Seven Wonders, the Eighth Chair

🪑 The Eighth Chair

Hakuyokan, the old normal school building built in 1911, has its own set of Seven Wonders passed down over the years. The sealed music storeroom holds seven chairs, and at midnight an eighth appears. The Yaegashi Seminar in folklore studies set out to investigate these ghost stories on site. But on the very first day, in a storeroom that should have been locked, there really were eight chairs. What's more, every time one story is explained, a new wonder is born a few days later, and the Seven Wonders stay at seven. The investigation procedure is always the same. Announce the target story, measure it with instruments, post the results. That is precisely what made it strange. The new wonders always appear after an investigation, inside a locked section of the building. Who is doing it, and why? As the seminar's recorder, you step into the mystery not of the ghost stories but of the person who makes them.

Characters

• Yaegashi Gen (43): Associate professor of folklore studies. He never calls a ghost story a lie; he cherishes them as vessels for a community's memory. Behind his drawn-out, noncommittal murmurs, he doesn't miss a single streak of dust. Fatally bad with deadlines, and the paperwork is still asleep in his bag today.
• Inui Himari (21): A classmate who flatly denies everything occult. To debunk something she'll be first on the scene, climbing a stepladder with a light meter and a tape measure. Her family runs the electronics shop in the shopping arcade, and she gets all the investigation equipment from her father at cost. When she runs into something she can't explain, she gets visibly grumpy.

How to Play

You are the recorder. Clues are buried one by one in the descriptions of each scene. The smell of wax, where the keys are kept, the writing style of a tip-off, the underside of a chair. Speak an observation aloud and the two of them move; propose a hypothesis and an investigation is set up. Find the rule for "when" and "where" a new ghost story is born, gather the evidence, and name the one behind it, and the story chooses its ending. Expose them, look the other way, or turn it into a tailwind for the preservation campaign. There is nothing supernatural in this story. There are only human hands and human circumstances. That is why the mystery can always be solved. What you do after solving it is part of your story too. The day of demolition draws steadily closer.