The Fire Triangle -- Part II, Oxidizer

The Fire Triangle: Book II - Chapter 12

And if anyone happened to be looking at it...well, then that was what was going to happen.

Slipping on his backpack again, Conor moved out into The Quadrangle at a brisk walk; he did not run. A moment later, he was standing at the base of a statue that had been placed here only somewhat recently. Up until about a year ago, it had occupied a hallway in the Zootopia Museum of Science and Industry, the honorable Dr. Lionel G. Lionheart.

Only distantly related to the former mayor of Zootopia—a great uncle twice removed—Dr. Lionheart had been a genuine polymath, a true Renaissance mammal. In his time, he had been an architect, a painter, a philosopher, and a poet. The twisting horns that graced the four corners of Zootopia Central Station were his design; the only items remaining from the original building. Several of his works hung in the Savanna Central Art Museum, and his treatise, 'On Being Feline' was considered a classic of the genre.

But it had been as an industrialist and an entrepreneur that Dr. Lionheart had made his biggest mark on the world. Spearheading the electrification of the City of Zootopia, he had accumulated a small fortune...which soon became a vast one as more and more of his business ventures prospered. He had also been the first mammal to propose dividing Zootopia into different climate zones, and had even drawn up plans for the venture. That had been one of the few of his ideas he hadn't lived to see brought to fruition. While the concept had been sound enough, the technology needed to make it a reality had not yet then existed.

Urged many times to run for public office, Dr. Lionheart had always politely declined, insisting that he could do more good as a private citizen. And good he had done; helping to found the Zootopia Philharmonic, and the Zootopia Opera Company. Later, he built the city's first movie palaces. It would have pleased him to no end to learn that his former estate was now the Zootopia Academy of the Performing Arts.

His former estate...

Like many another great mammal, Lionel Lionheart had sired a generation of ...well there was no other way to put it, wastrels and ne'er-do-wells. Within twenty years of his passing, his heirs had run through his nearly entire fortune. What they didn't squander on lavish lifestyles, they lost in bad business deals. In one case, a sizable chunk of the late Doctor's money ended up in the pocket of a swindler who was never caught. Before another three years had passed, everything was gone, including the family estate, seized by the City of Zootopia in lieu of unpaid fines and taxes. For many years afterwards the property had remained in limbo...until another Lionheart had proposed its rebirth as a school for the performing arts.

Now Conor stood at the base of Dr. Lionheart's statue, his expression not unlike a pair of crossed fingers. Was all this really worth the risk?

"Dumb question, you're HERE already, aren't ya?" the young fox chided himself, gazing upwards at the sculpture. It depicted a short, burly lion, standing with an elbow on a plinth and his trademark pince-nez held in his other paw. The smile on his face seemed to suggest that he was sharing a private joke with the viewer. On the base of the statue, carved in Old Roman Script was an inscription, Qva Re Necesse Est, Qvod Svpergreditvr, 'Reality Is That Which We Must Rise Above.'

Those words had been Dr. Lionheart's lifelong motto. With an attitude like that, it was hardly surprising that Gazelle, the mammal who'd given the world 'Try Everything,' was a champion of the academy now adorning his former property.

None of that, however, was of any current interest to Conor Lewis; what was drawing his attention at the moment was the late Doctor's tail, winding its way around the base of the statue in a counterclockwise spiral. Of particular interest was the bulbous tail-tuft, about a foot to his right. Leaning forward on one leg, he reached out and rubbed his paw over the tuft as if trying to summon a genie.