the unwinding

[groundrules]

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

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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.

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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!

Comments

[mad_here]

Do you want a spare, or not? You're the one who's sinking!

( Ah, but the third jackalope — nicely fattened, prettily splashing, rolling between waves — has caught on to their villainy, and appears to be deftly attempting to inject distance —

As Alice pivots his jackalope, pointing it towards its brother and muttering viciously in its floppy ear: )

You better know what's good for you and keep paddling.

( At the very least, between crisscrossed pale waves and riotous spumes, the jackalope seems intent on angling in, on cutting distance. Alice, occasionally cursing but mostly cheering on, spares his companion a glance to mutter behind him — )

How did you start this, anyway? Couldn't you have thought of a more reasonable execution?

[inkfire]

[ Sinking? No one's sinking— until he looks, and there it is, the water rising higher, or his body receding into the depths. A strong kick propels him up, and he clings a little firmer to the jackalope.

Only it proves futile, both of them sinking, and Mo Ran loosens his grip; always a problem, holding too firmly when he needs to flow. And he struggles to strip off his jacket, bobbing along with it on one arm, until he can switch the arm he has thrown over the jackalope. ]

Blame the dice. I was trying to get out of here.

[mad_here]

( ...oh no. Oh, but he's hopeless. Give a man a fish, and he might secure his dinner, but he'll certainly not survive mooching heroically on its scaly back. Watching this young fellow, Alice is at once overcome by the tragedy of reckless youth and the woes of absent hustle.

His jackalope squeaks and burps in agreement. Damned creature. Simply the worst. Alice encourages it to revise its manners with a heartfelt squeeze of where its stomach's pleasantly soft, turning the jackalope to paddle towards its brother.

The third jackalope backs into a corner. Into a crevice. Nearly, squealing, into the wall — until Alice, brows perked, nods behind him: )

Do you want to belong to that guy instead? ( ...all at once, the jackalope flops, ears wilting, life's ambitions eroded. Magnanimously, Alice accepts it under his second arm. ) Thought so.

( And louder, as his two jackalope engines roar into action: )

Hey, you, are you still alive there? Have you found your dice? What are you waiting for? Honestly... must I do everything myself?

[inkfire]

[ The struggle to rip off his jacket and shed it in the murky depths of the water now filling the room is not an easy one. Mo Ran, normally graceful despite his height and occasional blunders, feels like a drowned rat, struggling to stay afloat, and probably looks like one too, hair stuck to his forehead and straggling down his back.

But he gets it off, letting it flow away from him, and grasps the jackalope in both arms, his feet kicking endlessly to help stay afloat. ]

I don't know where they went. [ It's not his fault he lost track of them. A roll of the dice and then the room was flooding. Didn't even have a chance to grab them before the water was up to his ankles, and then he didn't think about it. ]

[mad_here]

What do you mean, you don't know where they —

( ...well, isn't this a turn of events that no one, other than the mysteriously smug and definitely trouble-making jackalopes had anticipated.

Alice, who has spent the better part of his young life in stupor of wretched animal murderers and conspirators, can't help but roll his eyes at the predictability of this particular turn of watery events. Really, bubbles spuming the waves around him, this is the worst.

And the dice? The dice, as he strains his neck to search them, are no where to be seen, breaking to surface. Leaving only the inundated floor. Held close, one of the jackalopes almost swells and vibrates out of satisfied existence. )

They're probably down there, you — can you dive at all? ( No, not if he can hardly swim, just what sort of desert worm spawned this perfectly useless — ) I'll do it, but you have to keep watch for me. I'll bind my waist with... with...

( ...that snake's skin of twine flopping pathetically in a sad float, an arm's length away from Mo Ran. ) That rope! Fetch it, what are you doing?

( Arguably no, having only now been informed of its usefulness. Details. )

[inkfire]

Hey, it's not like I deliberately lost them. [ You try keeping track of them when water is rushing up. Had he thought about it, he would have done something with them, but it had all been so quick.

The rope floats by him, nearly out of arm's reach by the time Alice tells him to grab it, and he grunts but steers the jackalope in the direction of the twine, muttering at it to behave. ] I can dive if you'd prefer to stay up here.

[ Normally, he wouldn't mind if someone else did most of the hard work, especially diving for a stupid set of dice, but Alice sets him on edge, and this entire thing has been frustrating.

But the rope is in his hands moments later, and now he just needs to get it to Alice. ] I've also got a whip.

[mad_here]

...aren't you the same man who's too stupid to swim?

( Really, who'd condemn someone like this to drowning? Even Alice has... the good sense not to incriminate himself by floating near a corpse. All right, suppose the jackalopes could be the witnesses of his brimming innocence. Would any absent, likely non-existent and entirely corruptible court of law accept their testimony?

...there are times in life when the well-connected company of a Cheshire Cat is truly critical to one's ongoing, murderous welfare. Truly, he's never offering to keep a dog, at this rate.

In the end, no need to negotiate: there's a rope, thick and wet and full and sensibly dependable. He reaches, hand first missing the length when he paddles, then latching — drawing the rope close and fumbling to fit it tight and corset his waist, while his two jackalopes start the craven's retreat towards the wall, foolishly thinking they might escape him —

It's a fine thing, wagging your finger and simultaneously bursting an entire room's devilishly still waters into spumes. Someone should congratulate him for it. )

Don't you dare. ( Then to Mo Ran, voice low-deep and equally unrelenting, while he throws out the unbound end of the rope. ) Hold on, while I go down. If... if I tug, I suppose... well. Well, you don't look strong or resourceful enough to pull me up, but at least pretend you'll try.

[inkfire]

[ Anymore, it's easy to let such insults roll off his back for the most part, but it does illicit an eye roll, and a muttered, "Jackass over there thinks he knows everything," said to the jackalope he's holding on to. ]

Told you, I can swim.

[ He's a capable swimmer, but this is one area where he doesn't feel the need to push back. Let someone else do the work here.

When Alice tosses the rope at him, it falls too short, but he guides the jackalope forward, squishing it a little as he reaches out to grab the rope. ] No handle. Perhaps we should have used my whip. [ But he wraps it around his arm, testing the strength. ] I'm not some useless pretty boy. I'll pull you up. Hurry and go find 'em.

[mad_here]

Of course you're not a useless pretty! You're not pretty at all, so —

( ...so, kindly don't mind one [1] Alice's distinctly blooming nerves, as he rounds the rope's heft around his waist again, tightens, and politely gazes into the dark, cloying unknown of the room's depths.

Water petrifies, somehow, for all he knows the waves, the gentle swaying, the currents are no more than natural manifestations, minute adjustments of domestic wind. No living thing will graze his ankles or tear his bones, or —

One lung-tearing inhalation, and he dives down. A long descent, deeper than he remembers. His throat burns. When he first searches the floor, he thinks — unthinkable, too large a perimetre, he'll never find the pieces in time — but then they shine and glimmer pale, and he's drawn to them, rescues them with clumsy hands and tugs at the last moment when breathlessness consumes him, for Mo Ran to help pull him up.

In the end, breaking water, wet and morose and heaving, he surrenders the pieces on the back of Mo Ran's jackalope, for the throw. )

You... you d... do... you do it. I'mmmna... I'm not. Taking the blame.