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

[greatcleavage]

"I remain baffled that absolutely no one besides me appears to have read a core rulebook," Roy grumbled, more to himself than Fatima. "But I at least knew before I came here that there are multiple Prime Material planes, so at least understanding that all these differences exist in the first place was something I was prepared for."

[dust_of_life]

He might as well have been speaking German, for all Fatima understood him. She made a mental note that she would have to learn more about his world, although. If nothing else, it certainly sounded interesting. And 'interesting' wasn't something to be undervalued right now. Between bouts of being furious and being drunk, she was dealing with a healthy amount of boredom.

Study was clearly the answer. Maybe she could ever trick herself into believing that she was uncovering a hidden truth that might help her escape this place.

"Does 'multiple Prime Material planes' mean...parallel universes?"

[greatcleavage]

Roy paused for a moment, trying to decide how best to answer that question.

"That is an excellent simplification of it." Planar cosmology made the question way too complicated to describe in such a simple term. After all, the ethereal and the astral were both universally coterminous with the Prime Material, but not with each other.

[dust_of_life]

Under normal circumstances, Fatima might have bristled a little at something she said being called a 'simplification,' but in this instance, she found herself a bit proud of herself. Making progress in understanding this place was a little like trying to trudge uphill through peanut butter. She'd take the victories she could get.

"I guess theoretical physics was never really my thing," she sighed. "My world has enough problems, without factoring in the problems of others."

Aside from the Veil, but she was pointedly compartmentalizing that, for the time being.

"It is cool, though," she added. "Some of the differences really make you stop to wonder about social evolution." There were people who didn't automatically assume she was a terrorist here. That was pretty nice.

[greatcleavage]

"Not mine either; I'm running off of Knowledge(arcana) myself. Not even Knowledge(the planes), so I can't even begin to promise my answers are accurate."

Or comprehensible to anyone that wasn't Roy Greenhilt, let's be fair here.

Curious as to her second comment, he arched an eyebrow. "What are you thinking?"

[dust_of_life]

She wasn't sure what he'd just said. She got the sense of knowledge, but she wasn't familiar with someone 'running off of' knowledge. Of any kind.

This was going to give her such a headache.

Fatima shook her head. "Events can shape the future of whole worlds," she said. "I mean...in my world, a group of really bad people did a really bad thing. And it changed the shape of society. There are people who think I'm some kind of terrorist, because my name is similar to the names of those people..."

[greatcleavage]

"Ugh, I'm so sorry." Roy was quick to sympathize, but not to decry the entire idea as ridiculous. He could understand it very well in theory -- after all, weren't any number of species or even races classified as 'Usually' or even 'Always Evil'? But humans were far too diverse, by definition, to pigeonhole like that. "Every world has something like that, and it's always stupid."

[dust_of_life]

"I guess it's comforting that every world has it," she said, shrugging. "At least it means we're all...human, as it were. You know. Whatever the generic term for that is."

Or maybe...maybe what she really meant was that it was nice to know there wasn't a perfect world out there she was missing out on, by the misfortune of being born in her own.

But that was hard to put into words and she didn't want to admit it, anyway.

[greatcleavage]

"I'd say 'mortals' but I've had enough direct experience to realize that even the gods are blatantly flawed in ways that are unpleasant to contemplate." No exaggeration, from a man who had been working to sabotage a divine plan to destroy the world. "The honest truth is that 'good' and 'evil' are absolutes, nothing -- and I mean nothing that has the slightest scrap of intelligence or free will can attain that absolute. There's always some shade of grey. That's life, no matter where you are."

[dust_of_life]

It was a bit heavy and philosophical for a party, but Fatima nodded. This guy, she thought, would really get along with Artemis. The two of them could talk themselves into circles and love every minute of it.

As for Fatima, it was sometimes easier to try to live in black and whites.

But she knew well enough it wasn't so.

"Well," she said. "We'll think of the word eventually."

[greatcleavage]

Roy was, in the end, a very deep thinker. Quite to the opposite of his looks and profession, many people would say -- to his vast annoyance.

"The word isn't quite as important as the knowledge that we have to try to improve it," he mused.

[dust_of_life]

"That's very Zen of you," Fatima said, thinking once again that he would get along well with Artemis. But she quickly winced. "Sorry. 'Zen' is a thing from my world. It was a compliment."

At least in this context.

[greatcleavage]

"I understood your meaning, no worries." Roy was pretty certain that Fatima was not subtle in insults. "I suppose it may be a bit too much philosophical depth for a flower festival, but -- you know, with everything that's happened both here and at home, it really gets the brain going."

Given the subtle cues he was reading out of her body language, he thought she understood.

[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...