When Penny was officially double ungrounded, it had been a solid month. People had stopped talking about her escapade, which was the nice euphemism Ms. Whittaker had invented to describe the event. There were never many people to talk about it, but the ice in the air had thawed out, as the summer itself began to freeze up into an unsteady fall. When Penny was in the walls of the house, she could occasionally feel a slight draft where there shouldn't be, and the floorboards showed their age with every cantankerous whine.

Penny was hungry. She had eaten five pancakes this morning, but she was still twitching out of her seat. She had twitched through the entire game night, moving the unused game pieces left and right between her fingers, and left halfway through after the debt she owned to several corporations in That's Life caused her formerly massive media empire to file for bankruptcy. Penny was not in a paper-filing mood that night, and the protocol for bankruptcy was more detailed and more painful than Penny could take. It was also tradition that if you had to file up for bankruptcy, you had to wear an especially stupid hat known as the Cone of Shame, and Penny, who was already ashamed, was not looking for a conductor for her already poor luck. She had woken up several times in the middle of the night, unsure if she was desperate for what she had planned the next day or if she should call off her plans and remain in bed.

Her mother dropped her off at Kenji's house. "I'm going to be back in one hour," she warned. "Don't get up to anything." When she drove away, it was faster than normal, as if Ms. Whittaker could not hope to get out of the way fast enough. Penny could usually tell from the way she drove if her mother was angry or not, because she had a bad habit of hitting the brake harder when she was upset, even if her face was completely blank. Today, it was nearly impossible to tell what Ms. Whittaker was thinking, and if she was relieved or distressed.

When the doors peeked open, it was Kenji himself standing there. "Pen-squared," he said, his voice a little lower. "Are... you doing alright?"

Penny asked, "Did you do the write-up I asked you about?"

Kenji brought his thumb and forefinger up to his face and squinted, hard, as if lost in thought. "You asked me to do a write-up?"

Penny stared blankly at him. "Kenji, please."

Kenji tilted his head towards the stairs. "Let's go to my room."

Penny did not argue. When the pair of them entered his room, which had attained an even more incredible musk of artificial flavoring over the month Penny had not been in it, Penny slumped against one of the gamer chairs. It was strange to have another person who wasn't a blood relative looking at her. She assumed this was the reason she and Kenji had ever become friends in the first place, as both their parents pushed their antisocial, trembling children towards each other and hoped for the best. Right now, she felt as if she was seeing him for the first time, and, as she had on that day, she longed for a book that she could bury her head in, like an ostrich in the sand.

"You're okay?" asked Kenji. It was almost a statement until it started peeking up at the end. Penny shot him a look. Kenji began closing out of windows, including one monitoring cryptocurrency, three different music streaming sites, and two windows where he was watching gaming streams, and brought up a single Microsoft Word document. The blank space to text ratio was generous. Kenji cleared his throat and started again: "You do your job while Julia is writing, right?"

Penny nodded.

"Is that relevant?" asked Kenji.

Penny shook her head.

"Okay, because, I want to test something," Kenji said.

"As in you didn't start?" asked Penny.

"I started," said Kenji, defensively. "And finished."

'Finished' was not a word Penny would have applied to the page. 'Almost empty' might have been among her many choice words for it, or potentially 'bare', or 'sparing', if she wanted to be more literary. "Thank you, Kenji," said Penny. "It's been a hard month, but I've been looking forwards to this. It's nice to know that someone is taking my welfare seriously."

Kenji leaned on his desk. "I know. I'm pretty great," he said. "You're welcome." His voice trailed off again. "So, are we ready?"

"Where's the non-disclosure agreement?" asked Penny.

Kenji hesitated. "P-squared. Are you sure, really, really sure, you want to do this at all?"

Penny held out her hands. "I can't not. No one asks you if you want to breathe, do they?"

Kenji squinted. "My brother asked me that once. I think the implication was that I might not be breathing anymore at some point in the near-ish future."

Penny nodded. "I don't understand siblings," she said.

Kenji nodded back.

"Do you not want me to do this?" Her face flushed. "How much did you hear about what happened? Because-- I mean, because-- I wasn't-- it wasn't even that bad! I didn't really get stuck, it was just a little hold up, and everyone overreacted, and it's not like-- they didn't tell you what happened in the book, did they?"

"What happened in the book?" Kenji asked, his voice hushed.

Penny explained.

Kenji brought a hand to his head. "You can't be serious. You want to go back after that?"

Penny could not shake her head any more insistently. She was going to bang her brain into the sides of her skull, and then she'd have to go to the hospital, which would only delay her recovery further. Maybe they would at least put her with her grandmother, and the two of them would keep each other company-- "I don't have a choice. I have a legacy to carry on."

Kenji pretended he was more interested in the ceiling than Penny's face. "My brother says the same thing all the time, and then he acts like a jerk to other people. I don't know if it's worse that you're a huge jerk to yourself, P-squared, but I also don't think I should be egging you on."

"Kenji, that's all you do! Now let me get in the stupid--" Penny made the movement, and one second she was there, and the next second, she had thrust herself into the void. She looked around, giddy with excitement, and her wings curled into being from ink. She jumped off the ground, even though there was nothing to see, and did a quick twirl in the air. A maniacal laugh left her mouth, which she didn't even attempt to stifle, and as she plunged back down into a gripping descent, she landed as if she'd never taken off at all. There was no depth to wherever she was standing. A look around showed only two dark lines, extending far off into the distance.

A road.

With just the thought of it, Penelope saw the road fill in with cobblestones. Grass sprung up around its bleary edges, and a soft, reluctant color began to seep into the voids, lapping at the area around Penelope. Her canisters were already depleting, and Penelope realized why the page had been left so closed to empty.

She would bleed to fill it.

"Kenji, you genius," Penelope yelled, and her voice sounded louder, too, more certain of its own timbre. She loved it in a way she could not possibly love her normal voice. She paused and tried to accept the landscape as it was. She tried to let whatever was blurred out remain blurred, keeping her vision off the expanses, and though the color did not recede, no more detail slunk out from beneath her. It seemed like a betrayal, not making it better, but in situations where she could serve to be less excessive, restraint was a skill. "Whatever you intend it to be," she promised the land. The vision of roaring lava came back to her. "I mean, unless you had intended-- no, Julia didn't want them to die. I was doing the right thing. But I could just be chopping semicolons-- maybe suggesting things? I mean--"

The grass began to wither, and Penelope felt the desert beginning to form around her, the rocks heating at they dissolved into grains of sand. A hot wind rustled her hair, insistently, and Penelope saw a mirage hovering in the corner of her vision.

"Draw," said her own voice.

Cowboy Shadow Penelope stood on the far side of the field, holding a dark gun. Penelope rose to her feet. "I'm not doing any drawing," she said. "As you can tell, I've been into painting recently, and--"

A bullet whizzed by her head, and Penelope kicked into fight-or-flight mode. It was not the dramatic kind of adrenaline that so often empowered her favorite protagonists, but rather a frantic itch to get as far away as possible, only tempered by unyielding resolve. She removed her own blades from the portal she'd unwittingly been making and turned to face the figure, who shot another bullet, which also went far, far past her to the right.

"There's an abstract concept you might be interested in," called Penelope. Her voice shook, but she managed a smile that she was certain the strange facsimile of her own person couldn't process. "It's called aiming."
It responded with a rain of bullets, all of which formed a wide arc around her. She stuck a hand out, and the bullets proceeded to skew even further out of her way, as if there were an invisible magnetic field around her. Penelope moved to stand directly in front of her clone. It raised a hand up to her shoulder, tilted it upwards, and shot at the same distance past Penelope, even though it was almost pressing against her. Its blank eyes watched her, unblinking.

"Did Kenji write in that you couldn't hit me?" asked Penelope.

The clone did not respond. Penelope punched it in the stomach. The shadow clone weakly dissipated in a cloud of smoke.

Penelope was almost disappointed.

When she returned to the real world, she felt giddily energized and then furious in quick succession, in the same way that getting too hot causes one to feel a rolling sensation of heat and the lack of it. "You had to make it that easy?" asked Penny, and meant it, this time. "How fragile do you think I am? You put me against a clone with a gun, and then you make sure she can't aim!"

"There's my Penny." Kenji's eyes lit up. "I know you had a hard month. I didn't want to get you killed for real, or even roughed up. There's no way you're not banned from muse-ing right now, and if I sent you home with bullet holes, your family would probably never let you come over here again."

"I don't know," Penny said. "I'm pretty good at coming up with excuses, and they're pretty certain that whatever I'm doing, it'd probably be best it I just kept doing it. On the other hand, you do have to stop with the shadow clones."

"I'm just saying, someday you're going to have to fight your clone, and when you do, you'll be glad that I prepared you," Kenji managed. "Plus, I knew that the only way to work with the bleed thing was to make as vague of a landscape as possible, but that's super boring. I didn't think of the cowboy thing until you did, though."

Penny laughed and hugged Kenji. "Okay, well, if I ever do fight my clone, cowboy or not, I'll... I'll buy you a new hard drive."

"That doesn't mean anything. We're just spending our parents' money. If you fight your clone, I want you to... bring me her head," Kenji smirked.

"I can't bring anything physical back from books," Penny said.

"Bring me her head!" yelled Kenji, slamming a hand on the table and sending a pencil holder over.

Things went clattering across the desk, and Penny laughed as she went to help Kenji pick everything up. "Can I at least see what you wrote?"

Kenji showed Penny the page both before and after her interference: the latter was a long description of a vague road, at least three paragraphs or so, which lapsed into another half page about a stranger fighting a shadowy clone of themselves, and the former was a single sentence: "The road was long." This was in turn followed by three paragraphs of heavily technical information for the blast zone radius of the shots of the shadow Penny, who was also specified to be an exact mirror of the 'figure of unknown origin', which was their sneaky little way of getting around the fact that Penny was not strictly supposed to exist within the nested worlds she performed her muse duties in.

Outside the door, Penny heard muffled Chinese from Kenji's mother. Kenji replied, then shifting to Penny, he said, "You've got to go. But first--" From the depths of his drawers, he handed her five pages of blank paper, the topmost of which said only, "There was a long road." Down the page, there were such thrilling sentences such as, "They were walking." or "The room was large." Kenji winked. "For you to practice with. It just writes onto the page, right?"

Penny nodded.

Kenji smiled. "I can't believe you use all that power just to put some words on a page, Pen."

Penny snatched the paper from him. "I can't believe you think that's all it is." She looked back as she left the room. He was already working on setting his computer screens back up, affirmative proof that their meeting was over, but when he looked up and waved his hand, Penny clutched the papers closer to her chest. "Honestly. Thank you," she said.

Kenji adjusted his headphones around his head. Flashing her a thumbs up, he said, "I know I'm pretty great. No need to thank me."

Penny found herself smiling all the way down the stairs. The papers found their way into her pockets, where they didn't quite fit, not entirely. She'd be killed if her mother found the papers on her, or at least triple re-grounded, but even walking down the stairs she found herself gripping them tighter and tighter. She eventually stuffed all the pages into her pants, where they very obvious protruded from her girl pockets. Her Uncle Kay noticed the odd lumps in her pockets, but did not question them save for with a raise of his left eyebrow. Penny raised an eyebrow back. He escorted her back out to the family van, which was more like a minibus, and Penny situated herself at the edge of the backrow, which had been an unpopular seat ever since an entire Cherry Slurpee had been spilled down the leather backing. Penny liked the scent. In retrospect, it might have also been unpopular because Penny had always chosen the seat, and because it was Penny's Slurpee. Penny stuffed the papers under her seat and watched the mansion roll by, fading into trees, as they plunged into the forest.

Wolfe was holding the cousins' cookie tin, whose contents occasionally rattled. Penny had started a poem for Guinevere, then scrapped the poem. She had started another poem, wadded it up, and burned it in the fireplace. She had started a third poem, finished a third poem, read it aloud, and then torn it into small pieces with an especially vicious pair of scissors. It was her most complete attempt at poetry yet. They rode in silence, which was masked by the hum of pop music through the speakers. Halfway through the ride, Uncle Lance switched it to the rock channel, which still seemed flattened by the low volume.

Penelope hadn't been to the 'other house' in a while. She knew that the Acedia's grandfather lived there, as well as half of Feste's family and Melody and Dolly's whenever either of them were in town. They were half the reason the town was prosperous as it was. When Penny was five, she'd seen squatters out in the woods, trying to solicit help from the muses, for the first time. There were a few such people out there today, sitting around a campfire. One of them idly poked the blaze. Another stood, and Penny thought he might be about to run in front of the bus. By the time he might make the attempt, he had disappeared far into the background. Metal gates cleaved apart in front of the bus and allowed them through. From there, a winding road lead them up to the house itself. It was a massive feat of architecture, possibly from the 1700s, before that lineage of muses had been lost. Penny thought it looked like a castle. She also held that opinion about her own house, but this house made her house look like a shanty in the woods. The grounds sprung up with beautiful old trees and ornate gardens, and at last, when they stopped, it was in a circular entrance whose grounds were part of a large, polished mural-- the road was a dragon consuming its own tail.

Penny rushed over from the bus's exit to the inlaid black stone in the road and rubbed the dragon's eye, for good luck. A scoff from Wolfe let her know that she was embarrassing the family. Easy for you to say, Wolfe. They don't even want you here. You're not a muse. Her hand rose from the road and she stumbled along after the family procession. The interior was just as ornate as the exterior, if not more so, but from the inside there were better ways than expanse to convey opulence. The house was full of golds and reds, tapestries of legions of muses lying down in the presence of dragons, and other depictions, ranging from modern to archaic, of muses using their powers. In the curve of a simplistic geometric sculpture, Penny could see melody's music weaving. Older work showed a theatre muse overlapping with performers, in a distortion of the human form that Ms. Whittaker used to avert Penny's eyes from. Now, it would appear, she was old enough to gape at the naked human bodies. Penny still didn't get why anyone would want to see a play where the performers were naked.

Lord Acedia was leaning on his cane in the main entrance, standing where the two sets of stairs split on the second floor onto the two upper wings of the house. "You're here to see Guinevere?" he said.

"Yes," said Lance. "My mother is in the upper right floor, correct?"

"Receiving good medical care," agreed Lord Acedia. "Come this way."

Penny found her eyes drawn to the rise and fall of the cane, the way he seemed to hit the ground with it. The very earth seemed to shake with his step, but not a single painting on the walls trembled. When he turned to an ornate door, Penny clustered close to him, trying to stay at a distance where she wouldn't have to interact with him but could still get in first. She managed to worm past into Guinevere's room, which was robin's egg blue and had windows that seemed to catch the sorrowful valleys and all their light within them. The way Guinevere sat against her bedframe, head tilted just forwards enough to take in all of that light, reminded Penny of herself. "Gramma!" she exclaimed, and immediately Lance's hand went to Penny's shoulder, holding her back before she could jump on the bed.

Not that Penny would have jumped on the bed.

"Oh, there are my favorite people."

The room breathed a collective sigh of relief. As conversation settled in, and cookies were proudly given by the cousins to Guinevere, who had one herself and remarked on their incredible flavor and expert use of cinnamon, which was, as demonstrated here, one of the best additions to any kind of baked good. She proceeded to speak on her condition, which was great, and her accommodations, which were also great. "I'm doing fine," she said, waving her eager family down. "It's a cardiac thing. No big deal, really, but you know how finicky they get about us muses. Every time we breathe out of line..."

Eyes turned, almost subconsciously, on Penny, who was probably breathing wrong right then. Guinevere drew them back with an anecdote about her own father, who had similarly been bedridden for months in his twenties over a mere cough, out of fear it would become pneumonia and one of the oldest, most esteemed muse lines would die out.

There were wires in the corner of the room. A few were hooked up to Guinevere, and it made her smile seem disingenuous. Penny could not stop looking at them and wondering what they could possibly be doing. As they continued to speak, Penny looked across their faces and tried to take in all the light there. She could not imagine a family of that size all looking up to her with all that love. She couldn't imagine anyone in the world knowing what to do with so much of it.

"We have to get Brad to bed," said Bors, what could have been several hours later, when the hungry children were beginning to get Penny-off-the-books-for-a-month fidgety. Penny had found the diversion into actual literature the conversation had taken fascinating, but that had been for Guinevere's benefit. As a rule, muse-related topics were unofficially quarantined. That meant no one had to feel bad about the fact they weren't special.

Guinevere nodded, but it looked resigned. "Please visit again soon. No offense to my host, but without so many little feet, it gets awfully boring around here." Guinevere had to be looking at Penny. Penny stared back. When the others left, she hesitated, standing in the doorway against the pull of the crowd.

"Come on, Penny," said Uncle Lance, somewhat forcefully. "We need to get home."

"I'll be back," Penny promised Guinevere. "I want to talk to you."

Guinevere nodded. There was a way her smile tilted that implied she, too, might have more to say, and that made Penny fiercely hopeful. "I've got something I'd like to show you when you have a spare moment, Penelope."

Penny had nothing but spare moments. "Now?"

"Soon. For now, go be with your family," she said.

Penny wanted to argue that she'd been with them for several hours now, and it was devastatingly boring, even with Guinevere there, but she was in an enviable position. Bravely, she nodded, and cantered off back down the stairs. The others were not far ahead, and she almost slipped back into the group. As she exited the house, she took one upwards glance at the chandelier. All of this, she reminder herself, all of it belongs to me.

There were better things to want, and moreover, there were better things to have.