The Mess

 "Come, my friends,
 'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
 Push off, and sitting well in order smite
 The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
 To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
 Of all the western stars, until I die."

 --'Ulysses' by Alfred Lord Tennyson

[Adapted from the webpage]

It is most unusual for Puzzlebox to display artistic ambitions. Only once has it displayed a sense that its construction meant anything to its inhabitants. Only once has it expressed a sense of style. The result is now known as "the Mess."

The Mess was named by its discoverers, who failed at first to recognize anything but uncharacteristic disorder in it. The area is like nothing Puzzlebox has ever extruded before. Instead of hospitable but empty seed-worlds, the Mess came prepared with cities, buildings, rooms, even furniture. There are signs of civilization, though no being had ever lived there. The architecture references cultures long forgotten, and some that only existed in stories. Clearly, Puzzlebox had a point to make. It was as if it had recognized its inhabitants' need for mental stimulation, and created an environment optimized for nothing but.

The Mess is divided into six Warps, which are linked together by a centralized transit system, as well as by Parks, Zipways, and innumerable secret and less secret passages. The topology of these interwarp connections, and the warps themselves, are laid out in a highly nonrational manner that defies attempts at two- or even three-dimensional cartography.

Theories

• Puzzlebox is insane, but [she] contains that insanity to the Mess.
• The Mess is designed to kickstart sentients into transcendence.
• Puzzlebox uses the Mess as a scratchboard/sketchboard, thus its fickle laws. The Mess is just a preview of what will come next.
• Puzzlebox finally got bored and created the Mess to provide an contrast to the unending sameness.
• Puzzlebox is an inscrutable Goddess, Her ways are not to be questioned.
• The Mess was created just to enable the Museum as part of a project to defeat entropy itself.
• The Mess is a prototype of the Museum. Or perhaps it's the other way around.
• Puzzlebox created the Mess as a way of expressing its love for all who wouldn't fit in anywhere less remarkable.
• The Mess hasn't been created yet, but it's creation, when it occurs, will transcend causality. The Puzzlebox did/is/will not create/ing it.
• Puzzlebox created The Mess as a playground for the mind, body, and soul, with the intention of appealing to every possible taste.
• The Mess is where Puzzlebox guides those She watches over a little more directly. That includes the worlds themselves.
• Puzzlebox is only a year or two old, but its history and future are happening in fits and starts, growing in both directions from its time of origin.
• The Mess has undergone huge upheavals in the past wherein the warps changed places. Up's physical structure and social order crumbled to become Down. Down blossomed into Top. Top mutated into Strange. Strange was healed and became Charm. (Call it Worlds In Collision, PB-style.)

I love this idea, and if there's enough sentiment to make it canonical and ongoing, I'd be fine with that. It reminds me of the cyclical elemental offices of the Invisible College... Given the Bottomish version of the Strangemyth?, how about if Strange "got over itself" and became Bottom, Bottom blissed out and became Charm, and Charm mechanized itself straight into Up? Perhaps the cycles themselves go through cycles -- every permutation of transformation is played out at some point, and after they're all finished, the whole Mess goes through another even weirder rebirth?

• Puzzlebox is the result of another historical timeline's infection by some kind of hypersentient oneirochronic symbiote. The inhabitants perceive their lives, now, as the Puzzlebox world, but they have "already" lived their lives in another form. This symbiosis is mutualistic and benevolent, but of questionable consensuality; if the infection is purged, somehow, the Mess will revert to being a very, very dull Terran city of the late American Era.