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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
The question earns a rare guarded look. Usually Kamala is the definition of an open book, willing to share anything that pops into her mind at any given moment. This is heavy. She treats it as such.
Kamala answers seriously:] The long story is some people thought I could do more than manipulate hard light and they were right. There is- or I guess was? [She shrugs. To this day Kamala still isn't sure if they're all dead or not.]
This group that came from another dimension connected to my world. They were thrown out for whatever reason and really wanted to go back home. They thought my great-grandmother could get them back to where they came from, where she came from too, but she knew it'd destroy our world so she refused.
[She pauses here, sucks in a sharp breath, and looks away.] They killed her. They killed a lot of people over the decades. More than I'll probably ever know.
[For a second it seems like she'll leave it there. This talk really isn't her. Kamala is content to always see the positive side of things and focus on them. There is no bright side to a group that left death and destruction everywhere they went.
Her gaze does wander back to Five and she finishes.] Some people decided to fight back over the years and since you know I'm technically related to the psycho killers they thought I was there to kill them which fair. They were awful. I get why they thought it was better to kill me first and ask questions later. We worked it out so no harm done.
[She shrugs like it's really as easy as that. Maybe it is for her.]
no subject
It isn't the one he could have seen coming. Kamala doesn't act like someone who has been put in many life-or-death situations. Usually Five can tell. Which makes him think all of this was a very recent shift for her. ]
Right. No harm done. [ He's impressed, really. She compartmentalized that well, for someone without training. Five at least looks uncharacteristically sympathetic, before he follows up with a very important question: ]
You inherited the same powers? [ It's been a while since he's asked this, but there's always a chance he's overlooking something. ] You did technically travel through dimensions to get here. Do you remember anything about how it happened?
no subject
Kamala nods at his question. Given her conversation with Bruno before he left and the signs of strange abilities that her grandmother shared, there is no doubt in her mind this is something passed on. It's probably the only thing they can be certain of.]
My grandma has it too- kind of. Sometimes we have the same visions. We saw something that was important to my future or I guess her past at the same time even though we were literally across the planet from each other. She turned my light into stars when she was basically a baby.
[Kamala explains knowing that won't make this conversation any less confusing. She thinks Five can pick up she only knows one aspect of what she can do pretty well. The rest is still a mystery to her.
Kamala swallows, trying to gather her thoughts as she explains the most unbelievable part about all of this.]
I do now. I finished my patrol and my bangle started to glow. [Her hand falls on it for emphasis. Aside from sleep and showers, it never comes off.] Usually when that happens I get weird visions or I accidentally travel through time. This time I ended up where Allison found me.
[She sucks in a sharp breath and adds softly:] I'm not sure if I brought myself here to be honest. That freaks me out because last time I did something like this it was because I was meant to save my family in some weird time loop. I don't know what that means for us.
no subject
He scrutinizes her bangle when she points it out, and thinks very hard about what she just said. Usually he's famously opinionated when it comes to time travel, but she's already established she was figuring it out on her own. Which hits a little too close to home. ]
Accidentally. Are you saying you can control time, but you don't know how you're doing it? Or something else is taking control of you?
no subject
I'm saying that the only thing we know for sure is that all of this is coming from inside me. The light, the visions, going to the past to save my family... Bruno thinks I have some kind of mutation in my genes or whatever label you want to put on it.
[Her hand gently passes over an inscription in Urdu etched into the bangle, What you seek is seeking you.] This bangle just keeps waking up all this stuff inside of me, I think? When I put it on, the visions started and then I created my first construct. When Najima hit it, I travelled through time. I guess in theory one day I'll control the visions and time travel stuff like I do the hard light. I just don't know when. Or how.
[She shrugs as she finally glances back up at Five, throwing in a sheepish smile for good measure. Like all things, Kamala appears to once again be ready to take it all in stride.]
no subject
The bangle is obviously dangerous, but it also triggers her one form of defense. ]
That can't be a theory. You need training so you'll know how not to do it. [ She might be ready to drop it, but Five isn't. ] You went there and back to exactly the same point?
no subject
no subject
As little as she seems to grasp her powers, he's not positive she did time travel or if it was simply a vision, but he's going to find out. ]
Right. [ This is his way of expressing sympathy. ] You managed to accomplish one of the hardest thing to do in time travel, purely by chance.
Does Allison know about this?
no subject
[She shrugs dismissively. The whole thing still remains something that just happened versus something to actively worry about. At the mention of Allison, guilt colors her features. Maybe she should have mentioned this to her guardian/roommate at this point.]
I haven't told Allison. She doesn't really ask about what happened back home. I don't want to scare her or make her feel like she has to protect me. [She sighs softly and concedes,] You know. More than usual. I've got this.
[She says it with full confidence despite literally just admitting she doesn't understand her abilities.]
no subject
It's better hearing that Allison doesn't know and wasn't keeping things from him. They're going to have to deal with this, and he's got a lot on his plate already. ]
You don't even know how you did it. [ She's got nothing. Five runs a hand through his hair. ] How long has it been since you discovered you had powers?
no subject
A couple of months. What about you?
no subject
He gives her a flat look at the question. ]
A lot longer. [ He honestly can't remember a time when he didn't know about them, and he trained to use them every day since he could walk. Up until he screwed up and pushed them too far, because kids do stupid things. Especially in the situation they're in now where anything could trigger her powers if they don't figure it out. ]
...We'll have to work it in.
no subject
After a few seconds she huffs and crosses her arms over her chest.] Sure, why not? Pencil me in between harassing small children and getting involved in crazy stuff.
no subject
Like not getting involved is an option. ]
Right, as soon as I wrap up the crazy stuff. [ Or whenever it stops for more than a day so he can focus on unimportant things like Kamala inadvertently breaking time. ] You've avoided it so far?
no subject
no subject
...Good. If you have more visions, it could be a signal that whatever triggered it before is about to happen again. Let's try to stay on top of it. [ He frowns, not making the connection. ] What weird train?
no subject
Oh! So that's kind of how I know you're right. When I went back at time, all the things I saw before in the visions I visited minus the creepy purple place with the faceless people, were there. I ended up at a train station, Najima was there to murder her way through that crowd to my great-grandmother, and yeah. Basically it all came true in that weird way that only makes sense after it happens.
no subject
There's a lot to unpack, and he's already stretching himself thin with this brainwashing nightmare of a city. He sighs and shakes his head. ]
Alright. I'll come up with some theories so we can run down the possibilities. [ Like she came to him for help in the first place. ] Anything else you're leaving out?
no subject