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

"Someone who reinforces a reality separate from this one." A lingering pause, and he exhales, lips thinning. "Perhaps one in white."

He isn't sure with the shifting nature of his mind of late, but he holds on to certainties forged in different years, in different suspended darknesses where there was nothing but himself to craft his sanity or insanity. Here in the rain that falls, mud splashing around them, water puddles shivering with a sense of inevitability that didn't match the careening of burlap bodies and faceless horrors on parallel streets, he wonders at enough.

"A man in white walked East. I wonder, time to time, if we're not following his lead, unwitting or unknowing. But this blood we see, it isn't ours. We're not what burns the brightest here."

He's speaking in riddles that do nothing to help resolve the conflict he has within himself, and Five wonders if he even knows what he's saying. The cold dampness lingers on him and he crosses his bloodstained arms as he tries to piece together any semblance of meaning in his words.

"I don't understand you," he finally admits. Maybe because he's sick. Part of him just wants to go about his business. A change of clothes and he thinks he could forget all about it, but he still can't shake his unease that there's more he's missing. "...I didn't see a man in white. You're saying he has the answer?"

"He feels like he does. Or has more of one," Wei Wuxian admits, holding that blood splattered umbrella steady overhead. His gaze drifts up, studying that truth, too.

"It doesn't flow, or melt, or diminish. The blood here, have you noticed? It remains no matter how hard the rains fall."

Like paint, but he knows in a way that makes no logical sense it's blood, not paint, not a staining. That something about it is part of the protection of self and sanity maintained under the umbrella's reach.

"Same for what's on you, or what's on me." He gestures toward his legs, where mud and blood are intermingled, both clotting in ways unfortunate and strange. "From the burlap dolls wandering here as if they were people all along."

He notices when Wei Wuxian point it out. Not that it really explains anything. If the blood that stains them came from a man who spread the sickness, wouldn't he be dead? And how did it mark both of them, unless they'd been there to witness it?

His memories are too painful to remember, physically spiking through his brain whenever he tries to think of how he landed in that room. The need for answers outweighs his trepidation, and he looks at him with weary eyes.

"Where is he?"

"Was he not at the mansion? It's hard, slippery to remember. That's why we can't allow the rain to fall on us, making it harder." Later, he might have words for a man and a child, masked in white, at a pond of a puddle where paper boats floated. Where hatred pooled and swept away sensibility, to all those but who were used to hatreds swallowed and tempered by patience, all things in due time.

"But he was there, and he burned bright. We flicker like candles compared... I've said that already, I know." His fingers tighten on the handle of the umbrella, spinning it gently, sending water flying in all directions. Closer now, feet stomp, shadows flee. Burlap people set about the tasks of their day, driving the faces of those who bore bodies down and down, into the growing, staining pools of mud.

"We need to keep moving. Find your family. Find mine. Keep them dry," he says, looking to Five, looking at what he is and what he isn't. "Keep their memories safe."

This place is not theirs, it is not right. It must be done.

What he says sounds like it should be familiar, but it's like trying to remember a dream after waking. Wei Wuxian blames the rain, although he's only felt more unease now that he's covered by his umbrella. It's his nature to pick at whatever doesn't seem right. Ordinarily, he'd be accused of being paranoid, and this time it's someone else telling him.

They don't belong here. They have to find his family.

"I could get us there, if I knew where to go." Maybe. He's not sure how his powers work in this reality, but he could attempt it. He frowns, trying futility to remember the way. "The mansion?"

"With the tea." The order for him here has been a mess, tripping from one state, one place, to another. He shakes his head, loosening his thoughts. "Have you been in any mansion? Where they served tea, or asked for herbs in a garden with plants that want to hold on to you, strangle you, if they can?"

If not, was that a different time? Different reality? Had it happened? Part of him knows it, recalls the sense of the too alive and the living and the not-quite-really-not-quite-nots.

"Let's... follow the paper boats. Find the child. Find them there too? Or risk finding that mansion with its terrible tea."

Five doesn't have answer, even though he was the one who asked about the mansion. He knows what happened and he doesn't, and trying to put the pieces together just makes his head hurt. At least the pain and frustration brings him back to something like himself again.

"...There was a fox." Does he want to go back there? It doesn't feel like he does, but at a mention of a child he gets some of his focus back. He nods, and looks back out into the rain.

"You're right. We need to stop wasting time." Like he isn't the one who has been standing here confused, waiting for Wei Wuxian to nudge him along. Now, what paper boats? Five can't blink there with that little to go on, so he waits for him to lead the way with more conviction than he's had since he stepped out into the rain.

"Show me."

He spans his hand open, fingers splayed, head turning before his body does, the umbrella held aloft.

"Come," he says, motion a call to arms, the memory of folded paper bobbing on an endless puddle, crashing in minuscule waves against a muddy shore, luring him on. It feels real, more substantial, than so much here. And we are what we are, and we will be what we are, and the confused memory will part to leave the kernels of truth floating on the seas of confusion.

He glances behind them, at a place he belongs and doesn't, even as he keeps step beside him. Who knows what might have happened if he hadn't come along with his umbrella? Faceless bodies still lurk around them like they're somehow watching. That feeling of uncertainty, and confusion, lingers on. That sense that they're being hunted.

But he manages to pull himself away with the promise that answers are ahead of them. One way or another, whatever is doing this will come to an end, and he'll find his place again. Wherever that is.

the unwinding

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shall we wrap with them wandering off to find the child with his boats?

yes! /wraps this blind leading the blind