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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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Hospital/Around - Week two and onward.

[Shuri doesn't dislike parties and festivals but there is work to be done and her work keeps her fairly distracted. So distracted that she almost doesn't notice the sickness that's sweeping over the city.

Almost.

One by one, her friends develop fevers or have other alarming signs of illness. A lot of the machines she had developed in Wakanda were used in the medical field but she had none of them with her now. Armed with the comm-links and programs in her bracelet and a 64bit tablet, Shuri makes her way through the city to look for a cure.

She's careful, keeping a distance from those who are infected while trying to use an algorithm to trace back the source of the sickness. She needs more data and risks getting sick in an attempt to find it.

Eventually, Shuri ends up at the hospital. She offers to use the data she's collected to retrofit some of the machinery to be more useful against this virus but she hasn't been able to find a cure. It attacks everyone differently, mutates and then continues to spread. She has ways to combat the symptoms but it isn't enough.

She hates feeling useless and by the end of the second week she ends up sacrificing sleep and her own help in search for an answer.

By the end of the month, Shuri has her own room in the hospital. She had contracted the same illness that she'd been working tirelessly to fight and she isn't waking up.]

[ooc: For the last four or five days of the month, Shuri will be in a coma; she got sick and didn't realize it in time to help herself. If you want something else with Shuri please let me know. I'm down with doing any of the prompts and I can write a starter if you'd like. Feel free to PM this journal or hit me up on plurk

mizuyoko.]

Edited 2018-05-07 16:30 (UTC)

[He might have been there for Sam, but that didn't make it any easier for Tony to sit still. He wasn't particularly fond of hospitals at the best of times and this -- standing around with everybody getting sick and no real idea of how to fix it -- made him tense and jittery and generally unpleasant. Rather than inflicting that on Sam for too long, Tony made it a point to get up and start wandering whenever he could feel himself starting to get snappish.

He's seen most of the hospital at this point, probably. They've been remarkably tolerant of just letting him roam the halls, maybe because he'll stop to help out with the machinery every so often. Or maybe everyone is just too busy to care. Either way it works out for him, so Tony's tried not to dwell.

The sound of moving metal is interesting, though, and Tony heads towards it without really second guessing the urge. And honestly, finding a familiar face bent over what looks like an electrocardiograph isn't all that surprising.]

Got bored too?

[Shuri glances up, a smirk tugging at her lips as she recognizes the voice.]

Yeah. [Even if what she's working on doesn't help those infected, she's doing something.] You here visiting? I saw Sam's in one of the rooms. [She's been keeping track of those who are admitted at the hospital. It's to help complete her data and run the algorithm she'd designed but it's also because she wants to know when someone she knows gets sick..]

[Tony hums a vague agreement, but there's a slightly noncommital tone to his voice that says he'd rather not talk about it. He's worried, of course he is, but he's also really looking for a distraction from that worry. Just for a bit.]

What're you working on?

[Shuri recognizes the tone and decides that its best not to pry.

Her eyes refocus on the electrocardiograph while a determined expression colors her features.] I'm trying to wire this to output the data that I was able to collect in during my research. I don't have enough information or a strong enough system. I'm going to extrapolate by hand and this machine can help.

[Trying to comply her data on any of the computers here would take days. This way will only take hours.]

[He can't help but huff a quiet laugh at that and slip further inside at the unspoken invitation.]

Sometimes it feels like there's too much data, but none of it makes sense. No two people seem to be reacting to this thing exactly the same way. Magic. [That last bit gets a tone of pure exasperation.

But he does tip his head and give her a thoughtful look.]

What kind of a system are you looking for? I might be able to help.

[The main culprit to Shuri's predicament is that she doesn't have a formal job and so she has limited resources. If she'd been in her lab in Wakanda she could have pieced together the information but here... this is harder.

She glances over at Steve and studies him thoughtfully for a moment.]

Magic is relative. It's a different form of energy but it's still energy. If we can find a way to measure it then we can see how it reacts with the body and how to cure it. [She shakes her head and looks back at what she's doing.] I was talking to Loki about magic. I'm going to see if it's something I can replicate and at the very least measure.

[She has high goals.]

I'm looking for something more powerful than a tablet that can measure anything by putting it on a scale that we can quantify.

Energy, maybe. But it does stupid things and doesn't even follow it's own rules half the time.

[But that's mostly grumbling for the sake of it. He makes a slight face at the mention of Loki as a reflex, and doesn't even bother to ask which one she's talking about. Either would probably work, on the off chance they actually feel like being useful.]

I've got a fairly decent setup. I can probably knock something together for you that you can use here.

Yes but that's just because we don't understand it yet.

[She's stubborn and determined.

Shrui has also volunteered an unwilling Loki to help her with study magic further. Eventually she'll get wider samples but she has a place to start and that's enough for now.]

What do you have to work with?

In terms of computers?

[Tony shrugs, more than happy to leave the discussion of magic to people who get it. Maybe he can bother Strange about it later, if he really needs to. One of them.]

I mean I'm probably not going to whip up Watson out of nothing, but I can throw together some pretty basic setups without too much trouble. Or you can just use mine, unless you want to stay here.

I don't have to stay here.

[She pushes herself to her feet and decides that it's time to finally assemble her own lab. Shuri doesn't want to keep having to rely on others or imperfect machines and this most likely won't be the last of the situation. She needs a better place to work.]

Thanks.

Sure.

[He shrugs easily as he waits for her to gather her stuff. Not like it's a hardship, sharing space with someone who knows what they're doing. And JARVIS is probably the best kind of help you can get for sorting through data points, so the more hands on this thing the better.]

Come on. We can get coffee on the way.

[Some things are just universal. Engineers needing caffeine is one of them.]

[Shuri shoves a few things into her pack and then slings the sturdy strap over a shoulder. Her eyes are thoughtful though there is a lightness to her motions that suggests something more than just confidence in her abilities.]

Coffee sounds good.

Do you think that your system will be able to tap into the Friendr and housing networks? I was thinking of another way to find the spread of the illness. Since it could be magic and spread through different means for each person. We can map who live together and who speak on a regular basis or people who work in high crowded areas and map when they got sick.

It might tell us something about the spread.

[She's partly thinking out loud and also questioning if Tony's computer will have the ability to access and compile that much data. She wasn't sure how many people lived on this moon.]

If you mean, can I hook in to peoples' private networks?

[Tony's eyebrows lift a little. Probably, yes. But...]

People tend to get a little twitchy about that kind of thing. I can trawl network posts and see if anyone has talked about it, though.

That works.

[Shuri is less concerned about privacy, then again, she isn't going to read whatever it is that people are sending each other and once she has what data points she needs the information will be discarded. If it's for an ethical reason, she isn't going to push it.]

I just need more data points and I think that it's connected. There was a pot luck a few days ago and over all of the attendee's got sick.

Connected sure, but connected to what?

[It definitely seems to pass from person to person somehow. Airborne, physical contact, who knows. But they seem to already be passed the point of quarantining anyone, so maybe it's just a thought experiment.]

The problem is that nobody's symptoms are alike. Makes it hard to track things.

To how people are getting sick.

[Shuri shakes her head.]

It might be that everyone reacts differently to the magic aspect of the sickness and it's causing it to have different symptoms. [Right now it's only a theory but from what she has, it's the most likely.]

Might be. It's definitely not the nanotech.

[That much, he's gotten a pretty extensive look at. Even so, he'd be hard pressed to think of any kind of programming that could result in this many variations, even allowing for weird tricks of biology.]

Seems like the tech might just be a carrier. A way to get the infection in.

It's possible.

[Shuri agrees with a nod, though it doesn't bring them any closer to figuring out what is really causing all of this. She's starting to get a headache.]

I take it that Quarantine has never seen an illness like this before?

[Tony makes a quiet thoughtful sound, a placeholder while he pages through his mental rolodex. Something about that sounds familiar.

Ah, right. He does pay attention, sometimes.]

Not while I've been here. But I think there was a big one a while back. That's what the whole festival thing has been about.

[He gestures vaguely, somehow trying to encompass the entire concept of the celebrations for the month. Tony's kept his distance from them, mostly. He doesn't need to do any more remembering.]

[Shuri looks over at him with an expression that mixes confusion and disbelief.]

You're saying that the festival is causing this?

[That doesn't sound right, except that it'd be a brilliant way for all of these people to interact and share a virus.]

No? I'm saying that the festival is a memorial for the first outbreak.

[Though that does make for interesting timing, doesn't it? Huh. They've all suspected that someone caused this thing on purpose, maybe they were feeling nostalgic.]

[Shuri's eyebrow raises in a delicate arc.]

Did the first outbreak have a cure?

[Tony just shrugs.]

Long before I got here. I mean, I would presume so, since there are still people here. Don't think whatever that was had nanites involved, though.

It might be another place to start.

[Considering what few options they have.]

Are we almost there?

[Shuri continues to follow at Tony's side though her thoughts are quickly sorting through data and entry points that she wants to quantify and extrapolate from.]

monthly mingle: MEMORIA

Shuri - Sickness Prompt [OPEN]

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