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Most people, upon learning about a cursed castle less than a day’s walk from their new home, would take the information as the warning it was intended to be. People who go there come back changed, the villagers say. If they come back at all.
Tony is not most people.
He’s been trying to figure out how magic works for most of his life. He’s made some progress, but his research has been hamstrung by the fact that most magic is fleeting. Stable magical sources are extremely rare. And now there’s apparently a magical event that’s been around for hundreds of years less than a day away! Of course he’s going to go investigate it!
His plan is to set up his instruments along a generous enough perimeter to avoid triggering the curse itself. Except he’s not getting any readings, so he moves them a little closer, and then closer, and then—
Then a mass of dark purple-black tentacles comes boiling out of a formerly innocuous shadow. By the time Tony has jerked his pistol out of his belt he’s surrounded, the tentacles writhing over and around each other, but not actually touching him. He pauses, pistol at the ready, but… it hasn’t actually attacked him yet.
When it speaks, the voice is a deep baritone, and it seems to radiate from all around Tony, as sourceless as the mass of tentacles themselves. “Who are you, who trespasses on my grounds?”
Talking is good. Tony is great at talking. He plasters on his brightest smile.
It’d be a lot easier to analyze the magic with the resident’s permission, after all.