[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

[imsorey]

With it raining fish and then actually raining from the ocean hovering above us, I've already talked plenty about the weather.

But I can settle for a topic change. Are there any options that are safe besides the weather?

[splinten]

Politics, religion, and sex.

[No.]

There's a multiplicity of worlds of topics, dude. It's traditional to start with your interests.

[imsorey]

I don't know how interesting it is to somebody else, but I like reading and exploring ruins. I'm also enjoying the new foods and sights on other worlds, although I would have preferred to finish exploring my world before going off to another one.

What about you? Care to share some of your interests?

[splinten]

I'm down with ruin exploration myself, for starters. I'm also into robotics and programming, pop culture, rapping, puppets, philosophy, Strifing, and a bunch of other shit. I had a lot of free time to kill growing up.

[He doesn't expect Sorey to know all of those, from what he has seen.]

[imsorey]

[Sorey is dying to ask him about, well, all of them, but he restrains himself.]

Nothing wrong with having a lot of interests to fill up that free time. I'll admit that I don't know what half of those are, but I'll look them up. Is pop culture similar to a study of other cultures?

[splinten]

[It's okay, Sorey, they can go one at a time. Until their date is up.]

It stands for popular culture. Basically, the culture of the middle and lower classes, as compared to elite culture elevated as being superior art.

[imsorey]

I see. So popular culture would be...like the latest romance novel by a famous author, as opposed to a more classical narrative by someone from twenty years ago, or even longer than that. It's sort of like saying you keep up with what's currently popular with average people, yeah?

[splinten]

In part. It's treating it as worth serious study, and it's particularly taking an interest in its social, cultural, or political roles. Most of my research is on the pop culture that was a big deal four hundred years ago.

[imsorey]

That sounds like it delves more into archeology than just popular culture. Why four hundred years ago, exactly? Is it just a time period that you're interested in?

[splinten]

Pretty much. That's also basically when civilization stopped being much of a thing.

[imsorey]

Stopped as in...it stopped existing?

[how

why

he has so many questions]

[splinten]

It was sort of difficult for civilization to continue to sustain itself once all the humans that made it up were dead.

[does that answer some questions]

[imsorey]

[DIRK THAT'S SO CONCERNING]

Is it rude to ask how that happened? I mean, something big must have happened for things to end up like...that.

[splinten]

It was more of a series of events that decimated the population. The full story would take longer than we have.

[Since he has one more comment after this.]

The shorter version is that an alien tyrant puppeted human governments to turn on themselves, leading to a serious reduction in the population. Genetic experimentation and mass culling followed, and eventually rising sea levels dealt with the few remaining humans.