"Yep! Sure, let's start with the stable."

She leads him across the paved area, past the fountain, which she pauses to regard fondly.

"I should decide when to wake the house. Not tonight, I think, but definitely before we start doing any major setup work in it. —part of the reason we had to abandon the house is that it has its own... spirit, I guess you could call it? Kind of like the forest, but more concentrated? And it got to be, um, slightly too helpful. It's very friendly to guests! But it's not exactly subtle, you know? And it's dormant right now but I need to wake it back up if we're ever going to use this place for anything substantial. For one thing it'll be a huge help cleaning up, and for another thing it'll wake up anyway if we spend too much time here and it's better to do that kind of thing under controlled circumstances."

Huh, that's neat! Though not very subtle... "So, wait, what exactly does it do? How was it... not subtle, and what was it doing, exactly? What can it do? Besides cleaning up, that is." 

"Dishes clearing themselves away when people are done with them, beds making themselves, little bowls of nuts setting themselves out in the sitting rooms whenever someone looks likely to take a seat. Laundry, it was really aggressive about laundry—in a sweet way! You'd take your clothes off to shower and come back ten minutes later to them neatly folded and smelling of lavender. Oh, the lights are a big one, apparently it got a bit huffy in the early twentieth century when we tried to transition to electric lighting, so the old gas lamps are all still there with no gas hooked up and they light themselves with arcane flame when you approach. I brought flashlights since we will not be dealing with that today."

"...I can see why you couldn't let, um, non-magical people see the place, then." That's... really cool? That's really really cool? This house is really cool. "I'm, um, looking forward to living here? Well um. Not living, most likely. Spending time here? That sounds... I mean, I can see why it might get a bit, um, grating, but also that's really awesome? I think that's really awesome." 

"Awwww. I'm glad!"

They have reached the big car-sized gate. She pecks him on the cheek and gives it a shove, hauling it sideways rather than swinging it inward; it makes even more noise than the front gate did, but it does open, slowly and under protest.

John notices she's having trouble, and goes to one side of her to help her pull. (It is very difficult to pull. And boy is it protesting a lot. (Possibly it's not really meant for human hands, but for house spirit to operate? He can ask her when the air isn't full of metal screaming.))

When they've gotten it open far enough to comfortably get his bike through, she stops, panting. "Okay! Whew. Thanks. That was tougher than I expected. C'mon, I think there's bike racks inside."

There are indeed bike racks inside, at the back of a sort of garage-foyer space. There are three big garage doors along the wall on the left, and three big garage doors along the wall on the right, and a beautiful pattern of old, worn bricks making up the floor, and at the very back of all that, past the garage doors, there's a little extra area with some shelving and some miscellaneous garage detritus, and among all that are several bike racks, the kind where you wheel your front wheel into a space in a row of metal bars, and three very ancient-looking bikes already wheeled into them.

John is a bit concerned about parking his bike in the... state of everything (it's very run down and dirty!) but at least the bike racks are painted and not covered with rust. (The three other bikes are very very dead, though.) He wheels his bike into it gingerly, half-expecting the paint to flake off when he does. "How long has it been since anyone was... here?" he asks. 

"About a hundred years since the house saw serious use. Somebody does come in every so often to wake the spirit up and make sure it still recognizes us and stuff, and things usually get cleaned up a little when that happens, but apparently nobody ever cleared out the century-old bicycles."

That was a danger? He did not realize that that was a danger. He's glad that that danger has been taken care of. 

"Oh good," he says. "I have no idea what the house would do if it thought we were intruders, but from what you described it might not have been pretty." He lets go of his bicycle. It stays put. He turns to Rosy. "Where to now, then?" 

"It wouldn't be that bad. I'm still a Blake. But I'd just as soon skip the shouting match." She looks around. "Okay, so we could try to wrestle the garage doors to get into the main house from here, but if it's all the same to you I'd much rather head out into the courtyard and go in by the main door."

John remembers how difficult (and screamy) it was to get the doors to the stables (wait why were they called stables?) open this much. "That sounds like the best approach, yeah," he says, looking at the heavy garage doors. "Lead the way. Do the doors normally operate by magic? Or is it just the age and rust and things? Also, you said these were called the stables?" 

"They used to be stables before they were retrofitted for cars," she explains, leading him back out into the courtyard. "The spirit usually helps with doors, yes, though of course they would've been designed to work without it because we never meant to have a house-spirit. Probably it's a combination of age and rust and the electricity being off—we did get some electricity in, just nothing that replaced a light, and I bet the stable gates were supposed to have a motor to help with them. The front gate definitely is, Mom specifically told me the front gate was going to be a pain to open with the power out."

John wonders what its issue was with the lights being replaced. (Also it's slightly worrying that it took issue with that sort of thing at all. How smart is it? How does this work, at all? It's probably ok though, Rosy doesn't seem to be worried.) 

"Makes sense," John says. "And I bet whoever has been coming here regularly to, um, rewake the house spirit on occasion has been going through the front gate, and not opening the garage door at all. So at least some of the rust and things get shook off that way, probably."

"I expect so!"

She strides up to the front door, walks between the pillars supporting the balcony above, and tries one of the many keys on her keyring (each with a colourful and neatly written label). The key labeled FRONT does indeed open it.

(Somehow he is not surprised that all the keys are so neatly labeled. Given the way being a ritualist works, at least from his impressions, the family is probably full of Rosys, at least when it comes to organization. (Not when it comes to her personality, though, that's hers alone, and he's so lucky to be with her.)) 

He follows her to the door, watches her open it, and peers inside. 

It's pretty dark in there. Rosy's flashlight reveals glimpses: a grand curving double staircase straight ahead, rows of decorative pillars lining the halls that stretch off to the left and right. She plays the light over the floor before she takes her first step inside, and this proves to have been a great idea, because not ten feet away toward the grand stair there's a set of broad curving steps where the foyer floor rises to meet the elevated back half of the house, and if she'd gone trotting incautiously forward she'd probably have tripped and fallen on her face. Just past those, in the whole span between the entryway and the grand stairs, the walls open up on either side into big empty arches flanked by pillars; if they want to see what's in those adjoining rooms, though, they'll have to go in and take a look.

Well that's... a lot. It's extremely pretty, though it's also hard to tell in all the darkness, and he doesn't actually have control of the flashlight. "Did you, um, pack an extra one for me?" he asks, feeling a bit foolish. (Did she say flashlights plural? He thinks so but isn't sure.) "We may want to get the lights working sooner rather than later if we're going to spend any time here also," he adds. It's rather difficult to see, and John very well might have also tripped over that step as well if she hadn't shone her flashlight across it. "This place is huge, though. And really pretty!" he adds when he realizes he's only been complaining. "Really quite stunning. That said I have... no idea where to start. Do we just pick a direction? Do you have any suggestions on which way to go first?"' 

Rosy hands him a second flashlight. They're pretty big and powerful; it's so grand in here that they'd have a hard time seeing anything with less.

"I intend to explore systematically but there's plenty of places we could start. The master bedroom suite should be that way, past the stairs and to the left," she points. "There's also the kitchen, in the opposite place, and of course the billiards room and main floor offices, down thataway," she points leftward along the hall lined with pillars. The dining room and main floor library are up front but I'm not sure I want to explore the libraries much until we have books to put in them, I'll just be sad about all the empty shelves."

Having control of the flashlight makes it much easier to see things, now that he has control of a lighting source. "Thanks," he says. "Do you have a map of this place?" he asks, "Or did your mother tell you what the layout was, or something." He's not sure how else she can know the stuff she said. "I vote the um, master bedroom," he says, suddenly blushing (and being glad of the dim lighting so she can't see), "since we may, um, be spending some time there." A lot of time, he hopes. (Still blushing though.) 

"Sounds good to me! I don't have a good map, Mom wants me to make my own to compare against the most recent one we have in case the house changed anything. But she did tell me approximately where I should find everything. There's a pool in the basement!"

She heads for the master suite. Behind the grand stairs is another pair of pillars flanking the yawning entrance of an absolutely cavernous empty room, almost a ballroom or something, with a huge bay window covering most of its back wall. She turns left just before it and heads down a short hallway with a little alcove at the end, holding a statue of a regal-looking woman with a certain Blake look to her; a right turn just before the statue takes them through a set of double doors into a square, spacious sitting room, all the furniture covered in dust cloths, with a big fireplace set into the right-hand wall, and a double door in the far wall flanked by two windows that offer a lovely view of the grounds. Another double door opposite the fireplace presumably leads deeper into the suite.

Having only seen two members of her family up close (and her grandmother from afar), the statue does still look like it is likely an ancestor (ancestress?) of hers. (Though the fact that it's here at all is also probably why he's guessing that.)

The giant ballroom is, well, giant. John peeks inside, shining his flashlight around for a moment. But he doesn't want to lose track of his guide (or have the house wake up and decide he's an intruder, now that he thinks of it, yikes), and hurries after her. 

"This is, um, the master bedroom?" John asks, confused. The furniture in here looks more like living room furniture than bedroom furniture (despite the cloth covers which weren't making it look any better). "There's no bed here." 

"This is the master bedroom suite," she says. "Patience, my love."

She opens the next set of double doors.

The master bedroom is dominated by a dust-clothed edifice that's almost certainly the bed. When Rosy peeks under the dust cloth, she reveals a pillar of elaborately carved dark wood.

"This must take some absurd custom mattress size," she says, eyeballing the dimensions. "It's bigger than a king. Do we even have a mattress for it?" She lifts the dust cloth higher. The frame is bare. "Well, maybe it's stashed in a linen closet somewhere or maybe I'm due for a Measuring Tape Adventure."

Besides the bed, there's also a door set into the far right corner—all four corners of the room are cut off into elegant curves, but that's the only one whose curved space seems enterable. Rosy is too busy examining the bedframe to talk about it.

Well he feels foolish now. (Also, is that what suite means? Multiple rooms? Apparently so.) 

The bed, is, in fact, massive. And beautiful. It's not what he'd have picked out for himself, perhaps (what would he have though?), but it's certainly befitting of, well, a Master. Or Lord. (He gets a little bit hard just thinking about it.) It's also really, really big. Much bigger than his own bed, clearly bigger than his parents'. He doesn't know much of anything about how bed sizes work (king is the biggest, it sounds like), but if this is non-standard, well, that could be a problem. Annoyingly. There are probably places that the Blakes know of that make mattresses to custom sizes filled with water or the finest duck feathers or something, but they aren't going to deliver by tomorrow. 

"I hope so," he says, still assessing the size of it. "Otherwise, we can't..." he trails off. At least they'd fit easily on it. In fact... John blushes again, thinking of multiple Rosys again. (How many could it fit, along with him of course? Three? Four??) 

"I promise we will have sex in a bed in this house even if I have to borrow my aunt's pickup truck and drive one of the spare guest beds from home over here myself. But probably there's a reasonably well-preserved mattress for this thing squirreled away somewhere, and almost certainly there's at least one bed in this house that has one even if this one doesn't. Do you want to check out the tower, or try to find the master bathroom?"