[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

[sealeted]

It's always interesting, to untangle where weird little turns of phrase like that came from.

[don't worry Dirk, this is a Safe Zone. An inescapable safe zone, but. Shh.]

Yeah, it's... It certainly raises some questions, for sure.

[splinten]

Agreed. The history of any word or phrase is ultimately a cultural history that has a lot to offer in terms of information about past societies and practices, as well as the present moment.

[Thanks, Hakuno. Thanks for being a goddamned nerd. The awkward monotone boy can at least relax a little at that.]

We have a lot of dots that we need to connect here. And not by swiping right.

[sealeted]

...'swiping right'?

[Hakuno tilts her head to one side, her brow furrowing slightly.]

Sorry, I'm missing that particular linguistic legacy. Is there a wrong way to swipe?

[splinten]

It comes from a dating app called tinder. The application sends you a picture of someone on your phone. You swipe right if you'd want to be with them and swipe left if you wouldn't. If you both swipe right, you start a conversation and potentially go on a date.

[More history! It's exciting.]

[sealeted]

Oh, neat. Kind of shallow at first glance, but it's as good a way to reach out as any, especially for people who don't... get out much.

[Like being stuck on a magical moon, just as a totally random example.]

[splinten]

[Or being trapped in the middle of the ocean!]

Yeah, it was apparently functional enough to be one of the primary dating applications in the 2010s.

[sealeted]

[Screw the ocean, honestly.]

Huh. Well, my world was in the 2030s when I left it, but I don't know if we had that particular fad.

[splinten]

It's likely a difference in history. I'm beginning to suspect that there are major divergences in world histories generally set around the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. In my universe's case, it was a slow alien takeover that warped and ultimately destroyed humanity.

[And that doesn't seem to match up with many others! Thankfully.]

[sealeted]

Oh, definitely. In mine, the Moon was actually a magical supercomputer that had been observing and recording the progression of life on Earth for billions of years.

[Which seems to be a very unique situation. Thankfully.]

[splinten]

Who set it up?

[This is a normal conversation. They're from very normal worlds.]

[sealeted]

I don't know. I didn't have access to that level of information while I was there.

[Or, well, she did, but time was limited and she could either help humanity avoid a repeat of the Holy Grail War or mess around nosing through ancient archives.]

[splinten]

Do you have any idea? It'd obviously be entities outside of humanity. Or it could be one of those things that has no clear ontological origin, like Sburb. In that case it could be a necessary component of the world structure.

[sealeted]

Well, it had a strict no-interference policy until this year, no matter how interested in it humanity became. It was definitely set up by some highly advanced, spiritron-based civilization, but beyond that...

[She shrugs.]

It's hard to say, even as a guess. Sorry.

[splinten]

It's cool. Pretty interesting regardless. But maybe I have an unusual fascination with the detritus of absent civilizations.

[sealeted]

I don't see why that should be unusual; absent civilizations are practically interesting by default.

[Her chair gives a warning wobble; time's almost up. Luckily, she remembers something quickly.]

Oh! I'm Hakuno Kishinami, by the way. I don't think I said that yet.

[splinten]

[Oh right, good social interaction.]

Dirk Strider. Nice to meet you.

[he's a+ at it]