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

[esquive]

He'll find no sympathy from his companion. On the contrary, a singularly disgruntled expression has settled across Marcoulf's face. It's deep enough to be visible even behind his curling red beard, his jaw set at a particularly unpleasant angle. It must be someone's idea of a joke. He's strong for his shape, but that isn't nearly so brawny enough to make up for the fact that the boy's he's meant to be working with has arms like a pair of limp noodles and the breeding to match.

"Seems you do now."

He says it very mildly, not strictly unkind even as he's rolling up his shirt sleeves, but the fact that he's said it at all is a testament to his distaste. In any other circumstance - were Benedict's hands kid soft for any reason other than Tevinter mage reasons -, he's keep his mouth shut and his head down.

But here they are and it's the smallest kind of liberating to be nasty about it.

[altusimperius]

The look Marcoulf receives is one of absolute incredulity and disbelief. How dare he be so glib? Who even is he?

"Oh, and you presume to tell me what to do," Benedict scoffs, folding his arms to indicate he won't be pushed so easily.

[esquive]

Marcoulf has begun to roll up his sleeves. Without pausing: "Yes."

He crosses to the crate, testing first one corner and then another to see how balanced its contents are. One side, he thinks, is definitely heavier. It shifts slightly less when he nudges it with his boot's toe--

[altusimperius]

The audacity.
Still, Bene doesn't move. He watches Marcoulf with his nose wrinkled in distaste, arms tightly folded and offering no indication that he will be of any use.
"...well you can't," he says after a moment, in case anyone forgot what they were arguing about.

[esquive]

That gives him pause, his toe set against the unmoving crate. Marcoulf gives the boy - because that is what he absolutely is, all young and snot nosed - a blank, slowly blinking look.

"Why not?"

Princes of stimulating conversation here.

[altusimperius]

What a confusing question. Benedict looks back at him, not sure he understands. Why... can't Marcoulf make him?

"...because I won't let you?" he clarifies.

[esquive]

"And yet, here I am telling you. Now," he gives the crate a deliberate nudge with his boot. "Mind that end, won't you? It's the lighter of the two."

He is, grudgingly, telling the truth if only because he'd rather not have the whole crate dropped on his toes from the boy losing his grip.

"As you've never lifted, Messere, let me give you a demonstration. Namely, lift with the knees--" He stoops to demonstrate.

[altusimperius]

It may not have been a challenge before, but now it absolutely is. Some may cave to the bestial manners of a bearded commoner, but Benedict is no such person.
"Suppose I just walked away," he muses, watching the demonstration with idle disinterest.

[esquive]

"Then I suppose I'd find a more suitable pair of second hands and have it done in half the time, Messere." Now that he's moved past the initial extreme distaste at having to share the same air as Benedict, Marcoulf has transitioned smoothly into apparent ambivalence. He fixes the boy with a blank, expectant look that says 'Do it, nerd.'

[altusimperius]

Oh. It's that easy?
"Then I suppose that's what I'll do," Benedict replies, chipper as anything, and turns to walk away. Off the hook, nice!!

[esquive]

It's not quite the same entertainment as watching him struggle with the far side of the crate, but convincing the boy otherwise is officially more trouble than it could possibly be worth. Namely: the health of his own fingers and tows. Realistically, he can't imagine dredging that thing up a series of stairs and not having Benedict drop it on him.

"Enjoy whatever you have better to do, serrah," Marcoulf calls after him, all faux cheer.

[altusimperius]

HE WILL (it's drinking tea and being pretty. Sorry Marcoulf.)

[esquive]

Two absolutely USELESS past times, honestly!!