After being chastised by the oracle for taking too long with the pilgrimage and allowing the Raven to hatch the red egg and release the Behemoth first, the Goose spoke with Robert and explained the situation to him and the need for them to start acting more aggressively. Robert agreed with the Goose and the oracle's assessment of things and together with the Goose they made the decision to go after the Leviathan. Robert and the Goose weren't the only ones that had decided to start getting aggressive. The owl, once it had sensed the emergence of the Behemoth, had a similar conversation with Ryan and the two of them agreed to get more aggressive with the Solomon leaks and start targeting the Raven's inner circle directly. The rooster had decided to get more involved with the advent of the Behemoth and was traveling with Ryan and the owl. Having taken the decision to get more aggressive with their leaks, the three of them strategized about how they should go about targeting the Raven's inner circle and the owl and the rooster believed that targeting David Huntsman first would be a good place to start because of the rift that had been growing between David and the rest of the Raven's disciples ever since Fyodor had come on board. The rooster also raised the idea of Ryan revealing himself as a way of protecting himself against the Raven deciding to eliminate him as a threat, arguing that it would be a lot harder for the Raven to do so if Ryan was a global celebrity who people were paying constant attention to. The owl saw the merits in the rooster's idea but felt that it was still too soon for Ryan to reveal himself and that they should wait and see what the reaction was from those in the Raven's circle to the leaks before they made a decision on Ryan revealing himself.

The first leak targeting David Huntsman concerned an e-mail sent directly from David to Gerard Huppert, the CEO of Apex Energy, regarding an offshore drilling project in the North Sea off the coast of the Netherlands that Prism Capital was putting up fifty percent of the capital for. In the e-mail, David leans heavily on Gerard to use steel of a lower quality than what Gerard wanted to use for the purpose of saving money. The steel that David wanted them to use was known to be a higher risk for corrosion and had been the cause of spills in the past. David was adamant that environmental concerns were to be ignored and made his firm's investment contingent upon everything being done to lower costs as much as possible. Two years after the project had been completed an underwater explosion resulted in forty million barrels of oil being spilled into the sea, one of the worst environmental disasters in history. Shortly after the story broke on Solomon.com it was picked up by all of the major news agencies as headline news. David was blindsided by the news and spent the hours after it was published scrambling for an answer while watching Prism Capital's stock tumble. He hoped for a reprieve in the form of anchors on networks had always been kind to him like CNBC and FOX News coming to his defense but this proved not to be, the story had rendered him too toxic. Faced with no options, David called the Raven in desperation.

"Why aren't you helping me?! Why are Chris and Jim not coming to my defense?!"

"I don't think that's a good idea right now, if they were to do so they would become contaminated by this, I think the best thing would be for you to deal with this on your own."

"You're going to leave me out to dry? After I poured millions of dollars of my own money into Jim's campaign? After I gave that instruction to use those cheap materials on your orders? How can you treat me this way?"

"If you handle this right then there is no reason why you shouldn't be able to defuse this whole scandal in a relatively short space of time."

"This is a much bigger problem than just this one scandal, if I am being targeted it means that all of the skeletons in our closet could potentially get dragged out into the open, and if that happens then this whole company will collapse and the war chest that you've been building up here will go with it."

"I am aware of that, which is why I'd like to ask you to make sure that the money that we need for our plans going forward is kept in a safe place."

"Is that all you care about? Your plans? What about me? What about helping me to defend myself against these attacks that could spell doom for me?"

"David, we've been working together a long time and I have always looked after you just like I will now, you just need to trust me like I'm trusting you to do what's best for the rest of us."

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Jim's got skeletons in his closet too, I suggest you start thinking about what you're going to do when those start coming out in the open."

The Raven had thought about this, in fact it was all that it had been thinking about since the story about the oil spill became headline news. The Raven wasn't expecting the owl to strike so hard and so soon and was as blindsided by the attack as David had been. The technology available in this world made the owl more dangerous than it had ever been before, and from the prolificacy with which Solomon was publishing damning information on people in high levels of power the owl appeared to have found the perfect adoptee for helping it achieve its goals. There was no way for the Raven to find out who Solomon really was, like the Goose it had no choice but to wait for him to reveal himself and hope that he didn't do too much damage in the meantime. David wasn't comfortable with waiting and felt that perhaps the best course of action was for him to start putting himself first. The morning after the revelations about the North Sea oil spill had been made public--which had precipitated a 20% drop in Prism Capital's share price--David called a press conference which he used to apologize for his involvement in the oil spill and to announce that Prism Capital would retroactively cover half of all of the costs associated with the oil spill, the total cost of which had been $45 billion. For David $22.5 billion was a manageable amount of money, it was the damage to his reputation and the reputation of his company that hurt him. Following his announcement Prism's share price dropped by a further eight percentage points before it stabilized, affording David the chance to reflect on his situation. It seemed dangerous for him to continue trusting the Raven, which seemed to only look at him as a cash machine and didn't have the kind of ambitions for him as it did for its other disciples. David was at a crossroads, he could either keep trusting the Raven and risk being sold up the river when it was convenient for the Raven to do so, or he could go against the Raven and risk losing the Midas touch that he had been granted by the Raven and the pig.

"You have to look out for yourself," a voice said from behind David when he was sitting in his office and thinking.

He turned around to see who it was and there was the cat in her human form wearing a red dress.

"It's you."

"Yes, it's me; I've come to let you know what's in store for you if you keep blindly trusting the Raven."

"Aren't you on the Raven's side?"

"Hardly, I've been through this enough times to know that nobody is ever really on the Raven's side, as soon as it's gotten what it needs from you it'll toss you aside, I've seen it happen countless times before."

"Do you think it's going to do the same thing to me?"

"I know it's going to do the same thing to you, which is why I'm telling you to start looking out for yourself."

"The Raven would really do that to me when I've been its disciple for so long and made so much money for it?"

"The Raven doesn't see money as power; you do, because you're an arch capitalist, but for the Raven the only power that matters is true power."

"Which means that Jim Balmer is the only one who's safe," David observed.

"Exactly."

"Why are you doing this? Why are you opposing the Raven like this?"

"Because I don't like the way that the Raven treats me, so I do my best to undermine it every chance I get."

"What is it about the way the Raven treats you that you don't like?"

"The Raven thinks that all that I am good for is seducing and sleeping with men, so every time we go through a cycle that's all that I am made to do."

"Why is the Raven allowed to treat you like that when you're a Guardian?"

"Are you familiar with the story of the cat from the Chinese Zodiac?"

"No."

"The story goes that the Jade Emperor once summoned the twelve mystical animals to his palace for a banquet and that the rat tricked the cat into being the last one to arrive by telling it that the banquet was to take place later than was scheduled. Since then the cat has always been looked down on as being stupid and gullible. So you see, I have no choice but to do what I'm told no matter what it entails."

"Did that actually happen?"

"Whether it actually happened or is a story that somebody just made up is irrelevant, my role has been set, and like the other Guardians I must fulfill it."

David looked at the cat sitting in the occasional chair in his office, looking sorry for herself, and was engulfed by a wave of sympathy for her. Of course it was possible that making him feel this way about her was a method of seduction that she was employing on him but he didn't care, at that moment he was being drawn to the cat and the pull that she was exerting on him was inescapable. David was consumed by the experience of making love to the cat in a way that he had never been in the past when making love to a woman. He was reminded that there was more to him as a man than just his capacity for making money and this was something that he wasn't prepared to allow the Raven to just take away from him.