Originally published in Witch Eye Volume Eleven

Alas, Nimüe the White One was not the laughing maiden this fine day. No, she was down right grumpy actually. Now many of you may not know this, but a grumpy goddess is not the most pleasant entity to be around, bad things happen...Fires, plagues, Buffy gets cancelled, need I go on? And no mere ice cream was going to help this one, especially as she was right in the middle of trying Atkins. Was it lack of carbs that was making our maiden deity so cranky? No, although it was a good guess! You see, her mother was damn sexy, as you all remember from my previous look into the lives of the sacred...and her skin was the color of the black well of space. Yes, this goddess definitely was not in any desperate need of sun block if you catch my drift, and this was what made Nimüe so upset. You might have thought she got the label “The White One” because she was pure, or because she was the keeper of the Black Heart, but no, really it was a cruel nickname given to her by the other gods at school...Nimüe is...lets see...how do we put this delicately...pasty. It was her mother’s obsession with ice cream really, vanilla was the first ice cream and so was her first daughter. You can’t fault her for it really, I mean...the first TV’s were in black and white...anyway...

So this particular day that I mentioned earlier, the one that she was grumpy on...

Yes, the one I was just talking about...a paragraph ago...come on now, it wasn’t that long ago...I know you were raised in front of a TV and all, but try to muster up a little attention span here.

Where was I? Oh yes...

So on this particular day Nimue was feeling especially down about being all pastylike, it made her feel different...and we all know how mean kids are to people who are different, even if the kids in question do happen to be gods. And then it hit her...

“I could go get a tan!!!!”

But this was madness...a TAN??? The White One??? Get a TAN??? Particularly because, well...no one knew what the hell that was really. Its like if I came up to you and said, “Hey, Im going to go get myself a gnorf.” You’d be all like...well what the hell is a gnorf. And you’d have a right to because I’m not a god and I probably would have forgotten to take my medication that day...but I digress...

So she thought about an energy source strong enough to give her that nice bronzed look that she so wanted, and poof....she was standing in front of a big orange ball of flame. And boy was it hot...I mean really hot...like Goddess on Goddess hot....and let me tell you...that’s hot. Now as any of us pasty people would have told her had we been around yet was that she was standing right in front of the Sun, and pasty + sun = you better hope you have aloe handy. But as she has just invented the tan, the sunburn was totally unheard of. So she sunbathed....and sunbathed...and sunbathed...and for the LOVE OF GOD GET OUT OF THE SUN WOMAN!!! But it was too late...Nimüe, the White One, the laughing maiden had become Nimüe, the Red One, the blistered maiden. But she was in luck!! You see, just four planets to the right was one that was almost nothing but water. A few high peaks, but other than that...just water...so as you probably guessed she made a beeline straight for it and dived right in!

Well, much to the chagrin of the animals living in the water, Nimüe was unaware of just how much heat she had taken in, and upon jumping into the planet she instantly evaporated half of the water on the planet. I mean, come on...how would you feel, being your little prehistoric fishy self, swimming along happily and then poof....your home is gone and you are laying on that hard stuff that you usually pooped on. Because that’s how it went down, don’t let a scientist tell you that life decided to leave the water voluntarily, because well...um...they are stupid heads.

So that’s how it happened...Nimüe’s burn eventually went away, and life on Earth was permanently changed. Nimüe did go back to Earth a lot, but she never tanned again.

The moral of the story? Always morals with you people....fine....

If you are in the pool and a pissed off Goddess comes your way....swim to the deep end.