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

[He doesn't like that AND he really doesn't like how she offered to help.]

I'll admit that I don't know that much about Illyrians & their genetic modifications, but do we even know if you can burn it out? We are not in our universe.

( trust her, she doesn't like it either but it felt very much like a desperate solution, one that she didn't expect mccoy to take )

Chris, McCoy is infected.

( that's why she offered. it wasn't given as a small notion, this was big for her, something that she didn't offer comfortably and would never ordinarily do. and likely would never again )

I... have to trust my biology, that I can burn it out. ( even if her experience in the brig worried her ) It's what my immune system was built for. We hadn't encountered what we did on the Enterprise when I was born, that was new.

( she held a lot of faith, first in starfleet, then in herself. she'd made m'benga the offer on both of those faiths, again for mccoy. if she can heal him, he can extract the antibodies to cure everyone else. she had to have faith )

I understand that.

[And he did, because if he had the same ability Una did, he would be volunteering to do the same thing she was.]

Isn't there a smaller scale test we could try? I'd rather not have two infected officers if it could be avoided.

[It's not that he didn't trust her, he did, but he was also nervous. Who knew if something from this universe could kill her, or worse. If it doesn't burn it out, would it create something more resilient?]

In the brig, I was infected with something... I couldn't heal from it.

( and that had scared her. una's never been sick before, not long enough to really notice it before her immune system burned it out, but being sick here? she'd been afraid. the first time had felt like a bad cold, the second time she'd genuinely thought she might die, would have if she hadn't been rescued from the brig )

Somehow there was a bio-dampening field around the brig that nullified everything. I had no immune system, no cure. Getting out of the brig, out of that field let my body do was it was meant to.

( if that's small enough scale for her -- germs, illness from this place, the terrible conditions of the brig causing her sickness. something that wouldn't do more than make someone feverish... if they had an immune system or natural antibodies. if they weren't her )

I'd rather not be infected but if he doesn't have time to find something else?

All of that is more of a reason to try something smaller scale, if possible. That being said, a bio-dampening field probably won't work well if they don't have power.

[So she should be reasonably safe, but he still doesn't want to risk her life if it doesn't have to be.]

Do we know how much time he has or if he's contagious?

He's been quarantined. And he didn't sound good.

( una didn't know what the time frame would be but it didn't sound good and he'd be contagious... or they were just afraid. if he wasn't contagious her plan wouldn't work.

una understood chris's reluctance, she wasn't jumping to do this either, she didn't want to be sick again... she wouldn't be angry if he didn't want her to do it )

He's been getting equipment to analyse it first. It might not be needed.

At least we could find out if it's like something we've seen before, then make a decision with as much information we can get.

[He's not saying no, but he is saying let's see if we can get better information.]

Though you did survive a warp core breach....so I can see how you'd be able to survive this, if it doesn't make you worse off than he is.

( she's sure there are worse illnesses than the radiation from a warp core... but also-- )

I can get you his data. Spock's been looking over it and helping him analyse it.

( and spock was definitely better to do that than una was. give her a ship or an engineering problem, not a medical one )

In the mean time, I can show you their ships, the systems I've been repairing...

( give him the good tour. shove a bed at him in the apartment. okay, there weren't any spare beds but she'd get him somewhere to sleep )

I trust Spock just about as much as I trust you. If you both say you think it'll be okay for you, then I'm going to be okay with that.

[Or at least try to be. Una being sick or worse is not something he's looking forward to.]

We should do that, at least figure out what we're dealing with. Though I'm sure you already know.

If I had my notes here.

( a smile. of course she knows what they're dealing with. she usually has a notebook with her, she's gotten more used to paper notes lately, though she's glad that it didn't fall down the rabbit hole with them, kept safe by her bed )

Though I doubt they're letting us out yet. So give me questions.

How long do these things usually last?

[It is the basic dynamic of their relationship, Una always knows more than he does, about pretty much everything. Always has.]

I assume whatever got us here is more advanced than we currently know about. What about day to day? Older tech?

We were are sea for two months.

( roughly, though it definitely felt longer, especially when you were banned from daylight )

I've been in the city for about the same amount of time. From others' experience you stay somewhere a few months before travelling east, always the same.

And always East?

[And that was weird, wouldn't they eventually end up where they started?]

I don't know if I can handle being stuck in a children's book for two months.

Hopefully we won't fall down any more holes.

( ... that didn't sound as good as it had in her head. or before )

Though it's the first one I've seen. It's only been the past few weeks that the power outages have happened. ( pause. wait ) How many books about dragons do you know?

Not that many, but if we get stuck in the old west, you're with the right captain.

[Hang on...]

Were there dragons?

I've seen them. There are dragons here.

( and the ships purposely avoided them. though it was the contrast between dragons and technology that probably meant more to people that weren't her. dragons meant little to her anyway )

You'd love being stuck in the old west.

Yes, I would. I already have useful skills for that.

[Horseback riding, cooking, fire building.]

I'm not the best at poker, but I can hold my own.

You should teach me.

( she'd be terrifying at poker, don't teach her )

I've never played.

[That is exactly why he would teach her!]

You'd be good at it. No one can unnerve you.

What are the chances this place has cards?

( unlikely. but hey, maybe she can learn by figuring it out ask they go. be that terrifying beginner who smashes the hands on 'luck' alone )

What else would you visit if you could? As if it were a training sim?

It's possible, or we can find something similar.

[He sort of looks around to see if he can find anything.]

Where would I visit? I'd like to see Earth back in Jon Archer's time.

The original Enterprise.

( though she imagines there are other reasons he'd want to see that )

He met some Illyrians. ( starfleet and illyrian meetings are so few that the few are documented, especially the responses. especially to una who'd sesrched the history to get her expectations ready as she planned to leave ) It was a very different time.

I think it would be fun to spend some time on that ship, watch how they worked.

[It sounded like fun to him at least.]

That mission wasn't one that Archer liked to remember, he did some things he wasn't proud of.

I remember reading about it.

( it was a different time and an unfortunate situation. could there have been a different answer? well, that's a question that they could ask at many things )

I don't know if I'd want to visit the past. Not because of the histories I've read just... we have enough already to explore, more than we ever will get chance to.

[You can only work with the information you have at the time, but it doesn't mean you can't wish for it to have been different. Pike knows that probably better than a lot of others.]

Where would you like to go?

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