The Ranch

"The Wilderness Must Be Explored" (3)

Theodore leaves the party, but the show must go on. Next on the agenda, the team walks along the river and heads to the beach.

"Tih." Kai calls out. Tih looks back at Kai. The background is full of flowers and sparkles, Kai's face is in the middle of it all, holding a pose. The sparkles are water droplets reflected off of the sunlight sprayed by Kai and the flowers are wild. He picked them along the way.

Tih stares at Kai, waiting for what he wants to say. Kai stands motionless for a few moments, but sees there's no effect and gives up," Nevermind."

They keep walking. Kai sticks next to Tih's side. He's between the river and Tih. When he sees his chance, he aggressively grabs Tih wrist and pins him to a tree, making a thud sound. He leans against the tree with one arm and stares solemnly into Tih's eyes. Tih doesn't react.

"What are you doing? Don't lag behind." Sherlock calls out.

Kai admits his second defeat.

They reach the beach. Victor, Basile, and Pierre find driftwood and large stones to use as makeshift seats. They drag them to a spot fifteen feet from the water.

Lucien sits on the sand and leans against the rock before taking out his laptop. Pierre goes back in the water to continue swimming. Basile sits on a taller rock and takes out a sandwich. Victor and Kai decide to spar.

Basile, Abel, Sherlock, and Tih are tasked with the challenge of catching seafood for tonight's dinner. Before that though, Kai gives them a rundown on their potential catches,"Clams can be caught by digging below sand or mud flats. Look for a clam show. A small depression in the sand.

mussels, and oysters

Lobsters are found at the bottom of the sea. They like hiding in rocky ledges, crevices, reefs, kelp, among other things. They stick together in groups. They're more active at night, so I would fish for those last."

With that, the three scour the area to look for depressions in the sand. I say three, because someone tied a net to Tih and told him to go swim. Tih has the inability to do anything other than a dolphin swim. He can be seen zooming through the water, the open net behind him.

They also tried to set up the fishing poles, but without Theodore, they're not very successful. In actuality, Theodore wouldn't be much help in this department. He's never fished at the beach before. It's good that Kai had knowledge about the topic.

Basile finds what Kai described as a keyhole. He has to dig a foot deep before finding his first clam. The three collect a bucket of clams after an hour. At this point, someone calls Tih back to shore.

Kelp, a sea urchin, a sea turtle, and a few fish can be found in the filled fishing net trailing behind Tih as he exits the water, but the most conspicuous is the troupe of prawns. Tih must have swam through a passing group of them and they were caught before they could run away.

Kai throws out the sea urchin, but Victor tells Basile to put it in his space. They let the turtle go and throw out the kelp.

A few fish, two buckets of clams, and three buckets of prawns. This is what they've collected by sunset. They plan to wait a while before cooking. According to Kai, they have to let the clams soak in the water to spit out the sand in them.

They spend the rest of the evening messing around. A giant water battle, a race, they find a small ledge and have a belly flopping competition, along with other things.

They have a small tournament on the sandy terrain, which affects their balance at times. Victor comes out on top.

Tih sits on the wet sand. He gets submerged every time a wave rolls over and his position shifts but his posture remains the same. He takes his time staring at what's underneath.

It's a completely new sight that he only discovered after coming to the island, and he still hasn't seen everything there is to be seen. He explored the lake back at the orphanage, but the sights in this water are completely different.

A seahorse swims past him and he grabs it bare-handed. His movements aren't affected by the water. He perfected this skill of catching sea creatures when Nathan had a short-lived seafood craving. Every day, he'd order Tih to go catch a certain sea creature.

Not knowing what these names looked like, it would take a few tries before Tih got the correct animal. This repeated every day until Nathan had to resort to describing what it looked like, but even after that, sometimes Tih still got the wrong animal that had a similar look to the description.

What happened with the failed attempts? Nathan would take them and sell them, pocketing the money. Tih had no care for the money, he was more interested in the new creatures he laid eyes upon each day.

Those creatures still remain in his head, but Nathan...what did he look like? The face is blurry in Tih's memory. So many things are recently. What did that person tell him? What did they look like? What did he used to eat when he lived in the woods? What was the animal he befriended? What happened to it? It's blurry. Very blurry.