The Fire Triangle, A Zootopia Fanfiction -- Part One

The Fire Triangle, A Zootopia Fanfiction -- Part One: Fuel - 84

Disclaimer: Zootopia stories, characters, settings, and properties belong to the Walt Disney Co. This story is written under Fair Use Copyright laws.

----------------------------------------------------

The Fire Triangle—A Zootopia Fanfiction

----------------------------------------------------

Part One:

Fuel

----------------------------------------------------

Chapter 9 –Fire And Mirrors

(Continued...Pt. 11)

Zootopia Canal District, 03:30, Monday:

It was quiet along the Quarentena Canal; the only sounds to be heard were the sonorous clanging of a bell buoy, and the occasional splash of a small fish. It was dark, too; a drizzly fog had settled over the canal, wiping the stars from the sky and reducing the dock lights to sickly, greenish-yellow fuzzballs; in other words, just another, very-early morning in the district.

The Quarentena was a wide but relatively short expanse of water, located near the center of Logwood Island, just south of Banana Street. The waterway took its name from the 'mercy' barges moored here more than more than two centuries previously, in a vain effort to curb the Great Distemper by keeping the victims isolated. The canal had been both shallower and more constricted then—and also much more remote.

These days, the waterway served as part of the Canal District's industrial hub. Here you would find a dredging company, a towboat company, and a business that specialized in the service and repair of construction barges. Here too was the local branch of Interspecies Recycling Systems; (the initials were a private joke on the part of the company's owner and founder...an animal whose tax issues made Nick Wilde's debt to the government look like a minor oversight.)

Like every other business on the Quarantena, IR Systems was ensconced on its own private, concrete pier. There was nothing aesthetically pleasing about the place, (nor was that necessary, given the location; none of the firms on this block had been intended as tourist attractions.) The facility consisted of two simple, slab-sided, cinderblock constructions, each with vault-thick walls and an insulated steel roof; (recycling is a noisy business,) The smaller structure, the one that fronted on the canal, was fitted with rows of roll-up, steel dock-doors facing the water on three sides, all of them painted in dull red with the company logo in the center. The building itself was done up in an eggshell white that had long since faded to a dull, pasty grey.

If Interspecies Recycling's façade wasn't pleasing to the eye, no one could deny that it was a secure facility. (Theft of recyclables is a much bigger business than many mammals might realize.) Rock solid and equipped with a state of the art alarm system—including both motion and scent detectors—the building was all but impenetrable after the last employee clocked out for the day. (The plant manager liked to boast, 'a fly couldn't get in here without us knowing.')

That, however, only applied to the parts of the structure located above the water-line...but down below, the place was equally secure, hemmed in by a cage of steel rails and cyclone mesh. As for gaining access by slipping in under the dock doors, good luck with that! They all closed tightly against the barrier-cage...and at a depth well below the surface. The owner of IR Systems would brook no outside intruders in any of his facilities—for reasons that some said went well beyond the need to deter any would-be thieves. (The two giant shredding machines inside the recycling plant were rumored to be employed, on occasion, for the disposal of 'other things' besides unwanted plastic.) That made the place even more protected; no one wanted to run afoul of an animal capable of something that monstrous.