riverviewlogs | monthly mingle: PRIJATA

Entry tags:

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

[Speak of Earth to Padmé and she would think that the person was referring to the ground itself. There was no planet bearing that designation where she came from. No whisper had reached her ears either of such a planet, but given the size of the galaxy, it isn't surprising.]

Oh? Do they actually make it from scratch here?

[Where she could see it made, or was it already pre-packaged and ready for purchasing?]

[Alex had spoken to a fair amount of people from other universes that consider things the same way, including her Grandson, so she doesn't bother arguing with people over that anymore. Actually, when it comes to the entire whole multiverse thing, Alex is rather accepting in general. When one only needs to look to the horizon to see how strange everything is, then in her mind it doesn't leave much room for doubt.

So Alex just nodded enthusiastically, and gestured next to her.]

Come on, I'll show you. They have other colors than pink, but they all kind of generally taste the same.

... what is it's natural colour?

[White, or was the sugar here pink? She knew of a few different varieties in her own universe and wondered after that. The colour that Alex had had hadn't exactly seemed naturally, but Padmé realized that what was natural was subjective to the viewer.

With a smile and a small shake of her head, she moved to follow her.]

Does that mean that sometimes they do flavour it, or?

White. Well, sort of after it's been all refined and stuff. Natural sugar is brown and forms hard little crystals of its own. They packets are sort of all over the place back home.

[In Seattle, the place where coffee snobbery happened to be born of course. But the question about flavors makes Alex laugh softly, and she just shrugs.]

I think the flavors are just pink and blue honestly. I've never had it taste like anything else other than itself. Of course, cotton candy is a flavoring back home though. They even make it into ice cream and my best friend Nic is sort of obsessed with it.

[Which was embarrassing because they were two grown ups and when they go get ice cream, part of their order shouldn't be something that a five year old would be comfortable ordering.]

They mix the cotton candy in with ice cream?

[It would likely disintegrate, but leave a sweet flavour in the ice cream, or so Padmé would think. Of course, she could be completely wrong with that guess as well. She did offer a smile though.]

We all have things that we love to eat... Mine is five blossom bread. I don't get to have it too often, or at least not the one from Naboo. The others... They just aren't the same.

Alex shook her head a bit, trying to remember what she could about how people actually made cotton candy ice cream. Anything that happened to involve cooking normally flew right over her head, so she wasn't sure. But then again there were those varieties that had the hard sort of pebbles of what may once have been cotton candy inside of it.]

For the most part, I think they just sweeten it with a syruph or something. I'm not really sure, cooking isn't something that I'm known for. [A beat and a smile.] Well, unless it's for turning something that's supposed to be foolproof into a burnt mess stuck to the bottom of one of my pans.

[Alex wasn't ashamed of her inability to cook things that weren't coffee, toast (most of the time) and ramen or easy mac. After all, she was a busy reporter and ordering takeout was a thing that she normally did at least once a day. But she focused on the idea of five blossom bread.]

Sometimes the locals can manage to find local foods, or at least close enough to it if they know what theytoy're looking for. So who knows, it may end up showing up here at some point. But it sounds really good.

Is Naboo where you're originally from?

[Alex couldn't help but wonder if it was a planet like other people's where there was a lot of violence or something that explained the woman's skilled with the game's gun.]

[Padmé considers those words, nodding or lip twitching ever so as she speaks. Nothing is ever perfect the first try, and sometimes the journey is more fun than the actual end. Although, Padmé can say that cleaning very dirty pots and pans is never much fun...

It's not like Padmé could judge either. Most of the time she has her food brought to her. It just seems that there is never enough time for her to accomplish everything that she wants to accomplish in a day and sometimes she would even forget to eat. It would be interesting though if she could find something that was similar to what she knows.]

Mm. Yes. It is the planet I was born on.

[There was a reason Alex was banned from cooking at her house. And of course at any event back home. And going back to when she was at college and one time forgot the water she was boiling for ramen and had ended up setting off the fire alarm during finals. Honestly, Alex didn't mind the way that she couldn't cook, as far as she was concerned she had other skills to make up for it, and she was really good at knowing the best and cheapest takeout in any area she stayed in for long enough.

Focusing on what the other woman was saying, Alex smiled. She'd been here long enough that the hearing that people were from other worlds was no longer a shock, and even hearing people say they were from Earth didn't mean that they were from the same one that she was from. Or the same when, honestly. That was the problem with the whole multiverse thing here. Or a perk of it, depending on how Alex thought about it. Normally, it was more of a perk.]

It sounds beautiful. Well, the name anyway. What's it like?

It is beautiful.

[Or at least that is what Padmé believes. If one doesn't like water or pastures, then it might not be the ideal place for them. Quaint, is one word that could be used for it, pastoral views and flowing rivers... It had seemed soft and pleasant, a place that nurtured, although was not as industrial as Coruscant. Not that it lacked, but the whole planet wasn't one big city.]

It's well known for its rivers, lakes and swamps, and grassy acres. Temperate in temperature, it is a world that has been granted much.

[Alex can see the love of the place in the woman's face and hear it in her voice, and it makes her smile in return. The best thing about being here, she'd discovered several months ago, was the way that there were new places and new worlds that were opened up just by talking to people about where they were from. Traveling was always something that Alex loved to do, which was a good thing considering how much of it she needed to do for work, but more than once, Alex wished that she had the ability to visit the worlds of people who were from different universes than her own.]

Is your planet mostly water then? My planet, Earth is like that too.

It does have a lot of water, and the Gungans build their cities beneath the surface, but there is also a fair bit of land.

[Water is something that Naboo has never wanted for though. Then again, it doesn't have too much water either. It is a moderate planet, gentle in nature compared to some of the other planets in the galaxy. Breathable air, fertile soil, bountiful harvests and a pleasant temperature.]

Earth?

[It is a peculiar name, given that earth implies dirt or ground.]

Yet it has reasonable land masses as well, or no?

It has some land of course but it's about 70% water when you include the oceans and the polar ice caps and everything. The funny thing is that only two percent of the planet's water is actually drinkable. But yeah, still called Earth.

[Calling land 'earth' t is just one of those things that seems to be universal and Aex gives a quick shrug and a little bit of a laugh, because honestly, it's just a thing that's how it is. Of course she has to ask:]

Gundams? [She can't help but ask.]

[That much water, and yet only such a small amount that is potable? Had something happened on her planet then that had made it so, or was there some natural reason to have so much water and yet so little that one could actually drink? Padmé would have found it strange had Naboo been like that, although she can acknowledge if it was naturally like that, she likely wouldn't have thought twice about it.]

Do you know the origins of the name?

[Perhaps there had once been less water, or maybe it was an ironic name? Of course, she knows that the chances are that the information could have been lose over time. The laugh does bring a smile to her lips as her head dips.]

They're the other sentient species on Naboo. They're amphibious in nature, able to live above and below the water.

[The question earned a quick shake of her head along with an easy smile.]

I'm afraid I don't. If my partner was here, I'm sure he'd be able to give you the whole epistemology of the thing so I can ask him if you'd like! But I don't know, it's slightly depressing that our planet is named for something that doesn't even make up fifty percent of it, though.

[Stupid historical figures! Who wants to be from a planet that isn't even properly named? But she Alex didn't focus on that. Instead she focused on the gungans, her eyes going slightly wide.]

Do they like have cities and stuff underwater?

Oh, no. No, that's quite alright. A passing curiosity, is all.

[It isn't as if Padmé is going to lose sleep over not having an answer to that question. If anything, it was an interest in trying to understand how the planet got its name, yet not having an answer isn't going to be the end of the world.

Her smile grows a little as Alex's eyes widen, and she nods.]

Yes. They travel above water, of course, but their cities are often built under it. They can hold their breaths for a very long time, so that they may get to their cities. Within, they do have breathable air.

He'd love the chance to show off though...

[Alex is probably not wrong, and there's a reason there's not a snowball's chance in hell that she's going to ever play Trivial Pursuit with him. Alex Reagan is a lot of things, but she's not a complete idiot.

Besides, she's too entranced by the idea of underwater cities.]

Wow. They must have a huge lung capacity!

[It earns a small chuckle from Padmé, knowing some others who are like that... Or maybe one other, Anakin. The Force is impressive though, even if it is just moving fruits around. It's not what one expects from a Jedi, even a Padawan.]

Mm. In that case, I could indulge him.

[And she likely would be interested in it, but it certainly isn't an area that she specifies in.]

They do, although don't ask me how large, as I really don't know... I just know that we need aid if we wish to visit, like a ship. They have historically kept to themselves, and not that many leave the planet, actually. They're a bit mysterious in that way, I suppose, but the Humans of Naboo also didn't seek to learn more until recent years. Overall, they are a pleasant race.

[Alex is just going to grin for a moment in that stupid but adoring way that she will completely deny if anyone ever points it out to her. But it's just for a second before she adds:]

I feel like I should warn you, he can be a giant ass at times. But he's really smart.

[It's not fair to send someone to her boyfriend unprepared, no matter how together they seem.]

Why didn't they seek them out?

[The slight pause from her and the expression on her face speaks enough for Padmé to understand and the corner of her lips twitch as she relays the information. So long as he isn't aggressively rude about it...

Her question in turn does have Padmé giving a little blink, before shaking her head. It's not like they were hostile towards each other. Rather, indifferent.]

We hadn't really had any reason to deal with each other, so we more or less didn't. Each race had their own society, culture, commerce...

[Focusing her attention on this part of their conversation rather than anything about Richard was surprisingly easy honestly. Just a part of the compartmentalizing that she did when she was dealing with things around the show. So instead she thinks about Earth and its history of colonization, and how pleased she is to hear that it's not something that humans... or humanoids, she guesses, always tend to do.]

Wow. It must be really weird to have neighbors so close and not to interact with them. I mean my mother can't even go a single day without bringing a casserole over to meet the new neighbors.

[Thankfully for Riverview, Alex wasn't like that with people.]

Our two races interact more now but looking back, yes. At the time, not so much.

[It had taken a disaster to shake the pot and status quo. Now that it had been, it wasn't as if they had returned to what they had been. It was a pity, as the two of them working together likely could have achieved a lot for Naboo. But it is never too late, and working with each other, they would be able to accomplish their goals.]

It is one of those things that you don't realize until you review what you have done, and realized the opportunities that have been missed. We, as a whole, didn't look at the Gungans with the best light either. Thankfully that has changed.

Oh, I see.

[Alex nodded, and it wasn't how people would have dealt with it on Earth, and all and all, that was good to hear. Because she didn't want there to be some sort of Belgium and the Congo thing. Also she can't deny that she's fascinated by all of this.]

What are they like?

It's surprising how similar they are on some levels. They have those who are more serious, and those who are a bit less so.

[Or who seem to always trip over their feet... Jar Jar does mean well though and he has been working hard, even if Padmé does need to keep an eye on him at times to keep him from bumbling in to the wrong situations.]

They're taller than I, which isn't much of a feat.

[That private smile, as she knows she is a petite woman.]

They more or less have two distinct races. One is taller and leaner, while the other is a bit more rotund. Mainly earthy colours- greens, browns, reds. The Otolla are the slimmer ones, longer billed, with eyes that sit on short stalks about their head and long ears. The Ankura are bulkier, shorter billed, with hooded eyes on their head. They're apparently the older race of the two.

[Alex is only slightly taller than Padme, so she just grinned at that, because she definitely gets it. It seems like nearly everyone in her life is taller than she is. It used to be more of a problem than it is; now it's only when someone intentionally tosses something on a higher shelf.

But her attention is focused on the other woman when she explains, and Alex just nodded for a minute.]

It sounds a little like the difference between frogs and tadpoles honestly. Even if I'm assuming one isn't the baby of the other.

Oh, no. They aren't. They're both Gungans, but each a different race. They've each their own offspring.

[Although Padmé hasn't seen too many younger ones. Whether they are able to come to the surface, she doesn't know. They are two distinct races though, but clearly related.]

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monthly mingle: PRIJATA

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