It’s been one week since Mari received the deed to the house, and she organised a moving van to move all her stuff over. It was a bit more expensive than she would have liked, especially considering the short notice, but she figured that no longer having to pay rent would more than make up for that.

Most of her furniture was either moved into the master bedroom, which is on the far end of the upstairs area, or the study which is the next room over. She had asked Cassandra’s parents to help her out with one last trip, so that she could transport her more valuable and fragile items without having to risk leaving them with the movers or taking them on public transport.

She walks through the front door with the last few bags in one hand, and a pet travel carrier in the other, which she gently sets on the ground before opening the latches on the grate. 

“Okay Martin, time to see your new home!”, she says as a black cat starts to nervously walk out of the carrier, scanning its surroundings.

Mari sets out his food and water bowls while he gets used to the new place, she puts them in the foyer for now, making sure that both are a fair distance apart, otherwise he’ll refuse to drink the water.

She’s finishing that up when she hears Martin start running from somewhere behind her, and when she turns around she finds that he’s disappeared completely. Mari sighs, realising it’s going to be much harder to find him in this place, considering how many hiding spots there are, but she’s sure he’ll turn up at some point.

Mari takes a good look around the foyer for the first time since the place was given to her. The place is clearly old, but it’s well maintained, and much of the furniture has an antique charm. She’s sure that Cassandra would like this place, but her condition means she can’t travel this far out.

She decides to put that thought aside for now, and goes up to the study to confirm something she noticed when investigating the place last week.

The rooms she checked all seemed to have power points, and several even had ethernet ports, but she couldn’t find any evidence of a breaker or a modem anywhere she checked. The taps had running water, both hot and cold, but the pipes didn’t seem to lead anywhere. She also found a wifi network with no name, which seemed to have a full strength connection no matter where in the house she went.

Once she gets to the study, she sets up her PC and plugs it into the wall, and it powers up perfectly fine. She didn’t have anything to test it with last week but the power is definitely running in this place. The ethernet port seems to be working as well, but her PC is unable to give her any information about the network she’s connected to.

She also can’t help but notice all the energy in the air. After learning how to detect different types of magical energy over the past few months, she couldn’t help but notice this place was full of it. She figured that was mostly due to the witch and all of the things she was doing here, but now that it’s been a whole week she can’t help but notice that she’s still surrounded by it.

Mari ponders what this could mean. If the utilities are all working, but they seemingly aren’t connected to anything on or off the property, and there’s clearly a lot of magic still in the air, then does that mean the property is completely off the grid due to some kind of spell? 

She hopes that’s the case. She’s not sure how much it would cost to power a place of this size, but it would probably be more than she’s saving by moving here. In the end, Mari decides not to look the gift horse in the mouth and just roll with it.

Mari lets out a yawn, her old place wasn’t huge, but getting everything packed in under a week while still working took a lot out of her. All of the important stuff has been unpacked already, so the rest can wait until later, but there’s one more thing she wants to do before she relaxes for the rest of the day.

She goes back to the lobby before getting out her phone, and she starts recording a video of herself going through the house that she can send to Cassandra later. Mari figures that if she can’t see the place in person then this would be the next best thing. It’s also a good excuse for her to take a proper look through the whole place, and get an idea of exactly how large it actually is.

As she explores the house, it becomes abundantly clear how many people it was designed to fit. The kitchen is huge, and most of the upstairs area appears to be bedrooms. Mari says hi to Martin, who seems to have claimed one of them for himself and is sleeping on the bed. She spends extra time showing everything in the master bedroom, especially the ensuite which is equipped with an extravagant bathtub.

The witch lived on her own, so what was the point of living in a house this big? Mari recalls that she had a good number of dolls in the house as well. She’s unsure if they needed to eat or sleep, but she’s not sure what else all of these rooms would be used for.

Outside of the kitchen, most of the rooms on the ground floor seem to be pretty ordinary. The witch’s office is still equipped to seat clients, but most of the other rooms seem to be mostly bare, with little in them besides empty cabinets. Mari can only assume most of these were used to house magical items or ingredients the witch used for spells, or simply for general storage.

The last room Mari has to go through is one that she’s only been in once. At the end of the hall on the ground floor is a door that leads to a spacious basement, which is where the enchantment on her lungs was originally performed.

She was too nervous to take a good look around at the time, but she recalls it feeling like a workshop, with the walls being lined with unfamiliar tools and devices. Now it’s quite bare, with the shelves and racks being empty, although the bench that the witch used as an operating table is still there. 

The basement is decently lit, but Mari can’t help but be unnerved by the room, especially since she’s familiar with what it’s used for. She climbs back up the stairs to leave the basement, feeling just a bit shorter of breath than usual. She considers cutting that part of the video out before sending it to Cassandra.

Recording the tour took longer than Mari expected, and it’s almost time for dinner. She collapses into a chair in the lobby, deciding to celebrate moving into a new place by getting pizza.

She opens up her favourite delivery app, and enters her address, but is shocked to see an error message saying that the address cannot be found. She tries to set it to deliver to her current GPS location but the same message pops up. 

Out of desperation she tries the other apps she has installed, and they all give similar errors, with the exception of one which seems to think her address is somewhere in Denmark.

It’s a good thing she brought all of those ramen packets with her when she moved.