---

You did not explode when you opened the front door, which was mostly a relief. You didn't really want to explode, but you didn't really want to clean the tower either, and you'd heard that exploding was the kind of thing that you didn't really notice. From the explodees perspective, it was just a very sharp discontinuity in the experience of life. 

The house smelled faintly of old bananas and strongly of tobacco. There was a single brown rat, sleek and fat, staring at you from the upper balcony of the foyer, intelligent and refined in its expression. The lone beam of light coming through the ceiling made you feel like you were an actor in a play, and the rat, your patron, watching from the upper stands. 

You would not be your grandfather's grandson if you were not at least a tad dramatic. So you did a grand flourishing bow before the rat, taking off your hat and sweeping it in front of you. You weren't sure what you'd expected, exactly - perhaps that the rat would run away, or that it would stare at you blankly, all of its cunning bent towards its animal desires. Eating, pissing, shitting, etc. But instead it pressed up to the baseboard of the balcony, as close to the edge as it could without falling over, before standing on its little hind legs, like a man. Then it gently clasped its two little hands together, in a way that was both distinctly rat-ty and distinctly not. 

Huh, you said. And the rat sniffed the air in a way that seemed both huffy and curious, before turning back on all fours and retreating further into the darkness. 

You would catch the rat watching you at several more points throughout the building. Or at least, a rat. Maybe all rats sniffed like princelings here. Maybe all rats clasp their hands worriedly when strangers open doors. Maybe grandfather bred them to be fussy little things. You don't know. You never found out. One day, the rat(s?) disappeared, and you didn't question it until, several days later, you were rummaging through the attic and found a long series of tail marks running across the dust. You followed those marks up until you found a potion rack containing three bottles: de-ratter, un-ratter, and de-un-ratter. The first two were empty. You thew the third out. You knew better than to try and outsmart a dead wizard.

---

You found a cupboard. You thought it would contain spices. It did not. It appeared to open up into the room it started in, but scaled up somehow. You emerged from a small hole in the baseboards just across the room to a ceiling that was 70 feet tall instead of 7, 200 feet wide instead of 20. The door that you'd entered was in front of you, and you considered, briefly, going through it a second time. Instead, you walked back out, out through the cupboard, and back to the room you started in.

There was a hole in the baseboard, just where you'd exited, and against your better judgement, you poked your finger through. Even expecting it, you couldn't help but shriek a little when nearly two-feet of salami thick phalange clawed its way through the cupboard.

You slept poorly that night, and the night after. It wasn't until you found a box of rat traps that your worries of the cupboard even began to settle. When you found a full-size, polished guillotine in the basement you were too relieved about having something to put on the large end of the door to even begin to worry about its history.

You spent that morning dismantling it piece by piece, carrying it up six flights of stairs, and reassembling it before finally, happily, balancing the blade on a sawed off length of broom handle. You tested your work by pushing a carrot through the baseboard hole, and jumped for joy when the guillotine hacked off a foot wide-foot long length of carrot.

---

The first magical sword you found was wrapped in 30 feet of steel chain. It asked you very politely if you would unwrap the chain, and in a fit of polite madness, you did. It was gone by morning. The lesson you learned from that event was "do not listen to magic swords" and it cost you surprisingly little. May have cost someone else quite a bit, but some of the best physicists in the world will tell you that not being sure if something happened is awfully similar to it not happening, which works for you just fine.

The second sword you found had a sign on it that said, Do Not Throw Into The Lake. The sword asked you to throw it into anything but the lake, please, not the lake, which you are mostly certain was a rather transparent attempt at reverse psychology. You considered taking it to a smith to melt down into something else, but you figured damn, what if it got turned into nails and some of those nails made it into the lake? What a headache that would be. So you just put it into a safe with a combination that you were pretty sure you were gonna forget and considered that two problems turned into one solution. Excellent.

The third sword had a nasty habit of trying to fight the second sword, and you only found it after waking up to an unbelievably loud clanging noise in the middle of the night. The third sword could talk, you're sure of it, but it simply did not want to talk to you in the slightest. You'd catch whispering in the rooms you left it in, whispering that would go silent whenever you turned around.

Eventually, by chance, you wound up moving the safe, which ended hostilities between the two swords. The third sword was simply quite territorial.