That brittle rage, the bitter rubble, take your time and bring the trouble… (Open!)

[der_weevilkonig]

Owen thinks he has managed to sneak out of the Kashtta without attracting the attention of his stalker.

Owen is probably very wrong about this.

For the moment, though, he's enjoying a burger, and the less he knows about events in the outside world, the better. The last time he was here he met one truly confounding demon who stole his fries chips

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[chimaerasaurus]

Abby gathers her own beer and food at the bar, a file tucked under one arm. She seems distracted and a little depressed, circulating a dim glow that's barely noticeable in the bar.

"Cheers, mate," she mutters, navigating through the crowd as best she can, on the hunt for an open table. There aren't many, which is kind of surprising on a Sunday night. Maybe the rest of Chicago knows something she doesn't.

But there is an Owen. And half of a table there. She helps herself to the chair across from him and sets her burdens down on the table's surface, dropping the file next to her plate with a soft pap. "No worries, I'm not here to actually talk to you. I just need someplace to sit."

She takes a slurp of her beer and flips the file open. There's a sequence of detailed sketches of what seems to be the inner workings of a dragon, followed by pages of meticulous notes. Abby sighs and sets her glass aside with a murmured, "Bloody waste."

[der_weevilkonig]

Owen looks up mostly to see who's managed to work their way through the field of projective Owen-ness that's kept the seat clear this long, and almost jumps. Abby. The person he managed to greivously offend within the first about five minutes of her coming through the Rift and then run into at every possible opportunity.

It's almost, Owen thinks, like some sort of higher power is arranging all of this just to see the sorts of faces he'll make. But of course really thinking that would be stupid.

"Help yourse-" He cuts himself off when he catches a glimpse of what she's reading, and brightens immensely. For Owen, this mostly means that he goes from being insufferable to sufferable. "That the - our newest acquisition?" he asks. He's not enough of an idiot to go talking about dragons in a pub full of probably-drunk American idiots, any one of which might be CLF.

[chimaerasaurus]

"Yeah." Abby rubs the corner of one eye. "It's beautiful. What they didn't blast to pieces."

It's clear what she thinks of dragon-killers. She turns the file so Owen can see one of her sketches. "Dunno if you've gotten a chance to look--but see? These secondary lungs here? The surrounding tissue's got these incredible concentrations of hydrogen, like. The esophogeal structure that connects it to the things mouth opens up right over it's back molars. Flap of skin there acts like a cap." She taps the drawing. "Found a bit of flint wedged in between its teeth. My guess is, it stored hydrogen in the secondary lungs, and when it wanted to breathe some fire? Used that flint to give itself a spark and opened the flap to let the gas out. There's dried mucus coating its mouth and throat. Protection of some kind, from the flames?"

[der_weevilkonig]

"Helped dissect and catalogue it, actually," Owen says. "Did you have a chance to look at the chemical analysis of that mucous layer? Fascinating stuff; highly endothermic, though we can't work out what precisely it does with all that energy. Aside from keep the throat cool."

Xenobiology. Perhaps the one thing Owen will actually be sanguine about.

"The gland structure controlling mucous secretion was a charred mess by the time we got it - which is a little ironic, if you think about it - but I guess its evolutionary defenses didn't adapt to environmental rocket launchers."

[wagglingfingers]

Though Alex would never, ever admit it, sometimes she gets cravings for greasy food and beer. (She can practically feel her mother's disapproval as she picks up her cheeseburger. Of course, Alex's mother would've disapproved of just about everything in her life, which is probably why she's as neurotic as she is...anyway.) She blames this on spending far too much time in the 1980s, when nobody worried about things like lung cancer or high cholesterol. Which really means that she blames it on Gene.

Alex doesn't have a problem, she swears.

At any rate, she also has a need for some sort of interaction that isn't with an angel or a shapeshifter or, uh, Sam, and she thinks she might've glimpsed Owen around the hallways of the Kashtta once or twice (unless he's been holed up somewhere since her arrival). So she slides in next to him, offering him a smile and a greeting. "Hello."

Oh, Alex, what have you done?

[der_weevilkonig]

Alex blames everything on Gene. Owen blames everything on Jack. By their powers combined, they are Captain Displacement! ...or something.

Owen glances up from his chips, registers the new person, doesn't register that he's seen her around the Tower because he doesn't pay that much attention, honestly, and wonders exactly how much interaction he's required to throw himself into. And hopes, deeply and desperately, that she's not another stalker.

Hey, he ended up being able to talk to his office building and speed-dash about. He's not going to assume the Rift lacks the ability to turn him into Mr. Irresistable To Some Segment Of The Population, but if it did, he'd appreciate a bit or warning and control over it.

"Hello."

[wagglingfingers]

Just as long as Alex doesn't get Heart. She really doesn't want the pet monkey. Sam can have the pet monkey.

Look, Alex just wants to talk to someone relatively normal, and, unfortunately, Owen...sort of qualifies. Vaguely. Somehow. At least she's not dressed like a hooker from the 80s anymore? "Beer's better back home," she offers. Granted, she's drinking something several degrees better than the piss that passes for beer in much of America, but it's still not proper beer.

[der_weevilkonig]

Sam doesn't blame his problems on things so much as he shouts at walls, questions the structure of reality, and makes questionable judgment calls, so the narration is not sure where that puts him. Maybe Sam is the pet monkey.

Owen snorts. Complaining about things? That, he can do.

"Among other things," he says. "You know, I spent the last couple of years living in Cardiff, and while I was there, I thought 'never in my life will I live in a place I like less than Cardiff.' Few months later?" He tosses a chit at his burger. Then picks it up and sticks it in his mouth anyway. "Tossed into Chicago. Wait until you've seen their version of winter."