Who? Edward & Adele Where? The beach on the island What? Collecting shells and throwing pebbles When? This afternoon Rating? Low Open? Yes
Edward had tried to tell Adele that it was going to be an impossible feat to bring back every shell on the island, but of course she knew that. She was not an idiot, after all, but she did think that she could get a good amount. She could make some more jewellery with some of them, and then decorate the parks with the rest perhaps. She thought that it would look pretty, and Edward thought he could probably use the opportunity to try to make her accidentally learn something.
She had groaned and very nearly lay down on the sand and refused to get up when he had revealed a little book for her. Edward was to be surprised, though. Once she had been able to identify the first few shells from the book, a certain liveliness seemed to come about her. Eventually, he had coaxed her away from shells alone to poke about in rock pools. She screamed in horror whenever anything moved beneath the water, and at one point even a particularly slimy bit of seaweed made her shriek and run and eventually dissolve in laughter when he read out the description to her and she realised it was only a plant.
He had asked her to remind him about some of the shells without the aid of the book, and she had remembered quite while, so he had let her continue in peace, gathering shells into her little bucket and showing off now by naming them as she went.
Walking along with her, Edward had started to absent-mindedly pick up little pebbles to throw into the waves. There was a rock sticking up from the water not to far off, and eventually he decided to use it for target practice. The first throw flew wildly to left of the rock, and the next few followed the same trajectory. As someone who could handle a gun, he a good enough marksman usually - but of course, blind as he was on one side, that depth of focus he had once had was now gone. He knew that given time his mind would compensate for the loss, correct the error how it could. And so he took the opportunity to practice, with a determined patience. Each pebble gradually got closer to making contact.
Curious about what he was doing, Adele threw a pebble of her own and hit the target. She was quite pleased with herself, but didn't gloat. Instead, she closed her right eye and tried again. The pebble veered to the left as her guardian's had, and she looked up at him curiously.
He instructed her to look beyond the rock, but note its position. Then he had her close her eye again, and tell him what happened. "It moved a bit to the right," she confirmed, and then spent some time closing one eye and then the other, watching it move left to right and then back to where it was 'supposed' to be. He held up a pebble very close to her and had her do the same thing. "It moved a lot more," she observed.
An unexpected lesson about stereopsis followed, complete with a triangulated diagram drawn on the inside of the book cover for her. It wasn't a lesson he had ever expected to be delivering, but he found that she was interested because it seemed relevant. She wanted to understand, and if she was being honest it was because she cared deeply, it was because she loved him dearly.
"Right, a rematch. Best of three, but we can use monocular vision only," he told her, and knowing exactly what that meant now, she gathered her pebbles and closed one eye.