Welcome to Gaia! ::

Rana woke up to find the city covered in a fluffy whiteness. The weather report had predicted the snowfall, but the question had been how much. Once she saw the thick layer on her windowsill, she grinned and rushed to check the school website. Sure enough, all schools had been closed for the day. Snow day!

She considered spending the day curled up inside with cocoa and video games. But when she looked out the window to survey the neighborhood, she found there were already kids out there building forts or snowmen. So it looked like the snow was the wet kind that packed together well. Good for building, or snowballs. She could have some fun with that. So after a leisurely breakfast, she bundled up warm, grabbed a thick pair of gloves and headed to a nearby park.

There weren't too many people out yet, but those that were seemed mostly to be building stuff out of snow. Rana scooped up a large handful of it herself, and found it stuck together perfectly. Really, this stuff just begged to be sculpted into something. She smiled and dropped her ball into the snow, then started rolling it around to make a bigger ball. She wasn't sure what she was making yet, whether it would be a classic snowman or something else, but a big ball of snow was a good place to start.

Rana was rolling her snowball along the ground, thinking it was starting to get big, when someone wandered over and said hello. She glanced up at him, saw he wasn't anyone she recognized, and answered "Hey," ready to get back to her work. But he had more to say. She sat back on her heels and looked up at him.

"What, you're never made a snowman?" she said, a little incredulous. Even if he hadn't, plenty of picture books and kid's TV shows and stuff showed kids making one. Did this guy live under a rock or something? Still, she pointed out the basics. "It's not hard. Just pile up snow in a vaguely human shape. If you want to get traditional, made three large balls of snow and pile them on each other. Here." She scooped up a big double-handful of snow, packed it quickly together into a ball, then plopped it on top of her first ball. Then she gathered together a smaller ball and added it to the stack.

"That's the basic idea," she said, indicating the shaped pile of snow. "Then decorate it with sticks and rocks and whatever else you got." She backed up a couple steps to examine her creation critically, then commented, "Eh, I want a bigger one." So she scooted back to its side, squished the smaller balls into the bigger one, then kept rolling.

Rana dimly noticed the guy wandering off to build his own thing, but she kept her focus on her own growing collection of snow. She still wasn't sure what she wanted to build, but the basis for anything was a big hunk of snow, so she kept rolling. She packed in the sides as she went to help it roll easier, but in general the snow didn't need a lot of help to stick together.

When the ball started to get too big to roll easily, she stopped and looked around. The guy was still nearby, and gathering up his own mound of snow. His pile seemed to be pretty big already, and getting steadily bigger. Rana raised her eyebrows incredulously at the sight. How big was he planning to make his snowman? "Geeze, that's a lot of snow. Are you trying for a snow sumo wrestler or something?" she called over to him.

A Snorlax? What was that supposed to..."Oh, that's a pokemon, right?" she asked, kind of remembering something about it. She hadn't really gotten into the whole pokemon thing, but after the phone game was hugely popular over the summer, it was kind of hard not to learn something about it. So apparently a Snorlax was something big, huh?

At his question, she looked back at her own snow ball. She didn't really have an idea of what she wanted to make yet, but if he was going big..."Well, maybe I'll make a snow sumo wrestler, then!" Go big or go home, right? She considered the shape of a sumo wrestler, then decided her ball wasn't big enough yet. Since it wasn't easy to roll any more, she gathered up handfuls of snow and started packing it around the sides to build it up. While she worked, she planned the rest of the build. The classic 3-ball shape didn't seen to fit this idea, so maybe make one small ball for a head, then sculpt the arms and legs onto the body. That would also be easier than trying to haul two more balls of snow on top of the big one.

"A fat bear pokemon? What, like a giant teddy bear?" she asked. That sounded pretty easy to make out of snow. But she bet she could make her snow sumo wrestler look better than his snow pokemon!

She took a step back from her giant snow ball and considered its shape. If she wanted this to be the best snow sumo guy, she'd want to get the shape of the body right. A sumo wrestler was, like, a really fat guy, right? With those one of those loincloth things. She looked down at her own torso for ideas, decided the front and back should be flattened a bit more, and started packing the snow a little tighter there, scraping some off when it wouldn't pack right. Then she started to shape the shoulders a little, getting it ready for the head.

Rana rolled a ball for the head and stretched up to put it on the shoulders on her sumo wrestler. She had to pack a little bit of loose snow around the neck area to help it stay in place, but she got it steady soon enough. She stepped back to see how it looked overall, and immediately realized it would have been easier to do the face details before putting the head on the body. She scowled, annoyed that she hadn't thought of that earlier, but figured at this point it'd just be more work to take it down, do the face, and then re-position it.

She huffed at herself, then decided to pause for a minute and turned to look at the other guy's snow pokemon. If his sculpture was accurate, it did loot like it's make a good plushie. "Oh yeah," she said in agreement. "Or maybe a giant bean bag chair. Looks like it'd be fun to flop on."

"I'm Rana," she replied simply, waving as Jason headed off. She glanced at her watch too. She had been out longer than she expected, and she was getting kind of cold, but she wasn't done with her snowman yet. And if he could finish his, she could finish hers! She...might speed up the process a little, though. Go for a little less detail, perhaps. She rubbed her chilled hands together a moment for warmth, then started carving groves in the sides to suggest arms.