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!

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Alec cracks into the ground with a wholly undignified grunt after getting derailed by Yelena's impossibly sturdy umbrella, a heap of very long limbs on the floor. Embarrassing.

For a moment he just sits there like he actually can't believe that happened to him, before the continued rain of items and a belated registering of Yelena's words get him to push himself up with considerably more grace than he fell. When he stands he's nearly a full foot taller than her, with the recurve bow and a handful of silver arrows that he'd managed to snatch out of the air on the way down slung over one of his shoulders and tucked into a quiver respectively, a very grouchy look plastered across his face.

He eyes her briefly like he's sizing her up, before pointing a finger at her: "You didn't see that." Surely that will work, right?

Oof. That doesn't seem like it was fun. For him, that is. For her, it was fairly entertaining to watch.

Her subconscious mind sizes him up immediately and supplies a handful of ways to take him out, most of them involving turning his size and weight against him. A few creative uses for the umbrella also come to mind. But that's just background noise; she'll probably never be rid of it, thanks to her training, but Yelena is the one in control now.

She shrugs at his pointed finger and moves on to more pressing questions. "What's with the bow and arrow? When did everybody decide to take up archery?"

Alec doesn't actually know many other archers. In fact, for the most part it's worse: almost everyone he works with specializes in swords or daggers (or the whip.) Not a single gun amongst them, and all in the 21st century no less. At least arrows have some range.

Still, he's trying not to be insulted as he brushes off his pants, glances back up, and then immediately has to side-step a falling machete. Yikes. Too bad he hasn't seen a second bloodied umbrella like the one she's got, it seems pretty useful right now. "It's, uh, family tradition." Sorta. Not really. Minor details. "What's wrong with archery?"

You don't understand, Yelena. You can't beat the Aesthetic™ of bows and arrows!

"Oh, nothing's wrong with it," says Yelena. Isn't that nice and non-judgmental of her? It's too bad she doesn't leave it there. "It's a great choice, you know, if you're a Flintstone."

Pop culture references aren't really her forte, on account of spending most of her life as a brainwashed assassin, but she remembers Saturday morning cartoons fondly. Maybe that's why the flying machete gets a laugh out of her: it looks like something right out of the Looney Tunes. If only they were as invulnerable as Bugs Bunny.

"You should probably stand under here with me," she offers, extending her arm holding the umbrella to accommodate his height.

Alec's nose wrinkles immediately. "What's a Flinstone?" Good news, she found someone even worse at pop culture references than she is! Though Alec is dressed far too contemporary and sounds entirely too American to not be familiar with Saturday morning cartoons, please ignore that.

He steps swiftly into the shelter that she offers up, ducking his head slightly to avoid the very edges of the umbrella's nibs. "Never mind," he amends his earlier question with a wave of his hand like he can shoo the topic away, because clearly that can wait: the jackalopes are now pointing towards the door, after having been interrupted by his unceremonious entrance into her attempted conversation with them. "Is that an exit?"

Why is he expecting her to know? He glances up at the loud clatter of a pie plate smacking off the fabric of the umbrella right next to his ear is followed promptly by a splat as the dessert spills all over the floor and their shoes. That probably doesn't help their situation seem less like the looney tunes. Belatedly, he tacks on a: "Thanks," for the cover of the umbrella. He can be polite, it turns out. When he wants to.

Yelena is just relieved the pie didn't end up on their faces. She loves a good slapstick bit, but it's never funny for the subject.

"Oh, this is going to be annoying," she says as a new realization dawns on her. They'll have to move in tandem to get to the door, unless one of them wants to volunteer to leave the cover of the umbrella. And Yelena doesn't plan on being the one.

"Okay, since you are so crazy tall, why don't you hold this?" She gestures for him to grab the umbrella handle. "Follow my lead and do not fall out of step. I will be very angry if I get a concussion."

With that, Yelena begins an awkward and slow progression towards the door, glancing up every now and then to ensure she is still covered from the deluge of items continuing to rain down over them.

It is rather embarrassing for Varshahn to fall instead of land anywhere; he’s had control over his flying for longer than some mortal cities have existed, and yet here he is, flopping onto the floor in a heap like he’s newly hatched. He is a fairly humble being, but he can still feel warmth on his cheeks as he sits up and dusts himself off. (His real body isn’t exactly capable of blushing, so it’s an interesting sensation. And impressive that this body can do it! He’s in for a lot of new experiences here, isn’t he.)

“Mine apologies,” he says awkwardly to the woman. “I hope your umbrella is not damaged.”

"Nope! Not even a little bit," Yelena says excitedly, twirling the umbrella in her hand. It's rare to find an umbrella that can withstand a gust of wind, let alone blunt impact.

Suddenly the bottom of the tunnel grows very bright and warm, and Yelena looks up to see an enormous ball of fire zooming down at her. At them. She leaps over to where the other person is heaped on the floor and angles the umbrella to give them both cover. Inexplicably, the umbrella's surface handily deflects the fireball.

"Are you good? Anything charred?"

(Speaking of new experiences! He's usually the one hurtling balls of fire at people, not having balls of fire hurled at him! Not that he often fireballs people, just...you know...fire-breathing dragon...anyway.)

His reply is cut off by the deafening roar of the fire; he instinctively but ineffectually holds up his arms to shield himself, and is extremely grateful that Yelena is more prepared than he.

"I am - fine," he manages, touching the pendant around his neck just to make sure it's still there. "Thank you. Are the...creatures - ?" He looks over for them, concerned, but they seem utterly unruffled. "Oh. Well...that is good."

Cautiously, he stands up, keeping an eye out for any other falling objects or fireballs, and offers her a hand.

Yelena furrows her brow as she considers the offered hand. She isn't normally one to mind the rules of etiquette, especially not in a situation like this. But if he's only being polite, she can indulge him. If he makes a grab for her arm, she's prepared for that, too.

She takes his hand and gives a nice, firm shake before nodding toward the rodents. "They're not very talkative, these guys."

He is very polite, and doing his best to remain so even under the circumstances. It’s important to maintain composure even when you’ve just been kidnapped to another planet, stowed away in a train, and then thrown down a giant pit, right?

“I see….that is unfortunate.” He’s not entirely sure what they even are, honestly. Though at least they’re not the strangest new creature he’s met within the past few days. “Perhaps they cannot understand the speech of man?”

In response, one of the jackalopes looks him directly in the eye and sighs dramatically. Chagrined, Varshahn mutters an apology as a few balloons gently rain down upon them all, one bouncing delicately off of his head.

“Or perhaps they are simply as lost as we.”

"Perhaps they are just super duper high," Yelena posits. From the corner of her eye, she catches one of the jackalopes making a gesture that could almost be a shrug. Then it puffs from its pipe and exhales a smoke ring.

It probably isn't good sense to rely on their suggestion, but when all three jackalopes point simultaneously at the door, Yelena simply feels relieved to have an exit within her sights. "Okay, we're going to have to move together to get over there."

He has to concede that as an option, it's true, with the size of the pipes they've got in their paws. He glances up at the...sky to check their chances, but fortunately it's just balloons still, so he prepares to move with her to the door.

(Is she going to continue shielding him from any of the more dangerous falling objects? That is...very kind. He really does love mortals. They're so thoughtful.)

"I am ready."

Yelena nods her own readiness and takes the first step forward. She is reminded of three-legged races on sunny afternoons in suburban Ohio, among her few untainted childhood memories. She grips the umbrella tighter as a cello, a bicycle, and an anvil crash down from the sky in rapid succession.

"So, what's your name?" Might as well make conversation, Yelena figures. It seems like they're in this together now.

He follows her lead, stepping as she does. It's a bit awkward, but it's working, keeping them safe as they slowly progress towards the door. And after the cello, he doesn't even flinch at the barrage of objects pummeling their umbrella.

"I am Varshahn," he says, smiling faintly,though he keeps his eyes on the path in front of them. It's true, they ought to introduce themselves, despite the absurdity of their situation! Mortals are also very practical. (Well, some of them are. This one is, it seems.) "And yours? Have you...has this happened to you before?"

"I'm Yelena," she answers. It is tempting to speed up as they approach the door, but she keeps pace with Varshahn. The steady thump of objects bouncing off of the umbrella fades into the background. They're almost there. "Not exactly. But it is reminiscent of a children's tale from my home. A girl falls down a rabbit hole and has a very long acid trip."

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the unwinding

rabbit hole!

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