OPEN LOG: A beach party.

[bouchonne]

WHO: Everyone.
WHAT: A beach party.
WHEN: On a very hot day. At some point during the month.
WHERE: A beach just outside of Kirkwall.
NOTES: It is a beach party.

During a particularly hot and oppressive week in Kingsway, the Diplomacy division announces it will be diverting some of its funds to organize a party on a nearby beach. Kirkwallers are invited as well - a relationship-building sort of effort - but the party is mostly intended for morale boosting for Riftwatch itself.

The party features the following:

• Transportation to this lovely beach from the Gallows and from Kirkwall.


• Sunbathing and swimming in skimpy (or non-skimpy, if you're a fuckin square) bathing suits.


• Live music and dancing.


• Delectable grilled meats (and some vegetables, if you're a fuckin square).


• Rum drinks served in hollowed-out fruits.


• A sandcastle-building competition.


• A swim race.


• A few fun little sailboats bobbing around out on the water.

Does all that sound too wholesome? Great! There's also a cave system in the cliffs next to the beach. These little grottos are full of nooks and crannies and are perfect for a bit of sinful action after dark; in one cavern, there'll be some gambling games where some of Kirkwall's citizens are losing money; in another, you're likely to run into people making out.

Have fun! Soak up sun! Don't get in trouble! Or do, whatever, it's a beach party.

Comments

Mr and Mrs Rivain (Darras & Yseult) || OTA

[staysail]

i - Sunbathing

Yseult is wearing a bikini and that is now in this tag and no one can do anything about it.

A cloth umbrella with a very fetching fringe running along its edge is planted beside the water, with a towel spread out beneath it. This is for Yseult, who looks, by the way, great.

“You look great,” Darras says to her. He rolls onto his side so he can get a better look at her. Shirtless, he also looks great, even with a crust of sand on his back. The sun is strong and bright and he’s weathering it very handsomely. “Doesn’t she look great?”

"Darras," Yseult says, in a tone that makes his name sound like "stop." She lowers her book and her sunglasses both (Riftwatch acquired a bin of them from a rift a while back, just go with it) to give him a look over the top. The stern effect is slightly spoiled by her then setting down the book to steal the coconut full of rum out of his hand.

"Please ignore him," she says to whoever's been asked this question, "Too much sun."

Impossible, and to prove it: Darras puts on his sunglasses. They look great.

ii - Sandcastle Competition

“Knock that one down,” Darras says to Yseult, out of the side of his mouth. He’s busy digging a pit, mining good deep damp sand for the walls of their castle--which is half-constructed and well-formed, with good clean lines and turrets studded with little windows formed from small twigs tied with ribbons of beach grass.

He slaps his hands together to clean them off and nods, surreptitiously, toward the castle that he means.

“Or get someone else to do it. C’mon.”

"I'm not knocking down a child's sandcastle," Yseult replies, giving Darras an incredulous look that lasts only as long as it takes for the castle's true owner to return—not a child but a child's father or maybe uncle who has aggressively taken over castle-building while shooing the child out of the way to watch forlornly. Yseult's eyes narrow, rethinking.

She gets to her feet, suppressing a quick twitch of a smile at Darras before heading off. She's still brushing sand off her hands as she walks past, head down as if focused on picking a fingernail clean, so that it must be entirely by accident when she bumps into someone and hooks a foot around their ankle in the process, sending them stumbling right into the offending sandcastle.

Darras, observing from the hole, just barely suppresses his laugh. He ducks his head to muffle the choked sound, but stands up again to watch the aftermath.

“Oh, nooooo,” he says, loudly, “what’s happened….”

iii - Sailing

“It can be done with two, but it’s better with three.”

The sailboats, that is. Obviously the sailboat. For context, one of the sailboats is present. Darras has gone out into the water and dragged one closer to the shore, the better to be boarded once they’ve settled on the crew. Darras, still knee-deep in the water, is making his appeal while holding the line.

Yseult, already in the boat, is not paying attention to him. She's absorbed instead in peering at something further out in the water, a hand raised to shade her eyes even though she's also acquired some sunglasses from Riftwatch's stock, and so will have no say in who joins them.

Which gives Darras all the power. Without hesitating, he turns around and flags down the nearest passerby.

“C’mere!”

ii

[muckspout]

Edgard falls into the sandcastle face first. He raises his head to a child sobbing. He spits out the sand in his mouth. The child screams and runs. Edgard pushes himself to his feet and sees Darras laughing and the woman who bumped into him walking back.

Covered in sand, he walks over to them.

"Was that on purpose?" It is spoken calmly and sand is spat with every word.

[staysail]

Darras has turned his back to the scene and done a sort of half crouch in his great pit, to conceal any sign of laughter. Yseult's shadow falls over him as she returns, casually; Edgard's shadow is larger and fills more of the pit as he approaches. Darras shades his eyes and peers up at him.

Not the uncle-or-father come for vengeance. Good.

"Surely you've been used as a weapon before, mate."

Meanwhile, at the scene of the crime, the father-or-uncle has gone chasing after the kid--who, after having fled from that first brief moment of shock and horror at seeing Edgard, has actually stopped crying and has now circled all the way back, having lost his chaparone. He drops to his knees besides the ruins and starts scooping sand toward himself, starting in on a rebuild. All's well that ends well, until uncle-or-father makes it back this way again.

[muckspout]

Edgard peers down at the couple, raining sand with this action.

“I have. Didn’t much care for it.” He kicks at the sand at his feet. “Did you do it because you want to win the competition and you were threatened by a child or some other reason?”

Sure, the children appear to have recovered fine, but it’s the principle of the matter.

[staysail]

"Edgard. Mate." Darras gives him a steady look, which is somehow effective and leveling even from the bottom of this pit. "What's gotten into you? Sunstroke? Head injury? We're here for a good time, all of us, you included. Have you had a drink yet? He can't have had a drink yet," an aside to Yseult, "he's better company than this, usually."

[hassaran]

Yseult, who has been busy circling around to send the guardian off further in the wrong direction and then delivering one of the broad flat stones Darras has been using for digging to the boy left behind to work on his castle, returns in time to cock an eyebrow at Darras over Edgard's shoulder that's decidedly skeptical.

"Perhaps a swim would improve his day."

[muckspout]

Edgard gives Yseult a distrustful look and then looks back to Darras. He rolls his eyes and then sighs. He pushes his hair out of his face, sending sand flinging backward.

"Get me a drink and I'll let it go. I'll pass on the swim."

He goes from standing to crosslegged next to the pit in one fluid falling motion, sending another wave of sand down with him.

[staysail]

"A mercenary."

Darras sighs, without much weight behind it, and hefts himself out of the pit. Damp sand is crusted on his arms and his hands, and he's a polite enough barkeep to start to brush it off.

"How do you feel about rum? Yseult, stand guard, would you, make sure he doesn't roll in. I don't want him to be buried alive."

[muckspout]

Edgard narrows his eyes at that.

“I won’t fall in! And rum is fine. At least I won’t fall in unless pushed.”

He looks warily at Yseult, his guard.

iii.

[sulahnan]

Make that passers-by, plural, because it's Athessa and Derrica who happen to be nearest.

Athessa raises her eyebrows, eyes inscrutable from behind her sunglasses.

"If three's better, then whaddya make of four?"

[tender]

"Can we fit four?" is the more pressing question, though is a little bit of an opening for Yseult to dismiss them both.

[staysail]

"We can fit four," Darras says with great magnanimity, "it's small, but it's not that small--c'mon--"

He's already wading back out to the boat to join Yseult, who is not being allowed the option to dismiss. He's the captain here. (Of course if she wanted the option to dismiss, as captain, he would let her have it, but that's not applicable to the moment.)

[hassaran]

Yseult is too late to slide out of this and too polite to openly refuse, so when she turns back to find Darras urging Athessa and Derrica into the boat, she just smiles in her usual minimalist way and nods her agreement. "Of course."

She's wearing his shirt (presumably, given the size). It's open and almost transparently thin in any case, but she twitches the corner further over a thigh before settling back on her hands and looking at Darras, expression expectant even with the glasses. Just because he's the captain doesn't make her crew here.

[sulahnan]

Well, if he says they can fit four, they'll fit four. It's not weird to hang out, scantily clad, with your similarly scantily clad boss and the Vice Admiral. It's not, don't worry about it.

"I take it we have permission to board, then," Athessa says, hauling herself out of the shallow surf and onto the sailboat and automatically offering a hand down to Derrica.

[tender]

The gauzy tunic Derrica's unearthed has a scattering of wet droplets across the front, as if someone had slung a handful of water across her. She's plucking at the side, a little anxious, right up until the moment Yseult acquiesces. The anxiety ebbs, enough for her to take Athessa's hand and pull herself up on board.

She's sailed with Darras enough times now that it is familiar to turn to him and smile, tip her head towards the flapping sails.

"Where are we heading?"

[staysail]

Darras clambors up with a great sluicing of water. He's not at all careful with it, and if Yseult is splashed a little in the process, well, who can say that wasn't his intent.

"Oh, I dunno," he says airily, "wherever this wind takes us, I'd say. Off to Calabar, to meet the Calabarbarians. Or just out into the open water and turning around again before we get out too deep. Any opinion?"

--This to Yseult, even as he's pointing Derrica toward the sail. The flapping of the cloth puts them downwind; time to let it out.

[hassaran]

"I don't have the right wig for Calabar," Yseult replies, with the air of an inside joke. She flicks her arm to send a smaller spray of water back at Darras. "So a lap out around the sandbar will have to do."

There are two glasses tucked in the narrow gap between the bench and the boat's edge, and she picks up one for a sip. It's visibly chilled, containing clear liquid, a couple slices of lime, and a stone cube. "Darras tells me you've spent some time at sea, Derrica?"

i

[cozen]

"Ouais," Bastien agrees.

Should he be inviting himself to sit down with a lounging married couple and their remarkable collective amount of bare skin? Are they that sort of friends? They are now. He's decided. But he's also not sitting on their towel or beneath their umbrella, rather than at a polite remove, his own barely-touched book in hand.

"Obviously sun-addled. You are completely hideous."

[staysail]

"I think we duel now," Darras says--but he says it after he's laughed, so the amount of levity in the remark is no doubt implied. "C'mon, on your feet, mate. I can't let a comment like that stand."

[cozen]

Bastien looks at the sand, and his bare feet in the sand, and his book, and otherwise makes a great show out of the fact that he just sat down before he does as instructed.

"Fisticuffs? I left my épée in my other pants."

[staysail]

Darras sizes Bastien up as he stands. Hm. "Now that I'm confronted with it, I don't think I could punch you. Definitely not in the face. But generally we don't have a choice, unless--?"

He looks to Yseult, expectantly.

"Suggestions?"

[hassaran]

"Wrestling," Yseult suggests, then holds up a finger, "No. A race to fetch me another drink."

[staysail]

"A race," Darras repeats, slowly, "right. But... you know we're neither of us runners..."

[cozen]

"Then no one will have too much of an advantage," Bastien says, taking a few steps in the direction of wherever the drinks are waiting.

They're slow steps, with his feet dragging lines in the sand, like inviting Darras to follow. He only cheats at competitions when they matter.

[hassaran]

"You're not duelists, either. And we need another round. Be careful not to spill it on the way or I'll have to declare a forfeit." She's turning back to her book now.