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Alekto, now considering herself an obligated sort of supernatural animal control officer, sat on the edge of a building - what was the point in being a magical superhero if you couldn't hang out on roofs, all cool-like? - and swung her feet to and fro, a girlish and cheerful mannerism entirely at odds with her appearance.

She was eating a lukewarm McChicken, unimpressed with the thermal insulation abilities of subspace, and listening for the sound of distant howling. All she was hearing, however, was yapping, and while there probably were ankle-biting youma in existence - or worse - she had not yet encountered them, and was somewhat comfortable filing the noise away as "regular annoying dog." Probably one of those fluffy white ones with tear stains, in this neighborhood.

"Hello," she called out in no particular direction, aware of an approaching energy signature. She was still learning how to feel out their type and size and angle of approach, and could only categorize them as friendly, and therefore felt it would behoove her to extend an early greeting just in case they were in fact about to show down with an ice wolf - or a lava-based Yorkie, or something. "I have an extra apple pie," she added.

She was grateful for the veil, which allowed her to conceal her expression of disappointment that the stranger was someone she knew, and hadn't exactly left on the best of terms with. Still, he seemed less miffed than last time - if still holding it over her head a bit - and she decided to fib a little.

"Yes," she said loftily. "But not my dialects."

She was aware that she herself had blamed the mix-up on an ignorance of geography and not linguistics. She was hoping he'd forgotten.

She lifted up the veil in one hand, a dainty gesture to accommodate one very un-dainty bite of her sandwich.

"To do that," she retorted cheerfully, "I'd have to know that Nessy is Scottish, or whatever. I only know about Champ, so unless you're from Michigan, you're safe."

Champ did not live in Michigan. Champ lived in Vermont.

"You seen any dogs around?"

"Wolves are dogs," she stubbornly repeated.

She then, in the way of dumb people, manifested surprising capacity for knowledge in one very specific topic. "Canis lupus familiaris. The lupus is for wolf. We can't even, like, agree on what speciation actually is with any kind of certainty - like, definition, I mean; where the cutoff is - and a dog is just a neotonous wolf, or like, close enough. Anyway, I'm glad there's no dogs around. I ran into another one and they're gross and I didn't even have a shopping cart to hit it with this time."

She crammed the rest of the sandwich - a full quarter of it, probably - into her mouth and let the veil fall back, answering around a mouthful.

"Do you think they'll go away when the snow melts? I hope so."

"My whole life," she said, managing at last to swallow, and then procuring an apple pie from subspace before tucking into it as well, her feet still swinging gently back and forth. "But up until Halloween I wasn't one of the odd things happening."

Which made sense: things did have a tendency to be drawn - or at least it seemed so - to the magically-inclined. Perhaps, for Alekto, all those things had happened on the periphery of a blessed, swaddled life - something to be briefly noted and aware of while happening to other people.

"And I didn't go anywhere when Halloween was over. I thought I might, though. I sorta thought - you know - maybe I dreamed all this. Like, maybe my drink got spiked and I was just remembering tripping balls, and not a talking cat and a cursed Jumanji game and stuff. But then I kept happening."

"It was wild," she said in fervent agreement, dispatching the pie with alacrity as he talked. "This girl in a maid costume knocked me the ******** out somehow and when I came to a cat was bothering me about not being a loser, so I tracked her down and pointed at her and she just started screaming. I didn't even touch her."

This, with a bit of a puff of pride.

"And I guess I'm grateful for the cat versus, like. Nothing. But I'd probably be more grateful if the cat wasn't so crazy. I'd barely been awake at all and she dragged me off to some ******** - fish b***h's planet in the stars and made me fight a giant fungal whale skeleton and I died and it was ******** terrible. I'm never doing anything she tells me to do again."

This was a lie. Alekto was a natural pushover. But she thought she meant it, when she said it.

"Do you have a ghost? I think it'd be pretty ******** cool to talk to a ghost."

She made a face, perceptible despite the veil. "Damn. I thought you were gonna tell me about hanging out with Samara or something. Like you watched a cursed VHS tape and got turned into a Knight or something."

She paused, kicking her heels gently against the building and leaning on her palms now that the pie was gone. She looked very young - childish might be the word - despite clearly being north of twenty. "I really like scary movies," she said confidingly. "Like, a lot. And I thought I'd be doing a lot more - I don't know - maybe if not Samara then some Art the Clown type stuff, you know? Killing him, I mean, not being him. But I think I'm pretty relieved that it's not all that. I'm pretty relieved I don't have to be Sidney all the time or deal with ghosts all the time or whatever. But it does kinda make me feel like I'm supposed to be doing more, but I don't even really know how. I'm not sure I wanna know how," she added, still more confidingly than before, as if confessing a sin. "But I guess I'll find out either way."

"Already doing a lot of that," she said, "or at least trying to. I guess most of us are - trying to make it good, I mean." She sighed, her feet coming to a stop and dangling, and she exhaled a little puff of air that made the veil flutter.

"Screams," she added, belatedly, and then: "Oh. Did we ever introduce each other? I guess we were kinda busy." She put out a hand, then. "Alekto. I just stopped to eat, too, so I should probably get a move on. I hope you don't run into any more scary dogs. Or wolves or whatever. And that you make it good in the between parts."