introductory mingle: FLOWER FESTIVAL

[riverviewmod]

who: everyone in Riverview!
what: Introductory Log and Flower Festival Celebration
when: April 2nd - April 15th
where: In several different locations in the downtown area of the Inhabited City.
warnings: please put any necessary warnings in the subject lines

flower festival

In the days leading up to April 2nd, residents new and old may notice advertising around the city, everywhere from digital screens to paper flyers pasted on blank walls, all advertising an upcoming holiday: The Flower Festival. Celebrating springtime, beauty, joy, and togetherness, the festival heavily features floral themes and dancing. The advertising mentions that on April 10th, a paid holiday, there will be a Blossom Picnic, as well as lists of various public dances at clubs or other open venues, and adult raves.

a celebration of spring

The Flower Festival's main event is the Blossom Picnic on April 10th, but it also features traditions of sharing food and drink, and dancing that span over the course of the whole two weeks. There are a large variety of events going on throughout the city, from dancing lessons in any wide variety of traditional dances, to old-fashioned sock hops, to adult raves complete with mild party drugs. Feel free to use the prompts below or create your own event at any point during the festival, and if your character creates an event and hosts it in a top-level, you can submit that thread for extra bonus points.

i. blossom picnic

The main event that kicks off the second week of the Flower Festival is the Blossom Picnic on April 10th. A relaxed and low-key event, it draws several thousand people every year to the spacious Riverview Central Park, where there is a generous lawn lined with various blossoming trees, and families, found families, lovers, and groups of friends are encouraged to lay out a picnic blanket and share food. There will be live bands playing (but not loudly enough to distract from conversation and peacefully watching the petals flutter in the wind), a variety of demonstrations of traditional cultural dances from many different realities and planets, and a ton of ice cream vendors. This is an excellent festival not only for celebrating togetherness with the people who are already important, but for mingling and making new friends.

Characters may either pack their own lunches or they can purchase pre-packed Blossom Festival lunches. Stores and street markets are carrying a wide variety of specialty food that is only available at this time of year - predominantly pastries, an assortment of types of candies, and ice cream treats all in various floral flavors, as well as a sort of ambrosia salad based around a sweet rose-flavored cream and a native fruit that is bright green and tastes like a combination of peach and citrus.

ii. dancing lessons

Starting on April 2nd, there will be dancing lessons offered almost everywhere you look! From partner dances to group dances to line dances; sexy and sensual or innocent and childlike - almost any type of dance you can imagine is represented, from any reality or planet that has people in Riverview Quarantine.

Additionally, the Riverview Central Community Center has multiple rooms blocked off so anyone who knows a dance from home can teach it to others in their community - sharing is caring, after all. Characters are welcome to block off one of these rooms and offer lessons in any dance they happen to know from home (and these sorts of thread starters would be eligible for the mingle AC Point bonus)!

iii. flower festival dancing

This is pretty simply what it says on the tin - in almost every club, community center, or other public space, there will be dancing at almost all hours of the day or night, formal and informal. Musicians bring out their instruments and play in the street for demonstrations of cultural dances and music at the same time as clubs are offering VIP cover charges for exclusive dances, and you can find anything in between.

There are also many low-cover-charge raves that allow under-18s so younger characters can stay up all night and dance like crazy. The legal drinking age in Riverview Quarantine is 14, and so anyone over 14 can enter and indulge in a few drinks, dancing, and playing tag with a non-intoxicating version of the colored powder featured at the adult raves. There is copious amounts of security on site to ensure that everyone is safe, as well as nurses and off-duty police officers to offer advice or care for anyone who overindulges out of lack of experience.

Grab a partner, a group of friends, or just cruise and mingle the various dancing events.

Characters may also notice that most of the street markets and clothing shops are offering clothing that features floral patterns, flowers as accessories, and that show a lot of skin - for men, women, and anyone in between!

iv. adult raves

Advertised on flyers and digital screens around the city, made to pop as if they were under blacklight, is a series of adult raves that are happening in various large empty warehouse spaces around the city, including one that is listed as the danger rave and hosted in an abandoned factory outside the inhabited city walls. With bouncers at the door to ensure that anyone entering is 18+, the raves are comfortably adult in nature. Clothing is optional, showing skin is encouraged, and there are a lot of neatly tucked away spaces for attendees to get some time alone with one or more than one person, as well as spaces intended for orgies. The atmosphere is sex-positive and non-judgemental, open to any orientation or preference, with various forms of protection available for free, however, to ensure that everyone plays safe there are sober security teams out en masse at all premises to oversee the events.

(CW: DRUG USE) In each location, there is one specific room where attendees can enter, and dance or play tag with brightly colored powder that contains small amounts of a legal party drug commonly available in Riverview, which is absorbed through the skin. Not much more intoxicating than having a few beers, the effects of the drug are a pleasant low-key buzzing euphoria, positive sensitivity to touch, a heightening of desires for intimacy, and a mild lowering of inhibitions. Once a character has been hit with the powder, the color lingers on the skin so other attendees can know who has partaken, but once the powder makes contact with a surface it deactivates, meaning that partakers can safely dance with non-partakers without sharing the intoxicating effects.

Please be sure to warn in subject lines for any threads involving drug use. And remember, there is always security to intervene and make sure everyone is safe.

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 at the Flower Festival, feel free to write it up!

visual inspiration

click on thumbnails for larger view

Credit: third image by Steve Goad; other images found on uncredited on Pinterest or Google images - please let the mod know if you find credit!

navigation

Comments

[dust_of_life]

Fatima made another note that she was going to have to watch her language a little bit more closely. The last thing she wanted to do was start an incident.

At least, by accident.

She canted her head to one side. "If it's not too personal a question," she said, "what do you mean by what's happening at home?"

[greatcleavage]

"Oh, lots of things," Roy said, rather bitterly, "but the most relevant one to all this navel-gazing is that I was trying to stop the gods from destroying the world before I came here."

[dust_of_life]

And she thought she'd had problems when it came to untangling the mess in Phoenix.

Fatima blinked. Once. Twice. And then had to suppress a nervous laugh. There wasn't exactly a good way to process something like that?

She whetted her lips. "Okay, I'll bite. Why do the gods want to destroy the world?"

[greatcleavage]

"Because the world is a prison for an immense god-killing, soul-eating abomination, and it's really damn close to escaping."

Maybe. That was the worst part -- Roy knew perfectly well that there was MORE to the tale than anyone either knew or was telling, but in absence of any certainty he had to proceed with what he did know and fit the available evidence.

"If the gods act quickly, they can make a new world that fixes the flaws in the old world that allow for that escape."

[dust_of_life]

"Okay...but what about all the people?" That was always Fatima's first logical concern. She'd never considered it quite on the scale Roy was talking about, but maybe that shouldn't have been much of a surprise. He had a way of taking all of her old perspectives and turning them up to eleven.

Would he find her little world of darkness a quaint vacation from his troubles?

It scared her to think so.

[greatcleavage]

Roy would find Fatima's world sanitized (thanks, Technocracy) but also a resolutely miserable place to adventure. Sometimes, raw moral clarity was the only thing that could keep a man sane -- the certainty that his cause was right and Good. Her world offered little of that.

"All go to their deserving afterlife, of course. Which is why one of the gods is undergoing some contortions to sway the vote and damn all dwarfkind to dishonorable deaths, thus basically promoting her to head god of the pantheon because of control over all those souls."

[dust_of_life]

It helped Fatima to think in terms of the pantheons she'd studied. Hel and Hades. Osiris. Deities of the underworld. She hadn't read much about them trying to organize said souls, but she could see how it could happen. Not a very far leap.

She nodded slightly. "Well," she said, "that sounds...awful."

[greatcleavage]

Just give it time and it will come out that the Northern gods had pretty familiar names.

"Oh yeah, and the best part is, her High Priest is an undead monstrosity that used to be my best friend. Pre-mortem."

[dust_of_life]

Now that sounded painfully familiar. He probably wasn't talking about a literal Cainite, of course. But it sounded close enough. Close enough to get a wince of sympathy out of Fatima, anyway.

Which was no small thing.

"That sounds...awful," she said, fully aware that the adjective was probably inadequate. She tried to imagine how she would feel if Emily ever became a Cainite. Or worse, a Sabbat Cainite. It caused a hollow feeling to suck the life out of her chest for a moment.

More than awful.

[greatcleavage]

If she was using Cainite as a synonym for vampire, well...

Roy, a bit self-consciously, shrugged. "I didn't mean to get into all of that, really -- it just tends to creep to the top of my mind for some crazy reason. It's just stuff I'll have to deal with when I get back there, is all."

[dust_of_life]

"No, I get it," she said, trying to sound as sympathetic as possible. "I left behind some unfinished business too."

Nothing that quite compared to the end of the world. She hoped. But then, if Auntie Diana wasn't found, it would be the end of Liam's world. And Arty would be completely crushed.

Fatima herself wouldn't exactly be thrilled.

[greatcleavage]

"Hopefully nothing as large." Though considering Fatima's considerable rancor at being brought here, Roy had to wonder. Wonder but carefully not judge. "I don't think I ever caught what you did back home, though, come to think of it."

That wasn't a question, so she could easily not answer it if she so chose...

[dust_of_life]

Fatima sighed, grimacing at the question. Roy was an interesting case study. He was completely comfortable with the existence of magic, of the supernatural. Her compulsion to hide those things was lessened. It wasn't exactly gone completely, but it felt like less of a risk with him.

She wondered if she'd ever feel that way with anyone else.

Maybe Chandra?

"Well, I'm legally just a student," she said. "But my family's part of a bigger...organization. We kinda try to save the world."

[greatcleavage]

"What, like a secret society?" Roy accepted this at face-value without question. Honestly, that seemed very Fatima-ish from what he knew of her so far...

[dust_of_life]

Masquerade breach, Masquerade breach, Masquerade breach, Masquerade breach...

Fatima's skin absolutely thrummed with the refrain. And she hated it. As much as she lived by the Masquerade back home, here it was strangling her. Maybe. Sort of? She didn't really know.

But asking herself if it really mattered was giving her an enormous headache.

And possibly an ontological crisis.

"Kinda," she said. "We're not, like, out to dominate the world or anything. Just keep it going."

[greatcleavage]

"Oh, no, I'm familiar with the concept." His own world didn't have many that he knew of, but everyone knew of things like the Harpers, which were of course just one more element of the Forgotten Realms setting that had been beaten so far past death they had achieved a new level of deceased unheard of in mortal affairs. "That explains a lot, honestly."

[dust_of_life]

Both of her eyebrows went up. "Does it?"

Fatima really couldn't justify being too surprised. She'd been so eager to show off, when dealing with the dragon. Maybe she'd had a bit of a flashing, neon sign over her, reading 'I'm magical, ask me how.'

Or maybe it had been her eagerness.

Maybth both. Who could really say?

[greatcleavage]

"Just a little. You have a sort of undercover-agent vibe around you. Maybe it's just the fashionable fightwear." Roy grinned, meaning nothing by it. His own particular worldview meant he picked up those things more readily than someone from her own world might. (But that's really getting into Mage territory, isn't it?)

[dust_of_life]

She smiled and had the grace to laugh at that. Fatima wasn't much of a spy. She tried far too hard to stand out.

With a sheepish shrug, she said, "Well, if you're going to save the world, you might as well do it in style. You can quote me on that."

That was Fatima. Eminently quotable.

[greatcleavage]

"See, I've always been of the same opinion, but then everyone takes offense. 'Armor and a sword and a bald head isn't style, Roy.' 'Why is one boot bigger than the other, Roy?'"

Roy was, at least, not afraid to poke a little fun at himself. When he was in a good mood.

[dust_of_life]

One boot being bigger than the other didn't strike her as stylish either. She wondered what his friends were like. Or if she'd ever meet any of them. The portal ripping them from their homes had a peculiar talent for playing favorites. She'd run into any number of friends and allies all from the same place.

Something to pay attention to, in the days to come.

But for the time being, she just nodded. "Well. Glad we have something in common."

[greatcleavage]

"I'll believe that when I see you wearing unequal footwear," Roy shot back with a smile. "Instead of just really pointy footwear. Which I give you full credit for managing just as effectively as boots on that run we did, by the way."

[dust_of_life]

She tossed her head back in a little preen that was only slightly imperious. "I said I would."

And she had. Merali girls were true to their word. Most of the time, anyway. Fatima had always had more trouble in what Artemis called 'the honesty department' than her ancestors. But big deal. Times changed. People changed.

The job description changed.

"I think I might hold off on the unequal footwear though," she added. "I'll let that be your look."

[greatcleavage]

"Oh thank goodness, the rest of everything I have going for me just isn't enough," Roy joked.

[dust_of_life]

"Never under estimate the power of branding," she replied, giving him a one-shouldered shrug.

Okay, she decided to herself. She didn't understand Roy. She probably never would. But at the very least, she supposed, she'd consider him a friend.

That was something.