Ilde rests her chin in her hands as Penelope sits down, with a dutiful expression of great sympathy, and it turns out that there is something sort of comforting about this particular flavor of admittedly bizarre normalcy. The world is still turning, and Penelope is still a small cigarette-smoke tornado person. Everything in its right place, etcetera.

“Me, too,” she says, a moment later, because it's true. “It's been one of those weeks for you, too?” It's always a bit surreal, she finds, just getting used to the fact that after things change, mostly...they stay the same, for a while. The world is not drastically altered because of the shitty and less shitty things that happen to her. It is what it is.