riverviewlogs | monthly mingle: PRIJATA

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

prijata

In the days leading up to June 1st, residents new and old will notice preparations beginning, a flurry of activity getting the city ready for the upcoming celebration: Prijata. Riverview Quarantine has a strong culture of love, and they celebrate all types - Prijata is a special celebration of platonic love and building community through friendship. Prijata traditions include gift exchanges between friends, sharing meals cooked together by friend groups, and a variety of events and services aimed at making friends.

a celebration of platonic love

Prijata is a relatively relaxed holiday, focused mainly on friendship and platonic love - dedicated to appreciating the friends already in one's life, and opening oneself up to making new friends. Besides the private giving of gifts between friends, there is also a city-wide government-sponsored gift fountain that is open throughout the entire month. Included in the wide variety of events catered to finding new friends, are 'speed friending' and a large open exhibition where all the specialized clubs in Riverview can recruit for new members - and residents new or old can create a club and recruit.

i. gift fountain

While Prijata gift exchanges between friends are generally a quiet affair, done at friend-group dinners or parties, the element of gift giving does extend outward - community-wide, in fact. Throughout the course of the month, anyone living in Riverview Quarantine can drop by the huge fountain in the City Center, in front of the City Hall. They will find that the fountain is chock full of floating gift boxes in a wide variety of colors, patterns, and different shapes - though none larger than a shoe box. There are signs put up around the fountain stating that the boxes are magic and will only seek and open for their rightful owners. Characters will find that, upon touching the water, a box will float over to them, and when they pick it up, the top will unfurl like flower petals, displaying the gift inside. Sometimes, the box won't appear on the first try, since there's only so much space in the fountain at any given time, but if at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Every person in the city (including new arrivals) will receive one gift by the end of the month.

Gift fountain boxes will contain one small item from each character's home dimension (or, for CRAUs, from their previous game), similar to the "items from home" bonus reward, but without needing to spend points. The item should be small enough to fit in a shoebox, sentimental, and cannot be something intended for another person's character. If you can't think of an item like this that would work for your character, something of similar size and quality to what's described above that would make the character very happy can be substituted.

This prompt can also be used for gift exchanges and for characters to receive the Government-given gifts that were suggested in the Prijata Pregaming post on the meme community. Any newly apped character is welcome to post on the meme entry as soon as they're accepted, and will be linked to it in this month's acceptance notification, so to all you pre-existing players please keep looking at the Prijata Pregame meme throughout app week and afterward to help give new arrivals a warm friendly welcome!

ii. speed-friending

This is pretty much what it says on the tin! Much like speed-dating setups, many bars, coffee shops, and other places that people might gather are holding speed-friending! It's your standard setup - characters enter and fill out a quick questionnaire about themselves, and flit from table to table looking for someone with great friend chemistry. Not all of them are general and open to anyone who walks in, though, with many being specialized to people who are invested in certain hobbies, occupations, or with specific sets of interests. With specialized speed-friending setups ranging from horror movie buffs to members of the Perimeter Guard to fashionistas to sports or martial arts to video games, no matter what your character is into, they're likely to be able to sign up for a special event where they can go looking for a friend who's into the same things they are!

For this prompt, you can put up a list of hobbies or interests your character has, and compatible characters can hit them up for a speed-friending thread, like the IC equivalent of the CR meme!

iii. club exhibition

Speed-friending is all well and good, but not everyone is outgoing or open enough to know if they have friend chemistry in only a few minutes. For anyone looking to find groups of like-minded individuals they can spend more than a few minutes with before committing to something as daunting as a friendship, there is a month-long club exhibition happening in the Town Square in the City Center. Table after table and booth after booth are occupied by existing clubs in the city, with an incredibly broad scope of focus interests and hobbies - enough that any character should be able to find a club with their niche interest represented.

And if it isn't? Characters are welcome to start their own clubs - much like a business, a character-run club can have space set aside in the city for meetings and event mingles that are eligible for Activity Point Bonuses for the organizer.

iv. amusement park & waterfight

Remember the Amusement Park that citizens of the city were working together to clean up and power up a couple of months ago? Well, the endeavor has proven to be a success, and after a lot of hard work and technical expertise, the amusement park is up and running! For the first two weeks of June, admission will be free to honor those who helped make the park usable.

Sporting just about any amusement park ride you can think of, from kiddie rides, merry-go-rounds, and ferris wheels to high-speed roller coasters and more extreme rides for the thrill-seekers, the park takes it a step further by adding in a lot of different high-tech attractions not available at conventional amusement parks. It has banks and banks of VR simulators that allow park-goers to enjoy a variety of adventures and scenarios, or join shared mutual worlds with other users to explore or take out their aggression with a VR first-person shooter. There are also rows and rows of typical carnival games, some heavily rigged and some not, with prizes ranging from dollar store trinkets to stuffed animals to bits of advanced tech.

For the month of grand opening, though, the amusement park is offering a couple interesting events - a naming contest for the park, and a park-wide water fight.

The water fight is opt-in, with participants signing up and being given a purple or orange flag, tank top, or cap to wear marking them as to which team they're part of. There are buckets of water balloons around the park that are constantly being refilled by staff, and water fighters can participate in special target practice games to win the use of a watergun for the duration of the day - how big your watergun is depends on how well you do in the game! Ultimately, there aren't any real winners or losers, because the point is to get wet in the brand new summer heat, but it's always more fun to cool off with a bit of competition involved, right?

The naming contest is another story. Anyone who visits the park is welcome to think up a name for the park, and all entries will be listed on a large LED board. Every customer who enters the park is invited to vote for their favorite name, and the name with the most votes wins! To submit either an in-character suggestion or a suggestion from yourself as a player, hit up the thread below with a new top-level; whether or not you have a neat idea, place a vote for your favorite! Votes are one per player; suggestions are one per character.

v. roommates or wildcard

Feel free to use this prompt to set up headers for a communal floor, or threads open to roommates for the purpose of getting to know each other. Or if you have an idea for a prompt that isn't in this list, set during Prijata, feel free to write it up!

visual inspiration

click on thumbnails for larger view

Credit: image i: Odysseas Stamoglou; image ii: Dave Arredondo; image iii: spainforpleasure.com; image iv: mit19237

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Alex winces on Wanda's behalf, because well:]

God, that's one hell of an introduction to this place. I'm sorry.

[It's clear that Alex means it without a doubt because no one should need to deal with the whole being kidnapped thing and on top of that coming in and having people getting sick because someone had a grudge about how the holiday had become.

But Alex is going to focus on something else, and she eyes that green plushie again.]

I guess it can't hurt to try, right?

[Wanda shrugs.] I've had worse.

[Ironically, the festival had been the worst part of it for her. She'd lost everything barely a month ago and hadn't fully settled into her new life before being ripped out of that and dumped here...right in the middle of a holiday that torn fresh emotional wounds right back open.

A few rigged carnival games is practically a vacation by comparison.]

The bottles are heavier than they should be, but maybe if you throw it very hard?

[And if Alex tries, she might notice a small wisp of red around the ball just before it connects with a bottle - insurance, if you will. It's a small movement, just a wiggle of Wanda's fingers by her side. She doesn't want to draw the booth worker's ire.]

[Hearing that Wanda had worse isn't a surprise, not with some of the people that she knows here, but it still makes her frown on Wanda's behalf. For all of the reasons that Alex wanted to get home, she understood why people might want to be here, when their own homeworlds were well terrible for them. So, she just gives a little nod of understanding before she picks up the balls from the smug looking barker.

Let's be real, they're all smug looking when someone comes in to play.

So, she takes a deep breath and rolls the ball between her fingers for a moment before she draws back and beans it at the cans, holding her breath as she does it. She's watching intently, and she sees the red, but doesn't say anything as the ball connects solidly and then the cans fall down, making Alex cheer.]

[It was a good throw. Wanda didn't need to change the trajectory, just give it a little more force than a ball that light should have. Her grin widens when Alex cheers and the smug look on the man's face falls.

You didn't see that coming? echoes through her mind, but it doesn't put a damper on her mood. If Pietro was here, he'd be sharing in their joy.]

I think you owe her a bear.

[Begrudgingly, he hands it over. It's not like he can prove they cheated.]

I think...

[Alex adds with a smile, when the bear was handed over, she looks to Wanda for a second, and then she looks around to make sure no one else is around because well, that's the way that this thing works best.]

That you probably should give my friend a bear too. I mean, it's not like you want to be a front page story of the paper of how you're cheating normal everyday Riverview citizens out of prizes. It's not very sporting.

[Then before giving him a chance to respond, Alex just looks to Wanda once more.]

What color do you want?

[Alex may not have superpowers, but she's got a platform and she's definitely not a pushover by any stretch of the imagination. At least not on something like this.]

[Wanda doesn't even need to think.] Red.

[They might look like Christmas walking around with their bears but whatever, they're cute.

The booth worker looks annoyed, but he's not getting paid enough to take the fall for the park's shadier business practices. What's one less plushie to him? So he turns around, grabs the red bear, and sets it on the counter. Wanda doesn't need her powers to read the just please go in his eyes.

The sharper edge to her smile fades.]

Thank you. [It's cuter up close and very soft. Hopefully Zora will behave, not assume it's a cat toy, and not immediately try to shred it. Wanda turns to Alex.]

Are you going to name it?

Thank you.

[Alex didn't need to be psychic to read the look, and she just gives him a quick and warm smile before she turns away from the game and walks in time with Wanda, giving the green plushing a little bit of a squeeze with her hands as she looked down and gives it a very serious look.]

Hmm...

[The word was drawn out, because well, she hadn't thought of it before. She was probably too old to name a stuffed animal, and she expected to be made fun of it when she arrived home with her collection, but honestly Alex didn't care. Instead she just decided:]

Probably. When I know what his name is supposed to be.

[Wanda looks down at her own bear and hums thoughtfully. Seems like a girl, and the name needs to go with Zora's...]

I think this one's name is Dajana.

[What? You're never to old to have or name stuffed animals.]

[Alex isn't judging, not by a long shot, and she gives the bear an appraising look after Wanda names her, and then she nods quickly.]

I think it's the perfect name. And it's pretty too. So, it's excellent for her.

[Alex rolls her bear between her fingers for a minute, examining it as they walk before she nods again.]

I think this one is Occam.

monthly mingle: PRIJATA

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