House of Knowledge rules

I am thinking of updating the HoK rules around here. This is my first draft. What do you think? To harsh?

HoK rules

These are the rules of this House of Knowledge. Comply to them or suffer the consequences.

- Seek help! No matter what your HoK related problems are, always come to the reference desk with them. Do not try to solve them on your own. Chances are, you’ll only make them worse, and not just by adding a pissed off Keeper of Knowledge to them.
- Walk in an orderly fashion! I am sure when your mother taught you to walk she also taught you not to stomp or drag your feet. But above all, don’t you dare run in my HoK.
- Cases are essential! Memory stones are very delicate things, especially when out of their case. So don’t let them lie around and by all that’s holy, don’t ever bring two memory stones close together without their casing. That’s the kind of dumb ass move that gets you killed.
- No memory, no shelving! If you can’t remember where you took an item from, don’t just put it somewhere in the shelves. Leave it on your work table or bring it to the reference desk. And don’t think I wouldn’t find out if you shelve something wrongly. I am a very powerful magician as well as one strict Keeper of Knowledge.
- No try outs! If I catch you trying out newly learned abilities inside the HoK the consequences will be dire.
- Tardiness will be punished! Believe me, you don’t want to know what happens to people who bring items back after their due date.

The blind date incident

I joined my parents for dinner yesterday, well aware what that meant. See, an invitation to my parents’ house is never just that. It is always attached to them trying to finally get me a husband. Pretty much since I reached adulthood, they have been pestering me with their wish for a grandchild, and as the years went by, they decided to take matters in their own hand. Unfortunately, their taste in men isn’t always good (basically never, really).
Last night’s candidate was a perfect example for that. Let me give you the first impression I got: thin brown hair, waxy skin, bad posture, fidgeting, wearing a shirt with orange and white horizontal stripes that covered his slight belly and made a futile attempt at hiding his spindly legs. When he greeted me, he was so nervous, the words tumbled out of his mouth without clear order but a distinct stutter.
Not very impressive.
During dinner Hanian kept us “entertained” by telling us all about his work and how much there was of it and how little time he had to do it in. Interestingly enough, in all his anecdotes he came off as the poor hero while everyone else was just evil and out to get him. It soon became clear to me that he was fishing for complements with these stories. I don’t like people who think if they didn’t come to work every day, the world would end. Ordinarily, I would have told Hanian this in no uncertain terms, but out of respect towards my parents I merely nodded politely and swallowed all sarcastic comments with the food.
I really had every intention of sitting through dinner nice and polite, but then Hanian said something that burst through my resolve. I couldn’t help but snicker and once the dam was broken, all was lost. I broke out in peals of laughter, followed by, “Do you own a mirror?”
The rest of dinner was spent in uncomfortable silence only broken by my mothers desperate attempts to draw Hanian out of his moping. He left right after dessert and my mother spend the rest of my visit – which I kept short – with complaining about my behavior. Well, I am not sorry.
Honestly, what would you have said when someone like Hanian tells you (without trying to be funny, I might add), “I’ve got these new sunglasses. They are brown with large glasses. I took them off before I arrived here though. I didn’t want you to think I was a secret agent or something.”

memory stones in heat

Knobblyville is currently in the claws of a heat wave, but at least my workspace is always nice and cool. Apart from my personal preferences, this has a very important reason: while the books in my collection don’t care whether it’s hot or cold, the memory stones react very badly to heat. They tend to get instable if they heat up and it might come to the point where they explode. Not something you’d want to happen in a HoK.
As I was musing about that yesterday, an Imp came running into the library and straight towards my reference desk. She was carrying a memory stone without a protective chase. I sprang from my chair and headed towards her: “What do you think you’re doing. Carrying a stone without case and in this heat!”
“You have to help me! The stone is instable and I can’t cool it down and this was the nearest place I could reach. I think it’s going to explode,” the student answered hysterically as she hurried nearer.
My gaze went back to the stone she was carrying and saw immediately that it was too late; the stone would explode within seconds. My assistant was coming towards us from the shelves so I screamed at him to weave a protection screen around the student while I hurriedly drew up all my strength to form a protective bubble strong enough to hold the escaping magic.
The enormous wave of magic exploding out of the level 3 stone hit the student and ripped her off her feet. When the free energy slammed into my shield, I could feel my power draining out of me, but the bubble held.
Once the outward momentum of the magic was gone, it was relatively easy to put the magic into a newly created stone, that I put into my pocket.
A look around confirmed my suspicion that my assistant had gone down as well. The magic wave had to have been too much for him to hold off the student completely. I knelt down by the student and scanned her body with my magic. Thankfully, she was just unconscious, no bigger damage had been done to her brain.
The Imp opened her eyes and I asked her, “Are you alright?”
When she nodded I let out my frustration. “What in the name of all the gods were you thinking? DON’T EVER BRING AN UNSTABLE MEMORY STONE INTO A HOUSE OF KNOWLEDGE. You could have started a horrific chain reaction. Do you have any idea how much magic you could have set free? The whole city could have died of a brain fry!”
“I… I didn’t know what to do…” whimpered the imp.
That was the moment I decided it was high time that I came up with a new compulsory tutorial for all HoK patrons. I intent to install it ASAP, before some idiot actually does blow up the whole city.

teaching shelving awareness

I’ll give you a valuable tip: when in my House of Knowledge, do not, under any circumstances, mess with my system! It could end badly for you. There are huge, big signs scattered around the library that tell the avid reader to always put memory stones and books back exactly where they found them. They even include the helpful aside that you should just leave the stones/books on a worktable if you’re not sure where to put it.
When I made these signs I was under the impression that every student coming to this HoK would read and understand these few simple words. What a naïve thing to think, honestly. I should have known that most imps are under the impression that signs are there merely for decoration purposes.
Since those naïve days I have evolved and developed a system that teaches students the whole putting back thing quite effectively.
In the beginning I developed a spell that would find any misplaced books or stones, so I – or one of my assistants – could put it back where it belonged. Apart from showing me how many incompetent imps there are, this didn’t help resolve the problem, though.
I decided that the first step to my goal was to find a way of identifying those misplacers. I developed a spell that would track the fingerprints of the last imp to touch a misplaced stone or book, linking the punishing spell to the imp in question. Ingenious little trick, even if I say so myself.
Now to the grand finale. I came up with just the perfect punishing spell. Inspired by human Greek mythology – Sisyphus to be exact – I send the offenders a nightmare in which they have to shelve memory stones over and over and over again. The whole time the imps are aware that they are dreaming and that their experience is courtesy of me.
Second time offenders are very, very rare.

the toilet incident

Alright, I admit, it’s not nice to take my frustration out on an innocent student. But then, who ever said I was nice?
For the fifth time today, a young Imp came to my desk and interrupted my work (reading the newest bestseller I had acquired for the library – purely to be able to index it correctly, of course) only to ask me where the toilets are. Honestly, couldn’t they just use their magic to find the way or something?
So I explained to him how to get there – after all being helpful is my job – in such a roundabout manner that it would take him ages to actually get there. And because it’s no fun to send someone on a scenic tour through the library without watching, I followed his journey with my magic mirror.
In the beginning he looked still fine, but by the time he rounded the fourth corner and there was still no toilet in sight, he started to walk a bit funny. Two corners later he started to hobbly-run. He then took a wrong turn, not that he would know, considering that he was probably totally lost already, and I decided to step in before he peed on my beautiful carpet.
With a broad smile on my face – cause my mood had picked up significantly in the meantime – I went to him and helpfully showed him directly to the toilet.
See, I can be nice ... sort of.