Work Proximity Associates Meme

[byblow]

This is a meme for getting quick and dirty CR with characters you might not normally tag, because for the most part everyone lives or works in the same place and would be interacting during the daily grind in ways we might not think about or have time to fully RP. It isn't designed or intended to make characters become best friends—though if that happens, cool!—but to give people entry points for future CR development, or at least IC awareness of who a few other characters are, even if it's just "that lady who glared at me for ten minutes without talking."

INSTRUCTIONS

1. SIGN UP. Go HERE by the end of the day on August 28 and sign up (comments are screened) with a character and list of opt-outs. Depending on how many people participate, I'll give everyone up to three randomly chosen matches to tag.
   
2. WAIT. I might need a day or two to get everyone matched up correctly and hand out those matches. Once that's done, I'll unlock this post to allow comments and post the scenarios list.


3. TOP LEVEL. Post a top-level here so people can tag you. You aren’t required to have signed up for matches to participate, but you are required to tag at least one other person if you post a top-level comment, or I’ll find and destroy you.
   
4. PICK A SCENARIO. For each character pair, roll for (or deliberately choose) one of the provided scenarios. Or make up your own. It's all cool man.
   
5. TAG YOUR MATCHES. You can actionspam an actual conversation/thread, or you can just chat out OOC how things would go between the characters and what (if anything) they would learn about each other over the course of their time together.
   
6. TAG WHOEVER ELSE YOU WANT. It's your life.

SCENARIOS

THE GALLOWS


1. FERRY. Your characters are stuck on the ferry together, alone, for the 10-15 minutes it takes to reach the other side. Possible complications include a drunk ferryman, a drunk singing ferryman, bad weather, capsized boat, and lost paddles.
   
   
2. HEAVY LIFTING. Your characters have been tasked with moving a large, heavy, and ungainly piece of equipment in a large wooden crate up to the seventh floor of the Central Tower. Magic isn't cheating, but it will still take more than one person to guide it up the staircases without anything breaking. And it is entirely possible that, once they get it up there, they'll be told it was actually meant to go to the basement of the Templar Tower.
   
   
3. DINING HALL. They're either awfully early for breakfast or awfully late for dinner, making them the only two people in the fairly sizable dining hall, and the staff insists they sit together at a little table in the corner so the rest of the tables and room can be readied or cleaned in the meantime.
   
   
4. GARDENS. The herb garden has been invaded by caterpillars. They are adorable and fuzzy, but they have to die. Or be picked off the leaves gently and transported out of the Gallows. Or, if butterflies and pickles sound fun, they could be moved to one of the Gallows’ smaller decorative green spaces and enticed to stay there, away from the medicinal herbs, by planting dill and fennel, their favorites. Their fate is in your characters’ hands.
   
   
5. LIBRARY. Not every book in the Gallows' library belongs there. A sizable number are on loan—from Skyhold, from the universities of Orlais or Markham—and sometimes they have to be sent back where they came from. Your characters have been tasked with finding a text called Qunari Irrigation Techniques: What We Think We've Learned From Staring At Par Vollen From A Long Way Away somewhere among the thousands of books on the shelves.
   
   
6. TRAINING GROUNDS. Maybe your characters are sparring! Maybe one character is practicing and the other is nearly getting their head chopped off trying to walk past because neither of them are paying attention! Maybe a gust of wind has blown someone's important research into the path of someone else's archery practice!
   
   
7. GRIFFONS. One of the griffons has taken something important—armor, a sack of supplies, whatever else—and is playing smug keepaway on the walls and rooftops. Good luck.
   
   KIRKWALL
   
   
8. STABLES. Besides the griffons and everyone's dogs and cats, the Inquisition's domesticated animals are largely kept in stables located safely on the docks—no horse likes a row boat—inside the old Qunari Compound. So go exercise some animals. Or heckle them. Or sleep in the loft because you missed the last ferry.
   
   
9. LOWTOWN. Kirkwall is a large city, and the bulk of its people live in Lowtown. That’s where you’ll find the loud, busy market stalls, the taverns, the street performers and scammers. It is where you won’t find Gareth—not the Templar, not the archivist mage, another Gareth, young and recently missing from his guard posting—but it is where he was last seen, flirting with a woman selling fruit, so your characters have been asked to scour the area for any sign of him.
   
   
10. DARKTOWN. What are your characters even doing down here? It’s dark. It smells weird. And at the moment, one of them is likely being mugged, and the other is likely lost.
    
    
11. HIGHTOWN MARKETS. Getting past the guards in the residential areas of Hightown might require looking like you belong there, but the market square will take anyone who has money to spend—which currently includes your two characters, equipped with a purse of coins and a list of purchases to make on the Inquisition's behalf.
    
    
12. CHANTRY GARDEN. Keeping a place looking this tranquil (ha ha, sorry Anders) takes work. It isn’t strictly the Inquisition’s job to do it, but nonetheless, after a strong summer storm rattles the topiary and scatters debris around the garden, a couple of people—your characters—are dispatched to put things back in order. Please do not reshape the topiaries into anything obscene.
    
    ELSEWHERE
    
    
13. THE WOUNDED COAST. Not everything grows easily in the Gallows gardens, but there are reports of Amrita Vein scattered around the winding, sandy shores beyond Kirkwall (beach day!) and Ghoul’s Beard growing in the craggy caves of the Wounded Coast (giant spider day!), and your characters have been rewarded/punished with the task of collecting some.
    
    
14. PLANASCENE FOREST. Spooked by something in the woods, one of the Inquisition’s suppliers bolted on horseback and left behind his cart of goods. The Inquisition cannot PAY him ENOUGH to go back into that CURSED FOREST ALONE to retrieve them. Fortunately, the Inquisition doesn’t have to pay your characters anything extra at all to go do it for him.
    
    
15. VINMARK MOUNTAINS. Somebody’s fickle mount—be it horse, hart, dracolisk, or nuggalope—got loose and is really enjoying Mount’s Day Off in the mountains, while your characters get to enjoy Riders’ Day In Pursuit. Unless they don’t. How much do they care about that beast, really.
    
    WILDCARD
    
    Do whatever you want, whether it's completely new or an altered take on one of the prompts.

Comments

1

[summerfae]

It's not that Resa doesn't like music. It's that she doesn't like the music that the ferryman is singing--or at least, attempting to sing. Maybe if he could carry a tune half as well as the ferry is (slowly) carrying them, she'd have a little more patience. As it stands, she's eyeballing the ferryman, then the bay, then the ferryman again.

She yawns, stretches out--and her foot stretches right in the way of the ferryman as he walks past her, caterwauling away. Said caterwauling is rudely interrupted by a surprised yelp, and then a loud splash.

Whether purposeful or accidental is hard to say, but Resa doesn't look overly concerned as she inspects the rather wet ferryman, now splashing about to the side of the ferry. "Oops."

[in_death_sacrifice]

Kain has been content to just sit back and attempt to think of other things, trying to ignore the irritating singing. Or what he's trying to pass off as singing, anyway. The moment the man goes 'accidentally' overboard, Kain looks over. The sound of the splash is all too satisfying. So satisfying, in fact, that he starts to applaud.

"Finally, a sound I can get used to." He didn't see what actually happened, but he certainly isn't objecting to whatever it took to give them a reprieve. "It's quite hard to keep your balance on here, isn't it?"

[summerfae]

“Oh yes,” Resa agrees, with more cheer than is probably appropriate for the situation at hand. “Terribly difficult, what with the waves, and the water on the wood. Perhaps,” And here, she shoots a glance at the ferryman currently trying to get back out of the water. “It would behoove more people to concentrate on their footing, rather than other pursuits.”

Aka, shut up and focus on your job, dumbass.

Resa certainly seems content to watch the struggling, waterlogged man. Well, of course she can’t help, she’s small. She couldn’t haul a grown man aboard. At least, that would be her excuse. “Or maybe put some more safety measures on this thing. It’s a floating safety hazard. It’s a good thing OSHA isn’t a thing in Thedas. Yet.”

[in_death_sacrifice]

"It's truly a shame that they've not yet gotten around to fixing up their weak points like that." He watches the man down in the water, but he seems to be making his way along, slowly but surely. The little swim will probably do him good, and it's not like it seems particularly unsafe down there. The water isn't too choppy anyway. It's all worth it for this blissful silence. If they'd wanted music, surely they could have just... hired someone deliberately for that.

He glances at her, eyebrow raised. The rifters really come out with some curious things sometimes. "Osha? Is this some kind of safety spell where you're from?"

[summerfae]

One day, Resa will probably get tired of having to explain all of the various references she makes, and stop making them. But thus far, her urge to chatter without thought outweighs any desire to not have to constantly explain herself.

"Uh, no, most people where I'm from have generally agreed that magic doesn't exist. OSHA is an organization--The name is an acronym, but I can't remember what it's for. But it makes sure that people's workplaces aren't hazardous, or at least they're compensated for it if they are." She's pretty sure it's more complicated than that, but hell if she knows anything more about it. And it's not like she can just pull it up on Wikipedia anymore.

God, she misses Wikipedia.

"So I'm sure they'd have a few words about this ferry. And we wouldn't have any more tragic accidents." Here, she jerks her head at the ferryman, who's finally hauled himself out of the water, now quite wet and getting water everywhere. Resa helpfully scoots her feet away from any dripping.

[in_death_sacrifice]

Now to hope that the drenched man isn't in much of a singing mood anymore. Fortunately, it doesn't yet seem to be the case. But... the night is young, who knows what might happen if he dries off. Kain hopes he's learned his lesson though.

"You have entire organizations for that sort of thing? Your places of work must have a lot of dangers... Are people frequently attacked by savage creatures or terrible magic or such?" At least, that's his best guess, because to be so preoccupied with such a thing means, to him, that they must be constantly dealing with it. Her world must be even more treacherous than Thedas. "I wonder what they'd think about the Inquisition as a whole, for that matter..."