Officer Gronckle
Officer Gronckle is a babirusa with curved tusks and a guard at Zootopia Correctional Facility in We Can Fix Pawbert. He wears badge 117, and he is the compromised link between an inmate courier working the loading dock and a supplier outside the walls — the first connection Luther maps after going into the facility under cover.
Series History
Season 3
Gronckle appears in "Licence to Claw". Newly processed into general population on a ZSI operation, Luther walks the yard perimeter reading the room the way he reads any room — who leans toward whom, who gives ground — and picks out a weasel near the loading dock talking to a guard with more familiarity than the job allows. The weasel passes a small package across, quick and practiced, and the guard pockets it without checking what he has been given. Luther memorizes the face and the badge number on the uniform without yet knowing whose they are.
The name comes at dinner. Gronckle works the mess hall door, scanning the room as a guard on that post is supposed to, except that his attention keeps drifting back to the courier's table three tables from where Luther is eating. That is enough to give Luther the shape of the chain — courier to guard to whoever is supplying from outside — and it is what he leaves in the chapel dead drop that night, coded and compressed, along with the badge number and an admission that the target of whatever is being built remains unclear.
Gronckle never speaks on the page and takes no further part in the operation, but the exchange he accepted is the thread the investigation pulls on for the rest of the arc.
Trivia
- Gronckle's badge number 117 is a nod to Master Chief, Spartan-117, from the Halo video game franchise. His name references the Gronckle dragon species from How to Train Your Dragon.