When you let Tony and Liliana collaborate on something, you had to know that the results would be fantastic if also potentially catastrophic. Still, Ignis and Steve had finally relented and let the two of them put their extravagant and brilliant heads together and come up with a Halloween party spectacular (while occasionally advocating for one (1) bit of restraint, and for them not to ignore the 'laws of man and nature,' even to execute their grand vision. But still, Fandom could rest easy that tonight's Halloween party would have at least some moral and ethical guidelines. (Even if that had been incredibly rude to necromancers.))

The decorations started outside (because of course they did), sending arriving guests through the creaking, wrought iron gate into a haunted graveyard. The entire area was blanketed in a thick, roiling fog, lit by candles and lanterns, where ghostly apparitions appeared in thin air, wailing and beckoning people to come closer. A skeleton offered guests two options: they could go through the front door and experience the haunted house maze, or, if they wanted to head directly to the party, they could continue through the graveyard and enter the ballroom directly.

For those who dared the haunted house, they would find themselves in a professionally designed and fully staffed maze of ghoulish and terrifying rooms, where they might be chased by scary nuns who crawled out of walls, chainsaw-wielding maniacs, creepy little girls with even creepier dolls, and undead nightmares down hallways of chains, corridors festooned with spiderwebs (and sometimes the spiders themselves), and rooms filled with some familiar faces. (If a resident cares to look, they can find their head amongst the decorations, all of which were welcome to be taken at the end of the night as a souvenir). And it was a real maze, with portals through each doorway leading you to a different part of the mansion. At any time, however, a guest could speak to a staffer and be let through to head to the ballroom, rather than continuing through.

If the rest of the mansion was a spooky haunted house, the ballroom itself was an ossuary. Greeted by two skeletons in tattered monks' robes, people were escorted inside, The walls, ceiling, and floors lined and decorated with bones, including a bone coat of arms and a bone chandelier. The further in the guests went, however, the less human and more terrifying the skeletons being used as decor became. Especially since they sometimes moved, shifting position to menace people before returning to their still state.

(Fun fact! Tony had discovered a way to grow real bone in minutes! What had started as fiddling with better prosthetics with the armor as a base had turned into a rabbit hole of the biological sciences! But now multiple hospitals had been given a cutting edge medical technology that could help them mend or create bone for patients, and Liliana had been able to craft various horrific bone creations, which she could control via necromancy, but with none of those pesky arguments about 'respecting the dead'.)

Don't worry, Ignis had made sure there were plenty of delicious party snacks (everything neatly labeled for people with dietary restrictions or allergies), along with appropriately spooky cocktails and mocktails to enjoy.

Happy Halloween!

[OCD is up!]