Makedewa, Maine
Beaumont Theater

The Beaumont Theater sits more or less abandoned in the historic downtown of Makadewa. It's an old building with an art deco style the rest of the town has failed to maintain elsewhere. In its heyday, it would have been a true beauty. But its day is long past, and now the town planning commission is stuck. It's probably too expensive to restore, but it's also too important to the town to easily let it go, and so in this state it remains: derelict and rotting from the inside.

You can still see playbills and posters, faded with time, of the last time the theater was maintained, sometime back when Y2K was a looming threat, but that was only the last of many failed attempts at turning the theater into a booming business again. It has changed hands dozens of times since the last brick of the building was laid. Somehow, something always goes amiss. The theater is never open for long, and not even the town's few transients trust the building enough for even temporary shelter.

Nowadays, absolutely no one wants anything to do with the old thing, and on this particular evening, absolutely no one is around.


"It's perfect," says an absolute no one to himself.

It's absolutely perfect.

The Beaumont Theater... I never thought I would feel such a profound kinship with anything, much less an abandoned building...

Victor sighed as he floated in place, casually reading over the faded and weathered playbills and advertisements affixed to the outside of the theater. When he'd seen enough, he took a few more moments to circle the perimeter of the old theater admiring the architecture. It had seen better days, and so had he.

You were meant for so much more than this, darlin'.

Victor eventually comes to a stop back where he began - right before the battered Beaumont's front doors - still chained shut from the last time the dreams of a prospective owner died on the vine.

Knock knock, Vic is home.

Victor closes his eyes and floats closer to the barricaded front doors, attempting to phase through to the interior of the theater.

You slowly move an arm through the glass of the the window of the theater. It's thick stuff and caked in dust and grime, but you make your way through with little effort, and after that little experiment is ended, the rest of you follows.

You feel a delightful little chill as you finally step into the interior.

The inside is... well, obviously it has seen much better days, but... there's still something quite grand about the entryway. The ceilings are high, and its built to fit a crowd. It's easy to ignore the trash on the ground and the peeling paint on the walls.

This place is regal and grand and best of all, all yours.

There is just one little thing. You don't catch it at first, but one thing the theater isn't... is dark.

It's very dim, but some of the lights are on.

Despite enjoying the theater in general, one of the main reasons Victor had picked these grounds for his first haunt was because it was such a notoriously bad investment. Victor had never considered that someone else could be here while ownership was up in the air.

Maybe I should poke around...

Victor floated down the entryway, towards the emptied concession area. A bit more on edge now, Victor still found the time to appreciate everything he was seeing. It was like a time capsule in here, advertisements for plays, movies and other community produced entertainment that were, in their day, no doubt huge ticket sellers.

The lights may be on but it still seems rather... dead in here.

After loitering around the concession area, Vic moved on from enjoying the ghost of the smell of popcorn and went in search of a more centrally important location. He considered looking for a manager's office, but figured if someone was here they were probably in the auditorium.

So to the auditorium he went. He began to call out prior to phasing through the heavy curtains hanging down and shielding the entryway, but stopped himself. He was here to haunt after all, a ghost wouldn't apprehensively call out before bursting onto the scene. So through the curtained entryway he went ready to surprise the person that might be on the otherside.

Uhhh... Boo?

You listen for a response, but... you don't hear anything.

No, really. This building is almost eerily quiet for such a large structure left along for so long. You'd expect creaking floors and maybe an echo to your words. You would expect the sound of wind through the cracks of the roof, or howls through leaky windows. You would at least expect the low hum of electricity flowing through the building.

But there's none of that. It's quiet as death in this place, and maybe that would be appealing to you in another circumstance, but right now it's just... unsettling.

You wait.

Something moves the curtain. It looks like a gust of wind, but just like everything else, it makes no sound.

What do you do?

Victor observes the curtain rustle as it barely and briefly flutters outward. The ghost of his left eyebrow raises in an arch.

How is it that I'm a ghost and I'm still the second strangest thing currently happening to the Beaumont?

Pray tell the hell we got going on around here?

Against his better judgment, Victor floats ever closer to the curtain in order to investigate.

[Is using Magic to try to detect other magic a thing? If not, just a general investigation of the curtain and the area immediately behind it. Need to find out when it was last dry cleaned.]

[Let's just go with the golden standard - Investigate A Mystery.]

@Zersch rolled 9. (3 + 6 = 9)

[What sort of creature is it?]

Victor, you look over the curtain, and try to stay as undetectable as you can, which normally is not that difficult.

It's probably just the wind, right? But you don't hear any wind. And it could be a squatter, but... no. That doesn't seem right. You've never been a man of intuition over logic, but being an actual, literal ghost has changed that aspect a bit. You've become a bit better at, say, "reading a room" ever since your untimely demise.

And what you're reading here is silence. Utter, absolute silence, and with it a stillness that could only come from an absence of life.

There's something here. It isn't moving and it isn't breathing, but it's very much awake.

Just like you.
...Exactly like you.

Something or someone is already haunting your haunt. There's another ghost here, and you can tell just by standing here that the claim it's staked on this theater runs far deeper than any you could currently match.

You aren't sure its detected you yet.
What do you do?

Really? My theater is already haunted? The beautiful Beaumont is already full up on spectral suitors? That WOULD be my luck. It wouldn't be a day in the life of ol' Vic without something going wrong. Now, what to do...

If Victor had a pulse it would undoubtedly be racing at this point.

You know, this IS a pretty large theater. Maybe it's tired of haunting every square inch of this place on its own. Maybe it could use a friend? A confidant? Maybe it will take me under its wing and show me that life as a ghost isn't as... hollow as it seems to be. Am I really so lonely that I would want to try to tap dance for this... thing's approval?

...

Victor sighs.

[Attempt to use DARK NEGOTIATOR on the apparition and try to speak and/or reason with it.]