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

8

[exsecutus]

[Usually when Nikos misses the last ferry back to the Gallows, he goes to Marisol's house and knocks on the door until one of her servants opens it for him. Or he sleeps in her garden, if he feels like arriving instead for a lecture over breakfast about having servants that have to open doors for him. Last night, he had drunkenly decided that he would not give her the pleasure of staying over, which had made sense at the time.

The stableboy calls him Kostos, when he climbs down from the loft with hay in his hair and the pattern of his sleeve pressed into his poorly shaved cheek. The look Nikos turns on him could curdle milk, and the stableboy backs away into a stall, with a confused apology, and Nikos, still glaring, walks right into--]

Mghnfdn.

[--A stranger. Bleary with sleep and lack of a morning drink, he pushes away from ser whoever-this-is, and turns that milk curdling glare on him instead.

Just as the horse from the stall they're stood beside leans out to grab the edge of Nikos' cloak with its teeth.]

[wythersake]

Good morning, [ Asshole. The reflex (an arm posted out, steadying) is automatic: Nikos isn’t the first menace of dairy to shamble into his face this morning. ] Are you still —

[ Drunk? His expression narrows with a breed of scrutiny Nikos must be as familiar with by now as mistaken stableboys, irritated debt-collectors, and angry young women. Usually Kostos is better-groomed. And straighter-backed. And bleeding more.

Whether he’s as fashionable to horses remains to be seen, because the mare yanks, and begins lipping for Nikos’ hair as well. There’s hay in it. ]

There’s hay in it.

[ Isaac adds, helpfully. ]

[exsecutus]

I wasn't aware. So good of you to--

[Mgfkr, more indignant this time. It's difficult to look the exact brand of pissed off that Nikos wants to embody, when a horse is eating his hair. Or trying to eat, anyways. Nikos tries a sidestep just as horse lips mush against his hair.]

Get off--

[He swats at the mare's face. Respite is brief. The horse pulls away with a blustery noise, leaving the side of Nikos' hair flat and glistening with slobber. The hay is still there. The mare makes a choice to risk it, and leans in for another go.]

Intervene, would you, don't just stand there looking smug--

[Looking familiarly focused, more like. If Nikos pretends that he wasn't first mistaken for his stupid brother, perhaps he can just go on pretending.]

[wythersake]

Smug?

[ Repeated with faint curiousity, as though he’s never heard the word before, this strange foreign term. A hand flutters over his heart. Who, me?

But there are only so many people this can be (only so many personalities this charming), and he does have a job to do here, so Isaac hefts his bottle and sprays water directly into Nikos’ face.

It makes a little ‘ss sss sss’ sound.

The mare startles back, releases him. And kicks her water bucket hard at Isaac’s shins. He also makes a little ‘ss sss sss’ sound — with more of an ‘sh’ on there, and then an ‘h-i-t’.]

[exsecutus]

[Nikos' sputter might have a what the fuck buried in there somewhere. Indignation and water obscure some of it, as does the hand he wipes over his face.

It doesn't take so long that he misses the water bucket routine. Now he can be at least a little smug--difficult, when you've been sprayed in the face with water, but Nikos was once a noble once a long-and-embarrassing-to-current-politics time ago, so he manages all right.]

Changed my mind. I do like you. [he says to the mare.

Then he gives the water bucket a kick of his own, to try for a second score on Isaac's shins.]

[wythersake]

[ It strikes home with a cheery ping, sends what little remains sloshing over both their feet. ]

Intervene, [ He hisses, ] Go on, intervene, why don't you —

[ He gestures emphatically with the bottle, tries to recall the Nevarran conjugation of to fuck oneself. And maybe he'd get there, if the stableboy hadn't reappeared with a remarkably large sailor in tow. He points at Nikos, chatters something fast and inaudible.

Isaac's expression sobers, at once alert (alright, at once still pretty irritated). The horse whickers and champs. Somewhere distant, a bard begins playing ominous music. ]

Friends of yours?

[exsecutus]

[Nikos could have provided the Nevarran for that phrase. If he wasn't so occupied with thinking a version of it, as the stableboy leads the hulking form of the sailor around the corner.

Fuck me, but in Nevarran, and a more oh-shit context. Nikos is no coward. He does not take a step backward. He does tighten, wound like a snake before it strikes. Or before fleeing, because he does know when to pick his battles.]

I don't have any friends. Which, considering how unfriendly he looks--

[At the other end of the stable row, the sailor grunts and shoves away from the stableboy. Nikos does not grab for a knife. His arm is coiled tightly, ready to go for it.]

If this is my fucking brother's fault, again, I am going to put a knife in his eye.

[A vow made in irritation is no less sincere. If Kostos is missing an eye, he will look less trustworthy so no one will want to play him at any games of chance and he'll stop incurring debt. If Kostos is missing an eye and Nikos makes it ugly, people will stop fucking him and then being angry about it the next day.]