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So here's the thing: Blarney did not have a ghost. Or memories. He didn't know if he was a broken Knight or if Blarney Castle was broken or some combination of the two, but - he did not have a ghost, or memories that didn't belong to him.

And now he was going to show one of the coolest people he'd ever met that he was a broken failure of a Knight. Blarney was not exactly looking forward to this meeting - but he was looking forward to hanging out with Miss Joy again. She was a complicated person, and something about her kind of made him insane, but--

Well, it would be cool to show Blarney Castle to someone else. Someone other than his sister, anyway, who wasn't even magical like they were. He felt weirdly self-conscious about Blarney Castle, and he was suddenly retroactively very very glad that he'd at least done some modicum of cleaning of the place the last time he'd been there. He couldn't give it a roof, but he could at least get the dirt off the floors.

So he was in a weird excited/anxious spot, waiting for Joy to join him. He had another big backpack stuffed full of supplies for Blarney Castle; he could only come so often, and every time he came and went he got a better idea of what he was supposed to do, bring, and have - solar outdoor lamps, a fold-up broom and mop and soap, along with other cleaning supplies. He also brought food and water, and two sleeping bags, just in case they needed to spend the night.

He wondered - how would Blarney be changed now? He couldn't imagine it would be as shocking a difference as it had been between the first and second times: from near-nothing to half-assembled, basically, holes in walls and lack of roof aside...

Would it be fully realized? A full entire castle? With roof and all? There was no way - he just hoped it hadn't somehow gotten worse since he'd last been there. That would be embarrassing. What was Miss Joy's opinion on manual labor? She seemed too - not delicate, per se, but above things like work that got your hands dirty, and he still wasn't entirely sure he believed her that she'd try to help him get the trap door thing open, but...

Well, she was coming. Madeline was always telling him don't borrow trouble, but - well, he was anx-cited. Miss Joy was coming to his Wonder! He couldn't help it.

If he could manage to keep his cool for their entire visit, it would be nothing short of a miracle.

Blarney considered this - he had brought Madeline, and he had brought stuff, but he hadn't brought Madeline and stuff at the same time. "Good point," he said, shrugging the backpack off his shoulders for a moment to spin it around and take out some of the unnecessary-but-maybe-might-be-nice-to-have things. These he deposited in his subspace; he had no idea if subspace stuff counted against him, in terms of energy spent, but--well, short of leaving the stuff behind in the little corner of the Destiny City Park, which he didn't love as a concept. So it would have to do.

"Just don't make fun of me if I barf," Blarney said with a grim smile. Joy, as usual, looked nothing short of goddess-ly, and he again found himself hoping that Blarney Castle - and himself - wouldn't be a massive disappointment in her eyes.

Blarney took a deep breath, straightened his shoulders, and caught her hand from underneath, a knight grasping his Lady's offered hand, and closed his eyes. Nerves aside, when Blarney reached for Blarney, Blarney was there, and then they were there.

Were there two Blarney Castles?

No--nope, nope, just one, it was just that he was seeing double. Blarney's butt found the grass with a faint thump and a strangled gasp escaped him. His stomach roiled, but he squeezed his eyes shut tightly and willed himself: you will not throw up, you will not throw up, you will not throw up, and shortly, the feeling faded, at least enough for him to risk opening his eyes again. A moment later, he stood, dusted himself off, and bowed playfully, one hand extended toward her and one to the Castle before them.

"My lady," Blarney said, amping up the silliness on purpose. "May I welcome you, Miss Joyeuse Garde, Knight of Earth, to Blarney Castle?"

Blarney Castle itself was, actually, looking a bit different from how he'd left it, though the change wasn't quite as shocking as the first time around, given that it wasn't something from seemingly nothing. However, it was still surprising; before, where there had been functionally two-and-a-half stories of one rectangular room, there was now...more. It did look a bit more castle-y, he had to admit, and not just because the outer walls looked a little bit less like they'd lost a fight against some unfriendly canons.

There was, for starters, an outer wall. That hadn't been there the last time he was here. It wasn't complete, by any means - it wouldn't stop even a single person who had a mind to invade - but he could see the vision. Past the outer wall was the room he'd thought must have been the Great Hall, but now he realized must only have been some kind of receiving room, a starting point. A very fancy castle-y foyer, judging by the archway at the back of the room that mirrored the one at the front. That meant that maybe - eventually - there might be more to see out that way, though right now it looked out over nothing but empty greenery. The staircases had grown back a bit, though he still wasn't sure he trusted them to support his weight, let alone the combined weight of himself and another person, and there were staircases, plural, where before there had been only one. There was a staircase in each back corner now, and Blarney realized with slow delight that the slight rounding of the walls around the staircases meant only one thing.

"I'm gonna have towers," Blarney breathed, blinking slowly as a huge grin spread across his face. "Yes! I'm gonna have towers!" Blarney let out a happy whoop, then remembered - he had company.

"...Sorry," he said, "I just--you know, what's a castle without towers, y'know what I mean?" Blarney looked back at Joy with a sheepish smile. "There was only one staircase last time and it wasn't - like, its own separate thing. It was mostly just a couple rocks that pointed up to..." Blarney looked up, eyebrows raising slightly. "Huh. The floor--er, the ceiling--it's more...solid than it was last time," he mused. They were, actually, he realized, properly inside now; if they spent the night, they wouldn't need to worry about getting rained on, but they would maybe need to worry about dying from smoke inhalation if they built the fire indoors, and that sort of made him miss the gaping holes in the wall. The interior walls looked more or less solid, like the completed-ness of the castle was slowly rolling out from...

Blarney's eyes fell on the trap door, the one thing that seemed to be exactly where he'd left it.

"This is what I was talking about," he said, pointing to the trap door. "I can't get it open. And, y'know, as you can see, or not..." he looked around, then shrugged openly at Joy. "No ghosts."

Blarney blinked, raising his eyebrows in surprise as she spoke, a slight flush coloring his cheeks. "Naval jelly?" Blarney echoed. He had never even heard of such a thing, and the only definitions of 'naval' he knew were either relating to boats or to bellybuttons, and he didn't understand where jelly fit into either of those things.

But that was forgotten as she began to unload her subspace; he hadn't thought of work gloves. Or rope. Or duct tape. He'd brought WD-40, with the trap door in mind, and a flashlight that looked like the sad, distant cousin of the flashlight Joy pulled out, and he didn't even know what the last thing she pulled out was, but he decided that two out of six wasn't bad.

Well, it wasn't great, but...it could've been two points worse, right? Or something?

Blarney shook his head, refocused. For someone in a very pretty dress, Joy sure did seem to know what she was doing when presented with a locked door on the ground. She even knew what a bailey was, which Blarney himself hadn't known before he read all those books about castles. He had, in fact, forgotten it, until she said the word aloud.

She was so cool. She was so pretty and so cool, and he didn't even have a ghost to show her.

"I don't know," Blarney said, forcing himself to focus up - or rather down - on the problem at hand. He picked up the work gloves, pausing only long enough to take off his official Earth Knight gloves and slide those on instead. "It just straight up wouldn't move basically at all." Blarney paused. "I wonder if you could bring a goat or something. For the weeds, I mean. Not leave it there permanently, I guess, but...you know. Should we just...try to open it? I don't think it'll blow up or anything. Should we WD-40 it first? Or maybe the rope, a lever system or something?"

Blarney had not thought about the rotting goat corpse concept, and he made a bleched as the idea of the scent alone hit him. Gosh, carrion eaters were an important part of the ecosystem, weren't they? Plus, did decomposing even happen when instead of the real world you were in a pocket dimension?

Blarney was pondering this deeply important question when - with a surprisingly loud ka-thunk, the door did start to move.

"Hey!" Blarney said, a surprised laugh escaping him. "Hey, it moved! Yes!" Blarney beamed at Joy. It hadn't moved enough, not enough for them to get down into whatever was down there, but--it was enough to give him hope that maybe they could.

"Okay, one more try. Good things come in twos," Blarney said, then took a deep breath, braced himself, and pulled. There was another loud thud, followed by an ear-bleeding screech of hinges that hadn't been moved in probably a thousand years, but then--

"It's open," Blarney said, through a wince as he rubbed at his ears--they were still ringing from the hinges. "But the WD-40 was definitely the right call, sheesh." Blarney moved around to grab the very-impressive flashlight, turning it on before he peered it down the trap door's gaping hole.

"...I'm suddenly realizing this is how horror movies start," Blarney said, taking in the cobwebs and the stone stairs that seemed to lead straight into the void. "Should we like, rope ourselves together and then tie ourselves to a tree or something, just in case there's an awful monster down there that wants to eat us or something?"

Blarney blinked, then laughed, a breathless little sound that escaped the boy almost accidentally. "Y'know what, that's honestly fair." Blarney looked down at the stairway again, took a deep breath, waited, then shook his head.

"Nope," he said, a little disappointed in spite of him. "But I don't think it's a wine cellar." Blarney sighed, took off the work gloves and carefully set them down, slid on his actual gloves, and hoisted his stick on his shoulder again. "Alright. I'll lead."

Without any more hemming or hawing, Blarney began to move down the stone stairs. Unlike the staircases aboveground, this staircase was so far incredibly solid, and smelled like they were the first people down here in a million trillion years. He was glad to have the super-powered flashlight, because otherwise it felt like the sort of place that should've been illuminated by torch in an Indiana Jones movie.

Blarney nearly tripped into the wall when the staircase began to turn under his feet. Not in the sense that the staircase was moving, but in the sense that it wasn't a straight line down; it was curved, and not a subtle, slow curve, either. It was almost tight enough to be called a corkscrew, and Blarney was suddenly very glad he didn't have claustrophobia. He had no idea how far below-ground they were, but they were certainly far enough that the light from the door didn't reach them anymore.

"Maybe this just goes no--where," Blarney said a few minutes later, stuttering over the last word as he did, in fact, find the end of the staircase. It gave way to a dirty stone floor, and Blarney swung his flashlight around, praying that nothing would move, that there wouldn't be anything to see here, just his castle's unfinished basement--

"...Definitely not a wine cellar," Blarney said a moment later, the flashlight stilling as it caught the reflective gleams of metal bars. Blarney blinked, his eyes somewhat adjusted to the dim by now, and felt - a little queasy. He knew that castles had dungeons - of course castles had dungeons - but he hadn't known that his castle had a dungeon. What on Earth was he supposed to do with a dungeon?

Cautiously, he took a few steps forward, surveying the space around him. The walls were heavy stone, and surprisingly well-held together, especially compared to above-ground. He didn't think his Wonder had to deal with the effects of weather, really, but it was the only thing he could think of that would explain why, aside from general disuse, this area was so much more - complete than the rest of the castle.

"...Do you think we should keep exploring?" Blarney asked, turning back to look at Joy. "Or is this...do you think this is kinda...it?"

No sooner than the words were out of his mouth did he hear - something. Almost like a sigh, a hush of air across a deserted, stony space.

"...What was that. Did you hear that?"

"I'm not afraid of the dark," Blarney said, unable to keep the indignation out of his voice. "I'm afraid of creepy old dungeons in magical wormholes," he muttered, but he couldn't just let someone else explore his own creepy old dungeon, so he continued further into the space, peering into the cells carefully. He tugged on one and it opened, making exactly the screechy, squeaky noise that a cell door in a creepy old castle should make.

Blarney wasn't stupid enough to go into the cell itself, but he took a cursory glance around it. It was, mercifully, empty.

"That kinda makes sense," Blarney said, meaning both that his people weren't stone cold killers, and that hers were. He continued down the hallway, peering into the cells as he went. He came to the end of the hall, and grimaced as it branched into a T. He looked down either direction, grimacing as he went back and forth.

And he still didn't have any ghosts. Or memories. He closed his eyes and tried to beat down the swelling of irritation he felt rising; he'd dragged Joy all the way out here, opened up a door that probably weighed more than he did, visited a creepy dungeon that was somehow the most real part of this whole magic castle deal, and still.

Still nothing.

He let out a long, slow breath. Getting angry wouldn't help anything. Especially not getting angry in front of Joy, who would rightly accuse him of having a temper tantrum if he did. So he forced himself to relax, and to remember that this wasn't some creepy old castle, this was Blarney. His Blarney. He was this castle, or something; nothing in it would hurt him. Probably. He thought of the wild joy he'd experienced when he came back to not an empty field, but a halfway-there castle. This was still part of that same castle, and there was no reason not to love this creepy old dungeon just as much as the rest of it.

Warts and all, Blarney Castle was his, and he belonged to it, too.

"I'm gonna be so mad if there's a torture chamber," Blarney called over his shoulder as he began to move down the left branch of the T. "Does your Wonder have a torture chamber?"

Blarney nodded absently - torture was the most ineffective method of trying to gain information from someone, but maybe killing people was also not the best method of getting information, either. However, all that meant was that back then, the Joyeuse Garde Knight, whoever they were, wasn't interested in information. The evidently expansive dungeons of Blarney Castle said that maybe the former Blarney Knight had been more concerned with keeping people - prisoners - alive than with killing them outright.

That was something.

Plus, he was pretty sure he heard something again. Another sigh. Not a breeze - he could feel what air movement there was, and it was all coming from the other direction, from the open door however many feet and a staircase above them. This...

This was more like a whisper. Every part of Mason said that going toward the scary whisper in a literal dungeon was a bad idea, but Blarney? Blarney knew, suddenly and to his core, that he had to follow that whisper. Something would be there, at the other end of that noise, but he didn't know what, and he had to find out.

The hallway opened out into a large, cavernous room, with rotted remnants of what may have been tables or other furniture scattered around the room.

"I guess the prison guards had to go somewhere on their legally mandatory 15-minute breaks, right?" Blarney joked weakly, giving the room a once over. There was a door - closed - at the far end of the room, but Blarney didn't rush over to it. Instead, he meandered from pile to pile of rubbish, poking through the debris curiously. He didn't really expect to find anything, but it was strange to physically touch the old wood. It made it all seem - real, somehow. Was that what the whisper wanted him to find? That all of this was real-real?

Then Blarney's fingers brushed across something that wasn't falling apart. It was solid, beneath his fingers, and didn't crumble when he applied a bit of pressure. Blarney made a curious noise and pushed aside the rest of the debris, pulling out a small, wooden box. He shone his flashlight over it, turning the box over and over. It was plain and unadorned, except for a carving of a stag on what Blarney could only assume was the top, and had a seam bisecting it across the middle. Curiously, Blarney pushed up on the top, and sure enough, the box opened, revealing...

"Earrings?" Blarney blinked, tilting his head curiously at the plain black hoop earrings that rested innocently in the box. "What..." Blarney couldn't tell what material they were made of, and Blarney lifted his flashlight to find Joy again. "Did you find any jewelry at your Wonder? This is so weird."

Blarney raised an eyebrow, in the darkness, to himself - so Miss Joy wasn't a natural blonde, then. Interesting. While that wasn't remarkable by itself, what was remarkable was that she thought it was remarkable enough to breeze right past and hope he didn't notice.

Interesting.

"A map is a good idea," Blarney said, tucking away his observation, rather than voicing it aloud - at least for now, anyway. The way to reward vulnerability wasn't to chase after it and beat it to death, after all. Besides, he liked that she sounded actually happy for him - praise was praise was praise and he would absolutely take it. "I'll be sure to let you know if I find any...dogs...buried around here," he added with a wry smile. In spite of how Pal kind of broke his brain, he liked her. She was sweet...or something.

"What do you mean you can't get it open?" Blarney asked, tucking the box with the earrings into the pouch at his hip. He'd have to wait until he got into proper light to determine if they were just ye olde accessories or if they were, in fact, Something Important. He stood up and joined her at the door, gave it an experimental push that also resulted in zero change. He was about to call it quits and turn them around to explore the other end of the T intersection when--

The whisper again.

All the hairs on the back of his neck stood up and Blarney jolted his hand away from the door like he'd been shocked.

"Okay, you had to have heard that," Blarney said, looking from the door to Joy and back again. Apparently the earrings were not what the whisper had in mind for him to find. He frowned and returned to the door, this time brushing his fingers along it rather than pushing or pulling at it. He wasn't sure what he was looking for, but he thought he might know it if he found it, whatever it was...

His fingers brushed against - something. He moved his flashlight closer and found a knock in the wood of the door, which was probably nothing, except that it was a little too perfectly round and shaped to be there naturally. Frowning deeper, Blarney knelt down to get a better look at it. It was about at hip height when he was fully upright, left of center of the door itself, and it was--

"There's no doorknob," Blarney muttered to himself, "but I wonder if there isn't still a...mechanism or something..." But what was he supposed to use to activate it, if there was a mechanism? He held the flashlight close to the hole, peering into it as closely as he could without blinding himself, and let out a startled, amused huff a moment later. "There's no way," he said, but he was starting to think that not only was there a way, it was the only way to get to whatever lay beyond this door.

Carefully, he lifted his right hand up to the hole and, after a bit of fidgeting with the angle, pressed his signet ring against the hole.

It fit. Perfectly.

There was a loud kathunk that made Blarney start in spite of himself, but when he stood, he was grinning broadly at Joy, and he gave another playful bow, a repetition of the one he'd done to 'welcome' her to his 'castle'.

"Ladies first," he said, and gave the door a gentle nudge, his smile only growing when it did, in fact, swing open.