riverviewlogs | introductory mingle: SAMPREMI

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introductory mingle: SAMPREMI

who: everyone in Riverview!
what: Introductory Log and Sampremi Celebration
when: March 8th - March 15th
where: In several different locations in the downtown area of the Inhabited City.
warnings: please put any necessary warnings in the subject lines

sampremi celebration

In the days leading up to March 8th, new residents may notice advertising around the city, everywhere from digital screens to paper flyers pasted on blank walls, featuring the name of the spring holiday in celebration of new beginnings, new love, and lust: Sampremi. The advertising mentions that there will be street festivals set up at various locations throughout the week and lists where the market will be set up on each day.

street market

The main draw of the holiday is a roaming street market that features special treats and street food that can only be found during Sampremi, a bustling bargain market with any kind of goods you can think of, and fair games that allow a person to win a prize for that special someone.

i. street food

One of the major draws of the festival is the special street food that can only be obtained this time of year. Almost everything you can buy at the Sampremi Festival is meant to be shared - whether it's one piece of meat on two sticks or desserts baked with a narrow part in the middle for convenient tearing, everything is built in twos. The stalls sell everything from cups of soup, sandwiches, roasted or fried meat, deep-fried vegetables and cakes, dumplings, donuts, bagels, turnovers, and anything else you can think of.

Many of the savory dishes are based on the meat of a particular fowl native to the moon Riverview is situated on that has a taste and texture halfway between chicken and duck, cooked to be spicy (ranging from very mild to throat-burning). Many of the desserts are based around a fruit native to the moon that is spherical, red-orange, and has a light sweet taste that is similar to a combination of mango, pineapple, and strawberry. Both ingredients are considered to be aphrodisiacs. Of course, the foods aren't actually aphrodisiacs and any effect is purely placebo.

ii. fair games

The festival features an entire row of fair games ranging from very high-tech games featuring virtual reality and neon holograms to extremely old-fashioned games with darts and balloons or balls and glasses. The games all have prizes in various shapes and sizes, with the standard stuffed animals, but also with goods and special items donated by any business in the city; ranging from tiny prizes to huge and expensive ones.

Due to the nature of the holiday, many of the stalls are set up to cater to winning a prize for your partner, and due to the nature of the Quarantine, a lot of them involve aiming or other aspects of pretending to fight.

iii. shopping

Originally, the part of the street festival that involved an actual market, with stalls and booths set up with goods, was aimed primarily at romantic trinkets like flowers or jewelry, gifts intended to be purchased for a loved one. As time has gone by, however, this aspect of the market has increased, with many businesses participating, though the emphasis is still on small businesses and anything relating to local culture rather than booths for any of the larger more corporate businesses.

There is still plenty of jewelry to be found, for sure, mostly handmade and artisan, but the scope of the Market has widened immeasurably. The Sampremi Market is an excellent place to find specialty foods, clothing, jewelry, art, or other goods that were originally native to cultures on other planets in this reality, or other realities altogether. Many residents in the city use the market to share their unique cultural goods and traditional dress with others.

iv. adult

In a side alley of the Sampremi Market on any day, one can find an area roped off with a red silken cord, attended by members of the Perimeter Guard in casual dress who will ID anyone entering to make sure they are 18+. Once characters are permitted entry, they will find all of the adult offerings that the market has to offer.

Since Sampremi is, historically, a celebration of lust and physical love, the adult offerings are all set up to cater to two or more people of any sex or gender configuration. One can find an adult or sexualized version of almost anything that's featured in the main market, from fair games to adult goods to street food laced with actual aphrodisiacs (there are always warnings for food spiked in this way to avoid accidental consumption).

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 Sampremi Festival, feel free to write it up!

visual inspiration

click on thumbnails for larger view

Credit (left to right): Theo Prins, andreasrocha @ tumblr, hrormir @ deviantart, nkabuto @ deviantart

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Chandra is having a little linguistics issue here. 'Earth' is another word for ground, soil, dirt, land. Maybe that was it? She meant lands? But she's never heard lands called Earths before. "If you mean completely different places that don't even look, sound, or smell alike, I guess... different planes."

"I guess that's most places, huh? I wouldn't know, I've never had anyone to share anything like that with." Being a Planeswalker had one really major downside, you couldn't take people with you. It was a wrinkle that seemed to bother every other walker Chandra knew that wasn't evil. Or Liliana. Who was okay probably evil too. But less evil. "I'm still not sure how a lot of this stuff is fun. Not when it's in a box and not being used."

"The games do seem like fun if you have the right partner. And don't mind ruining some perfectly good clothes!" Chandra might lack in experience, but she's not blind to the fact that people are enjoying themselves. And not hurting anyone. So what could be wrong about that?

Shaking her head just slightly, Caitlin chews her bottom lip. "No, I mean like parallel versions of the same place. It sounds like you mean, uh...what we'd call planets where I come from, maybe," she replies. Then, she shrugs. Maybe it doesn't actually matter that much, in the end. The point is already understood: different places have different cultures, but everywhere Chandra's been has a similar behind-closed-doors approach to sexuality.

"Maybe so," she replies thoughtfully, a small smile tugging up on the corners of her mouth. "I was married," she adds and shrugs a little, the smile fading away again. "He died. I haven't really looked into any of this sort of thing since." More specifically, since she thought he died in the Particle Accelerator explosion when they'd only been engaged to be married. Their reunion was not a very long one and their actual marriage was horribly short-lived before he perished saving the city, lost to the singularity. So Caitlin, too, is a bit more inexperienced with this sort of thing, as well.k

In spite of her gloomier line of thought at the moment, Chandra surprises a little laugh out of Caitlin with the comment about ruining perfectly good clothes. "They do. Well, to the people who are playing them, in any case, they appear to be. I don't think that sort of thing is really for me, though. I suppose just poking around in here might make me kind of creepy, though, now that I think about it," she says with a little frown. She should probably leave, really, and go back to the regular celebration.

"Why would you want two of the same place? That seems dumb." Chandra Nalaar, why go to the same place when you can burn down two completely different places!

"Sorry to hear about that, same thing happened to my mom. Well, she was also in prison and thought I'd been executed and was focused on undermining the government. And I thought she was dead and..." Chandra balled her fist... and her fist burst into flames. For those wondering even though she has locked Baral in a deep dark cell and promised to never think about him again, thinking about what he's done has a certain lasting impact. Chandra shook her hand so it would go out. "Anyway, the point is getting over losing someone sucks."

"I don't think they'd mind, this is a party about love. I feel like if they really cared if people watched, they wouldn't do it." Chandra didn't feel like anyone cared that there were strangers watching the festivities. Sure they probably expected most of the people here to be with someone. But not everyone had a date. "But I really wanna ask people questions and everyone seems too busy for that."

And it would be rude Chandra.

"I don't think anyone chose it," Caitlin explains. "I think it just sort of happens. Every time someone makes one decision, there's supposedly another exact replica of that person making the opposite decision on the same situation in another, parallel Earth. There's dozens of them that we know of officially, but probably an infinite number, in reality," she goes on. It's harder to explain than she'd thought it would be.

This whole time, Caitlin has steadfastly been trying to ignore the other woman's abilities with fire. The reason for that is two-fold: the irony in Chandra's power being placed with Caitlin, who has freezing abilities is a little too intentional for Caitlin to be comfortable with — in so far as it makes her a little suspicious of the powers that be, so to speak; not of Chandra — and...

Well. Firestorm. Even before merging with Stein, Ronnie could do things with fire...he kind of was fire, in a way. She tries not to think about it too much if she can avoid it. It isn't that she doesn't still love Ronnie, because she does, but sometimes thinking about him is painful and she knows that he wouldn't want her to be hurting that way, so she fights it when she can. "Yeah...yeah, it really does," she agrees softly.

She supposes Chandra has a point, but Caitlin's cheeks still go a little pink when she wrinkles her nose. "Yeah, but I think it's less about being okay with being watched and more about, probably, knowing that others will join, which isn't the case with me," she rebukes, looking a little apologetic at that. "What kind of questions?"

"That... sounds really tedious. So everything you've ever done happened some other way? How does that work if you go to other planes like I do. Does that mean each of them has a parallel whatever depending on if I went somewhere else instead of there?" Chandra's trying to wrap her head around this but really they are well into Jace's world of 'things he thinks are interesting but really they suck' like books and paperwork.

Chandra was aware Caitlin had an issue with her fire, maybe it was the ice thing, maybe it was the fact 'fire is bad for buildings' thing, but she always felt a little uneasy. She was doing her best to not be too obvious with her powers. Being nervous about her powers was fairly new, even with the gatewatch it wasn't her fire that was the problem, it was the occasional burning of someone's possessions.

"I dunno, you'd have to ask one of them when their mouth isn't full," Chandra didn't see the big deal, they were in public, some people had to just enjoy watching, or remembering a life when they had a partner like Caitlin was doing. As for the questions in Chandra's head, Chandra had to pick one. She considered, "How are positions like that, and that comfortable for anything, what's so sexual about banana eating, what's with the vibrating mechanical beast ride over there?"

"Essentially, yeah, every decision anyone has ever made may have been made differently on a parallel Earth. Most people don't even know or believe the parallel Earths exist, and each is off on its own, impossible for the majority of people to get to, so the impact is minimal to nil," she explains. "Each Earth is in its own dimension so they all have their own solar system, sun, moon, etcetera...and within those solar systems, there are other planets, which I think is my world's way of saying 'plane' in yours, so space travel is still totally possible. It's just currently pretty limited access to that sort of travel." ...she's probably boring this poor woman to death.

A childish reaction, she realizes, but at Chandra's response, Caitlin snorts softly in an attempt not to laugh. "Sorry, no...yeah, I see what you're saying," she agrees, pressing her lips together as she regains composure.

To Chandra's questions, though, Caitlin shrugs a little, having composed herself again. "I could answer those sorts of questions," she says simply. Besides the fact that she's a doctor and doesn't see any reason for someone not to ask questions that will help them learn new things to shape how they grow as a person, to some degree, she's also not as uptight as she seems. Once upon a time, Caitlin had just as high a sexual drive as anyone else. It's just been a while since she's indulged it, that's all.

"Like...different positions are comfortable to different people based on their own personal flexibility, but even so, when you're trying stuff like that, the discomfort is kind of overshadowed by the pleasure of the act. Bananas are phallic, so to some people, someone eating a banana reminds them of someone performing felatio. And...the vibrating mechanical bull...you've never used a vibrator before? I imagine it's a bit like that, on a larger sort of scale maybe?" Caitlin's head tilts curiously in thought for a moment.

This was tedious, boring, and complicated. This was totally a Jace conversation. In a Jace conversation Chandra usually 'accidentally' sets a small fire to distract him. Usually his cloak. "I'm really glad Planeswalking takes me to places that are different from each other. Even if a lot of them try to kill pyromancers."

People try to kill her before she blows up any buildings. People kill those around her because of her power. That was what really got to her.

Chandra nodded, there was a general excitement. She liked to learn stuff, and she was interested. Of course all these answers lead to more questions. When Caitlin was trying to get a sense of Chandra's own experience, "If the monastery had any sex toys, I didn't know where they were. And on other planes they didn't make things that vibrated just for that. Maybe I should buy some things then..." Chandra realized after saying it she didn't have a private room. And that she shared it. With Caitlin.

"To use when you're definitely not around."

Caitlin looks a little taken aback by that. "Really? Why?" she asks before she can stop herself. She answers her own question a few seconds later. "Because people fear what they don't understand, I imagine, right?" It brings to mind Caitlin's own powers and how, whenever Killer Frost takes over, the fact that Barry refuses to kill is probably the only reason why Caitlin is still alive. She's done terrible things as Killer Frost. There's a reason she prefers to keep the metahuman inside her locked up and buried deep.

In spite of herself, Caitlin laughs a little at the sudden distinction. "I sort of assumed you'd wait until I wasn't around to explore that avenue," she says warmly. It'd be better for both of them, really, if she did. "You could, though. Buy some things. Or try the bull. Or both," she suggests with a shrug.

The thing most people don't know about Caitlin is that she isn't always so reserved. When she's with someone she loves and trusts, she can be actually quite experimental and curious in the bedroom, so her array of knowledge isn't quite as pinched as she imagines people who've met her assume it would be. "If you decide to, I recommend making sure you get a dual action. Um, that is to say, something that will also stimulate the clitoris. Not all vibrators do, but you're missing out if you opt out of it."

Chandra nodded, "That, and fire kinda runs wild. People fear what it can do. But at home it was just natural mages aren't common. The moment my fists burst into flames the first time they wanted to lock me up for the public good." Chandra, overall, didn't do a lot of damage. She blew up one factory. Just one! And in self defense. Everywhere else it was just a fear of the power, the flame, the life that is a pyromancer.

Chandra didn't seem bothered, by the laughing or the suggestions, "Sharing a room is weird. I think I'll save this to explore on my own. Or if I find the right person." Orientation, gender, species, not really things Chandra considered on a sexual level. She felt things, they vanished out of her head later. All she was.

There's a brief flicker of confusion at the words, mostly because Chandra didn't learn things in school as much as through exploring the world. She guessed at what Caitlin meant with that word, from her own experiences, "Right, dual action, I'll keep that in mind!" It was good to have someone to talk about with this. Who wasn't really old like Aunty Oviya or Liliana. Also not evil, like Liliana.

"...Do you wanna get something to eat where the food isn't meant to be eaten off someone's chest?" Important clarifications.

Caitlin frowns a little. Fire can be exceptionally dangerous, that much she can admit. But she has a feeling that it's less about the fire and more about the fact that someone has the ability to create and control it. Without knowing that person exceptionally well and being able to trust that they'll use it for good rather than evil, it makes sense that they'd be wary. "Ronnie could do that," she says softly. "The...with the fire. Before he died, my husband could do that sort of thing, too. Which, admittedly, at first was pretty scary." Although, admittedly...that was also because Ronnie wasn't the Ronnie she'd known, at first. It had taken a short while to get the "real" Ronnie back.

"That's probably a good call," Caitlin agrees. "Maybe we can come up with a system to alert one another when we'd prefer some privacy so that neither of us walks in on the other in a compromising position," she offers. It seems both logical and polite to her, anyway.

Laughing a little, Caitlin nods. "Yeah, that sounds good. Let's head back out and see what we can find."

(( ooc: want to keep going or call this complete with a ftb? ))

((OOC: I'll close us out.))

"I don't fault people being scared, it was pretty surprising to burst into flames." Chandra wasn't really known for her fear, she wasn't really afraid when she found her powers. It was alarming, sure, but she was also being arrested and mocked. So she had other things on her mind.

"Yeah, I'll try to clean up some of my mess too." Try was the operative word. "Let's go, I hope they have something with mango in it."

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introductory mingle: SAMPREMI

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