the clock tower

[groundrules]

Happy Hallow-elevator! The clock tower event lasts between 22 October and 8 November. ICly, the tower incursion stretches around a week, and you’re welcome to have your character investigate something else, if they finish early!

THE CLOCK TOWER

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ALL IS AS ALL WAS| TRIAL & NO ERRORS | THE TOWER

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ALL IS AS ALL WAS

Play it cool, as Serthica’s customs officers pore over your passport papers, before grudgingly allowing you overground. Minaras, you hear, is hunting a delinquent.

Both it and Eidris fare well, with no sign of the damage that preceded the Unwinding. Locals no longer behave eerily, dragons and clockwork droids roam freely, and everyone hates taxes.

Yet perfect strangers insist they know you. Your assigned address leads to a different house. The roads, buildings and architecture look ‘lived in,’ but changed.

No one remembers the Unwinding.

■ Burlap mannequins sometimes watch from mirrors, windows and reflecting surfaces.

■ You might hear shifting and scratching in Eidris walls.

■ Minaras has doubled its bounty for a man not unlike Leonard McCoy.

■ Black fungal spores are found on the increasingly voluminous experiment vials, specimens and supplies thrown out by Minaras medical facilities.

■ Frail and confused, Ellethia survivor Zenobius finally awakens. A short thread is up for RNG grabs.

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TRIALS & NO ERRORS

The guard troops that Eidris and Minaras assign to the Neutral Zone now protect King Thivar and High Councillor Arabella during the annual Sanctuary Reckoning trials. Both adjudicate cases that violate the ceasefire.

Prolonging the trials buys time for your companions in the clock tower.

■ Create a distraction — flood the judgement hall rooms? Fire? Illusions?

■ Pose as trial participants: perhaps you are of Eidris, and you caught this wicked Minaraian raiding your home? Mayhap this wretched man of Eidris stole your girlfriend? Wait, you’re a Minaraian who wants to kill King Thivar?

■ …organise breakouts, if Thivar or Arabella have your jailed. You are first imprisoned in makeshift Sanctuary cells — all but poorly locked, glorified closets. Get a trial sentence!

■ Thivar and Arabella treat the trials as a box-ticking exercise.

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THE TOWER

As Eidris and Minaras play court, you can infiltrate the Neutral Zone clock tower of Vassarizhia.

■ Only token security remains. The door is unlocked.

■ Karsa supplies paper talismans that must be burned in the watch fire at the tower’s top level.

■ Each burned talisman amplifies the reveal spell that Karsa activates. Link a finished burning thread by 8 November to help the cause.

■ A November mod post will describe how much of Serthica’s ‘undeath’ characters can see.

■ Placing Magnus’ dragon eye before the tower’s telescope will allow characters to always see Serthica’s undeath, moving forward.

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✘ ELEVATOR ETIQUETTE

Imperfect stillness dominates Vassarizhia: your footsteps do not click, words die in your mouth. The tower’s rickety gear slither silently. Your heartbeat aligns with the clock’s tick… tock.
You have the growing, gnarly certainty that you have invaded something ancient and alive.

The tower’s entryway level is large, deserted, stacked with gears. At its core is a dilapidated open elevator shaft.

A large sign says to find and pull the floor lever, if elevators stop.

■ There are two elevators. Each narrow lift can hold up to four people, crammed. The upper half of the carriage is chain-link fence, while the floors contain hatches that sometimes open mid-travel for 30 seconds. Hold on to ceiling-bound leather straps.

■ The ropes holding the elevators are thick, but tattered.

■ The elevator’s creaking squeals can awaken swarms of 1m-tall bats and bat wyverns. They rattle the lift, but ultimately withdraw.

■ The elevator can stop at as many levels as you want (or none!).

■ Beyond the second level, you feel intensely paranoid and see your companions as the persons you most hate/fear for five to 10 minutes. Reaching the top, you are tempted to cut the lift ropes of those who follow. (The ropes and elevators recover, after crashing to the bottom. )

■ On each floor, as you exit the elevator, a nearby wall shows a different scratched instruction, signed by DAVID.

LEVEL I: THE LABYRINTH| LEVEL II: THE ANCESTOR | LEVEL III: TAG! YOU’RE IT
LEVEL IV: THE ROOM WHERE NOTHING HAPPENS | LEVEL V: IT’S RAINING (AGAIN)

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LEVEL I: THE LABYRINTH
CONTENT WARNING: MINOTAUR, BODY HORROR

Step into a jail maze, flooded to knee level. Confusing corridors narrow, widen and contort, while wall torches dim.

Intermittent howling reveals you’re not alone. Hiding, you see child-like chalk drawings of forest animals on walls — and a great minotaur. Keep silent.

■ David S P’s wall scrawl says, IT RUNS IN THE FAMILY.

■ Collect some of the many discarded daggers or axes. Rope bundles float in water — use them to paralyse your captive or briefly force them under your control.

■ Don’t linger in one place: rotting, bodiless hands surface to restrain you.

■ Bad news, if you swallow water when the minotaur or dead hands try to drown you: your skin stretches and bursts, while your bones pop and extend. You mutate into a half human, half woodland creature, all bloodlust. ( Inspiration, anyone? ) Your companions should still recognise you; between hazy memories and constant pain, you might struggle to remember them and even attack.

■ Morphed characters can (painfully) return to normal within minutes of re-entering the elevator.

■ A smaller and distressed three-headed minotaur also roams the labyrinth. Two of its heads sob, while the third urges you to hide with it when brother approaches. It tries to throttle you with a noose to make brother happy, if you follow. David did say.

■ The minotaur and its sibling have poor sight. They cannot enter a corridor where you’ve drawn or laid down a line.

■ Pull the lever, and a straight corridor leads you to the elevator.

TOP | LEVEL II | LEVEL III | LEVEL IV | LEVEL V

LEVEL II: THE ANCESTOR
CONTENT WARNING: GIANT SKELETON, BLOOD DRINKING

Here, only barren stone and thin rivulets of fresh water pouring from wall fountains with sharp-tipped ornaments — your spilled blood quickly infects the basins. Knives, pins and bowls have been abandoned nearby.

High pressure and vertigo overwhelm you. Follow a rhythmic heaving to where the upper half of an enormous skeleton — the Ancestor — has broken through a wall. White, silk thread fetters it. Dried blood rims its cracked mouth. Before it, the stone floor has been tarnished, up to a 5m radius.

The Ancestor appears dormant, a crown of iron thorns on its head. It clutches the lever tightly in its right hand. Above it, an engraving urges, SPILL WINE FOR YOUR ANCESTOR.

■ David S P’s elevator scrawl says, WATER TO WINE.

■ Dally staring and you feel dizzy, nauseous, depressed and compelled to share your close-death encounters. Before you know it, you are stepping into the Ancestor’s radius…

■ …where it plunges for you, if you don’t bear a filled cup. The silk ropes keep the Ancestor from reaching beyond 5m.

■ Two carvings under his fists read HONOUR THY FATHER and DISHONOUR THY MOTHER.

■ Quickly distract the Ancestor from crumbling his captives, tearing their arms or attempting to eat them.

■ The Ancestor is instinct-driven, consumed by thirst. It cannot see or smell, and only remembers taste. Sounds divert it.

■ Improvise: there is no actual wine here. Infuse water, spill blood, or vocally pretend you are delivering wine, and the Ancestor might spare you.

■ If sated, the Ancestor releases the lever.

TOP | LEVEL I | LEVEL III | LEVEL IV | LEVEL V

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LEVEL III: TAG! YOU’RE IT
CONTENT WARNING: SCARECROW, SKINNED CREATURES

Enjoy pitch dark, dread and bile spreading in your gut. Take a candle from near the elevator and roam through small, unlocked rooms that feature tattered beds, strips of tanning leather and blood or wax spilled on the floor.

■ David S P’s wall scrawl says, O CATCHES IT.

■ Ahead, you see candle-bearing mannequins that dance a hora to the same song played by Jim Kirk’s music box: “Up the mountain, in the grove, hand in hand to Ke-Waihu, fresh harvest’s a treasure trove, each fall we feast anew.”

■ The creatures are patched abominations of wax, skinned flesh and burlap. In the middle of the hora is a wiry scarecrow, eyes blazing with candle fire as it points a large cleaver. In certain lights, the scarecrow’s face briefly contorts into that of your mother. It wears priestly robes that Arc III survivors may recognise from the House of Ravens.

■ As the dance finishes, you notice the lever in the middle of the circle, where flame spells out TAKE THEM, NOT ME. The game begins.

■ The abominations run, gleefully manic and screaming TAAAA~AAAAAG. YOU’RE IT! The scarecrow unflinchingly cuts them down while pursuing you. Hide in the abandoned rooms, or risk snuffing your candle to avoid detection.

■ Some abominations slap you, hold you, or alert the scarecrow. Others offer shelter. A few peel off wax skins from their limbs — showing black fungi beneath. They murmur, IT NEVER GOES AWAY.

■ Parchment strips fall from the scarecrow’s sleeves, reading, HAPPY NAME DAY, MOTHER KNOWS BEST, THE SIN RAN DEEPER THAN SKIN, IF YOU CAN BEAR IT, IT’S A GAME.

■ Bless David: draw the scarecrow into a drawn or makeshift circle to trap it.

■ Intense, paralysing fear arrests you, if the scarecrow catches you. The wax abominations chant, TAKE THEM, NOT ME. One might even take pity and move your numbed mouth to utter the words. Say them — and the scarecrow lands deep cuts on your arms, then pursues your companion.

■ If you betray someone, the abominations take the appearance of your worst version: whether physically mutated, with a temper that amplifies your worst features, or both.

TOP | LEVEL I | LEVEL II | LEVEL IV | LEVEL V

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LEVEL IV: THE ROOM WHERE NOTHING HAPPENS
CONTENT WARNING: MANIPULATION, MENTAL COERCION

You enter a quiet room. The lever sits on a table, beside rope and a dagger. As you approach, your surroundings transform: perhaps your dearest dead appear to warmly welcome you. Crowds of your doubters celebrate your success. Or you are in a calm oasis, where nothing hurts.

■ David S P’s wall scrawl says, THIS DREAM IS A NIGHTMARE.

■ Whatever your deepest wishes, the room’s vivid illusions provide. With time, your beautiful dreams deteriorate into horror. Sometimes, you hear whispers of, Make a wish.

■ The room increasingly drains your life force. Within half an hour, you have gaunt flesh, brittle bones and a hunched back. Or you might feel compelled to harm yourself, clawing your arms and face, or pulling your hair out.

■ The damage comes undone minutes after reaching the elevator.

■ The room focuses on one person: if someone joins you, they see fainter echoes of what the room shows you, but they are not enthralled. They must coax or drag you away.

■ If you are under the room’s influence, it forces you to make any later intruders stay.

TOP | LEVEL I | LEVEL II | LEVEL III | LEVEL V

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LEVEL V: IT’S RAINING (AGAIN)
CONTENT WARNING: PLAGUE, THE CHILD

At the tower’s open-sky top, fire crackles from a small stone pit, shielded by a familiar, immovable blood-spattered white umbrella. Nearby, discover an immense rusted telescope and other discarded astronomy tools.

You trip on rain-battered yellowed bones at every step. One skeletal hand holds a watch piece, engraved for Mr. David Sebastian Pumpkins.

■ David S P’s has only scrawled his signature.

■ You might reach the flame easily, or be overwhelmed by sickness, black fungal spores blooming on your fingers, while you cough blood and experience intense fever. The symptoms wane once you reach the fire.

■ Burn paper talismans and link finished threads to help Karsa’s spell.

■ The child with a fox mask from the Unwinding could appear. Sign up for one of three short threads, which must finalise by 3 November.

NOTES

■ Some of the bigger plot clues have been emphasised, to help navigate through the horror details.

■ You can hit up some NPCs during the trials.

■ Check out plotting posts for last-minute team-ups.

■ Back to the top.

QUESTIONS

Comments

[makemeasong]

[ She hadn't realized she was holding the knife defensively while facing Wangji. Clara doesn't remember holding it in that way before. Was she always? It isn't that she wants to hurt him, she just wants him to stay.

There's no time for them to argue again before a sound catches Clara's attention. Her eyes widen and both hands drop to her sides. Around the corner, a Dalek; she remembers Oswin, slowly losing her humanity to save the Doctor. It enters the room and sets its sights on Clara.

You are incorrect. You will be exterminated.

Before she can do anything at all, the Dalek turns its eye on her mother and in an instant she's gone, her body flaming all at once before turning to a pile of dust. Exterminate! Exterminate! Sabine, bleeding from her head and now her chest, is still smiling when the Dalek kills her, illuminating her skeleton through flesh before she too, is dust. The words leaving Clara's mouth are choked out. ]

No. No.

[ The Doctor is next, and Clara turns to him. He's as old as he was on Trenzelore, hunched and shaky. But she watches as he rises as tall as he can, facing a death that never happened. He straightens his bowtie.

Oswin Oswald was a sacrifice. You will be exterminated.

There's a significant pause before five more words come from the Dalek. They're slow and seemingly said with great difficulty.

Why. did. you. leave. me?

One beat later, The Doctor becomes an explosion of golden dust and Clara hears a scream. It takes a long while for her to stop, breathing heavily with sobs that won't leave her chest. The knife has been long dropped, forgotten by her. She doesn't seem to realize she's now as bent and aged as the Doctor was, sinking to her knees weakly. ]

You can't leave. Watch. I made her, I made all of them just to die.

[ Her voice is raspy, shaking with effort, and one boney hand grasps his wrist. The Dalek has turned toward them both. If she dies, maybe the echoes will cease to exist.

Echo. Echo. You will not save the Doctor. You save no one. You will be exterminated. ]

[downswing]

( She made them, she says, summoned them like dolls and clay and puppets of parchment. Roused them alive and set them on their stage, and how they suffer now, their terror rippling, cloying, saturating Lan Wangji's skin like the stench of burning.

There is a sense in this room of walls closing in, of claustrophobia. As if the chamber has found life it must snuff out, like candle's flame.

You can't leave, watch. He does, readily transfixed. What is it ghosts become in the absence of a spectator? This, debris and seedling. Smudged shadows, caricatures of themselves. When they 'die,' Clara's demons perform their own extinction, rehearsed.

He licks his lips, greedily vigilant, absorbing the truth of the strange, hefty, dull creature that eliminates rapidly without dithering or negotiation. It will turn on them soon, he supposes. Despite the sorcery's limitations, it may yet threaten Clara so.

Chair creaking, table rattling, he is on his feet again — only, this time, he catches the bird bones of Clara's wrist, and he drags, reaching to the table to push the lever. )

If I must drag you by your hair, I am not adverse.

[makemeasong]

[ By now she has no real strength left, and she lets Wangji pull her. ]

Get me out then. Just get me out, please.

[ That last word comes out weakly, too tired to protest. Real or not, she can't stand being in that room anymore and wants everything to be over. Her feet stumble and for a second she thinks she might vomit, but mercifully she doesn't, gulping stale air with shaky inhales. ]

[downswing]

( Please. And fare-thee-well, and thank you.

How he has come to loathe courtesies, the weapons of his brother. How they bruise and cut and leave wounds, bleeding. Later, he will count his blessings: at least, this way, her hair is spared.

At least, part lifting, part dragging, part pushing the table until it is propelled futilely with a hefty thud into the diminishing illusions — they make advance.

He does not utter word for the better part of their blitzing trek, satisfied with the dust swept by his feet, with the creak and wailing of the elevator doors, when they gape open for Clara to pass through. )

We need not speak of this. ( Her privacy, her fears, her loss. His gaze lands low on barren ground. ) But we may.

( After. )

[makemeasong]

[ There isn't anything Clara has to say on the way to the lift. She hurts to the bone in a way that isn't physical, a pain that sinks in and settles with hooks in her soul. She feels exposed and raw in front of a person she doesn't know at all; aside from his name and that he has a sword and magic (?), she knows nothing about him. There's usually a trust that's formed when one's heart is exposed.

When he speaks, Clara keeps her eyes ahead, and there's only one response she can think of. ]

Don't tell the Doctor.

[ The words from the Dalek, from one of her echoes, would destroy him. Upon reconsideration, she looks at Wangji. ]

None of it's a secret, it'd just break his hearts, and they're already broken enough.

[ She has no idea if she'll take Wangji up on his offer or not. He might be the best person for her to talk to, since he hardly speaks, himself. ]

[downswing]

( His... hearts. Of all the afterthoughts, the dissolved trinkets of nothing, this should not be what lingers with him — the quiet and unassuming reality of... twisted biology.

The Doctor was ever too kind to be as average men. And Clara too ragged by the riches of her hurts to be as carefree maidens.

He nods, measured and crassly crafted and slow, more jutting, hard inclination than a gesture of approval. Behind him, he draws the elevator door like a tomb's gate, swallowing. They should not have laid step here, should not have come, should not have lingered.

Lan Wangji hesitated. This rescue was his, poorly done. )

...Clara. ( And softened: ) It did not happen.

[makemeasong]

[ Clara looks at Wangji, her eyes moving over his face. It didn't happen, the room wasn't real. And yet somehow her guilt, pain, fears — all of it collided in one moment that's left her feeling nothing but numb. ]

I would've stayed if you hadn't been there.

[ It's all she can think to say before closing her eyes and covering her face. ]

It didn't happen, but they're all still dead.

[ The room had warned her, and she hadn't listened. Being in the elevator is little comfort, not knowing what might await them next, if anything. ]

[downswing]

( What is it, to walk a field of corpses and know their blood, your blood, caking your soles? To churn good mother's earth with part and particle and debris of decay, metabolised as fertiliser? All that which lived, dies, lives again.

They are dead, her dead, still dead. They will weave, warm, into the fabric of Clara's existence.

He does not reach out to coax her hands free, to serve her the gentle reassurance a child (his son) might welcome. Only shifts on his heels, timely, shield of his back turned to her — so that, in the claustrophobic, cluttered confines of the lift, she might have the conceit of privacy. )

And you yet live. ( He suspects, to the Doctor's gladness. ) Forgive yourself the notion.

[makemeasong]

[ She nearly asks why she should when she couldn't save anyone in the end. Continuing down that path won't help. Her hands drop from her face and she looks up at the sound of rustling, pressing her lips into a thin line. Wrapping her arms around herself, she concedes a hair. ]

Maybe one day. For now, I wanna get the hell out of this tower, and figure out if the people I know are all okay.

[ Clara hates being exposed, hates that she was manipulated on display. His offer will linger though, one she may take him up on later. ]

[downswing]

( He pauses, touch lingered slow on the elevator's doorframe, thumb skidding its metal bones. Rickety, slow, barely shifting, carriage starts, and he releases the first of many long-withheld exhalations, as if he had long acknowledged they would progress from the room, but simultaneously restrained himself from the assumption. )

They must be. ( Definitive, strong. ) They number my son, my soulmate, my family.

( Therefore, survival is decided — through the sheer strength of Lan Wangji's will, if no feat to call their own. )

[makemeasong]

[ Clara looks up at him sharply; that seems to pull her out of her daze as she looks at him. She swallows whatever else she'd been feeling and meets his eye, firm when she speaks. ]

They will be.

[ It's a fact. She won't think for a second they aren't, it doesn't help. ]