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westwhere2022-09-24 07:00 pm
groundrules) wrote in westwhere2022-09-24 07:00 pm
Entry tags:
- 2ha: chu wanning,
- 2ha: mo ran,
- arc iv,
- arcane: caitlyn,
- arcane: vi,
- arcane: viktor,
- doctor who: river song,
- doctor who: the doctor,
- harry potter: hermione granger,
- kingdom of the wicked: emilia,
- kingdom of the wicked: wrath,
- legend of fei: xie yun,
- legend of fei: zhou fei,
- mcu: kamala khan,
- mcu: yelena,
- oh! my emperor: su xunxian,
- original: red,
- penny dreadful: vanessa ives,
- shadowhunters: alec lightwood,
- shadowhunters: magnus bane,
- star trek: christopher pike,
- star trek: jim kirk (aos),
- star trek: leonard mccoy (aos),
- star trek: spock,
- star wars: finn,
- the unwinding,
- umbrella academy: allison,
- umbrella academy: five,
- untamed: lan sizhui,
- untamed: wen qing,
- warcraft: anduin wrynn,
- warcraft: wrathion,
- warframe: kahl 175,
- x-men: charles xavier
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!
SPILL THE TEA | DRIP BY DRIP | ALL A DREA —
✘ 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.”
✘ 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 —”
✘ 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. - one: gravity fades, the dice floats out of reach. ( The jackalopes enjoy the breeze. )
✘ 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.
✘ 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.
✘ 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!
no subject
Your luck is as good as mine then, good to know. [ Swallowing hard, Clara wets her lips and pushes wet hair away from her face. Where's the person who could talk to the dinosaur with wings and fire when you need him? Probably still stuck in a whisky barrel somewhere. ]
Okay, so, not immediately attacking, that's good. That is hopeful. Now we have to attempt not to piss it off while trying to get the dice at the same time. Which is also assuming we can lift them.
[ All of this is said as Clara edges along the wall with the dragon staring at them both, tracking them with its eyes and making her feel very much like its assessing a dinner menu. ]
no subject
Pretty sure a dragon is worse luck than heavy rain. Hell, heavy rain is just life in England. [ Lila is getting the thought that Clara has no superpowers that she can mimic, so guess she may have to fight the dragon the old-fashioned way. ]
If it starts attacking, I'll catch its attention, and you go for the dice. Surely, whatever else we roll has got to be better than a dragon.
[ Oh, she sees how the dragon locks on to Clara. Let's not have that. The blond crouches down and draws her machete with the other hand slowly. With it free, she lowers it to the ground and scrapes the metal against the floor, drawing those slitted eyes towards her. ]
no subject
One in four chance now. Please don't get eaten by this dragon. [ Is she talking to herself? To Lila? Why not both!
As she picks up her pace edging around the room, the scrape does indeed catch the dragon's attention and it responds with a loud, cringe-inducing screech right at Lila, wings unfolding as much as they can in the space. The distraction was perfect and Clara runs for it, ducking a falling ceiling fan and jumping over the dragon's tail.
The dragon itself moves in closer to Lila, snarling and clearly assessing its plan of attack. When Clara gets to the dice she can't lift it again but keeps trying. ]
Come on! It won't move again, it's like it's glued to the ground!
[ Clara keeps at it, trying to hit it with her scythe like a golf club. The dragon rears back, taking a step that she has to dodge. When she looks for the dice again, she sees that it's moved and she dives for it. Just as she grabs it, the orange glow of fire burns in the back of the creature's throat as it inhales deeply. Clara throws the dice, it exhales and -
The dragon is gone, and as gravity exits the building, Clara bounces off of a wall again. ]
Alright, I was annoyed, then terrified, now I'm angry.
no subject
That'd be a terrible way to die! Swallowed by dragon only sounds good from the one who doesn't get chomped. [ Witty banter is always the best way to deal with a threat.
Lila moves across the room with her machete dragging on the ground, keeping the dragon's attention away from Clara's path to the dice. She keeps her distance, not wanting to appear as more of a threat to speed up its attack. Let it keep analyzing the next move.
Her eyes don't stray from the overgrown reptile, but she can kind of see Clara struggling with the dice. ]
Guess it'd be too easy if we could just roll right away.
[ It's clear that Lila is about to dodge out of the way at what is clearly a move to breathe fire at them, but then there's the clattering of dice along the floor, and they lose more than the dragon. ]
This wasn't what I meant when I said I wanted another go at diving down the hole.
[ Even as she says it and floats upward, she goes for her belt and wraps it around the handle of her weapon. Lila throws it at the wall, so it sticks, and uses it to pull herself in. ]
Right, coming your way. [ She pushes off and floats towards Clara with her free hand outstretched. ]
no subject
Never get used to gravity deciding to take a sudden vacation.
[ When she snags the other woman's hand, Clara grins in success but then looks at the ground getting a little higher. ] We should try to stay close to the bottom. Otherwise, when gravity inevitably returns we don't break anything. [ Her own words make her think of something, though, and she looks around. ]
The die, where the hell did it go?
no subject
You in a lot of situations where gravity decides to go on holiday?
[ Contact! It's an interesting combination, Clara wearing Victorian clothing but not being surprised at any of this. Then again, she used to work for a time agency and fitting in was pretty important when going out into the field. ] Good idea, we've survived everything else so far that it'd be a shame to get hurt now.
[ At the realization and question, Lila looks around for it. ]
How do you roll a die without gravity? [ Okay, it isn't the rolling that's the hard part - it's getting it to stop and land on something else. She spots a speck of white floating through the air and points at it with the hand not grasping at Clara. ]
no subject
[ Clara likes Lila and she's not above admitting that in another life there'd be some attempted flirting. But there's no time to think about it, grasping onto Lila's hand and seeing the most frustrating object she's ever encountered in her life. Looking for something to push off of, she makes sure Lila's ready and then follows her pointing. Reaching, she manages to wrap her fingers around the die. ]
I have no idea how we make this work, but whatever. Here we go.
[ She's able to sort of toss it, and it spins a bit. The die pings off of an object and lands on a floating table. Finally, a four. But it's not as easy as the gravity simply coming back, of course. The door opens, but they don't stop floating. ]
Think this is a final 'screw you.'
no subject
[ She may not have been back to London in a while, but Lila still likes tea. Also, Lila is also not above flirting with Clara - though there would have to be some disclosures on that. Fingers curl around the other woman's hand in return, holding with a firm, but comforting grip.
The die flies, bounces, and lands to show four black dots facing upward. ]
Bloody beautiful. I'm bringing you to all my antigravity die games.
[ Those are words she genuinely means. Unlike the other times, the effects don't just vanish with the new roll, but that's all a matter of getting to the door. ]
Or maybe giving us a bit of fun before we go. [ Lila tightens her grip on her makeshift grappling hook. ] Here we go!
[ A hard tug on the belt sends them sailing across the room towards the door, a nice leisurely trip with nothing trying to kill them. She stops them with a foot bumping gently on the wall. ] Your lift has arrived at its destination, Lady Clara.
no subject
[ Holding onto Lila gives Clara a renewed sense of maybe it'll be okay that she was beginning to lose. So, even though gravity doesn't make another appearance, they got through it. All she wants now is that tea. ]
Twister in space. The game, not the movie. Try holding that awkward position with no gravity. [ She says this just as Lila shoves off and it's actually not bad. Certainly not the worst time she's spent flying through the air today. ]
That was super Mary Poppins of you. [ She does her best curtsey without being able to actually do it properly. ] Lady Lila— which sounds better than Lady Clara by the way —thank you for your service and your company. Shall we get the hell out of here?
no subject
[ If only they knew the tea party that awaits them on the other side of this door. Why are they the help rather than the guests? ]
Twister, now there would be a very exciting game done without gravity. How do we make this happen? [ Lila is trained to deal with all sorts of situations, this might be relatively new, but flying-floating was something she could do and adapt to. ]
I do look good with an Umbrella. [ A hidden meaning in her words, but also just the truth. She bows in return for the curtsey. ] You're welcome to both any time you'd like, mi'lady. Fuck yes. Let's see what trouble's in store for us next.