in place of justice, becoming a cop all the same, but one feared by all for her wrath instead of loved by all for her heart.

Now, you're probably wondering how I know all this. I can see that thought in your head. Simple, really. When time doesn't flow like it should (like now), it's not too hard to travel through it. In fact, Luke did it with just baking soda and vinegar.

But wait up- I see something else. You're wondering how I, as the supposed villain of this tale, can understand my enemies.

Let's get something straight then. As I told John Wilde, I'm the low woman on the totem pole. Believe me, I don't call the shots. You want to know who does?

The Fates. The Three Fates are in charge here. Yes, the Celestials (Karma, Serendipity, and the like) can influence fate, but only the Three can decide it. The Celestials try to keep the fates under control, but I think I've forgotten to mention something. The Fates are foxes, always able to slip any binding. Bad news for us mortals when they do.

Looks like I have bad news then.