Private Finished Ouch

Malina nodded. "Mhm. I left my pack about thirty years ago."

Vance seemed fairly surprised by the idea of other werewolves without packs. She assumed Vance himself didn't have a pack any longer. Judging from his behavior and those scars, his pack must have been responsible for the horrors he'd probably lived through.

As Vance tried to explain himself, Malina nodded. "I don't blame you. Hunting can be fun, so long as you're being safe and following the law."

She paused, thinking something over. "Well, anyway. I was going to keep going on my patrol. Since your hunt's pretty much over with, you could come along and learn a few things. Or I could just give you a lift home. Up to you, kid."

"Alright." Malina finished packing up her first aid kit, then pulled out a helmet. "Put this on, then," she told Vance. She only had the one helmet; normally she would wear it, but she knew she could survive a bad accident. She wasn't as sure about Vance.

"We're going to finish most of my patrol by bike, since I had to call it over here anyway. You ever ride a motorbike before?"

Whatever he said, the first thing Malina would teach him was how to safely ride as a passenger on a motorbike - and that even though this one could fly, it followed the same principles.

With a barely preceptible hum, the bike would lift off. It stayed only a couple of feet above ground. The two moved slowly, not much faster than Malina herself would have gone on foot. They weaved between the trees with gentle turns.

"So. The most important thing for anyone to look out for when they're out here, myself included, is signs of a fire. We do more search and rescue type work than most narrow reality forestry units, but fire management is still major part of it. If the wrong parts of the forest burn up, it'll take peoples homes and lives out with it. My home included, potentially."

"So let me know if that nose of yours picks up any smoke. You might just save a stranger'a life.

"Often enough to give me extra work," Malina explained with a half-smile. "You have to take extra precautions when you're on this side of the forbidden signs, and not everyone does. So, sometimes..."

Malina trailed off. The two werewolves figured out the direction of the fire at about the same time. Malina slowed down just as Vance started talking, then turned the bike and sped up, weaving even more quickly through the trees.

It was just a neglected campfire. Everything else had been packed up, and the people left. Malina sighed with relief, then started giving Vance a demonstration of how to properly put out a campfire and a mini lecture about how much damage this sort of thing could cause.

"I'm glad this was just negligence and not anything messier than that. Three-headed deer aren't the scariest things out here. You ever see a gargantuan nesting spider?"

"If we can catch them, yeah, they'll get fined." Malina said. "By which I mean, me and my colleagues might catch them eventually. Smells like they're long gone. I'm going to call this in and finish my patrol, and if we can figure out who was camping here we'll send them a fine. But mostly we just try to educate people about how not to burn the whole place down. If you want to help, you can just make sure you and your friends know how to manage a campfire properly when you go camping."

Malina heard that stomach growl, though. She paused. Vance did mention something about feeling like he needed to hunt. Maybe this was one of those exotic eating disorders - he didn't feel comfortable eating unless he earned it, somehow. She'd heard a podcast about those.

"Good nose catching this fire, Vance." She flashed him a smile. "I bet you're getting kinda hungry, so I'll tell you what. After I make a quick call on my radio, we ride down along the rest of my patrol, and then I give you a lift back down to the Academy so you can have a well-earned meal. How does that sound?"

Does education work? "Absolutely," Malina said. "We have the numbers to prove it too. It's a fact."

Could Vance contact her again? Malina smelled something on him, she noticed - it was almost familiar. He may have been her kind of werewolf, more or less. She nodded. "Absolutely. You have a cellphone, right? I can give you my number."

He deserved a better role model than whatever he'd been stuck with before coming here.

After she'd given him her number, she took a moment to radio in what she'd found. Particularly, the fire-related violation and the fact that she had a kid to return to the Academy after her patrol.