fh_trips | Kohala Coast, Hawaii - Morning & Afternoon - Friday

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spring break 2011: hawaii

Kohala Coast, Hawaii - Morning & Afternoon - Friday - February 25th

With only two days of vacation left, time was running out for the guests to enjoy the blue skies and warm ocean breeze of Hawaii. Luckily, there were still plenty of things to do at the resort, for anyone who wasn't worn out from all the fun yet!

[ Guest Quarters | Resort Activities | The Spa Without Walls | Beach Activites | Tidepool Education | OOC ]

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Ben gave her the well-practiced "I'm humoring you" look of all sixteen year old boys before flashing her a genuine grin.

Click!

"Good," she said, checking the viewing screen. "I'll have something to balance out all those drunken pictures I took of you at the bar on Sunday. I can't have everyone thinking that's all you did on vacation."

He turned a lovely brick red. "That was all your fault."

"Right," she said dryly. "I'd forgotten I'd forced you to steal all my drinks. Funny how that detail had completely slipped my mind."

"I hear drinking leads to memory loss," he told her.

"So what you're saying is that you have no idea what happened Sunday night at all," Karla said, snapping her fingers in comprehension. "Why didn't you say so?"

"I was embarrassed to," Ben lied, grinning at her.

He remembered all of it. Including the terrible, terrible poetry.

Hers. His was astral.

Clearly, alcohol inspired delusions as well! Karla's poetry had made people weep at it's beauty. Weep.

"Was it the dancing on the table that led to all that embarrassment?" Karla asked. "Or the announcement that you'd fight anyone in the bar that didn't agree that Dink Meeker had the prettiest eyes of anyone?"

"I didn't say that!" Ben declared, perhaps a smidge too loudly.

The table dancing would never have happened, but the other...was possible.

"Oh, maybe you were just projecting that thought so loudly that I thought you were saying it," Karla said innocently. "That's entirely probable."

"I didn't even notice his eyes," Ben said stubbornly. "I mean, he had two of them, but other than that..."

"You're trying to tell me that his big, brown eyes garnered no notice whatsoever?" Karla challenged.

...If Ender's memories were correct, she was pretty sure they were blue.

"Blue," Ben corrected absently. "Maybe hazel."

"My mistake," Karla said, so dryly the ocean level dropped a few feet.

"Photographic memory!" Ben said. "It's not like I gazed longingly into them or anything."

"Of course you didn't," Karla said, somehow making her agreement sound like anything but.

Ben began ticking points off on his fingers. "One, Dink is not exactly my type. Two, Tahiri was on the trip with us." He paused. "Maybe that should have been the first point. Regardless, he's going to pass along information he's gathered about Graff to me, so I'm going to be inclined to like him a lot for that."

Karla was giving him her best 'you said it, I didn't' look, but didn't press. Or mention that his type seemed to be 'Ender' a lot of the time.

"You're going to share that information with me, right?" she asked instead. "I'm no more a fan of Graff than you are."

Possibly less, considering she had Ender's memories about him.

He nodded. "Graff is fixing his problem with his mostly damaged children by trying to shoot them into space."

"So Ender mentioned," Karla said. "And helping Bean locate his missing embryos in exchange for Bean acting as Peter's messenger boy or whatever."

"Bean said he believes in Peter and what he's doing," Ben said, looking conflicted.

Finally he said it. "It's so horribly unfair that Peter's going to be labeled the peacemaker and Ender the killer."

"That's what Ender told me." Which meant that Karla trusted it a lot more than whatever Bean had to say on the subject, even if the subject was Bean himself.

"I know," Karla said. "I know. It's like Locke and Demosthenes all over, only so much worse because Ender's not complicit the way Val was. And Ender says he doesn't care, but...how can he not?!"

"My feeling is that it's because Ender believes it about himself anyway," he said. "He's cast off Earth and its politics--or he's trying to, anyway--like you'd cut off a limb. It only affects him as an echo of what used to exist. History will change its opinion on him a dozen times over the centuries. He honestly doesn't care about that: his opinion on what happened with the Formics is the only he'll trust." He sighed. "With the information he had, he made the only decision he could, and it's a decision that will haunt him for the rest of his life."

"He acts like he made that decision in a vacuum," Karla said, shoulders slumping. "Like he wasn't trained and guided towards it every minute of his life."

"He made the final decision," Ben said quietly. "And he was picked because he would. The rest of the Jeesh wouldn't have done it."

Re: Tidepool Education

glacial_queen - 2011-02-27 18:30 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Tidepool Education

momslilassassin - 2011-02-27 21:06 (UTC) - Expand

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