All the characters appearing in Gargoyles and Gargoyles: The Goliath Chronicles are copyright Buena Vista Television/The Walt Disney Company. No infringement of these copyrights is intended, and is not authorized by the copyright holder. All original characters are the property of "Alex Checnkov."

The Avignon University presented here is not meant in any way to represent the Universite D'Avignon and any similarities are coincidental.

Author's Note: "Homefront" is meant to compliment the other arcs of the Avignon Saga. Its purpose is to flesh out some of the behind-the-curtains workings of this alternate universe which affect the main characters but with which they have little or no direct interaction.

It's also my way of justifying not making any forward progress on the other arcs, so bear with me during such periods.

And as a word of warning about what's below: Consider it a quasi crossover of Gargoyles and The West Wing. Yeah, it's dry reading: you've been warned. They won't all be this way, I promise.

Takes place a few days after "New Horizons: Arrival," and coming chapters, so I apologize for getting ahead of myself.

Homefront: Incentives
Alex Checnkov

Washington, D.C., September 24, 2018

Just because it was election season did not mean that the business of running the country came to a standstill.

The executive cabinet was assembled at the White House to review the departments' budget necessities for the fiscal year none of them were yet certain they would see. While the bulk of the work would be done by those of the president's Office of Budget, Management and Policy ahead of the February deadline, she insisted each year that the cabinet secretaries discussed their needs as a group; despite how time consuming the process was.

Michael Glenn, a short, stocky and balding man of fifty-four and wearing a basic suit, had been the president's secretary of gargoyle affairs since her administration was elected into the White House eight years ago, and he was one of only three secretaries at the table who could make such a claim.

Given that his constituency was nocturnal, Michael was more than used to working at night. But as the day-long meeting wore on into the night, many of the other department heads and their attending senior aides began to show signs of fatigue, and the White House's interns had to create something of a bucket brigade to shuffle coffee into the Cabinet Room almost constantly.

The president was never afraid to kick someone out of her administration who could not keep pace, whether they needed unhealthy doses of caffeine or not; and many faces had come and gone over the years. But despite the pressures of her long-time political career and the pace at which she charged through it, Linda Washington, not much older than Michael, never let stress affect her presence; and while many in the room had taken off some of the layers of their working suits, she had not paid any mind to her white three-piece suit through the whole of the meeting.

"And so that's just about it, Madam President," Crofton Moore, the secretary of education, tall and in his mid-forties and the newest appointee to the cabinet, only four months on the job, said. "Assuming we can get next session's Congress to let the CBEA expire in favor of our updated legislation, we should be able to stay in the seventy billion range."

"And if they don't?" the president asked.

"We can push it down to a lower priority in the authorization bill. The only party keen on the measure is the American Liberal party, and we have a better chance of knocking out the Democrat-Republican majority than they do," he replied.

The president shook her head. Although Michael had never known her as adverse to risk, he knew she hated guesses and gut feelings. "I've been in this town for thirty years, and it will never stop to amaze me how one day's 'impossible' becomes tomorrow's reality. You draw up a contingency more solid than what your gut tells you and get back to me immediately, am I clear?"

"Yes, Madam President."

"Let's move on, then, to gargoyle affairs. What do we need to do for our friends of the night, Secretary Glenn?"

Michael, seated across from the president at the large conference table by the precedence of his station, met her gaze directly and responded without missing a beat, "The outlook right now, Madam President, is that we'll need a budget of about seven billion for fiscal Twenty Nineteen."

The president furrowed her brow and said, "If I recall correctly, in October you're getting a budget of barely six billion. That's an awfully large jump for one year."

"Yes ma'am, it is. But I'm sure you haven't forgotten that this year was a hatching year, so the population of gargoyles has jumped by twenty percent over last year's; and we couldn't take the current population into account for the coming budget. Furthermore, as secretary Bryant told us earlier, Health and Human Services has readjusted its poverty line to something considerably higher than the last time we had to peg our mandatory spending."

"How much mandatory spending are we talking about, Mister Secretary?"

"Two billion, up six-hundred million from the coming fiscal year."

The other members of the cabinet muttered disapprovingly among themselves.

"You're practically doubling this year's amount," the president said, silencing the others in the room. "Does that have to be mandatory?"

"Madam President, it's the law. Every two years we have to set our mandatory spending to the gargoyle population times the poverty level for two humans. Since there hasn't been a hatching in 20 years, that number has been decreasing each time we've had to do this. Now it's back up. But really, ma'am, how much the law's making me spend is the least of my concerns at the moment."

"Please go on, Mister Secretary."

"Gargoyles are waking up to the fact – and, quite frankly, I'm surprised that it's taken them this long to – that we're pretty much giving them a free salary. Even though this year a net of twelve thousand gargoyles became eligible for work, barely ten thousand signed up – one-half of the generation of forty-year-olds.

"With that, the total gargoyle employment in the eligible generations is at fifty-five percent, down from sixty-two percent from twenty years ago, down from sixty-five percent when the Gargoyle Health and Welfare Act came into effect forty years ago. They understand that they're going to get money from us no matter whether they work for it or not, so they're not going out and working for it."

"Fifty-five percent?" the president asked with some shock. "Is there any chance that number will climb in the next few years?"

"Well, the numbers are preliminary, yes, but historically gargoyles don't join the labor force as time goes on. So if the number goes up in the next two or three years, it won't be by much with the present state of things; and then it won't be but four or five years before it will start to go down again," he responded.

"'The present state of things,'" she echoed. "You have a solution?"

"It's the same thing I've been harping on for the last eight years, Madam President. The system's broken, the numbers are starting to show it, so we've got to overhaul it."

"You mean cut spending," she said.

"I mean…" he began to say before being interrupted by Donald Buckworth, the president's chief of staff, seated two seats to her left, his suit jacket draped over the back of his chair and the knot of his tie loose.

"You can't cut spending to gargoyles," Donald said. "People look at that like taking away food from the family pet because money's tight. You just don't do it."

"What I mean to say, Donald, is yes that we have to cut spending, but not by simply slashing it. We just need to revise the system."

"A cut's a cut, Mike."

"Give him a second, Donald," the president insisted. "Go on, Mister Secretary."

"Thank you, Madam President. Okay, let's look at this with a real-world example. You all know Katrien, right?" Most of the people in the room nodded. "My youngest daughter just bought her latest album and plays it incessantly; I've practically got it memorized."

A few people in the room smiled in amusement.

"Anyway, now that Katrien's forty years old, her production company is obligated to pay her contract wages, which on her birthday a few months ago they set as what she was making before the law took effect – thirty-two million dollars. On top of ticket sales for concerts and appearances, Katrien makes more than fifty-three million a year, making her the twelfth highest-paid singer in the world and giving her a higher salary than the next seven highest-paid gargoyles combined."

The considerably less-well-paid public officials at the table reacted to the statistic with a mixture of awe and irritation.

"We had to remove her from our salary estimates for the gargoyle population because she was skewing them too much.

"She makes enough money, in fact, that she is the sole benefactor of seven gargoyle clans – for which she gets tax write-offs; and taxes on her earnings and property are ridiculously low because of the fact that gargoyles just aren't taxed as heavily as humans. After it's all said and done, we only see about two million of Katrien's earnings come back to us in taxes, and that includes income and property taxes."

Many in the room began to talk in harsh whispers among themselves to the point that the president had to silence them by raising her hand.

"But Katrien isn't the problem," Michael continued, "just an example of it. One of the clans she provides for is, Madam President, is your hometown clan: the Rappahannock Clan of Virginia. It's an independent clan which, with this year's hatching, now boasts a population of one hundred nineteen. By law, we're obligated to pay that clan one and three-quarters million dollars, just by the nature of their population.

"On top of our money, the Rappahannock Clan will get two million dollars this year from Katrien, a donation which we don't tax. So at the end of the year, each gargoyle in that clan will have been paid almost thirty-two thousand dollars for just being alive, while the average salary for a gargoyle who works – before we give them obligatory money – and isn't receiving a benefactor's donations is thirty thousand dollars.

"And here's the real kicker. The income per person in Rappahannock County is twenty-eight thousand dollars; and then those people pay taxes on that income which go back to pay the gargoyles in their county more than those people earned through hard work just for just being alive."

The room filled once more with side conversations, most of them disapproving in their tone, and Michael let the figures sink in for a moment before he continued.

"Now, these numbers are going to come out in my report on this year's hatching to Congress in December," he said. "And when this does go public, I'm going to have to disagree with you, Donald, that people aren't going to push for a reevaluation of the current program. People are already beginning to crunch the numbers, and I would be very surprised if a question or two didn't come up about this when the president goes into the debates next month.

"I don't know how the administration missed this in the last hatching, or how the public overlooked it, but I'm pretty sure they won't let it happen twice."

"So what are you suggesting, Mister Secretary?" the president asked.

"First, we have to stop pegging what we give to gargoyles on the national poverty index. What works for the Shenandoah Federation doesn't work for clans in New Amsterdam or Los Angeles; we have to localize our spending indices. Second, we have to stop mandating that every gargoyle receive an equal distribution. A hatchling does not require as many resources as an adult or elder gargoyle.

"Third, we can't let people get away with throwing money at gargoyle clans and not only not taxing those donations but letting donors write it off their taxes. Fourth, we have to stop counting gargoyles who work among the population eligible to receive handouts. We don't blindly pay people to work, we shouldn't blindly pay gargoyles to work."

"So if all that takes care of the spending problem, what about the employment problem?" the president asked.

"I do have a few of suggestions for how we can increase gargoyle employment to near Nineteen Seventy-Eight levels, if not higher."

"Let's hear them," the president insisted.

"The first is to drop the legal minimum age for a gargoyle to work from forty to thirty-five, maybe even thirty, to get future generations working sooner. At those ages gargoyles are wanting to prove that they are capable members of their clans and greater communities, particularly in rural clans where unemployment is the highest.

"Second, gargoyles now are being paid on average twenty percent less than their human counterparts. Gargoyles aren't going to work if they think we won't treat them as equals."

Michael hesitated before moving on to his next suggestion, knowing its unpopularity well in advance. As his pause wore on, the president raised an eyebrow and asked with the perceptiveness he had come to know of her, "What are you holding back?"

"Two economic sectors saw increased gargoyle employment this year," he began. "Construction and law enforcement, particularly the latter since Congress relaxed rules on allowing gargoyles to serve as police officers; right now one in twenty-five gargoyles in the country is involved in law enforcement."

He looked around the room as he continued, "We all know gargoyles believe that it is their duty to protect; however they interpret that duty, it's undeniably part of their nature."

Michael looked to the secretary of defense, Maurice Sheridan, fit and only a few years younger than Michael, three seats on the president's right, "I think we can foster that instinct to increase employment and mitigate the consequences of our entitlement program if we open up an occupation currently forbidden to them."

Maurice looked as though he had been punched in the stomach by what had been suggested by implication. "No!" he said emphatically after taking a moment to recover himself. His exclamation caused the other secretaries and their aides to stir as they caught on to Michael's implicit suggestion.

"No, absolutely not," Maurice said – almost shouted – above the flurry of side conversations. He leaned forward and looked at the president, "Madam President, if you put gargoyles in uniform, forget the sting in the polls you might get because gargoyles are getting larger handouts than people are getting in earned wages, you might well be disowned by the party, I dare say by the American people."

"Why?" Michael shot back as the room began to quiet down to hear the exchange. "They're police officers and doctors, Mister Secretary. We already put our lives in their hands. They build our homes and heavy machinery, and one of them, if you missed it, is making fifty-three million dollars per year as an entertainer. But what they really want to do we aren't letting them, and we can let them do it to our benefit."

"So what happens when they want citizenship and voting rights?" Maurice asked in response. "Do we just hand them over? I bet that would make the Liberal Party real happy to hear at the debates."

"I haven't said anything about citizenship," Michael replied, "and this is not at all inconsistent with either the Party's or the president's platform. President Washington has always said that the best way to promote the health and welfare of our country's gargoyles – which is in the Constitution if you forgot, Maurice – is to promote cooperation. Giving them handouts does nothing for them that they can't do themselves and is probably about to fall out of favor with the American people."

The president held up a hand, "Before you go telling me what my position on this is, Mister Secretary, let me get a little more informed on the matter." She leaned forward and looked down to the right end of the room at the assembled military leaders behind her national security advisor, all of whom were engaged in their own side conversation. "General Mansfield, what's your take on the secretary's suggestion?"

The chairman of the joint chiefs, immaculately groomed in his Marine Corps uniform, one of the oldest and still among the most physically fit people in the room, leaned forward in his chair away from the conversation and said, "Madam President, as you may be aware, I was one of the first members of the force recon special operations unit. And as you also may know, the formation of that unit began a tradition of inviting gargoyles to take part in special operations training.

"My nighttime instructor during my training was a gargoyle, and today many young men and women in special operations training of all branches are being taught key combat skills by gargoyles. Now, we technically consider those gargoyles civilians, and it's not uncommon to bring in civilian experts as part of training; but gargoyles are natural warriors and the experience our soldiers get by their training is unmatched by human instructors. Most nations with gargoyle populations utilize their skills in a similar manner."

"But no nation on this earth puts gargoyles in uniform and send them out to the frontlines," the secretary of defense said.

"No, Mister Secretary, they don't. But some countries do use gargoyles in supporting roles. France, England and Germany are beginning to incorporate gargoyles into their military structure, and China and Russia have used them for years. I don't think any nation, including this one, is ready to utilize gargoyles in a combat role, but I think we could tolerate them in a support capacity."

"And what is the extent of 'support?' I have a feeling that if gargoyles signed up for the army then found themselves shaving potato skins in mess tents, we wouldn't see many come back," the president said.

The general shook his head, "I'm not here as a policy man, Madam President, just an advisor; and my advice is that we might be able incorporate gargoyles into our armed forces in a broader role than we do now."

Toby Woodrow, the national security advisor, considerably older than the president and very formally dressed, said, "Like the general, I can't see any reason why we couldn't at least consider the matter."

The president nodded and then looked to her chief of staff. "What do you think, Donald?"

"Not in an election year, certainly not this close to the debates," he replied. "If you go forward with Secretary Glenn's other suggestions in the budget proposal for next year, we might be able to bring it up then with less fallout; but if you announce it now, the Independence Party and Liberals will never let up. You might not even make it to the run-off, Madam President."

"And keep in mind," Andrew Ellsworth, the president's director of budget, policy and management, seated on her immediate left, said, "gargoyles aren't voting, Madam President, the American people are. Even if you do introduce such a proposal at the start of your third term, it might well cost you the party's nomination for a fourth if you try to seek it."

"Be that as it may," the president said, "I'm quite close to the gargoyles of my hometown, as I know most Americans who live near gargoyles are to their clans. I take the 'health and welfare' clause of our constitution very seriously for that reason, and so does the Party." She looked back at Michael and asked, "How much do you expect allowing gargoyles to serve in our armed forces would improve their employment numbers?"

The secretary of defense scoffed at the question, earning him a sharp glare from the president, and Michael responded, "If all my other recommendations are put into place, I think we could see employment levels as high as seventy-five percent. Attitude polls suggest that gargoyles of eligible generations would be very receptive to the opportunity."

Andrew added, "Attitude polls also suggest that gargoyles would vote this year, as every year, American Liberal five to one over Conservatives if they could. Madam President, I have to join Secretary Sheridan as a voice of dissent on considering this course of action as catering not merely to the wrong constituency but a non-constituency."

The president tapped her pen on the stack of budget information in front of her and said after a moment's pause, "Okay, we're going to shelve discussion on this until after the elections. In the meantime, I want the departments of defense and gargoyles affairs to explore – together – the possibility of integrating gargoyles into our armed services and get back to me at the start of next year's term. Ladies and gentlemen, I expect to win in November, and I intend to find a solution to the problems Secretary Glenn has raised tonight. Am I clear?"

All in the room answered in the affirmative.

"Good. In the meantime, let's move on to your discretionary spending needs, Mister Secretary, and get on with the business at hand."