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 Posted: Fri Apr 04, 2008 8:12 pm
Riku finished piling the driftwood properly inside a neatly-dug sand hole, and snapped her fingers under it. Blue-green flame sprouted from the wood immediately and she leapt back to squat next to Lizzy. It was gratifying to hear the girl shriek with surprise and glee at the sight, and even better for the child to be sitting down and relatively motionless for a time. She was getting tired of chasing her out of tide pools and the surf. When it seemed apparent that Lizzy was too occupied with the driftwood fire to attempt to drown herself again, Riku fell back onto the sand and closed her eyes.
God. Children were exhausting.
On Lizzy's part, though, she was having a ball. So far she had found exactly forty-one pretty shells (the sum total of every complete shell she had seen that day minus one) and put them in a bucket. One of them had turned out to have a small creature inside it, and she had let that one go. Now her goal was to build a sand castle with a moat and a drawbridge and all those cool things! But, unfortunately, she'd been told to stay put. So she started to build up a mountain of sand instead. Dwarves lived in mountains, and dwarves were neat! Really, she didn't want to go home. If Kae-Askavi were here, it would be the best day ever.
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Posted: Sat Apr 05, 2008 12:00 pm
Earlier that week, Ophelia had discovered running, and she was hooked. If daddy told her to go get in her chair at the kitchen table, she ran. If he told her to wash up for dinner, she ran. If he told her to go get her PJs on, she ran. If he told her to go pick a book for story-time, she ran. Prosper sincerely hoped all this running was just a phase, because it was tiring him out.
Ophelia ran down the beach path ahead of her father, who carried a chair, a bucket, a shovel, and a small fishing net.
"Gonna build a castle!" shouted Ophelia, hopping over a piece of driftwood. "Gonna catch a fish!" she added, running around a clump of beach grass sprouting in the center of the path. "Gonna find some shells!"
She reached the end of the path and it widened into a beach. What to do first? She looked back at her father, a good ten yards up the path still.
"Come on, Daddy!" she called, hopping up and down impatiently. "You're too slow!"
I'm too old for this, thought Prosper, finally catching up. He picked a good spot, set up his chair, and handed Ophelia her bucket.
"I'm gonna build a castle!" she said happily, putting it on her head like a helmet and gripping her little plastic shovel like a sword. "I'm gonna be a king!"
"Queen," Prosper corrected her.
"King," said Ophelia stubbornly.
"Kings are boys," he said. "You're a girl. You'd be a Queen."
"Okay!" she said, agreeable as ever. "I'm gonna be a queen!" With that, she bolted off down the beach, looking for the best place to build her castle. Sandcastle physics was tricky business, after all. Your sand had to be just so...
She spotted more people on the beach. One of them looked to be about her side. Without hesitation, Ophelia ran up to her.
"Hi! Wanna build a castle with me?" she asked.
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Posted: Sat Apr 05, 2008 12:24 pm
"Yeah!" Lizzy threw handfuls of sand behind her into the air, quite on accident. Her aunt spluttered and looked quite irritated as she wiped sand out of her eyes. "This is not good castle-building sand. I bet if we moved down the beach there'd be better castle-building sand. I'm Lizzy! Who're you?"
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Posted: Sat Apr 05, 2008 1:26 pm
"O... Oph.... Opha..." Ophelia paused. Clearly, toddlers were not meant to have four-syllable classical names. Finally, she gave up trying to pronounce it and said, "Squishy."
She pointed down the beach to the wet part by the tide line. "That's good sand!" she proclaimed, pointing her shovel skyward in emphasis and marching towards it purposefully.
"Come on!"
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Posted: Sat Apr 05, 2008 1:38 pm
"Okay, Squishy!" That was totally a good name. Lots better than Lizzy, anyway. She trotted after Squishy, dragging her own bucket and adding another pretty shell to it on the way. "I wanna be, um," she paused and thought about it. "I wanna be the Seneschal! That's when, when you get to boss around everybody and tell people where to sleep and stuff. Miss Amy is a seneschal." She sat and started to dig a moat in the sand.
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Posted: Sat Apr 05, 2008 2:13 pm
Ophelia still didn't know what a seneschal was, but she smiled, nodded, and pulled her bucket off her head. A few stars danced angrily in front of her eyes for a bit before settling back into orbit. Apparently they'd gotten squished. She laughed and began to fill the bucket with excavated sand. When it was full, she turned it over on the little island Lizzy was creating and produced a tower.
"See how to do it?" she asked, smiling.
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Posted: Sat Apr 05, 2008 2:18 pm
She nodded and upended her shells into the moat. That way, she wouldn't lose them. "I see!" Cheerily, Lizzy piled sand into her own bucket and made another tower. It collapsed a little, but she smoothed it down. The only hint that she had messed up somewhere was the slightly misshapen side. "Your tower is really good!" Smiling, she fluffed her hair. Even messed up, she was pround of her tower. "Maybe it needs a wall too?"
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Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2008 5:51 am
Ophelia looked at the castle for a moment, deliberating. "Uh...." she said, patting more sand into her bucket. Well, without a wall, who would keep the bad guys out? Didn't all castles have walls?
"Okay," she said finally, beginning to pat sand up into a battlement. "It does need a wall! Help me?"
This was so totally going to be the best. sand castle. ever.
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Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2008 7:35 am
"Yup!" Lizzy started to pile sand on the castle-side of the moat. Because it was wet, she could stack it up maybe four inches high, which was pretty big. Well, she thought so, anyway. "This way all the forces of evil can't get into our castle!" She nodded firmly, twice. This was so cool.
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Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2008 7:57 am
"Forces of Evil?" asked Ophelia, wide eyed as she lengthened her wall. She stuck a little shell she picked out of the sand on it and kept going. There, that was pretty! What else could she do to make her castle pretty?
She plucked one of her stars out of the air and pressed it into the sand. When she let go, it floated back up indignantly, leaving a star shaped impression in the sand. There, that was pretty!
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Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2008 10:25 am
Lizzy nodded. "Yeah, forces of evil. Like... mean people! And gigantic monsters! But they can't get in." She picked up some seaweed that had floated near her foot and covered the outside of the wall with one large leaf. "That's so it'll be all slippery and they can't climb up the side!" Warily, she eyed the tide. Well, it wasn't getting too close to the castle. She grinned and decided that they needed a guard tower, too.
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Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2008 10:34 am
"Good idea!" exclaimed Ophelia. Lizzy was so smart. Ophelia would have never thought of that. And now Lizzy was building something else - she was piling sand up really high. What?
Ophelia leaned across the castle to investigate. She carefully planted her hand in the courtyard for balance.
"Whatcha doin'?" she asked curiously.
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Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2008 10:46 am
"It's a guard tower!" She poked windows in it. "So that we can see really far. And maybe we can look at the stars and stuff and when we're not fighting people we can have, like, artists and stuff and they can paint what they see. That's why we need a guard tower." Lizzy nodded again. Her head was starting to ache from all this nodding. "See, if we're really safe, then we can be happy. When there's not anything safe then we can't be happy," she explained, although it was kind of confusing and she wasn't quite sure why she was explaining this when it was obvious.
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Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2008 10:51 am
"Ohhh," said Ophelia, withdrawing her hand from the courtyard and sitting back up. "My daddy's an artist!" she said happily. "He paints the ocean, and sometimes he paints mountains and trees and things that only exist in his imagination!"
She clasped her hands together. Her daddy was the coolest. "He's a really good painter!" she said. "People give him money so he'll paint for them." That proved how good he was, didn't it?
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Posted: Sun Apr 06, 2008 10:56 am
"What are imaginations," Lizzy said blankly. Of course she knew what oceans and trees and mountains were. Imagination was a new word. "Awesome! My daddy's a music person. But your daddy sounds cooler." She smiled at the other girl. Certainly this meant they were friends! "Are you gonna be a painter too, Squishy? I wanna be a princess ballerina dancer superhero." She thought about this for a moment. "Or a seneschal."
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