Isaac’s story of his encounter with a hyper-aggressive ghost starts with a trip to Madrid, where he met with a few magic users and toured the Madrid Magic District, a huge old building, sandwiched between apartments and shops, apparently abandoned from the outside. https://twitter.com/oscaropossum/status/1381754187067756545
But inside, it has a large courtyard, and there are shops that open up into the courtyard like a tiny shopping mall. The courtyard is about 200 yards long, despite the building being only about 50 yards deep. Bigger on the inside, if you will.
After perusing for any particularly rare magical artifacts, he met up with an old friend who was an expert in ghosts, who took him up into the hills, to an old manor that she wanted to check out.
Now, ghosts can my dormant for decades, they seem to be “awoken” by the presence of the living, and Isaac theorizes that they don’t actually feel the passage of time unless the living are nearby. This manor had been abandoned for several decades.
It has once been the home of a wealthy aristocrat, and his family, but the local doctor, after making several house calls over a period of a few weeks, reported to the town at the foot of the hill that the man’s family had all fallen ill and died, leaving him alone.
He was never seen nor heard from again. And that was roughly 70 years before Isaac and his friend arrived at the manor. 70 years the house sat empty. Not even any vandals had bothered to come and rob the place. No squatters. No ghost hunters. Not a soul.
They were the first two to set foot in the place since that doctor who had declared the rest of the family dead. The gates were rusted shut, the road overgrown and impassible, the doors locked, the windows shut.
Now Isaac can pick a lock, and specializes in antique ones, so it was no trouble getting inside, the trouble came from navigating the house itself. It wasn’t filled to the brim with piles and piles of books, paintings, vases, chests, with only narrow passages between.
It was impossible to tell where one room ended and the next began, not a single wall could be seen, even the ceiling was often obscured by cantilevered artifacts, creating tunnels of densely packed stuff. Isaac quickly recognized the labyrinthine nature of the place.
He stuck close to his partner and began keeping track of their left and right turns, and looking for a ball of twine to mark the way back, but when they found one and attempted to retrace their way back to the door, despite Isaac keeping track, there was no door to be found.
His partner had been just as carefully noting the odds and ends they had passed on their way in, anything that caught her eye, and between both their careful observations, they came to the same conclusion: the path they had taken to come in no longer existed.
This was the first evidence of the ghost. Much like a simple aggressive ghost, it was rearranging objects to confuse the living, but in this case, the objects that filled the manor were so numerous, so tightly packed, that rearranging them moved the labyrinth walls.
The two were both highly capable adventurers, and Isaac was well armed against any physical threats, with a Luger only moments away, and his partner prepared for the more supernatural, with expansive knowledge of post-death apparitions and a bag of charms.
And so, they agreed to delve deeper into the house, to find the epicenter of the apparition, and hopefully end his influence over the house and its contents so that they could find their way out again.
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