riverviewlogs | monthly mingle: MEMORIA

Entry tags:

monthly mingle: MEMORIA

who: everyone in Riverview!
what: monthly mingle: memoria
when: the month of may
where: anywhere around the city
warnings: please put any necessary warnings in the subject lines

memoria

In the days leading up to May 1st, residents new and old will notice preparations beginning, a flurry of activity getting the city ready for the upcoming celebration: Memoria. A more solemn celebration than Sampremi or the Flower Festival, Memoria is a week-long time of remembrance for those lost in the Great War and the epidemic that decimated Riverview Quarantine's population 10 years ago. Memoria traditions include lighting lanterns for the dead, telling stories about lost loved ones or lost homes, eating meals with loved ones, and a special gathering to send floating lanterns down the river in honor of those lost.

a solemn commemoration of those lost

While the main city-wide event associated with Memoria is the floating of lanterns down the river on each Sunday evening of the month, the holiday is generally seen as a time of reflection on and appreciation of things that have been lost - people, homes, cultures, and planets. It is also a celebration of the things that remain. Many locally-owned shops will host displays of culturally-significant food, and will hand out informational flyers sharing the unique customs of their own homeworlds and inviting others to share those customs. There is a heavy emphasis on sharing time with family, friends, and lovers, and anyone who is able to will cook meals or treats for loved ones, or at least purchase them something good to eat.

i. hanging lanterns

Throughout the entire week of Memoria, residents will be hanging lanterns around the city. Lanterns are generally placed in greater number in places of passage - streets, bridges, and all alongside the train lines are particularly well-decorated, as are any trees alongside paths, and most homes and businesses have a profusion of lanterns around their doors and windows. This tradition is twofold; some people believe that the lanterns are hung in these places in order to guide the spirits of the dead back to those who still love them, other people believe that the lanterns are to give light for living loved ones to find their doors in times of darkness...many people believe both.

No matter what your character might believe, you can be sure they will find themselves offered a lantern for free from various businesses or friendly citizens passing by, and invited to hang it before the sun sets, or they may be handed a bundle of lanterns and asked to help share them with others.

ii. sharing life

Throughout the city, characters will find groups of people gathering to share hot drinks and talk about their loved ones lost, their homes and planets, or their experiences during the Great War and the epidemic. Anyone who has lost someone, who has fought to survive, who is feeling cut off and homesick, is welcome to sit and share their story. If your character chooses to sit and to share their story, they will find that people will gather to listen, will generally be respectful of the telling, and may share their own similar experiences in return. This is an excellent time to air grief in an environment where most people understand and respect grief, and a good time to deepen the connections to others around you, to understand them better.

There is also a very large focus on cooking or purchasing meals or treats for loved ones during Memoria, with many people taking meals with everyone they care about during the week of the holiday. Some go the extra mile and will hand out baked goods (usually chocolate or cinnamon), packets of candy, or other little treats to acquaintances, especially if they would like to form a closer bond with them. This is a great time for characters to reach out to someone they would like to get to know better with a surprise treat!

iii. floating of the lanterns

On the evening of May 8th, just before sundown, many of the city's residents will head toward the banks of the river, where they will light lanterns in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and colors, in honor of their dead loved ones. The types of lanterns vary wildly, based on personality (either of the person floating it or the person they are honoring), culture, and many other factors. Some lanterns are very simple, others are incredibly complex, but the one common feature they all have is that people write on the shades of them - they write about their feelings for their loved ones, their wishes for their relationships and friendships, a memory from childhood or home, or even just lines of poetry or lyrics from songs that express something they miss, or something that hurts them.

Once those emotions are written on the lanterns, the lanterns are set free, floating down the river in the darkening evening, in a cathartic gesture shared by most residents of the city. Waves of lantern floating will start around 7 pm and continue until the sun rises on each Sunday evening of May.

iv. down with the sickness

The epidemic that happened 10 years ago was an incredibly traumatic experience for the people living in the Quarantine, on a cultural scale as well as a personal one. While most people who live in the Quarantine are able to leave after 5 years, the trauma lingers in any number of invisible ways in the city. Besides that, there is a small population of people who have chosen to live permanently in the Quarantine, who have made it their home and embraced its melting pot of cultural diversity as their own. Many of these people are survivors of the epidemic, and have a particularly poignant connection to the Memoria celebration.

One of these long-term residents is an engineer specializing in magically-enhanced robotics who lost most of her family in the epidemic, and as each year passes she becomes more and more distraught by how the population turns over and slowly loses track of the importance of Memoria. In her eyes, it's become symbolic, commercialized, a celebration of general grief and not the very specific grief the Quarantine experienced 10 years ago. And she has decided to do something about it, something to make the specific trauma of the epidemic very real and very current to everyone in the city.

On May 1st, she will be releasing a small cloud of self-replicating magically-enhanced nanites near City Hall. The nanites are drawn to warm, living bodies, and once they enter, they find their way to the brain and central nervous system (or equivalent, depending on physiology) and start to take effect on the parts of the brain (or equivalent) that control a person's sensory experiences and psychosomatic responses. In effect, the nanites work as an artificial virus that makes residents horribly ill, and which can be passed from person to person like a contagion.

Throughout the month, reports of this mysterious illness will sweep through the Quarantine, with residents uncertain of how to cure it. Symptoms vary widely depending on the person, with each affected person facing a uniquely personal set of symptoms - but each case has the same thing in common: it ends with the victim losing consciousness and lapsing into a coma.

How It Works

● Participation is opt-in, and while the "epidemic" can't be ignored in the city, characters are not required to get ill even if they are exposed.
● The "disease" can be spread from person to person by skin-to-skin contact or exchange of fluids (kissing, coughing, spitting, etc.) There is no set symptoms for the "disease," and how much or little a character is affected or in what ways is up to player discretion. Incubation period (time between exposure and first symptoms appearing) is also up to player discretion.
● Since the nanites are based in both tech and mgaic, they are much harder to defeat than they would be otherwise. However, they can be deactivated and destroyed through a combination of electromagnetic pulses and magical nullification or spell-dispersing abilities. Players are also welcome to come up with other ways to deactivate the nanites, keeping in mind that it should not be too easy.
● Affected characters can be sick for as long or short a time as the player decides, and once they lapse into a coma it can last as long as the player decides. Once the character wakes from the coma, they will no longer be sick and the nanites will no longer be present in their system.
● Once a character has been infected, they will be immune and cannot be reinfected.
● All sick characters will be well again by May 31st and there will be no long-term effects.

● If any players wish to pursue or bring to justice the perpetrator, please send the mod a PM and we can discuss your ideas!

v. roommates or wildcard

Feel free to use this prompt to meet new roommates, for the purpose of getting to know each other, or hit up the mod-posted prompt to create a Communal Housing floor mingle. Or, if you have an idea for a prompt that isn't in this list, set during Memoria, feel free to write it up!

visual inspiration

click on thumbnails for larger view

Credit: image i: RAW Visual, image ii: by trenchmaker, image iv: Bianca Draghici; image iii: found uncredited on Pinterest - please let the mod know if you find credit!

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[Steve frowns as their eyes meet. While it doesn't look like Bucky is dying, he's not well and whatever is going around has apparently caught up with him. Steve reaches out and takes his arm, pulling him up and getting under him for support as he tries to urge him up.]

On your feet. We're gonna get you some water and a real chair.

[He doesn't fight it as Steve hauls him up to his feet, but neither does he help all that much.]

I told you, I'm okay.

[Gosh, listen to him!]

[He will listen when Bucky doesn't look like he's delirious!]

You're okay, but we should still get you water. I don't want you collapsing from the heat out here. Especially not with everyone else getting sick.

I'll feel better knowing you had a minute to recover.

[Steve's smart to phrase this like Bucky really would be helping out the actually sick people by coming back and hydrating himself, it makes him nod with vague approval to the idea.]

Suppose so.

[He's quiet for a moment, just focusing on stumbling along.]

You're really warm.

[With the strange illness on his mind, Steve is too worried about that to really pick at Bucky's choices. He knows that heroes, including himself, are going to take some risks to save lives and he respects that. But while Bucky is there he is going to help him keep doing that in whatever way he can. Steve leads him to a shadier outdoor cafe, sitting him at a table and then going to buy a bottled water from a nearby store before saying anything. He speaks when he holds it out.]

Are you cold?

Yeah.

[He takes the bottle of water with his left hand, he can trust the metal to be steadier than flesh at the moment, and pulls off the top.]

I hate the cold.

[It seems strange for Bucky to mention cold twice. Steve himself doesn't feel too much change at the moment and he can tell Bucky isn't doing well. Steve puts his fingers to Bucky's neck to check his pulse and see how warm his skin is.]

When did this start?

Hating the cold?

[His brain is a bit too scrambled at the moment to follow a change in conversational shift right then, though he sits obligingly still for Steve's investigation. His pulse is fine, but his skin is burning to the touch.]

1944, I guess.

[The answer is one he would have expected and part of him already knows that Bucky is feverish, but the exact date makes him pause. He almost says something, but now isn't the time to be debating details. Steve stands up.]

You're dehydrated. Better drink some more of that and keep to the shade. Have you felt strange lately? Anything off?

[He's going to have to talk to someone about Bucky. But whom is the question.]

No, I can't get ill.

[Or he shouldn't be able to, anyway. All the evidence staring him in the face said that his serum wasn't as helpful against this particular illness as it should be.]

Been helping out the people I found that were, getting them to help, guess I wasn't as immune as I thought.

Can't?

[He gives Bucky a skeptical look.]

You look like you're doing a pretty good job so far.

[Okay, not helping, but he had to say it.]

What made you think you were immune?

The serum.

[Hasn't he told Steve this before? No, maybe not. Maybe it was only Bucky that he told when they were warily comparing how similar their lives were.]

It's supposed to stop that sort of thing.

[That one is a shock. He feels like he's looking at Bucky as a complete stranger for a minute. Steve's jaw drops and he stares at the man, trying to wrap his mind around the knowledge that Bucky could be changed - an experiment like him.]

What serum? How did you-?

You didn't know?

[He frowns in mild confusion, had he not mentioned it before? Hard to recall with his head this messed up.]

It happened during the war, I didn't even know I had it 'til I survived a few hundred feet drop into a ravine.

No one else I know has it.

[Not in its true form, since Erskine was killed. The formula was lost with him and any attempts at replicating it had all been incomplete or unpredictable. It turned out that the man had taken his golden goose with him, leaving only Steve behind.]

You didn't know you... That seems like a pretty big thing to miss, Bucky.

[He is not less concerned by this news.]

Anyway, it doesn't seem to be resisting this one. There's something off about this disease. We should get you looked at just in case.

[He shakes his head at the idea that he should get looked at, he'd much rather just go somewhere secluded and sleep it off, if he really is sick.]

They didn't exactly tell me what they were putting into me.

[How was he supposed to know that he'd been given a bastardised serum?]

All I knew was that it'd killed all the ones they took before, and I thought for damn sure it was killing me. It sure felt like it.

[ The story just becomes more unsettling. Steve doesn't even know how anyone got a perfected sample of the super-soldier serum. The fact that it was being used on people without any consent is even more disturbing to him. ]

Well, it's not keeping you from being sick now. At the very least we should try to get your temperature down. I don't like how easily it seems to be spreading.

Yeah, me either. I was trying to get the infected people into some kind of quarantine, keep it spreading, but it's like trying to fight a forest fire with a wet blanket.

[And now he's managed to get it too, which is really not a good sign where everyone else is concerned.]

Whatever is causing it seems to be helped by some kind of supernatural power. I don't know what it is, but if it's getting to you, it can't be just a disease.

[It makes him wonder about other things, too.]

I haven't been exactly at my best either, but I didn't think it was this virus.

[His reactions seemed to be different. Steve, as usual, brushes things off when he can keep going.]

Now I'm not sure.

If you're sick too then you should go and get help, don't hang around people who've already got it in case it exacerbates it.

[He's already pushing away, taking a couple of stumbling steps off to one side.]

I'll be fine.

Don't be stubborn.

[ Even Steve can hear the irony in his own statement, but he follows Bucky anyway. ]

You don't need to collapse on people. If it's getting worse, we should talk to someone. Maybe Strange or Tony will know what this is.

I'm not collapsing on anyone.

[He gestures down at himself as if to prove he's holding himself steady. Well... steadyish.]

I really will be fine, the serum will kick in and this'll be gone before long.

[Steve gives Bucky a skeptical look. He might still be standing, but he's not well.]

If it hasn't been working already, I doubt it'll start now without some kind of help. What happens if it gets worse around the people who you're helping? You were talking about exposure. If you don't have a way to suppress it, then aren't you exposing them?

[He seriously hopes it won't escalate that way, but Bucky did make the point.]

I'm feeling all right. At least let me go with you.

Steve.

[It's firm and hard, he's far less likely to accept help if it's being forced on him. He hates being crowded, hates feeling like he's being trapped.]

I said that I'm fine, can't you trust me for once instead of arguing everything I say?

[That's not really fair considering Bucky is clearly not fine, but he's not always the fairest.]

[It sounds wrong hearing his name from this man. He frowns immediately, bristling against the tone. And the words, which rub him the wrong way.]

You want trust?

[It's laughable, the way this man keeps acting like there's ever been trust to give or take. He can understand wanting the distance, but the results are right there between them.]

When you're not about to leave someone in danger by passing out when they might actually need you, I'll take your word for it. You're sick. I know you want to help, but it's about more than just acting tough.

[It's not just for Bucky's sake either. The strategist in him knows what will happen if Bucky keeps up. But, of course, he's got no authority to say anything about it.]

Fine. I'd recommend you talk to someone and get help. Sooner rather than later, if that's convenient for you.

[He sighs, shaking his head.]

Good luck.

(no subject)

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