[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

[decipheringeye]

[Here comes a human in a flying chair!]

Team-building? I thought this was about romance.

[deem]

[He really wants to know how the Palai can make flying chairs but not flight units. This is ridiculous]

Romance? [9S surveys their surroundings] This looks more like that Old World game of musical chairs to me...

[decipheringeye]

I mean, I asked one of the Palai, and they mentioned something about finding potential mates, so...

[deem]

Isn't that a way to refer to comrades too? I remember reading about it...

[He could swear that was the case]

[decipheringeye]

--Ah, that's true, isn't it... Wait, did I have the wrong idea about this from the start...?

[deem]

I dunno why they'd involve androids if it was about romance. I mean...we're the creations of mankind, trying to pair us off with them doesn't add up, does it?

[9S could swear he'd explained somewhere amid the flurry of questions the locals had asked him]

[decipheringeye]

Hang on. I've heard that word before, but what exactly is an android?

[deem]

I'm an artificial being created in the image of mankind to fight on its behalf.

[He's getting used to boiling this down, by now]

[decipheringeye]

Oh, kind of like a shikigami, or that other technology thing. A computer? [ It's hard to tell what's going to be weird for people from Gensokyo. ]

I don't get why humans need something like that to fight for them, though. Is it because androids are more powerful?

[deem]

I... [He finds himself reluctant to say androids are better at anything than such noble beings as humans, but] I guess the difference is we're made for that purpose, so by design we're more durable among other things.

[9S questions whether this is a sufficient explanation or not, though]

We were necessary to combat an invading force from another world.

[decipheringeye]

Wow! I knew I didn't know much about the outside world, but it sounds like it's way different from what I imagined.

[deem]

What do you mean about the outside world? Outside of where?

[He's full of questions too, they're well-matched in this department.

That and misinformation, right...]

[decipheringeye]

[Technically they're even from different dimensions, but the outside world is already so weird and alien to Kosuzu that the difference is pretty academic.]

I'm from a place called Gensokyo, which was cut off from the rest of the world by youkai a long time ago. Someone asked me why the barrier around it exists at all, but I've been thinking about it, and I guess I don't really know.

Anyway, what all this means is that everything I know about the rest of the world is secondhand information, usually from books.

[deem]

Yo-kai..?

[9S intones the word curiously, and not quite properly, having never been confronted with it before. It must be a word from an Old World language]

Well, for what it's worth, everything I've got on the Old World's kind of secondhand too. I mean, I analyze things I find and explore ruins, but it's not the same as seeing what it once was.

[decipheringeye]

[Kosuzu lights up immediately.]

Wait, that's great! If we're both trying to learn more about the same world, we should be able to help each other.

[deem]

[Reconnaissance Squad 2.0

Except her demands might not be as high as 4S']

You'd want to collaborate with me?

[Pardon him being mystified, but a human wanting to work with him just makes him feel surprised and honored. Not acclimated yet, if he's even capable of adjusting to it]

[decipheringeye]

Of course! I've read a lot about that world, but there's still so many things I don't understand about it. A second viewpoint could be a big help.

[deem]

[Well, being helpful certainly appeals to him—]

In that case, it would be an honor to work with you.

[Not even an overstatement, since she is apparently human. That's androids for you]

[decipheringeye]

[Unfortunately, Kosuzu's chair takes that moment to fly off to the next table.]

Ah! I'll get in touch with you later, okay?!

[deem]

[9S lifts a hand to wave]

Good luck with uh...whatever this is.

[The jury's still out on this one, isn't it?]