[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

[enflame]

( Holy shit, this is not what he bargained for when he came out here to get food. Well -- there is food, but everything else is extremely no bueno.

Emil shoos away the Elto that is trying desperately to talk to him about freaky ass words like ~mating~ in an effort to focus on his breadsticks. At least he knows what these are, and the shrimp don't smell half bad.

Suffice to say, his main goal will be eating and not dating you, whoever you are. )

Ask the question if you want, ( He says this focusing on peeling the breading off of a shrimp, barely looking up but seeing the paper pop out from his peripheral. ) but you can find food at another table.

( This is the only highlight of this for him, don't ruin his evening. )

[teratias]

I...was not going to do that. Or eat the food, since those stupid pastries made everyone's powers go weird again.

[Waver can't even have a good time because he doesn't trust the food. But he does remember Emil and them both getting huffy with each other, so there is that.]

Did your friend ever end up waking up?

[enflame]

( Emil has no use for forethinking ideas like "maybe I shouldn't put everything I see immediately into my mouth." He might have an excuse for this oral impulsivity if he actually cared about speed dating, but moving on. )

Oh? Yeah, he did. Not soon afterward, actually... ( It was a whole Big Drama Deal, par for the Nordic course. ) Thanks for trying to help, by the way.

[teratias]

Oh, good. That was...well, crap timing, among other things. [But it all worked out and no one died, so, everyone wins? Probably.]

Sorry it didn't result in anything. Uh. Is the food any good?

[enflame]

( He will be soft and offer Waver one [1] bread stick. )

These aren't bad. I'm sure I've eaten something better back home. The shrimp is actually decent, though.

( Then offer him some of those... )

[teratias]

[Waver holds up a hand to politely decline.]

I'm good.

[Moreover--]

Where is home for you?

[enflame]

( One [1] breadstick is returned to Emil's inventory. )

Sweden. It seems to be a toss up whether or not you'll have any idea where that is.

[cadventuretime]

[Suddenly a girl he may not have seen for a while sits down, reaching over for some shrimp because they are delicious and because he specifically said not to.]

Hmm... [She looks over the card as she snacks.]

...Who would run faster of the two of us?

[enflame]

( he asks for ONE THING!!

The sudden green hand taking his coveted shrimp, plus the question make him actually look up. Him. He -- probably can't run as fast as she can, and this is a stupid question, but he'll bite. )

I don't know. It depends on how fast you can run.

[cadventuretime]

I can run pretty fast. The fastest zombie in Sequin Land. But I guess there will be a time to test that one later.

[She'll go back to the questions because that was, indeed, a stupid question. But, hey, she got a response. That was a start.]

Hmm...

Oh, here's a good one. Coffee or tea?

[enflame]

Coffee, absolutely. Tea is watery and tastes like dirt more often than not.

( Actually, something to drink would go great with this dry bread. He motions to one of the observant Palai, hoping they don't think his bringing one over means this is somehow going well in the context of dating. Feel free to ask for something to drink if you want, Rotty. )

What about you? ( Coffee or tea, hea means. )

[cadventuretime]

Oh coffee, for sure. I'm going nowhere until my sixth cuppa Joe. [She nods and kicks her feet a bit. In fact, if the Palai are going to get them something she'll be sure to acknowledge that.]

[Afterwards, she returns to her list.]

Do you ever cook?

[enflame]

( He'll have whatever they bring him because he's hungry. Coffee he won't say no to, unless they don't bring milk and sugar along with it. )

Not really...? Not that I'm opposed to it. ( Most of the time people are cooking for him, he means. )

You don't have to play along with the questions, you know. Unless you actually buy into this kind of thing.

[talim]

I'm not interested in a date or food at the moment, but I do, actually, have one question.

[ jude leans across the table, his hands clasped together. ]

How is Lalli holding up? Any more strange incidents?

[enflame]

( How disappointing, as he was very interested in both eating and dating Jude. )

Strange incidents aren't really the abnormal thing. ( He's a Grieving Gremlin. ) But he's not bleeding out of any other orifices that I know of, so he's fine for the time being.

( ...Actually that kind of sours him on food; great, wonderful. ) Thank you for trying to help him...I just don't think his magic nonsense takes well to modern medicine sometimes.

[talim]

Magic nonsense?

[ jude tilts his head. ]

I think there are a great number of things about you, Lalli, and your world that are completely beyond my understanding. Strange incidents not being an abnormal thing is a good place to start.

[enflame]

Oh -- well, just like this world's witch gives people magic, there are people born with magic back home. It can be useless outside of a few key purposes, so some of it is virtually nonsense.

( AKA Magic is just way too much for him to ever have to put up with full time and yet here we are. )

I think most people I've talked to here come from sort of...abnormal worlds. Like they're from the past or they're zombies ( keep your food down, man ) ...so I don't really get a lot of the things people talk about here when they talk about where they come from, either.

[talim]

I can understand that. It all gets to be incredibly overwhelming, doesn't it? There's just so much information to take in from so many different people, it's hard to make sense of it all.

But my world sounds sort of similar to yours. Pretty much everyone back home is born with something called a mana lobe that permits them to use what we refer to as spirit artes; in other words, magic. We humans use spirits for everything from streetlights to medical care. We couldn't get by without it.

Not so different, right?

[enflame]

( Emil just sort of stares and absorbs as much as possible. He's not particularly interested in this kind of thing, so "overwhelming" is a bit of a reach. Jude seems to be into this kind of thing, though, and he has SOME home training. )

Magic exists in my world, but not everyone has it. Just some Finns and Icelanders and the occasional Norwegian. I haven't had magic at all until I got here and it's ridiculous. Magic has something to do with spirits and souls....also sleeping for days, as I'm sure you know.

But I'm not an expert; if you're curious about details you'd have to ask Lalli. ( If he'd tell him anything, that guy is hot and cold these days. )

Stuff like electricity is all man-powered, though -- not any kind of magic, just ingenuity and the genius of mankind. That's what my country prides itself on; that we've gotten by and made major technological leaps without the help of any Gods.

[actus]

[ are you seriously hogging the food? how dare. how dare, good sir. ]

...Really? You're going to eat all the breadsticks?

[ don't you think you can spare him one, considering the selfie-demon-summoning incident? come on buddy, be a pal.

ignoring the fact, of course, akira has had several already from different tables, and the food has been his go-to distraction. ]

[enflame]

( The way Akira emphasizes "all" is kind of embarrassing... Well, Emil can slide the basket towards him as a gesture of compliance. )

This is my original table, but if you really want some, I guess. ( He'll eventually be moved to eat someone else's food like a lard, and he DID help him a couple times. ) How many of these have you had to sit through at this point?

[actus]

[ he's going to break a breadstick in half and casually start nibbling on one of the halves. ]

Five? [ he can't really remember, it's been a blur of an hour or so. ] No idea how many rounds there are.

[ which sucks. being clever and witty is getting tiring and all he wants to do is relax and zone-out. ] What about you?

[enflame]

( Emil's still preoccupied with whether the shrimp is better without breading or not, but he eventually decides they can't be torn apart. )

A few. It hasn't been as horrible as I thought it would be, but it's still a really weird way to spend an evening. ( But at least there's food, so. ) I don't really have an interest in dating near-perfect strangers.

[actus]

It's definitely weird.

[ the speed-dating thing. it's a good way to get to know the other coven members, but he's fairly certain organic meetings would have produced better results. ]

Have you gotten to know anyone here yet? [ when he wasn't trying to wake up his friend, anyway. akira is pointedly ignoring the bowl of questions. from what he's seen, it's just far too weird. ]

[enflame]

( It would be best to dodge any forced questions about being called daddy, yeah. )

A couple, I guess...? Not anyone I'd say I was close to, or anything. ( It's sort of strange, feeling awkward, but a lot of Shit has happened in the past month and interacting a lot just feels like a struggle sometimes. ) What about yourself?