S0WE13 - What If... Nothing Was True?

"What If... Nothing Was True?" is the thirteenth episode of the W-Series and its second "What If" episode, following "What If... the Weakest Lynx Chose Differently?". Framed by The Watcher from Marvel's What If...?, it imagines a Zootopia whose institutions have been steered for two centuries by a secret Templar Order, opposed all that time by an equally old Brotherhood of Assassins. The episode is an Assassin's Creed crossover and has zero continuity with the rest of the W-Series.

Synopsis

A clouded leopard kills Felim Drenn, a city archivist, on the Gnu Jersey waterfront with one drilled thrust. The case reaches Luther through ZSI and Nick and Judy through the ZPD because the victim had been pulling founding-era infrastructure records; a ZSI trace shows six weeks of escalating requests steered by anonymous notes that stopped two days before his death. Searching Drenn's ransacked office after dark, they surprise Kael, a wounded margay at the same drawers, and Luther catches the spring-loaded blade she deploys from her forearm two inches short of his throat. Kael names herself a Brotherhood Assassin and the killer a Templar, from an order that has run Zootopia through appointments and policy since before the weather walls. She names Drenn's retired colleague Tarsa Mellick as the next target, and the pack takes her rowhouse in Otterdam. Three Templars breach at two in the morning. Kael pins the fisher on the roof, Nick and Judy put the maned wolf down upstairs, and Luther turns the clouded leopard's own blade into his throat, then finds himself in a white void where the dying operative, Corvane, calls the murder maintenance and the Order the mammals who designed the city. Kael cuts off the escaping fisher with a five-story dive into the canal and is gone before the ZPD arrives. At home, Pawbert gets the version Luther can tell. Afterward he digs a warm gold sphere out of a box of Lynxley Manor keepsakes and speaks the Templar blessing over it.

Plot

The Watcher opens on a reality with an older architecture beneath the visible one, where a secret creed has been steering Zootopia since before the city raised its weather walls. On Dockline Walk in Gnu Jersey, a clouded leopard steps out of the dark between two warehouses and kills Felim Drenn, a middle-aged aardvark city archivist, with one thrust under the base of the skull. The killing is drilled rather than improvised: a single strike, no hesitation marks, the blade wiped clean before the killer walks away.

Morning at Pawthorne Mansion. Pawbert has let the toast go dark while watching Luther read his briefing, Nick is upright but not yet awake, and Judy is already dressed with her badge clipped on. A ZPD homicide notification and a ZSI routing flag arrive seconds apart on the same body, ZSI having flagged it because the victim had been requesting founding-era infrastructure records. Luther takes the wheel, and the three of them leave Pawbert behind with burnt toast and a cup of tea going cold.

At the waterfront, Luther crouches over the body and reads the wound back to the mammal who made it: delivered underhand from grappling range, with a short high-carbon blade kept like a surgical instrument, by someone for whom killing is procedure rather than violence. A young okapi forensic tech confirms the metallurgy. Drenn's office on the third floor of the Port Authority Records Building has already been turned over, quickly rather than carefully, by someone hunting particular documents. Judy digs founding-era construction surveys out of the mess, among them a requisition Drenn filed three weeks earlier for "Infrastructure Survey, Grid Seventeen— Sub-Harbor Designation." Back at Precinct 1, Luther pulls the archivist's full research history through ZSI: six weeks of escalating requests for founding-era documents, circling one stretch of Savanna Central that has been torn down and rebuilt repeatedly since the city was founded. Someone had been leaving anonymous notes in Drenn's mailbox pointing him at particular files, and those notes stopped two days before the murder.

The pack goes back to the office after dark and finds the door standing open. Inside, a hooded margay is working the same filing cabinet, favoring a wound along her left flank that has been bleeding long enough to stiffen the fur. Luther identifies himself and tells her to show her paws; she comes off the cabinet instead. The fight fills the cramped room. She is small and trained in something older than any discipline Luther can name, using the scattered furniture as cover and as footing, staying so far inside his guard that his reach works against him, and Nick and Judy never get a clean angle. Then Luther's ears pick out a sound nothing else in the room could have heard: a spring-loaded mechanism releasing under her forearm. He catches the forearm with the blade two inches short of his throat.

The margay gives her name as Kael and stops fighting the moment she registers that they are not Templars. The blade retracts. It belongs to the Brotherhood of Assassins, she tells them, and in two centuries no Templar has ever intercepted one before it cleared the bracer. The wound on Drenn is Templar work, conventional steel and institutional method, and the Templars predate the weather walls, governing through appointments, policy and the framework underneath the agencies Luther serves. Drenn found records proving they exist, and an operative closed the problem before morning; Kael's order had been trying to reach him and arrived too late. She gives them a second name: Tarsa Mellick, a retired archivist in Otterdam who kept her own copies of everything she cataloged across forty years, and who will have operatives at her door within hours. Luther authorizes a protective detail on the spot.

Tarsa lives in a four-story brick rowhouse on Kanalstraat, squeezed between a locksmith and a chandler's shop shut for a decade, the whole building settled a couple of degrees out of true. She is a tapir in her seventies, and she opens the door already asking whether this is about Felim. She takes the news without moving, then confirms that Drenn had called two weeks earlier about an organization he believed was buried in the city's founding records. Luther and Kael survey the building together, the wolf mapping ground-floor approaches while the margay maps drainpipes, chimney and parapet, each reading the same walls in a vocabulary the other does not use. On the roof they compare predictions: Luther expects a move between midnight and four, in the gap left by the ZPD patrol shift change; Kael says two o'clock, because Templars prefer precision to opportunity. Luther takes the ground floor, Nick circuits the upper floors at irregular intervals, and Judy sits with Tarsa in a windowless interior study. Kael climbs the chimney stack to its cap, a full story above the roofline, and holds a crouch on its edge with one hindpaw on the lip and her weight out over the drop, then drops back behind the parapet to wait.

Three operatives come in at two, each through a different vector, each covering the others. The clouded leopard picks the rear door and enters the ground floor with a suppressed pistol and a combat knife, stepping over Luther's trip wires without ringing a bell. A maned wolf clears the eight-foot gap from the neighboring fire escape and comes through the second-floor window Nick deliberately left unlatched. A fisher rides the drainage pipe down from the roof and into Kael. Three fights start at once.

Kael and the fisher trade the rooftop back and forth. He is built low, refuses to slow down for injuries, and goes for the wound on her flank the moment he sees the blood. She answers with vertical angles he cannot follow, rotating her ankles a full half-turn to anchor on the parapet stone and swing down at him head-first, then locks his knife arm and holds the hidden blade against his throat until he stops. Two floors below, the maned wolf's arms give him nearly two feet of advantage over Nick until Judy comes through the study door behind him and the two of them work him as one animal without a word passing between them, Judy underneath his guard to break his balance and Nick trapping the blade arm against the wall. In the ground-floor corridor Luther and the clouded leopard exchange rounds and then lose the range for it entirely. Crowded against the wall with his muzzle in fur and the stairwell fight overhead, Luther holsters and works empty-pawed, reading a rhythm that is disciplined and therefore predictable, landing under the ribs, stripping the knife, putting the Templar face-first into the plaster. The leopard comes up off the floor with a second blade in a reverse grip, and Luther turns the angle back into him.

The corridor drains away. Sound withdraws, the walls give up their edges, the blood on Luther's paws goes from warm to gone, and he is standing in a white expanse with no horizon, no shadow and no temperature. Corvane stands ten feet off, upright and unmarked, and talks to him as though from the far side of a briefing table. The Templar Order supplied the city with its structure, he says: it designed the institutions, installed the mammals who wrote the law, and drafted the terms on which species agreed to live alongside one another. Before that there were territories and teeth. Drenn's death was maintenance, one archivist weighed against a city-state of eight and a half million, and what Luther defends with a badge and a salary is disorder rather than order. Corvane predicts that Luther will one day watch the system fail and wonder who is holding the architecture up. He finishes by casting the Order as the city's architects rather than its enemies, and Luther as the mammal who has just taken out a load-bearing wall. The white space closes in. Luther is kneeling in the corridor with blood spreading across the tile, and he reaches over and closes the dead Templar's eyes.

Upstairs the maned wolf is zip-tied and secure, but the fisher has chewed through the cord Kael bound him with and is already two rooftops away. He swings onto the fire escape of the last building on the block, five stories above the main canal. Kael takes the shorter route: she runs to the edge and steps off it, falling straight and controlled with her forepaws spread and her cloak snapping behind her, and enters the water head-first with almost no splash. She is up the far bank and waiting at the foot of the ladder before the fisher is halfway down, blade out, towpath closed. Watching from the parapet, Nick asks whether she really jumped, Luther confirms it twice, Nick looks over the edge and declines to comment further, and Judy keeps hold of the parapet stone and her eyes off the water.

With the two survivors restrained and Tarsa gone to put the kettle on, Kael asks Luther what he saw when the leopard died. He describes the white space, and she names it: the Memory Corridor, a liminal place Assassins have reported for centuries after a killing that mattered, and which, by the Brotherhood's records, has never happened to anyone outside the order. What Corvane told him is the Templar creed reduced to a recruitment pitch, she says, and it is the true half that makes it dangerous. The Order did build the framework. But the peace it built only ever covered the mammals the design accounted for, and the ones who contradicted it were removed by committee, construction contract and quiet institutional authority rather than by war, including an entire civilization buried beneath ice and stone for a hundred years, until nobody was left alive who remembered it existed.

The Brotherhood exists to ask who appointed the architects, and its creed answers that the structures mammals live inside are built things rather than natural law, and that every mammal owns what follows from choosing. Judy pushes back with courts, laws and processes for holding institutions to account, and Kael asks her who writes the laws. Nobody in the hallway answers. Nick, who recognizes the shape of the argument better than he intends to say in that company, keeps it to himself. Kael then declines to be there when the ZPD arrives: Tarsa's records are safe, the forensic match between the leopard's knife and Drenn's wound will carry the case, and the Templars have lost three operatives and their cover in a single night, which puts an elderly tapir well down their list of concerns. She stops at the door long enough to tell Luther that the Brotherhood will remember what he did, and by the time the first cruiser reaches Kanalstraat she has left nothing behind but canal water on the entry mat.

Luther gets home at three fifteen. Pawbert is cross-legged in front of the television with a PawStation controller, one rank short of Diamond in a tactical shooter whose operators drag armored panels across doorways, sweep rooms with overhead drones, fire cluster charges through hatches and send holographic decoys down corridors. Luther, who has previously dismissed the game as tactically absurd, has also, by Pawbert's accounting, put in four matches of his own and unlocked the heartbeat-sensor wolf. Nick and Judy go up to bed. Pawbert quits the round without finishing it, having already read the bruise on Luther's jaw, the forearm he is holding close, and the set of his shoulders.

Luther gives him the part that is not classified: an order older than the weather walls working underneath the city, assassins fighting in the shadows over free will, a creed about truth and choice, a weapon that comes out of a bracer faster than a drawn knife, and a mammal who went off a five-story roof into a canal without pausing. Then he tells Pawbert that he killed one of them, and that afterward everything went white. Pawbert skips the question he can already answer and asks what it felt like instead. Luther compares it to the stretch between two ZTA stations, where the train is moving and the doors stay shut and the tunnel keeps going until abruptly it doesn't.

Pawbert turns the creed over and remarks that an order defending every mammal's right to choose who they are sounds like something he recognizes. Luther's face eases. They sit in the lamplight with the mansion quiet around them, the green sweater still on the couch arm where Pawbert had left it.

The Watcher closes on the four of them: the lynx who stayed, the wolf who took a blade out of the air, the rabbit who still believes the system is defensible, and the fox who knows what it costs. Between them they have built an order with no creed and no council, and nothing keeps it standing except the four of them choosing to. That, the Watcher says, is the architecture that endures.

Once Luther is asleep, Pawbert eases out from under his arm, pulls the green sweater over him, and goes upstairs with the thought still running. In the hall closet is a box labeled in his own writing as junk from Lynxley Manor: dulled picture frames, a pocket watch that no longer runs, a compass with no needle. Underneath them his paw closes on a sphere small enough to hold in one paw, gold gone dark with age, its surface cut in fine geometric lines and its metalwork layered beneath the tarnish. It is warm. Pawbert lifts it into the hallway light, his eyes amber and steady above it, and speaks: "May the Father of Understanding guide us."

Key Moments

• Felim Drenn is assassinated on Dockline Walk by a clouded leopard working to Templar method
• Luther reads the wound as drilled and institutional before any context about the Templars is introduced
• The pack finds Kael in Drenn's office; she engages Luther and deploys the hidden blade
• Luther catches the hidden blade mid-deployment — something no Templar has managed in two hundred years
• Kael identifies the Templars and the Brotherhood, reframing the homicide as part of a centuries-old war
• Luther, Nick, Judy, and Kael secure Tarsa Mellick's rowhouse and assign defensive positions
• Three Templar operatives breach at exactly two o'clock
• Nick and Judy fight the maned wolf as a wordless married unit
• Luther kills Corvane and enters the Memory Corridor, the white space the Brotherhood has documented for centuries
• Corvane delivers the Templar creed: the Order designed the city, and what Luther defends is its work
• Kael dives five stories into the Otterdam canal to cut off the escaping fisher
• Kael departs, telling Luther the Brotherhood will remember what he did
• Pawbert waits up playing a tactical shooter and reads Luther's damage without asking directly
• Luther reaches for a stalled ZTA train to explain the Memory Corridor to Pawbert
• Pawbert finds a tarnished gold sphere at the bottom of a box of Lynxley Manor keepsakes
• Pawbert speaks the Templar blessing over the sphere

Key Lines

Characters Introduced

Locations

• Dockline Walk, Gnu Jersey — Waterfront pedestrian path along the harbor seawall; site of Drenn's assassination
• Port Authority Records Building, Gnu Jersey — Limestone block on the waterfront; houses Drenn's office on the third floor; pre-weather-wall construction
• Kanalstraat, Otterdam — Narrow rowhouse street along a canal; Tarsa Mellick's four-story building between a locksmith and a shuttered chandler
• Otterdam canals — Gas-lamp-lit towpaths and dark water; site of Kael's five-story dive and the fisher's attempted escape
• Precinct 1 — Luther's windowless office, where the ZSI trace on Drenn's record requests comes back
• Pawthorne Mansion — Kitchen (morning), living room (late-night debrief and gaming), upstairs closet (stinger)

Items

• Hidden blade — Spring-loaded double-edged steel blade deployed from a forearm-mounted bracer; instrument of the Brotherhood of Assassins. Stamped with an inverted chevron worn smooth by generations of use. Luther catches it mid-deployment.
• Combat knife (Templar) — Short, double-edged, high-carbon steel; maintained like a surgical instrument. Matches the wound in Drenn's neck. The clouded leopard carries a concealed second blade in reverse grip.
• The sphere — Tarnished gold, small enough to sit in one paw, its surface cut in fine geometric lines that age has worn down. Warm to the touch. Found by Pawbert at the bottom of a box of Lynxley Manor keepsakes. Parallels the Apple of Eden from the Assassin's Creed series.
• The Green Sweater — Draped over the arm of the couch; watches over Luther and Pawbert; used as a blanket when Luther falls asleep
• PawStation controller — Pawbert's gaming controller; one rank away from Diamond
• Canvas satchel — Drenn's, heavy with documents and still on him when he is killed on Dockline Walk
• Green mug — Luther's, black coffee, untouched at the counter until he has finished the morning briefing

Music

End Credit Song

"Ezio's Family" (From 'Assassin's Creed II'), Jesper Kyd

Jesper Kyd wrote it for Assassin's Creed II and it became the franchise's signature theme. The episode is an Assassin's Creed crossover, so it closes on the franchise's own music.

Notes

• This Assassin's Creed crossover features multiple franchise elements: the Hidden Blade, the Leap of Faith, the Synchronize pose, the Memory Corridor, the Creed, the Templar blessing, and Ezio's Family.
• Grid Seventeen is a reference to Subject 17 (Desmond Miles), the Animus subject and modern-day protagonist of AC1/AC2.
• The tarnished gold sphere is the Apple of Eden.
• The stinger implies Ebenezer Lynxley was a Templar in this reality. Zero bearing on main WCFP canon.
• Pawbert's tactical shooter is Rainbow Six Siege on a PawStation (PlayStation), another Ubisoft game. Operators referenced: Castle, Lion, Fuze, Alibi, Mira, and Pulse.