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Within a Weft of Unravelling Time
Sigil7
Category Story Event
Type Story
Data ID 294902

Within a Weft of Unravelling Time is a Sunless Skies Story Event.

Story description[ | ]

"Within the Weft, past and future knot like duelling pythons. Nothing is constant. Another age washes over your locomotive, and everything changes... Unravelling(Advice)"

Trigger conditions[ | ]

Area: Limbo
Frequency: Always (100%)

Interactions[ | ]

Actions Requirements Effects Notes
'Bury' the Navigator's Friend
You must be quick! Slide the body out of the exterior hatch into the snarling collisions of time.
Cast adrift
The Navigator insists on doing the deed himself. Altan's body hangs for a moment just outside the hatch. Then his left shoulder is caught by flailing time, and the corpse is drawn away from the engine. The Navigator watches his friend be snatched away – whenever he is, he is not now.

He turns to you. "Thank you, Captain. Now, let's find our way out of this tumult." His promise is discharged. He is changed.

Advanced alteration value probably needs examination.

Advanced alteration value probably needs examination.


Game note: You can appoint the Stalwart Navigator to be your First Officer when you are docked in port.

Game note: This will transform the Fortunate Navigator into the Stalwart Navigator, a First Officer who increases your Iron by 10, your Affiliation: Establishment by 1 and your Affiliation: Boheme by 1.


Escape a time when all was good as new
An old moment from long ago, worn bright with nostalgia. This is the day you first boarded your locomotive. Her fittings gleam. She smells of fresh wood and new brass and oil. You were both more innocent, then.
Failed event

Special is calculated as follows: 60-(Unravelling*10) * 1.67

Advanced alteration value probably needs examination.


Game note: If you escape you will gain Hull, and lose Terror, Experience and Sky-Stories.

Trapped
The boiler is cold and unfired; the controls stubborn and stiff. Before you can get your locomotive started again, it lurches as another, different age crashes against it...
Successful event
Then to now
The controls are stiff, and it takes a while for the engine to warm up. This is a time before you and your locomotive had worn each other in, but you manage to get her boiler running and edge, slowly out of the Weft. The past and present collapse, imperfectly, together. You emerge in a spick-and-span engine, but there are gaps in your memory of the time between then and now. You can feel their absence, like missing teeth.
Escape a grim ending
A cold future. Your locomotive is silent. Its engine is still; its coal-stores empty. As you make your way to the bridge you step over slumped corpses, pale in fine coats of frost. On the navigator's table is a brittle map, charting a desperate course somewhere no one has any business. There is a corpse in the captain's chair, too. You do not look.
Failed event

Special is calculated as follows: 60-(Unravelling*10) * 1.67

Advanced alteration value probably needs examination.


Game note: If you escape you will gain an Unlicensed Chart and Tales of Terror, while losing Fuel and Crew.

Trapped
There is not a drop of fuel left; nothing to coax the locomotive into moving the scant feet it must to escape the Weft. You can only wrap yourself in stiff blankets and wait amidst the corpses of your crew, to see if the shifting tides of time take pity on you. Eventually, as the cold is reaching your bones, everything trembles as time changes...
Successful event
Back to the present
You strip the beds and the bodies. You gather books, charts, logs, letters; anything that can burn. It is enough – just – to melt the ice blocking the pipes and muster a wisp of steam to nudge you from the Weft. As you emerge, the present and the future collide. But they fit together imperfectly; a broken bone, badly set. Your stores of fuel are a barrel down. And there are still frozen bodies in the corridors.
Escape days yet to come
Perhaps this is a near future. Your engine looks the same. There are familiar faces among your crew. But here, beside the captain's chair, is a logbook more thumbed than your own. You cannot resist perusing the accounts of journeys you have yet to make. It is not comforting reading.
Failed event

Special is calculated as follows: 60-(Unravelling*10) * 1.67

Advanced alteration value probably needs examination.


Game note: If you escape you will gain Experience, Terror and Tales of Terror.

Trapped
You order your crew to change course to steer from the Weft, but it is too late. With a sound like torn canvas, another day writes itself over this one. You watch as one of your crew, his own time now inseparably tangled with one of the dying days in the Weft, withers, dies, and rots in a second.
Successful event
You will never be free of the future
You instruct the crew to change course. They are confused, but obey. A few minutes later, you emerge from the Weft. The near future that you occupied runs aground on the present like a smuggler's dinghy on a sandbar. You are free. In body, at least. But your thoughts return to the logbook, and the travails you now know you will have to face.
Escape the distant future
It is dark. You find a lamp and matches. The flame seems afraid, leaking only a grubby, oozing light. It is just enough to make out one of your crew ahead, staring at a black square on the wall. No. Not a square; a window. You join them, and look out onto barren, blackness. The stars are gone.
Failed event

Special is calculated as follows: 60-(Unravelling*10) * 1.67

Advanced alteration value probably needs examination.


Game note: If you escape, you will gain Savage Secrets and Terror, and lose Visions of the Heavens.

Trapped
Liberated from decorum, caution and reason by the absolute darkness, your crew indulge their vices. "There is no judgement in the dark," one of them grins, his mouth bloody, as he comes at you with raised fists. You are forced to shoot him. Then everything judders as the Weft stirs, and another time imposes itself on this one...
Successful event
Who were they, in the dark?
You fumble through inky passages. Around you, your crew are weeping, laughing, raging, raving, babbling their secrets – all in frantic freedom. Alone, you manage to identify a course, start the engines, and steer your locomotive from the Weft. You emerge back into the day you left behind. Stars bloom against the sky, white and numerous as daisies speckling a meadow. Their light calms your crew, but none of you will forget the far-off, lightless age you wandered through.
Escape the days of innocence
This is an hour from the recent past. The captain's log is open on the arm of your chair. You've just written the date of a recent departure from port. The manifest shows your stores: healthy with fuel and supplies. The crew chatter cheerfully. They do not know what awaits them.
Failed event

Special is calculated as follows: 60-(Unravelling*10) * 1.67

Advanced alteration value probably needs examination.


Game note: If you escape, you will gain Fuel and Supplies, and lose Sky-Stories and Experience.

Trapped
You try to maintain a calm demeanour as you order a radical course change that would steer you from the Weft. Your crew are unconvinced. As they hesitate, perhaps suspecting you of star-madness, another shiver in the Weft shakes your engine, and this time becomes another...
Successful event
An echo of the past
You maintain a calm demeanour as you order a course change that should steer you from the Weft. None the wiser, your crew obey. A moment later, you emerge. The recent past is stitched crudely to the present: your stores are better stocked than they should be, but your memories of your recent journeys are now hazy as week-old dreams.
Escape the effulgent past
This is a day of the distant past. Before London trespassed on the heavens. Before the Clockwork Sun spilled its buttery light. Instead, your windows are filled with a true sun: fiery and luminous and terrible! You should not be here. It turns its attention toward you, flooding your engine with radiance.
Failed event

Special is calculated as follows: 60-(Unravelling*10) * 1.67

Advanced alteration value probably needs examination.


Game note: If you escape you will gain Visions of the Heavens and Terror, and lose Savage Secrets.

Trapped
The brilliance pours through you as if you were glass, illuminating your secrets and laying bare all that you hide. In your blindness, you hear your crew pleading for mercy. The sun's attention focuses, for a moment, on a crewman beside you, and you hear him boil away. Then the Weft quivers, and you are somewhen else...
Successful event
Beholden
The brilliance floods through you as if you were glass, illuminating all your secrets. In your blindness, you hear your crew pleading for mercy.

Unseeing, you spur your engine into the shadow of a vast stone structure you glimpsed before the sun stole your sight – a temple? An embassy? It grants a minute's respite; just enough to pass the threshold of the Weft and return to your present.

The light pours away. You are left feeling scrubbed raw, bleached. It will take time to bury your secrets again.
Search the past for a lost Correspondence sigil
Perhaps, in this long ago, the lost sigils are still remembered. You look out of the window, into the fires of the sun.
Seen in negative
A sigil flickers across the surface of the sun. Its light is darker, more bearable, than that of the sun glaring behind it. Your eyes water and blur with tears – but you have seen enough.
Advanced alteration value probably needs examination.


Escape a moment of crisis
Your engine heaves, throwing you to the floor. A shrill shriek of rending steel! Something is gutting your engine, great claws prising apart the hull. Is this past? Future? The gun-batteries thunder. Sky-suited crew pepper the breach with small arms fire, as a shape presses hungrily against it.
Failed event

Special is calculated as follows: 60-(Unravelling*10) * 1.67

Advanced alteration value probably needs examination.


Game note: If you escape you will lose Hull and gain Terror, Uncanny Specimens and Munitions.

Trapped
You join the crew fighting against whatever is mauling your locomotive. Despite your fire, it forces the breach wider, reaches in, and playfully disembowels the man fighting beside you. Then everything heaves as the Weft writhes, and another tide of days washes the battle away...
Successful event
Peace in our time
You force your way through the battle to the bridge, ordering an evasive manoeuvre that casts off your attacker and sends you thundering from the Weft. Your engine's scars remain, along with the rounds that had been freshly loaded into the guns, and several of your aggressor's talons, blasted from it in the fray.
Escape at precisely the moment you entered
Wait. This exact instant is known to you. You feel a thud of deja vu. Looking at the clock on the bridge, you watch its hands tick over to a familiar angle. This is the very moment before you encountered the Weft. If you act now, you could escape.
A stitch in time
You spur your engine forward and emerge from the Weft at exactly the moment you entered. You have lost nothing and gained nothing. Except for a story.

Game note: You will lose nothing and gain only a Sky-Story.


Remain in the Weft
Perhaps, if you tolerate this current present a while longer – or hide from it, or pray – it will pass. Perhaps another time will replace it. Perhaps you will like that time better.
Times change
You have only to endure, and the chaos of the Weft will sweep your current circumstances away as another time gains dominance. You can feel its approach: a roaring, like a gathering tide...
Advanced alteration value probably needs examination.

Advanced alteration value probably needs examination.


Inspect your Ravelling Jack
Its spindly, manifold arms grope wildly, seeking the snarl of the Weft.
Time and tide
The device needs more time to catch the strands of the Weft. You must endure the surging tides of time a little longer, first.
Inspect your Ravelling Jack
Its spidery arms are tangled. Its gears gnash. It is as caught in the snarl of time as the rest of you.
Too late
Its no good. You've been in the Weft too long, and the snarl has grown too dense to untangle. There is no repairing this Weft – you will just have to escape as best you can.
Attempt to repair the Weft
The Ravelling Jack has caught the edges of the weft. Its wheels spin. Its arms dance. But its hold is tenuous. It will take a delicate hand to affect the repair.
Failed event

Special is calculated as follows: 65-(Unravelling*10) * 1.67

Advanced alteration value probably needs examination.


Unravelling
The Jack's arms flail wildly, sending you ducking for cover. It loses its grip on the threads of time, and before it can regain them, everything shifts...
Successful event
Repaired
Ignoring the intrusive events you have been plunged into, you concentrate on the rattling machine. The work is painstaking and meticulous. Slowly, the Jack teases together the ragged edges of time. The intruding moment is banished. The present resumes. The Weft is repaired.
Partial success event (5%)
An unfortunate grinding noise
You work quickly as time ebbs around you. The Jack has begun to make a distressing grinding noise, and smoke is issuing from its innards. It finishes knitting time back together scant moments before something breaks inside, its wheels spin their last and its arms fall still. But the Weft is repaired. Your present, or at least something approximating it, has been restored. You will, unfortunately, need a new Jack.
Attempt to repair the Weft
The Ravelling Jack is stuck! It has caught the torn time of the Weft, but some part of its mechanism has failed. Can you find the problem in time?
Failed event

Special is calculated as follows: 65-(Unravelling*10) * 1.67

Advanced alteration value probably needs examination.


Unravelling
The instruction manual is atrociously written and disastrously indexed. By the time you find the fault, the Jack has lost its grip on time. Time shifts around you...
Successful event
Repaired
Crawling into the casing of the machine, you identify the fault, free the machinery and scramble out before you get Ravelled. The steel arms dart forwards and back. The gears whirr. The rent in time is woven back together, and you are returned to your present. The Horological Office will be pleased.
Partial success event (5%)
Giving up the ghost
The damage is worse that you thought. The best you can do is to affect a makeshift repair which is enough – barely – for the Jack to finish its current task. Its arms weave, sluggishly. Its gears clatter. Gradually, the snarl in time is untangled. The intruding moments fall away and you are returned to the present you left behind. Or close to it, at least. The Jack, alas, will ravel no more.
Dispose of a Death in a Jar
Why settle for hiding it somewhere when you could hide it somewhen?
Cast adrift
Racing to your exterior hatch, you cast the clay jar out into the surging eddies of the Weft. It is plucked away, lost in one of the feuding futures or pasts.
Advanced alteration value probably needs examination.

Advanced alteration value probably needs examination.



Links[ | ]

Links In[ | ]

Sigil7 A Weft of Unravelling Time, Sigil18 An Old Orbit, Fondly Remembered

Links Out[ | ]

Sigil18 An Old Orbit, Fondly Remembered


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