+ FOURTH WALL EVENT: BEACH PARTY +

[vitaelamorte]

Who: E V E R Y O N E
Where: The Beach!
When: Sept 5th to Sept 10th
Rating: G to PG-13 (please label higher ratings, thank you!)
Summary: Are the other parties a little too crowded and chaotic for you? Come and chill by the water! And don't forget to have a look at the Fourth Wall Master Post for event rules, puzzle clues, and more places to mingle!
The Story:

Beginning on September 5th, much of the shoreline will be taken over by a massive beach party! As with all good Wonderland parties, it will be run day and night, always mysteriously tidy and always with food that replenishes itself.

At various points along the beach, there will be wheel barrels full of candy and treats, and torches for people to claim as their own. There are also volleyball nets, and when darkness falls they will light up like Christmas trees for those who want to play well into the night.

There are many places set up to sit - some with tables, some with pillows and blankets, many with shade, and some even dug out in the sand. There is music playing, but the source is unclear.

However, there's one thing that the curious may find - a message in a bottle. It will regenerate within five minutes if taken, allowing as many curious truth-seekers to investigate as possible.

Comments

[doorkey]

"Hey, can I help?"

There's a girl with vividly blue hair plunking herself down in the sand beside Arya, and whole bag of nacho-powdered peanuts she's pilfered from the array of snacks, which she immediately begins pressing into the sand to create little lines of walkways between the towers- Sure, any sensible person wouldn't waste food and just use seashells, but theres so much food here!

"We can make little roads... or peanut-people, standing guard at the top!"

[needlebearer]

"If you want," Arya replies, though it takes her a moment to take her eyes from the sandcastle and up to the girl who's joined her. "But the castle needs to stay as it is. It's how it's meant to look."

It looks like a poor attempt by a child half her age, but it's Winterfell, and a sand-Winterfell is as close as she knows she will ever get now.

[doorkey]

"Okay." Coraline agrees, nodding, trying to keep her own opinion of the sandcastle's slightly lopsided shape to herself. It's this other girl's creation, after all, and it's rude to mess up other people's things, even if you might think that lending a hand to those outer walls might be an improvement. Especially once the tide starts coming in.

So instead she decorates with the orange peanuts, sticking them very delicately here and there, populating Winterfell with their cheesy adornment. It's not very long into this that Coraline finds herself bored once again.

"Could I build a moat, maybe?"

[needlebearer]

Arya glances down at the space between the two sets of sand walls, which was already supposed to be a moat, and feels a little embarrassed that it wasn't immediately obvious with her terrible artistic skills.

"All right. It needs a really big moat."

[doorkey]

"Can do!" Coraline salutes, and is on hands and knees in two seconds flat, scooping out a trench around the outer wall with cupped fingers.

"...There's this boarded up well in the backyard of my real-home-outside-of-wonderland, they told me when I moved in that it goes down half a mile deep!." She boasts cheerfully as she digs. "...A moat shouldn't be too deep, right? It should just have lots of starving crocodiles. Hey, or maybe we can find some crabs!"

[needlebearer]

She frowns, looking rather confused as she looks up at Coraline. "But Winterfell doesn't have crabs or crocodiles." Her hesitance gives way to curiosity. "...What are crocodiles?"

[doorkey]

"You don't know Crocodiles?" Coraline blinked, staring at the girl strangely. "They're from Africa, or Australia! They're reptiles and they live in the river and they've got short legs and really sharp teeth on a long snout, like this!"

She gestured with both hands and her fingers spread to inticate teeth, 'chomping' her arms open and shut. "They're really scary predators, they look just like logs whe they're floating in the water so that they can just-" Snapping her 'jaws' shut, Coraline makes a demonstrative chomping sound "Sneak up on some monkeys for lunch!"

"I think they'd make moats harder to get across, without being a goner."

[needlebearer]

The mental image she conjures up probably isn't completely accurate, but Arya thinks they sound marvellous nonetheless, like some little known beast from the jungles of Sothoryos. And while she'd wanted to create as accurate a Winterfell as she could, she had to admit that the addition of these crocodiles would be pretty amazing.

"All right. We could train them to bite off the legs of invaders."

The idea of a crocodile snapping at Theon Greyjoy's legs is quite satisfying to her.

[doorkey]

"Exactly!" Coraline nods with a little too much enthusiasm, still scooping away.

"I mean you wouldn't even have to train them, I'm pretty sure they'd just do that naturally." She shrugs, packing down the sand around the forming moat with a pat of her hand. "You'd probably have to train them to be nice if somebody who lived in the castle just fell in by mistake."

"...What's Winterfell, by the way?" It's no place Coraline's ever heard of. "Is that the name of the kingdom?"

[needlebearer]

"I can train them," she says confidently, but when she remembers how difficult she'd found it to train Nymeria to even follow simple commands, she's not so sure. "We both can."

She scoops up some more sand to fortify one of the walls that's beginning to crumble. "Not the kingdom - the castle. My home."

[doorkey]

"Yeah!" Coraline nodded, grinning, bolstered by the confidence of knowing that this was just a play-pretend game, and that no real Crocodiles would be harmed or harming anyone in the act of making this particular moat. "We'll train them with pieces of hot dogs for treats!"

"Oh...you live in a castle back home?" She looks fairly impressed by that. With a closer peering appraisal Arya's way, Coraline's voice adopted a slightly shyer tone. "So, um....Are you the squire to a knight, then, or...a princess?"

A tomboy sort of princess, by the looks of things. Or maybe even one of the servants, if those were the kinds of clothes she wore.

"Hang on, just one second..." Coraline climbed to her feet and moved back to the snack wheelbarrow, returning with a few pretzel rods to place randomly around the 'moat'. "Here, for now these can be our crocodiles. They look just like logs when they're sleeping, see?"

[needlebearer]

"I'm not a princess." Arya says it a little abruptly, then feels bad, knowing she was merely curious and not trying to force her into the role. And technically, she was a princess, ever since Robb had declared himself King in the North. She still wasn't sure how she felt about that. "My father was the Warden of the North. We're one of the Great Houses of the Seven Kingdoms."

She frowns a little as Coraline places the pretzels, not really able to imagine an animal that looked like a log when it was sleeping, but then nods, feeling they get the idea across well. "Do they disguise themselves as logs?"

[doorkey]

"So you're, uh... a Noble Lady, then?" Coraline squints, not knowing too much at all about the ins and outs of who's who in a castle. "Of the north?" Hm. Well that explained things. Like why it was called Winterfell.

"No wonder you've never seen crocodiles, then." She reasons thoughtfully, lookig again at the wall of sand and wondering if an ice castle would be more accurate. "They're reptiles, so they like places that get lots of warm sun to bask in."

Not that a tiny detail like that would keep pretend-crocodiles from being added in here and now.

If Coraline was honest with herself, it was a tiny bit intimidating talking to someone who was part of a Great House, and lived in a castle. Maybe that's why she was so adamant on schooling Arya in Crocodile facts... she might not have ever lived in a place bigger than a divided flat, but she did have access to a television , and on boring days had amused herself with programs on the Nature channel.

"Yup! Just like floating logs...for protective coloration." She nodded sagely, "And they keep their eyes just above the water, so they can see what's for dinner."

[needlebearer]

Arya shakes her head, knowing she won't be able to explain properly. "No, I'm not a Lady. My mother was, and my sister." But she was just Arya, especially here in Wonderland where titles meant nothing unless they belonged to the Queen of Hearts - that was the one saving grace of this place as far as she was concerned, apart from the parties and the sweets.

"They have the right idea," she says, pushing a pretzel-crocodile along the sand to imagine it swimming. "Just floating along like that until their prey comes by, they'd never see them coming."

[doorkey]

Coraline, silently contemplating the looks of Arya, decided that must mean this poor girl wound up getting treated like a tombyish Cinderella... something grossly unfair, like that. She could say something sympathetic, but it might just make a sensitive subject even worse, so she settled for a politely puzzled "oh" and left it at that.

"That's why, in Africa, the animals all need to be really watchful for crocodiles, when they come to the riverbank for a drink." She explained very seriously, nibbling on one end of the spare pretzel rods. Coraline wished she had some cheese dip. "Some of them aren't so lucky."