Completely exhausted from traveling through monster ridden forest and battling persistent beasts for weeks upon weeks, you stop at the front gates of Gnomish fortress of Shoftettae (Safe Haven Outside For The Everyday Traveling Traveler And Entourage). As the four foot perimeter gnomish guards check your packs once, twice, a third, and then a fourth time for dangerous or questionable content (as per gnomish standard, you can never be too sure!) you heave a great sigh as a pile of your possessions gets large and larger. You're going to be made to identify each reagent, each weapon, each and every tome you own. You sigh again as one of the cheeky little gnome guards brings over one of your minor spell-casting tomes and asks you in the complicated gnomish vernacular to explain what the tome is for.

As you painstakingly identify every item, you start to entertain the idea of taking back to the road. Why do gnomes have to have overly complicated rules for everything!? You finally get to pass through the iron wrought gates, but not before you're handed a map with every single detail about the fortress drawn, written down, circled, underlined, italicized, and translated into all 36 common and uncommon languages of the world. After sticking the "book" in your pack, you finally get to pass through the front wall's gates. Of course these are reinforced with iron, steel, wood, more iron, brick, wool, and cloth (just to be sure!)

You heave yet another heavy sigh and start to seek out the inn.

As you carefully travel the spindly roads, (Gnomish roads are incredibly efficient and each one is sure to lead to two other roads and/or six locations, at least. Don't get lost!) you can't help but to notice the Fulmtafoxafir building. (Fantastic Ultra-Librarylike Mansion Transmorphimizer Apparatus For Organized eXperiments And For Incredible Reading!) You're not sure if it's a mansion or a giant machine, as cogs, steam pipes, and all sorts of strange whistles and doohickeys adorn every part of it's outer structure. Against your better judgment, you seek to satisfy your curiosity and enter the front door. (At least you think it was a door. It may have doubled as an oven or a forge, seeing as it was spewing fire through its grates.)

Expecting the typical organized chaos of the gnomish race, you're quite surprised to see an incredibly tidy and extensive library past the front doors. (It even looks like a normal library!) You're not sure how the gnomes managed to filter out the noise from the roads, but you don't complain and you take a seat at one of the nearby ebony chairs and allow your eyes to follow the towers of bookshelves to the ceiling.

You're not seated for long however, as the sound of a snare drum cadence scares you to your feet. Out of the corner of your eye you see a group of young gnomes dash under a table, and you're smart to do the same. (If even a overly curious and incessant gnome takes cover, you'd better be sure to do the same!)

You hear a lone female gnome scream out "TIME!", notice her slam a large red button at her desk, and all of a sudden, chaos ensues! The seemingly normal rows of bookshelves start to quake and tremor, and start shifting positions into the ceilings as laboratory equipment rise from the floor. Beakers, Test Tubes, huge crucibles, mechanical unfolding tables, and an assortment of tools and machines you can't even begin to identify fly from the floor by some incredibly complicated gnomish technology and replace the encyclopedias, maps, and chronicles in seconds.

After the floor stops shaking and the silence is restored, you cautiously peek your head from the table, and incredibly, the extensive library has transformed into an extensive laboratory! You can't help but to smile as you watch grumpy gnomish bookworms exit the front doors and fledgling gnomish scientists rush through to get a good spot at one of the many experiment tables.

You dust your clothes off and toss the Fulmtafoxafir attendant who pressed the button a questioning glance.

"What!?" she quirks up, throwing you a crooked smile. "Don't tell me you've never been through a Mansion Transmorphimizer Session before! Oh, the process is very simple! Hold on, I've got the manual right here, I'll explain it to you..."

She reaches behind the counter, rolls out a dolly with the biggest tome you've ever seen on it and starts to roll toward you, intelligence brimming in her eyes.

You scramble out of the front doors (Watch the flame!) before she can get a chance to go into further detail.