[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

[oneandmikleonly]

I...would ask the obvious question here, about whether you're having relationship troubles, but that seems like a bad thing to do, so: if you could only eat one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be?

[NAILED IT, NAILED THE TACT]

[potentite]

You're a saint among men, Mikleo. [He's so relieved.] Umm, hmm, actually, I think I would pick... fish, maybe? You can cook'em a lot of ways!

[oneandmikleonly]

Boiled and baked and grilled and stewed, wasn't it...? I think that's how the rhyme goes.

Fish is very good; we didn't eat it too often growing up at home, though. You can get some in the streams, but prickleboar is a lot more common around the area and easier to catch.

[potentite]

Prickleboar sounds, well, prickly! Never had much meat, though. I only had monsters to contend with and frankly I was content not to tango with them for a meal when I could just grab some fruit.

[oneandmikleonly]

It's really just the fur that looks like it spikes out, but they don't have much in the way of actual pointy bits. They actually taste a lot like the boars back at the space island...

[shakes his head]

I'm curious about where you grew up, but I think it's your turn to ask, maybe? Depends how formally we're playing by the rules here.

[potentite]

I think I'm capable of both.

[After all, he's spent almost all of his life using the internet and chat clients to talk to people and since when have those ever had the most natural progression.]

Umm, but, where I grew up... It was a wild, untamed jungle island chock full of ferocious beasts. My friends and I dubbed it Hellmurder Island. Grandma built us a house there when I was just a sprout, set up shop working on all sorts of projects with her plants. But, well, one day, the Batterwitch swooped down, snuffed her out and blew up the house. So, after that, it was just me. [He pauses.] Uh, I stuck mostly to my room, which was all that was left. I didn't fancy run-ins with the monsters. But Dirk helped me get out of my shell.

[By building him a robot that would ambush him in impossible to beat fights but w/e.]

And then I just... spent most of my time watching movies and chatting with the others until we entered the game. Sooo, oh, what about you growing up!

[oneandmikleonly]

Dirk mentioned he grew up alone but for being able to speak to some friends through technology due to . . . time foolery of some sort . . . I guess it was the same for both of you? I'm glad you managed to get out of that situation eventually.

[his sympathy is genuine, but he does move on if Jake wants to change the topic]

Well, Elysia definitely wasn't a Hellmurder Island. Uh, it was a little unconventional, though, I don't think seraphs normally form villages, and we definitely didn't see any others after leaving. Gramps -- Zenrus -- raised me and Sorey, and everyone helped out and taught us. We sort of muddled through learning some human routines and habits so Sorey wouldn't feel out of place as he grew older, too; that was interesting. We're up on a mountain, Mount Mabinogio, and there's some ruins built into the mountainside near the peak -- that's where we played as kids, actually. It was...very peaceful, though we got into scrapes a lot exploring.

[he sounds a little tentative, not because this is Forbidden Information but because the contract to Jake's situation is so marked.]

[potentite]

[Despite the stark difference, Jake is happy to hear about it.]

Yes, Dirk grew up similar to me but we always had each other and our other two friends, Jane and Roxy. [He can't help looking a little sad then. It feels wrong to be without them. But he smiles again.] But wow, so you had an unconventional upbringing yourself! Is it strange, having parts of such different cultures?

[oneandmikleonly]

I mean, it probably helped. Humans are in the majority in our world, not seraphs, so having more of a handle on human habits and cultures meant it was easier to get around and help Sorey out when he did leave home, with things like, um, the capitalism.

[yeah.]

...how did all of you meet up? You mentioned -- a game? How could a game cross the boundaries of worlds like that...?