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

[The thought of those gauntlets being aimed at a person is gruesome, and a grimace crosses Caitlyn's face as she considers it. Vi needs to be able to protect herself, the last thing Caitlyn wants is for Vi to be injured again, but she's having truoble picturing the gauntlets as anything but horribly, brutally lethal.

One thing she's sure of: Jayce would never want them used as weapons. So did Vi really speak with him, or did she break into his lab and take them?

Perhaps the reason she deflected Caitlyn's question has less to do with her opinion of Caitlyn and more to do with the fact that she wants to hide her illicit activities.

But then, how would Vi have known the gauntlets were there if she hadn't spoken to Jayce? And it's not as though Caitlyn is unaware of her proclivities. Would she really be unwilling to explain that she stole the gauntlets? Perhaps stealing from Caitlyn's friend is different in Vi's mind than stealing from strangers on the street. Perhaps she thought Caitlyn would be less understanding. And if that is indeed Vi's thought process, perhaps she's right. If she had only told Caitlyn her plans, if they'd worked together...

Caitlyn scowls down at the gauntlets as she tries to figure out the answer to the question before she asks it.]

Did you go to Jayce? Did you talk to him?

[ There's only so much she can do to side-step the obvious. No matter what, this is going to be an awkward train ride, to say the least. While she considers just how to respond, the train begins to jerk into motion, and her hand shoots up to grab hold of the barrel before she tumbles directly into Caitlyn. Smells like soap.

She leans back onto her knees again, the screee of the train picking up traction fading before Vi lets out a big sigh and an even bigger shrug. She could so easily throw that Councilor in the line of fire, here, but why put off the inevitable? Vi isn't eager to lose anyone else, not when it's barely been an hour since she watched her sister commit an act that neither of them could come back from...

Brow furrowed, she's looking straight at Caitlyn now. She may not be ready to completely break her heart and tell her about that, not yet, but Vi knows she can't hide from this. Not with the gauntlets sitting right there beside them. ]

You heard him at the meeting, didn't you? He was the only one who wanted to do something about Silco. So he did. We did. Started to, anyway... He didn't have the stomach for it in the end.

[Caitlyn watches Vi closely, the concern on her face tinged with a sort of dread at what the answer could be. Vi leaving her to go to Jayce, Vi stealing from Jayce, Vi running off to start a one-woman war against Silco, Jayce helping her... Caitlyn's not sure what she's hoping to hear, but every possible answer she can think of is tumbling end over end in her head and she won't be able to think of anything else until she knows which one is right.

And then suddenly it doesn't matter, because the train lurches and Vi is thrown right towards her. She inhales sharply, hands instinctly reaching up to Vi's shoulders to brace her. Vi's shoulders are...

Muscular.

It's not until Vi has backed away and is staring at her with those soft grey eyes that she remembers to exhale, her brain once again starting to worry away at all those possibilities, just in time for Vi to tell her the truth of it.

She hadn't known what she'd been hoping to hear, but now she realizes she would have preferred almost any other version of events. Vi did go to Jayce after all. And Jayce... The furrow between her brow deepens as she bites her lower lip hard. How could Jayce do such a thing? Why would he want it? She's known him since she was a child, he's always been her best friend, and she never thought he'd be... And Vi...

She's glad to have the truth, of course, but the truth isn't easy to hear.]

He wanted a war. You can't--

[A loud screech as the train careens dramatically, sending her flying into the wall. She cries out at the sudden pain as a harsh chemical smell starts to fill her nostrils.]

[ The way Caitlyn's expression falls feels like a one-two strike to the heart, and Vi resists her desire to reach for her. To take her hand and ask her to understand, because she had to. She had to know what Vi was going to do when she left. But she does resist, and it's because she realizes that it's a stupid hope to have. Caitlyn still doesn't understand. Vi didn't start a war. It had always been raging on the streets of Zaun. Silco had just found a way to use it. She'd only been trying to end it.

She doesn't even finish forming her thought, having been ready to interrupt Caitlyn, but disaster gets there first. They're both thrown, with Vi's grip on the barrel only serving to bring it with her before she lets it go to slam both palms against the wall on either side of Caitlyn, bracing against whatever comes next. That barrel, and another, both crack hard against her shoulder and then her back, but with teeth grit she at least manages to cocoon Caitlyn and keep her from getting smashed by the flying debris. Not the worst beating she's had, at least.

With a breathy grunt, she starts to ask if Caitlyn's okay, but the sharp scent of something else─not soap, it's too much─is enough to momentarily take her breath away. She can feel the hairs on her arm tickle and raise like lightning just struck nearby, and the very air feels like it could lift her up with how it seems to crackle. Instead, she's wilting downward, eyes drooping as she fights against a lethargy she's never known before. ]

Cait─

Edited 2022-10-15 03:01 (UTC)

[There's a sudden spike of adrenaline that surges through her, and she tenses, fully expecting Vi's entire weight to slam into her. But that never comes. Instead, she sees the barrels rolling towards them, and tries to push against Vi's shoulder, to get her out of the barrels' path, even if that means they would hit her instead. But Vi's too firmly planted against the wall and Caitlyn's not fast enough and she hears the stomach-turning crack of the barrels breaking against Vi's shoulder and back.]

Vi!

[Before she can check how badly Vi's hurt, she feels something like electricity crackling across her arms and the back of her neck, making her hair stand on end. And then, despite the adrenaline flooding her system, despite how fast her heart is hammering in her chest, her eyes start to drift shut. She grits her teeth, scowling as she tries to will herself to stay awake, but her eyes refuse to open more than the narrowest bit, just enough to see Vi - nothing more than a red blur across her darkening vision - begining to collapse.]

Vi...

Edited 2022-10-15 04:45 (UTC)

the unwinding

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