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

iii. floating of the lanterns

Beverly's not sure what to believe when it comes to the afterlife, especially after her ghostly encounter with her husband months ago. But whatever happens after death, it's always been important to her to remember, to never forget those she's lost. She takes several small lotus-shaped lanterns and sits down by the river to carefully write a single name on each lantern: Isabel Howard, Paul Howard, Jack Crusher, Walker Keel, Tasha Yar, Reyga... their names stack up around her until she has a small fleet of flowers ready to set sail. She turns to the nearest person and asks, "Would you mind helping me carry these to the water?"

iv. down with the sickness

Sneezing, headaches, sore throat - symptoms that are probably very familiar to most residents of the quarantine and no great cause for immediate concern. Just a cold the other doctors reassure her. But for Beverly, that is very alarming: she's never had a cold and she's not supposed to be able to get one either. The cure for the common cold came a long time ago.

The answer comes, of course, from her tricorder: nanites. She's infected with thousands of them, self-replicating like a virus. It's not the first time she's encountered nanobots - in fact, she's developed ones for medical use herself before - but there's something different about these, something magical, she fears.

As she sees more and more people becoming sick, she becomes almost obsessive in her quest to fight the nanites. In an effort not to infect anyone else at the hospital, she recreates in the holodeck her own med lab from the Enterprise, where she works from morning until night. Obviously, this is hardly ideal in her weakened state and one evening as she walks home, she faints, right on the sidewalk outside her apartment.

Not at all; here.

(Lucretia's more than happy to help. She's got a significantly smaller stack of lanterns, so she's able to gather half of Beverly's into her arms to carry down to the water. She's not particularly fond of this festival (this is something she'd much rather do alone rather than in full view of everybody around her), but she's comfortable to observe it like this, with Beverly by her side.

Besides, the river looks so beautiful, with all of the lanterns bobbing along peacefully across the water.)

Thank you.

(It is... a lot, she knows. Seeing all the lanterns here together, she's struck by just how many people she has lost over the years. Too many and yet she knows they won't be the last. She's quiet as she walks down to the water with Lucretia, but as she lights the first lantern and sets it afloat, she reads the name out loud: Reyga. It only seems proper, in lieu of a true prayer. Not that she's entirely sure a Ferengi would want prayers anyway - so as a last minute addition, she digs a small coin out of her pocket and adds it to the lantern before it gets too far away. Better.)

I nearly lost my job for him, you know.

(She watches Beverly float the little lantern off across the waves and puts a hand on the small of her back comfortingly, rubbing in a little circle. She likes the little addition of a coin to this particular lantern, the care and personalisation Beverly gives to her work.)

Who was he?

(He must have been important, for Beverly to put her work in Starfleet on the line for him.)

A brilliant scientist, from a species that doesn't have much appreciation for them.

(Or at least, scientists who are doing it out of curiosity and desire to expand their horizons, rather than for profit.)

A Ferengi scientist. A contradiction that most people couldn't get over, even on other worlds. He was working on a new type of shielding for ships, one that would protect them even inside the corona of a star. No one would take him seriously, so I was hoping...

(She pauses. There's still some guilt there - after all, if she hadn't brought Reyga to the Enterprise, maybe he'd still be alive today.)

(She nods, watching the lantern bob away from them across the water. It seems odd that nobody would take him seriously for something like that, because it sounds very useful. Perhaps it was complex. Perhaps nobody thought it could really be done.)

You were hoping you could help? (She knows Beverly well by now to imagine what she might have done. Asked him back to the Enterprise, see if anybody there would lend him a hand...)

I was. I invited Reyga and some other scientists to the Enterprise to try out some... scientific diplomacy. Most of them were skeptical of his findings, but one...

(She takes a deep breath.)

He killed Reyga, for his plans.

(Lucretia feels an unpleasant jolt in her stomach at the thought of that.)

That's horrible.

I know. (She frowns as she watches Reyga's lantern float away.) I wish... I wish I could have done more, could have stopped it, if I'd realized...

Beverly Crusher | OTA

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