<div align="center"><em>Vanessa adjusts in the Big House</em></div><hr/><br/>Wide-eyed and mute, Vanessa stoically followed them toward the Big House.  It was hard not to read a lot into Hephaestus' visitation.  He'd come bursting out of the fire, his voice resounding with the authority of a millennium.  She felt shaken, humbled to her very core, and everything seemed only a shadow cast from his divine flame.<br/><em><br/>I wonder if this is what the children in Lourdes felt like,</em>she wondered to herself as Chiron and Vincent chatted.  She shuttered these thoughts away, figuring that the analogy didn't quite pan out.<br/><br/>"Would either of you like something to drink? I think all we have in cans is diet coke..."<br/><br/>"Uh no, thank you," she replied.  Chiron looked strange to her in his chair to Vanessa.  Having spent so much time around authentically handicapped people, watching someone transition from being large, stout, and powerful to being coddled in a chair with a blanket over him just made her brain twist.  Besides, he didn't look right when she didn't have to look up at him.  There were some people, she thought, whose heads you were never meant to see the tops of.<br/><br/>She stood awkwardly, unwilling to sit unless directed.  The Big House was just that: too large to be comfortable.  Even though the furnishings were designed to accommodate half-bloods and regular-sized gods, it still seemed somehow too big for her.  Since coming to camp, she would have these sort of disconnects, the feeling like the world had become too strange too suddenly.  It was like being Alice.  One day, she wished to find a blond, little half-blood to dress up and take a series devoted to that alien sensation she now silently endured.