Shadows Over Camp Darkness

On The Fly

Marching into a Dragon's den and announcing to his face that she was going to break the safety rules of his Camp, all but kidnap her Intake, and take them out for an unsupervised night on the town was not the first plan that Gideon came up with, but it was the one she ultimately decided on. Technically the second once since the first one had involved doing the same without anyone with authority finding out, but since she figured the Dragon would already know it would sound best if she acted like she wanted him to know all along. So Gideon walked confidently towards the Dragon's rooms and heard him tell her to enter before she could even knock. Normally inside the Dragon's lair she would expect to see him lounging around in his less than completely human guise, but with the Hell Cat plus kittens there, Doctor Cyr seemed to be content to be human-ish but not so gargantuan.

Gideon stalked into the room with purpose but before she could utter her declaration of potential insanity, she was actually waylaid by several smallish, furry, and purring cannonballs. A quick check confirmed that they were the Hell Kittens and even though they were mostly harmless at this stage of their development, apparently marching in here while carrying a bag of fresh guts and blood made her smell like snuggle time. A fact that Gideon kept in her head for potential use later as she gently disengaged the sharpest claws from her personage and chucked the bloody mess of food at the Hell Cat mama.

"If you haven't heard already, I'm going to find a way to slip my crew out through the Punt and go take them to a movie. No wards, no tracking, no supervision, and I will be acting as bait." Gideon was as nonchalant as possible but even she felt a flair of nerves as the Doctor just looked at her without saying a thing.

"Did you rewrite your weekly rules without telling anyone?" he calmly asked as if Gideon hadn't just confessed to plotting a fire-able offence.

"No, week two is still 'don't get caught'. But it's not you I'm trying to avoid getting caught by." Gideon confessed, feeling her nerves die down as the Dragon just rolled with her announcement.

His head tilted to the side for a moment in a very non-human way and Gideon held still as she realized he was coming to some kind of decision. "You're playing on a much more volatile scale now though." He sighed, the sound resigned. "I would be lying if I said I hadn't seen something like this coming." He admitted and Gideon felt her body tense, her focus sharpening in on the Dragon. "Before you go on the attack, no I did not anticipate the attacks on you or anything like that. I meant that I saw how much you've changed over the last year and I anticipated the fact that you were out growing the Camp."

Gideon felt an odd, internal chill as the conversation veered in a direction she could never had anticipated. "Why do you say that?"

Doctor Cyr regarded her with eyes that lost their human mask and slid into the faceted gaze of a dragon's eye. "Because Gideon, you've grown up. You're not the child soldier you were when you came here, and you're not the young Fury with something to prove that has worked here for the last few years. You're a natural leader Gideon, and despite your past you have a capacity to care about others that is astonishing. The Camp has benefitted from your life lessons and I know that the kids in your Intakes have gone on to embrace life and heal from their issues; you have a success rate that is almost illogically high. But I can tell that you're not going to fit here much longer."

"I thought you wanted me to be a Head Councilor next Intake?" Gideon felt strange, her momentum coming in here entirely halted as she had to try and mentally jump to this new track of conversation.

The Hell Cat padded over to Gideon and sat on her haunches, picking up on the emotional vacillation Gideon felt but hid from view. This was her home; she had lived here and worked here year round since she was fourteen. Except for her extended stint in the hospital and the time the Camp had closed for repairs, she expected to continue to live here for a long time. But now that the Dragon was pointing the truth out to her, Gideon knew he was right. She had felt betrayed by her friends when they said they wanted to move on from the Camp because that would leave her here alone and without the usual foundations she'd come to rely on. But the truth was that Gideon herself needed to move on because this place was familiar and safe despite the current presence of another Fury, and she was just complacent.

The Doctor smiled as if he could read the thought process off of her face, though Gideon knew he couldn't. "Be careful when you go out there with the kids. I know there's no one they'd be safer with, but you'll be vulnerable because they're there." He let the matter of Gideon's continued residency drop and switched back to her original reason for being in his area.

Gideon nodded, grateful to slide back into hunter and hunted mode. It was far easier to figure out what she needed to do when she was embracing her nature. "I wanted to take the Hell Cat with me but the Kittens aren't ready to be separated from her yet, and she sticks out even more than the Golem does in a crowd of Normals."

"She'll be safe here, regardless of how your venturing turns out. And I agree with your assessment that the Kittens should be released back into a safe area once they've weaned." The Dragon smiled again, this time with actual humour colouring it. "This Camp has enough Wild Things in it without trying to mess with actual wild animals."

"Five bucks says that you'll miss them when they're gone." Gideon smirked as she geared down from the confrontation that never happened. Working with a Dragon could be vexing at times, frustrating on the whole, and occasionally glorious, but the biggest advantage to his natural Neutrality was that he was smart enough to see the moves and countermoves that Gideon was playing with. With anybody else she'd have spent most of the next hour explaining to them the need to slip out of the Camp and the logic behind her decision, and then inevitably plotting around their interference because most people just cannot leave well enough alone.

"I'm not going to take that bet, a Hell Cat would be an excellent living mascot for the Camp." Doctor Cyr offhandedly remarked and Gideon laughed. Then he sobered up almost immediately. "Hold your plan until Friday night. I'm allowing your Intake out of the Camp for the following day as well, unless someone pulls an incredibly unintelligent stunt between now and then."

Gideon nodded agreement and they fell into a comfortable silence as she petted the Hell Cat at her side. Internally she could almost feel her mental chess board rearranging as the pieces started to move about and she wondered what her dreaming would reveal. She'd embraced the wholeness of her Fury nature but that didn't mean she was always privy to the subconscious logic of her more volatile nature.

"One last thing Gideon." The Dragon reclaimed her attention before she could slip out of his office.

"And what would that be?" The Fury asked as she looked at him with one good eyeball and her Fury sight.

"I can't protect you if you get caught breaking the Punt's protections. So I highly suggest that you abide by your own rules." He warned and Gideon grinned at him.

"Doc, you ain't seen nothing yet. My rules here in the Camp are the PG-13 version, but I'm thinking of adjusting the rating to 18 A and seeing what kind of trouble I can stir up with that." Gideon felt the new scars on her face twist as she grinned. The pain was brief and starting to become familiar.

"Well that will be exciting." The Dragon was as unruffled as he ever was with a Fury around.

Gideon made it back out into the nighttime air without further commentary or distraction and she stopped to get a feel of the atmosphere. The constant sense of being watched was distant, so her fellow Fury was not close enough to feel just now but she hadn't left the Camp either. Why one of Gideon's sisters would be here but not reveal herself to Gideon was all a part of the game, and Gideon knew that she'd get a disappointed look from her friends if they were to realize that Gideon was playing along. She'd been bored and hadn't even realized it yet, there was nothing in her life here that called for her to embrace everything that she was and could be.

"Queen's pawn opening move. Time for my countermove then I see." Gideon mumbled to the night air as she scanned around her with her good eye. She was letting herself adjust to looking around without her Fury sight as often as possible so that her equilibrium would adjust to the lack of secondary input. It left her feeling exposed and off balance, the perfect combination to help heighten her adrenal response. Gideon knew that if her Fury brethren wasn't watching her right now, she was off getting ready to stir up some trouble, and the thought was far more appealing than Gids knew it should be. "If I were a Fury in the enemy Camp, what kind of trouble would I cause?" Gideon let the options sift through her head for a moment and then it occurred to her.

If she wanted to cause a fellow Fury as much grief as possible to drive her out of a rut, she'd go after a very specific list of people. Gideon's loved ones would be on there no doubt, but the top of the list would start with Gideon's enemies, not allies. Even as Gideon contemplated the fate of her less than loved ones, there was a high pitched shriek of pain that made a dark part of Gideon's soul sing out in excitement.