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

(sorry about the icon I will get bespoke stuff when I can)

As Diane Aggripa understood it, visiting the beach was a tradition for psychological maintenance cycles - a concept she was beginning to understand that her fellow Einharjar were not clear on. An entire two days spent on maintenance would normally seem lavish to her, but she could not deny that after the intensity of their personal campaign against Chaos, some additional maintenance was warranted.

Besides, they did things differently on Waba, and Waba was, somehow, a bastion and safe harbor nonetheless.

When on Throne, the accepted wisdom was to do as the Throneites did. On Waba, she would learn proper Wabite procedure.

So, ready to deploy a legion of questions, she walked to the beach, a drone following behind with a parasol to shield her delicate skin, and participated in:

(1) Sand Architecture, an interesting technical challenge given the fragility of the material (she was attempting to make a sand observatory and use her ring laser to give it a real telescope lens);

(2) Skymelon Hurling, a sport where her twin servo-arms were an unfair advantage on offense and defense that she relished pressing;

(3) Grilling Crabs. Converting her sidearm to a small thermal induction oven was a trivial task - all she needed to do was set it to a lower-than-stun setting and keep the trigger pressed and they were in business, able to broil the crabs from the inside out with microwaves and have them retain the delicate flavor.

Thankfully, the stable genelines of House Dopledrachen had bestowed upon it's heiress an extra pair of arms of her own-though those were modified into wings, and were actually rather useless for fine manipulation. So Diane wasn't the only one with an advantage given to her by advanced technology. This was merely ancient genotech instead of cybernetics.

"Do your eyes even shut, or will you have to switch them off to play this game?"

“My (metaphorical) batteries run out just as my (literal) ones do, milady,” she says. “And I close my eyes to recharge because light emphatically does not help me rest. I can run blind.”

She’s more amused than offended by the question, if the auto-tuned lilting in her statement is any indication.

"Oh, so you do have some sort of mechanism to accomplish that. Then by all means, Technologian, run blind and throw your melon! Though I doubt your success, for mine shall fly farther without question!"

“I’m concerned, Aggripa.”

Leonides was peering over her shoulder at the observatory.

“This is well constructed, but the way you’ve placed these walls here, an attacker could easily find cover in a blind spot that cannot be attacked from the walls. What will your astronomers do if an army of tiny sand demons assaults this beach?”

“Thank the sagacious Emperor you’re our tactician instead of me?” Diane suggested, a voxbox calibrated to a feminine voice adding autotuned emphasis and amused lilts to her statement.

“I welcome any improvement you can suggest to the overall design, Captain. This, ah, does seem to be a team activity.”

"I think if we built out this wall here." he pointed. "We could greatly reinforce the whole structure, and also deny an incoming enemy shelter from small arms fire from this rooftop."

Somehow, the brutal business of war becomes almost funny when it's reduced to 1/100th scale.

Open Post: Beach O'Clock

Technologian Diane Aggrippa | this universe | OC

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