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

[She is perhaps a lot more clear-headed than many others in this situation...but she doesn't yet entirely realize this is a situation everyone is dealing with (though there is some suspicion there).]

I'm Kumoi Yuuri, it's nice to meet you.

[She realizes that being shorter does mean that either the person she's walking with needs to slow down or she has to walk faster. She is very touched to not need to have to keep up. She is not the most athletic person.

She's relieved to be walking though. This place is very, very unsettling.]

Ms. Caitlyn, did you also find two pieces of paper when you woke up?

[Caitlyn nods. One hand is holding the umbrella, the other is holding Yuuri's hand, so she has to balance the umbrella awkwardly between her neck and her shoulder for a moment to pull the papers out. One is legible, the other smeared from being underwater, but she can just about make out the writing on both.]

I did.

[Curious that they both woke up with two pieces of paper. That can't be a coincidence.]

What did yours say?

One said, "children lie" and the other said, "what is his name".

[She pulled out the papers too, though she fumbled her umbrella a little while doing it.

But once she pulled it out it occurred to her. Ah, right. She was technically also a child, wasn't she?]

I'm not lying though! [...well, she is but also not really since no one has asked if she's an esper or why she was used to being without her parents. So surely it doesn't count as lying!]

[She glances down at Yuuri.] It's alright. I didn't think you were.

[There's a loud shout to their left, and a man - no, a mannequin made of burlap - shouts and chucks something at them. Caitlyn instinctively pulls Yuuri out of the way of the flying object, bracing as it cracks against her own shoulder. She winces in pain though it's nothing compared to the persistent dull ache in her leg or the spike of pain that shoots through her head every time she thinks too hard about... about what? She can't remember.

There's another shout behind them.]

Come on, let's hurry. [Hurry where? Home? This is home. No, back to Vi. Vi? Away from whoever's after them. She tugs on Yuuri's hand, moving faster even though it means Yuuri potentially struggling to keep up.]

[She sees that wince and that is more worrying than anything else. But before she could ask about it she's being pulled along.

She's not the most athletic but she doesn't complain about being made to run.

There's definitely people chasing after them now, She looks back for a moment, trusting that Caitlyn won't steer her into traffic or into a wall. She could use hypno but the problem is...she wasn't sure the burlap mannequins were close enough to being human.

So, instead, she imagines into existence a hole in the ground into which their pursuers fall into with a yell. Unfortunately, a couple of them manages to stop before falling in, go around the hole then keep running at them. Drat.

Then she spots an alley and has an idea.]

That way!

[Caitlyn steers them between carriages and pedestrians, keeping to a light jog. Perhaps if she carried Yuuri on her back she could go faster. Then again, perhaps carrying the weight of an adolescent would slow her down even more.

A carriage careens dangerously, nearly crashing into them, and Caitlyn barely manages to pull Yuuri out of the way as the girl looks behind them.

Suddenly, there's a yell, and Caitlyn glances back to see a hole that definitely wasn't there before.]

How did--

[She changes course, jogging towards the alley Yuuri pointed her towards. It's a smart move; they may be able to lose their pursuers more easily in darker, more winding streets than out here in the open.]

This place seems to react to things we think!

[Which is weird not because the concept is unfamiliar but because usually she'd be using hypno while it happened! Oh well. It's best not to think about it too much right at this moment. They can worry about it when they're not being chased!

Winding was right. The alley's opening wasn't very wide but it splintered off into an intersection of openings. Before they turned the corner into it, she imagined a gate, tall and foreboding, open now but able to lock behind them.]

[When she sees it she frowns because.......the hinges were so rusted! So were the spots where screws were securing it to the wall!! It definitely didn't look like it'd hold long after they locked it!

Maybe she should have been more specific in her imagination but even still! What a rip off! She wants a refund! Redo! She demands a redo!!!]

I-it might not hold very long but we can lock the gate behind us!

[Caitlyn runs through the gate, quickly turning back to shut it behind them.]

Go on, I'll lock it.

[She balances her umbrella across her shoulder as she reaches for the chain and padlock hanging around the gate's handle. Yuuri's right - it likely won't hold long, not with the rust eating away at every bit of metal she can see. But it ought to hold off the pursuers for a few moments, perhaps long enough for them to get away.

She works quickly, securing the chain around the handle and slipping the padlock between the links of chain, and closing...

closing the...

The umbrella's slipped down, just enough that the rain's started to splash against her face, and it's getting harder and harder to remember where she's going or why she's running there. Why run, after all? She's home. This is home. She belongs here.

There was a woman... Red hair, a word tattoed on her face... No one Caitlyn's ever known. The rainwater is dripping from her brow into her eyes, blurring her vision.

Why is she holding a padlock?

She clicks it shut.

She's got to catch up to....

She can't remember. All she knows is this is home, this is where she's supposed to be. So she stands there, holding the padlock, hearing the shouts coming from the other side of the gate.]

[She...doesn't actually go on. She doesn't have the time to even think if this is what Kaoru would do. She doesn't actually even think before clearing the threshold of the gate and stopping within reach. Leaving her companion behind...not even for a second did she consider that an option.

Her grip tightens on the umbrella when she sees that Caitlyn isn't moving. Why isn't she...?

She rushed back over, reaching out to take Caitlyn's hand.]

Miss Caitlyn! We need to go!

[These things don't feel human enough for her to get a good grasp on their minds, otherwise...no, even if she could would making them believe they were drowning even help? Did mannequin monsters even need to breathe? Fire would be a hard sell without also convincing them the rain has stopped...which comes back to the fact that she can't get a good enough hold on their minds for this.

The shouting gets louder and, while looking up she notices two things.

One, the rain is hitting Caitlyn's face. She hadn't felt another esper so she can only assume this isn't a psychic attack, so the only change had been the umbrella? Maybe? It was worth a try, at least.

Second, there is a chimney on the roof.

She shift's Caitlyn's umbrella by a little, wanting to cover her but she doesn't have the time to make sure it stays because she's pulling on Caitlyn, hoping to pull her along.

At the same time she imagines...a chimney that's been eroded over the years, poorly built and even more poorly maintained. She imagines its mortar further washing away. She imagines it weakening and falling...hopefully on the ones chasing them but honestly? She has more to worry about.]

Miss Caitlyn, I need you to walk. I don't think I'll be able to drag you!

[Caitlyn barely feels the tugging on her hand at first, barely hears what Yuuri's saying.]

No, we've got to stay.

[It quiet, unconvincing. She's not really sure why she's saying it, but part of her knows it's true. They belong here, they have to stay.

Then the umbrella's back over her head and she's being pulled along, stumbling after Yuuri as she tries to get her legs sorted. She reaches up to wipe some of the cold, dripping rain off her face and it's like she's wiping the fog out of her brain.

Of course they have to go. They don't belong here. She has to get back to Vi.]

Yes. Y-yes, of course. [She finally picks up speed, overtaking Yuuri easily, just as there's a massive sound of bricks crashing down. She looks behind her to see a chimney having fallen off the roof onto the pavement, a burlap hand twitching underneath the pile of bricks now lying on the cobblestones.

But there are shouts, more coming. She tightens her hand on Yuuri's and points towards a spot where the alleys begin to open up again. If they can't lose their pursuers in these narrow winding streets, perhaps the opposite will prove more effective, and they'll be able to lose them in a crowd.]

Come along, that way.

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the unwinding

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