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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
Wrathion absolutely does not want to sleep in a bunk bed. His eyebrows loft, but he does not comment on it.
Still, more importantly: ]
You possesses a ship?
[ The wording here suggests spaceship, not the sailing variety. He clearly doesn't have it with him, however. Unless he left it somewhere? A ship would be a good alternative if the beacons continue to be a disappointment. Not that they know which direction to go, but still. ]
no subject
I've never been separated from her this long before. I parked her in an alleyway in Blackpool, stopped off for an ice cream cone, and ended up here. She'll find me, soon enough, my old girl, because we're connected. And when she lands here, I'll take everyone home before I come back.
[ An easy enough task for a time and space machine. He could be back here before any time had passed at all, so he could finish what they'd all started. ]
no subject
It has decent capacity, then?
[ Wrathion lifts a hand to stroke at his beard, thoughtful. ]
The trouble would be, locating the home worlds of all these people. They are... disparate. Somehow, the beacons they use here were able to pinpoint them and return us to the exact time we were taken from. If we do manage to unearth one here, that would be the easiest route, however they do seem... unreliable.
no subject
She's infinite, in fact! Adding new rooms all the time, rearranging. She's finicky, quite particular. A mind of her own, that one, and a glorious one at that. [ He complains about his fickle ship sometimes and her penchant for unreliability, but he adores her and misses her desperately. ]
I agree with you, though. If we could rely on the beacons, we'd all be sorted. Trouble is, can we believe it? Not sure what to trust here, apart from each other. [ Even then, perhaps questionable. He doesn't always trust easily himself, but he does trust himself and his instincts. No one he's met here so far amongst their group of wayward travelers has seemed untrustworthy to him. ]
If I can fix my sonic screwdriver, I might have a way to call to my ship, bring her here, like a different sort of beacon altogether. The TARDIS, she's called, by the way. Time and Relative Dimension in Space.
no subject
The beacons do appear to work -- that much I can answer from experience. They appear to correct the timeline as you are returned, as well. The problem being they are erratic, and can flare out to summon you back without warning.
no subject
I've wondered how our absence might be perceived by those we've left behind, what our presence here might do to the timelines we originate from. Timelines are a bit of a big deal for me. I'm a Time Lord, in fact! I can see everything as it pertains to time, everything that was, could be, should be, shouldn't be, what's fixed, what's in flux. Except here, of course. No, that would be too easy, wouldn't it?
no subject
[ Lord is a bit of a minor title for something like that, isn't it? ]
I'm familiar with the concept, though not under that title.
[ ... Not in the mortal races, either, although... there is something odd about this person. Something unfamiliar, that he cannot quite define. ]
no subject
[ And then there was the Doctor himself, a complete renegade. Of course, he can't speak ill of them overmuch. They're gone, by his hand, in a terrible war. Such things somewhat soften one's own reflections. ]
no subject
It's a disagreement I've heard several times before, although not from a mortal race.
[ ... Not that, most people refer to mortal races as 'mortal races' but listen. Very specifically, he's not heard mortals playing with time either. How did they even learn this? Fascinating, truly, ingenious what they come up with. He does truly admire it. ]
no subject
We are mortal, technically, though we have a trick for cheating death, at least for a while. Delaying it a bit, would be the more accurate turn of phrase. Regeneration, though it's not infinite, and this is my eleventh life so far. I haven't always been the best at avoiding trouble.
[ It's also not entirely truthful, the bit about this being his eleventh life. But, close enough. ]
no subject
Regeneration conjures a certain sort of image, for Wrathion, but an 'eleventh life' is not... quite something that matches up. ]
You can... undo the aging process?
[ That sounds... dangerous, potentially, depending on how it is done. ]
no subject
I say nearly because, even in this body, I'll eventually grow old.
[ And then, if he had any regeneration energy left, he'd simply get a new body. Of course, up until recently, he hadn't thought that was possible. Evidently, thanks to Clara, he's been granted another regeneration cycle. ]
no subject
I'm familiar with changes of appearance, but changing personality along with them is... unusual.
[ One could choose to affect a different persona, of course, but that doesn't sound like what he's suggesting. ]
no subject
[ In this case, Doctor meaning literally the invocation of the word; a healer, a helper, a bringer of hope. ]
no subject
You are an interesting individual, Doctor.
[ 'Interesting' is one of those words that can be meant so many ways, and right now Wrathion feels as if he means it in all of them. ]