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

---

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

Image source.

✘ 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.

Image source.

✘ 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.

Image source.

✘ 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.

Image source.

✘ 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.

Image source.

✘ 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.

Image source.

✘ 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!

Comments

un: polaris | text

[chromiums]

[ lorna's seated somewhere secluded (or as secluded as she can get at the moment) with charles's post open, which she's been trying to figure out how to respond to for at least five minutes. there's one name on that list that's obviously notable to her, and based on the rest of them and the fact that he'd just referred to that particular name as 'family', he's from well before she'd existed, from the earliest days of the x-men. he has no way of knowing what's happened since, what they'd left behind for her and the rest of the mutant underground to deal with after they'd disappeared.

she's angry enough that doesn't know if she cares that he doesn't. ]

Haven't met anyone with those names yet.

[ it's not quite a lie. lorna's known who her birth father is for most of her life, but the most he'd ever reached out was to leave a present on her doorstep on her thirteenth birthday. ]

[perceptive]

( the text message comes in just as charles is about to roll the dice for the one hundredth time maybe. he's getting increasingly frustrated with his bad luck. just how difficult is it to roll a four? why is this taking him forever? muttering a curse under his breath, he takes the pocket watch out of his jacket, deciding now is a good time as any to take a break. maybe he'll receive good news about his friends. or maybe they're even here... except nope. )

Hello there. Will you keep those names in mind in case you come across them? I'd appreciate it. That's a very nice username you've got there, by the way. I haven't inputted mine in. These things are a little bit tricky to operate. ( it's why his reads as username not set for now. )

[chromiums]

[ if they had the capability of changing their usernames once they'd been selected, lorna might have opted to use a different one for this particular conversation. if he's one of the latest crop of newcomers, she knows he's going to figure out her connection to one name on that list in particular eventually, especially given the nature of his mutation, but she'd rather not reveal it immediately. she's still trying to figure out what to do with this, how she's going to inform marcos about it and how much of her anger is warranted. ]

Sure. And thanks. It's a nickname that's just kind of stuck. [ so to speak. ]

You said your name was Charles?

[perceptive]

( a nickname and not just a username for communication through this device? well, he'll have to remember that. he's suddenly recalling that morning the kids told him about their new codenames. banshee and havok. he really hopes that wherever they all are right now, that they're safe. )

Yes, I'm Charles Xavier. From Earth. New York, if you know of it. And you?

[chromiums]

[ her own nickname had come about a bit differently, as an evolution of what her father had called her once. “to lorna, my north star”. she’d been angry at first, furious that he had apparently known who she was, where she’d been, and what she could do, and all he’d done instead of coming to meet with her was leave a gift on her doorstep when he’d known she wouldn’t be home. but eventually she’d embraced it, started using it. if it was all he was going to leave her with, she might as well. ]

I know it, yeah. I’m from Earth too.

[ xavier’s had long since been shut down and abandon by the time lorna had gotten involved with the underground, but you can’t be who she is or what she is without knowing its legacy and what they’d done to help young mutants.

before they’d left everyone behind, that is. ]

My name’s Lorna. Dane. [ it’s a test, to see if he knows the significance of that name. maybe he’s too young to, or maybe erik had kept it from him or hadn’t cared to share.

she’s betting on the former, but the latter wouldn’t surprise her. ]

[perceptive]

Very pleased to meet you, Lorna. ( finding out that there's someone else from earth is always a bit of a relief. at first, he'd thought he was the only one from the milky way galaxy even. thankfully, he's now met a few others from earth. although... )

What year are you from? It was 1962 for me. ( he's aware that people have been taken to this strange new world from different points in time. charles isn't sure what to make of that just yet, but it's definitely interesting.

the jackalopes are staring at him, so he simply stares back at them. charles is well aware that they want him to roll the dice already, but he won't. instead, he's going to continue having a conversation with lorna here for the next few minutes at least before trying his luck again. they can't force his hand. )

[chromiums]

[ she's still not sure if she can say the same. part of her wants to stay angry, even though the year he's from confirms how unfair that would be, but if he's here for the long haul and they're going to continue traveling from place to place together...it doesn't feel sustainable. more than that, it doesn't feel fair to the rest of the group.

if she were from a different point in time, maybe she'd feel differently. maybe she'll feel differently later. for now she sighs, adjusting to cross her legs underneath her as she settles against the wall with her device. ]

Likewise.

It was 2018. I've been with this group for about a year. [ which is a frightening, humbling thought. ]

[perceptive]

( he's not sure which is more shocking. that she's from so far ahead of him in the future or that she's been here for a whole year now. probably the latter. no. definitely the latter. )

What about the beacons? I was under the impression we'd be able to go home once we get to where it's located. ( not that he has any idea where that's at. he'd thought the train would take him there. perhaps he'd been too hopeful. or naive. maybe even foolish. )

Has anyone ever gone home?

[chromiums]

[ it's shocking to her too, when she lets herself think about it. almost a ear since they'd followed clarice through that portal, thinking they'd find whatever dark future she'd come to try to get them to help her prevent and winding up in a castle instead, held captive high above a hoarde of undead. they've been a handful of places since, roped into whatever quests they were needed for in that particular area before they headed somewhere else to repeat the same cycle. in some ways it's a blessing to have the distraction.

it keeps her from remembering how long it's been since she'd seen her daughter, that even if they do get to go back home, it might still be a very long time before it's safe to be with her again. if that time ever comes. ]

There have been a couple. We were meant to try going bck on one once. [ they'd only just missed it, something that still stings when she lets herself remember. ] A few have gone on one and come back. According to them time doesn't pass there while we're here.

[ which is what she's hoping is true. she and marcos have already lost so much time with dawn. ]

[perceptive]

( time doesn't pass for the people back home while they're here? that sounds like the stuff of fiction. ) Like this is just some kind of a dream? ( like alice in wonderland. charles looks up at the tunnel he'd fallen through, and at the locked door beside him where the three jackalopes are at, and he lets out a bit of a chuckle. well, on the bright side, at least there's the possibility their friends and family won't be beside themselves with worry. there's that.

honestly, at this point, he doesn't know what to think anymore. he's not sure how any of this makes sense. he'd thought that this might be some kind of a trick of the mind, that emma had gotten into his head somehow, but he can't sense the presence of another telepath nearby. )