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"Remind me why you dragged me into this again?" Hermann asked Tendo.
Newt, the most obvious member of K-SCI to be chomping at the bit for a snowball fight, was slightly bouncing up and down on his heels, his hair slightly peaking out of the makeshift cover each time he did so.
Tendo shrugged. "Three against two isn't fair, everyone else was busy, and I had a bet with Herc that I could get you to do it. That's 60 whole dollars I didn't have yesterday, but I can split with you if you feel—"
Hermann sighed. "No, no, if I have to be involved with this, I might as well give it the old college try."
"Which means I don't have to carry you both through this whole thing! Everyone wins!" Newt said.
On the opposite side of Newt, Tendo, and Hermann, another makeshift cover served as the base for the Becket brothers and Mako.
Mako was giving the "snowballs" an odd look. An option that mixed shaving cream with cornflour got nixed pretty quick as nobody wanted to raise the ire of the hardworking technicians in the hangar. The new option, ping pong balls covered in a fluffy kind of yarn, was craftily assembled by Raleigh in the lead-up to the fight.
"Not sure I see the appeal of snowballs without mess, but sacrifices have to be made."
Yancy laughed and pat Mako on the back. "Getting hit in the back with ping pong balls is still better than what my plans were this evening. So, we going to trash these guys?"
"Yes," Raleigh and Mako said in unison.
"It's like a training exercise!" Yancy said. "Sure, we'll go with that."
A group of onlookers had gathered, including Herc and the Kaidonovskys.
"Will give the Triplets the play-by-play later." Sasha said, handing over hot chocolate to a bemused Herc and the maker of said hot chocolate Aleksis.
The rules agreed upon were simple, snowballs got thrown at others until one team gave up entirely. No substitutions.
"Herc, give us the countdown!" Tendo said.
"THREE!"
Everyone braced themselves...
"TWO!"
Newt adjusted the goggles that served as protection for his glasses.
"ONE!"
Determined looks all around...
"GO!"
The informally, if not creatively named Team Backstage and Team Danger started to throw down. Hermann kept himself firmly behind the cover to throw from that position with Tendo being slightly more adventurous when it came to hitting then dodging. Newt didn't care, going right in the thick of things. The amount of snowballs he could actually throw were disproportionate to the amount he carried...and he was carrying too many to begin with.
Raleigh and Mako took bolder moves as far as edging away from the cover, but Yancy had tactics.
Yancy wasn't actually throwing snowballs directly at people, but aiming them at the surroundings, with the rebound hopefully being enough to take the balls to the target. This decision lead to Newt being pummeled not just from the front by Raleigh and Mako, but also in the back due to some well placed shots at a parked vehicle.
Some of those shots made their way towards Tendo, who dodged as needed, and Hermann, who just mildly tolerated getting hit on the top of his head by landing fake snowballs.
"This is not what I would call an inspired showing, Tendo." Hermann said.
Tendo took in the sight of Newt taking the snowballs thrown at him and throwing them back with an unexpected amount of precision. He wasn't sure if that precision was deliberate or not.
"I think that the more that get lobbed at him, the more...passionate he gets? Just don't underestimate the power of a good tank."
The two teams remained at a stalemate more than they had actually expected. Usually snowball fights involved things like the cold, snow getting into warmly bundled clothing, the dreaded "snowball in the eye", among other weather related factors. Aside from a few stray ping pong balls peaking out of unraveling wool and, as always, getting hit in the eye, this was a far more tolerable form of snowball fighting.
The unexpected spanner in the works was that many of the snowballs, either thrown off of Newt or misaimed by Newt, rolled close to the spectators. When Sasha and Aleksis discovered this, they grinned at each other knowingly.
Herc sipped his cocoa and pretended he didn't see anything.
Then the Wei Triplets rolled in, an even more unexpected spanner in the works since they came back far too early from their training session. With snowballs they made themselves. Yelling at the top of their lungs.
Alarmed that they were beaten to the punch as surprise entrants to the snowball fight, Sasha and Aleksis hollered a hearty "BRING IT" before gathering up as many snowballs as they could.
"That's not in the rules!" Hermann exclaimed, much madder about this turn of events than he ever intended to be.
Team Danger had stopped throwing stuff at Newt enough for him to talk to Hermann and Tendo uninterrupted.
"You know what that means though, right?" Newt asked.
"What?" Hermann replied.
"That means IT'S ON!"
Team Danger and the pilots of Cherno Alpha went to meet the challenge of the Wei Triplets, with Newt following close behind. Tendo and Hermann came out from behind the cover. Herc arrived to greet them with hot chocolate.
"We should head over," Tendo said.
"I reckon it will take a few minutes before they realize you weren't there," Herc theorized.
"Mm-hmm," Hermann said, enjoying his cocoa (and not being pummeled by fluff covered tennis balls), obviously not in a rush.