<div align="center"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 24pt;">~:The Hatter's Hovel:~</span></span></div><br/><div align="center"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: georgia;">Take six fair-sized mansions, of varying ages and states of decrepitude. Drop them all from the sky, one atop another, until the resulting wreckage is almost but not quite twice the height of any of the originals. Fix the place up, put doors, windows and staircases between and among the haphazard rooms until virtually all of the tortured floorplan can be accessed, though the routes be hazardous and circuitous. Then let the whole thing age as gracefully as a vain dowager countess, under the careful caress of constant bitter rains and the stinking heat of summer. You've a beginning, then, toward the Hatter's Hovel, though that of course is not by any means the way it actually came about.<br/><br/>For any form of suffering there is a room, at least one, and even Hatter doesn't know all of them. There are just as many forms of pleasure, of course, and if you tally up the two lists you'll find they're exactly the same. Dig into the piles of detritus, human and otherwise, that tend to accumulate in corners and crevices and you can find anything you might need, if you have the time to spare. It will never be exactly what you want, though. The Hatter is a collector, a provider, a dealer in things that want to be owned. Where he gets these items is unknown. Where he stores them is clearly evident -- piled up to the rotting ceiling, forming a living maze of depression.<br/><br/>A large ornate entry hall where the Hatter receives visitors. A set of expansive overgrown gardens where the flowers are all either just about to bloom or long since dead, with no in-between at all. A greenhouse full of nothing but bones arranged by genus and species, and a library overgrown with ivy fed from leaking rusted pipes. In the distance can be heard the barking and keening of mad dogs -- the way to the kennels has been lost for some time, and the poor creatures must be quite hungry by now.<br/><br/>It is a crumbling manse that seems supported by scraps of wishful thinking, the bricks mortared by their apathy and indifference to collapse. The attics are flooded, the basements are infested, and the things that cannot be found within ought probably not to be looked for in the first place. It is a bleak, rotting place that shouldn't rightly exist, and in any more sane place and time it would not.<br/></span></div>