The Fire Triangle, A Zootopia Fanfiction -- Part One: Fuel - 29

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

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The Fire Triangle-A Zootopia Fanfiction

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Part One:

Fuel

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Chapter 3 - Day of Carrots and Blueberries

(Continued...Pt. 21)

What happened next might almost have been the work of an imp with a warped sense of humor. Just then, Erin's Tablet declared, in Bunny Raitt's voice. "Let's give 'em something to talk abouuuut."

"What the heck is that?" Conor wondered to himself and it was Sue Cannon who answered his unspoken question, although not directly.

"Wha...? Who's sending you a chat request now?" She was looking at Erin.

By way of an answer, the young bunny picked up her tablet...and nearly dropped it.

"Oh cripes, it's Amanda!" She reached for the screen with an index finger, but the girl on the other end had already gotten the drop on her.

Don't even think about it, Snowbunny." A high, sing-song feminine voice came over the tablet's speakers, Conor felt his ears go back and his teeth setting on edge. He didn't like that tone, not one little bit. And besides, whoever this Amanda was, she sounded like...

He went around behind Erin and now his neck fur was standing up in quills. Just as he'd suspected, the girl sending the chat invitation was a member of his own species.

She was a red-phase fox but with fur much lighter than Nick Wilde's, almost the color of orange juice. Conor judged her to be a few years senior to Erin; not old enough for a driver's license, but definitely within range of a learner's permit. She had several piercing in her ears and another one through her left nostril. Standing behind only her partly visible was another canid, too big for a fox but much too small for a wolf. "Probably a coyote," the young silver-fox concluded.

"Heyyyy, little miss loser," Amanda continued in that same smarmy voice, "Look what IIIII got."

Her face vanished and was replaced by a VXN Media Player screen. Conor heard a wrenching sound from Erin and a cry of dismay from behind him. (the girl bunny's posse was also crowding around.) For his part Conor felt his rage meter spiking into the red zone. Our Feature For Today was a playback of Erin's onstage meltdown the night before.

There was no need to ask where Amanda had gotten it; half the mammals in the audience last night had brought camcorders with them.

But that lead to another question, one that wasn't so easy to answer.

"How the heck didn't we spot her?" Sue Cannon was almost yowling. The footage they were watching had obviously been shot at close range...and she and the others had been right up front as well.

Conor though he knew; Amanda, being another fox, had known to keep downwind of Erin's girlfriends-and with that breeze coming in off the stage last night, even a row or two back would have been far enough to keep Terri and/or Sue from picking up her scent.

Aggggh grrrrr, he wanted to reach through the tablet screen and wring that snotty little vixen's neck. Like Nick Wilde, he didn't like it when another of one his species played into the fox stereotype, shifty, sneaky, and in this case, downright cruel.

And that was the lesser of the two strikes against Amanda Whatever-Her-Last-Name-Was. If there was one thing guaranteed to get Conor Lewis's hackles up, it was a cyberbully.

While the average school bully tended to be an underachiever from the wrong side of the tracks, cyberbullies occupied almost the opposite end of the spectrum; often as not, they were high-end students from good families. As a result, whenever they got caught, (which wasn't very often,) their parents would frequently rally to their defense-"Not MY son, he's a good kid!" (Sometimes they would even go so far as to file a defamation suit against their little darlings' victim.)

It never failed to make Conor want to bite somebody; for all their privileges, for all the advantages these kids had in life, they still felt the need to pick on their inferiors. (Or those they thought of as their inferiors, he reminded himself; Erin Hopps hadn't earned the right to audition for ZAPA by lacking smarts or slacking off...and if her family wasn't exactly living large, they weren't just scraping by either.)

What bothered him most of all was, as he saw it, cyberbullying was an act of cowardice. The punk who stuffed you into a locker at school was at least willing to confront you face to face. Cyberbullies, on the other paw, usually worked anonymously, hiding behind avatars and screen names; most of the time you had no idea who they were.

Conor was none too happy with the myths that surrounded cyberbullying either. Most mammals assumed that the average cyberbully was a member of a smaller species getting back at a larger mammal, and that usually it was prey species going after preds...animals they didn't dare take on IRL, (In Real Life.)

Nothing could have been further from the truth and what was happening, right here, right now was all the proof you needed, a bunny being cyberbullied by a fox Agggggh, grrrrr, no wonder Erin didn't like his species, it all made sense now.

But Amanda, whoever she was, was no cyberwarrior; she had made not one but two amateurish and potentially fatal mistakes just now. First, she had revealed her identity to her victim; a smart cyberbully never did that. If Kieran McCrodon had been here right now, he'd have been sneering his tail off. "Oi, an' welcome to amateur night, missy!"

Amanda's second and even larger blunder had been to make her move when a certain other young fox was in the house...one who was NO cyber-newbie and who had access to resources she didn't even want to think about. Conor Lewis may not have been another Mr. Roblox but he was way above her pay-grade, and whatever skills he lacked himself, he knew some guys who could fill in the blanks... and whoa, did he have the tools.

On Erin's tablet screen, the video had wound up and Amanda's face was back again.

"What do you think would happen if the guys at ZAPA saw this, little snowbunny?" she asked, leering into the web-cam with her fangs showing, "Or maybe I'll just post it on Ewwwwe-Tube."

She turned to the animal standing behind her, "What do you think Craig? ZAPA or ewe-tube?"

"Ewe tube, definitely," a guy's voice answered in the background. He sounded bored with the whole thing.

He shouldn't have been; Amanda had just outed him, too; Erin, Jill, and especially Sue all seemed to recognize that name, and they had a voice to go with it.

Conor fished in his pocket, found a pen and a scrap of paper, scribbled a hasty note, and showed it to Erin.

He had written just three words, 'KEEP HER TALKING.' The girl bunny gave him a curious look but then said to Amanda, "Sorry Vixy...Not happening. All my girlfriends are here and they just heard everything you said."

"Ooo," the young fox-girl replied, "I'm soooo scared..."

There was more but Conor didn't hear it; he was already moving; hurrying over to grab his gear bag, he unzipped it quickly, rummaged for second, and extracted two items, a six foot USB cord and a fox-sized head-set. Putting the head-gear aside for the moment, he plugged the cable into his laptop, then scampered back and hooked it up to Erin's tablet. Now Amanda's BF-he assumed it was her BF-was speaking up.

"You even THINK about telling Amanda's parents about this snowflake, and me and my brothers might have to...'do something'...know what I mean?"

It made the young silver fox want to roll his eyes up into the ceiling. NOT the smartest suit on the rack; Craig had just let everyone see his face, too...and yep, coyote. And would you listen to this punk, trying to sound like one of the Sopurrnos? (Conor, who had once run with a real life crime cartel known as The Company could have given him a few pointers in how actual mobsters walked and talked.)

Still...the girls all seemed to be taking his threat very seriously. Even Sue, whose dad was a sheriff's deputy, looked halfway petrified.

"Careful Conor," he reminded himself, "don't underestimate this guy."

"And anyway, who do you think my parents are going to believe, me or you?" Amanda had returned to the screen with a taunting smirk on her face.

Conor didn't care. The important thing was that Amanda was talking instead of uploading. He hurried back to the laptop, slipped on the headset, adjusted the eyepiece and started typing.

211 miles to the north, a beast awoke inside its cage, red and green quill-points and a cold blue eye, a cave-dweller of immense capacity and nearly unstoppable power. Seconds later, in response to the commands of its master, it began to zero in on its target, punching through firewalls and security protocols like a diamond blade through crepe paper.

He typed again, Erin's ears stood up as a message appeared on her tablet.

Shut your mike off

Conor.

(Amanda can't see this, don't worry.)

Erin reached for the tablet, and then looked at him.

"'Kay, it's off. Now what?"

Conor laced his fingers and flexed them and then he smiled-a wicked foxy grin.

"Now...we dance."

Cara Combs turned suddenly in his direction from the tablet.

"Whatever you're going to do, do it fast, fox. She's getting ready to upload that video to Ewe-tube."

"Oh no, she's not," Conor muttered under his breath. He moved the cursor, clicked, and hit 'enter' twice.

Erin looked up sharply with her nose twitching.

"Wha...what'd you do?' she asked. On the tablet screen Amanda had become suddenly flustered.

"I just logged her out of her Ewetube account." The young fox answered, keeping his eye on the laptop screen.

"That won't stop her for long." Jill Blackburn pointed out. "She'll just log back in again."

"Yes, but then she'll have to start the upload again from scratch." Conor informed her, "And that's all the time I need. Okay, don't talk to me for a few." With that, he mentally shut her and the others out. Okay what was the name of that file again? Oh yeah...'Erin_Meltinng Q#907'. (Really cute there, Amanda.)

Okay, search...right click, click on 'open file location', right-click, click on 'sort by size.' And the closest match issss...Flaming Vengeance_01xv, almost exactly the same size. Right, open Microsloth Word on my laptop, click on Erin Melting. Copy the filename, paste on Word, click on Flaming Vengeance, copy the filename go to Melting, right-click, click rename, and paste. Back to Word, click on filename, Erin Melting, click to select, right click, click copy, back to Flaming Vengeance, right-click, click 'rename', paste, and...bingo.

Now reset the folder to 'sort by name' again...and that's all folks, (for now.)

"She's logging back onto Ewetube again." Sue Cannon called, looking at him.

"She's uploading." It was Tawny Lloyd.

Conor looked up from the laptop screen and grinned.

"Yeah, but not what she thinks." He said.

Erin's ears went up even higher.

"Huh, what do you mean?"

"Bring your tablet over here and I'll show you," Conor answered beckoning with a pair of fingers. "But make sure you keep the camera turned away so she can't see me."

"Like, DUH!" Erin snapped. She still had a little fire in the belly, but she brought the tablet over just the same, with the girls in her posse tagging closely behind.

"I switched filenames with another vid." the young fox said, pointing to the lap top screen and Amanda's video file folder, "She's uploading the wrong one...but she won't know it until the load completes and she tries to play it."

Most of the girls whooped and clapped their paws...most of them; Erin was anything but wholly satisfied, and Terri Blackburn remained uneasy.

"What video did you switch it with?" the white furred bunny asked.

"How do you know how to do all this?" The ferret girl inquired.

Conor answered the second question first.

"Let's just say, I got friends in low places." He said, and then turned to Erin. "Honestly, I don't know what I switched it with. I didn't have time to check,"

He was about to find out however; they all were. Without warning a scream erupted from Erin's tablet; not Amanda but her boyfriend.

"You dumb, stupid fox, what'd you do? Get it off, GET IT OFF!"

On the tablet screen Amanda was moving frantically, but Conor was quicker. With three fast clicks, he logged her off of Ewetube again and also closed the page, at the same time speaking into the headset. "Delete all bookmarks. Yes." And then in practically the same motion he copied the Mpeg she'd just uploaded to his own computer, went back into the folder and reversed the filenames again. In the background he could hear Amanda's fox-scream. "I'M TRYING!"

(She had forgotten to turn off her mike.)

Ignoring her for the moment, Conor called up an app from the beast labeled 'Malefaker', (one of Kieran's creations) and then went back into Amanda's video folder and clicked on the Erin Melting and Flaming Vengeance files while holding down the 'control' key. Then he spoke into the headset again. "Apply both." The icons flashed for half a second and then returned to normal.

"What'd you do this time?" Erin asked, no longer worried but merely curious.

"A head-fake," the young fox told her. "If Amanda tries to open either of those files again, she'll get message saying, 'Sorry, no can do, malware detected;' same thing if she tries to upload either one of 'em."

"You planted malware on her computer?" Cara Combs was aghast, and Sue Cannon looked tense and angry.

"Noooo," Conor waved a hasty paw. "Those files aren't REALLY infected, it only looks that way."

"Why didn't you just delete that vid of Erin?" Jill Pepper queried with her nose twitching. "It would have been way simpler."

"Oh I know why, Jill." It was Erin herself answering. "If he did that, Amanda could just plug in her video camera and replace it. Now she can't be sure if the original file is safe either."

"Exactly." The young fox nodded, impressed by her savvy. "and even she does figure out it's not infected, she still won't be able to open it...or upload it to Ewe-tube. And now if you'll excuse me for a sec..." He got back on the laptop and made a fast exit out of Amanda's database, making sure to delete all traces of his presence.

And then he turned to the others and smiled. "And now I suppose you're all wondering what the heck was so bad with that video, it made Amanda's guy almost go postal. Shall we find out?"

The verdict was a unanimous, "Heck, yes!"

At first, no one could understand why the thing had triggered an explosion. The opening scene showed Craig, just sitting huddled in the back of a pickup truck, with a hoodie pulled over his head. Barely visible over his shoulder was another Coyote in the driver's seat.

The truck slowed and began to swerve to the right. At the same time Craig stood up, bracing with a paw on the cab of the vehicle.

"What's he doing now?" Jill Pepper asked. Good question; Craig had taken his paw from the cab and now it looked like he was snapping his fingers. But then a tiny flame bloomed in his paw, becoming a blazing torch when the young coyote touched it to a wad of rags stuffed into the neck of a bottle.

"Molotv cocktail, wow!' Cara combs bleated.

As they all watched, Craig raised the flaming bottle high in the air, a bad pantomime of the Statue of Liberty.

Conor barely suppressed a groan. Good GAW, was this guy an idiot or what? He was actually starting to feel pity for this stupid excuse for a coyote.

"You moron, what are trying to do, set yourself on fire? NEVER throw a Molotov cocktail that way; always hold it back and off to the side."

Now they heard Amanda's voice, "Do it!" and saw Craig hurl the fire bomb, casting it down like a judgement from heaven. It burst again the front of a wooden structure, setting it quickly ablaze.

All the girls gasped, and then every single one of them was talking at once.

"Sweet cheese n' crackers, that's the Luckyfoot's produce stand."

"So it WAS the Guilfords."

"Yeah, but I never thought it was Craig."

"Who's that driving, is that his dad?"

"No way, if he saw Amanda with a video camera, she'd be out on her tail soooo fast..."

The image lurched and slewed as the truck burned rubber back onto the road, and then the view spun around into a bouncing selfie, Amanda and Craig grinning toothily into the lens and giving the viewer a thumbs-up.

The video ended with the two of them sharing a kiss.

For a long moment, no one said anything. It was Conor who finally broke the silence.

"You gonna show that to you dad?" he asked. He was looking at Sue Cannon.

The young bobcat blinked, sniffed and then shook her head tightly, not looking at him.

"I...can't. If Craig gets busted coz of that video now, he's going to think it came from Erin. And then it won't just be him, she'll have his whole darn family all over her back."

"Not just her back," Lisa Chatterton amended, "They'll go after Erin's mom and dad too; maybe even her brothers and sisters." She shuddered slightly and flipped her tail, "You know what those Guilfords are like, Sue."

"Well, I don't know what they're like." Conor said, looking from one face to the other. "Somebody care to enlighten me?"

They took turns filling him in; everything that had happened since the Guilford family had come to town, the thefts, the vandalism; the tit-for-tat revenge, sometimes for no more than an imagined slight.

"They're crazy, those coyotes," Erin Hopps told him by way of conclusion, "If you get them mad at you, they'll take it out on your whole family, sometimes even your whole species-and they won't care what happens next."

"Sounds a lot like a family of sea-mink I used to know," the young silver fox thought but did not say, "only way more nutso and way LESS smart." Still, he could understand the girls' reluctance to antagonize the Guilford clan, especially if they didn't care whether they got caught. He knew that mindset all too well; 'Then that's what's gonna happen.' Who was it, always said that again?

"You baaaa-etter hope Craig never finds out it was you inside of Amanda's computer." Cara Combs was pointing with a shaky finger.

"Don't worry, he won't." The young fox answered confidently; he had routed the hack through a server in Coronia and had covered his tracks well. (Or rather The Beast had done it for him; don't get cocky, kid.)

"You know," Sue Cannon spoke in a low murr, leveling her eyes at Conor, "I-I'm not sure I'm cool with you hacking into Amanda's computer like that; you just committed a crime, fox.""

Conor didn't respond immediately; he knew he didn't have to. One of the others would take care of it for him.

Sure enough, Jill Pepper came sailing out of her chair.

"And what were we supposed to do, Suze, just sit there and LET her upload that video to ewetube?"

"And didn't we see evidence of an even bigger crime just now?" Terri Blackburn said.

"Evidence that's useless," the young bobcat pointed out, with the stub of her tail shivering, "And how do we know that's the only video Amanda has of Erin from last night? For cripes sake, we don't even know if she shot it herself; she could be uploading another one right NOW."

"Let her, it doesn't matter," another voice said, and they all turned to see Erin standing with her bass guitar and her jaw jutting defiantly, "Amanda can go ahead and post a copy of that video on ten different Ewetube channels for all I care." She picked up her bass guitar, holding it aloft like Arthur hoisting Excalifur, "Because after tonight, no one's going to care about it anyway!"

And in that moment there could be no doubt that she was Judy Hopps' sister.

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Note:

This chapter and the previous one contain references to characters and events depicted in the Prologue to The Fire Triangle.