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

[twelfthsong]

Oh you're clever. [ The accent only makes him sound like he's being sarcastic but there's a genuine undertone of respect there along with a mirrored look of excitement in his eyes. There's too much fabric to jam it but there is enough for him to realize he can use the long strip to hook onto the candle holder near the door. As he's finishing up his trucker's hitch knot a knife tip slams through the thin wall and his eyes widen in surprise as the door rattles. But his knot holds. ]

They weren't this responsive when I tried to speak with them earlier. Little disappointed about that.

[littlemimic]

Not being clever can get you killed. [ Her mum taught her so much, and now she's looking for an exit strategy while he fiddles with the door, making sure to keep it blocked up with her body. The blade tip breaks through the door near her head and Lila turns to look at it. ]

Wish I could say that's the first time that has happened to me today.

[ With that knot secured, she slowly steps away from the door to move over to some furniture. A couch, a chair, a coffee table. Time to get moving on pushing them to act as a barricade, who knows how long that candle holder or door will last. ]

Someone rang the bell. [ A tilt of her head. ] Well, the clock chimed so nearly the same thing, I guess.

[twelfthsong]

Knives through a door or being chased by clockwork people and faceless dolls? Because the latter happened to me yesterday. [ Or maybe it was several hours ago?

He helps her with piling things up against the door and as a last act turns the faceless and creepy dolls to face the wall. On the otherwise white noise intensifies as the creatures try to bash the door in to retrieve their late guests. ]

This happens on the hour? How long does the chasing last?

[littlemimic]

Both. Very nearly, anyway. More beings dressed in samurai armor, one had a sickle! [ It's an interesting story, Doctor. About the end of the universe, and a hotel with guardians.

Satisfied with their makeshift barrier, she starts looking for another way out. Knocking on the walls to find a secret door, checking how strong those boards are on the window, trap doors under the rug. ]

No idea! I heard a clock chime out the hour and not long after, there you were with your fanclub down the hall. Since I'd been sent to fetch the tea, I figured we were late to serving it.

[twelfthsong]

You can’t just tell me that and not say more about it. [ There’s genuine interest in his voice as if they hadn’t just nearly escaped being stabbed by murderous dolls.

The room is in a state much like the rest of the house and other rooms he’d been in. The difference being that this seemed far more like a nursery than the other ones — but a room is a room. Even while he’s looking around he’s keeping a mindful eye on the watch on his wrist to see just how long those creatures were going to keep this up for. ]

Why did it take you so long to fetch the tea then? [ He quickly picks up on what she’s doing and wanders over to the large bookshelf in the corner of the room to see if there’s a latch or something behind one of the books that will reveal some sort of secret passageway. ]

[littlemimic]

We get out of here alive, I'll tell you all about it. [ Sorry, but this one has trust issues. She doesn't quite believe anyone is helping her out of the goodness of their heart.

So Lila is not above holding on to something he wants to hear to secure his continued help. It figures that she'd end up in the nursery, and there's a frown on her face as it dawns on her what this room is. Also, that portrait of the woman is downright creepy. ]

The mannequin cook sent me to fetch ingredients once I got to the kitchen. Which we seem to be lucky, since the sugar was in the nursery. Rubbish place for the sugar, if you ask me. [ She moves to stand in front of the portrait, lifting a hand to her chin. ] That's a very large portrait. Taller than I am.

[twelfthsong]

[ There's something of a grumble that gets lost in the sound of the thudding against the door and the shuffling of books but he doesn't push it. ]

We can agree on that. Why would a baby need sugar? [ After all, what else would stay in a nursery otherwise? He rifles through the books quickly before slowly wandering over to where she's standing. ]

To be fair your legs aren't very long. [ But he knows someone shorter so he can't exactly call her short. He's already moving towards the portrait running his fingers along the side of the frame. ] If the sugar bowl isn't somewhere obvious it might be behind this. Or even better - some kind of passage out of here?

[littlemimic]

[ This guy is reminding her of another old guy she knows, who often grumbles at her. ]

I understand the leaves in the greenhouse, the milk on the stairs is a bit odd, but sugar in the nursery. [ Her eyes go to the bed. ] Unless it's one of those old-fashioned nurseries where children stay there until they're older, and nicked the sugar bowl as a treat.

[ Lila turns back to the man. ] Oi, they get the job done. [ She doesn't say what job that is. While he checks the portrait, she hangs back - just in case. ] A passage would be great. I'll keep looking for the sugar elsewhere, maybe finding it will calm the crowd out there.

[ Turning to open drawers and other hiding places. ]