Zootopia - Brave New World

Chapter 7: Things Getting Complicated

Minutes passed, and Alex waited.

He kept looking at the ceiling of the cell they had put him, and he still wondered just what was going to happen next.

Alex tried to remember himself of all of the events that led to that moment, and each time that he tried to replay what he knew to be the last less-than-twenty-four-hours, Alex still had trouble believing it.

The previous night he was in a building, on a personal mission with his friends, the ones he trusted most, some of them old acquaintances, some of them new faces he had met from a few weeks to a few days ago. Nevertheless, they all were people he came to trust and care about, people who he knew he could trust to have his back and whom they would cover the back if they ever needed, and they were all willing to help on his mission.

They arrived, and seemed to have it under control, until of course, Alex saw Bastille's face, and it was only a matter of time to assume that things would go south from there. Alex still felt like giving himself a good kick in the butt for not predicting that Stoats would resort to hiring other evos to help him. After all, ever since the events of the Carnival and Claire Bennet, evos had took a more and more present place in the underworld, as "powers for hire", super-powered bodyguards, and even mutant hitmen.

Since the events of the H.E.L.E, evos started to receive better treatment, and be employed by some governmental agencies as special resorts, but of course, this didn't reduced the number of them that were already in the black market and global criminal underworld, even before the great reveal of evos to the world. People like Bastille, who was ready to sell his abilities to whoever gave to him the biggest price.

Next thing he knew was that he was about to surrender to Stoats and give him exactly what he wanted, what caused him a great feeling of failure and helplessness, when, all of a sudden, the whole building shook and was swallowed by a giant vortex of light. Alex had no idea of what it was or where it came from, but he knew that it had appeared almost as if on cue, and took the whole building and everyone in it.

Next Alex was spinning inside that vortex, holding Linda with all of his might, trying to avoid losing the last thing that he still recognized. The last thing that Alex saw was Linda being taken away by the vortex, before he finally blacked out, completely sure that he was going to die. He remembered a feeling of hotness in his body, as if he was being heated up, and the feeling of his body was somehow melting... no, like it was being reshaped, almost like it was clay... it was so weird.

An unknown amount of time later, Alex woke up in a hospital, and two creatures that looked as if they had come out of an old animation movie greeted him. A moose and a gazelle, both animals that walked like people and wore clothes just as humans, and behaved just like humans would. Alex took less than a few minutes to realize that he had been transport to some new kind of world where animals behave like people, walked on two legs and walked around dressed. Not only that, but he realized that he himself had somehow been turned into one of them. Alex Hunter found himself turned into an anthropomorphic cougar.

It still seemed like a strange joke, or maybe some kind of deep hallucination, or even a very wild and vivid dream, like the ones that he had when he was still a kid. Still, Alex just had to raise up his hand... or what once was his hand, and take a good look at it, to see a paw-like hand covered into light-cream fur, with four fingers and paw-pads in his palms, and he knew that it was real, or at least it felt real to him. Alex continued to look at his paw/hand for a while, and with a slightly flex of it, he unsheathed his claws. Not the nails he had, but real claws, just like the ones felines had.

Alex learned to do that almost by accident into his cell, as he was inspecting his new hand and discovered how to unsheathe his claws. Nice thing to have into a fight. Alex thought with humor after the initial surprise of the claws had passed. Alex would normally be much more surprised for him suddenly having claws, however, in retrospect; the claws were probably the less weird thing that had happened to him in the past hours.