The Colosseum

Built on an elliptical floor plan, Colosseum is over 600 feet long and more than 500 feet wide. Much of it is in ruins. The interior is a grassy field, 280 feet long and 180 feet wide, awash with wild flowers that dance in the noontime breeze. Most of the three-story external arcade stands, as does the fourth-story attic. The open-aired, stone tiers used for seating remain, cracked by weeds and spotted with birds' nests. Much of the interior infrastructure is intact, separated with brick partitions built by the present inhabitants. Below ground lies a complex network of rooms, passages, and cells, previously used to stage and house the many gladiatorial events held in the Colosseum. Many of these underground passages remain, still connected to a sewer and water system that is no longer in use.

The southwestern section of the Colosseum has been fortified by the Frangipane family, who use the facility as a power base for their family's fortunes. The Frangipane family members are Ghibellines, sympathetic to the emperor and often at odds with the pope and the Guelphs, particularly the Orsini family. The eastern section has been used by individuals to make private residences, shoring up sections of the arcades' arches like seabirds nesting on a cliff face. Anchorites, lunatics, outlaws, and other semi-permanent squatters live tucked among the arches and tunnels that interlace beneath the stone seats.

The Colosseum has Infernal, Faerie, and Magic auras, distributed in various locations as determined by past happenings or supernatural incidents. The Frangipane clan's residences have a small Infernal aura, a consequence of the family's greed and ambitions. Faerie auras dot the interior field, and on certain nights some faeries recreate

specific stories, like tossing Christians to the lions or the gladiatorial combats of Emperor Caligula.

Buonacorsus' residence is in one of the few Magic auras of the building, three rooms sitting one after another against to the outer wall of the third-floor arcade. Accessed via a stairway running from the seats to a tunnel whose other exits have been bricked up, Buonacorsus has lived in these rooms for several years. The first room is an antechamber, where he receives the few visitors he entertains, lined with musty couches, dirty dishes, and half-empty casks of wine. The second room is his bedroom, brimming with personal artifacts that are more sentimental than valuable, and the final room is his laboratory, where he has invented his many rites and awakened the stone naiad statue. All three rooms are in a Magic aura of 3. A secret door in the floor leads from the laboratory to the corridor below, which has several exits.