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

[perceptive]

( a lady with a sense of humor. he can certainly appreciate that. charles murmurs a thanks as she scoots over and he takes a seat beside her. it's the strangest thing to be making friends with someone after a kidnapping. or during. or if this can even be considered that. the how it happened and why of it all is still a blur to him. there's so many questions he has, so many things still that he's very much confused about. )

1962. ( that should be considered a strange question, really. or it would be one if they were back home in his world, at least. but he's starting to get the idea that nothing is normal here. ) We don't have these sort of tiny, portable communication devices back home. ( he lifts the pocket watch up. ) Well, we do have pagers, but a pocket watch that doubles as a tool for communicating with the people here through audio, video and text? It is rather impressive. ( he's definitely having a lot of fun with it. he's finding it so useful. )

And what about you, Clara? What year are you from?

[makemeasong]

[ The question shouldn't make her stop to think, and yet she pauses. From her clothing, it'd be a safe assumption she's from the late 19th century, perhaps the early 20th. ]

I'm almost positive the right answer is 2014. No, 2015. [ She frowns because she thinks she was right before. ] Sticking with 2014, final answer. But just before arriving here it was 1880...something. I'm pretty sure.

[ The last two days of Clara's life have been an absolute nightmare of a rollercoaster, and now she's here, on a train to God knows where in a galaxy who knows where. With a Doctor who isn't hers anymore stuck somewhere in a barrel. ]

My friend [ please ignore the waver in her voice. ] is a time traveler. Well, space and time traveler. Don't normally tell people that from the start but here we are, on a different planet in someone's galaxy. Might as well.

[ Clara's rambling, she realizes, and forces herself to stop, smiling sheepishly at Charles. ] Sorry. I ramble when I'm stressed. 1962? Lot of advances in space travel that year.

[perceptive]

( his eyes grow wide as he hears her saying she's from 2014, and also 1880. if people from the future are able to time travel, that's both spectacular and a little bit concerning. because wouldn't messing with something in the past affect both the present and future? )

That's fine. Ramble away. It's been a stressful time for a lot of people. But yes, great advances in space travel. We had a man orbiting around Earth three times in a small spacecraft. It was, frankly, quite amazing. ( probably not so to someone who's likely seen much, much more during her travels. )

But time traveling. That's even more fascinating. Your friend takes you along on these trips? Is there a purpose to it? ( are they changing history for the better? he thinks if he could go back to cuba, he'd make sure erik doesn't end up putting on shaw's helmet so he could still try to reach him somehow, stop him from committing more murders. ) What year is your friend originally from? Are they here with you? How do they... ( he stops just then. ) I am so sorry. I am asking far too many questions. ( he's just incredibly curious. ) You must think me so nosy.

[makemeasong]

[ It feels good to laugh, even if it's a small one. ]

Nah, not nosy. How are you supposed to not ask questions when someone casually tells you they're a time traveler? Let's see, starting with the easy question first. I'm a child of the 80s originally, but you don't need to know if I'm closer to 40 or 30. [ Clara gives him a coy smile before continuing. ] Born and bred in Blackpool, living in Lancashire and teaching English literature in between the time traveling.

[ The laughter, or what there was of it, has dissipated and her smile fades just a touch, though it's there enough to keep her from frowning. ]

Honestly, I dunno. Seems like the sort of place he'd be, but he wasn't on the beach, and he isn't on the train. [ He's left her. Again. But she can answer the questions Charles has. Sort of. ]

The Doctor's not from Earth, and he's never told me how time is tracked on his planet. I do know he's at least a couple thousand years old. He stole a ship from home when he was younger, it's called a TARDIS. 'Time And Relative Dimensions In Space' which are so many words combined together I don't understand, not for his lack of trying to teach me.

[perceptive]

Two thousand years old? ( that's unbelievable. ) So, he's an immortal doctor who travels through time and space. That's amazing, really. ( he knows of a mutant who can teleport, but he doesn't think even azazel's capable of traveling between planets. ) Hopefully he shows up here. He might be able to get us all home. ( wouldn't that be great? )

I was actually looking for my friends, but they don't seem to be here, which I suppose, is a good thing. ( he wouldn't wish being stuck here in this strange world on anyone. he hopes moira and the rest are back in westchester, safe and sound, and that they managed to stop erik from starting a war with the humans. that bit stresses him out, but he's trying not to think about it too much because there's really nothing he can do about that, not while he's stuck in this world. )

What do you suppose we're meant to do here anyways? Have you heard of anything? ( so much for believing that the train ride would be his ticket home. he's heard that some people have been here for a whole year. he's not sure if he should let clara know that. he just doesn't want to alarm her unnecessarily. it's been a stressful day as is. )

[makemeasong]

...More or less. He's not a doctor. Well, he is, I think. On some planets. He's called The Doctor. It's his name. [ Well... ] I may be accidentally aging him up, actually. Not by much, but by some.

[ She'd forgotten to ask how old he was before the Daleks. Forgotten, or hadn't wanted to, as she'd helped his feeble hands open a Christmas cracker. Now he has all new hands, and if he is here, she isn't sure he'd be as eager to help everyone. She's trying to tell herself she believes he'd still do it. He would, that's the point of him, isn't it? She's quiet for maybe a beat too long before responding to Charles. ]

I was still trying to figure out what happened to me and not paying enough attention, I think. Something about a beacon that we're trying to find to get home? I did realize pretty quickly that not everyone here's human. [ Some of it's obvious at a glance, but she knows there are plenty of humanoid species. Not that it matters, she only says it to let go of a theory. ] So, we aren't all here because we're the same species, or even because we all have abilities. I can't do much other than speed read and go an impressive amount of time without sleep.

[ Her sleep schedule has been conditioned by the Doctor's near-constant need to be on the go, and her need to always keep up with him. Clara circles back to the first statement Charles made, before the questions. ]

It would be hard, having people you care about here, but then to have someone you know you can trust would be a relief. Who knows, though? There could be other stops on the way to wherever it is this train is headed. We can hope-slash-not hope together until we know for sure.

[perceptive]

Hope is good. It's what keeps us going, isn't it? ( he thinks clara here has the right attitude for this place at least. despite what they've been through she seems pretty resilient. ) I'm hoping we do find those beacons someday, but in the meantime, I think I'm going to take the opportunity to explore this place and get to know the people who are here with us. ( might as well. there's no use in only obsessing over trying to leave and missing out on everything else. this is, after all, an extraordinary experience, and who knows what he can learn here. )

You must have had plenty of wonderful adventures with The Doctor. I assume he's the one responsible for keeping you up most nights. ( he blinks, realizing just then how inappropriate that probably sounds. ) I mean, you did say, you can go without sleep for an impressive amount of time. He must have kept you busy. ( that's really not much better. ) With the traveling from planet to planet. ( and there we go. he sucks in a breath. really, charles. )

How did you two meet?

[makemeasong]

[ Clara lets Charles keep going until he finally seems to get there in the end. If she's being honest, the way he fumbles a bit reminds her of the Doctor and it makes her smile just enough for the corners of her lips to rise. She files away his use of the word someday, because she'd like that day to be tomorrow. The sooner the better, but he seems curious enough to want to stay at least for a bit. It makes her wonder, but she answers his question. ]

It's a long story, but I was targeted by someone going after him. The Doctor saved me and in the process, I got to have a glimpse of what it's like to be with him. That glimpse was enough to make me want more.

[ It hadn't been quite as simple as all that, but it's the general idea. ] I think that's how most people meet him: they get swept up in some sort of chaos and have a difficult time leaving. Less chaotic and kidnappy than this, though. [ Glancing around, Clara takes in the surroundings before looking at Charles again. ]

I have to admit, I haven't spent a lot of time being curious about this place beyond how to get out faster.

[perceptive]

( a long story, she says. the urge to read clara's mind is there. he can easily scan through her brain and get all the information he wants in a matter of minutes, or even seconds, really. it wouldn't take long at all and she wouldn't even know it. but charles doesn't. and he won't. it's good to be able to maintain curiosity for someone in this way. to actually put in the effort to getting to know them better. to take the time to do so. having relied on his telepathy while interacting with most of the people he's met through the years is why charles has very little friends. prior to meeting moira, and erik, and the rest of the members of his team, he really had no one aside from his foster sister, raven. )

Considering what we've experienced, especially in that rainy city with the people who weren't so friendly at all, and the young child at the marketplace, and the names, and the umbrella, and... ( he stops short of mentioning the tub full of blood. ) Well, I don't blame you for wanting to focus on trying to leave as soon as you can. ( it's what any sane person would want to do. he leans forward to grab two cups from the table in front of them and sets about pouring them both some tea. )

Here. ( charles puts the cup down in front of clara together with a slice of cake on a small plate. he takes a sip of his tea and waits for her to drink or eat a bit first before continuing their conversation. ) I've actually found out a few things from the people here. It seems like there are some who've been stuck here for a whole year now. ( he'll just let that information sink in. )

not me sending dms before i've read the entire tag /sob

[makemeasong]

[ Clara smiles softly at the offering, thanking him before going straight in for the tea. She's found that for the most part, everyone she's met is at least willing to talk, and no one's been outright mean to her. Just stressed and afraid — that'd make anyone snappy.

When Charles continues and he mentions a year, the piece of cake in her mouth feels dry and she has to choke it down, chasing it with another sip of tea. ]

An entire year of this? And no one's gotten to the beacon or beacons yet? [ She forgets the fine details because she was in the middle of trying to figure out how the hell she got out of London. ] Something or someone wants us here, and is willing to do whatever it takes to keep us...if everything we just went through was a preview.