Dream Engineering

I was having a fairly standard dream. Tyrion Lannister is on the run from some King's Guard jerks while his squire is disguised as a Vestal virgin, but the guards hear someone might be hiding in the virgins' ranks, so the priests line them up in short skirts so that a man with a cross literally built around his loins to prevent them from stirring or whatever is allowed to hobble past and guess if they're actually women by the sight of their legs, since no one else is allowed to see any more. Normal stuff, right?

The squire passes inspection (I think the cross guy let him pass because he took pity on him), and he sneaks off to try and find Tyrion who has become completely lost in a labyrinthine palace. Before he can find his master though, a stranger appears and pushes Tyrion through a secret door just before some guards come around the corner. This door, it turns out, leads to the secret sanctum of a steam-punk order that's been hiding from the rest of Westeros for decades.

The most prominent object in their collection of doodads is what I remember best, though alas not well enough to reconstruct. Imagine a loom whose pattern is "programmable". By tying the strings that raise the  heddles to various overhead gears powered by a crank, the order of  of their activation is determined. However, instead of the heddles lifting and lowering the warp threads, they shifted plates to create a track along which an arm traveled. Attached to the arm was a feather quill. In short, it was a purely mechanical handwriting printer.

After that, I kind of ignored the rest of the stuff with Tyrion. I'm sure the stranger introduced himself or something, but I was just staring at the gorgeous machine before me. The dream then shifted into the far future where the machine had been placed into a museum, and my sister promised to let me play with it for the rest of the day if I helped her give a tour to a group of rambunctious children.

I did my duty, but did I get to spend an afternoon programming the machine as promised? No! I got to turn the crank one measly time before some emergency with swords and cultural insensitivity got in the way.