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“Now here’s something else we can’t explain. The data mining algorithms pulled this one out. The numbers of deaths and missing persons in Sunnydale had been growing, not by much, but roughly linearly over the past two decades, based on our extrapolations from the school paper totals. Those same numbers declined roughly linearly, starting the week Buffy Summers arrived in Sunnydale, which was very late in the first school term. And the decline was massive. The year before she arrived, the death toll of high school aged children was worse than in Mogadishu. The estimated murder rate we computed makes Caracas and Ciudad Juarez look like retirement communities.” Several people whistled in surprise. “The year she graduated, the class celebrated that they had the lowest death toll in school history. By then, the obituary page had shrunk to a small bi-weekly obituary notice. The death and missing persons numbers as listed by the high school papers continued to decline for the entire seven years she lived there, even with events like the school exploding and that epidemic of insanity. We don’t have causality, only synchronicity, but it’s really peculiar that this change happened right when Buffy Summers showed up. It would have been really helpful to look through the police reports for those years, but they’re all at the bottom of Lake Sunnydale and there are no copies of their files in the state archives – which, in itself, is suspicious.

“Once she was at Sunnydale High, Buffy stopped doing things like cheerleading, and based on group pictures and ‘casual’ pictures from the yearbooks, she was one of the school outcasts. She hung out with two other school ‘losers’, a guy who was in the running for class clown his senior year, and a girl who was the biggest brain in the school. Yes, Xander Harris and Willow Rosenberg. But look at these pictures of her from the yearbooks. She’s carefully made up but in a classy way. Well dressed, sexy but well within school guidelines, and a lot less skin showing than a number of other girls in the yearbook pictures. What is she listed as doing? Dr. Jackson, you’ll love this.” She clicked to another picture. “Archaeology club. With, you guessed it, Xander Harris and Willow Rosenberg and Daniel Osbourne. And who’s the teacher mentoring this odd little club? Why it’s our friendly librarian Rupert Giles.” She put up another image. “And notice, in this yearbook picture for the archaeology club, Buffy looks like she could be on the cover of Seventeen magazine. Big smile, perfect hair, fashionable clothes, expensive heels, and a very well coordinated look. There’s no sign of the usual outcast behaviors or appearances or friends. Osbourne even looks fairly normal in this photo, although that may be because we can’t tell what color his hair is, and we can’t make out the slogan on the front of his t-shirt. Mister Giles looks like he just stepped out of the curator’s office at the British Museum, and Willow Rosenberg looks nervous and nerdy. The worst you can say about the picture is that Harris is wearing a bad Hawaiian shirt.”

http://www.tthfanfic.org/Story-27400-28/