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Part 3

"Joseph Bogo!" A woman's voice sounded off just before a spritely vixen approached and gave the bull a hug. "I can't believe that old lion actually put you up as the chief of police."

"Joseph?" I asked silently as I turned to the others. "Did you guys know?"

Fangmeyer and Hopps looked at me just as confusedly and shrugged at once.

"Surely you didn't think that his first name was Chief, after all?" The woman said, sticking her hands into the long, white lab coat she wore.

"Th-this is Victoria Onna, an old friend of mine. We knew one another in college." Bogo responded, his voice stammering slightly as though he was unexpectedly nervous. "And don't spread the word of my name to anyone at the station."

"I could imagine." Fangmeyer snickered. "Could you imagine Clawhauser? Calling on his Joey during the morning announcements?" Suddenly, a hand grabbed Fangmeyer's shirt and he was abruptly lifted three inches off the ground. "AHH!"

"It's Chief... it's Chief Bogo... or it's Sir." He growled. "Not 'Joe', not 'Joey'. I have never been able to stand such pet names."

"G-got it." Fangmeyer said, staring into the chief's dark pooled eyes. "G-got it sir!"

With a long breath, Bogo dropped the tiger back to his feet. "Victoria, I apologize you had to see that."

"Oh don't be sorry. I love how getting angry ruffles the fur on your neck." She said with a tease. "Please, come with me."

As we followed the fox, I couldn't help but look around at all the shiny surfaces that lined the walls of this place. Chrome so shiny you could almost see our reflections. Buttons of many colors and monitors illuminated as we walked past them. Onna activated a button that snapped the doorway open, leading us further into the lab. The smell of cold and sterile environs began to tickle at my nose before we entered a long corridor with windows on either side, overlooking strange laboratories where technicians toiled on various projects down below.

"Here at Genuvics, we struggle everyday to create new challenges to innovate and help make not only Zootopia, but the world a better place."

Her accent was tough to pinpoint, I suspected it was somewhere in the east. She enunciated her 't' sounds like 'd's and she had a slight roll with her r's, but she was perfectly clear as she spoke. She was dressed in a white lab coat with black pants and a red shirt underneath the coat. She smelled of... not much more than her own scent, obviously the people working in this lab were quite intent on keeping any sort of contaminants out, but for what reason I began to wonder. Fangmeyer looked back at me and slowed a pace or two so I could catch up with him.

"Hey, you okay?" He asked. "You seem a little distracted."

"I'm fine." I said. "Just... observant."

"Heh. Like any good detective am I right?"

"Right." I agreed. "Oh, and by the way, I caught your act a few days ago. I think you need to tighten up a little in your routine, you're almost as loose as Gazelle is with her dancing and you need to be more like the other dancers right? More uniform?"

I had barely gotten the words out as Fangmeyer grabbed me by the collar of my shirt and pushed me off to the side. "What-what-what are you talking about?"

"Oh come on." I rolled my eyes. "This 'night job' of yours? Coming in exhausted every day? Humming Gazelle music in the locker room, I even caught you counting beats in the van. You don't even need to be a good detective to see it."

"Just--shut up about it, okay? No one needs to know." The tiger waved frantically at me, confirming my suspicions.

"So it is true!" I whispered enthusiatically. "Oh man, Ben's going to flip his donuts."

"PLEASE don't tell Clawhauser." Fangmeyer's eyes widened as he panicked. "I'd never hear the end of it; he'd always be hitting me up for concert tickets, begging me to see her up close and personal, it was the one thing I agreed to when she picked me..."

"Hey, hey. I may be an animal, but I'm not a rat." I teased. "Your secret's safe with me."

At last there was a little relief, though it only lasted about three seconds before Bogo appeared and grabbed both our shoulders in his big hands. "What are you two doing? We are a security detail, now quit lounging around and come on!" He pulled and both of us were forced to follow.

Continuing down the hall, I casually observed over either side, but couldn't really pick out what the people in white coats were doing down below; I only saw a lot of ears and a lot of tails moving frantically from one spot to another like a hive of worker bees. It continued on like this for several yards before I heard Judy exclaim; "What is THAT?" Curiously, Fangmeyer and I approached the glass she was looking through as Bogo stepped up behind. Slipping her eyes from the clipboard tablet in front of her to what Judy was looking at made her let out a knowing "Ahh. Yes, this is our incubation chamber. So far we have only been successful with six of our creations, but we hope to develop more breeds, more types as time goes on."

"Breeds?" Bogo asked.

"Did Mayor Lionheart not fill you in on the details?" Victoria asked curiously.

There was an audible snort from Bogo's nostrils as he tried to calmly respond. "Not entirely."

"I'm sure I wouldn't have missed a detail like this." I said, earning a sharp gaze from the chief that made my fur crawl.

"Victoria. What is all this?" He asked. "What are you creating down here?"

"Dinosaurs." She said, her voice making a little bit of a chirp as she withheld the better part of her expression to keep a calmer demeanor. Still, that didn't keep all our jaws from dropping at once as we stared at each other. "We bio-engineer dinosaurs; or we try to anyway."

"Then those..." Judy said pointing down.

I followed her finger, I hadn't gotten a proper look at the room immediately below, it was a light colored room, lamps focused on the nesting gave it a warm, amber glow, and in the center of their focus were five almost-ostrich-sized eggs. They were mostly white, but they had strangely shaped speckles of color across their surface. It was enough for me to gasp.

"Are... dinosaur eggs." Victoria answered almost condescendingly, as if we should have known what we were looking at. "The Allosaurus, to be exact."

"That... would be predator." She said.

"Correct." The fox nodded, adjusting her glasses.

"And on the topic of that, I assume was the mayor's directive that we not discuss this with anyone else."

"At least until their unveiling." Victoria said with a light hop to her step as we turned to follow her.

"Unveiling?" Bogo asked. "You're planning on introducing extinct predators into a city populated majorly by prey species? It's an insane notion."

"Joseph, your judgement to stick to your morals no matter the cost is the reason I adore you. You should know we have failsafes in place just in case some mishap occurred. But we're months from being ready for any kind of announcement, we've only unlocked the one species. We'd like to have the chance to breed herbivores as well, but the only sample we have on file is the Allosaurus. Would you like to see them?"

"I would!" Fangmeyer said almost enthusiastically. "I've been reading about dinosaurs since I was a cub, it could be fun."

"Until they decide to have tiger-tar-tar for dinner." I quipped.

Ignoring me, Fangmeyer turned to Judy. "Oh come on, Hopps. This could be fun."

"Yeah it could be a learning experience too."

"You know, I read a book like this once." I said. "An impossibly long series of movies too, and I've seen them enough times to know that these things never end well."

Doctor Onna remained quiet for a moment, as if re-evaluating what was on her mind by pushing her glasses up onto the base of her nose. "You are entitled to your opinion, mister Howard, but we have done our own--non-fictional research and think that these creatures, properly confined, would hold no danger to Zootopian civilians."

She gestured for us to follow, and I was hesitant at first. I knew that somehow, this day would get worse before it got better. And boy, was I right...

"The Allosaurus lived somewhere in the range of one-hundred fifty million years ago, during the Jurassic period." She said as we walked through a smaller corridor that was lined with monitors that came to life as we passed by. I could see diagrams of the dinosaur illuminate as she spoke about it. "They were roughly ten feet tall and thirty feet long on average. Our specimens come in about that range. Strictly carnivore, they would hunt their prey more than likely as individuals unless they were dealing with a large meal, then they would have their own cooperative station." She opened the door to the next room, which slid open upward and opened the way into a large oval-shaped area where hundreds of computers and at least fifty scientists gathered over them. "They would likely rip open their prey with their jaws in order to weaken it, and devour it as it died."

Bogo's eyes were as large as beach balls by the time she finished. "Victoria, I thought you were going to explain to us why having such creatures would be a benefit to Zootopia."

"I was just getting to that. You see, we aren't just in an enterprise to study extinct creatures, we are also developing plans on opening a park in which to habituate them, introduce them to the public in an educational and safe manner."

"Now I know I've read the book..." I muttered.

"Mister Howard, I admit that we used the idea from Michael Clawton's novels to expedite our research, but this concept is entirely in the hands of our benefactors. They're the ones paying so that this research is even possible."

I glared at her. "So, you know what generally happens when dinosaurs and people are mixed together."

She stared blankly back at me, coldly. "Sir, that is a work of fiction, and this is reality. Please evaluate your grasp on the difference."