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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
[ She'd like to circle back to the clone bit at some point, but for now, she's glad he understood. ]
no subject
no subject
[ It's an honest answer, she'd have to ask the Doctor, and she doesn't particularly care to do that right now. But for Kahl... ]
I think someone I know is here; I can find him after the train and ask. He'll know. [ She doesn't have it in her to move and see where he is when she's enjoying the break and the conversation. ]
Do you track days or time?
no subject
But that waits until they get off the train. He nods.] Intervals. Kahl knows days too. Very blue sky. [He had been used to dark sky, from being on ships. Seeing blue sky had been strange. Every Grineer stared at it the first time they noticed.]
no subject
He likes to get to know people, like me. [ She does think that's still true at least. ]
Can you see the moon at night when it's dark? [ If it's a parallel Earth like she thinks, it might not have the same moon, or maybe it has two. Maybe it isn't there at all and something else controls the tides. ]
no subject
Earth have moon now. Not have before. [Nobody in the Army had known why that changed.] Probably Orokin thing. [And Kahl only realizes now that he could ask Blue Girl about it. It's going to take a while before he can do that.
He wants to go back home quick, but not before he finds out how he got captured. Once he knows, Blue Girl or Tenno might know what to do.
That will be good.]
Can see moon in day, sometimes. Not as bright. [That clone Earth thing has him thinking.] Clara's Earth have Orokin?
no subject
Shaking her head, Clara gives a gentle shrug of her shoulders. ]
I'd never even heard of them before now. Are the Orokin from somewhere else? Not Earth?
no subject
And that was good. The way Blue Girl's family acted was... awful. Blue Girl too, sometimes. But she tried. She was getting better.]
Clara and Kahl's Earth very different. If no Orokin, no Grineer, no Corpus, no Ostron, no Infested, no Tenno. [That didn't leave many.] Clara's Earth... just humans?
no subject
When she explains, her voice is gentle, never rushed. Teacher-mode is activated, and she adjusts to Kahl, going back anytime he needs a different word. ] And that's right, only humans. Animals too, but humans are it as far as people go. No Grineer, no Infested. But they can't go to other planets. Only the moon, and not very many times.
[ Which sounds like it's bad. She hasn't been anywhere in the universe where 'infested' is a good thing. That makes her next question feel like it has an obvious answer, but she has a little hope that maybe she's wrong. ]
Is your Earth happy?
no subject
Some happy. Old Orokin make forest grow too fast. Most place, all trees. [It was very green, looking at it from space. The Bolkor had no windows, but the Tenno's ship did. When he got transported on the Tenno's ship, it was for hard missions, saving brothers from Narmer prison ships. Ones where it felt good to sit down after, and watch out the windows.
He thinks a little more.] Ostron can be happy. Grineer... sometimes. Grineer Empire? Not. Queens want forest burned. [Lots of flames. Toxin. Steel Meridian did that too, but only a little. He wished the trees would stop, but he liked Steel Meridian's way better than the Queen's.]
Is Clara's Earth happy?
no subject
I think so, mostly. Some times are better than others. Some places are better or worse depending on what you look like. [ Male or female, white or other. Unfortunately, every planet she's been to with sentient civilization has prejudice, it isn't just Earth. ]
What made the trees grow so fast? And how many queens are there? We only have one.
no subject
Kahl not know. Orokin do lots, never tell anyone. [Some of it was on purpose, Kahl was pretty sure of that. But Blue Girl was Orokin, and Kahl had been listening to how she thought about things. Some Orokin just didn't know how to explain.]
Two. Twin Queens. Like Grineer clones, but not. [There was a lot more, every Grineer was told a lot about the Queens. Though Kahl wasn't sure whether any of it was real.] Kahl not follow anymore. No Grineer should follow. [The more he thought about them, the more he saw the tricks that hurt him and his brothers.
Which made him a little suspicious of more Queens. Clara was nice. Queens might not be.]
Lan-ka-sher have one queen? What she like?
no subject
You've told me lots about your world. That was nice of you, I'm being very nosey.
[ Clara smiles at him, then tries to explain a little more about home. ] Honestly, she doesn't have power anymore, not really. All for show. A long time ago, her family invaded countries all around Earth and claimed them for their own. Not so nice.
[ She doesn't have any love for the royal family. Well, Liz the First was a fantastic kisser. But that doesn't mean Clara approves of the reign. ]
no subject
Lan-ka-sher have Queen for... looking shiny? Strong? [That was a strange idea.] Why keep Queen? She can't try invading again?
no subject
[ There is so much wrong politics that Clara can't get into because dammit, Jim, she's an English teacher, not government. ]
The family is very, very, very, very, rich, so they get to keep the 'royal' title. And all the castles and all the land they took. In return, now people get to have a say in who's in charge and they can change it every so often. Do you have the word 'vote' in your language?
[ She isn't sure if anything else has translated for him, so she's already thinking of alternate ways to explain. ]
no subject
Kahl shakes his head.] Grineer have word, but Kahl not know it.
[It was weird. The little gold machine made it sound like Clara spoke perfect Grineer, which was strange enough. He'd never heard a non-Grineer speak it without an accent. But when she said a word Grineer didn't have, like Lan-ka-sher, the machine suddenly gave up. But vote had gotten through. That meant the machine knew more Grineer than he did.]
no subject
Money always talks loudest. Whoever has the most flaunts it around like it means something. [ Usually the money is earned through the detriment of others but that's a whole other conversation. ]
Say there were ten people and there was a question. 'Should we eat apples or flowers?' Those people then vote. First, everyone who wants apples raises their hand. Let's say that's 8 people, they voted for apples. That leaves 2 people who raise their hands and vote for flowers. But more people voted for the apples, so the apple wins.
[ Clara pauses before adding: ]
That's how a lot of places on Earth pick their leaders.