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

1. Barreling In

[The first thought that enters his mind, after of course realizing that the air is real, not recycled, is what the hell just happened. Chris opens his eyes and looks around, a shoreline, that's unexpected.

He's given a communicator and a briefing about their situation. Being used as pawns in someone else's game is never something he enjoys, but it's happened on too many occasions to count, this is just another one.

The steam train is a nice touch though. He hadn't been on one of those since he was a child and it was in a museum. Though he suspects that one was a lot smoother when it came to actually traveling on it. This one feels like it's out to beat them all up.]

I think they need to redo the tracks.

2. Down the Rabbit Hole

[The only thing Pike feels is the unmistakable feeling of falling. The last time this happened he was in a pod hurtling through space and not a tunnel keeping pace with a very fancy grand piano. In both cases, he was fairly convinced that this was the end. He was going to go 'splat' on the nearest surface.

He hits the ground and gets the wind knocked out of him before a very quiet]

Ow!

[Then he sees that piano and rolls out of its way.]

Edited 2022-09-26 20:11 (UTC)

( she's out of uniform, a rare sight for una chin-riley though given the apparel that they were graced with here... necessary. she'd left her hair loose, though after falling through the rabbit hole and her less than gracious landing (ow! indeed) she's regretting that.

the various objects she'd unfortunately bumped into had left her feeling a little sore and bruised, along with the harder landing on her ass, though nothing that she wouldn't recover from. there's a deeper breath, hair being pushed out of her face and then the realisation of that ow! hits her-- )

Chris?

( she's still sat on the floor, though has to quickly push herself back when that piano gets closer, a quick yell amidst the dust and debris-- )

Are you okay?

Una?

[He'd know her voice anywhere, but how was she here? He'd just watched her walk out of his office after trying to resign her commission. He hadn't paid attention to the state of his wardrobe yet, but not getting crushed by a piano took precedence. But he does manage to sit up.]

I'm okay. Years of falling off of horses came in handy. Are you Okay?

I'll feel it later but I'm fine.

( it takes a lot more to reall hurt her, as they'd find out in a few short weeks in a certain gorn attack... )

How long have you-- ( she pauses, something ticking through her mind. she'd arrived by falling out of the sky into water. had he really done something so similar? )

Tell me you saw the city before falling.

No, I didn't. I was just falling.

[At first he thought it was a dream, like those ones you have right before you fall asleep but then, piano.]

( she laughs slightly, shaking her head )

A few months ago I fell out of the sky into an ocean, fished out by pirates.

( crazy, she knows. not that they haven't encountered pirates before but these were very different pirates )

I wish I was fishing you out but I don't know what this is.

( someone never read alice in wonderland )

A few months ago? I just saw you. You were headed to sickbay.

[Chris looks around trying to place where they are. He's been here before or heard of it before. Something about it is familiar.]

I think it's Alice in Wonderland.

( there's a blank look at alice in wonderland, una not even having heard the title before.

she also wonders what his last memory of them is, their last conversation given what she remembers and her time here... though if he hadn't known she was gone? )

This isn't our universe. I've met people from both interesting times and places.

( nevermind kirk and his universe )

It's a bit of a long story. Though we should probably get out of this hole first. ( she'd fill him in on everything later, she didn't even need to promise to ) What does Alice in Wonderland tell you about this?

That's something, I guess.

[Though if he just saw her, is she even his Una?]

Mostly? Don't eat or touch anything, watch out for smiling cats, and take nothing anyone says at face value.

Does that include you?

( it isn't serious though there's a mild hint of a question in her tone. it's hard to believe he's actually stood here after the months she'd been here and the strangeness of the situation. one that was just getting stranger.

una pulled herself from the ground, dusting herself off slightly before stepping closer to him )

It's good to see you.

Are you saying I spend too much time trying things I shouldn't eat?

[He's kidding, but if she knows that, then they at least know each other well enough.]

I'm...well I'm not going to say I'm glad you're here but I'm glad you're here.

( she also won't say it but una is glad that he's here. it's not that she's lost without him, she's resourceful and making plans no matter what, getting stuck in to trying to find a solution to their problem, but something does feel better about having him there. a trusted friend -- the person she trusts the most.

she does at least offer him a smile before stepping back from him, turning around to visually scan the room that they're in )

What about the animals?

( she's never come across them before either )

[That didn't do much to assure him that this was the Una from his universe but he supposed in the current situation, it doesn't matter. She's an Una. All Unas, he suspects, are smart.]

Those are [he thinks for a minute] Jack-something. [Another minute thinking. Alice and Wonderland was a long time ago.] Jack-a-lopes. There should be some kind of puzzle to solve.

Christopher Pike | Star Trek | Newcomer

✩ down the rabbit hole

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