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

[advanced]

[He backs up half a step when she reaches out for him, instinct rather than fear, and his expression fully closes off.]

I'm not going to a hospital.

[He is never putting himself in the hands of faceless doctors again.]

I'll be fine, it's just shallow. It wasn't even your fault, you don't have to worry about it.

[inlaid]

[Yeah, sorry Bucky, that's not going to happen. But she's not going to get pushy about this in the way she was a moment ago because clearly that's not going to work. Bryn doesn't advance, but rather heads back to her bike, starts wheeling it away.

And then she gives him a little jerk of her head. Follow her to the sidewalk, okay?

Out of the road, she begins fishing through a bag in the sidecar, pulling out some clean gauze from a medic bag.]

I don't have to but I'm going to. [She pauses a beat, and then adds:] You know, when I said we might run into each other in town sometime this wasn't really what I had in mind.

[advanced]

[He does at least follow her to the sidewalk, if only because they're blocking traffic. He waves off the driver of the car that hit him, practically growling when they ask about calling someone to help.]

You're a doctor?

[His gaze slides from the medic's bag to her face warily, he hadn't known that about her and it doesn't make him like her any more. He does not trust doctors.]

[inlaid]

[Bryn snorts, shaking her head.]

Far from it. Military, but my mother and fathers got me into the habit of carrying basic supplies around with me and it just seemed prudent to have a bag in my vehicle whenever I took it out.

[She gives him a rueful smile.]

Can't promise quality medical care but I had enough training in the Sky Guard to manage a slapdash job in a pinch.

[advanced]

It's fine, you don't need to do anything, I've survived worse.

[That's really not a lie.

He can already tell that the wound on his head is superficial, just bleeding a lot because of how close to the surface the blood vessels are on the scalp.]

[inlaid]

Fine, then why don't you humor me so more people won't stop you to inquire about your gushing head wound all the way home.

[She gives him a look.]

I realize they always look worse than they are, so if you want people not to fuss over you just let me deal with the worst of it so you can move on, okay?

[Don't be stubborn over a bit of gauze, Adam.]

[advanced]

[Urgh, she's right. He knows that if he leaves now then he runs the risk of someone less likely to take no for an answer stopping him. Or, worse, Clark or Steve running across him since they both seem to have the worst sense of timing for when to appear in front of him.]

Fine.

[He sits on the curb with bad grace, shoulders tense as a bowstring. He hates having anyone behind him, it's such a vulnerable position.]

But do it fast.

[inlaid]

[There isn't really a fast way to do this properly. She knows that at the outset and so she doesn't set any expectations that he'll actually let her take the time to see it handled. She grabs a latex glove once he's settled down and slips it onto one hand. It's a big big for her but it makes it easy to put on quickly. Grabbing the gauze once more she circles around to his side, identifies where the wound is and covers it in the gauze lightly. She pauses then, looking down to his face.

She's fairly certain he's more unhappy about being accosted to endure medical treatment than getting injured in the first place.]

I'm going to apply pressure to slow the bleeding and then I'll see if I can just use a few butterfly bandages to see you home, okay?

[The proper way to do this is to hold pressure for ten minutes, maybe fifteen. She'll be happy if she can get five and him sitting still long enough for her to apply a few bandages.

Slowly, carefully she begins to press the gauze down on the wound, watching him all the while in case he decides to make any sudden moves.]

[advanced]

[The smell of the latex and the distinctive feel of a glove covered hand is almost too much to handle. He hasn't been touched by anyone for this sort of treatment since the Soldier, even his splint was done far less professionally than this, and it sends him back to undergoing 'maintenance'.

He's incredibly still underneath her hands, like a statue barely breathing, though what little of his chest is moving is doing so in tiny rapid pants. He doesn't answer her, he barely hears.

It'll be a wonder if he doesn't lash out at her if this goes on much longer.]

[inlaid]

[He'd been skittish before when they'd first met. Reluctant to stay and talk, even with the reassurance that she was happy to simply act as a buffer between him and the speed daters if he needed someone to rest while stuck inside. She hadn't realized just how on edge the man was until he was sitting there on the curb under her care.

Bryn's been a soldier since she was sixteen. The first few years she was in the Sky Guard and during times of peace she never really saw any action. It was only after she was recruited for the Council Agents that she was truly thrown into the fray. Only then, when she got to know the other agents and had been through her own blighted gauntlets had she begun to recognize the way experiences like that could leave marks on people that couldn't be seen.

She doesn't know this man, not really, and perhaps it's intuition or familiarity, but there's something about his stillness and the way he breathes that tells her that something is amiss. His agitation has nothing to do with having gone flying in the street a moment ago and everything to do with sitting still for her while she tries to help.

For that reason she works quickly. Instead of waiting to see if she's gotten the bleeding stopped she pulls the gauze away when it seems to only seep from the wound. Staying in his peripheral view but far enough to the side to keep from blocking his field of vision, she quickly grabs some butterfly bandages and applies them as best she can. His hair is wet with blood and they probably won't stay for long, but she can't keep him there longer than that. Better to let him stand and step away from her than force him to take his personal space back.]

That's as good as it's going to get in a pinch but it should at least be a little less obvious now. [She moves back to her bag, stripping the gloves off her hands after gathering the medical waste together. In a show of trust or perhaps to simply indicate to him that she doesn't plan to be a threat, Bryn turns her back on him and begins putting together a small bag of some of the supplies from her pack. Gaze steady, she holds them out.] Here, when you're home you can probably take the time to do a better job of it.

[advanced]

[It's far too much.

Even with how quickly she moves, every second that he sits there sinks him further into a past that he'd rather bury and forget. Yet no matter how little else he remembers, his time as the Soldier is etched into his mind without escape. She's too unknown to be trusted, and that makes her a threat in this moment.

The second that she's done, he's on his feet and moving.]

No.

[It's a strangled growl, before he just turns and runs away.

Perhaps later he'll feel guilty for treating her when she was trying to help, maybe even make amends, but for now his only thought is to get away to safety and solitude.]