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Chapter Text

She shifted. She put a pillow behind her head, then removed it, then replaced it. It slid down the seatback behind her tail, so she removed it again. She sat up straight, then slouched. All the while her oversized seatbelt lay pooled in her lap and hung loosely over her legs, like a mountaineers encumbering ropes.
Nick, sitting beside her, cast a bemused glance at her antics.
"What are you doing?"
"I can't get comfortable in this seat," she said.
Nick watched her wriggling there like a restless child. She looked as if her excitement at their first vacation abroad was uncontainable, was spilling over the edges. She looked volatile.
"Best figure it out," he said. "We've got eight hours of sitting before we land."
"You're not supposed to be enjoying this," she muttered.
"It's not too late for you to move up the front with the other rodents," Nick suggested glibly.
This would have been sensible. Flights out of Zootopia, having to cater to a record variety of species, divided their seating by size and heft, the order reversed on the alternate aisle in an attempt to balance the weight. On the way in they had passed an army of rodents on one side, all stacked left to right and one above the other, and a single elephant to their left, strugglinnot to skewer her broadsheet newspaper with her tusks.
There were any number of vacant seats in the small-bodies section where Judy could have buckled comfortably, but she shook her head.
"I'm not a rodent, you meanie," she said. "And besides, I wouldn't be able to sit here and chat to you then..." She paused, looked thoughtfully at the roof. "Actually, you're right. I'm changing immediately."
"Oh, that famous sense of humor," Nick mumbled, flicking her on the ear. "But at least a surplus of space is easier to deal with than the other way around. I don't think I'd be half as comfortable if we both moved up to the front."
Judy imagined it. Nick strangled by a too-tight seatbelt, pop-eyed, cheeks ballooning, turning blue. She started to giggle.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Here," Nick said, picking up her cushion from the footwell where it had fallen. "Try sitting on it."
Judy took the pillow, tucked it under herself, and gave a little wiggle from side to side. The belt lay comfortably stretched over her thighs. She smiled. "Thanks."
Then she started exploring what her seating area had to offer: rifling through the seatback pouches, skimming inflight magazines, inspecting sealed packages of towelettes. The typical ritual of a first-time air traveller. Nick, by contrast, had already adjusted his seat back, had his earphones in, and was peering half-interested out his window at the activity on the tarmac. He was a virgin to flying as well, but his natural situational savvy and cultivated detachment gave him the air of a seasoned traveler. No single care in the world.
"I wonder what it'll look like," Judy said.
Nick flicked the bud from his left ear. "Hmm?"
"What it'll look like. When we land."
Nick shrugged. "You saw the brochure. Sand. Water. Giant starbursts with prices in them."
"Except it will be better," Judy said through a broadening smile. "Because it will be real."
"Well," said Nick, leaning back in his chair and closing his eyes, "you'll see for certain in eight hours. Wake me when it's over."

---

Judy came out of sleep when Nick seized her by the shoulder and shook her like a dinner bell, her eyes popping open in shock.
"What? Hmm?" she asked drowsily.
"Unbuckle yourself, Carrots," Nick said.
She rubbed one eye with a balled knuckle. "You need the bathroom? I did say take it easy on the gin and tonic." She unclasped her outsized lapsash and stood up on her seat. Nick likewise slipped out of his belt and rose.
"Switch seats with me," he said.
Judy shot him a confused look. "What?"
"Switch seats with me."
"I heard you fine. Why?"
"Do it."
"Nick," she moaned, "is this some prank? I was comfortable."
"Do it."
She sighed, then picked up her pillow, tossed it into Nick's vacated seat, and stepped over the armrest.
"Happy?" she asked, sitting down.
Nick slid backwards into her chair, laced his fingers behind his head, and smiled.
"Yeah, I am. Now look outside."
"What?"
He gestured with a thrust of his jaw. "Look out the window."
Still confused, still sleep-addled, she turned and peered through the glass.
Her eyes widened, and her lethargic fog was sucked away in an instant.
Below her lay a vista, its beauty too profound for words. A swathe of equatorial rainforest stretched from mountaintop to coastline, its canopy the most intense shade of green, a colour Judy hadn't known to exist in the real world. The sand that bordered it so white one could mistake it for so snow. The water mottled blue and green and casting the brilliant sun back in a pool of quivering diamond-glare.
Judy stared. Enraptured. Sole spectator to a fleeting moment of wonder.
"Is it as good as the brochure?" Nick asked.
Judy was silent for a long time. When she turned back, she was beaming from ear to ear.
"So much better."

Chapter Text

Judy lay down on the couch and stretched languidly; supine diva, splendid in her floral sarong and pink stringtie top, a single laelia orchid behind her ear, delicate perfumes spilling from its trumpet petals.
What a day. Nick and her had walked further than even the most demanding workshift back home would call for, had done more than they usually achieved in a particularly busy weekend. There was so much new to see, to taste, to absorb. Even the familiar things somehow alien and delightful. Her brain was coming undone at the seams with it.
She put her feet up on the armrest, feeling her pent-up muscles start to relax. She tried to imagine a more perfect day, a better spend of their time, and she happily failed.
Then came a voice from behind bathroom door.
"Um...Carrots? Judy?"
She rolled on the couch to face the source of the sound. "Yes?"
There was a pause. The question hard to phrase, for the facts that necessitated its asking were themselves some mystery.
"Where's the toilet paper?"
Judy grinned. Before they had flown out, she had done some research (of course she had) -- just enough to ease her anxiety at navigating the unfamiliar culture. She knew bare fur was frowned on in temples. She knew not to point with her feet. And She had discovered, and prepared for, this one odd aspect of domestic custom, whereas Nick was encountering it for the first time.
"There isn't any," she said.
"What?"
"Well, there is, but you don't throw it in the toilet. The sewers here get blocked easily."
"So how...what am I supposed to do?"
Judy could feel her breath streaming out of her nose -- the start of a giggling fit. She fought it down.
"Ok. Look to the left of the seat. Do you see a gun hanging up? It looks like a short length of garden hose."
There was a quiet shuffling from behind the door. Then silence again. Silence heavy with disbelief. Saturated with it. Like a towel thrust into poolwater.
"Oh you have got to be joking!"
A delighted high-pitch squeak shot out Judy's nostrils, a sound like a kettle's whistle, and she clamped her paws over her mouth to stifle it. Nick heard it anyway.
"I'm glad you find this funny," he growled. "This is barbaric. This is some Stone Age nonsense, right here."
"I think they used leaves back then," Judy said through half-laughter.
"Judy, seriously, do I have to do what I think I have to do with this?"
"It's a new culture, Nick. Embrace it."
There was a storm of mightily dark muttering, then a protracted pause while Nick took guesses at how best to proceed. Something clanked against the porcelain. Judy got off the couch and slunk across the room on assassin's footsteps, putting her ear up against the door.
"Do I have to - god dammit," Nick grumbled. "I have to put my paw in the toilet bowl..."
Judy was biting her lip so hard it stung, her eyes crinkled shut with delight. Then she asked, "How are you going in there?"
"Oh are you standing at the door," Nick asked in disbelief, which sent Judy into another burst of escaped giggles. "I can't even get a bit of privacy while I-"
Nick's words were suddenly drowned out by the hiss of pressurized water and sharp, heart-chilling shriek, a banshee's otherworldly wail. Judy stepped back from the door, eyes wide, fingers on her trembling lip.
The door opened slowly. Nick, framed in the space. Never a mammal less pleased before seen. His left eye was shut, and the fur around it was plastered wet. The tuft in his ear was soaked. Beads of water ran off his jawline, spilling in a thin stream from the tapered point of his cheek fur. The hair over his eye was standing straight up as the hosejet had styled it so.
Judy took one look at him and collapsed. She rolled on the floor like some uncovered worm in the summer sun, her chest heaving, completely disabled by laughter. It was easily a minute before she recovered herself enough to ask the obvious question.
"Nick, did you just shoot yourself in the face with a bidet?"
No reply. None needed. She descended once more into hysterical convulsions and juvenile chuckling.
And then, lying there on the floor, she noticed something. While Nick stood there in the rectangle of the door, a portrait of misery, his right paw could not be seen, it hidden behind the door jamb.
When it re-emerged into frame, it was holding the gun.
Judy was quickly on her knees, gone from tormentor to hostage in an instant.
"Nick wait. You don't have to do that," she said. Her wide eyes were fixed on the nozzle, trained directly on her. Black bore promising cold punishment. "Put it down. Let's talk..."
Nick smiled. His finger was on the trigger.

--

I'm sure you can imagine the sheer lunacy that some hotel cleaners have had to set right in the wake of particularly rowdy guests.
This one had seen some truly incomparable wreckage, scenes to shrivel the soul. Bathtubs full of unaccountable vomit. Graffiti hidden behind paintings. On one memorable occasion, a moose left behind, naked save for a bow tie, with no luggage, no idea of how he got there, and an incomplete grasp of what his full name was.
So, the picture that greeted him this afternoon was not the strangest he had ever seen, but it was the strangest this week. It was certainly a story worthy of recounting that night around the family dinner table.
For when he opened the door and pushed his trolley inside, he saw three things:
A folded apology note on the bed.
A rather generous tip.
Water absolutely everywhere.

Chapter Text

The boat was called the Luxurious, which Nick thought ambitious because it was, in actuality, a timber longboat with a tarpaulin shaderoof and a four-cylinder engine donated from some less fortunate vehicle. Its seats were planks, polished by a hundred wet rumps that had sat before him, and there were gaps in the floorboards through which he could see the gentle lap of bilge. The motor sounded like an old western gunduel when it got up to speed, blasting and shuddering, spitting unburned gasoline and coughing up clouds of blue smoke -- a middle-fingered salute to global warming.
But it did have a sort of lovable charm, a rakish personality. It wore a wreath of vibrant flowers over its bowsprit, and it listed dramatically when there was to much weight on one side; it was like a good-natured friend who'd had too much to drink. It was hard to dislike.
At least, that's what Nick offered as justification for why he wanted to remain in said boat, instead of going diving. Judy was having none of it.
"It's only snorkeling," she said, pulling her goggles over her head. "It's as gentle a sport as you're likely to find. You're not going to drown."
"I'm not worried about drowning," he said, peering over the gunwale; fish were already teeming under their hull, a colorful swarm of flexing dorsal bodies. "I'm worried about what might be under there. Some prehistoric leviathan that thinks I'm a giant orange cod."
"There's no monsters down there," Judy sighed, paws on hips. "No giant crab is going to grab you by the tail and pinch you in two."
"Oh it isn't, is it? These seas are just full of dangerous creatures."
"Name them."
"Jellyfish. Poisonous jellyfish."
"To warm for them."
"Well, piranhas."
"Not in these waters."
"Narwhals."
"Arctic. Piscivorous."
"I bet there's a narwhal in that water right now, just waiting to spear you."
"Nick. Put your gear on, before I take that snorkel from you and insert it in the wrong hole."
"Alright alright," he muttered, picking up the equipment laying at his feet, a befuddling collection of pipe and plastic. By the time he had his goggles on, Judy was completely prepared, looking quite the accomplished aquanaut. She was totally pulling off her one-piece, too; a navy-blue affair with a diamond excision over her navel. Nick was feeling a little bit unimpressive by comparison, wearing palm-pattern surf shorts, what else. At least they weren't green.
As he tightened the straps at his temple, Judy passed him a small black bag that looked a bit like a balloon. He held it up for inspection.
"What on earth is this?" he asked.
Judy drummed a finger on her nose, hidden under the plastic pocket of her mask. "You need a separate snoutguard," she explained. "Your mask doesn't cover your nostrils."
Nick gave the ballon a second's disbelieving appraisal before he rolled it over his nose like a condom. He tried to suck in a breath and the rubber suctioned against his skin.
"I look like an idiot," he announced in a nasal whine. He sounded like one, too.
"At least your nose is safe in there," Judy said, "and you won't end up with a sinus full of saltwater; god knows you don't need additional reasons to complain. Ok, come on." Judy clambered over the rungs of the ladder, somehow graceful despite her flippers, and then slid backwards into the menthol waters with a faint surge. A cloud of silver small-fry already orbited her like a miniature constellation of luminous planets around a rabbit-shaped sun.

Nick flapped after her, wrapping his gums around his snorkel's silicone mouthpiece and frowning first at the texture and then at the thought that other mammal's mouths had been here before, disinfectant be damned. He scaled the ladder and paused on the high rung, looking down at where Judy was paddling, surrounded by glittering fish. She smiled encouragingly at him. It's fine. It's safe.

Nick stood there for a long moment. Then he sprung off the ladder step and cannonballed into the water.
He regretted it immediately; his snorkel went under the surface and immediately filled with water, and when he bobbed back up he forgot to purge his tube and gagged on a mouthful of salt. When he was done spluttering he looked at Judy, whose head was sopping, water spilling off her ears. Her circle of silver fish were nowhere to be seen anymore.
She looked at Nick as one would a particularly dim child. "Was that absolutely necessary?" she asked.
Nick popped his mouthpiece back in. "Yerd, id woos," he piped.
Judy just shook her head and started swimming out to the reef, Nick following close behind.

Chapter Text

As they swam through the glass-clear baywater, like gods above this piscean realm, Nick quickly conceded that he had been foolish and Judy was right; this was an experience worth having.
He knew that the sea was home to a vast profundity of life; walk through a fishmongers, look at the variety of different fillets on display, and you'd be reminded. But just how vast? What is the true number? As Nick came face-to-face with a small slice of the ocean's enormous population, it occurred to him that the number was millions, and that the reality of that number was beyond comprehension.
He saw damselfish with zebra-colored stripes; Moorish Idols with their tall, trailing fintips; some bulge-eyed oddity that stared at Nick as if he were the thing out of place, which he supposed he was. He also saw their curious everyday behavior: a multicolored parrotfish cropping lumps of coral with its hardy beak before spitting out the fragments it couldn't digest; a pufferfish flaring it's gills, allowing wrasse, little things the color of electricity, to poke their heads in to clean.
At one point Judy suddenly dived beneath the surface, descending a few meters before clutching the rim of a coral shelf. She waved for Nick to follow, which he did, trailing bubbles as he went. His sinus protested, his ears squeaking with the pressure. But when he reached the coral ridge he couldn't have cared less; under its shadow, a school of incredible angelfish, bright orange, the colour of supernovae, goggled back at him. Perhaps they mistook Nick for a giant of their species, and they suddenly fled, streaming past his face to find other shelter. They looked like a stream of living fire.
He and Judy floated back to the surface cleared their valves in twin spurts, like a pair of breathing whales. Then Judy removed her mouthpiece and looked at Nick through the rivulets spilling down her goggle's lenses.
"Are you still scared of the kraken?" she asked.
Nick removed his own mouthpiece and looked at her seriously.
"I want to see more," he said.
Emboldened by the expanse of underwater beauty, Nick and Judy swam close to the rising face of the island cliffs, peering at the various barnacles and bivalves that hugged the rock surface, then watching in delighted awe as a sea turtle sailed past, fixing them with a strangely sapient stare before it turned and rowed itself out into the limitless blue. They floated to the surface and removed their masks, both suddenly overtaken by a fit of giggles at the sheer incredibility of it all. There was a crevice in the rockface behind them, and as the swell lapped against it the gap filled and sent a great geyser shooting over them, like the tacky effects at some themepark flume ride, which only provoked them to further laughter.
Then Judy spotted a wider cavemouth further along, a broad chasm in the mountain's rock, and she pointed towards it.
"Should we go and check it out?" she asked, but Nick was already swimming towards it, his excitement evident in his windmilling stroke, in the churning wake of his flippers.
They quickly made it to the cavemouth and tread water in the gentle swell, the advance and retreat, which pulled them forward and then thrust them back, the water in two minds about permitting or refusing them entry.
"What do you think is in there?" Nick asked Judy.
She shrugged. "Could be anything."
Nick grinned, and then swam into the shadowy grotto.
The first thing he noticed was a sea of tiny blue lights, almost unnaturally bright, and he dived down to inspect them. When they revealed themselves to be phosphorescent daubs on the outside of sea urchins he did not recoil from their waving spines with their promise of pain, but instead moved closer, intrigued by their purpose. The lights bordered the urchins' radial mouths, painted on like a clown's make-up. He'd just enough time to be interested in this before something small and vibrant shuttled past, and he set after it in hot pursuit.
He'd thought it a mantis shrimp, something he'd read of before his arrival and that he was very keen to see in real life -- a rainbow-patterned curio, which could snap its claws fast enough to make the water spark. He was desperate for more than a glimpse.
He chased it for some distance before he stopped abruptly, and the glimmering fairylight he'd been pursuing rushed away and evaporated in the darkness. He realized that he had gone very far. The spot of sunlight that marked the cavemouth was small and distant. And where had Judy gotten to?
Bobbing on the gentle, too-gentle, unnervingly gentle, water surface, Nick's echoing question sounded soft and helpless, a child calling for a parent.
"Judy?"
Nothing.
"Judy? Did you come in here?"
Again, there was no noise but the echo of his own timid voice. His eyes widened.
She is not here. She did not follow you in. No -- something has happened to her. Something has happened to her. Something got her.
And then, something took hold of his tail.

--

She kept her head tilted back, which was helping with the bleeding. So would some ice, which Nick had gone to rummage for in the cooler. What was not helping was that she couldn't stop laughing, and each amused snort sent another crimson gout dribbling down her chin, into her paws and onto her swim clothes.
"Would you knock that off?" Nick asked dryly, passing her a fistful of ice wrapped in a towel. "You're going to ruin your bathing suit."
She took the cold pack and pressed it over her swollen nose, but continued to giggle.
"I can't believe you kicked me in the face!"
"I can't believe you pinched my tail!" he returned.
"You, you thought I was a giant crab..." This came out haltingly through laugh-arrested breathing, and Nick stared blankly forward while she fought to compose herself. When she calmed down, he said, "I didn't think anything. All we've discovered is that if something grabs my tail in a dark cave, I kick it in the face."
"Hah!" she cried, and dabbed at the resulting scarlet spurt. "A kick in the face? Nick, I've been kicked in the face before. This was something else; you tried to bury your foot in my mouth and wear me like a shoe."
Nick just rolled his eyes and sat on the bench beside her, where she glanced at him and said, "Fine. Just for the record, I am wholly responsible and got everything I deserved."
Nick smirked, and muttered, "At least we found out what the most dangerous thing in the ocean is -- Me."

Chapter Text

"You don't have the faintest idea what you're doing, do you?" Nick asked.
Judy didn't hear him. She was busy roving over the dashboard, tapping toggles and gauges. Her mouth moved silently as she did, as though she were speaking to some invisible intelligence, some incorporeal instructor who could put right any uncertainties. After some time she looked up at him.
"Hmm? Sorry?"
"I said, you have no idea what you're doing, do you?"
"No no, I've pretty much got it," she said chirpily, inviting Nick to agree with a sweep of her arm. "There's the electronic start, the killswitch, ignition, indicator, horn, lights. It's actually pretty close to the pursuit units the ZPD has."
Where did these reassurances fall? Upon deaf ears. Nick stared at her, sitting there on the motorbike's high seat, smiling and urging him to clamber on the pillion. He was unimpressed.
Nick's Internal Dialogue Concerning Motorbikes:
So, you've got a car.
That's a nice vehicle.
Now saw it lengthways in half.
What?
Now you have half a car.
It only has two wheels.
Yes, In accordance with elementary math.
Won't it fall over?
Frequently.
There is no seatbelt. This seems tremendously unsafe.
You can wear a helmet.
Your solution to my imperiled livelihood in an inevitable head-on collision is some kind of hat?
Basically. Are you going to ride it?
No.
Congratulations; you have demonstrated the most basic level of self-preservation.
"I'm not sure about this," Nick told her flatly. There was a reason he hadn't joined Judy when she'd gotten her motorbike license and then completed the competency course for the ZPD pursuit cycles; they were deathtraps. He didn't want anything to do with them. Now here was Judy telling him to disregard his survival instincts, which were screaming alarm bells in his brain, and to just jump on.
"Look," she said, and Nick sighed, because he knew when Judy started breaking out the logical arguments then the battle was lost, and he might as well surrender. "The best way to see this country is from a motorcycle. It just is. It's cheaper than taxi rides. It gives us greater freedom. I even hired a more powerful bike for a larger mammal, so we won't get stuck on a steep hill doing twenty."
Nick did a quick walk around, giving it an inspection.
"Your feet don't even touch the floor," he pointed out.
"They don't have to," she said. "It's automatic; speed and breaking is all controlled up here." She gave the handlebars a little wiggle. Nick just stared at her.
"Seriously," he asked, "and be honest; what are the chances I can get out of this whole ordeal?"
"What's the number below zero?"
"Alright, fine," Nick murmured, taking the spare helmet of the handles, strapping it on, and clambering on to the pillion seat.
"That's my big brave fox!" Judy chided. "Now seriously, I've got this. You just relax."
There was a moment of noticeable silence, the sound of a motorbike conspicuously dormant. The moment stretched, like warm taffy.
"Nick, I'll need you to raise the kickstand."
"What?"
"The kickstand. The bike won't start while it's down. I'm, uh, too short to reach it..."
Nick grinned wolfishly. "You've got this, do you?" he said, and the shell of her ears started to redden. With commendable restraint, Nick did not devolve into further teasing about her height and snapped the spring-loaded stand up with his foot, then steadied the bike with his legs.
Judy turned the key, and the bike sputtered to life and settled into a throaty idling hum.
"Alright," said Judy. "Let's see what this thing can do..."
And Nick was genuinely surprised. For from the moment the bike surged forward up the driveway, destined for the sumptuous green landscape beyond, he was shocked to discover just how right he'd been to begin with -- riding on a motorcycle was terrible and frightening and uncomfortable, and almost certainly any desire to pilot one indicated an acute failure of brain function. And his trepidation only compounded when they arrived at the rutted dirt path that connected the driveway to the main road.
As Judy set about navigating the loose sand and bulbous rocks, the bike began to wobble desperately, like someone who'd gone a pint beyond their limit and was attempting to cross from the front of the pub to a taxi waiting at the curb. And ,as Nick knew from first-paw experience, such trips often involved the detour of falling flat on the ground.
"We're going to tip over, Judy!" Nick gasped, fighting to keep his balance.
"We're fine," she replied. "Let go of my ears."
"I thought you said you knew how to ride these things!"
"It's a little bit different with two passenger's weight," she explained. "Try to sit still, would you?"
"Carrots, I hate bikes, but even I know the cure for wobbling is to go a little faster-"
He regretted it immediately -- pre-immediately, actually, for he was regretting it halfway through the sentence -- and that regret intensified sharply when Judy gave the throttle a twist, and the bike gave a gravelly roar and suddenly sprang forward.
"Hey, you're right!" she said brightly. "It handles a lot better at speed!"
Then she glanced behind herself and figured that the handling improvement might have something to do with the loss of her passenger, who was tumbling in the dirt behind her.
She pulled the bike around, drove it back, and brought it to rest against a tree trunk, before looking down at the prostrate fox, lying in his billowing little cloud of red dust.
"You ok?"
Nick opened an eye and sat up. "Well, I'm not dead yet. You, however, are about to be."
"You know, Nick," Judy said through a creeping smile, "I don't know much about bikes, but I do know the cure for landing ass-first in the dirt is to hang on."
Nick just shook his head, and muttered, "Just relax, huh? She's got this."

Chapter Text

It was infrequent that words failed Nick. They had, in his foregone life, been tools of the trade -- chisel to the carpenter, numbers to the financier -- and he'd spent a career pursuing their mastery. It was rare that he was wanting for the right phrase or a sharp quip, or was missing a rebuttal to an insult. Words and he were close friends.
Well, they were failing him now.
The pristine countryside was passing him in a great green rush, a bucolic fableworld. It was a scene that simply alluded capture; a photo was too small, a painting too indistinct. Even words, he was finding, were not equal to the task. It was like...it was as if he were looking at some patch of ancient and unspoiled Amazonian jungle from a time before civilization, when the only footfalls were from languid sauropsids, hunting and hunted amidst the evergreen foliage, the leafy vines, the moist fungus and mineral waterfalls. And here it was, nestled in the median strip between the roadways. It was uncanny.
And I'd be enjoying it infinitely more, he thought dryly, if I wasn't watching it from the back of this unnecessarily dangerous, aggressively idiotic, deliberately unstable-
"Nick, duck!" Judy suddenly cried from the driver seat as they crested a blind hill.
His attention was preoccupied, her shrill warning only partly heard, so he was turning to face forwards with a distracted "Hmm?" on his lips when the tree branch rushed into them.
Judy already had her head down, and she cleared the bough fully, its twigs and leaves rattling against the shell of her helmet as it swept overhead. When she glanced back, her passenger was missing for the second time that day.
She turned the bike in a driveway and drove back to the hill where Nick was hanging from the branch, his legs and tail dangling forlornly beneath him. He looked like a forgotten scrap of copper-colored tinsel left behind on a halfheartedly de-decorated Christmas tree.
Judy brought the bike to a halt, leaning it against a candy-stripe crash barrier, and looked at Nick hanging there. He looked back, unimpressed with the state of affairs; he felt his current predicament was all the evidence one could ever need to prove the glaring deficiencies of the motorcycle.
"What are you doing up there?" Judy asked.
He stared at her for a second, before he exhaled in hopelessness and his whole body sagged; once again, words failed him.
"Oh, you know...just, hanging around..." he sighed.
Judy played him a comedy sting on an imaginary drum set.

---

"Oh! Seven! Nick, there's seven!"
The problem with trying to get someone's attention in a country full to bursting with unfamiliar colors, scents and sounds is that you never get it straightaway. Nick let the distraction du jour -- a swine so impressively sunburned that he looked like a giant overripe tomato -- have his full attention, before he craned his head over Judy's shoulder.
"What was that?"
"I saw seven," she informed him proudly. "Seven mammals all on the same bike. That puts me in the lead."
"You didn't see seven," Nick scoffed, tousling one of her ears.
"Yes I did!" she protested.
"How were there seven?"
"Someone was driving, and he had a kit in his lap. Two behind him, and one of them had a kit as well. Two sitting sideways on the pillion."
"Whatever," Nick said with a shrug. "I didn't see it. It doesn't count."
"It does count! It's not my fault you were too slow to look."
"The rules are that two spectators have to see it. Otherwise it doesn't count."
Judy shot him a disapproving glance over her shoulder. "These rules sound recently invented just to thwart me."
"No. They're internationally recognized and everything."
"I'm not having that, Nick. I saw them, clear as day. It counts."
"Ok," Nick said. "I just saw 36."
Judy's face split into a disbelieving grin. "You what?"
"Yeah, it was impressive. I don't know, maybe they were in the circus."
"You liar. How come I didn't see this spectacle of acrobatics?"
"You should have looked quicker, Carrots," Nick said with a shrug. "Doesn't matter what you did or didn't see; 36 is the new number to beat."
"Alright, fine," Judy sighed. "In accordance with international regulations for the seeing-many-mammals-on-one-bike competition, it only counts if verified by two or more spectators. Happy?"
Nick allowed himself an insufferably smug grin. "Absolutely. One-hundred percent."
"Good. Hey, look at that," Judy said, and Nick followed her pointing finger to an alleyway where eight wolves had all somehow squeezed onto the same bike, partly by having two hang off either side, balancing on a single peg each.
Nick watched silently as this miracle of mammalian tessellation surged past them onto the main road, and then looked down at Judy, who had fixed him with with a smug grin of her own.
He shrugged. "Yeah, well, I saw them first."