Gnome

Greedy Minds
Sometimes a gremlin will not just steal parts but also try to put together what they have stolen. They will devise a way to read the notes and books they at first stole simply to deprive, They will fit the components they have captured into one another. Over time they will begin to develop a spark of innovation and understanding of its significance. As this spark grows their thefts will turn to schematics, books of learning, they will lurk in crevices of lecture halls and scholar’s offices, they will ransack the libraries and laboratories and archives. They will seek out the brilliant and the innovative so they can steal their secrets. And finally their jealousy will drive them to interrogate and murder the harbingers of genius and innovation.

The gremlin has finally graduated to become a gnome, they are still about the size of a large rat, they are still hairless and boneless but they stand upright more often, they wear clothes and accouterments that they deem makes them akin to the paragons of innovation they seek out and murder. They begin to build new things or stolen designs or theories, they build whatever they can, they steal to further their ambitions. Sometimes they construct terrible devices, other times they end in a blaze of cataclysmic accident. Many a gnome has discovered nitroglycerin, very few survive doing so. As they age and survive by luck or skill the dangers of experiments their desire grows more refined and they may even engender to correspondences in order to locate innovators in seclusion, seek them out, and ransack them for more knowledge and secrets.

Gnomes will read every book in a library, then burn it to the ground. They will interview poets for their technique and then murder them and befoul every copy of their work.

Gnomes are just as jealous as gremlins, but they have moved beyond mere things and to the ideas that underpin them. A gremlin may yearn to steal your most precious or vital trinkets. But a gnome wants to steal your knowledge from the world.