let's set d o w n some (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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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
Her hands fidget awkwardly in front of her as she considers reaching out to him again, hugging him, offering him some sort of comfort. Being all alone like that... how awful it must have been.
And then Viktor tells her how long he's been here.]
Months? That can't be right. [Yes, it's been a little while, but she's sure she's seen him more recently than that.] If you'd disappeared that long ago, I'd know. Jayce would have said something, he'd have been looking for you, not-- [A frustrated scowl crosses her face.] Not concerning himself with Council business.
no subject
It's possible that, from your perspective, everything is as it should be. Branching timelines.
[It's probably a lot to wrap one's head around, if they don't often think of such things, and he can't blame her for trying to rationalize it in the way that she knows.
The more uncharitable side of himself thinks of how, just prior to his arrival here, he'd made a trip to the Undercity that had apparently gone so unnoticed by Jayce that he erected a blockade in Viktor's absence, and berated him on the bridge when he tried to return to Piltover. The more uncharitable side of him thinks that maybe, if he had vanished fully, as Caitlyn describes, Jayce wouldn't be looking for him, because of Council business.]
How long has it been since they made him a Councilor?
[It's been less than a week--probably the longest week of his life, but an insubstantial amount of time nonetheless. If he can count days, he might get a better sense of where they might align.]
no subject
She tries to work through it logically. If Viktor is suggesting that time... splits at different points, creating near-identical versions of Piltover, then that means there are different Piltovers, populated by people who look and behave an awful lot like the people she knows, but aren't. But that would mean that the person she's speaking to now isn't really Viktor. Not the Viktor she knows.
No, that can't be right. That would mean...
She's not certain what that would mean.
She shakes her head, frowning.] About a week, I'd say. [It's not easy to count the days down in the fissures.]
no subject
That's good. We're lined up, give or take a day or two.
[That said, a great deal can happen in a day or two. Like a trip to prison, apparently.]
What were you doing at Stillwater?
no subject
She answers Viktor's question eagerly, more than happy to discuss her investigation and Vi. The complexities of branching timelines are not without interest, but she can circle back around to that once she's had a little more time to come to terms with the concept.]
After the attack at the hexgates, and the bombing at the fairgrounds, I was certain the two incidents were connected. One of the smugglers had been injured during the fighting at the hexgates and incarcerated, and I knew he must have information that could help me track down the culprit. I went to Stillwater to speak with him, but by the time I arrived...
[She pauses, her frown etching itself deeper into her face. There's so much context to why Vi beat the man within an inch of his life, context Caitlyn's sure she doesn't fully understand. It's enough for her to know that Silco hurt Vi as badly as he did. But Vi's history with Silco, even the little she knows of it, is not her story to tell.]
He was unavailable for questioning. Vi offered to help me track down the man I was after, so I arranged for her release.
[Another room, another group of people who haven't seen Vi. But Caitlyn keeps going despite how badly her injured leg has started to throb, and she's going to keep going until she finds Vi or until she physically can't continue.
Of course the pain in her leg must be nothing compared to what Viktor is contending with, so she slows her pace a little for his sake.]
She saved my life. More than once. She can be a bit prickly, but she's a good person, with a good heart.
ugh sorry I lost this one
There are still missing pieces, it seems, most notably how Caitlyn arranged this release, and what she and Vi did afterward. What does seem apparent is that they must have been through a lot.]
I'll take your word for it. [He doesn't exactly have a choice.] Did you find the answers you were looking for?
[Doing...whatever it is the two of them were doing.]
no worries!
Yes. [She's glad, of course, to have the truth, but it was not an easy road getting there. Especially for Vi. And she still doesn't know what the fallout will be once they return home.
There are quite a few things she's not comfortable telling Viktor. Not because she wants to keep secrets from him, but because they're so personal to Vi. It should be up to her how much Viktor hears about Jinx. So she gives him a rather pared-down account.]
Have you heard of Silco? He's responsible for the manufacture of shimmer, and the smuggling that's been going on. His people were behind the attacks. [She scowls.] Marcus was working for him. Likely for years.
no subject
[The Council might call him an industrialist. Viktor, detached as he is from Zaun, knows better. It helps, maybe, to have a personal connection to the man developing new Shimmer variants for Silco, but that’s not something he’s going to disclose. Caitlyn is an ally, in this situation, so Viktor doesn’t need to give her any reason to distrust him.
Suffice to say, Marcus’ apparent allegiance does not come as a shock to him. The sister cities are a delicate ecosystem, one that requires some manner of cooperation on both sides.]
I’m…unfortunately not surprised. [Marcus was the Sheriff, which means that Viktor did not necessarily hold him in very high regard. What’s more important is assertion of who was behind the attacks.] You’re saying his people took the gemstone, as well?
no subject
[Caitlyn is not a practiced liar. She's never learned all the social graces and ways of delicately finessing her words that her mother would have liked her to, the skills a politician's daughter ought to have. She's never really regretted that – the truth is usually better than even the most well-intentioned lie, and she loathes the sorts of manipulations her mother would call 'diplomacy' – but every once in a while an odd situation such as this comes along, and she finds herself distressingly outside the range of her abilities.
Since she can't tell him about Jinx, all she's left with are half-truths, told with the noticeable stammer of someone who isn't saying everything there is to be said and doesn't feel comfortable about it.]
Y-yes. Someone working for him.
no subject
Jayce brought me a bomb, made by the alleged thief. He was unable to disarm it.
[So he’d asked Viktor to, and then they’d fought. He reminds himself that’s not what’s important right now.]
The device was childish, almost, at least aesthetically, but brilliantly engineered. [And, of course, full of that scrappy ingenuity so unique to the Undercity. He almost misses it.] However, the idea that this person could unlock Hextech, even with our stolen notes, seemed…unlikely, to me.
no subject
[How had Jayce gotten one of the bombs? It seems unlikely that Jinx would leave a live bomb at the fairgrounds that failed to explode. It wasn't left in the lab if Jayce brought it to Viktor. He must have gotten it from somewhere else. Marcus? Perhaps as part of the efforts to frame the Firelights. Would Jinx have given it to Marcus, or would Silco? Does Jinx care about framing the Firelights for her actions? She's certainly not shy about leaving that monkey everywhere.
Caitlyn pauses her train of thought to ask another room of people whether they've seen Vi, with no luck. She's starting to get properly worried.]
I wouldn't underestimate them. [Jinx may be mad, but from what Caitlyn's seen, she's got a sharp mind for building weapons. The wound in her leg is a testament to Jinx's brilliant engineering.]
no subject
Hextech has components. It's not as simple as inserting the power source into any given object. The gemstone is a conduit for arcane energies, and those energies require instructions--runes. Without an understanding of that, and how the runes work, and which ones to use, that conduit is useless.
[It doesn't occur to him that Caitlyn might know something he doesn't, because his thoughts are on the fact that all of this is moot, given their current situation.]
Anyway, it doesn't matter now, not as long as we're here.
no subject
She sighs.]
They've still got the gemstone. I. Failed to retrieve it. [And Ekko may have been killed in the process. Another loss.] If they're working on it right now, while we're stuck here, they could figure it out, Viktor. I've seen what they're capable of. We could return home to find... [Jinx with a functional hextech weapon.] Catastrophe.
[Which just means they've got quite the task ahead of them.]
We've got to get home and prevent that happening.
no subject
You've seen it? [The missing gemstone.] Who are they? Silco's person?
no subject
[Does he know about the bombing on the bridge? That was about twenty-four hours ago for her, had he found himself here before then? Even if he was still in Piltover at the time, would he have heard about it? Jayce had, clearly, and so had the rest of the Council, but would Viktor have been informed?]
The thief attacked us. I was injured, [A gesture to her leg.] and the gemstone was taken from us again.
no subject
He does note, internally, that Caitlyn still refrains from describing the thief. Given the fact that he’s already asked twice, however, he decides to leave it there.]
Thank you for trying. [He’s not quite sure what he wants to do with the information, yet.] If you’re injured, you should rest. I can keep asking around for your friend.
no subject
Perhaps if we split up, we could cover more ground.