the unwinding

[groundrules]

Heya! Let loose for Serthica’s Unwinding — our event spanning 24 September-15 October that doubles as a test drive.

This round’s test drive participants do not require an invite to apply. Applications open over 8-14 October. Enjoy!

THE UNWINDING

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TEST DRIVE TOURISTS | OLD TIMERS | DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE
SPILL THE TEA | DRIP BY DRIP | ALL A DREA —

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✘ NEWCOMERS | BARRELING IN

Soaring seagulls and splintered silence. You awaken on the shoreline of steampunk citadel Clockwork Serthica, recovered by the irritable witch Karsa.

She shares translation and communication devices, scarce healing and a rapid briefing: you have reached a world where undead forces seek to weaponise you in their battle for dominion. Karsa’s employer, the Merchant leads travel to beacons meant to return you home.

Other otherworlders have already infiltrated Serthica. Karsa steers newcomers into the impoverished underworld of the Mouse House, to board a rickety coal train serving the citadel.

■ Silver tongues can win you passage.

■ ...alternatively, hide in the obscenely large whiskey barrels the train also smuggles in.

■ Mid-voyage, the train quakes, slamming you into walls and windows. Around you, the stench of bleach, the warm crackle of embers and static magic that builds thick, nearly electric.

You feel faint and fainter, when you overhear Karsa’s murmured, “It’s too early” — “find” — “find” — “it’s like a drea” — “don’t unwind” — “all child’s play.”

And then you’re U n w i n d i n g.

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✘ OLD TIMERS | INHALE-EXHALE

Eidris, Minaras, the Neutral Zone: all abuzz with residential whispers of imminent Unwinding — an annual fixture natives dread without fully remembering.

■ In the two days leading to the Unwinding, characters struggle to tell apart or remember the physical features of natives.

■ Some locals steal you into dark alleys, where they become suddenly stiff, emitting a rusty, guttural Ke-ke-ke sound. They do not recall this after.

The Unwinding kicks off at 6am, when both Eidris and Minaras are overground. Jim Kirk’s fixed music box begins to play, its chipper rural tune overtaking your thoughts: “Up the mountain, in the grove, hand in hand to Ke-ke-ke — Ke-Waihu, fresh harvest’s a treasure trove, each fall we feast anew.”

Earth shatters seismically underfoot, magic depletes, the citadel’s clock tower strikes 6:00 — and an urgent communication from the Merchant is interrupted by static, “You can we-we-we-…-stand it, the white man come — remembrrrrrrrrrrrr live, you are alive, do not be convinsssss —ssss — ssssd otherwisssssss —”

But you’re already U n w i n d i n g.

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✘ DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

Down and down, you tumble, Alice — through a cavernous tunnel that widens and chokes arbitrarily. Sometimes you float and fly, sometimes you’re thrust sideways. Mostly, you keep falling.

■ Beware objects falling into you: from grand pianos to mystical balls of fire, stray beds, love letters and sharp-pointed weapons. Even a blood-spattered umbrella that shields against anything.

■ You’re dropped unceremoniously into an underground lair, as items keep falling down. Unclaimed, they disappear within minutes. Three jackalopes smoking opiate pipes point you indifferently towards a locked door. On its handle sit a bone dice and a note instructing, ROLL FOUR TO OPEN.

■ The dice can only be thrown every 10 minutes and feels too monstrously heavy to lift otherwise. Each roll makes the effect of the previous throw disappear. If you get:

one: gravity fades, the dice floats out of reach. ( The jackalopes enjoy the breeze. )

two: the floor, barring a few narrow steps at great jumping distance, is lava. ( The jackalopes check ‘hell’ off their vacation list.)

three: an irked dragon coils beside you. (The jackalopes prepare to tan.)

five: the thrower grows and grows and grows, until they must contort creatively to fit inside. ( The jackalopes charge rent. )

six: the room fills with water that nearly reaches the ceiling. (The jackalopes are competitive swimmers.)

seven: everything about your companion irritates you. They even breathe wrong. ( The jackalopes find this awkward. )

eight: The floor slowly expands into quicksand. ( The jackalopes hoverboard. )

■ Roll four and the door creaks merrily open. A second note slips loose, I’m sorry. Head in, your newfound possessions abandoned — and keep U n w i n d i n g.

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✘ SPILL THE TEA

You wake, dressed to the steampunk nines, at a tea party, alongside a companion and a slew of eerie guests: cog droids, faceless people and animated human-sized burlap mannequins. You only hear static and white noise when they speak.

When you leave the table, a fox butler passes you the empty kettle, asking you to, ”Make tea and finish here”.

■ You’re inevitably stuck in a decrepit dollhouse. Heavily boarded doors and windows ultimately open to show plague sickness in the streets. The fox butler closes them, reminding, ”He’ll make it go away.”

■ Travel a corridor of repeating rooms to reach the kitchens, and don’t dally. Every time the clock strikes a new hour, the partygoers grab their sharpest knife and stalk down the house to pursue you. The frenzy lasts 10 minutes before they return to their seats — barricade in deserted rooms, hide behind curtains or climb up the chimney…

■ For tea, the mannequin cook directs you to retrieve juniper and rosemary leaves from the greenhouse, where plant tendrils try to trap you, leaving marks of mould; rescue the milk container from a cat that’s running on the crumbling staircase, and sugar from a dish in the lavish nursery room, where ghostly hands might seek to drag you into walls and send you back down the rabbit hole.

■ Supplied, the huffing burlap cook prepares tea. Just as you’re about to taste the black brew at the party table, a man in white takes and spills your tea out in a plant pot. You only hear, ”You don’t need this yet” — before you’re U n w i n d i ng.

■ On exiting the Unwinding, your pockets burst with plants or leaves of juniper and rosemary. They can alleviate McCoy’s sickness.

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✘ DRIP BY DRIP

You wake up in bloodied clothes in a filled bathtub. You are hounded by urgency, as if you’re hunted. The unease never wanes, as you gather your bearings and join the bustling city streets, armed with a blood-spattered white umbrella. In your pocket, two paper notes: CHILDREN LIE and WHAT IS HIS NAME?(

Your memories are confused: half of you is certain you are a content citizen of Serthica. The other riots that you don’t belong. An excruciating migraine strikes when you try to remember how you arrived here.

Gravity’s a loose concept: you walk, or you float. The city is either perfectly still, or inundated with the screeching of hearses and criers. Locals — all faceless, or man-sized burlap mannequins — mill busily, despite the forlorn rain.

■ Hold on to your umbrella: linger uncovered in the rain, and your facial features slowly fade, while you desperately try to convince your teammate that you should stay here forever. You recover once dry.

■ The inhuman locals grow increasingly more hostile with time: carriages want to run you over, friendly burlap shopkeepers push you into a ditch. They chase if you ask their name.

■ Happily, this world is vulnerable to your desires: wish gravity undone, and you can walk on walls. Think a river into being, and it bursts ahead. Imagine buildings, and they pop up. Playing God comes at a price of bad luck: the staircase you envisage thins and breaks just as you cross it, your knife rusts after the first swing.

■ Your pursuers abandon you, when you reach a deserted marketplace and encounter a drenched, battered boy wearing a fox mask. He is playing with paper boats in the middle of a large black puddle. You feel deep and building hatred for him.

■ Seeing you, the child mentions one of you previously tried to kill him. He offers his name, in exchange for your umbrella:

a. Refuse or dally, and dark hands rise out of the puddle to pull you and your partner in, scratching you bloody. The last thing you see, before you wake up in the bathtub again (or out of the Unwinding), is a man in white who collects your umbrella. He holds it over the child, scolding, ”Did you forget again? This one never hurt you.”

b. To surrender the umbrella, step on the paper boats as you cross the puddle to the boy. Walking straight on water feels like stepping on knives. The child accepts your umbrella, whispering his name is ”Hyang-Won”, before you start to fade out of the Unwinding.

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✘ IT WAS ALL A DREA —

New or old, as the Unwinding ends, you wake up in Ma’am Mariol’s modest orphanage in the Mouse House. Mariol, the orphans and Serthica at large recall nothing about the Unwinding. Karsa, who dragged you in, is pale and exhausted, her memory patchy. She urges everyone to recuperate before heading back overground.

■ Your body shows only a fraction of any damage sustained in the Unwinding.

■ Ma’am Mariol’s labyrinthine home offers limited accommodations: share beds, floors, and household chores, while the orphans led by curious Gavroche, peer in.

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NOTES

■ You can make network posts outside of the Unwinding.

■ Feel free to mark if you're a test drive tourist or an old timer in your top level!

■ The Unwinding is a shifting of realities not a dreamscape.

■ You can opt out of the Unwinding by keeping characters in the Mouse House. Here, nothing seems amiss.

■ QUESTIONS!

Comments

[downswing]

( ...she evacuates too swiftly. This, then, is the excuse of it — why a door creaks reedy and open in hefty increments, and Lan Wangji, ten minutes savaged by swarming, red riotous on his silks, turns Bichen's pallor to her neck. Instinct, then control: the blade, surging from Wen Qing's left, does not graze skin, lest she steers herself into the press, lest impulse guides her.

He wonders, briefly, viscera scattered on the turn of his sleeves, if she is beautiful under dappled light, young in a house of dust and makeshift silence. A level below, glimpsed down the stairwell, guests retreat to their table like marshalling legions, ungainly while they learn their drills. One neglects to recover the blade, thrust neatly in tapestry. It catches the light, sheen oily.

Upstairs, a string of closed, carved doors, each fortress or prison. Better they keep to where they have refuge for when next the diners resume their hunt.

He lowers Bichen. )

Apologies. ( A trinket of courtesy, mouth dry. ) We should fetter them within their hall room.

( Better the murderers are enclosed, than that Lan Wangji and Wen Qing should take cover repeatedly. )

[silverneedles]

[ An immediate recoil, the fear of a sword at her throat an instinctive one. Even in capable, steady hands, doubt remains: a single slip, a stray thought, and then her throat cut. She's seen too much of that before her time, in the castle of a madman.

Below, the guests return to the table, and she breathes, a steady release, firm even in fear. No trembling hands on her as she glares at Lan Wangji. ]

Stop wasting time, then. [ If they're going to trap these guests in their hall, then, by all means, start now. ]

[downswing]

( Wasting time. But of course, he bides it. Withdraws Bichen's wintered blade in slow gasps of her heft, cutting air — and shifting obediently down. Not yet fettered, but waiting, a silent widow maker.

Below, deathly pitter-patter, hard press of heels. The skidding. When they've settled, he starts like wisps of phantasm, prepared to haunt, only lancing with his gaze fleeting: )

Less taut. ( A nod to Wen Qing's hand, the knife's grip. ) For long slaughter, strain lands on the wrist.

( Trust a man born, bred and bathed in carnage: the clasp defines the push and pull and cost of downswing. The odds of recovering balance after, the footwork to steady or stir.

But he does not linger. They have moments, down the creaking staircase, where maggots and shadows and dust debris bind in matrimony. He keeps pace, so she might follow him — aunt to his child, pain sister to Wei Ying. It strikes him, once he's reached the stair's end: )

Mistress Wen. Are you armed to set them to long sleep without injury?

( There are ways for a healer to sedate extensively, for all he knows she lacks in herbs, in brews, in ingredients. )

[silverneedles]

[ The blade of the sword withdraws but the weight lingers; she watches Lan Wangji, careful now with how she moves. She trusted him to cut scales from her back, but she's not sure how she trusts him now.

Still, with direction, she loosens her grip, and follows, obedient in this, the disciple following their master. In this, she does trust his expertise.

The stairs creak but no one stirs, and the breath in her chest loosens. Even the question is easier to handle now. ]

I have my needles.

[ She'll have to leave them behind, in the heads of these guests, but they're replaceable, and she has a stash, now. ]

[downswing]

( The needles, slips and slivers of moonlight, paltry nothings. Too thin. Serviceable, yet he suspects there is no place for a clean diversion that will allow Wen Qing her work, to drift from one patient unto the next without screams or disaster. )

How long, to rest each man asleep?

( He suspects, for all she is swift and sharp and serpentine, for all the density of guests is thick as they huddle before their tea cups — however learned her hand, Wen Ruohan erred: she is no assassin. She will require time Lan Wangji cannot bide her.

So, then. Her needles, Bichen lingered close. The state of sullen dark, rusting in nooks and corners, seeping like flooding wet. Everywhere, reeking of old and stale and damp, and when he walks by the windows, searching light behind panels —

He wrenches back. )

Here, madness. In the streets, sickness. ( There is no end in sight, no epilogue to chaos. ) We must flee.

[silverneedles]

From approach to sleep, two to five minutes. [ Maybe less, but she can never tell. ] There is a chance it will prove ineffective on some of them.

[ A risk, but one they need to take; the revelers sit at the table, the cause of their madness unknown. They walk, quiet and assured until Lan Wangji opens a curtain. ]

We do not know the connection between the madness here and the sickness. [ Connected, most likely; if no disease lingers here, then madness from being trapped. ] Make tea, the fox said. Then we leave.

[ And she turns away to stab one of the guests in the head, the needle disappearing into his skull. None of the partygoers notice; the injured party continues laughing along to a comment, until he slumps over. ]

[downswing]

( Make tea. As if they are husband and wife, and these are their marriage rites. He suspects, more fool the man whose malady of arrogance misunderstands mistress Wen as a demure bowed-back bride. More fool, he who does not test what brew she sets before him with silver, for clouding.

But then, he maligns her unjustly. Of all the weapons at her disposal, she has shown little appetite for poison.

The corridor's a wide wound, gaping like a gutting. Black and shadow spew in, crawl on his step. He feels, foolishly, the compulsion to search beside or behind himself, for her. She is not his child.

Yet, innocent, in the ways of Sizhui. His eyes, his chin. Blood of the nightless blood.

When they reach the kitchens, he pauses, paralysed by stupor. Ahead, the cook's all sketched lines, a silhouette. And her skin — )

...burlap, again. ( And murmured, to Wen Qing: ) Mistress. Can curse or malaise reduce flesh to such coarseness?

( Perhaps... there is a natural explanation for this. One Lan Wangji is distinctly unable to fathom. )

[silverneedles]

[ She follows in his footsteps, trusting a Lan enough to know he would not let harm come. She's bared her back to this man, the most any man has seen of her, but the gulf between them still feels wide, an ocean current crashing up against their walls.

And so she remains ready with a needle in her hand anyway.

The kitchen brings some relief; away from the party-goers, at least, although there is nothing to say if they will be chased here. But relief is mild, when the cook is but a shadow, a— ]

A puppet. [ softly whispered, and she draws closer. But no, that's not even entirely right. No mortal puppet, like the resentful dead. ] No curse I know of, no malaise. Not that coarse.

[ Is this odder than the guests trying to murder them? Or part of the same? ] Did you see if any of the party-goers were like this?

[downswing]

( No curse, no malady. No long black flowers of mould, no tendrils of decay. He watches the world that's laid itself at their feet, their fingertips, how it's woven from brisk layer of artistry, of artifice, of something brittle and curse-born, of magic done.

...and gone, when he slips his fingers on the frayed ends of the cook's apron, in her passing, and finds it rotten with dust, burdened by erosion. Whatever stirs these creatures to play house cannot sustain them to the full spectacle of human likeness.

Asked, he remembers: the table, the crowded arrangement of faceless creatures, more burlap. As if — )

They were as dolls. Or absent features. ( They could be anyone, and they could be nightmare, and in the white of their barren nothingness, all featureless faces scream. ) Mistress. Tea, and you flee. Exorcism after.

( His work, to what little outcome. When he speaks next, it's to the cook in slow barter: he asks for instructions. She ignores him, first. Scoffs, after. Finally, ending a terse negotiation of impatient sighs, she concedes: there, the greenhouse. Tea in pots.

Turning his head, he barely sees a glimpse of bright blinding light, and hues of green, and he is not himself, reaching for Wen Qing's wrist — only a silhouette, possessed of Wei Ying's brazen rashness. )

By your leave? ( But they must. )

[silverneedles]

I flee? [ It's sensible. She's a doctor and a cultivator and eldest daughter; she knows the rites and knows how to perform an exorcism, in the most general sense of things. But Lan Wangji is trained and experienced; even when she had been alive, he was one of the best. In the years since then, his power and experience have surely only grown.

But she doesn't like the thought of leaving him here. ] Do you think exorcism will help?

[ It will be done, even if futile, she thinks and looks away, a familiar sadness rising in her chest that she ignores. ]

If you must. [ Collect tea and then they can leave. The greenhouse, with plants; perhaps she can gather other things, to supplement the meager supply she has. ]

[downswing]

( An exorcist descended of a righteous clan that forged, then perfected, then decorated the art. He knows what is expected of him, the rite of talismans and the pretty paltry play of notes strident, like waters rippling, while the guqin negotiates truth, ache, sorcery and compulsion.

The dead speak for the Lan. In exorcism, they wail.

Will it work? He delivers them to the rust of the greenhouse, where plants crowd and braid on the walls, and the few flowers in bloom looks like gaping pale mouths. Pots, small and dainty, everywhere. No doubt holding seeds, fertilisers, debris. Leaves, and he nods for her to seek the jasmine, the rosemary, the juniper — while he settles, Bichen drawn, to wait at the door. )

I think you are aunt to my child. ( Blood of his absent blood, flesh of his failing flesh. ) Pledge of my pledge. Duty of my duty.

( That he stands before her, both saviour and penitent, a shield scratched but obliged to serve. That she must flee, else Sizhui and Wei Ying will not forgive them. )

I cannot relinquish you.