Chapter Text
Elias did see the bright side in this, really. “Funnily enough, I can now win the Nobel prize without any effort” - was what he thought, with no small amount of sarcasm, as he transversed the dense forest he, somehow, materialized in after an explosion that by all known scientific theories should have killed him instantly. Of course, that didn’t mean he was unscathed. No, that would be too kind of the universe or god or whatever decided to make him today’s punchline. He appeared up at least 3 m (9 ft) above ground, traveling at very high speeds that led to him crashing hard on the branches of a tree before tumbling down to the floor; as a consequence, there was now, probably, an Elias shaped hole on a random tree top and, certainly, a very pissed, and in pain, human wandering around, screaming with an increasing tone of desperation.
“HEEEELLLLP!” - He screamed again, pain spreading through his bruised chest and his broken foot as he limped on the muddy floor and uneven terrain, putting all the weight he could on his left side; his clothes wet with blood and water from the incessant rain; his pale skin filled with red scratches, even with the, now ruined, white lab coat over his figure; inflicted by the rich foliage in his path, they made him look like he had lost a battle with a gang of stray cats. To top it all off, his vision kept blurring at each blink because of the downpour that was typical of a well maintained rainforest, making trying to follow a specific direction downright impossible. He couldn’t move much further now, already beginning to feel the pain in his bad foot increase drastically, spreading through his right leg like fire - “There goes the Adrenaline. Fuck, that hurts !”- He continued lamenting in his head as he leaned on one of the many trees around, tiredness finally making him stop his directionless walking.
“Hello, Is anybody there?!... I heard your scream. Is anybody there?!”.
The sound was faint enough that Elias almost mistook it, at first, as another sound of the forest; then his tired, overworked brain finally processed that what he heard was words, English words. The relief he was feeling was enough to make him cry. Standing upright again, he used all the capacity of his burning lungs to scream.
“HERE! … ‘ack’... I’M HE- … ‘cough, cough’”.
“Ah! I can hear you. Stay where you are! Don’t move!” - The voice said back.
“Thank heavens.”- Elias thought briefly, actually sobbing in relief, then having a coughing fit as his lungs were not in the mood to be stressed by his sobbing - "I'm saved; I’ll be fine… “. The sound of rustling leaves and crunched branches a few minutes after alerted him that help was close. Smiling through the pain - in other words, making a grimace that would communicate pain even to a blind person - Elias began limping towards the voice, to greet his savior - “ Oh God… ‘cough’... Thank you so mu-”.
He paused abruptly at the surreal sight of the figure that appeared from beyond the leaves. A jaguar. An honest to God jaguar, with yellow fur, spots and all the characteristics of a jaguar, except he was also upright, wearing a translucent raincoat and what appeared to be a green uniform underneath it. Locking eyes with it, Elias couldn't help but note how expressive the jaguar was as their face began to contort in terror, almost like a 3d animation instead of the ones he saw in the zoo last year. All of those details passed through his head in the microseconds they looked at each other and another microsecond later, Elias’ brain came with the only appropriate response.
“What the Fuck!?”.
“AAAAHHHH!” - the Jaguar screamed, falling down on his back as he desperately tried to back away from the weird pale creature in front of him.
Unconsciously taking a step back, startled by the sudden scream, the human failed to realise he was at the edge of a very downward slope. Sure enough, body followed the misplaced broken foot quickly and down he went, not even managing to formulate a scream as he almost immediately fell in a protruding root with his belly, taking all the air from his already exhausted respiratory system. Rolling down the hill, Elias had the distinct feeling that whatever had not broken on his arrival, was certainly breaking now as branches, exposed roots, holes and rocks welcomed their new, human shaped, punching bag.
He couldn’t know how long it took, but eventually, the painful descent stopped on a small clearing and by sheer luck, Elias was still somewhat conscious. His ears were ringing and he was sure that the warm liquid that fell from his head and in front of his eye was blood. He rolled over, moaning weakly in pain - “Please… someone…” . His other eye, not covered in blood but certainly swollen, could discern many blobs of many colors passing rapidly, some even stopping abruptly in front of him with the distinct screeching sound of tires over pavement. “A road… cars…” were all his final conscious thoughts before he succumbed to the alluring silence of unconsciousness.
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“Professor, I got it! I’m going there for the inauguration" - Elias exclaimed as he barged through the door of the professor’s room. To say he was happy was the understatement of the century; after painful months of waiting, he was accepted for a research position at CERN, just in time for the inauguration of the new particle collider: The FCC (future circular collider). He would be one of the youngest of the team comprising the group that was going to represent his country, being only 28 of age.
His advisor smiled, happily patting him in the back and promptly inviting the young physicist to commemorate on the nearby bar, extending the invitation soon after to another one of his students, Irene, that came like a missile of brown curls and bright smiles, hugging the man that had been her advisor for her master’s degree with the strength of a bear, if the sound of creaking ribs was any sign.
The celebration of the achievement didn’t stop for 2 days. There were many confraternizations, filled with hugs and “congratulations!” coming from family, friends, acquaintances and random people that were too drunk to realize they were at the wrong party. Elias was ecstatic and more than a bit anxious. He had the opportunity finally show to the world - and mostly, to himself - that he did put the effort to achieve his ambitions, even though he still lived in his parents’ house and liked to play videogames at ungodly hours into the night; Also, he was excited for Irene, since it would be her first time out of the country in all her life. But the fear of messing all up did put a bad taste in his mouth.
The day of departure was less tear filled, but nonetheless emotional. His parents and Irene’s both accompanied the two until they had to board. His father, surprisingly, had a gift for him, a lab coat. “might as well look the part, now”- he said with a rare humor and an honest smile, an even more rare thing when it came to his son. Elias couldn’t help but shed a tear or two, hugging them both tightly before running off with his colleague to board the plane.
Irene smirked knowingly to him as they found their seats- “ You haven’t stopped smiling ever since we boarded. You wanted that badly to get away from your parents? How shameful”. Elias slapped the back of her head softly, earning a mirthful laugh from her. Still, she was kind of correct: He was going to make his own life now, live abroad and participate in one of the most important experiments in the history of physics. Whatever the outcome would be of this first step towards his new life would be by his decision and his decision alone. He felt hope fill his chest. Everything was falling into the right place this time.
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“Everything is falling to pieces is more accurate.” - Elias murmured to himself after waking up from the memory filled dream, groaning as his muscles protested his attempt to move. It wasn’t the first time he was conscious, no. He had brief moments of awareness that lasted a few seconds before he was plunged into darkness again, but it was the first he remembered what he was dreaming and the first time he didn’t feel the need to fall back to sleep instantly after waking up, like before.
With some effort, and a lot of cursing, he managed to sit up and look around, eyes widening at the sight of the room and at the sight of his state. After looking around for a minute, letting his brain properly get into gear - as much as it could, anyway - he came to two conclusions - “More assumptions than conclusions, but who cares about details?”.
One: He was a captive, a prisoner. The room looked like a prison cell (a very sci-fi one at that) and it felt like a prison cell, so it is reasonable enough to conclude he was in a prison cell. It had square-shaped tiles that filled the walls, floor and ceiling, each appearing to be covering led lights; the exception of this monotonous pattern being the greyish door that looked like it could be used on nuclear bunkers or really secure vaults, and the two long, black tinted, one-way observation window that extended from the left side of the door to the right corner of the wall, opposite, both, from the side where his bed laid. The room was also relatively spacey, given the relative emptiness of it, and rectangular in shape, with the the bigger side, where his bed was located, having at least 5 m (16 ft) and the smaller 3 m (9 ft); at least, that what he could estimate based on where the bed was. The most impressive was the ceiling; it was difficult to estimate the height with the tiles, since the repeated pattern overstimulated the eyes if you focused too much, but using the two windows as reference and the fact that one of them was strangely placed way above the other, he could estimate about another 5 m (16 ft) of height from the ground to the ceiling, maybe a little more.
Two: The anthropomorphic jaguar was probably real. As much as Elias wanted that whole misadventure in the forest to be only a very vivid fever dream, his sore body, covered in stitches that would put Frankenstein's monster into shame, along with the IV in his right wrist told him he did get hurt that badly; also, although brief, his previous moments of awareness were clear enough that he was certain he could distinguish other animals talking to him in some of them. - “I swear there was a doe nurse…”, he murmured. He couldn’t tell really well, though, since most of the time they were wearing facemasks and his brain was going on and off really fast, so he hoped that at least he was wrong at this conclusion.
By now, he knew he should have started panicking, but whatever was being fed through the IV was doing a hell of a good job to keep him calm - “Or docile…”, His brain unhelpfully supplied. In fact, It was difficult to feel anything other than the dull pain of his battered body and the slow dissipating haze over his brain. He began trying to move his legs to get out of bed, or move his arms to wave at the window; both actions ending quickly as pain flared through his body like fire - “Yeah, no. Not trying this again. Sitting up was already a chore.”. Giving up on doing anything other than slowly reclining on his bed, Elias locked his gaze on the ceiling and began thinking about life, the universe and everything else that decided to screw him up.
His musings came to a halt moments after. The loud sound of the door unlocking mechanism - “ It really is a vault door” - made the human quickly stiffen and gaze at the door with increasing apprehension. It moved slowly enough to give the whole situation more suspense than necessary, and the loud, creaking sound was unnecessarily ominous. Finally, after anxious waiting, it revealed what was on the other side. “A snow leopard? Fuck! The jaguar was real.” - He thought, defeated.
The first things Elias noticed as the leopard got closer were the clothes: A black blazer dressed over a dark blue dress shirt that silhouetted the contour of its’ figure not enough to be too tight, but enough to see it was female; navy blue pants that ran through her legs and stopped over her bare paws -”do they call it feet, here?” - secured by a belt with a clearly visible gun holster on her left side and, probably, based on the height of the tail base, a small hole for her grey, fluffy long tail. A bench suddenly appeared from a hole where some tiles should be - "Movable wall tiles… sci-fi indeed” - right by the side of his bed. She took a seat and the next thing he noticed were her icy blue eyes boring on him, making the human feel face to face with a great snowstorm. Her sharp claws and almost emotionless face - quite the contrast from the jaguar in the rainforest - and dignified posture didn’t help his nerves either. Everything in her screamed authority.
“Can you understand me?” - The sudden sound of her melodious, yet frigid voice made Elias snap from whatever trance her eyes put him into and, after processing the question, nodded quickly, trying to look anywhere but her eyes, fear cursing like ice through his veins, followed by panic -“It was not shock. It was whatever they put through the IV and it wore off.”. Her posture, which he now noticed was tense, muscles flexed as if waiting for an attack, relaxed just a smidge. “Good… that will make things easier.” - She said before picking up a familiar plastic card from under the blazer. Elias looked at it surprised when he recognized it was his ID. “Elias… Silva? Am I pronouncing it correctly?”- She asked calmly, looking closely at the document in her paws then at him, and once more, he nodded, prompting her to pocket his ID again. This time, though, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut, driven by the increasing curiosity and overwhelming tension he was feeling.
“W-where am I?”- The stutter in his voice a testament of the panic that began to surface; his brain unhelpfully stating what appeared to be the obvious - “You’re dead. Congratulations, you imbecile”. The sharp movement of her head at the question made him almost jump, earning him a dose of pain from his body.
“I see you are confused. We all are, Mr. Silva.”- She began after a momentous pause, eyebrows furrowed in curiosity by the gasp of pain he made, motioning to the two observation windows. “ But I guess you have just as many questions as I do and are more overwhelmed than we are.” - She said, still with the same frigid and, yet, melodious voice. She then reached into her blazer again and took another ID, this time, with her face in it, presenting it to him - “ Let’s try again. I’m agent Alice Snow, of the Animal Intelligence Agency (A.I.A).”. Then, she pocketed her ID again - “... And to answer your question, Mr. Silva. You are under our headquarters, in the city of Zootopia.”.