Lemme see.. Yeah. Raindrops right?
Composer: Alson
Typist: MingKang

RAINDROPS.

A solid gray state of unchanging matter washed across the sky.

It had been like that for the past few days, with only short periods of muted sunlight wavering its way past the grey ceiling. Some places were starting to flood or already flooded. The amount of water was too much for the town’s drainage system to handle.

Taking shelter in a pavilion on a spot of low ground in the park was starting to seem like a bad idea.

“Now what?” my younger brother said, his tone dripping with barely concealed disdain. “Genius?”

I struggled to place my feet in a more comfortable position, for the fact that we were huddle on the small table. The water was already knee deep and it was rising rapidly. Neither of us, I believed, wanted to leave this little island and wade out into the rain. On the other hand, staying here until the sea of water resided was not a sustainable idea too, not with a cranky brother trying to push you off the table and into the water.

I growled and placed my feet where I had taken them from, after finding no suitable area to rest them on. To my annoyance, that space was already occupied by Jin’s hand. “Move aside.”

“Not until you tell me what you plan to do. Not sitting here like an idiot, I – ow!” Apparently, sharp stamp with my heel was all that I needed to persuade him into silence and shift his hand away, albeit with him muttering threats of some horrible retribution that I would certainly suffer once we were ‘out of here’.

To tell the truth, I had absolutely no idea how we were going to extricate ourselves from this mess. Being the elder as I was, however, I was obliged to do something.

And something was what I did.

“We’re going to sit out the rain and see how it goes.”

“Brilliant idea Diane! Now, why did I think of that? Hmm…” Jin pretended to ponder for a moment, “PROBABLY BECAUSE THE WATER IS ABOUT TO ENGULF THE TABLE!?”

The yell, or scream, or what one decided to call it, ended on a high note and the murky water submerged the last traces of the chair I had been resting my shoes on. I snatched them away hurriedly, not wanting to become wetter than they already were. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Jin doing the same; probably the cause of the high-pitched whine.

I probably should have noticed the mud on the seats when we first came in, but then again, could you really have blamed me? The rain was already falling hard at that time, each meteor crashing painfully on exposed skin. A gift from the heavens, I thought sarcastically.

“Diane! Your shoes –“

I snapped around immediately, expecting to see one of my articles floating, or sinking, into the murky depths that surrounded us.

“– Are wetting my shorts!”

So that was what he had called me for. By now, I was quite ready to slam one of my dirty, wet, maybe slightly smelly shoes into my moaning brother’s face.

A brilliant flash. A bolt of pure energy.The deafening crack of the whip came, nearly simultaneously with its physical partner.

Jin jumped, as high as I ever saw him go.

He is one of the few brave souls whom I know to be able to stay in a supposedly haunted house alone for a night just to get the kick out of it. There were only two things he feared, namely fruits with seeds (because he had choked on one when he was younger) and lightning.There was no particular reason to fear lightning. Reason and logic dictated that the only time one should fear it was when one was the tallest object for miles around.

But fear did not need a reason. Nor logic. You just felt it, that urge to run, move, cower. I smelt his fear wafting from him, betraying his innermost thoughts. The loss of his pompous attitude was immediate as his hand found my wrist. It was sweaty.

“Dy?” Jin uses ‘Dy’ whenever he wanted a favour from me or an intimate talk.“Yes?” I replied.

“My friend says that lightning can travel through water. Can it?”

I glanced at him. His small and now frightened face. I sometimes could forget that he was only eleven, a year’s time and he would be learning about electricity.
But young as he was, I did not wish to burden him with thoughts of electrons and protons.

“Dy? It… It can’t hit us here, right?”

I looked into his face, suddenly tired. I could, of course, take my revenge by scaring him. But then, the thought passed only with the brightest of moments; it being slammed to oblivion by the greater, damned sense of sisterly duty.

“No Jin, it can’t.”

-End