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riverviewlogs2018-05-01 07:34 pm
- !mod post: holiday,
- !mod post: monthly mingle,
- almost human: dorian,
- halo: forward unto dawn: chyler silva,
- imperial radch: breq,
- marvel (616): billy kaplan,
- marvel (616): tommy shepherd,
- marvel (mcu): bucky barnes,
- marvel (mcu): loki,
- marvel (mcu): peter quill,
- marvel (mcu): steve rogers,
- marvel (mcu): tony stark,
- marvel (mcu): wanda maximoff,
- once upon a time: victor frankenstein,
- original: shigeru miyata,
- ppz: elizabeth bennet,
- rivers of london: peter grant,
- star trek (aos): james kirk,
- star wars: cassian andor,
- star wars: finn,
- star wars: jyn erso,
- star wars: poe dameron,
- voltron: keith,
- ✖ marvel (mcu): shuri,
- ✖ original: freya vaughn,
- ✖ original: the tetherer,
- ✖ persona 5: akira kurusu,
- ✖ persona 5: makoto niijima,
- ✖ shadowhunter chronicles: alec lightwoo,
- ✖ the finder: willa monday,
- ✖ the raven cycle: ronan lynch
monthly mingle: MEMORIA
what: monthly mingle: memoria
when: the month of may
where: anywhere around the city
warnings: please put any necessary warnings in the subject lines
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.
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!
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!
no subject
[ It doesn't... make it less of a loss. She still wasn't there, right? He's met Lup a couple of times. She brings energy with her. Warm and easy. Sharp at the edges, but not the same way that Taako is.
Maybe this is part of why they're like that. ]
But I'm glad you got her back.
no subject
[It's not addressing whether or not things were fine but his voice is soft and genuine in a way that it rarely is. Talking about Lup, especially about losing her, is one of the few things he'll be at least a little bit honest with.]
Who are you tryna say goodbye to, darling?
[Because he's not completely callous.]
no subject
[ He looks down. Shrugs. Runs his thumb over a little poem someone wrote on his lantern, carefully. ]
Not always easy to explain.
[ It's not a dismissal. More of a heads up. Like hey, it's okay to opt out if you don't wanna hear your buddy try to word the thing right, or if you've already got enough on your plate.
He hasn't really gone to anyone from home about it for the same line of reasoning. They'll have more than enough to think about without him trying to bring in... half the reason that they have people to mourn in the first place. No one wants to be that guy. ]
no subject
[That's not entirely true, he could leave and go give Lup a hug, or see if Loki is doing alright, or any other number of things that would fill his time up better than sitting by a river being sad.
But that's not the point, this is his way of saying that he'll listen if Finn wants to explain, without having to actually say any of that.]
no subject
Finn kinda mulls his thoughts over. When you're bad at sorting through feelings and wording them, mulling things over takes up a little more time. So in a way it helps that it's Taako, who, as far as Finn's ever known, is also bad at sorting through feelings and wording them in his own unique way. ]
So we're fighting the First Order. Back home. I don't know if any of us have mentioned them. [ Or how much. It's one of those things that seems just about inevitable with people out of their corner of the universe. ] Big army. All the best tech and weapons. They don't-- recruit soldiers. Maybe they had to for a while to get started, maybe they still get volunteers. After a while, they figured out you don't need to recruit what you can raise. Galaxy's a big place. You can find kids anywhere.
[ Maybe part of him does care about what he can't remember, what he never got to have. Even if it only boils down to the fact that they took it from him. He doesn't know. Finn bites the inside of his cheek. Shakes his head. ]
You know, a stormtrooper goes down, they get left there? That's it. And it's... I really can't blame people for not thinking about it planetside. Any half-decent stormtrooper would shoot them if they got told to. It's what they're raised for. But the First Order doesn't do funerals. So I figured if the First Order won't do it and no one else should have to, I wanted to-- I don't know. Give them something.
[ People mourn Hosnian Prime, and they rightfully should. He's seen it even just in Poe's face. People in the Resistance mourn their own, mourn in some way for everyone the First Order's ever taken. He saw that, too.
Somewhere out there, maybe, thousands of families mourn the children they lost. The people that their children would have been, could have been. However many families were left alive. There's no way of knowing.
It's been part desire and part necessity to starkly split into me and them since he left. He never fit in the way he was supposed to. If Slip showed up right now, right here, with a second chance, if he trained a blaster on someone, Finn would put him down himself. He's killed a lot of stormtroopers himself. He doesn't know if this is coming from real compassion or something more selfish and complicated.
But it didn't seem right to do nothing. Even when he doesn't entirely know what he's doing or how to carry it. ]
no subject
Not that this changes anything, Taako doesn't give much of a shit about what Finn did before he turned up here, even less so if there was bullshit brain washing involved, which there has to have been in a situation like that. So he gets it, what isn't being said, but he just lets the information get filed away while he focuses on the rest of what Finn's saying.
He does wish that Merle were here - he'd have something good to say about mourning or caring about people even if they did shitty things, but it's just Taako and he's kind of useless at this.]
That's real sweet of you, darling.
[He means that, really. It doesn't matter if they were the bad guys, those were still people that Finn knew, who had families at some point in their lives, who died for someone else's shitty orders.]
I dunno if I've got like, advice or shit but uh, I think whatever you end up doing is gonna be enough. It's the thought that counts, right?
no subject
It can be kind of like getting that "well you're a Big Hero to people in the resistance" bomb drop from Poe all over again. No thanks. He's staying in his lane.
If Taako did the two and two makes four on it, he doesn't bother writing it on the blackboard, so to speak. ]
That's what I've heard. Don't have to be an optimist to think that anything's better than nothing. [ If it's an optimist exclusive, no one told him and he pirated it probably. ] Guess it helps to have a whole holiday set up for it.
no subject
[Maybe that's a little too harsh, a little lacking in optimism, as it were, but Taako isn't much for sugarcoating things with people he genuinely considers friends, and Finn now falls into that category.]
Dead thugs are dead thugs, whatever way you cut it, they're not gonna see the cool lantern you made for them. Just focus on you, what makes you feel like you're doing the right thing.
no subject
Even if they could somehow see it, would they want it? Would it matter?
Probably not. And if a First Order ship dropped right here and sent a troop out, he'd shoot them.
It just matters to him that he's got a chance to do it. To feel like he's... taking something back for them, or something. He doesn't know. He doesn't put a lot of thought into the things that he does, sometimes. ]
Hope you're not saying that to all the mourners. Not sure how it would go over.
[ Finn doesn't sound offended, exactly. It's a real "why would you say something so controversial and yet so brave" day. ]
no subject
Figured you were tough enough to handle the truth.
[It's his way of saying that he doesn't think Finn needs things to be softened for him, or maybe that he thinks Finn is someone who'd prefer a little blunt honesty over useless sentiment, or that he respects him enough to be honest. Taako doesn't say a lot of things, sometimes, despite how much he talks.]
It's not gonna hurt 'em if you wanna be a little selfish.
[The dead, he means. It's okay for Finn to do this for himself rather than them.]
no subject
[ And if they did, they wouldn't be likely to be happy about it coming from him.
Stormtroopers do things their own way. It's easy enough not to get attached to each other in a traditional sense, between the competitiveness and the understanding that they're not more important than... whatever the orders are. Still, there's unit cohesion. Jokes, card games, nicknames. Maybe a way of sending each other off.
He never really had the inside angle to find out. Never quite fit into those spaces.
Finn left for himself. He knows where he'd be if he hadn't. Sometimes he still feels guilty for being the only one. Maybe that's part of it, too.
But he doesn't pay himself enough to ever circle that drain of thought. ]
In the mood to write something on it? [ Asking most people, he usually adds that it's okay if they don't want to, no pressure, something like that. But Taako's pretty open with his hell nos. The longer Finn knows him, the less afraid he is that he'll back him into any kind of corner. ]
no subject
[Taako isn't one for words, not in these sorts of situations, so rather than write anything on the lantern he reaches out to touch the center of it, where the flame is supposed to be lit.
He casts continual flame there, a small fire springing to life, though no heat comes off it and it doesn't seem to be burning the paper of the lantern.]
There ya go, darling, it'll be lit long after the other ones have snuffed out.
[And that's... something, maybe. A way to remember. Keeping the light going.]
no subject
And that's a form of kindness in which Finn places no small amount of value. It's one of the first things that would come to mind if someone asked him what he likes about-- well, anyone that he likes. They're not perfect, and in some cases it's definitely not always, but they're kind when they don't have to be. They'll choose it. He's watched it happen.
So yeah. It's something. Not a name or a word or a song or a picture, not a well-wishing or a refusal. Not a gesture, he's sure, that he'd be likely or able to get from anybody else. Which is as Taako as it gets. It's very much something.
Finn has roughly the poker face equivalent of a melting snowman when it comes to things like this, which is to say his expression softens with the utmost transparency. In Finn's ever-growing gallery of people he's looked at like they personally hang the moon, an illustrious Taako portrait has been framed for display.
After a long moment, he lunges forward to pull Taako into an impulsive hug. It's maybe a weird angle to start from, but he'll manage it. It's fine. He's made a commitment. ]
Thanks.
no subject
Magnus is the kind of man who impulsively hugs, though, so even though Taak isn't the biggest fan of them he doesn't react badly to Finn's arms around him. He even returns the hug, not with nearly as much strength but he does give a couple reassuring pats, because he's nice like that.]
If you make it weird I'm gonna push you in the lake.
[He wouldn't.
Probably.
He likes Finn, despite how weird their friendship is.]
no subject
I'm not gonna make it weird. [ Not sure what else to do in an emotional situation? Sound vaguely offended. ]
no subject
Also it's a river not a lake but don't @ me about it.]
I hate to be the one to break it to ya, but you make most things weird.
[Somehow both fond and teasing. It's the Taako brand.]
no subject
Since you're the weirdest person I know, I think that might be the world differences talking. [ Bold claim? Yes. Inaccurate? Also yes. ] Maybe I'll see you around later? If you don't send yours out before I finish up.
[ Gotta go get... maybe just a few more things put on here. For him and them. And some of that extra runoff that comes with the territory, things that people don't necessarily want to put on their own lantern, but that they think deserve a bit of carrying. Finn's not gonna judge. ]
no subject
Sure thing, my man. If I'm gone and you wanna stop round for coffee or whatever the door's always open.
[Literally. What's a lock when you have wards to keep out unwelcome guests.]