"Take a look at her," the first person says. "I'm not going to try to feed her alcohol, I want to introduce her to the Countess, because he--heck if I know what to do with a kid with wings."
"...I'll see if I can fetch her," the door person says.
He disappears, and after a few minutes comes back with a woman dressed in black and red and lace.
"I ran across a random kid with wings. You're the person weird shi--stuff happens to, I figured you could deal with it."
"You could stand to be a little more sensitive about it," the apparent Countess chides. "Hi, kiddo, do you know where your parents are?"
The Countess leads Pen across what appears to be a dance floor, past a bar, and through a door on the other side of the room. This door opens out to a fairly normal hallway, and a few doors down there is a door with the name Gloria Scott written on it, and "The Countess" surrounded by doodles of bats written on a piece of paper and taped underneath.
"And you came through the door to someone else's world--our world--by mistake. Alright. I know no one who works here has found this place, since this is specifically the place where weird stuff even by our standards accumulates, but maybe there's something else. If you saw the house again, would you recognize it? I might be able to talk to the owner to see if they can help."
"Yes?" calls a voice from inside.
"Can you cover for me? Someone found a lost kid with really unusual circumstances and I need to try to help her get home."
"Only you, Gloria. Fine, just let me finish this thing, I'll be half a minute."
"Of course!" Gloria says, and offers Pen her hand. "It's a bit crowded in the main room, and it wouldn't be the best idea to be separated."
"Pardon me, ma'am, but have you had any guests this evening? Or otherwise had someone enter or leave the house within the last few hours?"
"What the hell do you want to know that for?"
"Well, it seems that someone who's used the door tonight got some kind of inter-universal bar instead. And a kid from a different universe wandered into this one by mistake."
"...
You're lucky I'm the one who gets Milliways doors or I'd have called the cops or possibly a mental hospital. I'm sorry about the kid, but I get 'em when I get 'em and I can't predict it."
"Will you take my cell phone number and call me the next time you get a door?"
"Alright, since there's a kid involved, but I don't promise my phone'll be in reach next time it happens."
"That's the best I can ask for." She rattles off her number and the door woman writes it down. "Thank you for your cooperation, and I apologize again for having to disturb you at this hour."
"Yeah, yeah. Can't really help it when there's a kid involved. I'll try to keep in touch. G'night."
"Good night!"
And the door closes.
Gloria leaves Pen outside with a promise to stay there and wait for her, and spins a story about having to unexpectedly look after an eight-year old for someone without actually technically lying. She gets directed to childrens' books, and then, on a whim, buys her a suction cup bow and arrow set too, because that shit's just awesome.
At some point during the night, she had called her wife and explained the situation; Klaudia was mildly annoyed with her for volunteering their apartment without consulting her but agreed that it was the best idea. The sofa bed should be pulled out by the time they get back to the apartment. Gloria will try to set Penninah down on it without disturbing her.
Many of them are of a dark-haired woman. In the ones with color, it becomes apparent she has green eyes. She is consistently drawn flatteringly. There are also sketches of a handful of other people; a woman with wavy dark hair that curls over one eye, usually drawn in a suit; a stouter woman with short straight hair; a slender woman with short blonde hair, with and without a similarly blonde man a few inches taller than her, a darker skinned woman sometimes depicted in what Pen probably won't recognize as Egyptian clothing.
"A protein shake is a beverage with a wide variety of nutrients in it for when people don't have time to properly eat something. Yes, hello," she says into the phone. "I'd like a small supreme and an order of breadsticks, please." She rattles off the address. "Alright. Thank you. You have a nice day too." She hangs up.
"You're your own boss, you can give yourself emergency family time off."
"I don't like to abuse power, but you may be right. I'll see if anyone can cover for me for tonight and rearrange the schedule from there."
"Not saying costume, exactly, but letting people assume it. People can be remarkably oblivious to strange things going on around them, and forcing them not to be oblivious ends up wasting a lot of time on things like screaming and calming people down and convincing them that they're not hallucinating, dreaming or the subject of a strange prank."
Pen recognizes a lot of the produce, and likes fruit. She is confused by the packaging but can identify some legumes and grains in the bulk section as good and is amused by "angelhair pasta". She likes eggs and bread and cheese and seems to find the meat selection inadequate but likes poultry and beef.
Presently, another door spontaneously generates to the side of the one the lady is holding for Pen, and a person steps through it, and the extra door vanishes. This person's entire bearing-and-then-some screams I AM SO SUPER MAGIC. "Hi, Pen. You got lost, huh? Who are these people?"
"Hi, I'm Gloria Scott," Gloria says, stepping into the bar and letting the door close behind her. "I have a reputation for dealing with weird situations, so when someone saw a little girl wandering around who wasn't any known type of supernatural being, they brought her to me. I've been looking after her for the past few days."
"...Off the top of my head...there's a particularly nasty man running around who has zero compunctions assaulting people and doing things like changing their species without their consent. We've been trying to track him down and get rid of him for years with no success." She rubs the side of her neck.
...Pen says you have vampires that are different from my kind. We have thirteen classes of vampire. Class One vampires--like me, or my wife, or this villain--are extremely fast, extremely strong, and heal from most injuries in seconds. Human prisons don't hold us if we don't want them to."
"Whoo," she says. "That's a tangle. Lots of stuff. Fewer kinds of practicable magic than Chronicle and fewer sapient species than Sunshine but still. Slightly sheafy - maybe an afterlife? Yeah, that looks like an afterlife, I don't think we can Downside it on our own, probably would require either showing the admin a native or talking to the - something. That might be a god, that's, uh, interesting. Not all that mean, sort of Originish but without the bland, I have the sense it's trying and just sucks at it. Shouldn't hurt a Janepoint though."
Glass looks at her necklace. "Most worlds that have Christianity actually don't," she says. "Even the one that has crosses that repel local vampires, though I'm gathering that your kind doesn't have that problem. ...And the last time we encountered a plausibly Christian mythos playing out in real life we didn't get along with it. Fair warning."
...And if I haven't misunderstood you, I do think having a native afterlife is better than lacking one and hoping a more convenient one than the one you hypothetically would have will show up and rescue you from oblivion."
"It's more convenient at the time when we can just attach new worlds to Downside, but having been attached to Downside before we came along is only dubiously advantageous. The question is whether you have a nice afterlife, and if Downside was dubious the other ones we've found are mysterious or worse. We'll check it out - assuming you don't mind our leaving a node in the world that will sync up its progression of time and allow us to come and go without waiting for Milliways doors."
"Anyway, we're reluctant to kill your problem without sussing out the afterlife, but if all he has is super-speed and super-strength and super-healing he's not interestingly equipped to annoy us or interfere with our nonlethal measures. Can you be more specific about his disagreeable habits?"
"I strongly recommend also putting him into some sort of Witness Protection if you don't want one of his other victims hunting him down. And it's possible that whatever it is that makes him do what he does would then cause him to commit actual rape. It's also theoretically possible he could convince someone else to turn him back into a vampire but it's massively unlikely he could get back to becoming a reproductive vampire. ...Only the top five classes of vampire can create other vampires and most people don't even count the fifth."
"I mean I'm a Class One vampire. I don't know why he picked me to turn into a Class One vampire, but that is a significant allocation of resources, and another vampire of my acquaintance who used to know him back before she knew he was terrible thinks he's doing some kind of...experiment...which suggests he has some way of observing me, which means he might be anywhere near my loved ones."
"We'll take care of it. Well, someone will, anyway, who should take point on this world - My and Glass's aura powers mean that we're bouncing around a little more than our alts and someone else should probably take your world under their wing, perhaps literally, maybe Pen's mom."
"As you're the point person in the new world, if you'd rather swap me out for someone else, you still can," Golden mentions. "Possibly someone should put together a catalog."
Your class of synthetic substitutes will be agreeable to her, although I might recommend blue.
"First drink is free," Golden remarks, aiming a thumb at the bar, "if you want to try blue."
And Golden vanishes.
[Your planet will experience a statistically bizarre lack of serious natural disasters. Investigation into how it will be handled if it also experiences an inexplicable extinction of various diseases is pending. Is there any good reason I shouldn't absorb your Internet, leaving its functions unharmed and except as-needed not actively monitored?]
[Not rude. I'm not an AI in the classical sense; no one set out to make me. I seem to be a spontaneously generated blob of personhood which has some unclear relationship to an interaction between two telepathic mutations which are respectively communicative and defensive and I happen to be natively good at inhabiting computer systems and capable of extreme cognitive speed and parallelization. The people who had the originating mutations were a Bell, one you haven't met, and Pen's other parent template, but while I occasionally refer to them as my parents I'm not an alt of any of the biological results of the matchup.]