Pack Street: Next Generation - Ch.12 - Draft 1.1 (Zootopia)

Pack Street: The Next Generation - Ch.12 - 1.1 Version - Zootopia

[This is a continuation of: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9917648/chapters/32546730 ]

[Chapter Twelve]

[A few moments later in the same Pack Street gardens,]

Vivian was a hot-blooded mammal. That didn't change the fact that she wasn't stupid. She knew that keeping somebody from doing something wrong by distraction and diversion always wound up being easier than using brute force— whether done outright or set up as a kind of accident. As she'd overheard her father once saying about pack on pack relations, a slicing scalpel's approach worked better than that of a charging ax.

Alex and Vivian both figured that they had to come up with a new plan to stop Reverend Blair from voting in the upcoming fateful Zootopia City Council meeting. At the very least, they needed to start by putting the last of their gardening supplies away. Seeing the West Oak Middle School's teacher engrossed deeply in conversation with the half pastor and half politician that'd recently arrived, the two preteens made their way across a grassy path to a little nook that featured various boxes up together.

Alex noticed a mostly empty backpack and began to slide it upon himself, tucking his peculiar light-shooting machine into a side pocket. Vivian stowed away her shovel alongside a bunch of other wooden tools. She stared her reflection in a nearby bucket of water.

Vivian constantly had to simply sit back and let other mammals' own decisions control the course of her life. Fighting back usually only made things worse. That was why she'd gotten stuck inside of those gardens in the first place, Vivian thought, and she had to find ways to get other mammals to do what she needed them to do in a subtler way.

Of course, as a preteen living in a working-class neighborhood she had to simply had to grin and take it constantly when it came to weird decisions by her parents. Al and Velvet Roe did silly things such as buy huge boxes of elephant-sized clothes only to patch and snip them down to regular items that they all could actually wear— albeit with some embarrassment for the ladies, but Al in particular seemed to embrace the awkwardness. Until she got old enough to actually move out, Vivian thought, she had to learn to just swallow a lot.

The Cormo family, though, featured their own pattern of weird behavior where they'd constantly show some burst of sharp, independent-minded curiosity that hurt bad in the short term while somehow working out fine in the long run. It never made any sense to Vivian. Along with her parents, she had constantly found herself having to go and help with whatever shenanigans those three mammals got themselves into. Yet she didn't mind nearly as much as it looked as if she did.

Remmy was fine enough as far as dads went. Johnny actually made for a good friend. It helped most of all, Vivian thought, that she weirdly saw a ton of herself in Betty Cormo.

She popped out of her trance-like mental state to see Alex wandering idly around the nearby bushes. The smaller mammal tapped the screen of his cellphone over and over again. The clicking sounds felt painfully annoying by themselves. It somehow felt worse when Vivian noticed that Alex had gotten sucked into exchanging messages with his father.

She had to admit that the stoat did something rather cool— being able to determine what species after species of Zootopians actually read when they picked up the latest novel sounded pretty interesting. That didn't change the fact that Marty certainly didn't even know about the little failed hustle. Even if he did know, Vivian thought, he wasn't the kind of parent that had the ability to make snap decisions to make everything better. Betty Cormo was.

If that big wolfess had walked into the gardens that morning, Vivian thought, then they could've gotten together and come up with some foolproof plan. Instead of having Reverend Blair trip up by triggering some kind of an allergic reaction using a far-fetched little scheme, they'd fake some sort of emergency pulling the elderly pastor right out of downtown Zootopia altogether. Vivian admitted to herself that she didn't know much if anything about predatory religions, but then there had to be a number of things that the reverend would race over to.

"Surprise exorcism? Some tiger that's never even seen a broccoli sandwich in his whole life starts spitting up green glop over in that nearby diner? Or is that just too, like, plucked-out-of-the-movies level, ugh," Vivian muttered to herself, getting deep in thought, "or maybe some couple where the girlfriend looks nine months pregnant walks up? She begs to get married? At the last moment, she's keeping the cub, foal, kit, or whatever in wedlock—maybe asking this while faking labor pains, even?

"Vivian?" Alex asked, putting his cellphone away. He tapped a paw upon the bigger mammal's midriff.

"I sure as hell don't want to do anything here in the gardens, not really," Vivian whispered to herself. She shut her eyes and flashed back to the cartoons that she used to be deeply into. "Have the pastor slip and fall into a muddy pit of little saplings? Or wind up in a grassy patch covered in dangerous rakes, bumbling from one to another as he tries to escape? Accidentally inhaling a pawful of ground up fertilizer, he coughs and sneezes himself silly to the point of knocking himself out? God, each of those sounds worse than the last..."

"Vivian, uh, you're lost in your own little mental world again," Alex remarked. He reached into his backpack and pulled out the last of the ginger ale bottles. "Hello?"

Still, every silly idea that Vivian came up with on the fly made more sense than the notion of playing with allergies that Alex and his mom thought up. The two mammals likely had planned out a whole day of swindling together. Charlie and her son, Vivian thought, radiated off these vibes of emotional detachment that caused constant irritation and made their real agendas hard to read. It made sense when applied to those outside of the pack, but the ability to turn the rhetorical cannons inward and use them on their neighbors freaked Vivian out.

"Hey!" Alex interjected. He slipped the top off of the bottle and wiggled the open container directly underneath Vivian's face. The delicious smell of the bubbly concontion filled her senses.

"Give me that!" Vivian snatched the bottle and began guzzling it down. Her eyes met with Alex's own expressive pupils, something that the little mammal had inherited more from the paternal than maternal side. "Yeah." She couldn't talk and drink at the same time, but she could make a mumbling sound that indicated that the smaller mammal should start talking.

"So, the previous idea of how to keep Reverend Blair from the fateful vote has gone off the rails, honestly," Alex said, rubbing a paw against his chin, "and we've got to have a more flexible plan."

"Transportation," Vivian muttered, taking a quick break from drinking.

"Huh?"

Vivian sucked down the last of the ginger ale. "Simple enough, right? A Zuber brought him here. And a Zuber is the most likely way that he's planning to get from here to City Hall." She crushed the bottle between her hooves. "We need to make sure that the right driver shows up."

"It's approximately a fifteen minute drive under standard conditions," Alex chimed in. He reached for his own cellphone yet again, stepping in a semi-circle around Vivian's body.

"I usually don't give a crap about politics," Vivian went on, tossing the crumpled remains of the bottle into a nearby trash can. It made a satisfying plunking noise as it hit the bottom. "Still, from what I know about bickering adults, we can say that holding a vote takes more or less half an hour. I'd say... which means that we've got to stretch a fifteen-minute drive into a forty-five minute one."

"Indeed," Alex replied. He tapped a few icons on his cellphone. The screen lit up with an ominous looking green glow, the color bathing the little mammal's entire face. "There's various ways to try to trap a vehicle or otherwise keep it away from its destination—"

"Various abilities that applications of an illicit nature provide," Vivian remarked.

"Well, 'illicit' is relative. I'm talking  about ones that are, and this is important," Alex said, puckering his face a bit as he explained, "best understood as 'technically legal'. Okay?"

Vivian's curiosity in what exactly the smaller mammal did online often came back to bite her. From peddling some insider trading trips on some stock exchange to setting up details for an armored car robbery to hacking into secret poker games by international players and more, Alex constantly got sucked into something that shocked the larger mammal— Vivian still finding herself spying from over Alex's shoulder time and time again. This particular time, though, Vivian shot out a covering the cellphone entirely.

"Hold on, what is this?," Alex asked, his paws wiggling in place.

Dark feelings of inky blackness flashed through Vivian's senses as she realized what needed to happen. She shut her eyes and sighed. She wished she had at least two more ginger ales to suck in before she said the inevitable. Instead, she didn't have any more time to waste.

"I'm not sure how to say it, so I'll just come out and say it," VIvian declared. She sucked in a deep breath. "Call your mom."

"Call Charlie?"

"No, I mean call the technician that administers the slime mold from which all foxes and half-fox hybrids wiggle out... yes, of course! The Charlie that is your mom!" Vivian called out.

 "Wait, how did you know she works for Zuber?" Alex asked, though he slipped his cellphone against his ear all the same.

"Oh, come on," Vivian began. She paced around a set of bushes with a hoof gesturing in the air. 'First of all, it's safe to assume that she'll take a job that gives her the perfect cover to get into normally secure places that would otherwise shoo away random drivers. Second, I'm willing to say right now that because she's already planned this hustle with you this afternoon, well, she's probably been doing an additional con in downtown Zootopia as well. She's in the neighborhood— working one of the big business that we're close by. She probably is less than twenty minutes away from the gardens as we speak."

"Hey, mom!" Alex's paws wiggled as he tried to hold the cellphone in place against his slippery fur along the side of his head. "Yes, I'm doing fine! That's— wait, please— that's what I'm calling about, mom! Project Freaks is stalled out, and I'm in the gardens in need of a beta approach— ideally, one using a mobile asset!"

"I can go on," Vivian remarked, smirking as she scratched her chin.

"She'll be here shortly," Alex said, putting his cellphone away in a side pocket. "Wait, though, what exactly are you—"

"Third, I predict that she'll be wearing a Zootopia Parcel Service uniform. Being a courier— especially one with reason to look irritated enough that nobody's naturally going to want to challenge her— is yet another perfect way to get into an otherwise secure place. That will probably mean wearing that awful wig plus the gaudy-as-hell lipstick and make-up too. Hell, the first couple parts of her uniform will probably be unbuttoned— showing off some foxy cleavage for the sake of distracting prey and predator guys alike— just to comple the look."

"That's... fair, maybe," Alex muttered, not wanting to press the point.

"Fourth, and this is where I actually get bold," Vivian continued, her immense smirk filling up her entire face, "is that she'll be driving a hatchback. A grey one, yeah? One that matches the various vehicles that'd gotten unlawfully 'appropriated' by certain ex-Preyda employees from their company over the past several weeks? I see that scandal on the local news, damn, and there's no way that your mom didn't get involved in it. Hell, the hatchback probably has a lot of mysterious boxes lodged way in the rear stuck into generic-looking plastic bags— she'll immediately want to avoid talking about any of that."

"That's... well... possible, and all... but," Alex stammered, not wanting to argue with his friend but clearly looking annoyed.

"You should know by now that I'm not as dumb as I look. I'd like to add as well that— based on the time it's taken of us talking to each other, just now— your mom will probably start honking from showing up at the garden's entrance any second now."

"Hold on," Alex began, pointing a paw at Vivian's chest, "there's no point to any of this! And don't act like you and your folks are some kind of a paragon of legality, not when mom and I have seen—"

A set of loud honks sounded off from across a patch of greenery. The two preteens turned around— neither of them saying a word— and made their way to the entrance of the gardens. They hopped onto the concrete embankment and came upon a large grey hatchback.

"Hold on, please," Charlie started to say, nudging her body out from the driver's side seat to click a bunch of buttons, "this one has something like a twenty-nine to thirty-one percent change of the automatic door lock-versus-unlock mechanism breaking when you trigger it." The midday sun shone brightly off of her thick locks— the fox's wig sliding a little bit off as she wandered onto the passanger's side seat. "Wait! I've got it!"

[This Will Be Continued]