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The beach was an inspiring enough place, Raeburn supposed. It was a little overdone - everyone liked beaches. They were peaceful and generic and pretty. He liked pretty, too. He loved pretty.

He did not love people running around and splashing everywhere and tanning, though. "It's summer!" Sadie had grinned in his ear. "We've gotta go places - get wet and messy and - "

"I don't want to get messy," Raeburn had pointed out. "I like being clean."

"But it's so hot!" she'd whine. "And I can pick you up, and plus I totally drive the car anyway. Hey, don't get any ideas and try to start it up. I mean."

She was silly. Her car had cartoon duck decals on it and also a duck head antenna. He didn't know why she liked ducks so much, and not even real ones - she liked those cartoon yellow ones with fat orange beaks. Why would he want to drive a duck car? He wanted a pretty car, preferably one that looked like clouds and the wind blowing over a lake and something pretty. This would look pretty awkward on a car, on the other hand, so maybe he didn't want a car. A carriage would be elegant.

Sadie had brought them to the beach anyway. Right now he was manning their towel-and-umbrella - the umbrella had a giant duck beak on it. He glared on it. It was so not cute. The towel had a wave pattern on it, luckily. (Little did he know that the duck-patterned towel was stowed away in Sadie's picnic basket so she could use it after a dip in the water.)

She was off purchasing a kite or something. He leaned forward, frowning. The color of the ocean was extremely pretty today. Swimsuits were tasteless, too. Sadie had taken him out shopping for one a week ago and he'd chosen a fairly neutral one, or at least in his opinion - the blue certainly neutralized the warm grey. That didn't stop it from being ugly, though. He swung his head from side to side. There was no one pretty here, either.

Except...no, he reminded himself. Wings were not a hobby of any sort. Painful, he reminded himself. Itchy. No one liked to talk about their wings, least of all Raeburn.

But that pair looked so lovely when it caught the light just right, and in the shade it was a soothing blue. They weren't too far away, either. He glanced over at the wings' owner (and the tall man he was with, but he was unimportant). He glanced back down at his beach towel. Maybe he should wait until Sadie came back.

He looked back up. Oh, well. He chanced a wave in the other Herald's direction.

This had better turn out to be worth it.

Raeburn's head jerked back up when the other Herald suddenly shouted. That probably meant him, right? He took a quick survey of his surroundings. There wasn't anyone else nearby who could be mistaken for a Herald. Unless that was his father's name, but Raeburn doubted it. "Hello!" he called back. Well! Despite his pretty wings, he was loud. Raeburn wasn't sure if he liked that.

"Come here," he called imperiously, hoping the other Herald could hear from his distance (Raeburn was a few feet behind the high tide line). "I'm guarding our spot," he added. This would not ordinarily be incentive to keep him sitting there - Raeburn was often prone to doing his own thing, after all - but he'd already discovered that the wet sand left an icky feeling beneath his toes when he'd hoarded some of it earlier. He intended to build a sand sculpture, and he didn't really want to get much dirtier than absolutely necessary.

He crawled to the edge of his beach towel and patted his hoard of wet sand into place. He wouldn't mind help on his sculpture at all, especially as he had no idea what he was making yet. But inspiration would come.

(Probably not in the form of Sadie, who'd just reached the cash register down at the kite shack a few hundred yards off.)

(As Avery had just figured out, Sadie was not the most...responsible of child-raisers. But she'd grow into it, right?)

"Raeburn," Raeburn corrected. "I...I'm Raeburn. How about you?" This seemed like correct grammar to Raeburn, who was rather well-spoken but apparently not very well-versed in actually speaking to others.

He turned his head away so he could pretend he hadn't seen that Kingfisher had just fallen on his bum. But he turned his head back at the mention of shells. "They're pretty," said Raeburn approvingly. They had a very pale color palette, but they were on the beach and Raeburn couldn't see any shells with darker colors on them. Kingfisher had chosen well.

Raeburn'd managed to make a base shaped like a bucket, since having overturned a bucket of sand onto the ground and patted it into place - but that was about as far as he'd gotten. "I don't know what I'm making yet," he confessed. Was that a bad thing? He hoped not.

"Raeburn," frowned Raeburn. He liked his name because he was a painter. He didn't know the philosophy that Henry Raeburn had subscribed to, or maybe he'd like his name a little less. But you shouldn't belittle a painter by getting his name wrong, really.

Raeburn stared. (A castle wouldn't really be a bad idea.) The shells weren't transparent at all. "You can't see windows," he pointed out. Raeburn was very particular, and not really inclined to be the nicest Herald in the world, unfortunately for Kingfisher. "But they can be the shades or something. Or doors!" He lifted a small blue and yellow one up. "This one's like you," he said, not bothering to elaborate further. "It can be a flag!" He stared down at the shells again. There weren't really any rainbow ones there. But that wouldn't stop Raeburn from picking through them one by one to find one that matched himself.