westwhere | 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

[ Wrathion seems unphased by the challenge, gestures absently with one hand. ]

Repeated evidence of themes across each location. Dark water, mirrors, undead, repeated evidence of the White Wanderer in each location. Evidence of ties to Ellethia here, in the Remembrance base where they used the dark water that is associated with the White Wanderer. The Merchant himself being familiar with the staff at the Institute, enough that I wonder if he even worked there and is the figure who left citing concerns about their ethical violations. I would not be surprised if there were more clues that were missed, when we did not know what to look for.

[ Five likes a good conspiracy theory, but he doesn't buy that it all ties back to one man that the Merchant is after, given what he knows about him. Especially when he makes that wild assumption about the Merchant's ethics.

He's been around since the beginning, and it doesn't tie together as neatly as he seems to believe, but he's also not opposed to Wrathion finding out more. ]

Well then, I'd suggest you keep digging. Maybe he'll have a reward for you if you're the one who catches him.

I'm not interested in a reward, and I hardly expect him to give one -- if we even do come upon this White Wanderer. We're several years behind.

[ The trail is not, exactly, warm. ]

[ Apparently sarcasm isn't his forte. He's given him a couple things to think about, he'll give him that. ]

Then what do you make of what we saw?

[ Listen, where he's from people expect rewards for everything! Still: ]

A vision of some description, a glimpse into something. The specifics I'm less certain of -- past, future, something else. Several of those who touched the dark water around the site of the Minaras crash experienced visions, so there's precedent. I don't believe he's here right now. I could be wrong, I'm willing to accept that. I would simply be surprised.

I didn't touch any dark water that I can remember. [ Just... several mirrors, including the one still inside him. We don't talk about it. ] If it was only a vision, we wouldn't be hiding out here.

[ From that face-melting experience, it feels more like they barely escaped whatever was intended. ]

It was clearly a mass experience. We don't know how it impacted the locals. Karsa is the one who moved us here, perhaps the locals became violent and dangerous.

Or they became more docile and complacent. [ Like their personalities were washed away. Maybe replaced with mannequins who stole their faces. ] Either way, if we assume the man in white is responsible, he could have his hands in everything we've seen.

That's a problem if he doesn't physically exist here for us to find.

I do agree that it's a problem. However, if he is here -- or if we find him later -- we're uncertain how dangerous he is. His motives are uncertain. The water he gave to our previous location was marketed as a cure, and we're uncertain how much he knew of its consequences as it began to melt. Did he know and not care? Did he not know? When he met the Beastmaster, how exactly did their interaction go? Without this, we have no knowledge of exactly how to prepare for an encounter.

[ Knowing more would be preferable, so they could plan. Plans are good. ]

[ If he's able to create warlords like the Beastmaster and is responsible for putting them through the trials they just went through, they can assume he's more powerful than any of them.

They might not know his motives, but Wrathion seems to be leaning into the possibility that he didn't know any better. ]

You really think anything he did was unintentional?

I couldn't say. We don't know enough about him, but I'd rather not colour a line of investigation by ruling out the possibility when we haven't anything definitive yet.

[ He doesn't feel like this is entirely pure of intent, but that's based on having seen all of it go wrong. The figure they search for wasn't there for that part, and they still don't know exactly what happened in the areas of the story he was present for. Only a shape, with motives blurred. ]

[ That line of thinking makes absolutely no sense to Five. His was more of a rhetorical question, if anything. ]

He's a threat. It doesn't matter what he meant to do if he's the root cause. All we really need to know is how to take care of him when he inevitably appears again.

Knowing more about him in general would help with this goal, the two ideas are not at odds.

[ He isn't opposed to taking him out, if that turns out to be the plan. It's just worth making sure that it is indeed the correct one. Amusing that Five is so set on it -- Wrathion supposes he cannot use this man's power for himself, that they know, so he's disposable unlike an enchanted body part that can seemingly be used. ]

[ Five narrows his eyes. Motives matter less if the man is powerful enough to take control of their minds, and eliminating a threat is the obvious solution. He isn't convinced Wrathion is completely on board with that.

He can concede to that statement in general terms. Knowing more is helpful. ]

And how do you propose we find out?

[ Oh, by an extremely deep and complex method. Incredibly detailed, Five. Incredibly profound. ]

I think I'd start by asking some questions.

[ There is, in fact, a hint of humour here. ]

[ Exactly the kind of mocking humor Five appreciates. ]

Brilliant idea. Have you narrowed it down any further than that?

As it happens, yes. I have a description, and a theory. It might pay to see if anyone here recognises it, and what their interaction with him may have been like. I'm quite convinced he has been here, it's simply a matter of finding people who remember.

[ He thinks he can do that. ]

[ Remembering is the hard part, isn't it? He huffs an annoyed sigh, but he's not going to stand in his way. As long as his way doesn't interfere with what Five has in mind. ]

I look forward to hearing all about it on your next broadcast.

the unwinding

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