The Runaway Library

You follow the recent rumours and walk to the north part of Port Ffirst, where the Old Town and the New Town meet. A perfect spot to observe the life of the seaside city. But you're not there to watch Port Ffirst. You want to see the new library.

The Runaway Library is a large cube-shaped building, over a hundred feet in any direction. It has a flat roof and four large round towers on the sides, pushed into the building itself. The main building and the columns are made of the identical bright yellowish sandstone and covered with a mosaic of blue and white, interweaving of diamond geometric shapes. The mosaic shines in the sun, pieces of quartz in it sending reflected rays everywhere. The towers have a little bit more blue to them, but otherwise the mosaic is pretty even throughout.

There is a huge arch of bleached sandstone in the front of the building. It contains another entrance arch, a bit smaller. That arch also contains a smaller one, and so on, until the pattern ends with an oak double door about 8 feet tall.

You make a step towards the entrance, and raise your eyes up, to look above the first, largest arch. The mosaic goes all the way around it, and on each side the blue and white of the glaze is replaced by golden tiles that make out a shape of a pouncing tarrasque. The paws of both figures continue over the arch, and flow from tiles into stucco, so it seems like the arch is held up by two golden tarrasques, or two halves of one. Out of curiosity, you make a sideways step. The eyes of the tarrasque figures follow you. You might think it's a trick of the architecture. You'd be wrong. She is watching you. This is Thetis, the sentient engine of the library, spirit of adventure put into a physical form, like lightning caught in a bottle. She likes travelling, other planes, and beautiful sights, but is less than thrilled about visitors. If it was up to her, the library would be somewhere more picturesque. And less peopled.


With a nervous gulp, you force yourself through the double doors of the library, and end up in the Main Hall. If the space here was linear, you'd think this hall alone must occupy at least half of the library. The hall's austere stone interior and the rows of dark wood bookshelves remind you immediately of the Candlekeep, but it has a more festive feeling. Perhaps the reason lies in the lightning source used here. The space is lit up by fluorescent flumphs floating in mid-air with the same curious and care-free attitude as if they are back home in the Underdark. They change colours based on their mood, and the entire hall looks like a Mid-winter decoration. There are desks around the perimeter of the hall, most of them occupied by visitors. As soon as someone sits down at a desk and opens a book, at least one curious flumph floats by and glances over their shoulder, providing light enough to read. If people are particularly persuasive, they manage to talk a flumph into changing a colour for a better reading experience.

You walk across the hall, browsing the titles. The selection here is wide, if a bit mundane, containing mostly belletrist titles – ma-fi (magic fantasy) novels like Astral Trek, Plane Wars and Beastlands Park; changeling romance for young adults; and some more classic readings like The Three Adventurers, Pride and Prestidigitation, Much Ado about Necromancy and others. Eventually, you reach a small corridor leading to the Reading Hall. This is the only place in the library where there are no books. Instead, the walls are covered with etchings. It's just one phrase, over and over, in every language spoken across the planes: "Silence in the library".




The Reading Hall looks almost inviting. There is a fireplace in the far right corner, burning with warm arcane flame that can't set anything on fire. The books here, in contrast to the Main Hall, are mostly rare tomes about (and sometimes from) other planes. The air here is drier, no doubt contributing to the longevity of the books. Reading desks and tables are once again lit by rather nervous flumphs. You immediately understand the reason for their worry – there are two Spectators floating across the room, watching intently over the readers. You notice most of the people here wear soft gloves when turning the pages – they both protect the ancient pages and muffle the sounds. The Reading Hall is so silent you can hear your own pulse in your ears. You barely make two steps into the room when a thundering crunch rattles through it. You whip your head around, and stare into the terrified eyes of a young man, a bag of nuts in his hand as the evidence of his crime. One of the Spectators hisses in Deep Speech. You don't know the language, but immediately understand the meaning: "Silence in the library". Before you even have the time to turn, the Spectator shines a paralysing ray at the offending youth. He freezes, eyes still terrified. The Spectator picks him up with its monstrous jaws and teleports back into the corridor. He leaves the still paralysed (and a bit slimed) kid outside, and floats back into the Reading Hall, telepathically closing the door behind itself. You cast a look around the room, seeing the other researchers watching the removal – some with fear, others with approval. You don't have anything loud with you, but wisely decide not to tempt fate, and quietly retreat back into the main hall.

You walk past the young researcher on your way back. His paralysis has worn off. "I just got peckish!" He complains, standing back up. That reminds you: perhaps you could go for a snack as well? There's a smell of fresh pies coming from the room on the right of the Main Hall. Barely squeezing through a thin corridor, you end up in the Cafeteria. It's a large and warm place. You assume the walls are made out of stone here, too, but it's hard to know: every inch of the walls is occupied by bookshelves with books on cooking, serving, eating, and any other sort of household work. The list with a menu is posted on every table. It's quite vast, but seems to solely consist of pies, pastries, and fruit dishes. There are no waiters in sight, so you glance into the Kitchen.

There, a monstrous black pudding is operating several stoves at the same time, while struggling to keep small (about a feet tall) gelatinous cubes out of its many pots and pans.

"Can I… have cherry pie with tea, please?" You manage, holding two silver coins like a shield in front of you.

The black pudding - her name is Cookie, by the way, and she's got a lot of responsibilities, thank you very much, feeding a family of 20+ isn't easy – gives out a tired sigh. Don't take it personally, she doesn't have a larynx, so that's the only sound she can make. She takes your money, and gestures to the tables with one of her pseudopods. You nod and take a sit. In a couple of minutes, out of its room in the Sentry tower, rolls out the Arcane Engine. It downed a dragon during the gith invasion, and still carries some battle scars on it. The construct seems worse for wear, but still works. It rattles into the kitchen, emerging from there with a tray of cherry pie and several tea kettles. To your utter terror, it rolls up to you, as the construct's lifeless eyes stare into your very soul.

"Pie addressee detected. Delivering pie," the disembodied voice says, and a plate with cherry pie and a smaller yellow gelatinous cube that is trying to ingest it appears on the table. The engine pauses for a second. "Pie interception detected. Removing the interceptor." It extends the battered metal claw, gently capturing the cube and giving it a little shake, forcing it to release the pie. It throws the cube away unceremoniously. They yellow blob flies in a wide arch and hits a wall. It drips down and reforms, makes a couple of excited jumps, clearly amused by the entire situation, and leaps back into the kitchen to sow chaos there. "Distributing apologies," the engine states in an emotionless tone. "Delivering tea," it adds, pouring a large cup of tea in front of you. "Tea delivered. New task: locate tea targets in the library. Distribute tea. Distribute tea."

Its arcane core lights up as it rattles into the tiny corridor, squeezing through it with great difficulty, sending sparks along the walls.

You sigh in relief, and turn back to your pie. Except for one side where the gelatinous cube managed to dissolve some of it, the pie is great, and very filling. You enjoy several mouthfuls of it and drink some tea. The midday snack leaves you feeling refreshed and ready to face the rest of the library. You stand up and traverse the corridor to the Pool.

The place is dimly lit, with a pretty cascade supplying water to the large pool. In Port Ffirst, you're no stranger to unplanned swimming, so you decide to dip your toes in to the calming sound of running water. Half the books in this place are submerged and written on what appears to be seaweed. The titles above the water are about sailing, and water life, and oceans. You wade through the water towards a more brightly lit area that shines with muted colours. The glow is tranquil. You focus your sight, and it turns out to be a nest made out of stones and branches. Above it float a number of flumphs – both adults and tiny baby flumphs. The young ones seem to just be learning to float, and sometimes accidentally turn upside down in the air. The adults patiently turn them the right side up. You look with endearment at the peaceful picture before you. Suddenly, out of the water next to you, rises a mess of tentacles. A kraken! A baby one, but a kraken nonetheless. Instinctively, you grab the nearest rock and throw it at the monstrosity in front of you. By some luck, you hit just under its eye. The monster staggers back and begins wailing, slamming its tentacles around and creating tidal waves in the pool. A couple of adult flumphs immediately float towards it, blinking pink and baby blue. Another several float to you, glowing a rather dangerous red.

"Sorry! It jumped me!" You mumble in excuse.

But the flumphs are unyielding, and you are gradually forced out of the pool as the flumphs calm down what to them appears to be a very big baby who for some reason still can't seem to learn to fly.

Drenched but drying off quickly, feeling the unfairness in your bones, you march across the Main Hall into the corridor on its left. There's a small alcove, where you meet the Arcane Engine again. It delivers tea to a middle-aged halfling woman in a wheelchair. You see the portrait of the same woman, only many years younger, holding a small purple box in one hand and conjuring a spell with another, here on the wall. Beneath the portrait it says "Breola Goodbarrel, Librarian Extraordinaire". The woman is engaged in conversation with Menace, a highly influential merchant that you've heard of a lot. She's showing him the map of the library, telling about the different parts of it.



The tea in their cups begins to shake as a large spitting mimic approaches down the corridor. His lower part is all pseudopods, while the upper part retains some semblance of a purple chest cover, with pieces of 'wood' being pulled apart by orange cat-like eyes and a grinning toothy maw. His upper part bears an uncanny resemblance to the purple box on the painting. He approaches the table, and tries to steal a plate of cookies from it. Breola notices it and immediately pins him down with an icy glare.

"Chonk! You're on a diet!" She says sternly.

"But muuuum, I'm hungry," he plops down on the floor, making all the cutlery on the coffee table jump and rattle, and looks at his creator with puppy eyes. All seven of them.

"Then ask Cookie to make you a fruit salad. And please help out the people in the Main Hall, nobody knows where to go."

"There are so many of them," he grumbles.

"I'll come and help you as soon as I'll finish here," she pats his pseudopod, and immediately wipes her hand on her trousers to get rid of the sticky mucus.

"Okay, I'm going," Chonk, the Runaway Library caretaker, lets go of the plate of cookies, stands up and stomps into the main hall.

Breola shakes her head and turns to the tiefling.

"I'm sorry, he's a bit grumpy. Has a sweet tooth, as well! I mean, I've enchanted them to go for carbs instead of proteins, so it's my fault, really. I was so preoccupied with the fact that I could breed a humanoid-safe underdark creatures than I didn't spend any time thinking if I should. I mean, I totally should have, they're all adorable, but I should've considered their dietary requirements and proper nutrition…" She shakes her head, worrying a holy symbol of Tymora on her chest. She looks guilty, but a moment later she's already completely absorbed by telling her guest all about the Library's Greenhouse.

You pretend to ignore the family scene, and walk past it into the Glassblower tower. The construct there works rather well compared to the others: The room continuously seeps glass out of the walls of the library and makes bottles out of it, like a spinster weaving a thread from the wool on a spindle. Jars and bottles containing all sorts of specimen and ingredients cover the room, along with books on spells and alchemy. There is a fountain in the middle, with Breola's bust and some playful poem etched in bronze underneath it. You might think she's a bit of a self-absorbed person to have a statue of herself in a library, but actually, that was a gift from an admirer, so you'd be wrong again.

That seems like a really specialised section of the library, and you move further down the corridor. You walk through the Archive like one would go through a museum: reading the plaques under the different artefacts, and, with the assistance of a green flumph, even browsing through a couple of history books that cover the walls of the place. The Archive is a bit gloomy though, and, to be fair, very dusty. So, you are relieved to step into the sunlit Greenhouse.

Unlike the rest of the library, it has a glass roof, and natural light sips through multiple layers of the jungle made up of trees from the planes like Beastlands and Feywild, with only a few coming from the Material plane. Some layers of the Greenhouse are floating in the air, clearly coming from the Plane of Earth, shrubs and vines growing both on top of them and underneath. Despite the humidity, this room also houses quite a few bookshelves. They are mostly fit in between the tree roots and branches, and contain books on horticulture and wildlife. The Greenhouse is filled with the sounds of the jungle, and it's clear the fauna from wherever the plants come from followed the flora. You look around cautiously, and see a procession of gelatinous cubes making its way through the undergrowth. There are about a dozen of them, all different sizes and colours, like they were cross-bred with flumphs (which they were). Each of them carries a variety of fruits inside their see-through bodies. You can identify a couple of pears and apples, and some cherries that are currently in season, but the other fruits are a mystery. The cubes don't seem to be interested in digesting their harvest immediately, clearly having a destination for it in mind. You watch as the expedition speeds up towards the exit, and notice a young displacer beast stalking them. The monstrous panther glances in your direction, and, its cover blown, disappears. You figure it's not a place to be on your own, and, overtaking the cubes, rush back into the corridor.

The next door on the left is Game Room. You are terrified to look inside it, but upon hearing voices, open the door. The walls of this room are covered with rule books for any game imaginable. There is a bunch of people playing some sort of tabletop game on a rectangle plinth. On the side of the plinth, there are some dull runes, but they don't seem to be activated at the moment, and you ignore them. You go around the room, but the couple groups of players seem to be in the middle of their games, and you decide not to interrupt.

Down the corridor, there's a lot of screeching and rumbling. Curious as to the source of it, you walk into the third tower, the Weaver. The construct there is an enormous loom that takes up the whole tower. It consists of wooden frames and metal cogs that all seem to be moving in opposite directions. As you walk into the tower, you sneeze from the amount of dust and cobwebs in it. There's a lot of old fabric lying around, contributing to the patchwork feeling of the room. The construct moves, screeching and halting, and weaves another bit of tapestry depicting some scenes featuring the library and its inhabitants. There are few people here, mostly craftsmen, who peruse some of the books dedicated to different spheres of professional knowledge, arts and crafts. The books go up, propping up elements of the Weaver, creating a curious staircase that must be reaching the ceiling obscured by the jerking machinery.

When you leave, you are faced with a long queue of people. You ask a lady at the back what's the queue for. She explains that they are waiting to see Joone, the local psychotherapist. He has a bit of an edgy personality, which might have something to do with the fact that he's a huge oblex, but he does his job well. Being the youngest of the oozes in the library, he's never quite gotten into the whole vegetarian thing, and still sustains himself on memories. Following some adventurer's advice, he started allowing his victims to choose what memories he eats, and the amount of people who want to get rid of a couple of bad memories still overwhelms him. Of course, it isn't always easy to identify what memories are the bad ones, so he has to do quite a bit of talking to make sure he eats the right ones. You imagine that after the invasion, it is little surprise the oblex's services are in high demand.

Bypassing the queue, you travel down the corridor, to the Armoury. It's a relatively small room. Over the bookshelves with tomes on different weapons and fighting techniques hang some fashion of trophies. Instead of reading tables, the room features an array of training dummies and supplies a variety of weapons, clearly suggesting, like the rest of the library, that the knowledge is there to be applied, not just consumed. You make a couple of steps in, through a row of battered sets of armour. On the opposite wall hangs a strange poster. You approach to get a better look. "Current Metal Bros' Champion: Steel," you read, noticing other names crossed out: "Copper, Steel, Iron…"

There is a metallic clang behind you, and you turn to see the armour sets all swivel their heads to the side in an expression of silent curiosity, looking at you with their absent faces. One of them, a full-plate construct, abruptly raises its hand, pointing somewhere. You follow the direction of the outstretched finger, and see a small table, like the one used in arm-wrestling competition. You look from it back to the steel glove of the construct.


"Erh… No, thanks, I'm just browsing, really!" You squeak and, before the living armour can move another joint, you dart out of the Armoury, slamming the door shut behind you.

After everything you've seen, you are reluctant to go into the last tower, but it's right there, and you really just want to say you've gone across the whole library. So you dutifully trudge up the spiral staircase of the Herald. Along the way, the bookcases you see are filled not with books, but with what one would call periodicals. These are theses, hand-written encyclopaedias, and all manner of the most current academic works. The top floor of the tower is covered with pretty much the same sort of reading material from floor to ceiling. Quite literally, actually, because the floor seems to consist of many layers of papers sprawling away from the central cathedra. Behind it, stands a bright-blue gelatinous cube, about 10 feet tall. Inside it you see floating two enormous mismatched eyes, probably from one monster or another. The cube has what at first glance seems to be spikes protruding from its back. These are actually pipes of a bagpipe embedded inside the creature. As you stare at the strange instrument, the eyes turn to look at you.

"HellO," the cube says in a high metallic voice, using the bagpipes in place of a larynx. "My nAme is Cyanne. Who are You-u?"

"Hi-i… I'm just… looking around…"

"Are yoU LoOking fOr somethIng specIfic? I have just foUnd a vEry intErestIng mOnogrAph on the sEashElls' migrAtion," she says enthusiastically. "WoUld yoU like mE to sUmmarIze it for You-u?"

After the constructs, the oozes, the kraken, and every single potentially life-threatening thing you've encountered today, you draw the line at discussing seashell migration with a gelatinous cube. Without saying another word, you turn and start running. You stop running only when the door of your house closes behind you. And then you think that perhaps libraries are like fine wine – best experienced in moderation and slightly above your pay grade. Perhaps you should come back another day...