"He's a Giant Pacific Octopus, and they get really really really big. We had to fill nearly all the room with aquarium! Uncle Fester and I designed it with temperature control and water pumps and filters and everything! And then Lurch and Dad and everyone and I put it together! Wednesday helped too, a little bit." He suddenly shrinks back a little, noticing just how far from behind his mother he's come. "You can see it if you want, I guess." 

"That sounds amazing. I'd love to see it." She has landed on an entire family of engineering types who are also magic. Whoever or whatever sent her here may have been trying, in some alien way, to do her a favor, and she appreciates it.

"Then let's all visit Aristotle. I think that's a wonderful idea. Though I might duck out for a moment to see how Lurch and Thing are getting on with the fish and let them know about your guest room preferences."

She turns to her husband and kisses him passionately, for perhaps somewhat longer than really qualifies as a valid conversational pause. Then, straightening his lapels and gazing into his eyes, she says, "Darling, can you lead the way? Remember that Miranda is ordinary—we should be very sure not to let her stumble into any of Wednesday's old traps."

"Of course, my alabaster masterpiece," he says, looking longingly into her eyes, the taste of her kiss still on his lips. He spends a moment to run his tongue over them, his eyes closed in bliss as he savored the sensation. Then he too straightened, still looking his beloved in the eyes. "I shall make sure the fragile soul will be kept safe and secure in our halls." 

She succeeds at not giggling by a great exertion of will and by her mouth doing something geometrically ridiculous. Time to go visit an octopus!

Morticia smiles at everyone and sweeps off to go check on Lurch and Thing, leaving the rest of them to follow Gomez to Aristotle's room.

Once he has finished watching his ruby-lipped goddess saunter off, he turns to his children and their new friend, and smiles at them. He steps to the side, gesturing out the door. "Come with me, it isn't too far." 

He leads them through a short maze of passages, past (but not down) the stairwell. The floors are made of two different colors of dark wood, dark red and purple-black, styled in a geometric pattern, and the wood-paneled walls are colored in yet another dark shade, ornamented with scrollwork of skulls and thorny plants and thistles and other such things, along the ceiling and on the lintel of doorways. 

It isn't long before they come to a stop in front of another wood-paneled doorway. "This is Aristotle's room," Gomez tells them. 

This house is giving her the Crafts Hunger. She wants to learn woodworking and stoneworking and carpentry and architecture and every other skill that makes beautiful things.

Pugsley takes a deep, nervous breath, and opens the door. 

The room is dimly lit, and murky, which is to be expected aesthetic for the house, but this time it is not because of curtains over the windows. It is because the light is filtered through a room full of water and transparent acrylic and aquatic plants and toys. 

The ceiling above them is made of transparent material, save for a pair of holes at a diagonal to each other, one near the door and to the right, the other near the far wall and to the left. Both holes have ladders leading up them. The ceiling is mostly straight (and nearer their heads than normal, though only Lurch needs to stoop and only a little) until after the far ladder, at which point there is an obvious seam, and the acrylic curves downwards until it goes straight up and down after another melted seam. The water makes it difficult to tell just how much room is left behind the wall, especially with the acrylic at the other end, but it's clearly more than a few feet. That space near the floor is at least partly full of dark pipes leading upwards and carefully-enclosed electronics, partly obscured by the bubbles rising upwards from one of the pipes.

Similarly, the seaweed and fake coral and craggy rocks and full-sized treasure chest and other objects make it hard to tell how high the aquarium goes, but the room is clearly taller than normal room height, either the room is naturally a double-height room or the floor was removed between this floor and the floor above to make room

Aristotle is not currently immediately visible, amidst the water and pipes and toys and plant life. 

"This is amazing! It must have been a ton of work." And cost a ton of money, but hey, if you're going to spend a ton of money on a home renovation this is an extremely cool one. "Did you have to take part of the ceiling out?"

"We took the whole ceiling out," Pugsley explains, beaming a little from the compliment. "I wanted to make sure he has enough space as he gets bigger, and no one was using this room or the one above it." He walks over to a ladder and pauses for a moment. "Do you want to come up?" he asks, worried about if that's the wrong thing to say. "He might come out and say hi, especially if we feed him."

"I think I'll go check on your ravishing mother," Gomez says. "And see how the fish are doing. You can find me if you need me, and make sure our wayward fledgling stays safe, yes?" 

"I will take responsibility for Miranda's safety," says Wednesday.

"That's my little storm cloud," he says, smiling at her, and leaves through the door, heading down the hallway. 

"I'd love to get a closer look! Especially if Aristotle makes an appearance, but even if he doesn't." She goes up the ladder like someone who is only a normal human amount of fragile and has no reason to fear most of the things that can be bought at Home Depot. (Everyone's concern is too sweet to be really annoying.)

It's a long climb to the top for a seven year old body, but quite accomplishable, even for an Ordinary human. The cylinder of acrylic Miranda climbs through is only slightly cloudy, and the whole tank and all of the objects contained inside can be seen, including what appears to be gold and gems in the full-sized treasure chest. 

The top of the tank stops at around bottom-of-window height on the upper level, and is covered with wooden criss-crossing slats over a wire mesh. It's tall enough for children to walk around in, but a full-sized adult would have some trouble. One corner of the room has set of pipes leading out from some moulding in the wall down into the tank, along with a set of wires, carefully enclosed in acrylic. There's a pair of small fishtanks in another corner, far from where Miranda came up, Pugsley is already making his way towards them. 

Wednesday follows behind, but stays closer to the ladder rather than follow Pugsley to the feeding tanks.

Miranda follows Pugsley because this seems like the option that maximizes her chance of seeing the octopus up close.

Once one gets closer, it's a lot easier to tell that the pair of tanks contain a couple different kinds of sea life. One of them is full of oysters and mussels and clams, resting on the rocky bottom of the tank. The other tank has shrimp swimming in it, making slow circles amidst their fellows. 

"He might not come out," Pugsley warns Miranda as she gets closer. "He's really good at hiding, and likes to sneak up on his prey. And sometimes he really wants privacy when hunting." He takes a plastic net from beside the tank, opens it, and scoops up a half-dozen molluscs. "But sometimes he'll come out and play." He reseals the molluscs tank, then opens a latch on a square of metal lattice, pulling it upwards, before carefully lowering the sea creatures onto a small platform. "There. We can wait for him to come out now." He pauses. "I mean, if you want to. It may take a while. If it happens at all. You don't have to stick around if you don't want to."

"I definitely want to stick around. If I see him, great; if I don't, I still got to see your awesome tank." She peers into the water, wondering which of the many hidey-holes contains an Aristotle.

A few minutes later, Aristotle unfurls from one of the crevasses and glides towards the molluscs, tentacles undulating with dozens of individually articulated suckers. He sweeps the oysters underneath himself one at a time and then sits, head-surface rippling in the currents, while his venom starts to digest them. Eventually he walk-swim-swoops back into his den, prey nearly tucked away.

"He's gorgeous."

"Isn't he great? He's going to get so big. Maybe at some point later he'll be more playful, I think he was just hungry right now. You can help me feed him regularly, I bet he'll take a liking to you then!" 

"I mean, if you want."

"That would be awesome. I love octopi. Octopuses. Octopodes. Did this timeline ever reach a consensus on that?"

"As far as I know we haven't," he says. "I like octopodes though, it's fun."