Galatea - Chapter 17

CHAPTER 17: ARENOLOGY

“Oh Brian, you always know exactly how to make a girl happy!” Audrey said, allowing a content sigh to finally pass her lips.

“Anything for you, babe,” Brian replied, joining his girlfriend on the gingham blanket they had carefully laid out on the sand.

It was downright gorgeous today—the sun was shining bright and yet a cool breeze kept its heat in check. A perfect day for the beach, as it was a Wednesday and the sandy expanse was basically empty, allowing for Audrey and Brian to own the beach uninterrupted. But even if the beach was occupied, Audrey knew they’d clear a path for her.

She was fucking beautiful. Words were failing to describe just how flawlessly perfect her body was these days. It would have been no competition, were it not for—

No. Audrey wasn’t going to stress over her at the moment. It was time to relax now, enjoy a day at the beach with her loving boyfriend away from the “complexities” of her life. Classes were a joke to her intellect now, the professors practically begging her to take some time off from what they assumed were rigorous study sessions. Truthfully, her mind simply retained all the information, even when she was only half-paying attention. Then again… she wasn’t about to tell her professors “no.”

Audrey jumped into the ocean, swimming deep into the infinite azure. As a child, she always hated how the pull of the tides interrupted her playtime, a scientific phenomenon far beyond her mere human existence that obeyed only tectonic plates and the moon. But now, the waning tide had no choice but to respect her. It pulled and tugged and yet her impossibly beautiful form remained rooted in place.

The same could not be said for a couple so distracted by her beauty they were nearly washed out to sea, but luckily Audrey was there with the save when, a hundred feet away from shore, they were shaken out of their beauty-induced stupor.

“Have you considered maybe wearing a burqa?” Brian remarked in jest once Audrey returned to land. He wasn’t much of an ocean guy, preferring to remain on land and work on a spur of the moment tan. Needless to say, Audrey brought the ocean to him for that comment, flicking specks of cold water onto his hot body.

They got into a bit of a loving tussle, with Audrey running and laughing as Brian hunted her down, only for him to be effortlessly overpowered by his ever-improving girlfriend.

“Heh, how’s it feel being pinned to the ground by a girl, Brian?” a downright machiavellian smile spreading on Audrey’s face.

“Feels a bit… salty and coarse,” he replied with complete honesty, remarking how sandy Audrey’s body had become from the prior swim in the ocean. She hopped up off him pretty quickly after that, leaving him spread out on the towel.

“Fair. I’m going to wash up real quick and join you back here!” Audrey mentioned, adjusting her sizable breasts within her still-too-tight bikini as the feeling of salt and sand chafing her cleavage became all too apparent.

“That’s a copy,” Brian replied with twin finger guns. “I’ll be right here when you get back. That is, unless the ice cream guy shows up. In that case, no promises can be made.”

Audrey giggled. “I understand wholeheartedly.”

She made a b-line for the nearest community washroom, popping into one of the shower stalls and washing the salty seawater off her impressive form. But even after such a thorough shower, there was still one part of her body that remained frustratingly unclean.

Reaching into her traveling toiletry bag, she retrieved her brush. Her hair was totally speckled with sand! She swore she could feel every single grain that peppered her scalp. It didn’t even irritate her skin, but its rather noticeable ever-presence was enough to seriously annoy her.

“Alright, sandy hair…” she muttered to herself in front of the nearest mirror, taking care to line her reflected hair up with her next attack. “…feel the devastation of my hairbrush!”

Her hair follicles had rivaled steel for a while now. She didn’t have to be careful about accidentally tugging on tangled hair and yanking her whole head to one side in pain. Audrey was so casually confident that her eyes drifted away from brushing hair, deeming it downright unconscious as her focus shifted to a particularly interesting stain on the side wall. What was its history? Audrey wondered. How come it almost seems to resemble—“

*chict* *chi-chi-chi-chi-chict*

What sounded like the weight of an elephant pressing down on a pile of twigs echoed throughout the tiny washroom. Audrey froze stiff. Her hyper-intellect had already deduced exactly what had happened, even if she didn’t want to believe it. But there was no denying the facts of the situation—Audrey’s hair was so thick and luscious that not even her most sturdy brush could penetrate it.

She slowly brought the brush down to inspect it, not daring to receive the answer from the mirror. The brush itself looked like it had been run over by a bus, the plastic of its body torn and cracked, with around 75% of the bristles missing entirely.

“Fuck!” She exclaimed, effortlessly crushing what remained of the brush in her palm. “Now this annoying sand will never leave my hair!”

She continued to shout various expletives of impressive variety at the tiny yellow silica that refused to vacate her impossibly perfect scalp. But then, after expecting nothing to happen and her complaints being fired into the careless void of the universe, something did indeed happen.

“Why don’t you just leave my head and leave me the fuck alone!?”

It was meant as a rhetorical question, and yet the sand answered the call. With the organization of an ant colony, each grain of sand began to wiggle its way out of the blonde forest atop her head, falling to the ground until she couldn’t feel a single instance of the annoyingly small bastards. She wanted them out of her hair, and they simply obeyed accordingly.

Except now the relief of her having a sand-free scalp was undermined by a far more pressing situation.

She could fucking control sand.

Sure, it wasn’t as groundbreaking as flight, but humans have known how to mimic flight for over four centuries. Sand manipulation? That was something brand new. Her potent mind was already churning up new idea after new idea of what she could be capable of if all of the continent’s beaches suddenly slipped below sea level. Of course, she knew better than to act upon these strange, intrusive thoughts. But it was fun to fantasize about.

That would show them that Aubrey still had skin in the game!

That would show… her.

Like a kid on Christmas day, Audrey excitedly sprinted across the vast stretches of beach to show off her new ability to Brian.

“Babe! Baaaabe! You’re not going to believe it!” she exclaimed, only briefly distracted by the ice cream he had in his hand before quickly remembering her original point.

“What’s up Aud?” he asked, pausing from his frozen treat before silently offering her a lick, which she politely declined.

“I- I have psammokinesis!”

“What-a-kinesis?” Brian responded, genuinely confused.

Audrey blushed a little. Behind the bombshell body, there was still a bit of a meek geek that remained. “Psammokinesis. It’s like, the ability to manipulate sand. Er, that’s what they called it on the superhero discussion boards, a-at least, as far as I remember!” She downplayed her nerdiness, but Brian didn’t seem to care either way.

Instead, something else caught his attention, scratching his head with his free hand. “But where did the ‘psammo’ part come from? I mean, the scientific name is ‘silica’ and I’m pretty sure ‘arenology’ is the study of sand. Er—Not implying you’re wrong or anything!” He quickly course-corrected upon witnessing Audrey stretch casually, inadvertently flexing her feminine musculature.

Audrey giggled. “Oh Brian, I wouldn’t worry about offending me. After all, I wouldn’t need my physique to stop you. Just a mere swish of my finger aaaand…”

Brian felt himself sink slightly, losing about a foot of height. The sand beneath his feet suddenly adopted the physics of its watery neighbor, parting like waves as the dunes engulfed him up to his ankles. Panicked, he lost balance briefly and plummeted backwards, feet still rooted firmly in the ground.

His face scrunched up, jokingly skeeved at what his girlfriend had done. All the while, Audrey’s giggling had devolved into downright laughing. “Oh Brian, you should have seen the look on your face when you fell there! Heehee!”

As soon as Brian felt the sand loosen around Brian’s ankles he immediately yanked them out of the ground, hopping onto the blanket out of no-so-subtle fear. “Jeez, babe! Don’t go all ‘mad with power’ on me!” he spoke in jest. “You nearly made me drop my ice cream!”

“Heehee, I think you mean my ice cream now!” Her hand closed into a fist and a wave of sand scooped Brian’s cone right out of his hand, bringing it over to Audrey’s outstretched hand. She took a lick, only for the karmic taste of sand-coated frozen dairy to immediately come back to bite her.

“Bleck! Pthibit!” she hacked, coughing up bits of sand, much to the amusement of Brian. “Okay so maybe I didn’t think that part through all the way, but you cannot lie, having sand powers is awesome!”

“I don’t disagree one bit! In fact, I’m surprised at myself for handling this so well!” Brian admitted, baffled at how ultimately un-baffled he was at the sight of his girlfriend’s ever-improving prowess. “I mean, minor telekinesis? How can that even be possible? What about a virus altering your DNA is even allowing for such a potent modification?”

“Who knows! But isn’t this exciting!?” Audrey exclaimed with unbounded giddiness. “The virus is doing things that weren’t even intended! Like, it’s trying to find anything to improve about me and just making straight-up science fiction modifications!”

Brian’s eyebrows became briefly worried upon considering such a surprisingly plausible theory. “If that’s the case, who knows what else that thing could be doing to your body? I mean, what if—”

His pondering was interrupted by a bitcrushed rendition of ABBA’s The Winner Takes It All blaring from somewhere nearby. He quickly paused what he was doing and retrieved a burner phone from his pants which were hanging on the shared cooler.

“Yes? Hello?”

There was what sounded like panicked rambling on the other end. Audrey could have sussed out more details, but she wanted to respect Brian’s privacy.

“...Right. Understood, I’ll be right over.”

Audrey looked at her boyfriend with a quizzical expression. Brian’s, however, was one of resigned sorrow and disappointment.

“It’s Giles. He needs me back at the lab ASAP.”