Template:Featured Articles/16-2024

Moment of Awesome - Sam Guthrie/Cannonball: After a shaky start, Sam gets a job interview for X-Factor Investigations. In the kitchen. "You should talk to Jean or David, when he wakes up," he advised. "You've clearly been through a lot, and I'm sure you want to keep your privacy around telepaths like me. They're good at teaching people to shield their minds from psychics." "Oh shit," Sam hissed. "Sorry, sorry- I took a shielding class at Muir but I was hardly around a telepath so practicing was.... a bit tricky..." Sam closed his eyes and took a deep breath, mumbling a barely audible, "there goes your shot at that job Sammy," before turning to look at Quentin, nothing but pure concern on his face. "Are you alright? I didn't- I'm sorry. I'll work on it." Quentin released his white-knuckle grip on the counter and stood up to stretch out the fresh crick in his neck and soreness in his arms and legs. "Don't shit yourself, it takes more than a little residual trauma to turn me off. I'd never get off if that were the case," he quipped as he did an overhead triceps stretch, keenly aware of how much he was revealing in a crop top. Shifting the balance of dominance back in his favor, as he preferred it. "Why do you want to work for X-Factor, anyway?" "Savin' the day from a big monster is fine and all I guess, and I'm sure there's folks that love goin' around saving dimensions an' doin' big ol' trips to go help the world... but my hometown had folks come in every summer to help us and people tryin' to stop us from getting worse and natural disasters that brought in folks to put us back together and that's not what I'm interested in doin'. I was part of that rigamarole my whole life. The folks I always admired? They were the ones who put in the work in the community- the ones who helped take care of things, handled situations when they happened, and then tried to make sure they didn't happen again." Sam sighed. "Daddy always told me that you didn't fix a problem just cause you stopped it from getting worse, that you had to tackle the problem too, ya had to learn about it and take steps to make sure it didn't happen again. I reckon that's what y'all're best at. Y'all catch the bad guy and then help to make folks less vulnerable to the next one. That's the kind of work I wanna do." Sam rolled his shoulders back and offered Quentin an awkward smile when it made the burn scar on his arm show from the sleeve of his t-shirt. "You can't individualize a systemic issue, but you can help individuals that're trapped in systemic issues. It's work worth doin' and I wanna be involved in it." The telepath stopped mid-stretch, frozen as he processed Sam's words, then lowered his arms and sat back down. "That's very astute. I might steal that and claim it as my own," Quentin teased. "Do you have any experience with private investigating? Or criminology or the law?" “I graduated high school early to illegally work in a coal mine to support my eight younger siblings.” Sam replied, shaking his head. “That’s about the only thing I’ve got experience with aside from bartending but I was heavily involved in the union. Worked with the secretary of our chapter and did a lot of the clerical work and pourin’ over labor law……..What I don’t know I’ll learn. Take any course available to me and work twice as hard as a pair of Percheron mules. I ain’t in the habit of lettin folks down.” Quentin smirked, amused and encouraged by Sam's eagerness. "Sis, chill. I was younger than you and had far less experience doing anything besides being a whiny bitch when I started, and now I'm running things. Which is crazy to think about, but anything's possible when other people are footing your bills and you're psychic. So I guess what I'm saying is, let's see what you got." "T' clarify-" Sam said, slowly, "does that mean I'm in?"