Bran had been called by the Elder to a small office on the main street. It was a dusty little place which used to be an accountant's office, and for the first time in several years it looked as though it had a new occupant.
As Bran approached the door to the office, he could hear voices, one low and powerful — the Elder — but another he was not familiar with.
Suddenly the unfamiliar voice, a woman's, shouted from inside: "well are you going to stand out there all day or come in?"
Bran opened the door, and inside he saw the Elder, in his human form with his long white hair and beard standing next to a desk. Seated at the desk was a woman, and by her stunning green eyes, a pure blood by the looks of it. Bran smiled, his eyes glinting with a tinge of gold, betraying his true nature as a shifter.
"Ah, my babysitter. Do you have much experience with babies?" The woman asked. She was clearly annoyed, her voice containing a husky quality to it which Bran found arousing.
In fact, Bran found her very attractive. He hadn't been around many pure bloods before, but this woman had captivated his attention immediately with her long blond hair tied up into a ponytail, and her white blouse, clearly meant for work, hiding a curved and full figure.
"Well, do you have experience as a babysitter?" she asked once more.
Bran snapped out of his trance. "Uh…" he hesitated.
The woman saw blood. "Oh, great, you've sent me a puppy, Elder."
"Nonsense!" the Elder said, laughing heartily. "This is Bran, he's one of the finest Swiftclaws I know."
"What does she mean by 'babysitter'?" Bran asked suspiciously.
The Elder looked momentarily awkward, before explaining. "Bran, this is Doctor Goldberg. She's going to be here for the next year."
"Nice to meet you," Bran said. But going by the doctor's attitude, he wasn't really sure if it was nice.
"Doctor Goldberg is taking part in a study which the Swiftclaws have agreed to be part of. She's here to learn more about shifter physiology and culture."
It all seemed very strange to Bran. Ever since the Nazis had experimented on some captured shifters during the war, most shifters tried to keep human doctors at arms length. In fact, if the stories were true, the Elder himself had seen some of the experiments first hand during a rescue mission. If anyone should have been apprehensive around human doctors, it was him.
"Well, Bran, looks like we're stuck with each other," said the doctor. "Maybe it's a good thing, I can learn how to speak in that stilted way most shifters seem to..."
"Why do I feel I'm not going to like this?" Bran asked the Elder.
"People don't like change, certainly not shifter people. Most of us have stayed in the shadows for too long. I think it will do us all good if you act as a…"
Doctor Goldberg interrupted the Elder. "Bodyguard?"
"No… a… chaperon, just until you've got to know the town a bit better and it knows you. Bran, come outside with me for a moment. If you need anything at all, please do let me know, Miss Goldberg." The Elder smiled and left.
Bran grinned at Miss Goldberg too as he went outside, but he was greeted with a suspicious look.
"Elder, you can't really be serious. A chaperon?" Bran said outside. "I should be training."
"No, Goldberg was right. I need you to be her bodyguard. There are rumblings from LoHawk and his gang that they might try to make her life very difficult with us, and just how far they'd be willing to go, I don't know."
"Why did you bring her here, Elder? Surely it's only going to cause trouble?"
The Elder turned to Bran and smiled kindly. "Maybe one day when you're town elder, you'll understand. I have to protect all of my people, every person in the Swiftclaw clan. Whether LoHawk and the others like it or not, Lacey and Gage have a child, and that child is half pure blood. It might be more fragile than us, we just don't know. What if the baby gets sick? I feel much better knowing we have a pure blood doctor here as well as our own."
"So, how often do I need to stay with the doctor? She's a bit, cold, don't you think?" Bran said quietly, afraid she'd hear him through the door.
"She's just being cautious, as she should be. I need you to move into the spare room above her office. You must keep an eye on her at all times, and at no point can she venture out unescorted. Anyone tries anything, you have my permission to fight." As The Elder left, he turned around and said "you're one of our best, Bran. I have every faith in you."
Bran smiled and thanked the Elder, but as he was left outside on his own, he didn't know what to think. Doctor Goldberg, while easy on the eye, seemed pretty cold. To have to spend all his time with her for months on end, that was not going to be fun. Bran preferred to spend his days with his friends running alongside and into Swiftclaw lake, and when he wasn't doing that he was training. Learning the fighting skills which would hopefully one day serve him well if he were champion. Now he had to spend all his time babysitting? It wasn't his chosen pastime, that was for sure.
But he valued the Elder above any, and so opened the door and stepped inside.
The first night did not start well. Doctor Goldberg was busy working on her research, taking notes, trying to put all of her qualifications as a medical doctor and an animal expert into good use; but Bran was restless. He felt bored, stuck in his tiny new bedroom above the doctor's office.
Doctor Goldberg was in the living room jotting down some observations she'd made about the Elder, when Bran walked in.
"Doc, I have an idea, how about we go for a walk. It's a nice night, and we could…"
The doctor interrupted: "No thank you. I am much too busy. But feel free to go on your own." She didn't even look up from the pages in front of her.
"Listen, let's start over, I'm Bran, nice to meet you. What's your first name?" Bran stood over the doctor, smiling, his hand outstretched.
"Bran, I appreciate you're just doing as you're told like a good young pup, but…"
Now it was Bran's turn to do the interrupting: "Why do you keep saying that? You can't be that much older than me."
"I'm 30. By the look of you I'd say you're around 21 in terms of shifter development. Look… I don't mean to be rude, it's just I was told I'd have a once in a lifetime opportunity to study shifter biology and society here. But it appears I'm to be shadowed at every step. Can you not understand why that would annoy me?"
"Not really. I'm pretty good company when you get to know me."
Doctor Goldberg laughed, and for the first time Bran saw her smile. He liked it.
Then her face became more serious again. "I've got a lot of work I need to do, so if you don't mind I'd appreciate if you didn't disturb me."
"Whatever. You're just missing out on some fun, I have some killer jokes." Bran walked out of the room and back into his own. He didn't bother to check to see if the doctor was smiling or not as he walked away.
She was.
The next morning, it was doctor Goldberg who approached Bran. She'd had an idea, and Bran's experience of pure bloods, the little he had, told him that wasn't always a good thing.
Over some breakfast she spoke hesitantly at first. "Bran… Would you like to take part in my research?"
"Are you wanting to know why I'm so devastatingly handsome? I'm afraid not all shifters have that talent."
"Please, take this seriously," the doctor said.
The truth was Bran found her stubbornness attractive, unlike the type of woman he would normally pursue.
"I'm sorry. What do you have in mind?" Bran asked, this time politely.
All of a sudden the doctor's demeanor changed. She was enthused, and began to speak passionately about her research. "Fantastic!" she said, smiling. "I'm trying to figure out how you tell your body to shift, seeing as you can do it on command."
"Some can, others have more difficulty. Shifting isn't a precise thing," Bran tore his teeth into a bacon sandwich, before realizing how much noise he was making eating.
"The thing is, no one knows how you do it. The mechanism has never been found. My theory is that if we can understand the signals from your brain which start the process, we might reveal the secret."
"And what would pure bloods do with this secret?" Bran asked, sounding suspicious but not meaning to.
"Shifters are notoriously stronger than… What do you call us? 'Pure bloods'? You also seem to have an immunity to most human diseases, even though you clearly evolved somewhere from the human line. If I can nail down where this resistance comes from, then potentially we could save millions of lives by incorporating it into treatments."
Bran was impressed. The doctor seemed to be noble, and among shifter people, that was a trait which was held in the highest regard. "Okay, I'm in, Doc."
"Please, call me Elizabeth."
And he did.
Two hours later, Elizabeth took Bran into her makeshift laboratory downstairs. She pulled on her white lab coat, and then some white latex gloves.
"Oh, kinky. Please be gentle," Bran said, stretching out on am examination table.
Elizabeth was finding it increasingly difficult to not respond to Bran's charm. There was something about him. He had a carefree spirit. He was so full of life and vitality, and if Elizabeth admitted it to herself, Bran was also easy on the eye.
"I'm going to need to take some bloods, if that's okay?" Elizabeth asked, half expecting it to be a problem.
"No problem, Doc. On one condition…"
"What's that?"
"I get to take you out for a bite to eat afterwards," Bran grinned. "Purely in the name of science of course."
Elizabeth didn't answer, but she did blush slightly.
After taking some blood and measuring Bran's other vitals, she noted down some immediate observations. Then she turned to her patient: "Okay, Bran. If you wouldn't mind getting undressed then we can finish up the examination."
Bran's smile disappeared. "Wait a minute, you never said anything about being naked?"
"I have to examine you completely for my notes…"
Bran hoped off the table and began to back out of the room, knocking into some equipment nervously. "I…"
Elizabeth laughed. "You're not nervous are you?"
"No!" Bran said continuing to back out through the door. "It's just… eh… I'm not feeling well. Let's do the bite to eat thing later."
Bran disappeared, and Elizabeth continued laughing to herself. She didn't actually need to examine Bran naked, but she got immense enjoyment out of seeing him squirm.