Unloading and setting tents up was second nature and the whole process was kept well in hand. There was firewood stacked in the ruins themselves, because the ruins provided some shelter from moisture, and that was covered in a tarp. Gideon was probably the guy that had some of the best marks in the survival courses and was able to take an e-tool and quickly dig a pit, assemble the firewood and get it going so that it wasn't easily obvious. It wasn't hard when the firepit was the same one that family dug in the past. It was just basic operational security, ingrained into them.

Actually, it really wasn't -- any fire whatsoever would draw attention, but they were taking smart precautions to hide theirs and they were well away from where the fighting was...and there were no juicy targets for any Vangar raiders out there. In essence, the fire was a safe bet and they'd all frozen their asses off in the cold plenty times in training before earning the beret. They could do with just one night of fucking around like normal kids and not worrying about drawing sniper fire or some shit.

It was a point of pride that he could set a fire without having to resort to the mist; though when he did pull it down just to take a look at things, to see what the magic looked like around here, he saw multicolored clouds of mist with lights glowing, flickering, within. They could be seen through, but they were still there, overlaying various areas. It was as natural as blinking to flick back and forth. He called that astral overlay of the area 'peyoteland' to the irritation of more serious mage types. But Gideon was a devious and inventive user of the mist, and therefore felt entitled to work up new names for things. It was his bend of mind. 

In any event, with a few matches and his body shielding it from the wind, he got the fire going, mostly by rubbing some of the kindling in cooking oil and setting it all alight. "Gather round and bring the drinks, training's over and there's no sense freezing our dangly bits off in this fucking cold!"

He always enjoyed the cursing; it was decidedly unroyal, and of course those stupid press types that were royalty experts would go, "pooh-POOH" at the concept. But he'd picked up some doozies in his time in academy life.

"Someone bring something with a little kick? I think Country and Trent drank the Alpenbitter all by themselves." Not true, Zimmy probably killed a third of it on her own.