The Joy of Extradimensional Spaces, or Beauty and the Mimic

The team ventures through the glimmering doorway and step from Candlekeep into a mansion floating in an empty purple miasma. Within, they meet and greet a somewhat frazzled Matreous who is relieved to see the team as well as the book. He managed to open the portal to Fistandia's mansion after noticing the same command in the Joy of Extradimensional Spaces, but leaving the book behind like a dummy, he did not know the command word to reopen the portal when it closed behind him. 

He's been searching around the mansion (Fistandia is not present and Matreous is curious) and shows the players a small statue of an imp that he believes has magical properties. He needs to go back to Candlekeep ("I can work better from the library"), but asks if the team would be interested in looting exploring the mansion while he keeps the portal open on the other end. The teams agrees, but when Matreous steps through the portal they hear him shriek and the portal closes before they can esccape. Talk about escape rooms!

During their exploration the team encounter: 

• Two pleasant homunculi, Cumin and Coriander  who feed the team delicious food, happy to be of service once again to people with stomachs; (and sadly, Cumin was later eaten itself, so Coriander will have to now cook alone) 
• A chair that tries to eat Tybalt and is fought off by Reginald. Nox managed to land a savage attack but forgot his shil·le·lagh and did no damage.
• A swarm of flying books that Luocious manages to sharpshoot with his crossbow and were damaged by Gudetama's vicious mockery (who says books don't have feelings?) 

Swarm of Books

• An animated and very protective chained library--which the characters destroyed! Eventually. But Reggie was able to walk off with a nice new +2 mace in the form of a book-on-a-chain
• And lots of cats. They especially liked Nox  
• Two flying swords (which they out-dueled--if you've seen raw duel between Wesley and Inigio Montoya it was somewhat like that), a quasit / toad (that did not attack as the team  as they did not approach -- a narrow miss!)
• a Slaad tadpole narrowly NOT missed as Reggie decided it must die, which was supported by several animate clawed hands that unscrewed their jar and proceeded to scratch and make rude gestures to the team before they were handily dispatched. The team did, however, get a potion of healing out of this encounter (they looted it from among all the other jars and and glass vessels scattered throughout the menagerie).

Throughout their adventures, a few players (looking at you Tybalt and Luocious) felt like it would be easy to liberate a few items along the way. This keen observational interest did lead the team to discover several books in different rooms that together provided the solution to discovering the word of power to re-open the portal back to Candlekeep [word redacted here so newbs have to figure it out for themselves]. 

Sadly when they returned, they were met with a dead Matreous, and yet another inanimate creature come to life (the same imp in fact as the one Matreous walked out with, and the same one that did him in). The characters quickly dispatch it and it disappears into the ether. Even sadder, all the loot (besides the dead limb from the enlivened library) also disappear as they magically return to Fistandia's mansion (one must wonder why she created so many protections if they'd just return upon exiting?) Perhaps when and if the team meets Fistandia, after explaining how they got Cinnamon (or whatever its name was) killed, they can ask her.

The team are met at this time by Miss Hollypocket, a no-nonsense halfling who is the red-right hand of Janussi, Candlekeep's Keeper of the Tomes. She is curious about why the adventurers have now been discovered now with a dead body and a suspicious alibi but seems to believe their explanation. Noting that the team seems to be at least somewhat adept (at least at finding books) she asks the team if they'd be willing to look into two book-related attacks in the Great Library.