so last night, before falling asleep, we (Rose, mostly, I think?) had some kind of dream-idea-worldbuilding-vision-thing

a big pointy castle on a hill, like something out of a gothic horror thing, but the whole thing is a mechanism of unknown purpose that's been there for as long as anyone can remember

most of it is broken, except that maybe it's not because some of the things it does do stop working if you try to fix an apparently completely unrelated part of it

people working with it have figured out what some of it does and how to use it, but some of the things that it does are really difficult to even realize that it's doing them, like retroactively making small changes to history (like making it so that you were wearing a hat all day yesterday or something)

the north half of it is pretty much entirely unexplored, because no one has figured out how to get it to let you into the northwest wing and the northeast wing is as far as anyone can tell just an ordinary dilapidated castle except for the fact that random things in the south half stop working if you try to repair or replace any of the disintegrating furniture or crumbling walls

no one working with it is quite sure they were always the species they currently are. they *were* always that species, they have photographs and family history to prove it, but they might not have been always that species when they found the thing

-F/R