Chapter Text
“Hey, Nyx, are you okay?”
Nyx looked up with a groan, a flat hand sheltering her eyes from the glaring sun despite already being shaded by an upright umbrella. Ronove’s monokini stuck fast to her skin, the swimwear somehow still clingy despite the fact that the heat had long ago dried it and her hair into crispy, salted locks. The beachwater had done well to cool down the frying Wisp, but ice and water were not quite the same, and eventually being suspended so intensely in an element she was not used to drove Ronove ashore. “I-It’s…S-so hot…” she replied to her conjurer.
“Oh,” Eve’s face twists for a moment in recognition that she should have understood the situation immediately. The conjurer hummed with thought, before stating with a smile, “Hold on, I know something that might help.”
Ronove let herself relax back down onto the towel, relishing the splotches she didn’t realize had still been a bit damp and had cooled when she sat up and exposed them to air. The reprieve lasted but a moment, however, and Nyx soon found herself continuing to swelter despite the blanket of shade she laid under. “Kappoot!” Mott exclaimed in excitement nearby. The Wisp couldn’t see what the small Xothian was doing, but she knew, because the little insect-like creature had been doing the same thing for over an hour now, and did the same thing every time the four of them went to the beach, with or without additional companionship; they were making sandcastles as high as they could, before flying high into the air and crashing down upon them at full force, obliterating them in a flying debris of wet, gritty sand. On occasion, Eve and Klein (and June, whenever she was present) would help build a much bigger castle, which Mott loved. The activity wet the little creature, clods of damp sand sticking to her fur, only to be covered by a coat of fine and dry sand, leaving the alien looking much like a flying sugar cookie. At least they didn’t need to worry about sunburn, and while a standard form was useful, it irked Nyx to no end that her skin- like many other pale Mogwai- was vulnerable to the whims of UV radiation.
She could hear someone sit down beside her, and even with her eyes closed, Ronove could tell who it was; the snickering was a dead giveaway. “You don’t have to come to the beach if you don’t like it, you know.”
“E-easy for you to say. You think I wanna miss out on b-bonding with E-Eve and let you have her to t-t-to yourself?” she replied to Klein, her closed eyes furrowed in the frustration that came from merely acknowledging her pactmate, let alone engaging in conversation with the Cat Sith. “She l-loves the beach so much, and the h-heat comes from the l-light of the s-sun, which means y-you like it! I kn-know what you’re up to, Gr-Gremory.” But they’d had some version of this conversation so many times that neither of them were compelled to so much as look at the other.
But if they had been, Nyx would have seen Klein rolling her eyes. “Eve likes your company, dummy. You don’t have to do things you hate to prove yourself to her. I don’t exactly excel at building snow forts with the two of you.”
“C-come on, that’s d-different…”
“How?” Klein challenged.
“B-because she only did that t-to try and spend t-time with m-me! This is something sh-she already enj-joys.”
Even though her companion had closed her eyes to the world, Klein forced herself to not roll her eyes a second time. “She always liked building snow forts, but with other people. She hasn’t had someone to do it with for a long time and she was really happy when you wanted to.”
Nyx finally opened her eyes again, immediately regretting it as her retinas were seared. “How w-would you kn-know that?”
“This cool new fad called ‘conversation.’” Klein had been growing too familiar with Nyx lately with the snark, and the Wisp couldn’t hide her disdain. Still, if Klein was telling the truth (a tall order for the Cat Sith), she had a good point. “Uh, Eve? What’re you doing with-”
“Unf!” Nyx shot upwards in a sitting position by reflex, but a wave of cool bliss and relaxation overtook her, and she laid back down. Resting on her belly was a chunk of ice, originally several separate ice cubes that seemed to have begun to melt at one point before freezing back together. Even with the sublimation that was already beginning, the temperature felt heavenly on Nyx’s skin. Eve and Klein left her in peace, the conjurer mentioning something about a snack.
The chunk of cooler ice left on her belly gave Nyx an idea, and once the cooling agent completely disappeared into frigid and then lukewarm water, she sat up and used her magical powers to create ice from the moisture in the air; yes, the snow quickly melted to slush, but it felt revitalizing all the same, and the feed of energy she received from Staccato made the endeavor easy.
By the time Nyx felt awake, hydrated, and comfortable, Eve and Klein had moved on with Mott, helping the little alien baby build a tall castle to destroy. At first she waited silently, patiently, but as the time stretched out, Ronove found herself quite bored and began conjuring snowballs, tossing them with an unpracticed arm into the ocean. Despite her evident lack of athleticism, most of the temperature-defying projectiles hit their mark, and the half hour she spent doing this only improved her aim. It was satisfying to hear the ‘plunk’ and splash sound, the smaller snowballs never to be seen again, the larger ones buoyantly bobbing back to the surface, only to perish within moments as it was eaten apart by the warm water and salt. Something about it was so relaxing and cathartic that she didn’t notice Mott divebomb the latest highrise sand structure.
“So,” Klein asked, her words commanding her pactmate’s attention. “Why didn’t you just do this before?”
The answer was, of course, that Nyx had not thought of it, plain and simple. But she did not want to give that fodder to Gremory- and she felt deeply embarrassed about not having thought of it, too. And that embarrassment turned to anger and frustration as the Wisp realized there was no way to express any amount of it to Klein, so instead she just scowled with a scrunched up face and hurled one of the snowballs at the Cat Sith. It missed because of Klein’s catlike reflexes, and she dodged one, two, but Nyx was sure the third-
-not only was Ronove very wrong about her ability to nail Klein in the chest with a snowball, she had also failed to realize that between tosses two and three, Gremory had leapt in front of Eve, and in dodging that particular ball, the icy snow hit Staccato.
Time seemed to slow from the point at which the impact could first be heard, Nyx and Klein each feeling like they were moving at a tenth their normal speed, standing and turning respectively. But the good-natured laughter brought the laws of physics back to normal, and Staccato proclaimed, “Hey-hey! You made a snow cone!” Perhaps not as such; fortunately, the snowball missed Eve’s face and abdomen, but hit her square in the hands- which were holding a still-crisp orange from the cooler. Were holding. Now, in the fruit’s place, Eve’s hands held a soft ball of slush that had one side dyed orange from the impact. It was not quite a snowcone, but it had the idea of one. “Hey, Nyx, toss me another!” And the Wisp, otherwise as bewildered and still as her pactmate was, obliged; Staccato dropped the haphazardly made shaved ice and caught the fresh snowball after dropping the first, letting it melt down and create some sand optimal for making an orange-flavoured sandcastle for Mott to destroy. The snow was tossed into her left and, and with her right she pulled out a half-cut kiwi, viciously squeezing the juices out onto the snow that was already making her hand feel icy. She handed it off to Mott, who held it with all six stubby feet and began to gnaw at it. Gremory and Ronove finally snapped out of their shared trance at the shrieking trill of jubilant approval Mott elicited upon biting into the flavoured snow. “Hey, Klein, Nyx, what flavour do you want? …Well, don’t just stand there, I need more ice!”
The four of them found themselves just a minute later sitting in a row, watching the waves, each holding a handful of snow flavoured by whatever fruits Staccato had dragged along on their outing. Their hands were collectively chilled and sticky with the juice, but none seemed to mind. “I suppose next time we should bring paper cups,” Klein suggested. No one opened their mouths, but hummed in agreement. “But that means Nyx has to keep coming, too.”
The two mogwai glanced at each other, a feeling of peace threaded between them, until Eve asked, “Why would that have been a problem?”
