Sand, Sunscreen, and Emotional Recovery

There are few betrayals worse than emotional betrayal.

Except maybe narratorial betrayal.

Imagine this: you lose your airship ticket because a man with perfect cheekbones and the aura of a misplaced semicolon distracts you into missing your ride. So you, loyal and determined, hitch your way across half a collapsing world—through train yards, smugglers’ docks, a brief stint on a llama ferry—to catch up with the three grammatical delinquents you’ve been documenting since page one.

And when you finally find them, at long last—

They're on the beach.

Playing volleyball.

Wearing flower shirts.

Drinking out of coconuts.

Kaito had sunglasses. SOTA HAD SUNGLASSES. Even the parrot had a tiny towel draped over its wing like it was waiting for room service.

I thought they’d be preparing. Planning. Charging toward the U.S. in a blaze of plot-relevant urgency.

Instead, I found them living out a vacation montage.

Now don’t get me wrong, dear reader—after what they’ve been through, maybe they deserve a beach day. But from where I stood—sunburned, sweating, and still mildly traumatized by Colombian mafia pigeons—this felt personal.

I mean, I thought they'd be launching a counterattack on entropy. Saving grammar. Declaring war on corrupted autocorrect.

But no.

Kaito was buried in sand up to his neck while Sota sculpted a vaguely accurate sandcastle of the Eiffel Tower on his head.

And Hana?

She was lounging under a sun umbrella like a villain on her day off, sipping something that came with a little umbrella and a lot of judgment.

I stepped closer, notebook in hand, ready to announce my presence with dramatic flair—and tripped over a plastic bucket shaped like a pineapple.

So I stayed at a distance.

Watching. Recording. Questioning my life choices.

Whatever they were doing here, I had a sinking feeling it was going to be loud, chaotic, and exactly the kind of nonsense I’d come to expect from the only people still running toward the end of the world.

So dear reader...

Welcome to the Beach Episode.

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The day began with hope.

Not the useful kind. The dangerous kind. The kind that says, “Sure, let’s try swimming right after eating three suspicious churros and a seafood platter sold out of a sandcastle.”

Sota was the first to fall.

And by fall, I mean he attempted to samba.

It started innocently enough: he heard music—something vaguely tropical, violently upbeat, and possibly generated by a coconut with Bluetooth. Drawn in like a moth to a poorly mixed cocktail, he made his way toward the source: a group of locals dancing in the sand.

He grinned. “I got this.”

He did not got this.

His hips moved like tortured question marks. His arms attempted jazz hands and gave up halfway. For some reason, he tried to incorporate finger guns.

One grandmother, roughly the size of a mailbox but with the energy of a volcano, had seen enough.

She tackled him mid-twirl.

Flat. In the sand. Like a small clumsy gazelle hit by a samba freight train.

“Eu te ensinei nada disso!” she shouted, shaking a sandal over his head like a sacred relic of rhythm.

The parrot laughed so hard it fell off its perch and yelled, “TRAGIC!”

Meanwhile, Kaito had taken it upon himself to test every tropical drink at the beach bar. He was currently on something called “The Flaming Accent”—a cocktail that changed flavors based on your emotional state.

“It tastes like betrayal,” he mumbled.

“because you sad,” the bartender replied.

Hana, of course, refused to relax.

She stood on the edge of the water like a general surveying a battlefield, arms crossed, sunglasses reflecting chaos. At one point, a volleyball rolled to her feet.

She kicked it back with sniper precision. It knocked over a coconut stand.

No one questioned her after that.

Elsewhere, Sota had finally made peace with the grandma. Mostly because she tied a bandana around his head, declared him “her honorary idiot nephew,” and offered him a mango.

“I think I made a friend,” he said, smiling.

"To the woman who body-slammed you?" Kaito asked.

“Exactly!”

The sun climbed higher. The breeze smelled like grilled fruit and ambition. Somewhere, a kid released a kite shaped like the UN logo. It immediately got tangled in a satellite dish and burst into flames.

A seagull stole someone’s wallet.

The journalist? Me? I sat under a striped umbrella, scribbling everything down, unsure if this was a strategic pause…

…or just the eye of the hurricane.

And somehow, deep down, I knew: this was going to get much dumber before it got smarter.

And god, I was right.

It began, as most terrible ideas do, with a man holding a microphone and wearing sunglasses that screamed “I peaked in the '90s and I’m fine with that.”

“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,” he shouted into a speaker that immediately short-circuited, sparked, and then worked anyway out of pure willpower, “WELCOME TO 38th YEARLY SAMBA-FUTEBOL BATTLE OF BEACH!”

There was applause.

There was music.

There were two inflatable flamingos fighting in the background for dominance.

“This is” the man bellowed, “where dance meets destiny! Where footwork meets FOOTBALL! Where loser… goes home sunburnt and mildly humiliated!”

Kaito blinked. “Wait, what?”

A samba-football tournament. Not football. Not samba. Both.

Each team was expected to samba their way across the field, keep rhythm with the music, and score goals while occasionally being graded on “musicality,” “vibe,” and “sparkle.”

“Do we have to participate?” Hana asked.

“Look around,” Kaito whispered.

The entire beach had turned. Watching them. Cheering them. Chanting something vaguely resembling “JOIN! JOIN! JOIN!” or possibly “JOG! JOG! JOG!”—unclear, as the rhythm section was getting aggressive with the drums.

Sota nodded solemnly. “I think we’ve been chosen.”

Each team received a uniform: neon crop tops, glitter visors, and socks with little maracas sewn into the cuffs. Kaito’s shirt said “Footloose But Not Free.” Sota’s read “Dribble Like It’s Hot.” Hana’s just said “No.”

And then—music.

Blaring. Infectious. Probably illegal in three countries.

The match began.

It was chaos.

Imagine football, but everyone’s hips are moving like they’re possessed by rhythm demons. Imagine trying to dribble someone while also doing a full-body shimmy. Imagine trying to win while being penalized for not voguing dramatically after scoring.

Kaito tried to dance and dribble at the same time, tripped over his own samba, and landed face-first into a glitter cannon. He emerged looking like a disco ball that lost custody of its shine.

Sota was somehow incredible—until he tried to “flirt samba” with an opponent and got spin-kicked into the sand.

The parrot flew overhead screaming coaching tips like, “USE YOUR TOES, NOT YOUR TRAUMA!”

Hana?

Hana didn’t dance. Hana charged.

She bulldozed through rhythm like a tax audit—aggressive, effective, and devoid of flair. She scored once. Twice. Then glared at the referee who was deducting points for “lack of pizzazz.”

“I will pizzazz your spine,” she said.

They let the goal stand.

By halftime, it was tied.

Kaito was wheezing. Sota had a coconut helmet. Hana was actively foaming at the glitter penalty judge.

And then… the second half happened.

The opposing team turned out to be actual local champions. They had choreographed goal dances. They scored while doing synchronized backflips. One of them did a cartwheel mid-header.

Final score: 6-2.

They lost. Badly.

“Hey,” Kaito said, flat on the sand. “We got three.”

“One of them was an accident,” Sota wheezed. “And the other two was Hana threatening someone’s bloodline.”

“Useless,” the parrot added.

“Still counts,” Hana grunted, lying next to them, arms out, eyes closed.

The announcer declared the opposing team “Champions of Chaos and Sand,” and the trio received a pineapple shaped like it was crying as a consolation prize.

The sun dipped low on the horizon, painting the sky with dramatic oranges and the faint smell of grilled corn. The samba music had faded. The crowd dispersed. Even the flamingos had surrendered to exhaustion, deflated and bobbing sadly in the surf.

Our heroes?

Collapsed.

On the sand.

Emotionally and physically destroyed.

“I’m still finding glitter in places glitter shouldn’t be,” Kaito muttered.

“I have third-degree samba burns,” Sota groaned.

“I bent a referee’s whistle with my bare hands,” Hana said.

“…Should we be concerned about that?”

“No.”

They lay there in silence, listening to the waves and trying not to move. The air was still. Peaceful. For the first time since the apocalypse began, no one was chasing them. No language was collapsing. No planes were crashing into trains crashing into ferries.

It was... almost normal.

“These kinds of moments,” Kaito said slowly, “are the ones that I miss the most.”

Hana nodded. “We'll get them back.”

The parrot waddled up beside them, dragging the crying pineapple like a prize it hadn’t earned.

A breeze rolled in. Cool. Quiet. Almost poetic.

Hana opened one eye. “Tomorrow we leave?”

“Yeah,” Kaito said. “Back to the mission. Back to America.”

Sota raised a hand weakly. “Can we leave in the afternoon? I need time to emotionally unpack whatever samba did to my soul.”

The trio said nothing else.

Just let the moonlight fall across the sand as they rested, temporarily free from chaos.

Far in the distance, under a palm tree, I watched them from a safe distance.

I still had glitter in my notebook.

I didn’t care.

Because for once, they weren’t running. Weren’t fighting. Weren’t falling off a boat or being hunted by a grammar cult.

They were just… breathing.

But something tells me it won’t last.