Jesús
Jesús is a plumed basilisk and a fixture of the Reptile Hangout, the bar built into a sunken ship in Marsh Market. He originates in Zootopia 2 and first appears in We Can Fix Pawbert in the W-Series, where he welcomes Pawbert and Luther the way he once welcomed Nick and Judy — with a plate of live grubs and an instruction to eat before anyone talks.
Background
Jesús takes his lunch at a corner table with his back to a porthole, on wood rubbed smooth by long use. He wears a large black cowboy hat and a yellow collared top under an open fringed jacket, and beneath the brim his scales are bright green and his lips teal. Time has worked on him since Nick and Judy last sat at that table, putting more lines in his face and thinning the plumes down his back, though his eyes hold the same unhurried patience.
The Hangout was a hidden refuge for Zootopia's reptiles when those two first came through it. It is a neighborhood bar now, its doors standing open on the lagoon, families eating in the sun on the ship's tilted deck and the old speakeasy fittings still hanging on the walls. Jesús watched that change happen from the same chair, and none of it surprises him anymore.
Personality
He speaks slowly, in a warm gravelly drawl that has not shifted since Nick and Judy first heard it. He is patient with strangers and unreadable when he wants to be. His eyes move across the newcomers at his table: warm on the two he knows, brief on the wolf, and when they reach Pawbert they give nothing back.
What he does talk about is fishing. The water in the channels is high, the catfish are running, and a cousin of his has worked out a technique with a modified net that he will trade for a good story. He is a generous audience for an unlikely story as well as a good one, and he has the patience to run the same argument about Nibbles's podcast every time she comes in, conceding her point about the weather walls the way he has conceded it before.
The grubs are his own long-running joke. Jesús has been serving them to first-time visitors for as long as anyone has been bringing him any, and once the guest swallows he makes no attempt to hide what he has done — he slaps the table, tells the whole bar, and enjoys the result from under his hat.
Series History
W-Series
In "Touch Grass", Nibbles stops the pack at the gangplank to warn them that refusing food from Jesús is an insult to everyone in the room, then walks them in. He raises a claw to her from his corner table, and the look the two of them trade is quick enough to miss. A gecko server takes away what is left of his lunch, an iguana server puts down a plate of pale grubs, and Nibbles slides it toward the two mammals who have never been here before. Nick becomes absorbed in a neon toad on the wall. Judy examines her claws.
Pawbert starts to thank him for having them and gets cut off: "Eat first. Talk second." Luther eats one the way ZSI field training taught him to eat whatever a local contact puts in front of him, then eats a second. Pawbert gets one down, with a single chew and a swallow the whole table can hear. Jesús slaps the table, turns to the bar and announces that the wolf managed two, and the room comes apart around him. He calls to the server, whom he addresses as hermano, for the real menu and for something that is not alive, and the table moves on to catfish, marshmallow recipes and which of Nibbles's podcasts is the real one. Nick and Judy, handed the same plate in the same seats years earlier, sit through all of it without warning anybody.
Key Relationships
Nibbles Maplestick
Nibbles and Jesús are old collaborators. The etiquette warning she delivers on the gangplank is sound advice about Marsh Market and also the opening move of the trick, and the glance the two of them exchange once the pack sits down is the practiced kind.
Nick Wilde and Judy Hopps
Nick and Judy came through the Hangout years before the pack's weekend and were given the grubs themselves. Jesús recognizes them across the room and greets them warmly, then runs the joke on their friends while the two original victims study the wall and their own claws. Neither says a thing, and Pawbert works it out one grub too late.
Pawbert Pawthorne and Luther Pawthorne
Whatever Jesús makes of the lynx sitting across from him, he keeps to himself, and the Lynxley name goes unmentioned at that table all afternoon. Pawbert and Luther get the plate, the joke and the same seat that anyone Nibbles vouches for gets, and nothing in the hours that follow requires anything of either of them beyond sitting there.