show me what you got (MEETING)

To his surprise, the former alpha was the first to appear on deck. They stared at each other for a moment, both equally wary, before the gray-toned male broke the tension with a self-deprecating comment. Chaos gave him a crooked half-smile, but didn't respond. Yeah, he was bigger, stronger, and a fighter, but the older male had been wily. The fight could have gone either way, and he didn't really care to repeat it any time soon.

The rest of the pack filed in with a somber attitude, which he couldn't blame them for. They didn't know him, except that he'd come along and pulled the rug out from under them with a challenge. When he thought that they were all there - judging from the scents he'd caught along the border and throughout the lands, anyway - he straightened and swept his eyes over all of them.

The former alpha and Valdis and Delaney he all knew, and Asvor, Valdis' friend, but there were a few new faces as well. He stopped with a faint frown at one face, trying to place where he'd seen him before. Maybe he looked like someone Chaos had known? Or maybe he just had one of those faces. He stopped again on a snow leopard sitting beside a young woman, not so different from the one beside the former alpha except that she, like Chaos himself, had long fangs protruding from her upper lip. His brows twitched upward in surprise. Neat. He continued his sweep, and then began.

"By now you all probably know what happened. I challenged for your pack, and I won, making me your new alpha. You don't know me, or my goals, or what I'm going to turn the pack into, so I don't blame you for being wary." He paused, letting silence fill the moment as he met each set of eyes, then continued. "My name is Chaos Saxe. I am the son of Valentine Imperialis, a great alpha, which I know doesn't mean shit to you because it has no bearing on whether I'm going to be even a good one." Most of them seemed too young to remember Imperium anyway.

"I'm not going to be changing your pack structure right away, if at all, so whatever rank you've got you'll keep unless you want to change it. One thing you need to know, though. I have no intention of my pack hiding up in the north where no one can find it. No offense," he added to the former alpha, who shrugged gracefully. "I intend for every loner, pack, and band to know our name and respect us. So as soon as everyone is ready to make the trip, I will be moving the pack down south to the lands I grew up in - the Range and Buffalo Knolls. There's good hunting, it's central to many things, and it's right on the edges of the battlefield so everything from hunting to trading to training and spars will be easy to come by."

"Easy doesn't mean I don't expect my wolves to work hard," he added warningly, his voice going grim. "Any wolf that isn't putting effort towards the pack obviously doesn't want to be here, and I don't want to spend my time and my pack's time dragging along dead weight that won't contribute. This isn't a charity, and I'm not going to put my wolves through hardships to take care of someone who can't or won't give anything back to them. Everything has a price."

He softened his stance and his gaze from the fierce expression that had tightened them, though his voice was still threaded through with a grim note. "You can expect that my pack will in general be more involved in combat than it was. Not everyone will be expected to be a fighter, and most of what we do as a pack won't be focused on it, but those who are fighters can expect to be more openly involved in warfare, in raiding, and that sort of thing, and I won't lie to you, I have no problem with taking slaves or holding prisoners of war for ransom."

He paused, then pushed on. "I'm being blunt about all this because I am giving you all the chance to leave the pack now, without any consequences. If you don't approve, or you don't want to put yourself at risk, I understand and you will be welcome to remain here until we leave to go south, or to gather your things and find a different home, whatever you want to do, but rest assured that you aren't going to be just kicked out on your ass in the snow." He gave them a crooked grin. "But once the pack sets up borders in the lands in the south, I'm going to expect that anyone who's still with us at that point intends to stay permanently, and I'm not going to be very pleased with anyone who changes their mind and leaves after that."