Chapter Text
[Chapter One]
An afternoon outside of Zootopia's city limits besides the doors of a huge red-brick pub...
"Oh, my God, I've finally met one of them. One of those internet myths come to life. A grown-ass fox who doesn't talk," Gail Kalevi-Holkeri Bailey remarked, the short, skinny gopher anxiously rubbing one of his small paws across his neatly-trimmed grey fur. His plain-looking blue jacket clung to his body in the coldish spring breeze while he sat atop a wide wooden chair. "What’re the odds?"
The extremely tall mass of fur and flesh standing before the gopher shrugged, one of the predator’s meaty arms leaning up against a white sign covered in various hard seltzer flavors.
"Ayeh. Never says a word. Not since he got caught in the tenement fire of '99 as such a tiny lad… when he could barely buckle his shoes. Mind you." An equally tall yet far heavier fox— his scraggly orange fur sporting the heavy scent of an obnoxious citrus shampoo— sat at the other end of the rusty metal table across from the gopher. That fox's baggy black shirt was covered in icons memorializing 'Fleetwood Yak (by Candlelight) - '00 in Belfast' and matched his jet-black shorts perfectly. “Pretty meaningless if you ask me. He’s a cute hoor. That fella. A mechanic with both the brains and the connections enough to turn a pair of used yellow diesels into a bleedin’ tank maybe, if the ZPD asked ‘em to build one.”
"Still. A silent fox. It's like meeting a virgin at a maternity ward," Gail quipped. He then reached yet again for the small bowl of salt-soaked pretzels before him.
"Kiss my arse, you little pox," the overweight fox said with a small laugh.
"For the love of God, Gail, just tell us?" the third fox in the group chimed in, watching their three compatriots munching through another bunch of pretzels. They sucked in a tiny breath while gently hitting their skinny arms against their light pink blouse. "Are you going out on a boat with us or not?"
"I've already come all this way of my own accord," Gail began. He then slapped a paw upon his cheek in mock shock. "Oh, wait, actually, that's not true. At all. My roommate dragged me here for his—"
"Their," The fox interrupted, a paw tapping against a small silver necklace.
"Fine, alright, again," the gopher went on, reaching for a glass of sparkling club soda awkwardly positioned at the far side of the table, "It turned out that ‘Kris’ slash ‘Pseudo’ here told me that their family wanted to spend a quick moment with them at 'The Gleeful Gazelle's' to celebrate their academic award from their university, which meant getting an official letter from their Taoiseach, which came in the same exact day as their hormone treatment milestone thing that they have waited months to happen."
"Ayeh." The thick-looking fox shot up a paw and wiggled it in the air to get a nearby waitress' attention.
"And, as I've always suspected, all foxes are related. All of them. No exceptions. After my roommate sucked me out of my marathon of C++ programming, which you'll 'owe me one' for by the way, they plopped me in the middle of a karaoke competition inside some weird pub. A location inside of which everybody expects me to be 'okay' with drinking booze at Goddamn one-thirty-five in the Goddamn afternoon," the gopher rattled on, sucking down some more club soda, "yet I've apparently had to be a part of over a dozen predators all yammering on about finally seeing their aunts again, their cousins again, their nephews again, their nieces again, their step-fathers again, and goodness knows who else. Those foxes have been losing their minds."
The extremely tall predator tapped a nearby bottle of Irish lager as his stouter companion did the same. A joyful deer lady with a wide smile and a skinny red dress nodded at them. She then held her big tray of bowl after bowl filled with fried cheeses a bit higher and slipped it over Gail's head. While she headed back inside of the pub, the gopher glanced back at Pseudo. The larger mammal put on an amused expression yet said nothing.
"I thought that you can't get drunk and take a whole silver briefcase's worth of medications at the same time? Like… for real?" Gail sighed a little bit. "What the hell would your hematologist say?"
"Ol' Seamie Tubridy O'Dowd? I last saw him by the dartboards! Want me to fetch that culchie right now?" the bigger fox asked, interrupting with a massive grin spread across his chubby cheeks, "I'll say this for him as well: if you can beat 'em, which won't mean much since the poor mammal's arms are like this rubbery gobshite wrapped in white cotton, he'll give you a free 'consultation' for whatever you want. Even slip you a supposedly 'missing' doctor’s note for some extra painkillers or whatnot. Ayeh."
"No thanks," Pseudo remarked. He stepped a bit closer to the gopher's spot, both roommates looking out reflectively at the wide expanse of picturesque green hills and gigantic blue lakes that begin as the concrete road besides the pub ended. "After all, the best medications these days are specially ordered suppositories.” Pseudo’s voice grew even more cheeky. “Direct insertions that’re made by the best nurses around day after day? I’m amazed that the co-pay is in the single digits! Especially given the tools they use to keep you bent over!"
The two other foxes let out belly laughs. The gopher remained rather peeved looking, yet he cracked a slight smile all the same. The roommates then looked each other in the eyes.
"If Pseudo's ever been anything in all the months I've known... them... then I guess they've always had a knack for getting into the right ‘tools’ to meddle in anybody’s business doing anything anywhere," Gail muttered, hearing the waitress show up once again.
"Speaking of 'tools', you should consider taking your own daily multivitamins anally too, in my opinion," Pseudo commented as he picked up a wine cooler offered by the waitress, "Gail, like, I've seen how huge what you take looks for being such a tiny mammal. And they’re ‘libido enhancing’ as well, right?"
"You... you son of a bitch," the gopher murmured. He picked up a bowl of delicious-looking fried cheeses for his own part. "I mean, well, you… daughter of a bitch."
The three foxes chuckled for a moment. After a bit more alcoholic refreshments got taken in and the pretzels were finished off, the four mammals all stood up. Their eyes all returned to the bucolic environment nearby as the chill February breeze grew a tad strong.
"Lukey's boat. And you're inviting this little... burrowing prey mammal... along. Really," the thick-looking fox commented, reaching into his pockets for a pack of cigarettes, "I must say this about our Pseudo. He’s a real chancer."
The gopher noticed the pronoun shift but didn’t think anything of it. Neither, apparently, did the androgynously acting fox. "We're not even fishing? Though?” He shut his eyes for a moment in frustration. “We're searching for a variety of weird as hell objects that’re about to wash up suddenly? All these valuables out on the lakebed? Seriously?" Gail asked.
Pseudo nodded. They finished off the last of their drink. They then immediately chomped down the last gigantic cheese curd covered in breaded delights, with the predator's massive teeth and large paws striking Gail as weirdly juxtaposed against their frilly and feminine outfit.
"In the entire length of time that you've know me, little adventures going on for years throughout our entire lives, just what in the hell makes you look at a small, grey-furred gopher with his Coke-bottle glasses and his big blue pocket-protector and go: 'yes, he's clearly naval material, if not an admiral-ish type'?" Gail asked, raising both eyebrows.
"It's not that, if we're really honest," the chubby fox chimed in.
"Huh?" the gopher spun around.
"It's that if we invited another fox with us, well, then we'd expect that he'd try to swipe whatever he finds for himself instead of us all sharing in the loot. You, though, as somebody who’s more than a bit the whole 'grazer' stereotype, seem actually... uh... radically trustworthy by comparison..." Pseudo awkwardly scratched their neck while narrowing their eyes. He sucked in a deep breath. “Alright, forgive me, but I guess I just naturally trust prey mammals a lot at this point of my life.”
"He’s bang on," the wider fox added.
"Oh... God… damn it..." The gopher shut his eyes for a moment.
"Can you both stop acting the maggot? And help my nephew and I here pick up Lukey's boat?" The thick-looking fox shot out an arm and pointed backwards. The extremely tall fox— who'd stood as still as a statue and been totally uninvolved throughout most of that afternoon's events— blinked and slipped his head slightly to the side.
"Fine. I guess. I don't honestly have anything better to do on a Friday afternoon. Which is, yes, rather pathetic to admit out loud. And in public, no less," Gail murmured, his voice growing fainter and fainter with each additional sentence.
"Let's head on over to O'Brian's, then! It's only thirty seconds away!" Pseudo declared, posing their grey and orange body dramatically for absolutely no reason as they were in the habit of doing.
"Wait? What? Don't we have to pay something?” The gopher stuck out his chin a bit. “I had like ten soft drinks in a row!"
"Of course not! It's me cousin's pub!" The stout fox picked up a tall backpack that'd been resting against his table. "I got his step-sons this steady gig at the local post. And please don't ask me about 'em at all since they're a couple of dossers that barely know how to read let alone how to write. Still, they can slip a watch or anything else from a mammal's arm just like their paws were made out of buttery—"
"Okay! I won't ask!" The gopher felt no interest in hearing anything incriminating about his roommate's extended family.
"Ayeh!" Pseudo and his fox associate both called out.
"I know that it's pretty 'late in the game' to ask this, but can you please, Pseudo, tell me what their names are, again?" Gail asked, pointing at the two other foxes. Instead of getting offended in the slightest, the predators simply laughed out loud.
"The cracking one with the backpack who shut down those dossers last night," Pseudo began, shutting their eyes while stretching their arms, "I’ll—"
"Stop. Stop right there. I've never set paw in either Ireland or Scotland my entire life. And I'm not going to use Zoogle to look up every other slang word. Okay? Just tell me their names, Pseudo, and for my sake come across like less of a... leprechaun... for the rest of the afternoon?” Gail sighed for a quick second. “Look, I've been there for some of your ‘RA’ and ‘TA’ presentations at the college, for God's sake, and your natural tone of voice and fashion sense is like Jerboa Lewis from 'The Nutty Professor’," the gopher anxiously rattled off, finishing the last drops of his weakly-flavored drink, “since you’re the kind of mammal who’d actually use ‘prestidigitation’ in a sentence.”
"Somebody's rather tense," Pseudo casually remarked back.
"I've had multiple unhappy experiences in my life with ships and boating, alright?" Gail’s sudden stiffness made all three foxes think that they’d witnessed the gopher experience something like a Vietnam War flashback.
"It's 'Lukey's boat'! You've nothing to worry about!" Pseudo slapped a paw against his side dramatically. "It's huge and all made up with in this freshly-painted, ornate-looking green!"
"Freshly painted green! It's the prettiest boat that you've ever seen!" The stout fox grinned. "It's like a rhyme!”
"If one of them starts singing, then I swear to God that I will literally punch him in the face," the gopher whispered under his breath to himself before raising his voice, "so, anyways, names?"
"Him? Here? That's good ol' Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin!" Pseudo playfully smacked an arm across the chest of the fox wearing the 'Fleetwood Yak' shirt.
"Okay." The gopher stared straight upwards blankly.
"And the quiet one there is Pádhraic Fay Bohannon Moloney!" The extremely tall fox with the mute personality made a hint of a smile as he pointed at Pseudo and the other fox pointed right back.
"Okay, Pseudo, I just want us to be clear," the gopher began, stepping away from the pub onto the nearby street a bit, "I… you know I’m, well, 'on the spectrum', right? And I always tell you how badly I wish real-life had subtitles, right?"
The mammal's joyous-looking roommate simply nodded back.
"So, just so we're all on the same page, there's a snowball's chance in hell that I'll be even able to pronounce either of those full names let alone remember them. You understand this. Correct?"
"Ayeh!" Pseudo and his closest fox associate both called out.
"Fine. Then." The gopher sucked in an immense breath. "Let's go exploring out in the middle of a gigantic body of water that I’d never even seen before this afternoon. Using a boat named a weird sea shanty. After three of us have had one too many. With me coming along. Me. The mammal tailor-made by natural evolution over millennia to bury myself deep underground. Me as in the gopher who hasn't tried to truly ‘swim’ since my teenage days taking side classes at East Parkland Middle School… back when Dawn Bellwether of all mammals ran our school district. Okay. Let's... do… this?"
The three foxes sniggered in a way that the gopher found rude, although he said nothing back. They marched in a loose line down next to a set of massive green shrubberies. Gail rubbed his temples.
"For what it's worth, Gail," Pseudo suddenly chimed in, "you should know that 'Gearóid' becomes 'Gerald' and 'Pádhraic' becomes 'Paddy'. Just like how 'Kris Deke' and just 'Kris' evolved from my full name of 'Christopher Deacon’. Although, 'Pseudo', like you guys all know, has its own weird story behind it."
"Oh, those first bits of information would've been nice to know over an hour ago," Gail murmured. He tapped a paw all around his small jacket. "Speaking of double-checking things, uh, we might need to walk back inside and head to the far east side of the pub. My Ramsung has just like... vanished or something." The gopher put on an annoyed expression as his small paws slipped across his little body’s tiny thighs.
A peculiar noise, which sounded almost like steam escaping from a tiny bit of machinery, sounded off from the line of predators stepping behind Gail. The gopher flipped around. He watched Paddy slip a long black device out of one of the many pockets littered across his ragged pair of blue jeans.
"The hell?" the gopher called out.
Paddy wiggled his orange arms in the air in a circular motion and then scratched his right paw against his left knee. As well, Paddy swirled his head in a rhythmic fashion. He finally blinked in a peculiarly rapid way. Those little acts apparently satisfied Gerald. That other fox's contentment, in turn, satisfied Pseudo.
"Looks like that musky rascal with the odd-looking eye-mask and the quirky accent, the one-and-only Teddy Conneff, swiped your cellphone right out of your paws when you made your way to those arcade machines," Gerald commented, "but there was never anything to fear. Teddy couldn't get past your opening screen code thing. That bleedin’ mammal just likes meddling into other mammals' lives, especially stalking that girlfriend-ish Latina of his who's always filming in the green spaces nearby. And Paddy, well, picked that Ramsung piece up off of the gentlemammal’s room floor."
"You can tell all of that? Just from a few noises and gestures?" Gail asked, looking incredulous.
"Should I... not be able to do that?" Gerald asked back, the fox genuinely seeming puzzled.
"This is... wait..." The gopher held his electronic device high above his head. "He even wiped off the screen and apparently sprayed all of it with some reflective chemicals too, making it totally clean from top to bottom, after he got it back for me. That’s… kind of you."
"Ayeh… look, little one, our species isn't all made up of thieving, philandering bastards," Gerald said, scratching all along his scruffy neck, "and even if we were, well, you both living with Kris and being the closest thing that bipolar, gender-mucking fox has to a 'best mate' practically makes you family. And you don't turn family's lives into gobshite. Never."
"How's he... I mean... how's they related to you specifically, anyways?" the gopher asked.
"Oh, that's easy! My great aunt's late husband was his uncle!" Pseudo eagerly chimed in.
"His... and... then... but... that..." the gopher stammered, trying to set up the family tree in his head. He felt like he needed some black coffee to get more awake and alert. He also could use a spreadsheet application on his cellphone for help, if he really wanted to come up with something clever to say.
"Look. All foxes are related. Okay. Simple as." Paddy jokingly slapped the gopher's shoulder.
He then marched off with a bit more speed and came upon a white wooden fence around a tall yellow ranch house. The various residential blocks inside of that small town appeared just as pretty to Gail as the nearby commercial districts, with thick batches of evergreen trees proudly standing up alongside neat lines of white sidewalk and the occasional massive fire hydrant. The winter breeze, however, had grown quite stronger as time had gone one.
The four mammals all took in the first glimpses of a massive boat perched atop various grey metal struts that held it up a meter or so up in the air. The foxes had wide smiles. The gopher had started tapping a bit on his phone idly and mulling through various uncertain thoughts.
"Alright. I'm family. That means that I'm not going to drown. They won't let me drown. Obviously. And they’re all in good spirits. Hell, we just might discover something neat on the lakebed too. Right?" Gail rubbed his temples a bit more as he muttered to himself. "How bad can it be?"
A few minutes after the four mammals picked up Lukey’s boat and headed out into the water,
“I’ve got to be honest,” Gail began, the gopher rubbing his glove-covered paws together for a moment, “the water being this clear? Like… the fact that I can stare down length after length right to the very bottom? And count all the natural springs throughout a whole mile radius? It’s so pretty, I know, but it feels wrong. Like it’s breaking my sense of reality.”
“Reality,” Pseudo repeated. The fox continued to fiddle with their long, metallic device that leaned up against the sides of Lukey’s boat from within, the specially made item featuring a set of gripping pinchers at the end that the mammals found a bit too sharp.
“Well… like… I feel as if I’m living in a video game, and something about the programming for his lake itself got botched. So, the actual water itself failed to properly load, and thus I’m staring straight through an artificially created patch of philosophically perplexing nothingness,” Gail declared. He snorted. “The chemical make-up of these waters must be incredible. And it reflects the strange pattern of that cumulonimbus front coming in high above ideally.”
"To be honest, I thought everything about the way you talk and present yourself was, at first, some kind of a bleedin' act," Paddy remarked, the fox clutching a small bag of peanuts and munching on a few of them, "but it only took a minute or two to figure out that you're just like that. You little pox. You’re just like that."
"Like what?" The gopher reached idly for his own gripping device while still gazing at the shimmering rocks laying across the lakebed.
"Like a mammal that says 'philosophically perplexing nothingness' in a regular conversation," Paddy muttered, the fox chuckling for a few seconds.
“Is that something small, golden, and sparking out by the big rocks? Finally!” Pseudo interjected, the fox’s smile appearing as wide as their friends had ever seen.
“I think so!” Gail started rowing. His companions quickly followed his lead. The gopher stopped for a moment, though, as a strong breeze distorted the surface of the water. “Seems like a ring? Or a pin? A badge? Something else tiny yet shiny?”
“The hell is that little golden nub attached to…” The stout fox rubbed his forehead in total confusion.
The gopher’s eyes grew wide as dinner plates as it finally struck him that the gold ring that he and his compatriots had been gazing at, surrounded by a set of large grey rocks all around, rested at the end of a long paw. The formerly bright colors had faded considerably with bits of fur getting somewhat ragged. Facts were facts. The four of them had come across a whole arm buried on the lakebed.
“Mother of mercy,” Paddy muttered, the fox clearly looking overwhelmed as sweat began to bead up across his chubby cheeks.
“A dead body? Really?” Gail thrust both of his tiny arms in the air as emotions rippled across his whole body. “A dead body! The one time, Pseudo, I let you bring me on one of your weird adventures, and your stupid ass brings me right to a crime scene! God, you damned preds!”
“Could be… worse…” Paddy muttered without really thinking.
“How?” Gail asked, his eyes bulging out of his face a bit.
“Well, it could be raining,” Pseudo chimed in.
With a crack of thunder appearing far above, the chunk of thunderclouds that’d slowly migrated across the sky resting atop the lake began to darken. Drop after drop started to fall upon the three foxes. The gopher, though unscathed at first, let out a gigantic moan.
[End of Chapter One]