"You're not limping anymore," Judy said, speaking the words as the realization came to her.

She was walking next to Nick as they made their way across the block and a half between where they had left the car that Finnick had lent them and the Zootopia office of the New Yak Evening Graphic. Judy wasn't sure when Nick had started walking normally again; between their shower and helping Nick brush out the luxuriously long and soft fur of his tail afterwards, she had been more than a little distracted, to say nothing of her concerns about what they might be able to learn from the tabloid. Still, Nick favored her with an easy smile even as he kept walking, a smoothly confident swagger in his step. "It doesn't hurt too bad anymore. I've still got quite the bruise, though."

Judy involuntarily glanced down at his ankle, but she couldn't see anything through his fur. While she was still looking down at his leg, Nick let his paw brush against Judy's cheek briefly. "What about your face?" he asked.

Judy touched the scrapes Nick had caused when her apartment had been burning down around them. The marks were hardly visible and already well on their way to being fully healed, and she said as much. "It's fine. They're almost healed."

Nick nodded. "I'm sorry," he said, and Judy reached up to give his paw a gently squeeze.

"I don't blame you," she said, "It's my fault. Your leg, your arrest, it's all because I pulled you in."

Nick was silent a moment as the tabloid's office came into view. It was a three story building, built plainly of brick without any outstanding features other than a series of brass letters over the main entrance that spelled out the name of the newspaper. "You don't have to keep apologizing," he said mildly.

"Then neither do you," Judy countered, and Nick nodded slowly.

"I suppose we can both be sorry together, then," he said, and he reached down to squeeze Judy's paw.

Despite how large the building was, the reception area was small and more than a little shabby. There were grubby marks on the plain white walls near the door where countless paws and hooves must have brushed past, and there was a grayness to the simple white tiles of the floor that made Judy think they were no longer their original color. The entire building seemed to hum and vibrate, and from the noise Judy guessed that the printing presses that ran off the paper for Zootopia were somewhere in the basement. She thought she could catch the faint scent of fresh paper and ink, but that might have just been her imagining what she expected to smell. The reception desk was set across from a simple waiting bench of a stepped design so that it could accommodate mammals of a variety of sizes, and the desk itself was equally simple. At the moment, there was no one in the reception room other than the receptionist, a middle-aged female beaver in a plain dress, who quickly put away a stub of a pencil and a little book of crossword puzzles as Nick and Judy entered. Before they had left his house, Nick had said that he had a plan for getting the mammals at the newspaper to cooperate, and considering that she no longer had her badge Judy was happy to let him take the lead. His only guidance, before they entered, had been quite brief: "Just stand there, look concerned, and don't say anything."

"Excuse me, ma'am?" Nick said, his tone the very essence of politeness as he approached the desk, "Is the mammal who makes these pictures here?"

As he spoke, he held up the copy of the New Yak Evening Graphic that Judy had purchased the previous day so that the receptionist could see the image on the front page. The beaver squinted at Nick suspiciously, and her tone had more than a note of hostility when she responded, "Who wants to know?" and looked the fox up and down as though trying to find fault with his appearance.

Although Judy would admit she had something of a bias, when it came to Nick's appearance, she didn't think that anyone would have been able to find fault with how he was currently dressed. His suit, one of the ones that had been in his closet rather than one of the ones that he had purchased on their trip to the department store, was immaculately pressed, the crisp wool spotlessly black. A pair of silver cufflinks adorned with glittering emeralds almost exactly the same color as Nick's eyes were just barely visible on the sleeves of Nick's shirt underneath his suit jacket, and a matching tie clip secured an elegant silk tie with a bold pattern of diagonal black and green stripes. Nick had taken off his straw boater and tucked it under his arm the moment he had walked through the door, and something subtle about his body language had changed in that same moment. To Judy, he looked somewhat more serious, almost solemn, and even the way he walked was different, his back rigidly upright and every step precise.

Even the little chuckle that Nick gave in response to the beaver's question didn't sound like his normal laugh; while to Judy's ears Nick usually sounded as though he was laughing at a joke that only he really understood, it instead sounded entirely perfunctory and without any humor. "That's not important," Nick said, and his wallet appeared in his paw so suddenly that it looked like a magic trick.

In the blink of an eye, Nick had liberated a twenty-dollar bill and slid it across the desk while his wallet vanished again, but the beaver made no motion to take it. She did look from the money, then up to Nick, and then to where Judy stood. Judy didn't have to pretend at being concerned anymore; although Nick was plainly trying to bribe the beaver, they didn't have nearly enough money to casually waste if she insisted on more payment. Even worse, it suddenly occurred to her that even if someone at the newspaper was willing to help prove that the photograph of Nick was a fake, they might demand a cut of their own. Still, the beaver's features resolved themselves into an expression that Judy had no problem reading: naked greed. "It might take a little more," the beaver said, her voice dropping down to a low whisper that Judy had no trouble making out even above the low murmur of the printing presses below them.

"My client," Nick said, his voice at normal volume as his eyes flickered back at Judy, "Is the victim of some truly scurrilous accusations, bolstered by a faked photograph of a..."

Nick paused, looking back and forth and waiting for the beaver to lean in a little before he continued, his voice suddenly low, "...scandalous nature. Why, if it can't be proven as a fake, marriage might be off the table."

The beaver looked past Nick and at Judy, as though for confirmation; Judy felt her ears flushing at the sudden wash of emotion as Nick said the word "marriage." She couldn't meet the beaver's eyes, looking down instead as what Nick was implying ran through her head. Was he really suggesting that he would marry Judy in a way the beaver wouldn't catch? Although Judy had never been one to dream of her own perfect wedding the way some of her sisters had, clipping out pictures from the Steers catalog and talking of the exotic places they might hold the wedding or the honeymoon (although to the best of Judy's knowledge, no Hopps had ever married anywhere but at the church in Bunnyburrows or taken a honeymoon any further away or more elaborate than a weekend in Deerbrooke County), the image irresistibly filled her head. She had attended countless weddings as a kit, and suddenly all of the details that had always seemed so boring when she was fidgeting in her Sunday best as a preacher droned on and on about love and commitment, repeated over and over until she couldn't distinguish the memories of one wedding from another, took on a new life. It should have seemed strange to imagine Nick, dressed in his absolute best, standing before an altar with Judy across from him and pews filled with bunnies behind them, but somehow it fit perfectly in her mind until she thought back to how her family might react if she so much as introduced Nick to them.

Judy was so consumed by her thoughts that she nearly missed the beaver's response, which sounded a touch skeptical but not outright dismissive. "A fox working for a bunny?" the beaver asked.

Nick gave her a smile that, at last, looked like his own. "Who better to dig up what's needed?" he said, giving the last word a subtle emphasis, and the beaver's face slowly lit up with dawning comprehension.

Judy thought she understood what Nick was suggesting, too; the obvious implication was simply that he was looking for someone willing to say a picture was fake, whether or not that was true. Although Nick did wait a moment, once he seemed satisfied that the beaver understood, he put his paw on the twenty-dollar bill on the counter and began slowly drawing it back. "Of course, if someone here can't help—"

"Margaret Waschbar," the beaver interrupted quickly, placing her paw on the money and stopping its movement, "She works upstairs in the attic. Through that door."

The receptionist motioned with her head in the direction of a door even as the words fell out of her mouth at a rapid pace. "Wonderful," Nick said, letting go of the money and clapping his paws together, "Let's be going, then."

He directed his last statement at Judy and pulled the door open for her, gesturing at the entryway and waiting for her to enter before following himself. Judy waited until they had gone about half a floor up the narrow stairwell before she turned back to look over her shoulder at Nick. "Marriage?" she asked, and a sly half-smile played across Nick's face.

"It's the truth," Nick said, "It'll be pretty hard for me to get married if I'm in jail, and I am the victim of—how did I put it?—a scurrilous accusation. I never said that you were the client. Or that it would be the two of us getting married."

He paused a moment as they continued climbing the stairs. "But," he added, "If that's the only way to stop living in sin..."

To Judy, his tone sounded half-playful and half-serious, and she tried to strike the same balance with her own response. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves," she said, "We've got a case to solve first. Besides, you've got an awful lot of courting left to do before you can talk about marriage."

Nick suddenly squeezed past Judy on the stairs, allowing his tail to brush up against her in a slow and lingering way that couldn't be anything other than deliberate. "Is that so?" he asked, and Judy couldn't help but smile.

"Posilutely," she said.

Judy's first thought, when they entered the attic of the tabloid, was that it looked as though someone had taken a forgotten storeroom from her family's farm and stretched it to enormous proportions. The room was long and wide with a high ceiling, the dusty rafters of the roof above plainly visible. The walls of the room were barely visible behind an incredible variety of junk that didn't seem to have any kind of organization. There were untidy piles of books stacked here and there, rolled-up carpets leaning at dangerous angles, and racks upon racks of clothing in all different styles and sizes. An equally varied assortment of chairs and tables were in an unorganized mess where there was room, and beyond the familiar there was also the bizarre—an enormous broadsword was balanced across a crate, a stuffed and dust-covered goose stood in one corner, and an open chest was full of what looked like gold coins, rubies, and pearl necklaces but surely had to be fakes.

At the center of the room, it looked as though someone had erected three of the four walls of a bedroom, but while the insides of the walls had been painted a clean eggshell white with elegant-looking wainscoting running halfway up the walls, the outside revealed that they were just cheap and rough-looking plywood with some bracing added. One of the walls had a window in it with a piece of canvas painted to look like part of the Zootopia skyline by day positioned about three feet behind it. Inside the fake room there was a variety of relatively standard furniture, including a writing desk with a matching chair and a sofa, but the bed was as obviously fake-looking as the room itself when looked at from the right angle. What appeared to be a solid oak headboard from one angle was, from a different angle, just a piece of plywood that had been incompletely painted and decorated. Outside the fake bedroom, which didn't have a ceiling of its own, a female raccoon was struggling to setup a complicated series of electric lights and shades all angled inwards. The raccoon, who could only be Margaret Waschbar, was muttering and cursing under her breath as Nick and Judy approached, and she didn't seem to notice them at all even when Judy cleared her throat and said "Excuse me? Margaret Waschbar?"

It wasn't until after Waschbar had gotten one of her lamps set up with a wordless noise of triumph and turned away, rubbing one paw against the other, that the raccoon realized she was no longer alone. She gave a sudden start as she caught sight of Nick and Judy, her ringed tail going straight back in surprise. "You gave me quite a fright," Waschbar said, clutching at her heart in an exaggerated demonstration of fear that she obviously didn't feel, "The two of you here for a shoot? I didn't think I had anything on the calendar for a bunny or a fox, but..."

Waschbar shrugged her shoulders in a simple gesture that seemed to say, in a way that words couldn't, that her job was one of ever-changing priorities and jobs. The raccoon had an easy cheerfulness to her that Judy immediately appreciated, although her appearance wasn't quite what she had expected. Judy had imagined that someone who faked pictures for a tabloid for a living would have an oily, unpleasant air to them rather than looking like a friendly mechanic. Waschbar was wearing a paint-splattered set of corduroy coveralls, the fabric of which had faded to a gray-black slightly lighter than her fur. She was a about half a foot shorter than Nick was, but looked as though she might not weigh too much less; her coveralls seemed particularly snug at her generous hips and stocky legs. Her eyes were a chocolate brown somewhat lighter than the black mask of fur that surrounded them, and she regarded both Nick and Judy with mild curiosity. "No, we're not here for a shoot, Ms. Waschbar—" Judy began, but the raccoon quickly interrupted.

"Peggy, please," she said, "Everyone calls me that. Everyone I like, anyway. So, who're you and what do you want?"

Her words were brisk, their bluntness set off by her smile. "My name's Judy Hopps and this is Nick Wilde," Judy said by way of introduction, gesturing at Nick as she spoke his name, "Are you the one who makes the pictures for the paper?"

"Sure am," Waschbar said, "You're not here to serve me papers, are you?"

For the first time, a hint of anxiety crept into the raccoon's voice, and Judy supposed that the paper might have been sued in the past by those who thought that their articles (or, probably more pressingly for Waschbar, their pictures) were libel. "Oh, no, no," Judy replied hastily, waving her paws, "We were hoping you could tell us if a picture's fake."

"Of course I can!" Waschbar replied, her relief evident, "No one's better at making composographs than I am."

"Composographs?" Nick interjected, clearly as unfamiliar with the word as Judy was.

"Sure, sure," Waschbar said, and then she pointed at the newspaper Nick had tucked under his arm, "You've got a Porno-Graphic there, right?"

Judy involuntarily made a noise between a cough and a laugh, and Waschbar simply laughed. "I know what folks call it, you know."

Nick gave Waschbar a smile and the pink tabloid. "The Lionheart picture. That's a composograph; I put six different pictures together for that one," Waschbar said, nodding, "Not one of my better works, but not bad for five hours between getting the job and getting the paper printed, eh?"

"It's very good," Judy said, and the raccoon smiled.

"Come over to my desk, let me see this picture of yours," Waschbar said, and she strode purposefully off, gesturing for Nick and Judy to follow.

The raccoon's desk was in one corner of the room and was positively enormous, with a drafting table set next to it. Like the rest of the attic, the desk was covered with assorted junk, from stacks of pictures to razor blades, paint brushes, cameras, photographic negatives, and sticks of charcoal to an enormous and expensive-looking airbrush. Besides what were apparently the tools of her trade, Waschbar also had a number of large models on her desk, mostly cars and buildings, and one in particular caught Judy's eye. It was a model van, about two feet long, and while one side of it was painted green, the other side was painted black and had the letters "ZPD" painted in white. "That's the van from the picture, isn't it?" Judy asked, pointing at the model.

Waschbar gave Judy a wide smile as she nodded. "Sure is," she said, "I didn't have a picture of a police van with the doors open that I could use. So I made one."

She shrugged modestly. "I didn't get the perspective quite right, though, did I?" she said, and sighed.

Nick exchanged a glance with Judy. "Maybe before we show you our picture, you can tell us how you made this one. Could you explain it, Peggy?" he said, and he put the newspaper down on a relatively clear spot of the raccoon's desk.

That seemed to be the right decision, as she positively brightened at the chance to explain her process. "It's real simple," she said, "I started with a picture of the police station I already had. Then I got some actors to dress up."

A frown momentarily crossed her face. "I wish I could have found a better lion to stand in for Lionheart. He doesn't have a gut like that," she said, and then hastily continued onto her point again, "I found some pictures of Lionheart and Chief Bogo that were from more or less the same angle as each other. I always try to make it a little more dynamic than just head on, you know? It really makes it—"

She cut herself off. "This is real dull, isn't it?"

"It's very interesting," Judy said encouragingly, and Waschbar continued.

"So then I posed the actors in front of a backdrop. I've got a bunch of different colors so I can go with something that makes it easy to cut the image of the actors out with a razor blade once I develop them, and then I get the lighting to match the picture I'm going to paste them into. When I've got more time, I put up sets like that one," the raccoon said, pointing in the direction of the fake bedroom in the center of the attic, "It makes it easier. A lot less retouching to do if all I'm doing is pasting faces."

"Anyway, for this picture, I cut out the actors and put them over the picture of the police station. Then I cut out the pictures of Bogo's face and Lionheart's face and put them over the actors'. That's the hard part, really. It took a lot of time with the airbrush to blend Lionheart's mane in, let me tell you."

"It looks very convincing," Nick said, and it wasn't a lie; if Judy hadn't known that the picture was a fake, she couldn't see anything around the lion's head that showed that Lionheart's face had been put over someone else's.

"I took a picture of the model van, same as the actors, and put that in too," Waschbar continued, "And that was it."

It was a pretty modest summary, but Judy thought that she understood at least a little of the effort that the raccoon had gone to and discussed so casually. "Thank you," Judy said, "Here, let me give you the pictures we have."

She pulled the photographs that supposedly showed Nick on Zweihorn's doorstep and gave them to Waschbar. "And you're saying that this isn't you?" she asked, looking from the picture that showed Nick's face most clearly to the fox himself.

"It's not," Judy said before Nick could get a word out.

"Why do y—" Waschbar began, and then after cutting herself off continued, "You were framed, you think?"

"That's right," Nick said, and the raccoon nodded thoughtfully.

Judy had to admit that Waschbar seemed pretty sharp, and she was glad when the raccoon pulled out a magnifying glass and began wordlessly examining the pictures without asking any more questions.

"Hmmm," Waschbar said at last, "This is tough."

"So you can't tell?" Judy asked, and a note of desperation must have come through because the raccoon patted her arm.

"I didn't say that," Waschbar said, "It's just that these aren't great pictures. It wouldn't take a lot of skill to fake a photo this bad."

The raccoon paused a moment, sucking air through her teeth as she seemed to consider the problem that they had set before her. "Do you have the original negatives?" she asked, but she didn't seem disappointed when Judy shook her head.

"I guess that would have been too easy," Waschbar said, but she sounded cheerful enough as she went back to examining the images.

After a few minutes, she turned to Nick and asked a question that sounded like, "Do you die?"

Nick blinked and looked at Judy before turning back to face the raccoon. "If I got shot or stabbed, I'm pretty sure I would," he said, and then it was Waschbar's turn to look confused.

"No, no," she said, "Your tail. Do you dye the tip of your tail?"

Nick gathered his tail up into his arms and stroked it. "Never," he said, "Why do you ask?"

"Look at this," Waschbar said, and held the magnifying glass in front of the picture that Judy had thought the raccoon would have little interest in, because the entire image was so badly overexposed that the body of the fox in the image was barely visible and the face couldn't be seen at all.

"See?" she said, and pointed near the tip of the fox's tail in the picture.

Looking at it under a magnifying glass, Judy saw that there was a tiny bit of white visible between the darker tip of the tail and the rest of it. "Someone may have gone and darkened the tip. It would have been easy enough to lighten the negative before developing the picture."

"So we're looking for a fox with a white tail tip?" Judy asked, already feeling excitement rise in her chest at the potential lead.

"Well, maybe," Waschbar said, "The picture's so overexposed it might not mean anything."

Waschbar then held up the other photograph. "I'm pretty sure this part of the picture is real," she said, gesturing at the part of the image showing Zweihorn standing in her open doorway, light coming out around her, "Faking this kind of lighting would be really hard."

"Could you do it?" Nick asked.

Waschbar considered the question for a moment before responding. "If I had a few weeks, sure," she said, "I'd have to model it out to get it this good."

"So that part is probably real," Judy said to Nick, and he nodded.

Whoever had faked the photograph could have only had hours at the most, unless they had planned it out long in advance. From the techniques that Waschbar had described, it would certainly be possible to fake one part of the image before the rest. "As for the rest of it, I think the revolver was swapped out for something else," she said, tapping the image.

Judy looked at the gun closely, but she couldn't see anything, not even something as subtle as the tiny bit of white fur in the other image. "Why do you say that?" Nick asked; he had been examining the photograph as closely as Judy had, but he obviously hadn't seen anything either.

Waschbar shrugged. "I'm always real careful with paws and hooves, myself, and that's a real awkward way of holding a gun is all. To me, it looks more like this fox was holding... I dunno, a bottle or something. Something cylindrical."

That wasn't much, but it was another possible detail. Still, Waschbar hadn't hit on the topic that was probably the most important. "And what about the face?" Judy asked.

The raccoon sucked air through her teeth again. "Could be a decent fake," she said at last, "The picture's not good enough for me to be sure. Is it a picture of your face you recognize?"

She directed her question at Nick, who considered it a moment before responding. "No," he said at last, "Besides, no one's taken my picture since I got this cut."

He gestured at the mostly healed cut beneath his ear, but Waschbar shook her head. "It could be older," she said, "Adding a cut's easy. But if you can find the picture your face was taken from, there's no denying that this picture is fake."

"Do you know anyone who could fake photographs like this really fast?" Judy asked, but from what Waschbar had already said she wasn't too disappointed when the raccoon shrugged.

"Just about any artist could with a little practice. To me, these look like decent fakes, the kind I could do in about half an hour if I had all the pictures ready. Not great, not terrible, but without the original negatives or the picture his face came from I can't prove it. Really, I don't think anyone could."

Judy considered what they had learned for a moment. Although Waschbar hadn't been able to immediately prove that the pictures were faked as she had hoped might be possible, they hadn't come away empty-pawed. Knowing that the fox who had really been on Zweihorn's doorstep had a white-tipped tail and had likely been holding a bottle was a promising start, as was knowing that there were ways to prove that the photographs had been tampered with.

"Thank you, Peggy," Judy said, and Nick immediately echoed the sentiment.

Waschbar shrugged again and gestured to take in her attic studio. "I'm happy to help. Making a real difference would feel a lot better than making all these fakes."

Author's Notes:

The title of this chapter, "It's Only a Paper Moon," comes from a 1933 song by Harold Arlen. I thought that it was appropriate because the lyrics are about how everything in the world seems fake and cheap without someone believing in and loving you. It seemed appropriate considering that in this chapter Nick and Judy visit a studio filled with the tools to fake photographs, including props as fake as the paper moon in the song's title and referenced in the lyrics. "It's Only a Paper Moon" is also one of my absolute favorite songs, particularly Ella Fitzgerald's version, and I felt I had to include it since it's a sweet and period appropriate jazz number.

The receptionist at the tabloid being engrossed in a crossword puzzle is a reflection of a real-world trend in the 1920s; crossword puzzles were enormously popular at the time, with newspapers quickly including them. The first book of crossword puzzles was published in 1924 and was immediately successful, and the fad was still going 3 years later in 1927, although they were no longer quite as popular by the end of the decade.

The way that Nick is described as being dressed in this chapter is accurate to 1920s men's fashion. Although nowadays most men's dress shirts have cuffs that can be secured with normal buttons and cufflinks are relatively uncommon, they were a necessity at the time as the cuffs in style at the time were too stiff to be held together with standard buttons. Also in the 1920s, as ties made out of silk became more popular for those who could afford them, tie clips came into fashion as a way of securing ties without damaging the fabric the way that a pin would. Striped ties were also in fashion at the time, and if anything Nick's tie is somewhat subdued compared to some of the flashier colors popular at the time. As in the 1920s cufflinks and tie clips were some of the few pieces of jewelry it was considered acceptable for men to wear, some of them were quite elaborate, and a wealthy man having his inset with emeralds wouldn't be out of the ordinary.

As mentioned in chapter 6, when Nick used the word, "posilutely" was a bit of 1920s slang that's a combination of "absolutely" and "positively."

The set that's being built in the New Yak Evening Graphic offices is made mostly of plywood, which was available in the 1920s. Plywood was invented in the 18th century, and while the now-common four foot by eight foot sheets didn't become standard until 1928, the material was readily available and cheap in 1927.

Margaret Waschbar's last name is from the German word "waschbär." Waschbär literally means "wash bear" and is the German word for raccoon due to the tendency of captive raccoons to rinse their food before eating it. Interestingly, in the wild raccoons aren't apt to do so except when they're foraging for food near a shoreline, so in captive raccoons it may simply be a fixed behavior that is triggered by food and water being available near each other.

Waschbar gives what is hopefully a pretty good explanation of how photos were faked in the days before Photoshop. Any additional explanation that I add would be more or less a repetition of what's in the chapter, so I'll leave it there. As the name kind of implies, Photoshop was designed to provide digital equivalents to physical techniques, and while there are a ton of things that can be done with Photoshop that would be difficult or impossible with physical manipulation, it is still quite possible to achieve impressive results with simple tools.

As always, thanks for reading! I'd love to know what you thought.