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who: Alex Reagan and hopefully you!
what: An open log. There's a couple open prompts but if they don't work just add your own! And don't worry about styles. I'll match em.
when: The month of August.
where: Anywhere you want her to be that's not the mingle, honestly!
warnings: Not that I can think of at the moment.

I.

Despite everything else in her life, Alex Reagan happened to be someone who was a person of habit, and so where she could be found just happened to be habit as well. So, all too often Alex found herself working at The Coffee Shop rather than her office with the substandard coffee and the annoying interns. She was there almost every day with at least one empty cup in front of her, one full one and some sort of pastries there for anyone who might happen to want to stop by and visit, or for anyone whom she had a lunch date with. The table itself was largely taken up with two books and a notebook, along with her phone from home. She inevitably had one of the books open, even though both of them were on the same lines of things, even if vastly different.

Alex would either be reading from a book on learning Spanish and copying what she was learning into the notebook in small and frantic writing, as if her hand couldn't keep up with her brain, because well... That's basically what happened, even in things like this. Still, she was making a real effort to do it, and the book was deeply into, as Alex was hitting the harder parts of the beginner's section and there were lists of words that went along with it.

The second book is much older and still somehow less well-loved than the first one, and Alex had found it in the back of the library shelves. Despite having taken it out days ago, she was still dealing with the beginning pages of it, and if there was something that was guaranteed that would make her grumble, it was this. But still, she was determined to try and teach herself how to read Cruciform even if it killed her, which at this point it honestly just might do. So when someone came up to her, she was all too ready to sit either of them aside, and greeting the other person with a grin, especially if it was someone who she expected.

ii

The other way in which Alex was a creature of habit came with her walking her dog in the afternoon. Alex's pitbull was large and gray and more than a little friendly, which probably made sense considering Alex Reagan was his owner. Her mornings were normally running and rowing, but afternoon walks were more slow and leisurely and normally made by herself. Well, by herself as well as her playing Pokemon Go, even if no one else was. So, yes, she's walking her dog but she's also got her device out to let her know when there just happens to be a pokemon or two in the area that she's walking in.

Normally she collects one or two, and fights at a gym or so, and then goes about her business and comes home. Not today though. Today, Alex just stopped so suddenly that Apo's leash actually snapped taunt for a moment before the gray dog came back to see her, and Alex is just staring at her phone for a second. The dumbed silence only lasts for a second or two before Alex just yells like the child who she can come times be: "Oh my god! It's a Pikachu! It's a Pikachu!" Then without a preamble other than that, Alex just takes off after it, a giant grin on her face. She's never caught one before.

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Peter slipped into the offered seat without hesitation, though he did find himself shrugging a little at the question. "Well enough," he said, quirking a small smile. "It feels wrong to say, considering, but there are times I wish I had more to do. This place isn't exactly London." And he didn't miss the horrible things people could do to one another or the ethically-challenged practitioner occasionally trying to blow him up, but there was only so much time he could spend sitting at a desk waiting.

But he hadn't come just to whinge about his job to Alex. "What about you, then? You seem to be keeping busy." It wasn't quite innuendo, even if his smile had taken on a hint of mischief. He hadn't really had a chance to speak with her ever since the lanky bloke she seemed fond of had turned up, which meant he had quite a few comments stored away by that point.

If there was someone who wasn't going to judge him for having the lack of something to do, it was Alex. It was something that she struggled with as well, hence why she was taking up some of her work time with the whole studying impossible languages thing. She was used to her life going at a faster pace than it did now, and while she was actually extremely happy here, sometimes she wished that there was more to do like there was back home. Okay, maybe not the last few weeks back at home, but something more than this. "It's okay, I get it honestly. I mean, this place isn't exactly Seattle either. And sometimes it'd be better to write something that would be a better use of my skills than just... puff pieces."

There's been a lot of puff pieces in the last few weeks, honestly. More than she wanted to admit.

But then again, Alex knows that Peter doesn't exactly mean with her work, so she just picked up her cup of coffee and smirked at him over the rim of it before she took a sip. "I suppose I have been, I guess." Which wasn't exactly an understatement, even if the two of them had nearly broken up for a few days back there. Still, Peter reminds her of Nic enough that she knows it's not really that serious, and there's sometimes when you've just got to let the friend do the thing to get it out of their systems.

Alright, so she was going to make him work for it, but at least they both knew what this was about. Peter leaned forward in his seat a little, eyes intent on her like this was an interview. A ridiculous one, but still. If he was going to do this, he was going to do it properly.

"To be honest, I wouldn't have thought he was your type." Not entire true, but it was an invitation for her to open up a bit. Sometimes you just had to open the door to more discussion. Also Strand had kind of seemed like an arse the last time they'd talked, and Alex didn't seem like she'd put up with that for long.

The statement about Strand not being her type made Alex break out into laughter. She couldn't help it. It was big and it was pleased, because well, "honestly, Dr. Richard Strand with his three phDs from Yale including one in being an asshole couldn't be more my type if he was actually made for me." Yes, there's teasing in her voice, but she's also being quite serious in it as well. "I've always had a thing for older partners with amazing voices and mysterious backgrounds to go along with everything else." Look, Alex was always the sort of girl who'd get crushes on her professors, and more than once two of her friends had addressed her 'Daddy issues.' Alex Reagan knew what her brand was, and liking (and later loving) Richard Strand was definitely on brand for her.

"I mean, it's definitely not at all great that I fell for the subject of my show, and if I had the choice, I may not have done it, but honestly? I've been in love with him for way longer than I would have admit at one point, but now I can't deny it. I mean, yeah, he definitely is a complete ass sometimes," often. The word Alex should probably be using here is often, actually, but she doesn't need to say it, Richard himself would, and had on his friendr where anyone could see it. "But he definitely has reasons to be. Loads of them." Alex had already talked to Peter about back home, so she doesn't feel at all bad for doing it again now. There's a beat and a broad and fond grin. "What can I say, he's my Scully."

Well, that made a bit more sense. Sort of. But she seemed genuinely pleased, so there was only so much he could say on the subject. Friends they might have been, there was apparently still a fair amount that Peter didn't know about her. Or she about him, really.

"I'd say he's leaning a bit hard on the Scully thing, actually," was what he said instead, voice mild if not for the continued undertone of teasing. Really, that was more of a conversation to have with Strand himself, on the off chance they could stop snarking at each other for five minutes. "But fair enough. No accounting for taste." Considering the last girl Peter had dated, he really couldn't throw too many stones. At least Strand wasn't likely to eat people on accident.

That made Alex laugh again, because well... it was true. He did lean too hard on being a skeptic, and more than that, he definitely was refusing to admit to things that he'd suspected but then found out he was wrong about. The whole thing of them being a delusion being wrong, came to mind, but Alex wasn't going to mention it. After all, Strand would deny the whole thing. "Well, I did tell ya, he's definitely the irrational skeptic sort at this point. Even before he showed up here and magic was all around him." Which meant that he doubled down on it now, and Alex just shrugged.

After a sip of her coffee, she just peered at him quickly, giving him the same look that he'd already given her, because two can play at this game. "So, Peter, what have you been up to?" And the unspoken 'are you seeing anyone' is implicit in her expression.

Peter cocked an eyebrow back at her at the subject change, but luckily he had the perfect response to that sort of thing. Which wasn't much more than a shrug, really. "Honestly, not a lot. Work and occasionally finding weird nonsense out behind the wall." Didn't give you much time for dating. At least not that Peter had found.

"Which is not an invitation to try setting me up, by the way," he added, along with an attempt at a severe expression. He wasn't sure if that was Alex's sort of thing or not, but the warning seemed useful anyway. He got more than enough nosing about his love life from his mum, thanks.

Alex just smirked a bit at the attempt at the severe expression, because if there was one thing that she was entirely impervious to at this point, it was severe expressions. She'd seen them one too many times to not just shrug them off at this point. And Peter's wasn't even that good, but she was amused that he'd managed to try it to go along with his words. "Really? But then we can discuss your love life instead of mine, Peter." It was clear in Alex's smirk that she wasn't at all serious about it, besides, she didn't know anyone who might actually work with him.

At least not yet. Now, she was going to need to keep her eyes and ears open.

But onto different things, and Alex just leaned forward onto the table a bit as she changed the subject. "What kind of weird nonsense are you finding out beyond the wall?" Look, Alex loves weird nonsense, and yet she's also too smart (for the moment anyway) to go out on her own looking for some. So, she's going to live through him.

He gave her another look, but Peter allowed himself to be distracted without too much of a fuss. Which had nothing to do with the fact that he really didn't want to continue the other train of thought, nothing at all.

"There was this...building? Spaceship? Thing, I can't really describe it. But strange is probably the best description I can give it." Strange and unsettling. He resisted the urge to shudder, even a little. "Looked like something out of 2001, had all these pointy robots running around, did weird things to sound. And that was just recently. Who knows what all else is out there."

As he went down to the business of what he found, Alex leaned forward, and she rested her hand on her chin, entirely focused on him. There was a part of her that itched to reach for her recorder, but it was a habit that she was working on breaking. After spending three years doing things like recording most of her conversations, because work was her life, it was still difficult to.

Especially when he mentioned robots that did weird things to sound. "Did you guys bring any back for the tech people to take a look at and try to figure out what was going on with them?" Look, Alex (and the unsound) knows better than most people just how dangerous weird things with sounds could be. Studying it was better than just letting it go on outside of town where who knows what could happen. And hell, might happen.

"I don't know," he said with a shake of his head. Honestly, he hadn't been paying much attention by the end of it. Thank god there had been other people there. "You'd have to ask Breq, if you know her. She was mostly in charge of things." Or she'd taken charge, but either way lead to the same thing. She'd seen them all through, and Peter appreciated it.

"But it's weird, what all is out there, you know? Monsters and machinery and eldritch things in the deep. I guess maybe they come in through the portal just like the rest of us, but." Peter trailed off. "You never really know what to expect. Or if you can expect anything."

There was a nod and a smile when he mentioned Breq, because Alex definitely had met her a few times even if she didn't know the other woman well. They were friendly but not friends which meant that Alex would probably feel less bad about bringing the questions about what happened to her than she would be if she mentioned them to Peter.

So, she was going to focus on what her friend was saying about other things rather than robots. Oh, and also wiggling her nose up at that, because jesus christ the next thing on that list had better not be demons ever. "I guess I'd never thought of it that way, that those things got dragged into the portal like we did. They just end up elsewhere." Alex has never been outside the walls, because while she's a reporter, she's not a fighter and she has no intention of getting eaten by one of those eldritch horrors. "I do know an author would be very glad to hear that the members of the eldritch club are somewhere out in the universe."

Peter's eyebrows lifted just a little. "I'm glad someone would be happy to know there are things that can melt your brain by getting too close." Alright, so maybe that was overstating things. But Peter's seen enough tentacles in strange underground temples to know how that sort of thing went. And it rarely worked out well for people with his particular skin tone.

"Still, it's not all bad. There's plenty I would have never imagined until I got here."

"To be fair," Alex said quickly, in a tone that's more than a little amused, because well, the person she's speaking out is in a category entirely of her own. "She'd probably want to have sex with it first, but yeah." And then she just made a face and gave an exaggerated shiver. "This woman is probably Chuck Tingle's number one fan, honestly. Her work is definitely one of the things that would keep me up at night." You know, if the demons weren't doing it all on their own.

"I'm looking at being here as a vacation honestly, just enjoying all the stuff that we can't explain back home, I guess."

There was a long moment where Peter just silently digested that. He blinked once, then again, then just accepted it. People's interests were strange.

"Have you found many things you can't explain?" Alex had always struck him as the type who once she found something, she made a point of finding out everything she could. Though maybe there are things here that defy even that particular habit.

"Here?" The question was asked in an amused tone, and she just watched him for a minute, before answering without really waiting for the answer to her own question. "Well, here there's loads of things. Two of my friends have had this weird cursing table thing. It literally spends all night just insulting the hell out of the owner and their mother. But there's nothing I can find on it that definitely make it fake."

A beat, and she just added, "besides, given everything here, I'm finding it feels like I can explain less and less."

Well alright, Peter could understand that. He felt that way himself half the time, but he'd learned to sort of accept that he couldn't and move on right around the time he'd started getting introduced to river goddesses. For Alex, part of him had wondered if she'd ever get there. Apparently she had.

"I heard about that table," he said instead. "Does it really just swear at people?"

Honestly, for Alex she'd probably been a lot closer to it than she'd let on. After all, she was believer in her little group, and so she'd been already sort of believing in things even before she'd gotten her memories back of the demon in her bedroom. More than that, Alex had been here for a while, and had checked books out of the library at the magical school and she was trying to read cruciform, so she was dialed into believing now.

The question made her laugh. "Swear, insult people's mothers all of that! Dorian has it now."

"Some people have entirely too much time on their hands." It did sound more like the sort of thing that would be a prank than any kind of haunting Peter had ever seen. Though you never knew, not here.

"I suppose there's always going to be an urge to do ridiculous things. When magic's involved the ridiculous just gets even moreso." And then you had people showing off and all sorts of nonsense happened. Not that Peter knew anything about that. He was too busy blowing things up on accident.

"If there's something that I know about myself," Alex began quickly, and with a grin. "I would probably definitely be one of those sorts of people. No need to get up and refill my coffee, let me do magic. I would be Fred and George Weasley just apparating around because I can." There's a grin on her face, because let's be honest, she's been reading Harry Potter for a good chunk of her life, and she's got a good idea how to go about doing that whole thing.

"I mean, I know different magics have different costs and I wouldn't want my brain to bleed out my nose or whatever, but I would still probably be the worst about it."

Peter couldn't help a quiet huff of a laugh at that. "Believe me, when presented with physical evidence of what overusing magic does to you, it tends to put a damper on that sort of thing." Or maybe Peter was just more cautious about things. That didn't involve running into trouble, anyway.

"Besides, if there are spells that can do any of that sort of thing, I haven't learned them yet." Which didn't mean they didn't exist.

No one in their right mind would ever think of Alex Reagan as cautious by any definition ever. She was far too much of the sort of person who would simply throw things to the wind, so of course she'd do it. She'd probably do a whole lot more anyway. "Well, I've never been very good at not overdoing my limitations so it's probably a good thing I don't know magic." Which is... not an understatement from the woman who averaged two hours of sleep for over a year.

"Maybe your boss didn't teach you them because of that reason? The whole making things simple reason." Alex remembered what he'd said about the man before, so in her head it made sense.

There was a pause while Peter considered that, before he shrugged. "Might be. I think mostly he's just teaching me the same way he was taught. With exceptions." Nightingale had made it very clear that a number of the offensive spells he'd showed to Peter weren't meant to come up for a while. But things couldn't be exactly the same. "Mostly that I'm not eleven."

Alex was interested, she couldn't help it, and gave him a slightly guilty looking grin when he mentioned the being eleven thing. Having an entire lack of chill, Alex knew, could make her appear far less mature than she normally was, even if the things that she'd listed with magic were things that of course she'd actually do until the novelty of them wore off. "How long ago was he taught?"

That seemed important somehow, and Alex was definitely interested, because the way Peter described it made Alex picture something from a fantasy movie or a long distant past that was probably equally fictional.

Peter paused, debating on what exactly to say. Nightingale liked his privacy, that much was clear, but he was fairly open about his particular state with anyone in the space to understand it. And he wasn't here to complain, anyway.

"The 1910s, or thereabouts." He never gotten an exact date off the man, but Peter thought at this point he had enough hints to go off. "Things have changed a lot since then. And not just because it was a hundred or so years ago. The way he's told it, the old ways were around for hundreds or years before that."