Chapter Text
At an employment office on a nondescript Zootopian road,
"Just think it over, please?" asked the short wolf wearing a tight piece of plaid polyester. He held his clipboard against his chest as he stepped just behind the tired-looking gopher, both of them heading out of the nearby office complex.
"I mean what I said," the gopher replied, leaning up against the dew-covered glass walls of the bus stop. He still, though, glanced back up the sidewalk twoard the protesting predator. "Look, it's not that I'm not willing to get back to work."
"I know," the wolf said. He took a few steps closer. The breezy spring wind of the Marshlands slipped down the tall trees around him, rustling all over the sides of his sport jacket.
The small prey mammal, for his part, clutched his slender coat tightly. He put his eye level upon the wolf's belt buckle and blankly stared. "It's a great opportun—" He stopped to swat a mosquito buzzing up his leg. "—ity and all. I just don't want to waste the time of the mammals at any of those places."
"But, hey, why not take a look at," the wolf started to say, not even finishing his sentence.
He had pointed at a massive advertisement on the side of the bus stop. The gopher turned his head. Both of them took in the slick poster's layer of scenes— a shiny grey jet took off beside a crowd of mammals, all giving a standing ovation. That took above the ambigiously suggestive image of a buff, smiling tiger holding a red and white striped helmet at crotch level.
"The 'Zootopian Air Force'?" the gopher asked, "I see that the ZAF 'always looking out for sharp-minded mammals seeking adventure and excitement'... are you kidding me?" He let out a big laugh. "Me, with my eyes, waiting in line behind foxes with freaking night vision? Stepping up to a cockpit with levers and switches that I can barely even reach?"
The predator looked as determined as ever. "Well, there's that too." He pointed yet again.
"I'll give them credit," the gopher responded, eyeing the ad to the side of the ZAF poster, for coming up with the 'Stoner Panels' title. And I'm all for helping out 'alternative energy', even if I've got nothing like a 'career history in construction'." He kept on reading. "But, and it's a 'but' as big as the damn sun, this is still an invite to move clear across town."
"What?"
"Look at the fine print." The gopher trailed a paw downward. "It specifically says 'hiring for Tundratown'."
"Okay, forget that! Look up!" The predator allowed himself to get a bit peeved.
"An ad for the 'Night Bite', a predator/prey mixing nightclub," the gopher read aloud, shifting his eyes around, "and their plans to franchise in new areas such as the Marshlands— the place 'hunting eagerly' for 'fresh new bartenders with a taste for the naughty'."
"It could... be..." The wolf trailed off.
"I'll pretend that using the word 'hunting' doesn't make me deeply uncomfortable," the gopher began, leaning his small body against the glass, "and remind you about something important. You've seen my freaking medications list." He swatted yet another mosquito. "God, I wouldn't be surprised if downing one single wine cooler left me drooling on the bar floor."
"I'll bet," the wolf started to say, letting himself get huffy as he opened his mouth wider, "that you can't think of any comeback to this one!"
The gopher's eyes traced the wolf's final gesture over to a zig-zag-shaped ad located within the bus stop itself. An antelope with some of the tallest horns that he had ever seen stretched across the poster. Her warm smile matched the glittery red spirals with vibrant purple highlights that somebody had painted on her— each horn was a wonderfully pretty work of art in the gopher's eyes.
"Deluxe Hoof & Horn?" The gopher's tone of voice had shifted. "Their tag-line is: 'There's more to you then you think there is!'? I see—"
"Well?"
The gopher shifted about, hearing the bus finally chugging along the road toward them both. He idly scratched his nose and narrowed his eyes. "Got to give 'em credit: that's a catchy slogan. I'm not sure if it's grammatically correct, though, let alone logically sound."
"I..."
"Oh, hell, I promised myself that I wouldn't walk out without signing up for at least one thing," the gopher remarked, "no matter the odds." He opened his mouth a bit, chucking at himself, and reached for the predator's clipboard. "I got it. Thanks."
"Thank you," the predator replied, letting his feeling of relief wash all over his senses. He slipped the clipboard down and watched as a checkmark appeared coupled with a scribbled "Gail Bailey" signature. "You have a good afternoon, Mr. Bailey."
"Not like," the gopher mumbled to himself, smashing both his arms down on a fresh pair of mosquitos, "they'd actually hire one of me,"
A few days later, inside a shopping complex in the Marshlands,
It went without saying that they'd mess up the name-tag.
Gail stared blankly at the door-sized mirror in the corner of the employee break room. Of course, narrowing his big eyes behind his bigger glasses— thick as the coasters on the dining area's table— didn't change the solid black font embossed onto the slick plastic. The gopher still fantasized otherwise. He mentally pictured shooting laser beams from his eyes that finely tweaked letter after letter.
"G. Kalevi-Holkeri Bailey," the gopher read to himself, "so, they couldn't just let you go by 'Gail', could they? Not exotic enough? They had to print down as many vowels as they had to spare, then? Looking like a stamp on the side of foreign booze?"
The management at Deluxe Hoof & Horn hadn't misspelled anything. All of the forms that Gail had filled out made sure of that— the oddly personal questionnaires on the business' website had lead into detailed thoughts that his new bosses jotted down in their retro-style, yellow-lined notebooks. Yet the little quirk that somebody at DHH had put on his name-tag irritated the gopher more than a bona fide mistake. Those small, nagging things constantly set off the neurotic clump of brains that he had— shoved at the end of the tube-shaped furry flesh that he called a body— anyways.
He'd tried and halfway succeeded in forcing both his size and his species to the back of his mind during the interview process. He'd buried himself in talk of "creative cocoons", "trusting teams", "species-safe societies", and the other "business buzzwords" with "added alliterative appeal". The mammals at DHH had practically radiated out happiness over the past few days. Gail's own reflection, though, showed the ugly truth of exactly how out-of-place he felt.
The absolute smallest smock that the "hoof and horn specialists", as they called themselves, had in their boutique still didn't fit him at all. The gopher had offered to still "wear" it. Walking around with his flat, brownish-grey paws sticking awkwardly out of the limb holes, though, made Gail feel like a clothesline "wearing" a clump of drying towels.
"Hey, we're ready for you out here," yelled over a chipper voice from the next room. The soft noise of little paintbrushes slipping into cups of water sounded off. "They're polishing. They're painting. Everything looks jazzy."
The pair of rams working the afternoon shift alongside him went by "D'Iced" and "D'Ance", Gail thought, for crying out loud. Naturally, they'd want to make his name as exotic as they could. Just as obviously, they'd tell him that whatever outfit they put on him looked "fabulous" and fill him with enough encouragement that he might burst, even if almost none of it took. It didn't matter if he didn't fit in— if he didn't just lack any hooves or any horns of his own but hardly knew about them. He had little to worry about.
The gopher pressed his glasses up against his face, brushed some bits of cloth off of his forehead, and faced the double-doors that lead to the boutique floor. His paws anxiously rubbed against his belly as he took a few slow, awkward steps. He reminded a full meter away from the exit.
"Like they said: 'jazzy'. It's literally your first day," Gail muttered to himself. He took two more steps. "It's fine if the job has absolutely nothing to do with what you did in college." One step followed. "It's fine if this is the first job that you've had in over a year." Yet another step followed. "It's fine if you taking this job kills your government-paid health insurance, even if you were promised it wouldn't, and you look like a clueless moron after butchering some poor grazer's head." He reached out in front of him. "I can do this. Think 'jazzy'. Be 'jazzy'."
Gail thanked God that, at least, he hadn't gotten a job as a motivational speaker. He held his right paw up against the still doors and gradually pushed them open. His insides still felt frozen with raw nervousness.
"Only a few minutes to go as we set up, and you'll be behind this next ram in a jiffy! Oh, and he looks like he's a newcomer to this too!"
"Oh, good," Gail let out with flat joy, flopping his smock-covered arms over his head. At least, he thought, the guy in the chair knew about as much about the manicurist slash painter slash sculptor job as he did. "Sounds fabulous." Before anybody could say a word back, Gail thrust himself forward through the double-doors.
Deluxe Hoof & Horn had one truly wonderful thing going for it. The indoor mall that it sat inside of usually littered itself with garish area-themed items. DHH, on the other paw, utterly refused to tailor itself to the Marshlands. The restaurant next door specialized in the the most exotic plates of fried insects. The doctor's office across the street was even faux-submerged, with floppy-stem greenery planted all around its gangling wooden walls. DHH couldn't stand out more if it was literally on stilts.
The mammals that went in to get their horns delicately trimmed down, messily painted up, cleaned off to pristine whiteness, covered with gaudy designs, or whatever else— anything that they could possibly dream up, the DHH staff had to be game for— walked into something like a art teacher's playhouse. Rainbows of of acrylic color spread across multiple shelves while oddly-shaped clippers rested atop jars of bright glitter. DHH seemed like the kind of thing that a big-pocketed eccentric bored of downtown Zootopia would want to set up as hobby. And that was exactly what it was.
"Ah, there you are!" An energetic deer with a smile popped across her face and a smattering of shimmering gold paint across her outfit clutched Gail by the shoulder. "I'm glad to see you to your station!"
"Thanks, ma'am," Gail replied, "and I see that the stall has everything that I could possibly use on the guy."
Gail felt glad that, at least, the deer resisted the urge to physically pick him up and hoist him over to the customer-filled chairs. A stern warning that creatures of the chipmunk, gopher, guinea pig, et cetera size found that deeply offensive had apparently sunk into the management.
"I told you, you silly pickle, call me 'Krystal'!" The deer slapped an arm against the front of her smock, her massive smile growing a little bit wider.
"Never call me a 'pickle' again and we're golden," Gail remarked, not even thinking.
"Hah, we're going to love you here, more and more each day," Krystal responded. She made a quick bunch of gestures all around the stall, reminding the gopher of the scalpels, hammers, chisels, and other dangerous-looking equipment beside the industry standard "brush-n-clipper". "I'll check up on you in like fifteen if you don't mind— see you later!"
"See you in a bit, then," the gopher meekly stated. He watched as Krystal scurried away. Gail then scanned the scene all across the boutique floor, underneath the brightly-colored walls. Cheery prey mammals had gone off in their own little worlds, customer and DHH staff alike deep in passionate conversations.
Gail heard a coughing sound beside him. The fact that the gopher had his own corner, assigned directly to him, in the widely-spaced array of chairs and stalls hit him. It then hit him that he was on his own for the very first time at that job. It finally hit him that, down behind the desk that was his workstation, sat had an anxious ram many times his size.
"Oh, hello," Gail remarked, scurrying around a bit, "I'm new here. I've heard that you're new to this as well."
"Oh, yes," the ram answered. Gail glanced around the cape-like fabric stretched around the sitting sheep's limbs and noticed a fresh-looking "Meles Meles" t-shirt below it. "I still can't quite wrap my mind around it. So, it's like a haircut and shave, but... for your horns and hooves?"
"It can be, sir," Gail replied. He instinctively reached for a medium-sized clipper. The ram's black wool— done rather neatly, in a tightly trimmed way— didn't quite match the clump-coated sides of his somewhat gangling-looking horns.
"But they also schulpt them, paint them, and even stuff as extreme as attach little odds and ends to them? All right here?"
"Well, I—"
"You know!" The ram suddenly twisted around, meeting the gopher eye-to-eye. Gail snapped his metal device against his fur, awkwardly bonking the end on his ears. "I saw this thing, like, the day before yesterday— Aegrid and I did! I said nothing— I'm not a dick to anybody, no matter how weird they look, and even if they're a dick to me first I try to be nice! But like, anyway, this guy! He had horns on with tassels on them— the Preyda guy, not the behind-the-counter one but the supplying-the-shelves on— so these sparkly silver strings would like be wiggling and jiggling with his every move!"
"That sounds, uh, quite interesting," Gail nervously replied, watching his customer's odd facial expression.
"Like the things that some well-endowed lionesses and tigresses slap on themselves on those naughty pop-ups, you know! The 'Help me, my Lord, and play this flash game dripping with viruses' girls!" The ram mimed rubbing a pair of invisible breasts in the air. "Bouncy tassels with glittery bits!"
"I see," the gopher interjected, trying not to wonder how closely the ram's sordid Zoogle history matched his own, "and so, sir, if you—"
"Seamus!" The ram shifted about in his seat. "Forget about all that 'sir'-ing!" He shot out a hoof.
"Hello, Seamus," Gail said, twisting to the side to put his clipper back into place, "I'm glad to meet you." Gail clutched the sides of the Seamus' hoof with both arms, trying not to accidentally hook his smock's fabric onto the ram's wool. "My name's—"
"Kalevi-Holkeri Bailey," read the ram off of Gail's chest. He stopped for a second. Seamus' eyes grew wide. "Goddamn is that Scandinavian, you know? Like, whoa, really Scandinavian— like did your family come fresh off the boat like just a couple years ago? I can't hear a trace of an accent, not a whisper, hey! Was it hard to lose that?"
"We, wait, have—"
"Do you usually put those freaky little lines through the vowels in the name?" Seamus tapped Gail's name-tag. The ram clearly didn't mean to, but the strength of Seamus' arms shoved the far smaller mammal back onto a side shelf. "Oh, sorry, but I still, damn, think that it's as if you're taking off time battling Frost Giants in the sub-arctic to do... manicure work? Freaking manicure work, of all things?"
"Sir," Gail began, leaning forward and clanking a paw against a bottle of paintbrushes, "my family and I go back in Zootopia for more than three generations. It's nothing that special."
"Is there like, uh, some mythology, or," Seamus started to say, thinking up a question but not being sure how to phrase it.
"The names come from the Finnish Prime Ministers that used to be charge, back in the '80s and the '70s. Nobody really interesting or anything... the bosses of the Conservative National Party, like, my mother was a big fan of them when I was born for some reason." Gail blankly stared out, wondering exactly how to re-rail the conversation. "I... well..."
"Oh, I guess that's interesting of her," Seamus muttered.
"She's a bitch."
"Huh?" The ram appeared to genuinely not have heard what Gail said.
"It's a switch," the gopher remarked, amping up his voice, "I mean: my first name is 'Gail'. I'm 'Gail'. Name-tag switched it up to put the last names... well, forget about all that, how are you doing today?" The gopher walked up to a bottle of white paint. "Seamus?"
"Oh, I'm fine," the ram replied, and he turned back so that he faced an angled mirror. The glass gave him an ideal view of his head— his horns right in the middle of view. Yet he didn't seem to recognize his own reflection at all.
"You mentioned something about placing decorative items onto your horns, beyond just a bit of painting?" Gail asked, the gopher hurrying over to a drawer set with all kinds of glittery objects, "a jazzy bunch of swinging—"
"Oh, God! No!" Seamus let out as he burst out of his seat. His hazel eyes seemed to burn a bright yellow as terror struck across his face. "I was just asking!"
"No problem, sir!" Gail tried to put on a happy face, even though the ram's yell shocked him into tripping.
"It's Aegrid that's into all that, curious about all that," Seamus went on, lowering his voice as well as his rear end, "that shi—" The ram cut himself off and wiggled his back into the sides of the chair. "Asking about my best friend, who's really interested in coming in, but for me? Me? I just would like a trim."
"Certainly," the gopher said, stepping closer to the ram.
"Keep things basically as is. Just neater, you know? I want the standard trim. The standard look that's called... called... called whatever the hell the guys that you all put in your ads call it."
"Sure," Gail responded, scurrying about for a particularly small tool in the various drawers. He found himself making a natural smile, for once, as he picked up a metal file and leaned over the ram's body.
"Like three parts 'poppy'? One part 'jazzy'? Full part 'jazzy' styles are something for the rams with the roller-blades and the short shorts, no offense!" Seamus closed his eyes as he made the air quotes. "Thanks!"
Gail stopped a quick moment to wonder if that was homophobic, but he immediately shoved all distractions out of his mind. He had a job to do. It took only a matter of seconds for the gopher to clutch his tools and mentally sketch out his plan of attack. Every last section of Seamus' horns rising up into the air before him had noticeable imperfections— bumps, crannies, nooks, and the rest that an even sweep of circumference-hugging moves could easily smooth out.
Everything appeared fine. In truth, Gail thought to himself, filing horns into pristine plainness relied more on visual instinct than any kind of training. It had looked completely simple when the gopher had shadowed D'Ice the day before. Yet Gail's neurotic streak kept him from truly getting that fact, still worrying up to the moment he started slipping little cloths upon hooves himself. It oddly seemed to fit with his natural drive to keep things in orderly shape— Gail was the kind of mammal that walked next to a supermarket shelf, glared at a disorganized stack of soup cans, and then spent a whole minute carefully laying out the cans so that each row had the same number as each column.
The ram looked lost in thought for several minutes. He showed no objection to the gopher's careful moves, but his half-closed eyes scanning the boutique's psychedelic walls, over and over again, betrayed some kind of anxiousness. Gail had been told earlier that some customers completely clammed up when the work started, but he hadn't figured Seamus for such a mammal. Still, the gopher thought, it likely was no big deal.
"Not to chat you up, since I guess this won't take long," Seamus finally said, glancing over at Gail, "but like... uh, I asked before because I'm genuinely curious about you. Like, well, if you and your family are recent immigrants or something, you know?"
"Okay," the gopher flatly replied, his mind focused on shining the ram's hooves from the bottom up.
"It's not just that you see a weasel, or a mink, or a ferret, or whatever tube dude in a job usually worked by the so-called 'grazers', and wonder what's got him there, really," the ram went on, taking in a little breath.
"Geometrically, though, gophers are less 'tubes' and more like, say, 'wedged boxes', I'd say," Gail commented, his mind wandering as he opened a bottle full of shiny gel.
"Hey, how about that," Seamus replied, waving a hoof before going on, "but, still though, I'm wondering. You're not just walking around in one of the most predator-full parts of Zootopia. Hell, I'm doing that too. You're here, though, in all places... to work. And you've got a college degree."
"Got a what in the what now?"
"A degree," Seamus continued, "I'd think. You just used the word 'geometrically' in a sentence and did it correctly, for crying out loud."
"Huh, that's right," Gail responded, still engrossed in his polishing. He genuinely enjoyed every moment of it. If only, the gopher thought, the rest of the world could clean itself up into a new, shiny form just as easily.
"I apologize for being so blunt about it, but I've got to wonder, voices lowered," the ram said, finally spitting things out completely, "just why the hell are you here?"
"Here?" Gail's look of confusion was genuine.
"The freaking Marshlands," Seamus remarked. He twisted about in his seat, accidentally pushing the gopher off of his horns, and tapped his bottom hooves anxiously against the nearby desk. "Why here? I don't have to tell you— somebody with the double-whammy of your size with your species— that it seems really screwy."
The gopher froze for a moment. Memories about being literally stepped on, kicked down, shoved around, and more flashed in the back of his mind, much as he tried to stop it, and his mood flashed back to normal. His standard frown popped onto his face, and he sucked down a deep breath. The ram, for his part, waited for a response.
"Seamus," Gail began, meeting eyes with the ram, "the Marshlands are literally the last place that I'd like to live in! I'd take anywhere other than this! God, if I could swim, I'd literally flop myself into the water and head sea-bound for a Finnish fishing village even if I'd never even set a paw there!"
"Huh, alright, but—"
"The fact is, and forgive me for going off on this," Gail continued, slapping down his spray bottle, "this place is excruciating! I can't stand it, and almost everybody agrees! That, though, is the freaking catch!"
"The what?"
"Most mammals feel exactly the same as I do! And thus," Gail went on, shoving his arms above his head in frustration, "have things gotten well and sincerely screwy! Unfortunately, crap quality living means low rent, and vise versa, and so this has wound up the only place somebody with my kind of health insurance can afford!"
"Oh, I get it," Seamus said, nodding appricatively.
"The bugs that aren't on forks try their best to feast on his flesh," the gopher moaned, scratching by instinct all across his face, "and mosquito after mosquito stalk me wherever I go! But you know what?"
"What?"
"The miserable little shits have never managed to make it past through the booming air system! That DHH has! Here, right here, is an oasis!"
"That makes sense."
"Even if one or two of the puke stains with wings get in, paintbrushes work perfectly as bug-swatters!" The gopher's mood switched yet again. Gail's gigantic grin, stretching from cheek to cheek, came from one of the few sincere bursts of joy that he'd felt in a while. "Trust me, I've done it! Dunked the little bastard into a jar of pink acrylics and made a Jack Savage style one-liner too!"
"What was it?"
"I quipped, uh... 'Pink's your color, darling'," the gopher said, it suddenly concurring to him how lame the line sounded when uttered out loud versus in his head.
"Oh."
"Anyways, uh," Gail continued, trying to sound less embarrassing, "long story short: working here gives me a chance to go about my day actually getting things done."
"Oh, hey, speaking of getting something done," Seamus interjected, rubbing a hoof against his forehead, "how are my horns looking? I'm so near-sighed without my glasses on that all the mirror shows me are various blobs."
"Oh, one moment," Cail replied, clutching a small washclothing, "and I'll be done with the polishing. Not only are they preciously smooth, but I'll have them shining white as the shimmering keys on Elkon John's piano."
"Sweet, Gail," Seamus remarked, "thanks a bunch for this."
"We're not doing anything that would mess up the lenses or whatever else, anyways," Gail went on, "with no paints getting dripped around or glitter getting wiggled about. So, please, slip those glasses back on."
It took only a matter of seconds for the gopher to finish his polishing. The ram clutched his golden-colored frames and wiggled them back onto his face. It lit up with delight.
"Damn, it's like I dipped them into a washer full of Oxen-Clean, alright!"
"It's not 'jazzy', but it'll do," Gail remarked. He spied himself in the customer's mirror, and he marveled at his natural smile. Not the slightest bit of forcing, unlike countless other times he'd tried to fix the whole 'resting bitch face' thing that his parents always yelled at him about.
"Oh, I'm all ready to check-out and all that, then," the ram said, lifting himself out of his seat.
He turned backward and made his way to the entrance area— the ram awaited by both warm-looking set of three dark blue couches plus a pair of giggling mares with giant errings working the register. Gail duly followed. The botique's main doors opened and somebody stepped inside, but the gopher barely noticed. He, instead, tried his best not to trip as he hopped a bunch of stairs onto the check-in slash check-out counter.
"Forgive me for not knowing the standard tip or whatever they call it here," Seamus remarked, fishing inside of his wallet, "the 'bonus' or or 'gratuity' or 'honorarium' or whatnot... you can just take the fiver."
As the gopher reached out his paw, he felt like he'd finally had a truly happy experience. It was weird to put things that directly and that plainly. Still, spending a while without a perpetual raincloud following above him was a big deal for him.
"Oh, he's so cute!"
Before Gail could understand where the cheery female voice had come from, he found himself pulled backward from overhead. Puffy black wool rubbed all across his back. Gail sucked in a little breath, eyes growing wide, as he felt a pair of hooves probing his ears. The gopher's mind slipped into a sort of sunken place— not a single coherent thought coming to him— as he instinctively locked his arms against his sides.
"Oh, look at those ears! Those little flaps of pure adorableness!" The bouncy mammal behind him shivered in surprise, Gail shaking a bit as well. "Wow!"
"Aegrid, wait!" Seamus called out, stepping right up to the counter. Gail's sight got blocked from all sides by the thick wool. "I think he doesn't like that!"
"I could flop these ears up and down for hours!" Aegrid exclaimed.
Gail sighed. He closed his eyes. The raincloud was back.
A little bit later, in that same Marshlands shopping complex,
"If the pink could be a bit redder, you know?" Aegrid asked, sticking out her neck as her eyes feasted on her reflection. The freshly painted arrows going along the sides of her horns glistened in the sharp light.
"Could you be, well, a bit more specific?" Gail asked back. The gopher glanced about his long tray filled with blobs of acrylics— every little section of the metal featuring its own freshly mixed blend of colors.
"Like what if it was both red and pink, at the same time?" She patted a pair of hooves upon her chest. "Creatively chaotic, if that makes sense?"
Gail scurried across his workstation and grabbed a tiny red bottle. He twisted about and balanced a pristine, still unusued paintbrush in between his legs. It took a second for him to notice that Aegrid had met her eyes with his. Gail put on a toughtful sort of expression.
"Well, sometimes things in life don't make sense. You have to make them make sense— for you."
[End of Chapter One]