Another long-term idea...

[IamLEAM1983]

What if the mortal plane's inhabitants are someone else's own idea of the Others?

George owes his powers to the Architect having anointed him with the task of standing up against the Void Weavers. He's essentially using a benevolent, but no longer active creative instance's own laws of physics in an alien universe (Hope's), thanks to God and the Architect having reached an agreement. That, however, means that the Architect used to have a Creation all his own, and eventually found a graceful and dignified way of pulling the curtain on it. The thing is, the material he created stuck to him and possibly "infected" George to a degree. It's not harmful or anything, but it means the Toymaker's unconsciously propagating tiny, minuscule pockets of some long-terminated reality. He doesn't know it, but his best creations are teeming with little arcane bubbles - essentially microscopic universes born out of tiny chunks of the Architect's old rules.

Sometimes, and out of some sort of arcane or Eldritch interplay he doesn't fully understand, George's works break down or fail to work as intended. What he doesn't know is that there's entire civilizations living in the nooks and crannies of some of his music boxes - and they take after the environment they're born in. Gammell sometimes jokingly says there's gemlins in some of his failed works - but he doesn't know how right he is. Yet.

On a much smaller scale, there's an entire world hidden away in a small corner of one of George's proudest pieces - a clock he's built for himself as a bit of a hobby. Tucked away in that microverse, there's a society based on mercenary scientific advancement and self-interest - as selfish and lacking in awareness as you'd expect gremlins to be. One of their researchers is a maligned multidisciplinary scientist, and he's convinced there's something beyond their world. Time scales being different, centuries down there pass in minutes in the manifest world - with the rare instances of George exposing the World-Cog, as they call it, to the light of the outside world being reserved for rare tune-ups. Whenever that happens, the scientifically-inclined grab their tools, the religious ones fall to their knees and the already-unhinged lose their minds. They're as afraid of us as we're afraid of the Others - but Lionel Haversham isn't like the rest of his peers. He'll pierce the veil and see what the Outer Beings see - even if he has to die to make it work. If he pulls it off, maybe he'll finally get some respect and a good chunk of grant money. Or hopefully just a lot of money for his personal use, preferably directly from the king's coffers...

Culturally, gremlins are told to fear whatever's beyond the World-Cog's boundaries. They know enough to suspect time dilation is at play, so exploring what passes for "outer space" comes across as suicidal for them. It's hampered a lot of their cultural progress, locking them in a kind of permanent Industrial boom. There's thick smog spreading across the World-Cog, but it's barely perceptible from a human scale. Seas are bits of condensation sticking to the World-Cog's sides, tiny drops of water on a human scale, and you need an electron microscope to even guess at the grid-work of their metropolises and cities.

So what happens if you suddenly manage to exist on a human scale and end up with previously godly or Eldritch figures that are suddenly ordinary as all Hell? Or, if you want to look at it in the reverse order, what happens when you suddenly start existing on the same level as your fabled deities - and their abilities start making a disappointingly mundane amount of sense?