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

The rain patterns down, relentless, cleansing. Not the first or last time in his life that cleansing has proven to be a violence, an injustice difficult to evade from those who insist it must be the only way, the only steps taken forward to a life worth living.

He has stood here before, on another crossroads, watching another man hold an umbrella in hand, offering an exchange he couldn't accept in turn for averting his feet from the path they were on. For leaving people to die, leaving a friend to their possession, for allowing the righteous world to self-congratulate over their efficiency in exterminating evil. Asked the one he saw as soulmate to be the one to slay him, should that end arrive, and bid his horse on, flying past on thunderous hoofbeats in the cold, cold rain.

Now he steps quiet and sure, umbrella of a different design, bloodstained as the one Lan Zhan had carried should have been. When he makes his way to Lao Five's side, he doesn't need to lift the umbrella in order to cover them both. Merely stands, face solemn, talisman paper between his fingertips, watching Five's response.

"It's unwise to linger," he says, voice pitched lower, one not meant to carry, "In rain such as this."

Another time like the last. The frantic energy that had sent Five running through the street subsided to a steady buzzing in his bones that’s easier to ignore while he catches his breath. He's been in this situation before, hunted by people who can perfectly blend in with a crowd, except now every faceless stranger felt like one of them. The steady rain was just starting to seep into his clothing when a shadow passes over him.

He's uncharacteristically jumpy, but he doesn’t pull away when he recognizes the taller man shielding him from the weather. Wei Wuxian. The name comes to him slowly. Everything still feels muddled, conflicting with his memories, and he’s losing his grip on the idea that he doesn’t belong here. Maybe he knows why.

"Lost my umbrella,” Five says simply. He doesn’t remember when he dropped it, but it was lost by the time he thought to look for it. He stretches his neck to look behind him, like he's expecting to see someone still chasing after him, but there's no one. Just his old paranoia resurfacing again.

"Forgot where I was for a minute."

A humming acknowledgement, extended into a melodious manner of speaking. Keeping parts of himself close that feel like they fit to this place, but fit beyond it to, to some man he is when not walking water-logged streets with faceless people and burlap nightmares seeking to thrust him aside, into the mud.

"It's catching. The forgetfulness." He tips the umbrella, matching a shifting wind that tries bringing the rains down at a different angle. Tricky, this place, whatever Serthica this is and isn't. "Which you are you remembering right now? The Lao Five from Sa-Hareth," he says, "Killing a dead man in a lake, or the Lao Five who was of Serthica, born and bred?"

A splash in the distance, resolving into a second as wheels on an unseen carriage bounce through potholed streets one housing expanse over. Strange hints of normalcy in the unsettling twisted reality of both being here and not, right and not, living (mostly) and hazily not. Notable, he thinks, that his sense of things is present here in a way it hasn't been in...

In.

At first he'd thought it was an act of pity. Five thought he'd stopped because he saw someone caught in the rain and wanted to help. Unlike everyone else he passed, who acted hostile towards him, even if he couldn't remember doing anything to them that would warrant it. The more he tries to trace it back, the less sense it makes. He doesn't belong here. He does. Wei Wuxian seems to sense his confusion, recognize it, but instead of helping he only adds to it.

"Catching, how?" That sounds alarming. It's true that he doesn't feel right, beyond the chill that settles in his damp clothes, and his memories don't entirely line up. A symptom of something he doesn't understand, but might explain how he got here. If he's sick, that could be why they were chasing him. They didn't want to catch what he has.

"I know you." And he seems mildly offended that he's treating him like he doesn't. Sa-Hareth and a dead man sounds familiar, like some story he's heard, but nothing that happened to him. He shakes his head. "You know me. I'm fine, I just got turned around and caught in the rain."

On his way home? There was something weird about it. He looks up at the bloody stains on the umbrella, and down to the ones on his clothes. Both of them are covered in stains, only Five's have spread and saturated deeper from the rain, and he has no idea why.

"I didn't kill anyone."

I didn't kill anyone. Wei Wuxian laughs, a soft, short exhalation, eyes darkening with a humour that's anything but light. Lao Five is a man who kills, and a man who has restrained himself from killing, who doesn't like complications, who doesn't like a lack of control.

I didn't kill anyone is as true as it is false for him, but that's the conflict right now, the duality.

"I know you," he says, agreeing, "You know me. I know you're fiercely loyal to family, and Vanya covered your back then. I know Diego and his," he shudders, "Wolves protected you, and that Allison rallies to you even as she questions what you do. I know none of us are of this land."

Not Serthica, not any of the lands to the east or west, north or south.

"I know you would kill, if that's what you felt would protect those you love. Or because your frustration's boiled over, and death seems simpler and more final, even when here it's not either of those things."

Memories in lessons of healing and resurrection, of Taravast—Taravast!—shaking through the background of these Serthican streets.

"The people here aren't remembering who they were before. That's what's catching. That's why we need to stay dry."

Edited 2022-10-10 22:06 (UTC)

The laugh gets a sharp look from Five, and he narrows his eyes as he reminds him of his siblings, but only to point at all the reasons he'd kill for them. To highlight contradictions that seem to say that not only does he know him, but he knows him better than he knows himself.

His instinct is to push back. It would be easy to take advantage of when he's confused, and sick, to trick him into doubting his reality. He knows his family, and that they belong here with him, but questions remain. Why they're covered in blood. Why he was being hunted. If he can't remember everything, the implication is that he could have been responsible.

Wei Wuxian doesn't say that. Instead, he seems to explain his own motives sympathetically. Which doesn't make sense, if that's the person he's trying to remind him of.

"Stay dry." Five hasn't moved from under the cover of the umbrella, but he's far from dry. The chill on the wind runs right through him and he'd like nothing more than to go home. He's tempted to go on his own if he was confident that he could find his way back. "...Do you remember how we got here? Where my family is?"

"... Fell, through everything. Down, and everything was falling, like it had before... you don't know about that time."

The memory in his mind, Lan Zhan bleeding above, his brother etched in rage and sorrow, the skies filled with light after the dark was swallowed whole, his parting gift. That fall had gone forever too, the silence more consuming, the darkness more total.

"Where they are here is as lost as you are. Where they should be is where we will be, once we see through this." He looks at Five, expression serious, eyes too sharp. Wei Wuxian is a man used to this peculiarity of questionable design, doubting sanity in one presentation of self, acknowledging another, deeper sense.

"Has this felt unshakably real? Where burlap people walk as if they're men and women, about their work?"

He looks at least terribly concerned when Wei Wuxian mentions his family being lost. It feels like something he should be acting on, but he makes no move to storm off in an unknown direction. And it shouldn't be that way. He should know where to go if this place is where he's where he's supposed to be.

"They've always...," but he trails off when faced with that logic. People shouldn't be made of burlap. They shouldn't be chasing him like he doesn't belong. He doesn't want to admit to how conflicted he is over something obvious. Save for one thing.

"Whose blood is it, then?"

"Someone who reinforces a reality separate from this one." A lingering pause, and he exhales, lips thinning. "Perhaps one in white."

He isn't sure with the shifting nature of his mind of late, but he holds on to certainties forged in different years, in different suspended darknesses where there was nothing but himself to craft his sanity or insanity. Here in the rain that falls, mud splashing around them, water puddles shivering with a sense of inevitability that didn't match the careening of burlap bodies and faceless horrors on parallel streets, he wonders at enough.

"A man in white walked East. I wonder, time to time, if we're not following his lead, unwitting or unknowing. But this blood we see, it isn't ours. We're not what burns the brightest here."

He's speaking in riddles that do nothing to help resolve the conflict he has within himself, and Five wonders if he even knows what he's saying. The cold dampness lingers on him and he crosses his bloodstained arms as he tries to piece together any semblance of meaning in his words.

"I don't understand you," he finally admits. Maybe because he's sick. Part of him just wants to go about his business. A change of clothes and he thinks he could forget all about it, but he still can't shake his unease that there's more he's missing. "...I didn't see a man in white. You're saying he has the answer?"

"He feels like he does. Or has more of one," Wei Wuxian admits, holding that blood splattered umbrella steady overhead. His gaze drifts up, studying that truth, too.

"It doesn't flow, or melt, or diminish. The blood here, have you noticed? It remains no matter how hard the rains fall."

Like paint, but he knows in a way that makes no logical sense it's blood, not paint, not a staining. That something about it is part of the protection of self and sanity maintained under the umbrella's reach.

"Same for what's on you, or what's on me." He gestures toward his legs, where mud and blood are intermingled, both clotting in ways unfortunate and strange. "From the burlap dolls wandering here as if they were people all along."

He notices when Wei Wuxian point it out. Not that it really explains anything. If the blood that stains them came from a man who spread the sickness, wouldn't he be dead? And how did it mark both of them, unless they'd been there to witness it?

His memories are too painful to remember, physically spiking through his brain whenever he tries to think of how he landed in that room. The need for answers outweighs his trepidation, and he looks at him with weary eyes.

"Where is he?"

"Was he not at the mansion? It's hard, slippery to remember. That's why we can't allow the rain to fall on us, making it harder." Later, he might have words for a man and a child, masked in white, at a pond of a puddle where paper boats floated. Where hatred pooled and swept away sensibility, to all those but who were used to hatreds swallowed and tempered by patience, all things in due time.

"But he was there, and he burned bright. We flicker like candles compared... I've said that already, I know." His fingers tighten on the handle of the umbrella, spinning it gently, sending water flying in all directions. Closer now, feet stomp, shadows flee. Burlap people set about the tasks of their day, driving the faces of those who bore bodies down and down, into the growing, staining pools of mud.

"We need to keep moving. Find your family. Find mine. Keep them dry," he says, looking to Five, looking at what he is and what he isn't. "Keep their memories safe."

This place is not theirs, it is not right. It must be done.

What he says sounds like it should be familiar, but it's like trying to remember a dream after waking. Wei Wuxian blames the rain, although he's only felt more unease now that he's covered by his umbrella. It's his nature to pick at whatever doesn't seem right. Ordinarily, he'd be accused of being paranoid, and this time it's someone else telling him.

They don't belong here. They have to find his family.

"I could get us there, if I knew where to go." Maybe. He's not sure how his powers work in this reality, but he could attempt it. He frowns, trying futility to remember the way. "The mansion?"

"With the tea." The order for him here has been a mess, tripping from one state, one place, to another. He shakes his head, loosening his thoughts. "Have you been in any mansion? Where they served tea, or asked for herbs in a garden with plants that want to hold on to you, strangle you, if they can?"

If not, was that a different time? Different reality? Had it happened? Part of him knows it, recalls the sense of the too alive and the living and the not-quite-really-not-quite-nots.

"Let's... follow the paper boats. Find the child. Find them there too? Or risk finding that mansion with its terrible tea."

Five doesn't have answer, even though he was the one who asked about the mansion. He knows what happened and he doesn't, and trying to put the pieces together just makes his head hurt. At least the pain and frustration brings him back to something like himself again.

"...There was a fox." Does he want to go back there? It doesn't feel like he does, but at a mention of a child he gets some of his focus back. He nods, and looks back out into the rain.

"You're right. We need to stop wasting time." Like he isn't the one who has been standing here confused, waiting for Wei Wuxian to nudge him along. Now, what paper boats? Five can't blink there with that little to go on, so he waits for him to lead the way with more conviction than he's had since he stepped out into the rain.

"Show me."

He spans his hand open, fingers splayed, head turning before his body does, the umbrella held aloft.

"Come," he says, motion a call to arms, the memory of folded paper bobbing on an endless puddle, crashing in minuscule waves against a muddy shore, luring him on. It feels real, more substantial, than so much here. And we are what we are, and we will be what we are, and the confused memory will part to leave the kernels of truth floating on the seas of confusion.

He glances behind them, at a place he belongs and doesn't, even as he keeps step beside him. Who knows what might have happened if he hadn't come along with his umbrella? Faceless bodies still lurk around them like they're somehow watching. That feeling of uncertainty, and confusion, lingers on. That sense that they're being hunted.

But he manages to pull himself away with the promise that answers are ahead of them. One way or another, whatever is doing this will come to an end, and he'll find his place again. Wherever that is.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

the unwinding

wildcards myself in

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shall we wrap with them wandering off to find the child with his boats?

yes! /wraps this blind leading the blind