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Kreature eventually managed to usher Aizawa into an ornate sitting room before shuffling off. Aizawa only had a moment or two to examine his surroundings, but every second of observation managed to spark twenty new questions.

First off, after exiting the basement into an...extremely old fashioned kitchen, and while passing through the front hall, Aizawa noted a set of thick, tightly drawn curtains set into a wall that...did not border the outer wall of the residence. Passing into the parlor revealed the other side of the wall the curtains were bolted to did not contain the other side of a window. Aizawa could not imagine what the curtains were meant to be blocking out-perhaps a damaged wall?

Aizawa's first impression of the sitting room was opulent, but upon closer inspection was actually just old-or perhaps old fashioned, as well. The design of all the furnishings was perhaps eighteenth or nineteenth century English, while the wear on things gave the appearance of being at least fifty years old. There were no electronics-no, scratch that. There was one electronic-an ancient radio that looked like it was one of the first ever built, a classy thing made of wood, the metal bits polished to a shine by years of handling. There was yet another fireplace in this room; the design of this one would have been much less suspicious than the conspicuousness of the last two Shouta had seen-it was modeled after a plain brick fireplace set into the wall, rather than the large white stone pit that took up a good quarter of the basement-except that this fireplace had also been built large enough for a fully grown man to stand in with room to spare. And sure enough, when Shouta looked he found a small tin basin set into the brick at about eye level, full of more of that shimmery black powder, and curled up within the scorched stone was a little orange fire, merrilly crackling away, once again fueled by absolutely nothing.

Shouta had felt like there were eyes on him as soon as he had left the kitchen, in the same way that he did when his eyes had noticed a security camera before his brain consciously registered it. The feeling was even stronger here. Shouta couldn't imagine such a security system surviving in an environment that was so hostile to technology, but the hairs were raised on Shouta's neck. He was about to glance away from investigating the fireplace when something above it caught his eye-two paintings were hung against the brick, side by side, an obvious set. A man and a woman, perhaps in their late fifties. The man was dressed in a strange suit-and-robes combo, wild salt and pepper brown hair, and matching hazel eyes gazing down at him, leaning forward with a mildly interested expression. The woman was dressed in an equally strange dress-and-robes combo, with long black and greying hair pinned back in something complicated. She stared down her nose at the viewer, looking distinctly unimpressed.

Perhaps this was what had the hairs on his neck standing on end-the paintings were positioned so that someone standing where Shouta was would be directly in the crosshairs of both their gazes.

A bell rang from somewhere in the room, and judging by the echo, one or two other identical bells had rung in rooms elsewhere in the house at the exact same time. Shouta turned his head away from the paintings to eye the one in the room with him. It looked like an older timey shop bell, the kind that rang when you opened a door, except this one was positioned a good foot to the right of the parlor door, and closer to the ceiling. There was no obvious method by which the bell could have been rung-no visible electronics, no other person in the room whose quirk it could have been. It was possible the quirk responsible came from someone who was not in the room, as suggested by the fact that bells rang in other parts of the house at the same time, but quirks that both worked at a distance and did not require line-of-sight were fairly rare...on the other hand, the fireplace warp quirk obviously did not require the person who set it up to be present in order to be used...perhaps a lack of line-of-sight requirement ran in Lupin's family?

Shouta had been giving the bell a narrowed eyed look as he thought, but he was interrupted by a man's voice from behind him.

"Ah, that bell lets us know that a guest has arrived from the floo in the basement-I don't suppose we're expecting another new guest, today?"

Shouta wished he could say that it was his cool head that stopped him from jumping in surprise...but honestly the only reason he didn't jump out of his skin is because he had a tendency to still in surprise. His heart rate picked up speed and the hairs on the back of his neck raised. Slowly, Shouta turned his head to look behind himself, eyes a little wider than usual. There should be no one behind him. Shouta's well trained instinct had not picked up on an invisible presence in the room. There should be no one behind him.

Behind him, the painting of the man blinked down at Shouta through his spectacles for a moment, then glanced to the left at the painting of the woman beside him.

The woman's severe look deepened. "Don't look at me." She sniffed, then turned her attention from Shouta to meet the gaze of the man beside her. "I only ever hear the same gossip you do."

Shouta stared in a sort of deadpan surprise as the two paintings began a light bout of bickering. Shouta didn't often expect to be surprised quite like the many times he found himself to be today, outside of anything having to do with his students, but it just kept happening over and over. Shouta found himself wandering back over to watch the two portraits move and bicker and occasionally direct at Shouta the meaningless noises house owners made at guests in between calling eachother a 'senile old fool' and a 'blind old hag'. It really was...quite the experience.

The experience was interrupted when out in the hall there came a loud bang or thud, like the sound of somebody crashing into something quite hard with their shins, followed by a rough cough of surprise, wet with the now familiar sound of Yagi's bloody coughs.

Shouta turned his head away to watch the door, noting absently that the paintings had fallen silent themselves.

There came the low grumble of Creature's voice through the wood, "-clumsly, stupid muggle..."

And Yagi's stuttering return of, "-so, so sorry-!"

Which was interrupted by a shriek of metal on metal and the rustle of heavy cloth, like a curtain being whipped open violently, and then an actual shriek of a woman's voice that had Shouta wincing even from the next room.

"-dirty blood on my floorboards, you vermin-!" She went on and on, berating him visously.

"-ou woke the mistress!" Kreature's voice was raised in high offence, though not above the octaves the new voice was reaching.

The door suddenly slammed open, seemingly with no one close enough on the other side to have done it. Shouta raised his eyebrows. Kreature couldn't be seen from Shouta's angle through the door, and neither could the woman shrieking, but Yagi stood with his hands raised in a non confrontational gesture, facing away down the hall in the direction of the front door, looking quite allarmed.

"Sorry, again, so sorry! I-" He was saying.

"In the parlor!" Kreature's voice cut through. "Don't touch anything!" And Yagi was suddenly being bodily and telekinetically moved from the hallway, through the door, and into the living room. He looked like an image on a computer getting dragged around by the mouse, and equally surprised to find himself such. His shoes squeaked over floorboards and dragged over carpets, which remained unmoved and unruffled by his passing. The door slammed itself shut in his face almost before he was all the way through, and a second later all sounds from outside the room cut off and disappeared with an eerie suddenness.

"-didn't mean to..." Yagi's mouth had finished what he was saying before his brain registered the sudden change. He stood there looking gobsmacked and out of place. Bright, straw yellow hair and casual pants and a t-shirt...he looked like a modern day anemic man had suddenly and unexpectedly wandered onto the set of a movie detailing the average London city peasant's life in the Victorian era.

Yagi turned his head to scope the room he had been shoved into, and caught sight of Aizawa staring at him. "Oh..." he said, waveringly. "Aizawa san...there you are..."

Aizawa hummed and elected to ignore that. "Was that the woman's quirk who shoved you?" He asked instead. "The telekinesis?"

"What? Oh, no...that woman shrieking? She was a painting!" Yagi mentioned, glancing over at the door with some amazement and alarm.

Shouta found himself contemplating how he would take someone down who did not even need to be in the same room as him to use their quirk, much less in line-of-sight. This exercise was purely academic, of course, and entirely unrelated to the sentient painting who hurled incomprehensible slurs at his coworker. Shouta couldn't live in a world where one of his most mischievous students had access to someone with a quirk that could assign a painting to annoy him all day. It was bad enough that Shouta's husband was quite as loud and chatty as he was, but Shouta suspected a painting wouldn't need to sleep or pause for breath. On the other hand, a painting couldn't follow him if he just up and left the room. If only he could say the same about his husband.

Yagi sighed. "I keep thinking I must keep in mind to be stern about this teleporting into Japan every morning for school scheme young Lupin and his guardian cooked up...but I keep getting distracted by all..." Yagi gestured vaguely around them at the house and especially at the door behind which presumably was a shrieking portrait.

Aizawa's brows furrowed. "Yes...I've counted at least four...no, five separate quirks in use throughout the house, and only one person. Kreature has a personal warp quirk, there's someone around with a telekinesis quirk, there's whoever animated the paintings-" Aizawa gestured at the two over the fireplace, who were watching the exchange of Japanese and occasionally glancing at each other. Yagi's eyes followed the gesture and then were caught by the sight of the two. "-there's whoever set the warp fires, and there's some noise cancelation or something...whatever is preventing us from hearing anything outside this room." Aizawa eyed the doors and walls and windows with some unease as he mentioned this. He was suddenly reminded that their only phone was broken.

"So..." Yagi shifted nervously, and looked around. His eyes kept darting back to the paintings. They were rather unnerving to exist in the same room with for very long. "You think that fireplace trick was a quirk? Not some kind of technology or...something?" The man trailed off dubiously.

"Both." Shouta said without hesitation, eyes sliding back to his coworker. "The fire warp was a quirk, the powder was a support item needed to use it, the stone pit only there for dramatics. It's possible that the person whose warp quirk set that fire is immune to the heat of it, but for anyone else to use it...they would probably need something that makes fire safe to touch...hence, the chemical that needed to be added first." If only Kurogiri's portals worked through a medium as inconvenient as fire, rather than mist...then again, wishing for a giant mass of sentient fire was only wishing for different problems, new and exciting problems; it was not wishing for less problems.

Yagi was frowning through his whole explanation. He hummed thoughtfully at the end of it. "I don't know, Aizawa...if there was available a chemical that made fire that safe to touch out there...it would be all the rage in support circles...amongst rescue heroes...those who regularly combat fire villains...we would have heard something about it, I'm sure. And I don't think you're quite taking into account how rare it is for someone to not need to be physically present in order for their quirk to work..."

That was true. It was one of many of the holes that existed in the assumptions Shouta had been making about all the strange things he had seen today. He was increasingly feeling like he was hearing hoofbeats, and increasingly scrambling to justify why they had to be horses and not zebras...except Shouta wasn't really sure what the zebras were in this metaphor of his situation.

It's just that...the quirk + support equipment theory was the only one that came close to making sense...what else could it be? Expertly disguised, incredibly advanced technology? Multiple quirks working together behind the scenes to...what? Convince the two pros that all this casual quirk usage was easier than it really was? A sense of unease was steadily building in Shouta. There was something big they were missing. Something that would tie all this together.

The shifting cogs in his brain were brought to a halt when the door creaked open and Kreature peered in through the crack at them. Both their heads turned to look at him as he spoke. "The Lord of the House will see you now." The little man croaked, before beginning to shuffle away, leaving the door cracked.

Aizawa and Yagi spared a long glance at each other, then made to follow.