Artifector
The Artifectors were the Strange and Wonderful House's guild of inventors and mad scientists, who worked in the Laboratory.
Nature
Their inventions included various time-travel devices (PROSE: Our Strange and Wonderful House: The Lab) such as the Alarum, (PROSE: Our Strange and Wonderful House: The Lab: Setting The Alarum) “a prototype for an innovative bee-based mode of transport”, equipment for measuring “luck, rubber band elasticity and sense of humour”, unfinished blueprints for an anti-procrastination device, a Shiny Object Locator which had quickly been misplaced, various thinking caps. (PROSE: Our Strange and Wonderful House: The Lab) Their loose leader was Gravitcher, and, at one point, their youngest member was Renderblat. (PROSE: Our Strange and Wonderful House: The Lab: Setting The Alarum)
History
The Artifectors of the Laboratory of the Strange and Wonderful House also once tasked themselves with creating a Perpetual Motion Machine as a dare. They worked on it together in a rare show of cooperation, and the first prototype seemed functional, butit exploded in the face of lead Artifector Agrontus when he tried to solemnly switch it on. Gravitcher was appointed as the new lead artifector, with his first duty being to preside over the cremation of what few remains of Agrontus could be gathered. (PROSE: Our Strange and Wonderful House: The Lab: The Perpetual Motion Machine (Part 1))
However, now being confident that the idea could work in theory, the Artifectors continued studying various ways to implement it without blowing themselves up like Agrontus, such as running a network of wires around the House, “the first time in many years that any of them had seen any part of the House except for their own exclusive corner of it”, and creating a number of devices intended to siphon power from the House's network, one of which was later repurposed into a tea kettle. Eventually, they made it work at the cost of having to create a whole new tower and a permanent lightning storm. (PROSE: Our Strange and Wonderful House: The Lab: The Perpetual Motion Machine (Part 2)) The resulting machine had no other function than to go “ping-whoomp” every eight minutes, but was wisely left alone. (PROSE: Our Strange and Wonderful House: The Lab: The Perpetual Motion Machine (Part 1))
In the course of their activities, Housekeeping once burst in on the Laboratory and began cleaning it, much to the dismay of Gravitcher and his Artifectors. However, Spamblodgett tricked Lally, a member of Housekeeping, into the Alarum and sent her five minutes back in time, (PROSE: Our Strange and Wonderful House: The Lab: Setting The Alarum) altering the timeline so that the Artifectors had been warned of Housekeeping's impending arrival and locked and barricaded the door to prevent them coming in. (PROSE: Our Strange and Wonderful House: The Lab: The Alarum Goes Off) They sent an SOS to Elshanor, who made her way across the House to speak with the Housekeeping platoon, and convinced them to leave the Laboratory alone and go clean the Library instead, insisting that it was extremely dusty. (PROSE: Our Strange and Wonderful House: Heebie Jeebies)
