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

[justnice]

Finch smiles back, reflexive — outside the joke, and trying to pretend otherwise. That this is better money than he's ever seen, well. Marcoulf will know that, or he won't. And neither of those needs to hear it.

"I'm not fighting, am I. Maybe I'll get rich for peace." Now there's a joke for them both. "Is it... how d'you know you're supposed to be here?"

Isn't Orlais in the middle of a war, again?

[esquive]

It's the kind of question that warrants real consideration, that should prompt some pause for turning over. Which is maybe exactly why he doesn't bother with it and doesn't miss a beat: "The pay's regular, the Inquisition keeps a roof over my head, I've yet to want for warm socks and no one's tried to eat my horse." Best to keep these things simple.

He takes a few more turns with the needle.

[justnice]

They’re not bad reasons. By rights, Finch should leave it at that. But —

(Maybe something of Fern rubbed off, all those years chasing her shadow. Or maybe it’s only easier to look dull next to candleflame.)

"Reckon the Vints wouldn’t eat it either." He scratches a spot of absent stubble. "Or your Empress."

[esquive]

The rise and fall of the stitching doesn't still. Not entirely at least. But Marcoulf shoots him a narrow sideways look from under the shadow of his brow. Don't be rude, lad.

Still: "It's bad luck to spill too much of your blood in the same place," he says, pulling at his newly mended seam and reinforcing the end that frays. "And I'm not much for Vints. Don't speak the language and don't much care to learn."

The thread is knotted. He turns the shirt right side out again.

"I hope mending isn't why you're meant to be here."

Your stitching is irregular, Finch.

[justnice]

It's bad luck to spill too much of your blood in the same place —

That sounds, alright, sounds a little prancy. But it also sounds the sort of thing you'd say while squinting one-eyed with your cape blowing in the wind, and if Finch doesn't see the appeal in going on to only see half of life (look how pleasant it made Iorveth) he's still eighteen and,

Maybe a bit impressionable.

"No," He starts, dragged out of thought. The needle jumps and drags a new, unecessary hole through an elbow. "It's only, my girl —"

Boy, that's easier to say when Fern isn't around to contest it. A guilty pang all the same. Half a lie's still half a lie (and look how pleasant that makes anyone).

"— Well, someone had to look after her. See how well that's gone."

What an interesting hole. He stabs another.

[esquive]

Marcoulf looks at him, depositing the repairs shirt into the basket with the other mended bits and bobs before fetching another article of clothing from the stack between them. Second verse, same as the first and so on.

"Did she go off or did she die?"

Nothing prancy about that.

[justnice]

Maker. That pulls his eyes up at least, shock-sharp.

"She's not gonna die." He doesn't sound entirely certain about that. "Reckon Skyhold's safer anyway, or the,"

The other ones, on active battlefields?

"Well, she left." Finch finishes, lame. Better than thinking on the rest. He shakes his head. "Says she's done with men."

Slept with a girl once and turned her into a gay mage. u kno.