Dollhouse room

The Dollhouse room is a room in the current Harbor on the Starless Sea. It once contained an extensive, collaborative world with a dollhouse at its core, but the room was lost in a fire. A full-scale recreation of the dollhouse room exists in Zachary's afterlife.

Before the fire
The dollhouse room contained a large number of buildings and other objects intended to represent a miniature universe. At its core was a dollhouse which could open and expand with a lock and key, although it was generally kept closed. A family of dolls "lived' inside the house.

Around the original dollhouse were more houses, a landscape made of stacks of books, folded paper birds, and a variety of other objects. Many of these were made with found objects such as thimbles, matchsticks, or buttons.

The arrangement of the dollhouse room constantly changed, as visitors played with, repaired, or added to the contents.

History
The dollhouse room began with a single dollhouse in a room in the Harbor. The specific origin of the dollhouse is not known, although presumably it was put there either by the children who played with it, or after they were grown.

As time went on, visitors to the Harbor added areas around the dollhouse, including a landscape, other houses, and other dolls. Some visitors interacted with the dollhouse room very little, but others spent extensive time there, constructing new environments and narratives around the people who lived there.

Analysis
The dollhouse room represents the apex of culture and life in the Harbor. It is an ongoing creative endeavor, shared by all those who came to the Harbor, ever-changing and adapting. It exists for no purpose other than to be, and to tell stories.

The destruction of the dollhouse room, in turn, parallels the decline of the Harbor. In a sense, the dollhouse room "died," and perhaps that explains how it could appear in Zachary's afterlife.