westwhere | the unwinding

the unwinding

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

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.

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!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Caitlyn feels the impact next to her more than she sees or hears the other person landing. It takes a moment to get her bearings, both the adrenaline coursing through her and the incessant pounding of her heart in her ears making it difficult to focus on her surroundings. She finally manages to push herself up and take stock.

Bits of wood. A broken mirror. An old clock. A bunch of spoons. Three rabbits with antlers smoking pipes. A woman... injured? There's blood. Caitlyn's wounded leg is aching, and now her arm is sore as well, but there doesn't appear to have been lasting damage.

She gives a weary nod as she pushes herself to her feet. The other woman's right, they have to get out.]

Yes, I'm alright. But your arm. [She reaches out to inspect the injury, more worried for this stranger than for the bumps and bruises she sustained in the fall.]

[ With her mind reeling, the cut doesn't seem to register until there's a reach for her arm, and Clara looks down. Wincing a little, the tear has ripped through the fabric of her dress, the cut jagged. ]

I don't think I can say I've had worse, but it would be cool if I could.

[ The bleeding isn't as bad as it could be, but the wound is already throbbing in time with her pulse. ] I'll live, at least long enough to figure out how the hell to get out of here. You're sure everything's still attached to you that should be? No gaping wounds?

Let me.

[Caitlyn frowns as she pulls out a handkerchief and reaches for the injured arm, hoping to at least wipe the blood away. She'll wrap the handkerchief around the wound as a makeshift bandage if the other woman doesn't object. It's something useful to do, to focus on, rather than fixating on the absolute madness happening around her.

She shakes her head.] My leg was injured. Before I arrived. It's sore but it isn't bleeding anymore.

[ Clara doesn't object, touched that someone she doesn't even know is stopping to help, and glad to see that in this hellhole of a universe, kindness is still present. ]

Thanks for the field dressing. If you're really okay, let's try to get out of here. The door looks promising, but I won't hold my breath.

[ Her own words make her blanch a little; the last thing she remembers is holding her breath, trying to escape the mechanical man's small army. She'd passed out and woken up only to crawl up a beach. Shaking it off, Clara looks at her impromptu medic and introduces herself. ]

I'm Clara. Were you on the train? [ She tried to take note of the faces she saw, but once she was talking to Kahl, she'd tuned everything else out. ]

Caitlyn.

[She nods.]

My friend and I were on the train together but... [She and Vi were separated when she fell. And there's no sign of Vi amongst the debris. They were only just reunited; she's got to find her again.] I don't know what happened to her.

[As she's wrapping the makeshift bandage around Clara's arm, she notices the way her expression shifts, but she's hardly about to go prying into her new companion's private affairs, so she doesn't ask about it. She simply tucks the observation away in the back of her mind for later.

She finishes tying off the handkerchief and heads for the door, eager to get moving.]

Roll a four... [She holds the note and die out for Clara to inspect, if she'd like, and with her other hand she tries the door handle. It doesn't budge.]

[ Clara's offer is immediate, as soon as she realizes Caitlyn's lost someone. Once the makeshift bandage is in place, her expression changes again, softening. ]

When we get out of here, I'll help you find her.

[ When the note is passed to her, Clara lets out a frustrated grunt. Does everything have to be a trick or a trap? She's tired, she wants to go home, and she's already sick of playing games. ]

It looks like we don't have a choice, but I'm willing to guess anything that isn't a four is gonna suck. Our odds aren't the worst I've ever had but I still don't like 'em. Think we can break through the door instead?

[Caitlyn smiles gratefully in response to Clara's offer. She's always glad to meet someone kind.

One more twist of the handle, and again it refuses to budge. So she braces one hand against the door and slams her opposite shoulder into it. But there's nothing. The door doesn't budge at all; there's no give to it whatsoever. She tries a couple more times with the same result.

There's no keyhole, so no way to try to pick the lock or even see what's beyond the door. No hinges, either; they must be on the other side. Otherwise they might be able to remove them and break through the door that way.]

There's no keyhole and the hinges must be on the other side. I'm not sure we have much of an option other than the die. [If rolling a die will even work to open a door. It sounds bizarre, but then... she's just survived a fall from what must have been miles up, and now she's at the bottom of a pit with no idea how or why and a gaggle of rabbits with antlers are sitting nearby smoking and looking sideways at her. Perhaps rolling a die to open a door isn't so far-fetched.] How bad could it be?

Oh, well, now you've done it. Famous last words.

[ Clara takes a deep breath and rolls the die, watching as it comes to a stop on five. For a few seconds, nothing seems to be happening, and she goes to pick it up and roll again, but can't move the piece. ]

'Kay, that's weird. I can't pick it up. It's like it's been glued to the ground. [ She can't tell yet that she's growing taller; it's happening just gradually enough that at first, it seems like it isn't happening at all, a trick of the eye.]

You try, maybe it's 'cause it's your turn or something.

[ Clara backs up to let Caitlyn have a go, pacing the room in frustration. It's only when her head hits a torch on the wall that she looks up and realizes something is different. ]

...Is the floor rising?

[Caitlyn takes the opportunity to reach for the die, but Clara's right. She gives it several goes, bracing her feet against the ground as though preparing to lift something properly heavy, but no matter how hard she tries, the die won't budge.]

It won't move for me, either. Did we only get one chance, do you think, or-- [That's when she looks up and notices that Clara's as tall as she is. Maybe taller. No, definitely taller.]

Clara, you're... growing.

[ That makes her stop moving completely, staring down at herself. Now that it's been acknowledged, she seems to be growing faster and Clara can actually see the ground getting further away. ]

Alice in Wonderland is my least favorite story, and this is why! Stupid tricks and vagueness. [ There might be an edge of panic in her voice because how the hell big can she possibly get? Does she want to find out? ]

Now what? Taking any and all ideas.

[Caitlyn quickly casts about, looking for anything that could possibly help, but people magically growing is well outside of her experience.

If neither she nor Clara can lift the die, that likely wouldn't provide a solution. Everything else in here seems broken and useless.]

Maybe you're big enough now to force the door open?

[Perhaps the rabbits. Why not. Nothing else about this makes sense, why wouldn't the utterly mad solution to this utterly mad problem involve asking the smoking rabbits for help.] E-excuse me. [She ducks around Clara's legs, rapidly growing to the size of small trees, as she trues to get the rabbits' attention.] Excuse me, have you got any idea how to stop this?

[One of them unhelpfully blows smoke at her.]

Wonderful.

[Probably not the rabbits then.]

[ Of course. Useless animals. It's a thought she would normally feel bad about but at the moment, her body is beginning to take up space. Trying to push her leg out against the door, all the force she has doesn't even seem to make it shake. ]

Right, okay. It's the die, the key to all of this. We could only roll it again after...what? Obviously didn't matter who was doing the rolling.

[ Her body is starting to feel uncomfortable, pressing into the wall. ]

[The door's shut tight and the die may as well weigh as much as a building for all Caitlyn could conceivably move it. The broken debris, the rabbits... there's nothing else in here that could be the solution, at least not that Caitlyn can see. Clara's right, it's got to be the die.

It's entirely possible that there's nothing to be done in this situation, that perhaps the die will reset itself and they need to give it a moment to do so. But 'just wait for the problem to fix itself' is not a solution that Caitlyn is comfortable with, so she starts rummaging through the debris, looking for something long and solid that she could use as a lever.]

Perhaps if I can jam something under the die, I could leverage it onto the side with the four. [The note didn't say they couldn't cheat, and there's nothing else she can think to try.]

[ Clara tries stretching herself a little as she gets more cramped. ]

Okay, good idea. Let's focus on that. Because if we don't get a four soon, I dunno what else we can put up with. [ There's an edge of panic to Clara's voice even as she's trying to stay calm. It's hard for her to move and do anything anymore. ]

Even if it's another surprise, if it reverses this, I just might take it. Right now, I feel huge and useless. All Alice had to do was eat something and she shrank back down. [ Clara does reach, though, and finds a spade that looks miniature in her hands. ]

Think maybe I found something, try this.

Lucky Alice, [she mutters, having no idea who Alice is.

Caitlyn reaches up to grab the spade from Clara and quickly wedges it under the die, throwing the weight of her entire body against the spade's handle. She presses down with all her strength, kneeling on it, even getting up and stomping on it until, finally, she tries jumping on it. Nothing works, and all she gets for her trouble is the blow to her dignity that comes when the jump fails and she stumbles forward, barely able to right herself before she completely loses her balance.

It must have been a fair few minutes she was hurling herself at the die, and it hasn't moved even a millimeter. With a frustrated sigh, she goes to yank the spade out from under it, ready to give up on that and try something new, when suddenly, the die goes flying.]

Shit!

[She reaches after it, trying to catch it before it lands, but instead she does lose her balance this time. She topples over, looking up just in time to see it roll to a halt on a two.

Almost immediately, the room starts to feel very warm.]

Edited 2022-10-15 01:58 (UTC)

[ Clara is absolutely done with this entire world. She's small again but now, under her hands and knees, the ground feels like it's getting hotter. ]

...I don't think the ground getting warm can be taken as a good thing, but should I try to be optimistic?

[ The answer is a firm no as the ground directly behind Clara crumbles and instead: lava. ]

What the fuck! [ She stumbles backward quickly, nearly tripping as another section of the floor turns to ~~forbidden taffy~~ a huge problem. ] Caitlyn, try to hug the walls! [ It's the only real suggestion she has as she scrambles. ]

[Caitlyn quickly grasps for the die, trying to grab it before she's forced back, but to no avail. Once again, it won't budge, and she finds herself having to scramble backwards as the floor drops out from under her, creating a lava maot between her and the die.

She heeds Clara's advice, getting back to her feet and running for the wall, barely making it to a small island of what seems like solid, cool ground before the rest of the floor begins to fall away.]

What about the rabbits? [They've been nothing but useless, but that doesn't mean they should be left to die in molten lava.]

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the unwinding

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