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

RABBIT HOLE.

For someone who can't swim, six is a bad roll. She trashes as she tries to keep her head above water, inhaling way more water than she needs to be in the process, however, choking on it. The person in the practically ocean room with her is hopefully a better swimmer.

“Do you have one of those—” A few coughs as she gets water out of her mouth. “—floaty noodle things, by chance?”

Help.

**
TEA.

Wanda is running. Quickly. As far away as she can from the knife wielding whatever-the-hells after her.

01. // If she happens to run right into you and send the both off you tumbling, she'll quickly get to her feet and pull you up with her. “Sorry, we've got to move, no time to be graceful about this. If you dislocate anything, I can fix it when we stop again.” How? Magic. Not medicine. She's not a doctor.

02. // Or maybe she doesn't run right into you, but instead when she blocks herself in a room, she finds she's not the only one in there. Out of breath, she presses a palm against the wall and uses her free hands to tuck her messy hair behind her ear. Scarlet magic wisps travel from her fingers to around the door, trying to hold it even more secure.

“I don't know about you, but I don't trust that thing to hold the handle in place as a makeshift lock.” Her breath still hasn't returned to a normal pace.

“How long have you been in here? Meaning, do we need to be looking for an exit and a better place to hide?”

**
ETC.

(hit me with something else!)

Floaty noodle thing?

"No." Nothing is floating in here, aside from those blasted jackalopes. He's not in any shape to do this right now, fighting with his boots until he kicks them free, coming around in the churning water to snag the younger woman under the arms, to pull her back against his chest if she'll let him. Maybe he can tow her to the wall, where there are at least handholds in the stones, surely...

"Try to relax or you'll drown us both," McCoy tells her, "I got you."

The word 'pool noodles' escaped her. She was close, at least? Sort of.

She isn't in much of a literal or metaphorical physical position to argue about the rescue, though, so she lets herself be held on to, because that beats drowning. No thanks, hard pass, etc. “Relax???” She chokes out between gulps of water, but she at least stops thrashing so much like a fish trapped in a net. “How am I supposed to relax? I have never learned to swim in my life.”

"Relax now," he grunts, towing her with one arm as he carves water with the other, kicking his way toward the wall, "Or I let you go 'til you tire out."

It might seem cruel, he knows, but she could drown him with her thrashing before she ever sinks herself.

"I'm not lettin' you drown, either way."

(deleted comment)

She hears her own heartbeat in her skull and her heart also feels like it's about to fly out of her chest. This definitely counts as her cardio for the month, right?

“I really hope that's a good thing. Or at least neutral. Kind of tied up with stuff on the shit side of the scale right now.” She tries to make the comment sound mostly light, but that may be a little hard what with her breath being all over the place.

“Um, hi?”

Sokovia means home, and she's surprised that anyone from home has aleven a neutral opinion of her, let alone leaning good. She hasn't made a lot of strides in public relations in the past handful of years. To, uh, say the very least.

Finally, with her breath a little easier:

"Wanda Maximoff. Or if you meant that superhero code name business, Scarlet Witch. You?"

"Yelena. No super code name." She restrains herself from sharing her opinion of superhero code names (lame) but her tone, even in a whisper, betrays a bit of judgement. Oops.

"So how come you're hiding? Can't you just, you know..." She mimics an explosion with both hands, adding a little sound effect for flair.

Kamala having fallen into a river multiple times due to being a space cadet absolutely can swim. She knows saving someone the old-fashioned way is beyond her high school gym class education. They had a floatie in the class pool. Kamala only has herself and amazing cosmic powers.

She uses the amazing cosmic powers. A disk forms above their heads with one outstretched hand. Kamala holds her breath so she can stop swimming long enough to form a giant arm to yank Wanda close enough to grab on with her arms. It's not a perfectly solution. She will think of making some platforms to stand on once she gets a moment to breathe and figure out how to imagine that accurately in the murky water. Right now her only priority is saving what she thinks is a random drowning woman. After all, this isn't exactly the best lighting to recognize Wanda Maximoff is in the same cave as you much less thank her for her part in saving the galaxy from a madman.

the unwinding

tdm tourist: Wanda Maximoff — Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)

rabbit hole

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switched accounts but same person!

late as always :(