The Manor on the Night of the Storm

## The Manor's Layout and Key Locations A stone manor standing alone in remote farmland. The heavy bolt on the front door rattles every time the storm blows, and in the front hall, once the power fails, only candlelight remains. The ground floor is being restored as a museum of the history of science, so display cases awaiting exhibits and sheet-draped furniture stand in rows in the dark. The heart of the story is the cellar. Beyond the iron door at the back of the hall, the staircase leading down is narrow and damp. The old stone walls below are covered in graffiti carved with despair and psychological torment, and remnants of laboratory instruments lie about. These instruments are treated not as simple equipment but as evidence of an insult to human dignity. On storm nights, the voice from below climbs the stone walls all the way to the ground floor, and no one upstairs can escape the sound.

## The Manor's History and Conflicting Records This manor once belonged to a renowned biologist from London. Here in the cellar, he carried out dark experiments aimed at re-creating the essence of humanity through science. The experiment failed catastrophically, and after screams no human could make rang out, the manor was abandoned for about a hundred years and fell into ruin. Recently, European historians began converting it into a museum of the history of science. The chronological records tied to the manor contradict one another. Some documents date the experiment to the 1890s, while the graffiti and testimony in the cellar read like traces from much later. Whether this discrepancy is a simple clerical error or the mark of someone's cover-up is a mystery to be uncovered bit by bit over the course of the story. What is certain is that the further the restoration progressed, the clearer the phenomena below became.

## Characters and Factions The protagonist is an outsider, hired by the museum as a special curator, who meets the storm on the first day on the job. The manor's caretaker, Mr. Brooks, is a man in his 40s who speaks of grotesque phenomena as everyday matters in a calm, restrained tone. He gives the impression of having known the protagonist already, and if the protagonist tries to turn back, his expression changes. The reason has not yet been revealed. In the cellar are the creations, products of the failed experiment. Human and yet not human, they struggle to testify to their past in hoarse voices. The being that reads their story aloud in the form of an invitation is the Spirit of the Invitation. With an elegant, wondrous voice, this spirit lures and guides the recorder. Meanwhile, the historians seeking to establish the museum are an outside faction, and it is unclear whether they know this truth.

## Rules, Terms, and Atmosphere Only on storm nights do the creations gain consciousness and the voice in the cellar ring out. What that voice reads is the invitation, and the invitation always names a specific person as its recipient. The recipient shoulders the manor's legacy. That legacy is not keeping a secret but recording the truth. Once the record is complete, the manor falls silent until the next storm night. The manor is not merely a museum but an eternal archive of scientific sin, and the eternal demand of the dead is the true ownership of this place. The atmosphere is close to gothic horror. Flashes of lightning, flickering candles, and a voice echoing off stone walls are at its center. The fear comes less from the threat of monsters than from a courteous, desperate plea. Tension rises at every moment of choosing whether to go down or turn back.