Disclaimer: Zootopia stories, characters, settings, and properties belong to the Walt Disney Co. This story is written under Fair Use Copyright laws.
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The Fire Triangle—A Zootopia Fanfiction
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Part One:
Fuel
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Chapter 11 –The Fire Next Time
(Pt. 6...Continued)
No one could say for certain when and where it first appeared—but everyone agreed that the ZPD first became aware of the thing after it popped up on FuzzTube.
For once, Cybercrimes Division was able to track the posting to its source, a young kangaroo rat in Little Rodentia named Tracey Merriam—who insisted she'd copied it off a message posted on the Dischord chat-server, #ElevenFive.
When the Cybercrimes techs went to examine the #ElevenFive log for that day, they found no reference to it whatsoever. For a moment, Lieutenant Albert Tufts was certain Tracey had been stringing them along...until one of his officers, a Linsang cat named John Bakalop, pointed out a strange, disjointed gap in the conversation.
"Look there; here's this one kid talking about how his dad made an excuse not to see him on Saturday, and in the very next sentence, there's a girl, complaining about how her folks won't let her get her tail pierced. It's like they're not even aware of each other's presence."
A check of the time stamp revealed nearly an hour-long gap between the two messages. Everything in between had been deleted.
That had been frustrating, but also encouraging. Any and all misgivings about the video's authenticity had just been quelled for good.
The next item on the agenda was basically a fool's errand, a task everyone knows is a waste of time, (and that no one wants to perform,) but still it has to be done. And so Lt. Tufts had contacted Fuzztube and demanded the offending video be pulled. Even if the website had agreed—which the ZPD knew they wouldn't, (and they didn't,) it was too late anyway. By then it was common knowledge that the video had begun to go viral even before it had landed on the video hosting service ...and the word was quickly spreading IRL (In Real Life) too.
A young caracal at a skate park in Savanna Central told his buds about it, and one of them, a blackfooted tree-rat, told his girlfriend about it, and she told her girlfriends about it, and one of them, a Samoan flying fox-bat told her sister, who told her boyfriend, who knew a guy, who knew guy that worked as a DeeJay on weekends, and he put it up on the big screen at a rave in Old Growth City.
The first of Conor's friends to learn of it was, typically, Dana Alchesay, the coyote girl who'd been his shill that night on the Beach Promenade. After seeing a reference to it on Preddit, she'd looked it up and then quickly informed the other members of the fugitive young silver fox's crew.
By that time, news of the video had begun to spread well beyond the boundaries of Zootopia. Erin Hopps found out about it while taking a break from rehearsing her audition song to play some volleyball.
It was two on two, Erin and her friend Tawny Lloyd against a pair of masked opponents, Jessie Ringgold, a raccoon, and a Tanuki with blue-dyed hair and a name the young white-furred bunny could never quite remember; Mitchi, or Micki or something like that. The game ended in a tie because Jess had to leave for a babysitting job.
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The Fire Triangle, A Zootopia Fanfiction -- Part One
Mystery / ThrillerIt's been two years since Nick Wilde and Judy Hopps broke the Savage Predator conspiracy. Now a brilliant and effective team, they're only a few steps away from making the detective bureau and growing closer with every passing day. But even as thei...
