[WORLD ONE] SPEED DATING EXTRAVAGANZA

[spellbindmods]

Who: Participating coven members
Where: The Palai marketplace
When: Day 49
Open/Closed: OTA

[ Any and all who are in the marketplace will find that there is suddenly a mysterious barrier around the marketplace (that may be eerily familiar to some) -- specifically one large portion of the marketplace with a large number of tables and chairs, perhaps purposefully set out for nefarious reasons.

A few Palai are ushering coven members to chairs, and everything seems about normal. As normal as the Palai can be when they're putting on a show anyway. It's not until a sizable portion of the coven members are seated (and also supplied with breadsticks and small shrimp), that things get a bit more bizarre.

Thanks to the power of the Eltos, a small band of energy keeps coven members stuck to the chair (magic can interfere, of course), but that's not the end of it. On each table, next to those delicious smelling breadsticks and shrimp, is a bowl of scraps of papers. Every five minutes, a strip of paper will pop out from the bowl.

If you ask the Palai, they'll be inclined to explain speed dating to you. Asking questions, getting to know a person, then being shimmied off to the next potential mate -- this is made possible by Elto magic yet again, through flying chairs that transport their holder to a new table at standard intervals.

The Palai are extremely invested in this exercise? Will you let them down? ]

[ OOC: In the spirit of speed dating, each character will have a top level. All who want to respond to this top level can with questions from this post, but the threads have to end at 10 comments from each character. After this last tag, the characters can be assumed to have been whisked to a different potential match. You're free to have characters make up their own questions, interact with Palai serving food, etc. ]

Comments

[splinten]

You and the person you're interested it in or romantically partnered with participate in various activities. The intention is to get to know each other in initial stages, then strengthen or reinforce the bond in later stages.

[It's practically from one robot to another.]

[apatheia]

[Thank goodness, someone who talks in a way she can understand!]

... I don't understand why the Palai would involve me in this then. [Romantic relationships aren't unheard of among androids, but they're all androids in that case. There are humans here! Of course she could never be romantically interested in one or vice versa!!] But is that generally how humans form romantic relationships?

[splinten]

My impression of the Palai is that they don't make a distinction between any of the different species among us. They presumably use their own species as their baseline and act accordingly.

[So matchmaking for everyone. Sorry.]

That format was common for human romantic relationships from maybe the mid-1950s in America and spread through the Western world over the course of the decade. Similar procedures were used in other regions and time periods, but there are also a wide variety of alternate means of finding romantic or marital partners, which are not necessarily the same thing.

[apatheia]

[She follows along with most of that, even if hearing of the 1950s as a time period is strange given how long ago that would've been, and she puts aside the fact that she doesn't know what the "Western" world actually entails. Those are the kind of nitty-gritty details that she's not designed to be interested in, but there is something else that catches her attention.]

What's a marital partner then, and what can make one different from a romantic partner?

HOW DID I MISS THIS

[splinten]

A marital partner is the person you marry. People don't necessarily marry for romance. They might marry instead for land, money, power, social pressure, or other reasons. They might even marry to hide who their real romantic partners are.

LMAO PATS IT'S OKAY

[apatheia]

... Why would they not just marry their romantic partner then? [??? CONFUSION]

[splinten]

It might be unacceptable or even illegal. For example, for large portions of human history across the world, humans couldn't marry members of the same sex. Even when they could, it might be considered shameful or inappropriate.