westwhere | 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

[ Later, his umbrella restored and clothes mostly dry, Mo Ran remembers the most important thing, the most important person: Chu Wanning. Chu Wanning who might be out among the people and might have forgotten or ignored his umbrella.

The crowd is his enemy, figuratively and literally, as he stops to ask one of the shopkeepers a question and finds himself shoved aside, into another milling crowd, who are going in the opposite direction. He has to fight against them, searching through the crowd for a beautiful man in white. Everything bleeds together in the rain, muddled greys and browns. ] Shizun! Shizun, are you here?

[ Sometimes, it feels like nothing in this world can make him feel so powerless as Chu Wanning. But a staircase pops up in front of him, letting him move above the crowd, although it lasts only so long, and there's no going back.

He jumps off a step, floating back to the ground with ease, calling for his shizun the entire time, although he eventually resorts to his name: ] Wanning! [ Yelled, loud and undignified, followed by a softer, muttered: ] Where the hell are you?

[He had, in fact, left his umbrella behind. In his defense, his head had been hurting and he was distracted.

The longer he was in the rain, however, the less troubled he felt. It felt almost...normal to be in this place. Without realizing it, his features were becoming less distinct as time went on.

But then he heard a voice and even in like this he turns towards it instinctively. It was...

"Mo Ran." Driven by a force stronger than anything else in his mind, his feet carries him towards the sound of that voice, shouldering his way through the crowd. "Mo Ran?"

[ The figure that calls out his name is indistinct and muddled, and Mo Ran doesn't recognize him at first. But his voice is familiar, and as Mo Ran gets closer, the familiar scent of haitang hits his nose. ]

Shizun! [ What a relief, he's been found. Mo Ran steps closer, holding the umbrella over Chu Wanning's head. ] Where's your umbrella? [ Or the barrier technique? That should prevent the rain, although Mo Ran hasn't tried it out himself. Then, without letting Chu Wanning get a word in edgewise, he continues: ] It's fine, I have one. I'll always be here to hold an umbrella over you.

[Without the rain beating on him, things seem slightly...stranger for a moment. He had been settling in a comforting sort of blankness so to feel that ebbing away makes him feel uneasy.

He should step away, back into the rain...but then he'd have to leave Mo Ran.

He didn't want to leave Mo Ran.]

...it's just water.

[He could have erected a barrier or held an umbrella but it's just water. It's just water so Mo Ran really didn't need to do this for him.]

You can go, if you want.

[ It's just water, but it feels weird to Mo Ran. It's unsettling like so many things here have been, and he'd rather stick close to someone he knows. Even more, he wants to stay close to Chu Wanning, now that he's found him again. ]

Ah, Shizun. [ He smiles, the barest hint of his dimples obvious, and rubs the back of his neck. ] We need to get out of here, but I'm not sure how or where. Perhaps we could try together?

[ That might be presumptuous of him, but he'll take that chance. ]

[Even confused by the effects of the water he still hyper-focuses on that smile. It's...really a very nice smile.]

...why do we need to leave? It's fine being here, isn't it?

[He presses his mouth into a line because...no. It's not fine, is it? The rain's confusion is beginning to clear a little and he thinks...isn't there somewhere they need to be...?]

[ His smile softens a little, seeing how Chu Wanning blurts that out and then closes his mouth. ]

No. We shouldn't be here.

[ This feels familiar, in a way Mo Ran doesn't want to think about too deeply. He reaches for Chu Wanning's hand, only to stop himself and grab his sleeve instead. ]

Come back with me, Shizun, help me figure a way out.

[He finds himself disappointed that Mo Ran didn't take his hand...and immediately felt disgusted with himself.

Why would he make such an arrogant assumption? Why would Mo Ran ever want to hold his hand?

You conceited pervert. He thought bitterly of himself. Why would he want to take your hand?

He doesn't answer right away. He thought, no this is exactly where they should be.

But...if Mo Ran wanted to go then Chu Wanning would go with him. No matter where the destination was.]

...go where?

the unwinding

c. drip by drip, part two (closed to chu wanning)

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