Words by Falke

There was a fine line between sympathetic and professional that police officers had to strike. Too much one way or the other, and they could lose the trust or cooperation of their fellow citizens.

This time, Nick thought, it was best to stay professional. Sympathy would come across as non-genuine, from a predator - and if he thought too hard about the circumstances of this police visit, even he might let some of his amusement through.

Mammals ate the landscaping. It was a fact of city life, and so unavoidable that Zootopia's parks and maintenance departments just kept a line item in their budget for the losses, and worked around it. Trying to stop all of it would be hopelessly hard, and ZPD usually didn't get called in unless there was a whole herd of mammals stripping the sidewalks bare.

Sometimes there were special cases, though. The city preserve gardens were living museums, full of exotic specimens that didn't grow in these latitudes, or were going extinct, or only bloomed once in a generation. There were signs - and in the case of special exhibits, signed agreements - promising dire punishment if anyone decided to nibble on the displays. And judging by the weight of the summons envelope in Nick's paw, the botanical council took vandalism about as seriously as arson or murder.

Manchas returned to the open engine and started work. If nothing else, this damned cylinder was something he could fix. He had to get the injector out of its housing and check for seized parts. That was routine, not least because he'd had to do this for this very engine many times before. It never got any less finicky, though. He had to reach the wrench past the manifold debris covers and both fuel lines, into the gap above the block housing, then get the right leverage with too-big paws without dropping the whole thing-

The wrench slipped loose and clanked down against the oil reservoir.

He hissed a curse, and bit it off before he could say what he really wanted to. The rest of the garage would be listening. He could tell from the unusual quiet behind him. Instead he stood and braced his arms on either body panel, staring at the offending wrench.

When he reached for it again it slipped out of his pads and to rattle and ring on the floor. Again he held his tongue and bent to scrape it out from under the car, but his frustration found an outlet anyway. The claws on his other paw crackled and hissed against the rubber tread of the tire. 

When he got back to his feet, Feaver and Page were watching from the next bay over. Page's antlers were very still.

Spence wasn't expecting them back. It might have had something to do with how they'd squeaked in the door as he was on his way down to the front of the store to lock up, keys in paw. Now his scraggly mane was bristling.

"I told you already, you're wasting your time here."

"I'm sorry we had to come back so late, sir," Nick lied. "Chief got back and told us to get the full date range on your sales, so we can pass it off to the detectives. It saves them a lot of time."

That was a lie, too, even if Bogo himself recommended it - pass the blame up the chain, if anyone pushed back against legal inquiries. Nobody really wanted to take things up with the chief, and it usually made them less likely to take it out on the messenger, too.

Spence still looked like he was considering it. He had his arms crossed and he was dragging it out. But finally he did give a theatrical sigh and turned to stalk into the back rooms.

"Wait there."

They sat downtown for two hours and in the cruiser for another one, checking in with a couple of their suppliers again just in case they'd missed one that wasn't declaring all of its commerce. Nick wasn't going to hold his breath.

"Maybe we can get D and L machining to be more specific," Judy said. She tapped her pen on the console. "What's 'general statute equipment' mean?"

"The manual says it has to do with emissions regulations." Nick kind of hated that he could recall that without a reference now, and while he was driving to boot. But Judy's stubborn focus seemed to be inspiring. Or at least contagious. "What's the address?"

"287 Cherry."

"Got it."

There was traffic in the way. Three blocks later, they were sitting in the late-shift gridlock - and this wasn't something they had an excuse to blink the lights for.

Nick hadn't even registered that Judy's foot was going again, but when he reached for her she jumped in her seat and went still.

"Sorry."

"It wasn't even about that," Nick said. He laced a couple of his fingers through hers over the center console. This was a bad habit, when they were on the clock and under the cameras. But it wasn't like they had to drive just now, and it wasn't like anyone could see in their high-rolling cruiser.

"What should we do for dinner?" Nick had to smile when she chewed her lip. "Just while we're waiting in traffic. So we can save some time."

"Someplace we can get to on foot," she said. Her ears made a valiant effort to lift. "I'm tired of sitting in the car."

"Hearthseed it is."

Their slowdown was thanks to a lane closure where a mid-scale street crew was fixing one of the curbs. An okapi in a city-issue reflective vest was working the manual slow sign; He gave them a familiar smile as they passed.

This is compliant with Z2 and there are no spoilers.

"Fast Lane Detailing," Nick said. "Car cleaning, tires, odds and ends. And all of it's almost certainly legal."

The shabby building had been a chain car repair place, until some enterprising hyena named Spence had bought out the lease and turned it into a private operation. Now, locals called it the best-kept secret in Sahara for getting body work or custom audio done, no matter the scale of your car.

And everything was in order, as far as Nick and the rest of ZPD could tell from the paperwork. Spence had licenses, and paid his fees, and cleared safety inspections.

So naturally, Organized Crimes was paying close attention. The shop met every single bit of regulation and paid every due required of it, in advance. That set off all sorts of alarm bells. No legitimate business was that squeaky clean.

What was more, the few leads Nick and Judy had extracted showed chop-shops in Rainforest and Tundratown were both sending something back here. It was the last part of the city-wide auto parts puzzle - if they could just figure out what they were looking for.

The Watcher floated along into the middle of what might have been a dead end crossing, paying them no heed at all, and stopped there, looking off at something. It would be the farm, of course - but Judy was so turned around in the dusk and the close confines of the maze she had no idea which direction that was now.

Winter stared down at it like she was hunting, at least at first. But her expression changed to a simpler excitement as she watched it go, turning back the way it had come and melting without a trace into the stalks. 

"One day I'll learn how they do that," she promised.

Judy felt Nick's claws prickling under her vest. 

"Should we go after it?" he asked Winter. "See where it goes?"

"They don't like being chased, remember," Violet reminded them. She drew her scarf tighter around her tucked-in ears. "They'll just disappear again."

"And I don't have my lightning catcher." Winter sounded put out. "It's still charging."

"Are you really thinking of coming back later? It's already dark." 

"No." Winter picked up her paws and led the way down toward the junction, going slow. "I need another hypothesis first. A new one."

The farm traffic peeled away into the distant produce rows somewhere, and soon they were driving past the lake on their own. The last of the sun was crowded under ranks of thick clouds overhead, sending red and orange flashes off the choppy water.

Winter, half on Violet's lap, spread out the map to guide them.

"Go left after the lake," she told Judy. "On the old path."

It was twisty old doubletrack, leading them past the reeds and cottonwoods that gathered around the water and over a steep ridge into proper forest. Stands of oak gave way to taller willow and hickory trees that even with half their leaves gone still swallowed the light.

They came to a gentle gully, open to the sky and hemmed in all around by the skeletal trees. Leaves drifted down on the wind.

And at the edge of the trees, tucked in under their shelter, was a tiny wooden structure that looked as old and weather-beaten as the rest of it.

The cabin was built mostly of wood, mismatched and gapped in places where spot repairs or improvised patches used different timbers. The tin roof, spotted with willow leaves, had gone to rust so dark it nearly matched the rest of the building. It was maybe fifty square feet, counting the rickety porch that sat out front, and still mostly upright. An open door and window frame sat like lopsided eyes looking out at the clearing, with broken balusters on the porch railing for jagged teeth.

With a family the size of Judy's, even a simple jaunt into Bunnyburow's sleepy town center often became a production of errands and appointments. 

Judy had secured the use of the farm's old truck for the trip, but it had come with conditions that she drop off commissions and pick up orders of specialty ingredents along the way. Today she and Nick had been through The Grand, city hall's mailboxes and down the road a bit the other way to barter seasonal specialties at the Weston family's own produce stand.

Winter had waited in the center seat the whole while, craning up at the thready clouds in the skies through the windshield or scribbling notes in her book. 

"I have a to do list, too," she said, when Judy asked about it, and went back to her neat writing. "I've never been to college before."

Nick looked over her ears at Judy and smirked.

Now they were pulling into the lot at McLaren Tri-Burrows Technical College. It was clearly the holiday - there were more leaves than cars scattered across the blacktop.

Winter climbed out of the truck behind her, still clutching her notes. The door squeaked and snapped as Nick pushed it closed.

"Where to?" Judy asked. "This one's your errand."

"Um." Winter looked over her writing. "I have to meet with Professor Reeder. At the solar agriculture lab."

"Look at this." Winter reached past the bowl to tap at her laptop and wake it up. It displayed a stack of spectral bands and waveforms.

Nick had to shrug, when she looked back at him.

"This is what a Watcher looks like. Um, in infrared. I got this from a night vision monocular last year. Now look at this."

She called up another set of bars. Nick couldn't tell the difference.

"It looks the same," Judy said.

"Yep." Winter beamed at them. "There's nothing there."

"Why not?"

"Um. I don't know yet. But you can see Watchers, right?"

"Right," Nick said.

"Well, that means they are giving off radiation. In the visible spectrum. So why can't I detect them in the other parts of the spectrum?" She pointed her spoon at the inscrutable data. "Like right there?"

Nick glanced at Judy's amusement. It had been a long time since he sat through a science lecture, but he had an idea of where Winter was going with this. "So what's your hypothesis?"

She finished another bite of soup and grabbed for her notebook. "If the Watchers emit visible light, then... they are likely to emit something at other wavelengths along the non-ionizing electromagnetic spectrum, too."

Happy Christmas! Here's a story about Judy taking Nick along on the family's annual tree-cutting expedition.

Hills rose gently to the west, covered in the spur of forest. Most of the trees were titanic ponderosas, some of them surely a hundred feet tall, but there were firs of all kinds marking out the run of the water in the lowland and a wide sweep of skeletal aspens, looking thin and cold without their leaves. It hadn't snowed much here, maybe because of the shelter of the close hills. There were patches of dirt and prairie grasses everywhere, and under the shade of the biggest trees there was no snow at all.

The quiet was huge. All of the engines had died, and now they were many miles from the nearest highways. There was nothing out here but the whisper of the wind and the stillness of evergreen trees, smelling of cold.

It was pure wilderness, more than the valley around Silver Lake, or even the forest they'd traversed during the Moretti case. Growing up, Nick's benchmark for deep woods was Orchard Park, and that was in the middle of a city where he could go in a straight line and hit gridded roads eventually. The real thing was much more humbling.

Or maybe it was the confidence of Judy and her family doing that. Everyone who wasn't a kit being distracted by the adventure had gone to work again. Most everything that had been loaded onto the truck now had to come off into neat stacks on a ground tarp. Some of the rabbits clustered around Morgan, getting more instruction. A few trotted away on their own projects, lugging serious cameras or setting up hobby drones. Others seemed to be charged with nothing more than carefully watching as kits fanned out into the treeline.

"You seeing this?" she asked her partner at once.

"Yeah, I am," Riles said. He downed his coffee and threaded the mug back onto the thermos top, settling back into work mode as quickly as she had. "Do you have a plan?"

There was something wrong about it, something even more out of place about its presence than the kits they'd encountered. It was a thinner haze, less deliberate. And it being up here, tucked away at the end of a draw? That didn't match up. This wasn't the farmers' gully. None of them would have been able to see this from their houses, so it must have been something new.

"Do you know where we are?" Beck asked. She was reluctant to turn away and risk losing sight of the danger.

"Down to the second," Riles assured her. He squeezed a control on his wristop and Beck heard it beep faintly, saving the waypoint. "Got a bearing on that, too."

"Okay. Nice and easy. Let's get under it, see if we can find a source."

Happy Harvest, all! Here's a comfy and very slightly spooky story about what Zootopia firefighters get up to when the weather gets cold.

---

There was no trail. They followed a good line through the lowland, right next to the trickle of the creek, working their slow way up the hill in comfortable silence. Beck savored the quiet heat building in her calves.

She'd spent a lifetime hiking through draws like this, following the water or climbing the ridges to get the lay of the land. It was familiar surroundings, but unlike her childhood there were now more and much bigger houses rearing suddenly through the trees, reminding her each time they came on them of what they were out here to do. This was someone's legal backyard now, probably.

Beck didn't mind trespassing, in this case. They had their own mandate, and with the exception of Riles she had yet to meet a mammal that could keep pace with her through backcountry anyway. They were moving through like ghosts, watching and maybe judging a little bit from deep in the trees.

"You wonder if anyone's home," she murmured, as they passed a new three-story build that was shining lights from all its windows and from the fixtures built into a deck that would have comfortably held rhinos. There was no sign of a single mammal.

"I'm sure they have their reasons." Riles was always the diplomat. He ducked his head to see through the branches, ears perked. "No fur off your tail anyway. They've got a good firebreak."

"Next, then."

"You have somewhere to be?" He gave her a knowing grin, even as he fell in beside her. "We can take it easy tonight. No gear to ruck or lines to dig."

"I am taking it easy," she said, resettling the pack that was only slightly cut down from the full kit she carried on the fireline. "I could be making you hike this properly."

She did slow her paws a bit - not because he wouldn't be able to keep up, but because he was right. This was their first opportunity in weeks to enjoy the cold, and the sheen of moonlight that picked out the pine needles around them. Unless they happened on an active fire, the worst they would have to do tonight was take notes.

"So what's going to happen to you?" Nick asked.

They were an hour onto the road to Morrigan's Ford - the proper road this time, now that there were no bandits running rampant through the countryside. Judy and the others were passing mammals going the other way, bound for the farms and fields outside Willow Vale, and the occasional Sentinel that gave them a vague nod of recognition.

None of them knew what Judy and her companions had done. Having done it herself, she knew that was probably for the best.

"Why?" Judy eyed Nick's faint smile. "Wondering where you'll be able to schedule your hustles?"

He grinned wider at the teasing. "It's mucking out the stalls, isn't it?"

"Probably." Judy sighed. "And scrubbing the Watchhouse corridors."

"Fitting, since that's where this all started." Nick considered. "That's what you get for blackmailing me."

She stepped wide and waited long enough for Sedgewick to draw between them. "He's never going to let that go."

---

So this took five years and change, end to end. And yes, I spent some time in there teaching myself to draw and there was a virus going around you might have heard about. But I'm really hoping I never stall out on a big story like this ever again.

If you're still with me, thank you for reading all of these years. I hope the stories brighten your day like putting them together does mine.

In two day's time they had retraced familiar steps back down the forested slopes by the lake, and through the glades by the bridge.

They made camp in the same clearing Sedgewick had taken them to that first night, and dined on roots and berries they collected from the treeline. Judy took first watch again, and Nick second, and in the morning they crossed the broad field and made for Willow Vale.

Smoke rose into the winter air, but this time it was orderly and faint instead of the thick gouts from burning timber. Judy's sensitive ears caught sounds of industry and chatter, and she picked up her pace past the glassy remains of the magical fallout. There were mammals on the walls again, unfamiliar muzzles but with dazzling armor that she knew by heart. The Lord's Guard had come to Willow Vale.

"Ho, Sentinel!"

She beamed at Nick. Even through a week's worth of dirt and grime, they knew who she was. She pulled her eager rush to a halt at the gatehouse and saluted the horse who came down to meet them. His armor and the plumes on his long, silvery helmet denoted him as a sergeant of the Keep - many ranks her superior.

"Sir. I am Judith Hopps, of the Morrigan's Ford Council Watch." Would they believe her? It didn't matter. "My companions and I found the vergence that caused all the magical trouble. It's put to rest."

"Really." He took in her tattered cloak and dented armor, and the remains of the glaive in her paws. His fascination was plain - that she was so diminutive, or that her regalia had survived such abuse at all. "Hopps, you said?"

"Yes, Sir."

"The rabbit who left her post last week?"

Her ears wilted. She'd honestly forgotten how this had all started. But there was no getting around it. "Yes."

Apart from the kitchen, the only sign of life was in the huge number three barn, four soaring stories high. The central section of its doors, where a second set of hinges allowed them to swing more narrowly, were propped open despite the cold, spilling the bright of worklights into the cleared lot.

Inside it was immediately warmer, thanks to the quartet of heavy wood burning stoves that were wheeled out and run every season, hooked into a set of built-in flues inside the barn shell and surrounded with benches for mammals who wanted to warm up.

And now, instead of the well-packed dirt floor that Nick remembered, a herringbone pattern of red and brown brick spread out under their paws, carefully edged around each of the building's post footings.

Judy crouched down to run her paws over the fresh groutlines. She was fascinated - but then, she would have had even stronger memories than him of the way it used to be.

It's louder," she said, her ears swinging around the space.

Nick met her again just outside the front door, after she collected her cookies and went to wait on the patio where the decorative globe of the hearth sculpture would keep her warm. He smiled and dropped what looked like a bundle of straws into her little bag from the shop.

"There are beekeepers here, from Rainforest," he said, and held out one of the straws. It was a waxy tube, she saw, filled with golden liquid. "I knew they'd be here somewhere. Did you ever have one of these?"

"Honey straws? Of course."

"They were my favorite treat as a kit," he said. "And they're still two bucks for a dozen, so I got some for us and some for the kits."

The market around them showed no signs of slowing down - if anything, there were probably even more mammals out here now that the sun was down. Even the amphitheater's topmost tier of vendor stalls and tents was bustling, and Judy was gratified to see Christopher had his own short line of customers. She waved hello to him and ducked past the waiting mammals to reunite with her family. Nick lingered, long enough to endorse the blueberries to the prospective buyers.

"There you are." Rita put another crateful of root vegetables on the staging table and brushed her paws. "We were wondering if you'd gotten lost."

"It's Old Town above us now," Nick said.

"Above us?"

"More or less." He felt that sense of weight again, and felt the urge to lower his voice to a murmur. "That used to be the edge of the city, way back when the river was the boundary. And then they built a road to cross it for all of the trade and mammals who came through." He followed Judy's gaze up, as if they might see through to where traffic bustled along it now. "And then they redid it again when the trains were built."

She looked impressed at his knowledge. "You say you didn't come down here at all as a kit? You'd make a nice tour guide."

"Are you kidding? It scared the hackles off me." He nodded forward, at where the light picked out a sharp curve approaching. "Flashlights weren't this nice back then. Besides, it's just a tunnel."

Judy played the beam around, through dark recesses that probably hadn't seen the light for decades.

Maybe just a tunnel was selling it short. Nick could see locked diverter gates and cramped passages going every which way, and a lot of old stonework vaulting. The viaduct had once been a commercial interface of its own - the lone waterway and its attendant path had spread like a delta into Old Town back when it was open to the sky, full of workshops, storeyards and housing.

It just wouldn't have lasted long after things got built out. These days there were only a few species that still lived in fully underground burrows, and even fewer who tolerated the idea of being underfoot. Any homes that had once been down here would have long been abandoned.