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

[ For all that Five doesn't know how he got into this situation, this part feels familiar. Being trapped somewhere with Wangji with no discernible path forward, just to wait for something worse to happen. He's only able to find meager satisfaction when he doesn't have any better luck moving the dice. It would have been better if he'd managed anything at all, but now it can't be blamed on his weak teenage arms. ]

You're giving up? [ Five squints at him, like he thinks he's not telling him everything. He stopped trying too easily. ] If you sensed something, feel free to share.

Biding time.

( Hissed, gritted teeth like scratching the thinned metal of his patience, eroding its veneer. He does not so easily surrender, but there is a time, a place, a strange. An easy, tender calculation.

When he rolls his eyes, it may well be a final prayer to the heavens, while trickles of ash and littered pebbles begin to rain down, released by wayward heat. Five does not intend his petulance. It is only the way of a child, respecting his trueborn nature. )

We are surrounded by waters of fire. ( In case, perhaps, Five excused himself from the reality of their inundated cave and the flames that burn them both. ) Stirred by one roll, of eight. If instruction was left, then either further rolls are possible with time —

( Obligingly, nearly academic: ) Or sorcery prevents the throw while we yet live.

( And isn't that awkward. Grant him a moment. ) We wait.

[ A roll Wangji made. Five had only assumed that there was a correlation between the dice and the lava. Did someone tell him about a time limit? It seems much more likely that they'd only get one chance, and whoever devised this trap doesn't usually need to wait this long for someone to die.

With an annoyed sigh, he turns his back to examine the door for anything he missed when he was checking for damage earlier. That's when he notices a note still on the handle that seems to be those instructions he mentioned. No reason why he should have pointed to that sooner. ]

Roll a four. Easy enough. [ He'd rant more about not telling him, but he's stuck trying to solve an impossible problem. Every angle he looks at, if he's wrong about getting another roll, they're screwed. There's no other exit and he can't jump out of here. There's no getting out the way they came in.

What's the point of a game if no one is around to see them suffer? ...Except they aren't alone. He turns back to nod at the jackalopes. ] Speaking of sorcery, they've been watching us since we got here. How are they not burning?

( A roll, he wishes it known, please and kindly and many thanks unto you, master Five, that Lan Wangji made unwillingly. One he yet contrives to remedy.

...gently, still entrapped in the study of the door and how it creaks and trembles whenever Wangji scratches Bichen's blade against its plates, but remains shut — he turns to gaze upon the jackalopes.

They appear... luminous. Disastrously comfortable. Mockingly fond. One yawns. )

Precisely. If the game were destruction, they would perish beside us.

( Yet they seem strangely at ease, remarkably docile. Crisping to satisfaction, why, attaining a certain bronze, a splendour to their coats and flesh. )

The game is suffering.

( And, by the looks of it, they have already cut that particular gain from their likely spectators well and truly short. Alas, to think they might have far more helpfully perished.

When he tries, once more, to raise the dice, it gives, allowing him to lift — calmly, he holds it over for Five's taking. Do better, then. )

[ Five had more to say about the jackalopes and what he wants to do to them, when Wangji miraculously lifts the dice. He stops forward slowly, his dumbfounded expression shifting to a suspicious scowl when he reaches for it.

Once it's in his hand, it weighs practically nothing, and he examines every side of it for anything that might give him a hint for how it works. If it works. He halfway expected the four to be impossible to roll, but it seems theoretically possible.

He gives Lan Wangji a long look, like he knows he's just offering so he can't be blamed again. Just because the last roll nearly killed him doesn't mean he's nervous. There's not much space to work with, so he paces back as far as he can and tries to calculate how to carefully land on the right number without sending it directly into the boiling magma. He sits on his haunches and gets ready, carefully angling the dice in his hand as he prepares to roll.

If anyone asks, he'll blame the bubble of lava that spits just as he lets it go. He knows it's wrong before it ever settles back on the ground: Five.

The way that number fills him with dread is a first for him. But after only a moment, the lava starts to recede and their tiny island expands, which is at least deceptively encouraging. Immediately he tries to pick it up to roll again, and again it's stuck to the floor. ]

Shit.

[ Five groans as he stands back up and glances miserably back at Wangji. He hates this game. ]

Any guesses on what that does?

( ...his namesake. Five, then, and the outcome pleasing for how the fire waters recede with a tired, forlorn sizzle, and Wangji's wards finally crackle, broken. The last snap of their bindings nearly stings him, electric — sustained overly long.

He cannot presume to summon them again, not without cost to his qi and the intrinsic damage to skin and fingertips, and the long-sharp watering of his eyes. Leaves them, turning to find Five paralysed by fears of whatever atrocities the bones at their feet may root alive. Nothing, yet.

But then, Lan Wangji's head drifts to the side, and he sees the easy rippling of trembled, no longer heating air, the vibration of Five — growing and extending and blooming in slow increments. First, he blinks away the observation — perhaps he simply misconceived Five's proportions, perhaps if he only looks closer — then concedes it, voice reedy and scraped: )

...sit. ( And softened: ) You are gaining proportion.

[ From Five's perspective, everything around him gradually begins to shrink. One minute he's looking up at Lan Wangji, and the next he's staring down at the top of his head. Whichever it is — everything getting smaller, or him growing exponentially larger — it doesn't seem to be reaching a stopping point.

He steps away when he finds himself taking up too much of the space between them, and keeps going until his back hits the cooled door. Usually he can think of some kind of solution in any situation, but he quickly decides he preferred the lava. This isn't a problem he can blink out of. ]

Ow. [ Something hits his head, and he frowns to see that he ran into the top of the doorframe. Distantly he notes that he's never been this tall in his life. Someone out there must have thought it'd be funny to make it up to him.

For lack of ideas, he decides to listen to Wangji. He sits and tries to concentrate on not panicking. It doesn't help that his busy mind is already calculating the rate he's growing with the space available, and how long it'll take before it really becomes a problem.

What he arrives at isn't encouraging. ]

This is a fun twist. The dice curses whoever rolls. [ That would have been great to know a minute ago, when he wasn't rapidly losing control over the situation. ] There has to be some way to slow it down, right?

( There... is insufficient space in a tight, narrowing enclosure, to share with the likes of a man as a weed, growing, infiltrating, brutalising, dividing. Lan Wangji wilts into himself, teeth gritting and the first few steps of retreat reticently taken.

He barters patience from panic, seeping back, until the hooks and debris of the hard wall eat at his spine, ride his ribs, stab in. And he calls out: )

Consider attempting your greater strength — ( He assumes, but surely, with larger proportions, surely — ) against the door.

( Preferably before Wangji is reduced to dust and the shadow of himself and a storm of ashes. If Wangji must negotiate space amid discomfort, surely they can weaponise this opportunity. )

[ The luxury of headroom is quickly disappearing as the space gets more and more claustrophobic. Five actually loses sight of Lan Wangji until he speaks again, and then he has to find enough room to shift his body in order to find him. He could try to turn back time, but he's likely already past his limit to do that predictably, and anything less than before he rolled the dice and he's just resetting the timer and extending this horror show.

Whenever he thinks it must reach a limit in size, everything continues to shrink at an alarmingly consistent speed. Somehow it isn't painful, but he's increasingly uncomfortable as his limbs crowd over the room.

It takes him even longer to twist to the door, which is already far too small for him to fit through. Still, he manages to slam an elbow into it, and he's rewarded when the wall behind him shakes some dirt and pebbles loose from the ceiling that fall around them.

Another attempt, and pebbles turn to rocks and the ground rumbles until he stops. However it's warded, his efforts are about as effective as Lan Wangji's sword. ]

I think the walls might fall before that door does. [ And he could try that, but more than likely they'd be facing a cave in. It's a tossup if that's more or less preferable than getting squeezed to death if he can't put a stop to this.

And he's lost Lan Wangji again. He's so small now, it feels like he might flatten him on accident. ]

If you don't want to get crushed, stay where I can see you.

( If you do not crush me, perhaps I shall. But then, Five only negotiates the last trickles of his personal space, crushed between surfaces unyielding. Among them, the door — rattling, howling, threatening sooner the dissolution of the walls that barely sustain the ceiling above Five's tumultuously growing head.

Escape is failure now, a dream of forlorn mercy. The dice, then. Find the dice, roll once more, and — it appears, at least on this turn, the curses native to the room did not compound themselves. Perhaps, if the next roll is agreeable, no matter its result —

He decides, hopping rabbit-like with only a passing trinket of a glance at the jackalopes that sulk delightedly at the root of the walls, to make himself known at all times. There might well come the moment when Five risks collision with his body, for want of stretch and alternative. But it is not yet done.

As he blitzes by, he calls out: )

By your left thigh. ( Pivoting now, crossing the distance. ) Behind your knee — ( And passing by: ) Before it.

( And, bringing Bichen's silvered length to deploy as a lever, between the cavernous contortions of Five's oversized knee bone: )

Beneath your knee. The dice slipped.

( He recalls, then, seeing it. The trouble being, there is only very little space for Five to manoeuvre himself and relinquish it. )

[ It's getting darker in the room as his body continues to monopolize the space and blocks the light; not that he needs to see what's happening once he can feel the walls pressing in from every side. He wishes he'd had the foresight to move away from the door before he completely lost sight of the dice. This game must be hilarious for anyone watching, but if they don't reverse it soon (based on the minutes he's already calculated), they won't be alive for the next round.

Thankfully, he hasn't yet crushed Lan Wangji. They've had their disagreements, but he knows how important dignity is to him, and he can't imagine being smothered by a giant is high on his list of honorable deaths.

He's also their best chance at getting out of this. Five briefly considers trying to teleport himself to a better position, but there's not enough space he's not occupying. The best he can offer is to summon his powers enough to make his hands glow and hopefully compensate for the darkness. He holds it there as he twists his leg and nearly knees himself in the face in an effort to lift it from where he heard Wangji.

There are no words for how much he hates magic. ]

Hurry up.

( He thinks, wrap the leg tighter, push it in deeper, hold — and the bone will give.

Thinks, Five, spectre of selfishness and indulgence, who has never encountered a circumstance he would not twist to private gain, is seeking to shield Lan Wangji.

Thinks, there is goodness in things, in all things a sliver, there is possibility — and he plunges in now, rubble scattering at his feet, drives himself to rescue the dice, and lands poorly — all of his body flattened to hard ground, friction grazing his skin like grit. Thank the Heavens, sweet and providing, for the gift of Wei Ying's foresight, that these are his indestructible silks, that they survive him.

In the end, hand lax and wrist bone tense and locked and stiff, he does not throw the dice, so much as they slip of his grip, easily. He watches them, murmurs the start of an ask, whispers himself disciplined and guarded against the possibility of failure —

And lives through the shudder that walks his spine. )

...four.

( They have this. They have this. )

[ It's pure luck that it ends before things got ugly. Lan Wangji's voice is too far away to make out what he says, but he doesn't need to hear him to know he got to the dice. Within a minute he falls rapidly to the ground, because that's exactly what it feels like, and he stays there in a graceless heap once he returns to his normal size.

Which feels much smaller than it did ten minutes ago. He peers up at Lan Wangji, who looks disheveled but still able to tower over him, and then to the dice near him. Four.

He lets out a long, full-body sigh, and closes his eyes until the disorientation passes. It doesn't escape him that in the span of thirty minutes Lan Wangji saved him from two gruesome deaths. In the process, he saved himself, but that doesn't negate the fact that Five couldn't have survived without him.

When he looks over at him again, it seems like he wants to say something about it. Apologize or thank him or ask if he's okay. None of it feels comfortable in the moment, so he doesn't manage more than a subtle nod of acknowledgement. They could agree never to speak of it again, but it's going to be hard to forget. ]

Thank fuck. [ He sniffs and rubs a hand over his face as he collects himself, and he stumbles back to his feet like he forgot how to use them. The jackalopes are still watching from their corner. Enjoying the show.

He frowns at them and turns his attention to the door. ]

Any guess what's through there?

( Thank the throw. But then, Five's gratitude bites as deep and sharp as his rancour, and there's a sting that envelops Wangji, a formidable sense of self-preservation. Leave the dog to lick his wounds, to mend at his own pleasure.

The jackalopes know no such discretion. When Wangji saunters by, hand drifting down to search itches and pricklings of pleasure between their ears and their bedeviled horns, he nearly tsks and disciplines their conduct.

Instead, the door's peeling free of its confines, creaking and crawling open and there is a sense of anticipation, electric, static, forlorn. He should turn, to wait on Five. Maintain the alliance.

But then, they are hardly children, for all this — )

What else? Disaster.

( — remains a child's game, as he steps through. )

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the unwinding

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