busy work {James}

[Erik Stewart]

Since Erik’s viper-teeth had struck Oriel, he’d found himself buried in a whole lot more detentions than usual – which had been a significant amount in itself; he’d always been kind of a volatile kid, a “weird” kid, whose ostracization stemmed from an unclear line between others’ fear of him and their distaste. His attitude wasn’t very popular at parties, after all. He smelled constantly of smoke and he had that awkward gangly look about him. He’d come from a backwoods swamp in Louisiana; he still bore its accent. He was unfriendly, unpredictable and secretive. The odds were stacked against him even without the aid of his snake shapeshifting, which brought along all the natural aversions to snakes… along with a nice helping of hemotoxic venom – venom which, unfortunately, had been recently weaponized against a fellow student.

Whether he regretted it or not, he supposed, was not an issue. Erik had suffered steep penalties regardless, the least of which detention; usually he spent it after class or on the weekend with a regular teacher, but today was different. For whatever reason, he was relegated to the recruitment office to file some papers.

Erik’s own recruitment hadn’t been a cakewalk, either. He couldn’t have said he liked it at home, but those woods had still been his, and he had spent nearly every day in them. He still missed the childlike freedom of running through the woods barefoot on a full-throated summer, skinning his shins against logs and feeling moist leaves across his cheek, a young boy, all on his lonesome. He was half-feral when they came to take him away. Erik had resented them for it. They had placed him in a world full of people when he’d come from a town no more than thirty, all on account of a power he didn’t remember asking for, and one that caused him great pain. They told him he couldn’t leave. They left him to fend for himself in an institution and a community that seemed hostile.

If James had been among them, he didn’t recognize him. Those days had been a frenzied blur. At least he had come a relatively long way since he was fourteen: he wasn’t always angry, but he was a little bored.

Erik thumbed through some folders full of names he didn’t know. “What’m I s’posed t’do with these?” he said. “How long do I have t’stay here?”

Erik lifted one manilla folder and turned it, examining its sides. “These got permanent records ‘r what?”

He’d a lot of questions for him, aparently.

[Dr. James Campbell]

James Campbell didn't have any control over detentions. That is to say, he didn't have any control over who received detention or for what offences. Sometimes he wanted to, like when Sam Rixon broke into his office and set his chess set on fire, but most of the time he preferred not having that particular responsibility. For some reason though, he had volunteered to help monitor detentions.

That reason was so he could have some help with filing incident reports. His recruiters hated doing it, and so did he.

And, apparently, so did Erik. Not that James blamed him.

The recruiter picked up one of the files and held it in front of the student so he could read the label. James had spent quite a long time making up all these labels so they could be arranged and filed away properly. "No, these aren't disciplinary at all. They're just original reports that we follow up on. Some of them lead to metas who have just manifested. They're associated with reference numbers, not names, so you can look at them, if you want. Each file has things like newspaper articles or reports from schools."

He pulled out a large, empty cardboard box and put it in front of the boy. "What I need you to do is arrange the files by date--that's the numbers in the corner of the label--and then put them in order in these boxes. Groups of them will be in order, but all my recruiters have been keeping their files separately, so you need to combine them."

James picked up another one of the boxes and put it on the table. "And you're here until we're done, or until the dining hall opens for dinner, whichever comes first."

[Erik Stewart]

Erik placed his elbow on the table and let out a long, harried sigh. Dinner was at least two hours away, which was a long time if you happened to be filing a bunch of manilla folders. He felt frustration and surliness tie together and knot deep in his chest. It wasn’t like he did anything in particular after class, but he did like to have the time to himself…as anyone would.

He knew what the authorities would tell him if he complained about it. ‘You should have thought of that before,’ they’d say, and he guess they weren’t wrong, but like so many others of their mantras, he grew tired of it. Erik put his elbow on the table, supported his cheek with his hand.

“Fine,” he muttered.

Erik flopped some papers into the box, which he had only briefly ascertained were in the correct order. If teachers couldn’t rely on him to finish a simple homework assignment, he didn’t know why James expected him to treat this job with any more dignity.

’Missing Florida girl reappears in crowded station’, ’Unusually high bear sightings in neighborhood’…he wasn’t sure how they could come to the conclusion that these were evidence of emerging meta-humans. But he wasn’t the professional here. Erik supposed he wouldn’t have an article all to himself; his manifestation had been relatively quiet. They must have found him through – other means. He had heard of metas that could sense others, though he was still confounded that they could sense him in the middle of nowhere, Louisiana, where travelers never crossed.

“Y’all must read a lotta newspapers,” he mentioned idly, thumbing through a few more papers. “So you’re all professional stalkers ‘r what?”

[Dr. James Campbell]

When James was a student--at least a newly-arrived student--he would have never expected that he'd one day run the Recruiting Department for Hammel. He'd only been discovered to be Meta because he'd run into a recruiter at a restaurant. The woman, Aristea, had become a good friend of his after his divorce, and she had encouraged him to join her team.

But he understood how a student could feel that way about the recruiters. He had as well. "Not stalkers. We're closer to the NSA."

No, James, don't start with the dad humor.

"We don't watch one person specifically, unless there is an incident that catches our attention. We do a lot of research and cast a broad net. A lot of times, incidents aren't new metas, but Hammel alumni. Or just naturally-occurring weird phenomenon." The recruiter pulled out a few files from the box in front of him and started rifling through them, putting them in order. It was a long task, and he wasn't going to make the boy do it all by himself. 

"Once we've ruled out other causes, we focus our research and then send a recruiter out. Though there are quite a few students who come to use because they have a sibling here or a parent who went here. Then the families usually call us." That's what had happened when his nephew, Jordan, had arrived. His sister had called him up and told him that her son had disappeared. Literally turned invisible in front of her eyes.

[Erik Stewart]

Erik hadn’t heard of the NSA, so all that elicited was a furrow of his brow. He wasn’t expecting James to get so in-depth, and he wasn’t sure he was invested enough to pay attention to it. Erik never had been too concerned with what the management was doing. And it didn’t explain how they’d found him. He was pretty certain his parents never called in – they hadn’t even known about his transformation until the recruiters came.

“Maybe you should just send a letter,” he said. “Instead of just showin’ up. Might have made my day less shitty.”

Erik wasn’t exactly sure of that; there was a chance that, should his parents see the letter beforehand, they might have dismissed it as nonsense – they might have ignored it, too; that had happened before. But he thought anything would have been better than what had happened when the recruiters did come for him. Despite what his mother felt of him, she still hadn’t been happy to know that a bunch of officials from some yuppy town was taking her son away…and there was no sight more distressing than the panic of a mentally ruined and half-dressed screaming woman.
His father hadn’t been at home. He worked late; Erik wouldn’t even hear from him except for a short phone call later.

It’d been nothing short of traumatic for a boy who had lived a relatively isolated life before then. He felt as if he’d been abducted.

“How y’find every single person out there? Don’t you miss someone? I mean, no one ever went t’where I lived. It’s a fuckin’ swamp,” he said, then, quieter: “I didn’t want t’leave.”

[Dr. James Campbell]

((OOC: I'm really sorry for the delay with this. I have been supernaturally swamped.))

They had tried sending letters previously. It used to be standard procedure. But they had discovered that it wasn't the most effective way to communicate with new families. Some used it as a warning to move and try to avoid the recruiters, while many others simply ignored it. After all, it sounded a little bit like invitations to Hogwarts. (Why yes, James had a daughter the right age that he took her to see the early Harry Potter films, though he hadn't read the books at that point. He had finally caught up the summer before Deathly Hallows came out.) 

"We found it was better to go in person. It's easier to take someone seriously when we can show what we can do. For instance, Ms. Hawkins frequently shapeshifts on trips to prove that she knows what she's talking about." That was harder to do for James, however, because of his power. Usually the Dr. at the front of his name, the uncanny ability to suggest exact symptoms the newly-manifested meta was going thouhg, and a general tone of authority were enough to get people to believe him.

Of course, when Erik continued, James was reminded of how it was when he was recruited. He hadn't wanted to be picked up either, and he'd spent months trying to escape. "We try to find everyone. They've missed people before, and try to trust me, it's much worse to try to learn how to control your power as an adult.