The Investigator [open]

Samuel Blaine plopped down into a student's chair and threw a briefcase over the desk with a sigh. It was rare he got a moment to relax around here, so when he got the chance, he did it where he could. Even right now, he was supposed to be working. He glanced outside the window, to the school grounds. Dying orange light filtered in through the glass as the sun began to settle behind the mountains. Classes had ended hours ago, and most of the students would be out in town or screwing around campus.

Even though he rarely saw them after they enrolled, he felt like he knew them better than most. He knew their powers, their names, their backgrounds, their grades, their developments... Hell, even their family trees. Whenever he had a moment of quiet, he was flipping through files and test scores and behavioral reports, or doing his research on the next handful of students. It meant traveling all over the country, and sometimes overseas, doing 'work.'

And these were his work tools.

He slipped out of his trench coat, producing a cigarette, and lit it in one fluid motion. Nira always hated it when he smoked in her classroom, but Nira wasn't here, and she would never do anything but fuss. What she didn't know didn't hurt her. His other work tool was the handgun that he dropped on top of the briefcase.

Sam slipped out a leatherbound black journal and flipped it open, eyes running over his scribbled notes. He went through notebooks like wildfire, and he always had a constant shortage of paper. All this writing and reading was going to ruin his eyes one day, he knew it.

There were two words scrawled across the top of the page in scratchy blue pen.

POWER ABSORPTION

Gifts were a mysterious power. Supernatural. So it only stood to reason that there was only a handful of people living in the world that you could call 'experts.' Samuel Blaine was one of them, and there was only one other person who had written more papers on gifts than he had. And that person had founded this school. Edwin Rivers.

He scratched behind his ear, the words on the page blurring together, and flipped the notebook back closed with another sigh. Gift suppression was a tricky subject. The legacy of the old Headmaster's experiments was clear enough today, even twenty years later, and bad things happened when people poked around with old knowledge.

Oh well. It wasn't like Phoebe didn't hate him enough already.

Damn it Ed... Sam pushed the journal away from him and rubbed the blurriness from his eyes. He couldn't stay long. He never could. Look at the mess you made.

Meta-powers like his were exceptionally rare, even rarer than the 'pure' classical gifts that the Europeans and Chinese couldn't stop worshiping. That meant he was always on the move, because no one else could do his job as well as he could. Part of that was gift analysis and research for the school. Another part was enrollment. A kid would hit puberty, start to make a scene, and he would find them, track them, talk to them, and recruit them. Sometimes it was a letter in the mail, sometimes a visit to the house, sometimes it was something flashier. If he didn't recruit them, then there was always another group that would. A group that preyed on those sorts of people, a group of people in black led by an old friend.

And then the other part of his job...

Tired gray eyes found the pistol resting on the desk.

Well, it was easiest to describe it as 'investigation.'