"Until then, I should find you each a room for the night. I think there are two clean ones up on the third floor, next to the master bedroom. Once you're settled, you're free to explore the house and garden. I could give you a tour if you'd like, although it might be more fun to figure this place out on your own." He'd send a guide with them, of course, to make sure they didn't get lost.

"(Aw, don't be so shy,)" Ginger said in response to Cassius' earlier statement. "(It's fine if you don't want to admit it. But I've been trying to find Sidney a mate for some time now. She's at that age where she needs someone of the opposite gender to take care of her. Thing is, she's afraid of intimate relationships.)" She winked up at him. "(Just call me Ginger, the matchmaker.)"

"Thank you very much, Cassius. We appreciate your hospitality." The young girl bowed once more. "But we may need a bit of assistance finding our rooms," she added with a nervous laugh.

"(I don't think she'd appreciate the 'help' any more than you'd appreciate being pushed together with Rex)" he said, turning away from the absol. But for a moment, he was flustered by the idea, and paused before answering Sidney.

"Ah, right, the main stairs are through here" he said, leading the group back out of the kitchen. "(And don't eat anything there until dinner, guys)" he called back at the ghosts, who were eyeing the newly restocked shelves.

After Cassius had begun to lead them, Ginger stuck her tongue out at the back of his purple head. Yeah, I probably wouldn't want you around all the time anyway.

"Right, we don't want to get lost," Sidney said, smirking "Being stranded in that spooky hallway was enough for one day. But I may do some exploring later." Taro nodded in agreement, a bit of Sidney's skirt tightly grasped in his hand as he accompanied her up the stairs.

"If you do end up lost, just ask one of the ghosts for directions to the main hall, or get them to come find me. A lot of them aren't very good at remembering where the doors are, they don't use them much." He, on the other hand, knew exactly where to find yet another hidden door at the end of the hallway, which lead to a flight of stairs. "The bedrooms are mostly on the top floor, I hope you don't mind."

"(Hey, it's better than sleeping in that thorny garden of yours,)" the absol remarked, panting a little as she ascended the stairs.

"Why do you have so many hidden passageways?" Sidney asked, curious. "Were they here before you moved in?" With all these secret doors, the chances of them getting robbed were pretty slim, the girl thought. Unless the house ghosts decided to go through her bag, but all she really had were berries, a cellphone, and a CD player. The rest was junk.

"Most of them were. As I said, the previous owners were mostly rather eccentric. The original owner of the main mansion wanted a house where he could pass through the walls, like a ghost. It's been pretty convenient for me, really." Cassius had always liked the original inventor of the mansion, who looked downright batty in his portrait, a small old man with very large glasses and a purple suit.

"(Geez, what's with all these stairs?)" Ginger complained. "(Can't you like, y'know, install an elevator? Bring this house into the twenty-first century? Maybe even have cool techno music playing in the elevator to dance to. None of that boring stuff you usually hear. And definitely nothing spooky, because this place is creepy enough without adding music to enhance the mood.)" The darkling sure did ramble quite a bit.

"(If you can't survive a few flights of stairs, I don't know how you expect to take me on in a battle)" he taunted, turning towards the absol. His eyes were red, adjusted to he could see in the dark of the small stairway.

They reached the top, it really wasn't that far, and encountered another hallway, this one with several doors on either side. He opened the first one, revealing a sizable room with a large, antique four-posted bed, complete with heavy purple velvet canopy. It smelt a little musty, and the sheets looked as if they could have been from when the house was first built. "Ah, there's another of these next door. I think they'll both need some airing out." He went over to the window, opening it on the spooky garden below and letting in a gust of fresh air.

"(Sometimes I just can't stand that Absol. She just drives me nuts, yet I don't really know why? Perhaps it's her incessant yammering about nothing of general interest, or her constant insults to my trainer.)"

Lighthose was in the rear of the group, and right behind Mike, who was following everyone else up the stairs. Mike had been thinking of some sort of strategy to beat Cassius, but was drawing a blank.

"Oh, it's fine. Really." Being a trainer, Sidney was accustomed to sleeping up in trees and on hard earth. A bed was a luxury, no matter how old and musty it was. The sheets were softer than anything she had experienced recently.

Taro offered to take her bag, and she handed it down to him, the dinosaur carrying into the room for her and setting it down in a corner.

"(I wanna see!)" Ginger whined, pushing her trainer aside a bit so she could get through the entryway. "(Hmm, not bad. Stinks a bit though. Where will I be sleeping? At the end of the bed?)"

"Hopefully it will smell better by this evening. Yours is pretty much the same, Mike, I'll open the window there too."

Next door, Mike's room was nearly identical, although the furniture was arranged in a different way, and there was a landscape painting on one wall, whereas the other room had a framed portrait of the same pale woman whose painting had hid the entrance to the ballroom arena. Cassius opened the window in this room too, blowing dust off the small bedside table underneath the window frame.

Ginger trailed after the two male trainers, but Sidney stayed behind. She made her way around the left side of the bed and fell back on the soft comforted, her arms splayed out and her legs dangling limply off the edge. "Mmn," she sighed, letting her eyes slide shut for a moment, happy to finally relax.

Taro was still in the room as well, and he climbed up onto the bed with her, wiggling his way under one of her arms. "Isn't this nice?" she ask him. The marowak smiled under his skull.

Back with the others, Ginger took a moment to check out Mike's room. "(Not bad, not bad,)" she said. "(Now, what's the quickest way back downstairs, in case I have to...y'know...in the middle of the night?)"

"(The same stairs you came up, they lead right down into the garden if you go down an extra flight.) The human bathroom is at the other end of the hall, Mike." It was the only one in the house that worked on a regular basis, seeing as how it was on the same floor as Cassius' bedroom.

"(Thanks a bunch, Senor Fantasma,)" Ginger replied, no hint of sarcasming in her voice, shockingly. "(Hmm, where'd Sidney go?)" The girl was missing. The absol wandered back to her bedroom to look for her trainer, finding her sleeping peacefully on the bed, Taro passed out beside her.

Aww, isn't that adorable. Ginger strolled up to the bed, placing her two front paws up on the mattress. I wonder what she's dreaming about. "Absol! (Sidney!)" Sidney's eyes fluttered open. Had she drifted off? "(C'mon, Sidney. It's not time for bed yet.)" The ninja rubbed her eyes. Just because absols were nocturnal didn't mean she had to be.

Cassius followed Ginger back to the first of the two rooms, hovering (not literally) just outside the doorway. "If you'd like to see the gardens, now's probably the best time for it." Outside, it was starting to get darker, but there was still enough light left to see. If they timed it right, they could see most of the outside in daylight, with just a taste of the spooky nighttime atmosphere, a touch of fear near the end when it was getting dark and they felt as if they were still far from the house.

"That sounds like a good idea." As long as she kept moving, she wouldn't drift off. And she wanted to be awake for Mike's battle later, as well as Ginger's. The absol would be distraught if she found her best friend was too sleepy to show. And Sidney was also her trainer after all.

"Come on, Taro," she said, trying to rouse the marowak awake. He gave no reaction, so Sidney left him on her bed. "I'm leaving him here to he can catch up on some sleep," she informed Cassius, walking past him in the doorway. She turned around and smiled. "Let's go."

The stairway they'd come up did indeed lead back to the garden, emerging from a small door underneath a fading white trellis with thorny black vines and wilted roses curled through it. A thin garden path was leading to a longer arched trellis, hung with vivid violet blossoms grown so thick it blocked most of the fading sunlight underneath. The garden had clearly once been a very formal place, with a series of plant-separated rooms as distinct as the ones inside, and Cassius had done some very selective pruning to keep the tall hedges intact, if perhaps a little more wild than they used to be.

Ginger was about to go with her trainer, but then she figured the humans probably needed some time to themselves. She wandered back over to the bed, wrinkling her nose when she saw that the slumbering marowak had claimed her spot--so instead, she visited the window so she could observe the garden from above.

"You know," Sidney began, taking a single wilted rose in one hand, a few of the dried petals crumbling at her touch. "As surreal as this place is, it still holds a lot of beauty..." She moved away and silently continued after the spikey haired young man.

"Thank you" he said, smiling. "It looks best in the evening, really. Sort of a ghost garden, after all." Most of the plants did indeed seem to be wilting or poisonous, sometimes both, a strange sight in such mild weather, when the plants should have been thriving. "It stays like this all the year round, not quite alive or dead. I think it's because of the house..."

He was surprised that Ginger hadn't yet piped in with some sarcastic comment. Pandora was still inside, so he wasn't there to fill the role either, and Mike had apparently opted out of the garden tour. I guess this will be a rather small tour, then he thought, privately deciding to blame the absol.

Inside, Pandora had decided to try and find Cassius again. He was checking the third floor rooms, where someone reported he'd been headed, when he found Ginger and the cubone- no, marowak now- in one of the guest rooms. "(Whatcha looking at)" he asked, having come in silently through a nearby wall and being pretty sure he could startle her by speaking.

"(Gah!)" Ginger was indeed startled, scrambling to put as much distance between her and the spook as possible. It was Pandora again! "(Stop doing that!)" she chided the haunter. "(You're going to give me a heart attack, and then I'll never forgive you for finishing me off and turning me into a ghost.)" If she turned into a ghost, that is.

The flustered absol returned to her spot at the window, peering down at the two trainers conversing below. "(I was just watching Sidney take on Cassius,)" she lied, pressing her forehead against the glass. "(It seems my trainer's winning. She's got Cass in a headlock right now, so it's only a matter of time before he dies from lack of oxygen.)"

Down below, Sidney was still taking in the breathtaking scenery. "So the house is magical? Or is it something else?" If the garden was neither dead or alive, then did the house share the same traits? The thought of the house being alive gave her chills, but she knew she shouldn't be afraid.

"(He's already dead, doofus)" replied Pandora, floating over to the window to see what they were actually doing. He could see them moving just beyond the trellis, apparently talking to one another. "(If he's showing off the garden, why aren't you down there? Too scared of our killer plants?)"

Three floors below, Cassius was leading them through a series of small, formal flowerbeds, with small trees that had been carefully guided during their growth so their main branches were woven together. The ends now grew wild, ragged leaves blowing in the wind.

"The house is haunted, and not just by ghost pokemon I think" he said, looking back at it. "Lavender's an unusual place, the gap between this world and the next is much smaller here, it's much easier for spirits to linger on, in some form or another, waiting to set something right that they couldn't in life."

"(Eh, I figured they wanted to be alone. And gardens don't hold any real interest for me--unless they include berries.)" She licked her lips. "(Besides, I'm going to be seeing Mister Ghost later tonight when I get to fight him personally.)" She smirked, then moved away from the window. "(Care to watch?)"

"Speaking of spirits," the girl said, "I've noticed that Taro's been acting a little unusual since we got here." She paused. "I never told him this, but this is the place where his birth mother passed away, killed by evil trainers. A friendly traveller from this region entrusted me with his egg while visiting Hoenn--told me the whole story of how he was orphaned. But I'm beginning to believe he senses something..."

Pandora wasn't quite sure why the two would want to be alone, despite the obvious desire to escape Ginger, but shrugged it off, especially when faced with more uplifting matters. "(Cass is gonna fight you personally? That's GREAT!)" Finally, a chance for some revenge. "(I wouldn't miss it for the world, and I haveta be there anyways to set things up for him.)"

"From here? Near Lavender?" That was serious; the chances of a young cubone mother dying near the town of ghosts turning into one were incredibly high. "If Taro senses something, she might still be around as a ghost pokemon, or something else..." wandering spirits, not quite material enough to be called pokemon, could be a dangerous anomaly, although they were thankfully quite rare.

"(You sound excited,)" Ginger snickered, facing the haunter. "(Didn't think you'd be so happy to hear your friend's about to be mincemeat.)"

The pair's loud conversation forced Taro awake, the marowak groaning as he sat up. He blinked blearily at the two, an almost irritated look in his eyes, before wordlessly rolling off the bed. He stepped past Ginger so he could see the trainers below, and then turned to leave through the bedroom door. "(I wonder where he's headed...)"

"Yes, here," she replied, sounding almost sad. "There, in that tower." She pointed to a tall structure overlooking the garden, almost black against the darkening sky. "I forget the name of the man who gave Taro to me. He was pretty old though." She turned her gaze upward, trying to recall the name. "Mr. Kuji, was it? Mr. Guji?"