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Renna had just found her suntan lotion when a cheery voice from behind grabbed her attention. She turned over her shoulder and saw an unfamiliar dark-skinned girl with shock white hair. What was more surprising, though, was her accent. "Are you from Congo?" she said quickly, her own South African voice flipping over vowels and consonants. The accent didn't sound quite right, but it reminded her of home, which was enough to make Renna's heart flutter in her chest.

She had been born there in the mid-90s and lived there for much of the civil war. When things got too dangerous, she moved to the coast with her grandmother and mother, even though Eden had stayed behind. They moved to America once she was into her teens, but Renna still considered the Democratic Republic of Condo to be her home. It was strange to randomly bump into someone else at this beach party who sounded like her, and the joy of it took the girl by surprise.

Hopping up, she jutted a hand out quickly, "I'm Renna. I haven't been here too long, but it's just so great to hear a familiar voice." It was with a pang that Renna's recalled Eden's voice in that moment. Killed by a senshi. The Chaos in her heart clenched darkly.

Just then, her mind flicked back to the girl's original question. "Picture, yes, sure -- I'm not a model, but I don't mind." This was, in fact, precisely how Bo had charmed her this morning. He asked for a picture and then ended up sitting at her table for all of breakfast. Hopefully this girl wouldn't sprint off on her too.

Ouch. Arilee was used to seeing wipeouts of all shapes and sizes. Hell, she'd been involved in no few of them herself. Didn't stop the sympathy pains from hitting though.

Riding her own board in, the tall blonde leapt lightly from her own board as its nose just began to nudge the sand. Then, striding to where Daphne had surfaced, she quickly offered a hand and an encouraging smile.

"Sure you were," she agreed warmly. And really, Daphne hadn't done too badly for someone who'd never been on a board before. It would come in time if she wanted it badly enough. "Need a hand up?"

“Don’t you DARE!” He started to protest throwing up his arms to protect himself from another deluge.

Saved by the name it seemed, his shoulders dropped in some relief and he paused to wring out his soggy t-shirt and glance around.

Tate, Zink remembered the girl, she’d irritated him enough with some of her ‘quips’ that he’d pinned her to a wall to show her just how dangerous those that wandered the night could be. He knew wolfram had been quite fond of her, he’d even considered turning her for that very reason until she’d shown such blatant disregard for her own safety. He felt perhaps a shade bad for her now to know that Wolfram was here with… someone else. But why morn something if, for all that he knew nothing had ever come of it.

He did not however want to stare long enough to let on that he knew her at all. He turned his gaze back to Daphne, watching to see whom SHE seemed to recognize in the crowd.

(( omg There is a Tate. I might have to bring Parker. ))

Who could say where Bo ran off to once he left Renna's side? He bobbed in and out of tents, squirted guns and was squirt, borrowed a handful of trail mix from a cute redheaded girl, crashed on the blanket of a surfer in the waves -- all of this he had done, completely forgetting that he was looking for Kess and had left Renna alone at a party where she didn't know anyone. This was commonplace for the teen, unfortunately, and so now he roamed the shore looking for something new to entertain him.

One of the vast benefits of being ridiculously tall was having a great vantage point. It was from there, one hand cupped to his eyes to block the sun, that Bo sighted someone he hadn't seen in a long, long time. "Addie," he said lightly, too far away for her to hear it. A smile was already spreading over his face.

Truth be told, Bo had missed the petite girl since they stopped spending time together. This was, in and of itself, a remarkable thing since he typically forgot about people once they exited his line of vision. But Adira was different, even if he could never put his finger on why.

Bounding over the sand, Bo caught her waving to someone but thought little of it. He had seen Adira and now he had to say hello. Of course, Bo being Bo meant that his "hi" was coming up next to her, wrapping his arms around her waist, and spinning her in a circle twice before plopping her back on the ground and releasing her. "Adira!" he said, completely unphased by the potential inappropriateness of his action given the lapse in their friendship. "You're here! Small world." The grin on his face was blinding.

[Tate says "Get in the car, loser, we're going to the beach."

Also, I'm off to work--back in six to eight hours smile ]

Oh. Well. She guessed it was hard to be more than six feet tall, pale as alabaster, and keep herself Subtly Present. Kess apparently considered her arrival worthy of note, enough to swagger over like she owned the beach (and honestly she might as well have, it was hard to look away) and throw an arm around Tate's shoulders that had her shoulders stiffening for a moment. But it wasn't an attack and Tate was fine, so she let it be, and just wrapped both hands around the strap of her book bag. "This is Ladon," she said awkwardly, ignoring the stare from the short blue-haired boy. Man. Whatever, he'd stared after Kess and she knew who she meant. "We went to Meadowview together." It'd been a while ago, though; Tate was coming up on her graduation date in less than a year, and she…

"I guess it has," she said to Ladon, somewhat discomfited by the way Billy was pointedly not introduced by relationship; the boyfriend hypothesis looked ever more likely now. She ran her teeth over her lower lip then smiled self-consciously. "Got bored of having the ponytail, I guess. It's not really ideal for work…"

Awkward silence. Maybe Kess or the relative unknown Billy would say something? She fidgeted with the strap of her bag and said, looking down towards Ladon's feet, "I missed you. I've been… really busy." If 'busy' here meant 'I became a magical warrior of love, honor, and justice, and then I became not a magical warrior of love, honor, and justice, and then I became a more powerful magical warrior of love, honor, and justice' she had, in fact, been quite busy. Those were all things she didn't dare discuss with him, because if he didn't know, she didn't want to tell him.

The point was, she had a gut full of busy and she still had more on her plate.

"Ladon, this is Kess," she said, "My friend." Which was sort of a round-about, passive-aggressive way of asking who, exactly, Billy was to Ladon. She just didn't want to do something wrong and jeopardize anything she didn't have to, but… She didn't know what she'd actually do if Ladon said boyfriend. She really didn't.

Ladon gave a embarassed laugh, slightly high pitched, as he nudged Billy for that comment. "He's kidding. I have plenty of friends." He wasn't a shut in at all! Nope. Not at all. Well, he couldn't tell HER that!! The fact he had dropped out of school, got beaten up and burned, that he had some senshi talk to him about her (something he wanted to touch base on her about but had always been too scared to actually contact her in person to do), and that he now had a boyfriend was just too much to tell. While he never had the best picture of himself from last they met, he liked her to remember him as a guy who had been in school with a nice family, with normal goals in life, and as someone who had both his sanity and cared for her deeply. His only saving grace was that he wore a t-shirt to hide his burn scar on his neck and shoulder, and that he had been getting out recently which meant he wasn't pasty white.

"I guess you would be very busy. What with college and friends and work." He kept a pleasant smile on his face, but his insides were twisting, knotting, and pulling him apart. She had everything going for her. She left Meadowview, left him, to go to college. She knew people more in her age group, and made friends who probably could take better care of her and probably helped her when she felt alone. The one thing he had, keeping her company and making her feel better, was taken from him, and he wasn't as special as before. For some reason, he felt robbed, and even disappointed that he failed her. There was also a bitter hatred that she left him.

As for friend, he looked to Kess and smiled in the same pleasant, friendly way as he had Tate. "It's nice to meet a friend of Tate's." He still felt like the young, dorky kid before these much older, more experienced women.

"You're hair looks nice that way." He said, returning to this strained conversation, and he tried to keep his breath steady. "Where are you working now?"

The grin that split Bernadette's face at the recognition of at least some of her accent was wide if it was anything else, letting her camera down a bit as she relaxed from her more professional persona into an actual human being. Most people heard the accents in her English and some of her schoolmates caught her muttering to herself in French, just assuming that she was actually from France. Never mind that French, like English, wasn't always spoken the same in all the same places!

"You recognize a French African accent! You are probably the very first person I have met here that knows it when they hear it, but you have a similar one. I grew up in Bujumbura which is just across the lake." In an orphanage in Bujumbura because nobody really knew who her parents were but that wasn't something that Bernadette herself dwelled on much. When she'd first been about to come to America she was told that it was probably one of those things you best kept to yourself unless you had a very good friend that you knew wouldn't treat you strangely because of it.

The last thing she wanted was to be considered strange! Even if she was spending most of her free time avenging a horrible crime she had committed in a previous life. Metallia had shown her the error of her ways and was allowing her to atone for her sins by serving her officers as a tool; the one she reported to was currently shooting one of the many water guns at a freckled blonde. They'd talk later.

Taking Renna's hand she grinned again. "I'm Bernadette and I have to agree about hearing someone familiar. I haven't been in the city for more than a few months myself and everyone here sounds so different. Not a bit of French!" Picking up her camera again she inspected it a bit to make sure that when she went to take a picture again that it would be ready.

"And as for not being a model well, that is why I would like to take your picture. I like natural people doing normal things, not poses. It's a hobby."



Grasping the hand offered to tow her out of the surf Daph shook back her hair and grinned. Ari won a ton of points in the Daphne Proudmoore Book of Cool by not laughing straight-out at her. Kess probably could have gotten away with it but that was Kess and Kess didn't have a malicious bone in her body when it came to laughing at someone. Or really in general but then Daph hadn't actually pissed her off or seen her pissed before. Everyone had a trigger though.

"Thanks. I'm sure I'll get the hang of it eventually but I think I need to nurse my wounds for a bit. Metaphorically but later I'm going to try again if that's okay? The lesson was pretty awesome though, if nothing else I might just buy one of those to go out and sit on; that was totally unreal." Squeezing Arilee's hand she dropped it, fetching the board and sticking it in the sand as she'd seen the tanned girl do earlier with her own.

"Hey, you guys better not be gettin' my towel wet! I'm a mean wrestler!"



Allie had had a moment of worry when she didn't see anyone she knew but Aitana, people scurrying around the sand shooting water everywhere out of giant guns that seemed to be coming from a massive pile in a bin beneath the food canopy. That was really smart, something she'd never considered: food canopy so that if someone needed to get out of the sun they could absolutely do so. "Seems like all the fun is coming from there, we should drop our stuff in the shade. Did you want to swim?" Okay so maybe she wanted to get in the water and out of her pretty dress to make Ollie's eyes bug a big.

Could you blame a girl?

Billy took the offered gun with some mixed emotion. One - he could brandish a water gun pretty darn good considering the general mechanics of aim and whatnot were the same as his other self's weapon, but Two - was he really the type to play? A childhood spent trying to build up a holier-than-thou reputation didn't lead to much 'playing.' Dear powers that be, he didn't know how to play. Still, he accepted the toy weapon with a casual 'thanks.'

Then it seemed introductions were over and, whether or not Kess has meant Ladon and himself when she'd said 'love birds' didn't matter to Billy. He decided to take it as she did and seized the opportunity to assert his position with Ladon quite simply. He looked at his boyfriend with a soft smile, ruffled his hair and gave him a quick kiss on the forehead. In his mind it was a justifiable action in reaction to the subject being brought up.

Then again one had to question Billy's state of mind at times. Ladon knew well and good how Billy could act when he perceived a threat to their relationship, and Billy's jealousy, whether or not there was really anything to worry about or not. If anything, just be thankful he had some tact when he went about deterring said threats.