[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

[lalliho]

[um???]

That's none of your business?

[The list short... Possibly nonexistent... After all, any of the other teens growing up alongside him would have very quickly discovered that their crush was going absolutely nowhere, and that was if their feelings managed to survived a conversation with him.

It...didn't happen often -- a fact that had relieved Lalli up until this weird girl started questioning him.]

[wingfic]

So no one.

[She just . . . folds her arms across her chest. Point proved??

After a moment, she reaches for another breadstick.]

[lalliho]

[Hey!! She doesn't deserve a breadstick... Ugh, whatever.]

It doesn't matter because I don't want to date them either. It's a waste of time and people are weird and gross...

[wingfic]

[She shrugs, chomping down on the breadstick. She doesn't . . . disagree, precisely, or at all, but he called her small, so she's not about to say as much.

Dating is still stupid, though.]

[lalliho]

[She is small!!! As a smaller person older than her, Lalli knows these things. He watches her warily, but eventually goes back to his own breadstick. Her hair probably won't turn into a coiled nest of snakes trying to but his face off, or something, no matter how strange she is.]

...How old are you supposed to be? I don't think they should have you talking to me.

[If it's supposed to be that kind of thing...]

[wingfic]

[She narrows her eyes again.]

Sixteen. [This is only kind of a lie.] And I wouldn't want to date you anyway.

[lalliho]

[god

He's secretly a child, too, so he tears off a chunk of bread to flick at her. Take that.]

Ew.

[wingfic]

[Excuse!! She dodges neatly and just. chucks an entire breadstick at him.]

How old are you, then?

[lalliho]

[He'll catch it and set it down. Not gonna eat her gross weapon bread.]

Nineteen.

[Like a REAL adult but also he's pretty small, what with his below average height and stick thin...everything.]

[wingfic]

You're not that much older than me.

[So no need to get all superior about it, buster being the subtext here.]

[lalliho]

[Pfhh]

You're still a kid and I'm not,

[Said in the most childish way.]

[wingfic]

--wait, what?

[Genuinely thrown off by that. She is a kid by her own culture's accounting, but he shouldn't know about that--she told him she was sixteen.]

[lalliho]

[shrug]

What do you mean "what"? If I had to still be a kid then, you have to, too.

[Not that he got the opportunity to hear that or act on it often because of that sweet, sweet military life... It was mostly when someone -- mostly his cousin Tuuri -- wanted to talk down to him or didn't want to trust him with a certain route. As someone more experienced and prodigious than other scouts his age and even some adults, it had been infuriating. Now he can kind of see why people liked saying it.]

[wingfic]

That's not how it works.

[Now that she thinks about it, she's not unaware that there are different cultures, with different coming-of-age customs. But still--if she were sixteen, she would be considered an adult in Khola. That's what matters, in her mind.]

[lalliho]

Yes it --

[oh dear this stupid magic is moving them all again...! well. He can still shoot an indignant look at her as they go.]

I know how things work!

[This isn't over...except he will also literally forget this conversation because he can sometimes be a space cadet.]