pencilitin | Open Post: Beach O'Clock

It's a beach day! Whatever serious dramatic shit you've got going on, set it aside and let's have fun in the sun.

HOWEVER! This is in the Zeiha region, in the country of Peifou, on planet Waba. So, while the region is famous for its beaches, you might find some things a little different here! For the interplanetary tourists among us, here's what you might expect:

Sand Fights: Due to slightly different physical makeup, the sand on Waba clumps a bit better on humid days. In fact, it clumps just well enough to hold together in a ball for a few seconds! In other words, you can have sandball fights. It's like snowball fights, but not cold!
Skymelon Toss: They don't literally fly, but they're a popular local melon, named for their light weight and their sky-green coloration. What you do is this: Grab one, close your eyes, spin it around like it's Bowser in Mario 64, and let it fly. The goal is to get it as far into the ocean as you can (they float, so recovery is easy), but half the fun is letting go at the wrong time and beaning your friend in the head instead. Because they're so light, they don't do any real damage. If you get hit in the face, you get the first piece when it gets cut up.
Sand Towns: Rather than castles, people in Peifou build little villages. It's more of a group activity, with people lining up houses together and making streets and stuff. There are pro contests where people create elaborate landscapes spanning the entire beach, but for normal people, usually it's just making houses and doing some ad-hoc city planning as you go.
Beach Dash: At the beach, you gotta have some sports! The focus here, though, is on any game that forces you to run, from races to tag variants. The gimmick is that running on sand is extremely awkward, and shoes/sandals aren't allowed, so everyone is always falling over like idiots. That's the appeal! Accidentally crash into your crush!
White Crab Grill: Not crab, technically, but this planet happened to develop crablike life independently, too. They used to be a serious invasive species, so centuries ago, they started holding contests to catch and cook as many white crabs as you can, and it caught on. Look for them around the tide pools - where you find one, you'll usually find a dozen, and they're slow enough and not very pinchy that you can just grab 'em with your bare hands. Once you've got a bucket full of crabs, you grill 'em until they're delicious and eat them together.
Beach Shack: Every beach has a beach shack! They're full of chairs and inflatables and other such beach supplies. The rule is that you're supposed to leave something behind at the shack for each thing you take, but it's run on the honor system, and as a result, the beach shack tends to get emptier and emptier over time until someone leaves a really passive-aggressive note on it and someone else shoves a dozen beach towels and balls in there at once. Having a robust beach shack is supposedly the sign of a healthy community.
Gear Shells: There's a common beach denizen called a Gear Snail - not literally snails, more akin to a conch. They're small and come in huge numbers, so in the summer you tend to find whole bunches of beautiful seven-notched shells buried in the sand. A rare mutation occasionally yields a six-notch gear shell, and finding one of these is considered good luck! Among younger people, it's said that giving one as a gift to the object of your affections will bring you together, but it's a little cringe by the time you hit your late teens.
Night Beach: The beach is a very popular, almost cliche'd romantic spot, but specifically the beach at night. A chance encounter on the sand, beneath the glittering stars, to the music of the waves... It's what young people who want to fall in love dream of.
Burying people in the sand is a universal constant.

That's not a list of prompts! Just a list of ideas for you to play with in your various beach hangout prompts. If you're not from Waba, or have never heard of Waba, or have nothing to do with this OC setting at all, don't fear! Show up anyway. We won't ask how you got here, but you'll fit in just fine as long as you have fun.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

After a while, Nanjiao sat down next to Leonides. She'd watched him building siege walls around a sand town, eat entire buckets of white crab, and just in general he seemed lost. From what she knew about his history, that made sense. His homeworld probably didn't have white crab, or sand towns, or beach shacks. It probably didn't even have beaches. Of course he wouldn't know how to relax at one.

After watching the sun set in silence for a bit, she spoke up.

"What's the sky look like on your planet?"

Leonides flinched when he realized how close Nanjiao had gotten to him without him noticing, but was able to hold back the instinct to resort to violence. Control was more important than ferocity. He forced himself to relax again.

"The planet I was born on, or reborn on?"

That wasn't an answer she was expecting.

"I'm not sure I get the difference. How about both?"

He looked over at her for a moment, then back towards the horizon.

"I was born on the planet Tetchys. It's an urban hive world, with a population of twenty billion. Most people live underground because there was no room left on the surface. I don't remember much of it, but I don't think I ever actually saw the sky of that world. I understand it is blue, though you can't see it most of the time due to the layer of endless smog. But after I was recruit by the Drakkar, I was taken to Guad, THEIR homeworld, where I was reforged and reborn as a space marine."

His description of Tetchys was dispassionate, uninterested. When he continued, a bit of pride slipped into his voice. The pride of someone talking about their home town.

"The skies of Guad are pink. There are only a few fortress cities there, dedicated to training initiates. The rest of the world is raw, untamed wilderness full of terrifying beasts that will kill the unwary. But...it has a certain primal beauty to it."

Nanjiao watched Des with her arms wresting on her knees, as he talked. The man's emotions were often hard to read, but she could at least tell which world he liked more.

"Did you ever get, like... vacation days? Shore leave? I don't know what marines call it. Days when you just got to relax and not fight anything."

"It can take weeks to travel between stars. We spent most of that time training and preparing for the next upcoming conflict but there were times when it got a little slower. We had time to share stories of past battles, or to meditate on the importance of our task."

In the distance, something seagull-like cawed as it swooped on a breeze. Leonides watched it, trying to imagine what it would be to just...not do anything important.

"...Nothing like this, though."

"I get it. It's probably really hard for you to figure out what to do with yourself, right? It seems like second nature for us, but you don't really have any experience with goofing off."

Nanjiao yawned. They'd been out here for a while, and she was starting to get tired.

"I'll give you a challenge to keep you occupied, then. Tell me a story from your past that isn't about fighting. Doesn't have to be important... in fact, better if it isn't important. Something you did that was stupid or pointless."

“‘Goofing off’ is part of what makes you such a powerful warrior, is it? Very well, then. A trivial tale.”

Leonides lapsed into silence for a moment as he considered the challenge. A story not related to battle…

“The first time I met the Drakkar high command. I had just been promoted to corporal, and had been instructed to go and introduce myself to the commander while delivering a report.”

He smiled, very slightly, at the memory. “You must understand she is a very intimidating figure. Taller than me by almost a full foot, her face is a mess of scars and augments, and they say she has an augment-arm because she lost her original while wrestling a demon prince and still managed to pull its head off with her remaining arm. She is the stuff of legends and I had been an initiate not too long ago at this point.”

“When I went into the commander’s suite, I had no idea what to expect. I had this idea that she would be sitting on a throne and I would be expected to go to my knees before her. But when the door opened it was just…a meeting room. A big long table with a bunch of officers around it discussing some deployment or other. There was a pitcher of water on the table. She was using her cybernetic arm, which apparently has a plasma rifle built into it, to pour herself a glass of water and chuckling at a joke someone had just told.”

“I guess that was the moment I realized legends and heroes are also people. No one strides across battlefields crushing their enemies ALL the time.”

Nanjiao spends most of the story trying to imagine someone a foot taller than Leonides. Is he actually short? Is Waba a planet of tiny fairy people?

"You know, I met a guy like that, once. He was huge, had all kinds of terrifying weapons, and acted like he was ready to kill someone at any moment, but once I got to know him, I sort of got the feeling that we weren't really all that different."

The Wabans are pretty short it's true. And the high commander is...pretty goddamn tall. Even for a space marine.

"I am still ready to kill someone at any moment." Space marine humor is...easy to miss sometimes. Mostly because it isn't very funny.

"But, I think I'm starting to understand your planet a little more, too."

Open Post: Beach O'Clock

Sunset

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