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

Alec is not fighting a grin at his boyfriend's reaction, honest! But hmm, if there aren't any teabags, then: "Maybe there's a recipe around here somewhere?" Alec does love his recipes. For better or (much, much) worse.

He'd start looking, himself, but he gets totally sidetracked by Magnus' answer. Two, almost three months?? That's... "Magnus," Alec sounds appropriately aghast by the revelation, even as casual as Magnus appears to be. He sets down his knives on the nearest counter (Alec, that is not sanitary!) and makes his way back across the kitchen immediately. Danger around them be damned, he's tugging Magnus into a sudden but fierce hug: his fingers are still tacky, but the blood has dried enough that it doesn't transfer all over the fabric of Magnus' clothes, which is good because Alec is grabbing them by the handful, bunched up by his shoulder blades, and holding on like his life depends on it.

He should have just done this before. Hopefully Magnus hadn't been particularly attached to whatever it was he'd been doing a second ago.

But he finally gets it, he thinks. Maybe it's a blink of an eye to a warlock, but Alec can't imagine how it must have felt—he'd been so concerned over just a few nights. "I'm sorry. I said I'd never leave you again and then I—" Well, he didn't actually really do anything? Even at his most-self flagellating, Alec can acknowledge that. But it still feels like a failure somehow. After Asmodeus, and Edom, and— He squeezes Magnus a little tighter, for a moment. "I'm not going anywhere now. Okay?" Words don't mean much, but that's not going to stop him from saying them. And then from doing everything he can to prove himself too.

His own shock at being hugged throws him off again, although he's not sure why. Maybe the long absence of Alec in his life and hugs in general had made him forget how good it feels to be swallowed in by someone's arms.

His fingers slowly rise before digging into Alec's shoulder blades, wanting to immerse himself deeper. Let the moment chase away every fearful and somber thought that had whispered its way through his brain these past few months, but then he hears Alec start to apologize, and Magnus is quick to shake his head.

"It's not your fault. It's really not your fault. How could you have known?" Even Magnus hadn't been aware how he'd wound up in this world or the one before it. "Prior to waking up in Serthica, there was also...the House of Ravens, a place that was covered in angry spirits and an even angrier volcano. If I add it all together... it feels almost like half a year."

Again, his memory is a little hazy on all the details, but he's also well aware that saying this will just make Alec worry even further, so he pushes himself away just so he can clutch Alec's face between his hands, meeting his gaze eye for eye as his thumbs stroke Alec's cheeks.

"I'm fine. I've been fine." Mostly fine. He still missed Alec more than words can convey at this moment and had his own moments of overpowering grief. "There were others in a similar state, trapped here away from their loved ones. We've made do together, and you know me– I can never stop from entertaining others or doling out fashion advice. I'll be happy to introduce them to you when we figure our way out of here."

When Magnus starts to pull away, he almost doesn't let him go... but good sense does manage to win out and Alec unclenches his fingers from the back of his jacket, only for them to migrate to his lapels instead and hang on there. After a moment of eye contact, his eyelids flutter closed as he takes in the warmth of Magnus' hands on his face, the emotion in his voice, even if the words aren't the most comforting.

Is it silly that he misses Magnus in retrospect now? Probably. (Definitely.) He can't help but think of all the meals they didn't share, the talks in bed they didn't have, the missed chances to offer him a shoulder to lean on in his moments of need. "Okay," he murmurs, finally opening his eyes again to dart around Magnus' face and make sure he's not just putting on a brave show for Alec's sake. What he finds there reassures him enough that the corner of his mouth carefully ticks up at the corner, not quite a smile but certainly not his default scowl. "I love you," he tacks on for good measure, and just because he likes saying it. He'll have to find a sufficient way to thank the people that helped his fiancé while he wasn't around, and—

—Is that... knocking?

Alec's attention jerks suddenly to the door, warded shut as it is, where the knocking only gets more insistent. Has ten minutes passed already? Apparently! "Hey!" Comes a disgruntled, huffing voice from outside. "This is my kitchen, let me in!"

"I love–," he starts to say back before the knocking draws his attention sharply towards the door. So much for having an intimate moment, not that he's very upset once he realizes that's probably the robot chef on the othe rside.

His body separates from Alec's to allow the frazzled mannequin-droid-thing through, eyeballing it as it rushes towards the cabinets. Before it can start lambasting them about the mess, Magnus grabs its attention fast by gripping the chef by its shoulders.

"If we could have just a brief moment of your time. It appears we've been charged with making tea and could use a little guidance before my fiancé ends up using his tea bag in hot water method."

The robot looks just as appalled by that statement as Magnus had been, and the judgmental expression thrown from the chef at Alec is well-deserved in Magnus' opinion. But that statement does prompt the robot to start rattling off a list of ingredients for them to fetch.

"Alright, I believe I saw the greenhouse on the way here, so I can take care of the tea leaves if you want to fetch the rest," he offers to Alec. As much as he doesn't want them to separate right now, it'll be quicker this way, and it's only for a few minutes... Surely, Alec will be waiting for him when he gets back.

Please be waiting for him.

the unwinding

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