Pepper was not entirely sure what to think right now. On the one hand... this place was insane - even if everyone was telling her the truth, and they weren’t actually insane, if all of this was true? Insane still fit as a descriptor, that was for sure. The more she heard them talk about it, the more convinced she became, though, that they were telling the truth. Too many of them were saying exactly the same things - if they were crazy or on drugs, wouldn’t there be at least a little discrepancy in their stories? Some detail one made up or left out that would be important, that would make the stories not match up? Something would have shown up, but so far there was nothing.
...and if she was honest, Tony’s presence actually made things a little clearer ...this time. Usually, he made everything infinitely more complicated than it had to be, and then threw some kind of weird logic at it once she finally had it sorted out, something that made it just that little bit less clear - but in this case, it helped to know that he was confirming all of the wild stories she’d been told when she first gotten here. She was sure he wouldn’t carry a joke on this long, and if he were drugged, surely she would have noticed the difference. He’d seemed normal - mostly. There was that little issue with the fact that he was apparently from the future, or something... that hadn’t made a lot of sense, but neither had much else, so she was assuming, for the moment, that the time-difference was part of this place’s general insanity.
Apparently it was a time-difference that made him go from kidnapped by terrorists and warlords in the middle of the desert somewhere to relatively safe, living in alternate-reality Lawrence, Kansas, recently returning to wealth - that was about the extent of what she understood the differences to be.
She stepped out of the glass cafe doors, into the frigid winter air (God how she missed home right now; even in the winter it was never this cold), when she saw the limo pull up, a smile already spreading across her face. Her eyes didn’t start to burn until the door opened, and she expected to see Tony stepping out - and instead it was that woman from the internet, the one who had said she knew Tony, and Pepper did her best to blink away the moisture that had collected at the edges of her vision (now was not the time to get sentimental and worry about you were kidnapped and I thought you were dead, not in the presence of one of Tony’s women), offering a different sort of smile, something a bit more professional and formal-social, bright but falling immediately back into her role as Mr. Stark’s Personal Assistant, meeting new people and making connections, no matter what sort of connections they were.
“Hello. Felicia, right?” That was what someone had said her name was, on that message board, anyway - she hoped he hadn’t been talking about someone else, but, well, times like this being accidentally rude wasn’t terribly inexcusable, she was sure. She offered one hand to the other woman, taking in her clothing with a very subtle glance; definitely Tony’s type, she’d been right about that, at least.