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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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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."

Okay, that made Alex's brow arch. Peter as far as she knew was her contemporary, so she when she did the math in her head, that would make this man at the very least a hundred years old. And that was if he started to train in this as a child. "Wow," the word was dragged out, because for a second Alex Reagan, podcast host and reporter, she definitely didn't have another word to say. Well done, Peter, you've joined a special group of people with that one.

But not for too long though, because she had questions. Alex always has questions. "So that means magic extends your life? Unless you burn out on it, I mean. That's. Wow." Hundreds of years of training like this meant that Alex couldn't help but wonder if it meant that there were hundreds of year old people who were able to do what it was that Peter could.

"Ah, no, not quite. His is...kind of a special case." Not the only case, and not one that anyone, up to and including Nightingale himself understood, but it didn't seem to be the norm. Which suited Peter just fine, to be honest. He couldn't really see himself in a hundred years, still knocking around the Folly and trying to find an apprentice as dumb as he feels sometimes.

"Most were just regular blokes who just happened to do magic. Well, posh blokes. But still."

"Why am I not surprised it was posh blokes?" There's a little bit of amusement when Alex uses his own words, but she's thinking, that much is evident. Thinking and questioning, and wondering why he was such a special case. But being as she doesn't know him, and he's not here it's not as if Alex could go badgering and asking like she otherwise would have. And of course she would have, because she's Alex and Alex isn't particularly good at letting things like that go.

"It sounds very kinda secret order-like, honestly. Like something you'd find on conspiracy websites or the dark web or whatever." Alex didn't spend any time on the dark web, but there'd been enough for her story that had come from it that she wouldn't be surprised if there was stuff like that in his world. "I'm surprised more people don't try to use magic."

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