Spear of Athena story in general outline

[Originally posted at Ana Mardoll's Ramblings.]

It's an idea I'd had before that came back to me when on a long walk yesterday (the longest I've done since breaking my ankle), group of women go on an epic quest that's about a myth whose origin is obscure but seems to be vaguely Amazonian (mythological variety) and definitely Hellenic since it's for the spear of Athena.

As is often the case in these stories they have an evil counterpart.

Complications arise because the good group ends up crossing paths with an assumed male person and eventually is forced to let that person travel with them since the alternative is to leave assumed male person to be killed off by evil counterpart group. Assumed male person is treated as a prisoner, though, and leader of quest is very against person's presence.

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They locate the sanctuary in which the spear is located, each member of the group tries to take up the spear but can't.

This seems impossible since destiny was on their side and their quest was definitely foretold to bring the spear's chosen warrior to it.

Evil counterpart group announces their presence by saying that the the quest did, since clearly one of them is chosen and without the good group to follow they'd never have located the spear.

Cue low tech battle. These are people racing --as though the fate of the universe depended on it-- to find a Mycenaean era spear that is assumed to be magic. They're fighting with spears, swords, and knives. Mostly swords since it's easier to get fencing lessons than spear fighting lessons.

Assumed male person manages to get rope binding hands together cut, but the one who does that is immediately forced into a fight and none of the other good people will disobey their leader to arm assumed male person.

Dodging bladed weapons while completely unarmed and unarmored is a short term solution at best, and assumed male person gets backed up against a wall next to the spear no one could budge. In a moment of desperation, assumed male person grabs the magic spear to use its shaft to block an incoming sword blow.

Everything stops.

Quest group leader: That's impossible! You have to be a woman to wield the spear!
Assumed Male Person: Who says I'm not?
*Assumed Male Person says some ancient Greek words (introduced earlier in the story) agreeing to contract the spear offered by allowing itself to be lifted*
*Assumed Male Person gets a makeover including sensible, if Mycenaean era, armor, secondary weapons, skill that ought to require years of training, and results like she'd been on HRT for a year*

Battle is quickly won.

All of primary quest group is accepting except now-deposed leader who insists this is some sort of sacrilegious blasphemy.

Quest Group Member: So, I've felt like there was this thing between us for a while now but didn't say anything because I found you woefully unattractive.
Assumed Male Person: That's interesting, because I've felt like there was this thing between us for a while now but didn't say anything because I found you woefully unattracted.
Quest Group Member: I'm attracted now.
Assumed Male Person: So, you want to go out on Friday?
Quest Group Member: Friday I'm busy, how's Saturday?
Assumed Male Person: Saturday's good.

Spear of Athena is presumably used to do good and noble things.

A quick note on Chronos and Cronos

There's only one letter difference between Chronos and Cronos.  Blame the Latin Alphabet for them looking so similar.  Χρόνος and Κρόνος are much easier to tell apart.  Yeah, five of the six letters are exactly the same, but you're probably not going to confuse a Chi and a Kappa.

The letter K went out of style and went out of style hard in the Latin alphabet.  It was redundant since they had the letter C (always hard in Latin) and so when they transliterated kappa they did it not as K but instead as C.

So, people tend to confuse the two, and they have for a long time, and it's not just a question of spelling.

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Chronos/Chronus is the god of time.  He's not well preserved.  You see, Chronos was part of the Orphic tradition.  The Orphic tradition is pretty well fucked in terms of transmission.

As a result, Chronos/Chronus is very much bereft of a mythology.  He created the world egg, unless he didn't, and . . . that's about it.

Kronos/Chronos/Chronus is the god of . . . nothing really.  He is well preserved.  He's part of the traditions that do get transmitted well-ish.  There's really nothing where the transmission is good, but Greek Mythology is in many ways the best, and Kronos is a part of that.  A part that didn't fall into the hole of, "Well, almost everything gets lost over time."

The story goes something like this:

After the creation of the universe Gaia and Ouranous/Uranus were lovers and Ouranous was, for unfathomable reasons (fuck you patriarchy), the one in charge.

He liked having sex with Gaia, but wasn't too big into the initial results.  These were the Kyklopes/Cyclopes of old (not to be confused with the younger ones) and the hundred handed ones.  Ouranous locked them away in Tartaros/Tartarus.  This pissed Gaia off.

The Titans, not named that yet, on the other hand he was ok with.

Kronos was the youngest Titan and this was the situation he was born into.  Eleven of his siblings (the other first generation Titans) were free, his eldest siblings were imprisoned, his father did the imprisoning, and his mother wanted it to stop.

When Gaia asked her free children to help her save her imprisoned ones by violently opposing Ouranous, only Kronos, the youngest, stepped up.

Kronos attacked his dad by chopping off his genitals, which seemed to have done the trick because after that Kronos was undisputed ruler.

Kronos was an asshole though.  He reneged on his deal with his mother and left his siblings imprisoned.  He, like is father before him, found them aesthetically displeasing and kind of scary.

Prophecy said that he'd be overthrown by one of his own kids, just as his father was overthrown by him.  So he ate them.

When it got to the sixth child, though, his wife and his mother collaborated to save the kid, that being Zeus.

When Zeus had grown he began his fight against Kronos by inducing a vomiting fit which freed his older siblings.  (When a god is eaten, the god doesn't die.)

Then Zeus set free the Kyklopes of old and the hundred handed ones, as Kronos had promised to do but never done.

Finally Zeus sent out a general call for anyone pissed off with Kronos to join him in the coming war.

Kronos based his side on Mount Othrys, Zeus chose Mount Olympus.

The war lasted ten years.

Kronos lost; he was imprisoned in Tartaros and the hundred handed ones made sure he stayed in the prison he refused to free them from after promising to do so.

-

The point here is that Chronos has purpose, he's the god of time, and Kronos has story, see above, and if you put the two together you get a god with purpose and story.  So people did that.  And people do that.

People have been doing it for over two thousand years.  How far over?  Not really sure.  The Latin sources that conflate the two claim that the two have always been conflated but that seems questionable to me.

The takeaway should basically be this:

Chronos: God of time whose mythology we've almost entirely lost.

Kronos: God of [no clue] who plays a large and important role in the mythology we haven't lost.  Father of Zeus and siblings, former king of the gods.

Don't worry if you get them confused, there's a long tradition of doing that, but it's best to at least try not to.

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*  That's not to say that we know nothing of it.  There are ongoing attempts by brave scholars to reconstruct the beliefs and practices.  I'm sure there are non scholars doing the same.  And every so often we get our hands on a relevant papyrus.  It's not like archaeology is done with.

So, if you think that Orphic paganism is the path for you, there are resources you can draw on.  And, mostly, I don't want to make it sound like Orphism is dead.  I very much doubt it is.  This is a religion whose founding prophet was a poet extraordinaire and the best musician ever, whose lyre performance was more powerful than siren song and allowed be used to walk into and out of the afterlife itself through sheer force of musical awesome.

If a singer songwriter extraordinaire, who walked to the depths of Hell and back using only their six string guitar to get themselves through the gates, starts putting out prophecy in song, I think their religion is going to last.  The coolness factor alone should ensure that.  (Not an exact analogy, but pop culture afterlife is separated into different parts and Hell is the one with depths.)

All of that said, the transmission really, really sucks.

Tragedies with happy endings, what people don't understand about Athenian "pessimism", and the importance of reversal

If you're the type to go to Facebook, you can find a nascent version of this there.

Nietzsche liked early and mid tragedy and Athenian pessimism.  He thought it was the highest art form because of it's blending of Dionysian and Apollonian.

Trained in classics and specializing in philology, he definitely came from a place of authority and he understood the words quite well.

He was also wrong.

One of the great examples of this is why he didn't like Euripides.  There are plenty of good reasons to not like Euripides.  I don't like Euripides.  But Nietzsche didn't like it because the joke flew over his head.  Characters that existed to be farcically wrong in their thinking and were put on stage to be ridiculed were ones that Nietzsche thought were acting as mouthpieces of the author.  So Nietzsche thought Euripides was supporting the very thing he was attacking, and things like that are why Nietzsche didn't like Euripides.

For Nietzsche, tragedy was embodied in Aeschylus (the canonical early tragedian) and to a lesser extent Sophocles (the canonical middle tragedian) and utterly destroyed by Euripides (the canonical late tragedian.)

But Nietzsche likes them by way of taking part in a millennia long process of cherry picking.

Most tragedy doesn't survive.  If memory serves (I'm not going to look it up right now) Aeschylus is our best preserved author and we've got maybe ten percent of his work.  Tragedies came in threes.  Sometimes they were thematically linked, sometimes they were actually a trilogy narrative.  Every single tragedy was part of a set of three.  Only one of those sets survives.  Just one.

One result of this is that we've lost most of our happy ending tragedies and thus have a warped sense of the term.

Prometheus Bound survives, but it had two sequels in which Prometheus was first unbound and then he was reconciled with Zeus.  Prometheus got his happy ending, but we don't get to read it or preform it on stage because those happy ending tragedies weren't preserved.

But some happy endings do survive.  The famous king Oedipus finally, at the end of his life, is allowed to die in peace on his own terms having at last been forgiven for his unintentional crimes.

Nietzche's beloved Aeschylus produced the one surviving trilogy.  The last play, the Eumenides, has happy ending all around.  Everybody wins and nobody loses.

My favorite tragedy is the Philoctetes by Sophocles.  Happy ending there.  Euripides wrote one where Hercules goes down into the underworld and brings someone back to get a happy ending.

These things with happy endings are all tragedies.

Part of what makes them tragedies is that they hurt.  The endings are happy, but getting there is painful.  In the Philoctetes, for example, the character of Neoptolemus spends most of the play in an ethical dilemma that's tearing him apart.  Lying goes contrary to his very nature, but he's a soldier and his commander (Odysseus) has ordered him to take place in a morally repugnant deception.  It hurts to see the character go through that, and in the end you're relieved when he finally tells Odysseus to fuck off and isn't being torn inside anymore because it means the hurting will finally stop.

But a part that is perhaps more important is reversal.

Agamemnon starts his play returning triumphant from war.  Of course he gets his head chopped off.  Oedipus Rex has the title character start out as a beloved king, we all know what happened to him.  Antigone begins with the title character in a half-dead train-wreck family, but she's in a position of privilege and engaged to the prince so, while stuff around her is bad and she feels bad about it, she's sort of ok.  She ends up dying unnecessarily after being entombed alive.

Tragedy as we know it these days is all about that kind of reversal.  People rise, or (as in the Greek version) have already risen, and then they fall.

If someone starts in a shitty place, stays in a shitty place, and ends in a shitty place, that isn't tragedy.  That's abuse.

Tragedy with a bad ending requires people to have it good, even if it's only the half-good of Antigone's position in society while emotionally she's wrecked, and then have it all come crashing down.

The other sort of tragedy is the mirror image.  When Oedipus finally gets his happy ending he starts out already screwed over by fate: blind, outcast, with a dead mother/wife, and haunted by the knowledge of what he'd unintentionally done.  If that had ended on a downer there would be no reversal and without a reversal it's not a tragedy.

If we look at the happy endings that survived, and others that we know of, we see that where the more commonly preserved tragedies start with the character in a good place and end with them screwed over, the happy ending tragedies start with the character in a bad place and end with them in a good one.

In The Eumenides the human character starts off hounded and haunted by the furies, constantly on the run from them but unable to escape with his only respite being divine intervention.  Pretty bad place.  It ends with him free both of the furies and the curse that has for generations made his family a place of suffering, betrayal, revenge, murder, and so forth.

The title characters themselves start out as reviled old gods who are finding themselves without a place in the new order and are being robbed of their prize.  In the end they are loved, have a firm place in the new order, and have an even better prize than the one they were after.

Prometheus has to start out bound for Prometheus Unbound to be viable, he has to start out with Zeus really pissed off at him (which is never a good thing) for him to be able to reconcile.  That's how the two Prometheus sequels (which don't survive and so we know only the broad strokes of) are able to be tragedies with up endings.

Philoctetes starts off his play cursed, betrayed, abandoned, largely forgotten, and almost completely stripped of his humanity.  Also he's spent the last ten years in constant pain.  Most of the time it's almost unbearable pain, but that gets interrupted by periods of literally unbearable "drop to the ground screaming in agony because you're incapable of doing anything else" pain.

Plus the festering wound causing all this pain apparently smells really, really bad.

Philoctetes ends the play on his way to finally be healed and a prophecy-ensured glorious victory.

Neoptolemus starts out being coerced into doing things that go fundamentally against his morals and spends much of the play in anguish.  He leaves a hero.

Euripides Alcestis starts off with the title character dying.*  A lot of what happens in the play is her dying.  Which goes on, more or less, till she's dead.  Then there's a bit of mourning but even that doesn't go right, specifically it's cut short, and so those still alive feel even worse.  It ends with Hercules getting her away from Death and bringing the revived Alcestis back home.  Everyone gets to be happy again.

Tragedy isn't about good things going bad.  It's about things turning around.

I'd argue that there are three main points to tragedy:

• It's painful.  Whether the ending is happy or sad the journey will hurt
• It's about change.  Good crashes down to bad, bad is elevated to good.
• The problem is intractable.  It's the Kobayashi Maru test and the only Kirk option is divine intervention.  (Hercules was big into that even before he was elevated to full god, but other gods did stuff too.)

Tragedies are painful stories about no win situations, but sometimes you can actually win anyway.  It's just that you can't win through your own efforts.  Powers beyond those of mortals are at play and whether you crash and burn or rise above depends entirely on them and not on you.  All you can do is face the situation that you personally have no hope of solving.

They are also very much about reversals.  Which brings us to Athenian pessimism.

* * *

People hear things like, "Count no man happy until he's dead," or the story of Kleobis and Biton (their mother asked the gods to grant them what was best; they were struck dead on the spot) and they think the people who produced these things were pessimistic.  That's not quite it.

Though, it should be noted that the non-mystery religions of ancient Greece had a very negative view of the afterlife so being mortal was generally assumed to suck by the time you got to the end and one god claimed that the best thing that could happen to a mortal was for them not to be born at all.

It's all about an idea that's deeply ingrained in the Athenian mindset and has everything to do with change.  It's best summed up by a phrase that probably originated a bit later and definitely came from east of Greece: "This, too, shall pass."

You can't say someone is lucky before they're dead because, since they're still alive, you don't know what's going to happen to them next.  They might still fall.  What was best for Kleobis and Biton was to die at their peak in a way that gained them eternal fame (we know their names and have their statues) rather than to live on and possibly come crashing down.

It is extremely pessimistic, if you're doing well.

But people forget that Athens was a very old city.  It's so old that the margin of error on the earliest settlement date is around 2,000 years (9000 BC give or take 2,000 years).  It's definitely been inhabited non-stop for at least seven thousand years.

In 1200 civilization collapsed.  No one knows why (it was mermaids) but every civilization that had managed to be created was brought down.  Egypt and Assyria were basically the only ones to limp through the catastrophe but they were both quite diminished, all of the other civilizations were gone and people were forced to rebuild from scratch.

The empire that Athens was a part of was gone.  Literacy was gone.  Building techniques were gone.  At that point the idea of things turning around probably seemed pretty damned optimistic.

But they did rebuild, and they did regain literacy, and they did improve, and then came Persia.

Athens was, at the time, a nothing town surrounded by other nothing towns.  It made a play for power by supporting a rebellious Greek-speaking city in Persia and it backfired.  Persia was a giant nation.

Cue the battle of Marathon.  Athens took on Persia and won because landing is the most vulnerable time for an army invading by sea.  (Sparta was taking the day off for religious reasons.)

Persia, which was definitely the biggest thing around and possibly the biggest empire in the world at the time, didn't take the defeat lightly.

Having learned the vulnerability of landings the army was set to walk the distance.  This meant building a bridge from Asia to Europe.  They also dug canals so pesky peninsulas would get in the way of their ships.

Nature thus subjugated to their will, and with the largest army the world had ever known beside the largest navy the world had ever known, they sent emissaries to Greece.  Each city state was asked to give water and earth.  It seriously was just water and dirt.  It was, however, symbolic of becoming subservient to the Persians.

All but two Greek cities said, "Sure, have some dirt and water."

Athens figured they were screwed no matter what, so they threw the emissary to them in a well.  They were probably right.  While Sparta couldn't make it to the battle of Marathon, another city did send aid.  The Persians wiped them out entirely.

Sparta was just Sparta.  They also threw the emissary in a well.  They did it with a sarcastic remark that it was a good place to go looking for water and earth.

So Persia came.  After the Spartan defeat at Thermopylae (which was a useful-to-the-Greeks defeat because it gave the rest of the army time to fall back and regroup) the Persians had full run of the upper part of the Greek peninsula.

Which is about when Athens kicked their asses at Salamis.  There is no way that should have happened.  Athens was a city.  Persia was a nation.  This was their second seemingly impossible victory they'd achieved and they felt they were on a role.  So they said to the rest of the Greeks, "Let's keep beating these guys," and went on offence.

Sparta didn't opt in and instead went for navel gazing and enforcing one of the most brutal forms of slavery known to history.

Athens kicked the Persians out of the Aegean and the Golden Age of Greece began.  Why the Golden Age of Greece when it was Athens doing the prospering?  They owned a lot of Greek world by this point.

They were doing ridiculously well after defeating an enemy they should have had no hope of defeating three times, with one of those times involving beating the biggest army the world had ever known along with the biggest navy the world have ever known.  The alliance they'd led against the Persians became their de facto empire (which eventually just became their empire) and all of the places they'd liberated from the Persians they'd turned around and immediately subjugated to themselves (though it didn't look like that at first glance, it took a while before you realized you'd been conquered rather than freed.)

The wealth flowed, things were great, their civilization was at its peak.

Suddenly all of that stuff about reversal takes on a more negative tone.  Herodotus wrote the first history, the one that gives us the word "History", and he started out by pointing out that great things become small, small things become great, good things decline, bad things improve.

Given how great things were going for Athens, viewing the world as a series of reversals tended to imply that they were heading for a massive crash (they were, though it was in the form of a twenty year war, so not as fast as a crash.)

So, sure, you could say that there was an Athenian pessimism.  But that was when things were good.  If things were bad it became an Athenian optimism.

It was the idea that this will not last.  If "this" is bad then that's positive.  If "this" is good then that's negative.  But, regardless of how the idea applied to a given situation, it was always part of a larger framework of viewing the world that was value neutral.

Things are gonna turn around.  This, too, shall pass.

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* It wasn't a normal death though.  Wacky hijinks in the past that ended with Apollo getting the Fates drunk earned King Admetus a get out of death free card (not immortality, just living longer than he was supposed to), but death couldn't be denied completely so when it was his time to die came someone would have to go in his place.

He had years to try to find someone to take his place, no one would.  When the hour finally came round his wife Alcestis (title character) volunteered.

She had reasons beyond just loving him.  In the world they lived in their children would be better off if their surviving parent was the father, for example.  She has Admetus vow to always remember her, and never remarry (she doesn't want a possibly resentful step-mother in charge of her kids.)  He also vows to quit the merriment that his household was known for and live a life of solemnity in her honor when she is gone.

So she finally dies.

This leaves everything in a bad place.  She's dead, Admentus is really sad because he loved her and feeling really guilty for taking the deal, and so forth.  Everyone's kind of despondent.

Then it gets worse.  Hercules shows up and Admentus doesn't want to turn away a guest, so he brings Hercules in and tries not to burden Hercules with the knowledge of what happens.  This means no one can even mourn properly.

Finally someone gets pissed off enough about cheerful merry Hercules and tells Hercules exactly what happened and why what he's doing is pissing everyone off.

Hercules feels like an ass, apologizes, and leaves.  He comes back with Alcestis.

So she's returned to life, no one is sad anymore and everyone gets to be happy.  Yay.

(The movie) Percy Jackson and the Olympians annoys me

So I'm kind of sort of not really but similar enough to make describing it this way more useful than not making an inventory of my DVDs, seeing what still works, what doesn't, what has enough free space on it to justify leaving unfinalized even though the DVD machine is acting up, that sort of stuff.

So I came across Percy Jackson and The Olympians again.  Now it is by now probably common knowledge how I would do things, rather than having the main character be one of the big three (Zeus, Poseidon, Hades) I'd pick a lesser god (I'm thinking Ersa, goddess of Dew.)  Who you are stories are generally better than what you are stories and Percy Jackson is a "what you are" story by virtue of him being the biggest thing in demigods ever.

Part of that comes from him being a child of the ruling class of the ruling class.  He's not just the child of a god, which is necessary for the story to take place, he's the child of one of the big three gods.  He is therefore the coolest and most powerful halfblood and has everything handed to him on a silver platter (witness his fight with the daughter of Athena.)

But another part of that comes from him being the most loved god-child ever in the history of ever.

Seven months into his life Zeus felt like Poseidon was too close to his mortal son and created a law that no god may have any contact with any of their mortal children because no god had ever so loved a mortal child before.  In three to four thousand years or so.

Yeah.

I believe that. He's not just a special snowflake, he's THE special snowflake.  Every other half god can fuck off because none of them were loved as much in their entire lives by their divine parent as Poseidon loved young Percy in the first seven months.  He's so special of a snowflake that the extra special snowflake club is beneath him.

I call bullshit.

Also, is the sidekick whose mother was Athena* older or younger than Percy?  If she's older then sorry sidekick, your mother didn't love you as much as Percy's father loved him.  If younger than we can't say how much her mother loved her with certainty but we can say that the reason she's grown up without a mother is because Poseidon loved Percy on a scale that so surpassed all previous love that Zeus made it illegal.

My version of the story, I've said before, would go like this:

Main character is the child of Ersa and has the power to make water form on surfaces (child of dew, can fog windows like you wouldn't believe.  On the other hand filling a room with water by making the walls drip takes forever), basically comes to terms with the idea that in a fair fight he'd lose and takes the Jack Sparrow way out ("Well then that's not much incentive to fight fair, now is it?") rather than instantly being empowered the way Percy was.

I wouldn't have the helpful person turn out to be evil because I'm sick of the helpful person either being martyred or being evil.  The helpful person would just be helpful, and not killed off.

I wouldn't have the main character and mortal parent be stuck with an abusive parental figure/partner to hide main character.  I'd have the main character's gender switched so while everyone was looking for the daughter of dew they were overlooking this random male person. As mentioned somewhere or other I've been in a transfemale main character rut for a while and expect to remain in one until I actually finish a story.

Speaking of which when sorting through DVDs I noticed/remembered/was reminded by noticing that I recorded what looks to be a painfully bad movie about a mermaid, I assume for research purposes. Whether I'll actually be able to force myself to watch it to see an example of contemporary mermaid fiction remains to be seen, but since the DVD was already paid for recording it was free and since it was playing when I wasn't using the TV recording it took no time.  Even assuming the local library has a book, on the shelves, it takes more effort to get it.

Anyway, that would allow for a transformation as well as an "I am Maximus Decimus Merdius..." speech at the climax in which the character starting with, "Daughter of Ersa," traced her maternal line back to Nyx (if you can make it there, that's where you should go, Zeus is afraid of her) which is her come back, following Athena-child's suggestion to hit the books for lineage (almost everything in the universe descends from the same six entities, most things from several or all of them), to taunting based on things like, "I'm a child of [bigshot] you're the child of dew."

A lot of things would involve exploiting the character's water power (how many ways are there to make use of the ability to create water ex nihilo on a surface?) or hiding behind Athena-child when fighting was going on.  Trying to help, but very much hiding behind.

Part of the significance of water vs. lightning based powers, under explored in the movie, is that when you're wet it's not a good idea to bring large quantities of electricity into the mix.

The Lotus Eaters ate the lotus.  That's where their fucking name comes from.  They weren't a conspiracy intended to keep everyone else under the spell of the lotus, they were a commune that ever so innocently welcomed strangers by passing the bowl.  I don't know if I'd include them but if I did I sure as hell wouldn't have them be the opposite of what they were in the actual myth.

Stuff like that.

I'd probably have gods have varying degrees of involvement in their children's lives but intentionally limited because the idea would be for the children to be around their own kind (mortals) and also to get a good feel for what the mundane world was like because at some point they'd have to decide between the two worlds. Not necessarily forever and for all time, but if you live and work in the hidden demigod filled world you're giving up the chance to live and work in the normal world and vice versa.

Um... stuff.

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* Which how does that work? Athena doesn't have sex and gods who want kids without sex don't need to go to sperm banks because a god can just create children parthenogenicaly meaning that any child of hers should be as far from a halfblood as possible.

To a certain extent we're all halfbloods.  Roughly half of our makeup from sperm provider, roughly half from egg provider.**  A child of Athena wouldn't be.  A child of Athena would have only one parent and thus be a pureblood.  Pure divine blood.

**  If that seems impersonal it's because I recognize that your mother might not be the egg provider, your father might not be the sperm provider.  In the Avengers Thor had a good, short, speech on what it means to be brothers when Loki assumed that Thor still thinking of him as a brother was because he didn't know Loki was adopted.  Of course then, by following the rule of funny, Thor goes back on it when confronted with the fact that the person he just said was his brother has killed, if memory serves, 80 people in the last few days.  In response to that Thor hides behind, "Well he's adopted."

Random things

There are actual Satanists.  I did not know that.  Now I do.  I'm interested in learning more about their beliefs but I don't have time at the moment.  In fact for almost everything it seems to be a running theme that I don't have time at the moment.

I completely forgot to talk to my psychologist about getting registered in the school as being disabled.  University was the first place where you had to get that... distinction?  Label?  Not sure.  That thing for yourself.  Every school before that just knew.  Presumably at some point before my memory kicked in in full force someone somewhere had to make a determination, but after that they just passed it on up the line.  So for as far back as I can remember in elementary school they knew, the elementary school passed on the information to the middle school, the middle school passed it on to the high school when the time came.

This hasn't been a problem because I, being one of the most boring people in existence, have had a truly small number of teachers given how long I've been in university.  Thus I have tended to work with people who know me and thus knew the problems I face.  It was pointed out that teachers new to me have no idea what the fuck is going on in my head, and if I made it official they would and that could possibly lead to good things.  Sort of.  More that it could lead to the possibility that good things deferred might be able to count as good things not-late, or whatever.  Learning disabilities, mental disabilities, whatever disabilities, or no: you still have to get the work done at some point.

So another two weeks before we try with that thing.  I could look into it on my own, but I could do a lot of things.  Provided that "could" here refers to physical capability rather than mental, which seldom line up.

I have at long last sent Social Security the thing to send Albany to get a copy of my birth certificate because the original wasn't good enough for reasons that no one other than the one person, who happens to be an asshole, handling my case knows.  Everyone else just responds with shock, "You brought the original into the building and showed it to the person and that wasn't enough?"  National, local, doesn't matter, everyone else in the Social Security Administration is as bewildered by this as I am.

All that was required was that I walk across the street to my credit union when it was open and get one thing photocopied and another notarized.  That, to me, is something that takes near herculean amounts of effort. And I am far from Hercules.  Or Herakles, depending on whether you take it from the Latin or straight from the Greek.

My two major problems are these:
1) Initiating an activity on my own.
2) Doing work while unsupervised.

I have lots of other problems, but those are the two big ones.  I could only flip burgers, as just one example, if the company hired someone to watch me do it (even then it would take me a while to get started).  Which they wouldn't do because they could just have that person flip burgers and cut the burger flipping staff in half.

Once the Social Security office discovered this they set me on various tasks all of which required initiating activity on my own and doing it to the end while unsupervised.  And they wonder why it took me months to get done.  If I could do these things I wouldn't be applying for fucking disability, thank you very much.

Elsewhere, but on this blog, I compared it to saying to someone in a wheelchair, "Getting aid is easy, all you have to do is go up those stairs and ask for it.  No.  There isn't an elevator.  Why do you ask?"  I leave it to people in wheelchairs to determine if the comparison is fair.  I think it is if you're considering a standard "Legs don't work but arms do so an unpowered wheelchair can be used for locomotion," wheelchair and wheelchair occupant.  Arm power alone can get you up stairs, but it'll take a lot longer than someone walking and it'll be a serious accomplishment when you reach the top.

Given my mental problems the tasks given me seem like that kind of thing.  Hopefully, hopefully hopefully hopefully, this was the last one.  Hopefully it's in their hands now.  Hopefully I don't need to do any more of these, "It would be easy if you weren't disabled but this seems like it was specifically designed to be really damn hard for people with your disability."  Hopefully.

And no, I'm actually not filled with hope.  But there is a sense of relief that at least I got that part done.

Before that, seemingly out of nowhere came things for the Social Security of Maine.  So not the local Portland office, but the main office of the state in Augusta.  I couldn't figure out why they mysteriously appeared, but I did my best to fill out the forms and send them in and follow the instructions and whatnot.  These things asked me about my disability (though, strangely, never asked what the disability was.)  I knew it couldn't have anything to do with the SSI I was applying for because the application with them was being held up until they could determine my birth date for absolutely positively sure.  Every other government agency in the country (local, state, and federal) knows my birth date.  Social Security fucked it up.  Hell, I think the nation of Italy knows my birth date.

Having had time to reflect and reread and think and whatnot I think I know what happened.  When I applied for food aid I also applied for medical aid.  Now this is through HHS so I don't know why Social Security is involved and honestly I don't give a damn, but it would appear that this time (no idea why not last time) when they sent me a thing to renew my food aid they also assumed that I'd be reapplying to get the medical aid I was denied (very short version: I was denied on the basis of not having enough information, they didn't have enough information because they didn't contact any of the people I told them to contact.  When the opportunity came to appeal I simply didn't have the spoons.)

So that's all sent out and maybe I can get my medications paid for instead of a combination of having family members go broke buying them out of the kindness of their hearts and using student loan money.  (It's a living expense; it counts.  I checked before I got the loan.)

But, food aid and medical aid both apparently require me to talk to someone on the phone.  I got a very nice letter saying call this person on Monday through Friday between these hours.  After realizing today was a Friday (for some reason I thought it was Saturday) I did call.  Only to find out that the person I was to call would be busy for all but one of those hours.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The very nice letter said "Please call me with the following information" by deadline.  Otherwise benefits may be denied or cancelled or apocalypse or very bad things.

Now, if you're like me you're probably very interested in what the "following information" was.  There was none.  Nothing.  Blank page.  White space.  No ink.  Nothing.  Nicolas Cage in National Treasure couldn't figure out what the following information was because there was nothing there.

So I called the person, with the following lack of information, during the one hour he'd be available today.  Wasn't there.  Left a voicemail.

Now the deadline gives me all of next week so hopefully I'll get in contact to this person, give them the lack of information that they want, and thereby prevent the apocalypse, but that still leaves a lingering question.

Who the fuck says, "Please call me with the following information," and then doesn't have any information follow?  I mean, seriously?  Who?

Other than The Department of Heath and Human Services, I mean.  (That one was HHS not SSA.  So says the letterhead.)

My thing on aid, seems to be rather controversial, but not in the post I just linked to, instead in the thread that eventually inspired me to write the post.

I think part of it is that I'm not entirely against a nanny state and I believe that compartmentalization has benefits* and I have a fairly positive view of human nature.  If people get more aid than they need in one area, I trust that most of them will not sell it on the black market (there is currently a black market for government aid, no reason to assume that there wouldn't be under my proposed system) or spend it on things they neither want nor need just to be able to spend it all.

Likewise I assume that if the government did take care of the necessities (food, housing, clothing, medical care, education, fire, police, so forth) people would still get jobs.  Part of this is that I believe that people want more than just what is necessary.  Long ago there was a meeting of manufacturers and marketers where they realized that improvements had made it so they could no longer survive just selling what people needed, they instead needed to start selling things that people didn't need but did want, and in the absence of want they needed to create that want.  They're all still around.  And as John Oliver says, we cannot be beaten when it comes to consumption**.

If the idea is for everybody to be able to live with necessities, and have enough of a margin of error that they're not on the razor's edge of not living, then that still doesn't mean that the government is giving people everything they want, which means people still have an incentive to get a job, and capitalism can deal with wants rather than needs which is an area it seems much better suited for.

And I also believe that for a lot of people there is a desire to contribute, which means that even if they didn't need to they'd still want some kind of job.

But my idea of compartmentalized, "Here's your card, every month you get this much that can be used for food, this much for housing, this much for clothing, this much for..." which everyone gets got some serious pushback.  Not because it would cost so damn much (which it would, that's the reason that I always mention the fact that I'm in favor of serious tax reform alongside it, new revenue would definitely be needed) but because people, or at least one person, it's kind of fuzzy at the moment, don't like the idea of funds that can only be used for designated thing.

-

Ok, that was long.  There are various other things.  I tried to go to the credit union to get thing notarized earlier, but they had closed for two days on account of the blizzard.  Before the blizzard I opened the gate that I use to keep the dog in the backyard and the (back half of the) driveway when he goes out.  My hope was that friendly neighbor with plow would plow the snow into the back half of the driveway if he plowed the snow.  First off, he didn't plow the snow (though since then he has helped in plowing out the snowbanks that city plows leave in the front of the driveway) but second and more importantly, the result was that the gate couldn't be closed again.

Since the blizzard every time I think that the snow has gotten low enough that with shoveling (and ice breaking, what stopped me last time was reaching the ice core of the snowbank) I might be able to close the gate... it snows again.  Which means I can't close the gate, which means that there's nothing to keep the dog in the yard and back half of the driveway.  The solution has been to watch him when he goes out and verbally stop him if he starts heading toward the road.

That has worked, though inefficiently and annoyingly, with two exceptions.  Last night and today during the day.  Last night he saw a car and ran out to chase it.  Thankfully the car was parking on the street otherwise god knows if I'd have caught up with him.  I got him back into the house while shouting apologies.

Today was worse.  I think I've noted that my dog's breed is unknown for sure because he's a rescue and they don't come with pedigrees.  If you look up Mountain Cur on Wikipedia you'll see a photo of a dog that looks just like mine and that's what we think he is.

You'll also see that they're bred to bark.  Like almost any dog (or is it "any dog" without the "almost"?) they will fight to protect those they care about, but that's not what they're bred to do.  They're bred to do two things.  One is scare off dangers, which is done by barking at them, the other is participate in bear hunts.

Dogs do not participate in bear hunts by fighting the bear.  That would be a good way to lose a dog in a hurry.  Dogs participate in bear hunts by scaring the bear, and in so doing herding the bear.  (There was an episode with Dragon being called on to do a similar thing to a boar in Jane and the Dragon.†  I mostly bring this up because I happen to like Jane and the Dragon.  The TV show, never read the books.)  And how do you scare and thus herd a bear?  By barking at it.  Very loudly.

Attempts to use nurture to overcome nature and get him to bark less have thus far failed.  He barks at strange noises, and considers opening and closing car doors strange, he barks at anyone too far away to smell (For fear they might be Cylons I said to Lonespark, to which she replied, "But aren't we all Cylons now?"  Yes.  Yes, we are.)

The good news is that that's all he does, bark.  The bad news is that that's not much of a comfort when a strange dog runs after you barking his ass off.  I imagine it's rather terrifying.  And as I rushed out of the house after him today, thankfully not barefoot but in flip-flops totally ill suited to the cold and one of them broken enough that a certain amount of concentration should be devoted to making sure it doesn't fall apart (the right one, if it matters) I shouted to the young woman between attempts to call the dog back, "The good news is he doesn't bite.  The bad news is I don't know if he'll ever stop following you."  And I told her that if she stopped moving for a bit I could grab the dog and get him away from her.

She thanked me, which she honestly shouldn't have because it was my fuck up that let a loudly barking dog chase her down and harass her, and said that she's totally not a dog person.  I don't remember the exact words she used, probably not "totally", but something that indicated that this was worse than if it had happened to an average person.  This happened to someone who doesn't necessarily have a dog phobia (though she could for all I know) but at the very least a dog discomfort.

I have no idea how old she was.  She was a student, not a college student.  High school would be my guess based on when she was walking home.  But that's all I have to base my guess on because I really, really suck at telling age.  Someone asked me the other day how old Lonespark's children were (either my mother, my psychologist, or both) and I honestly have no idea.  After spending a day with them.  And previously I've shared a house with them for the night.  I suck at telling age.

I'm like Mike from Stranger in a Strange Land when it comes to telling age.

"Patty," Jill put in, "he really does mean that he can't guess. He hasn't had much chance to
learn to judge ages-you know how short a time he's been on Earth. And besides that, Mike
thinks of things in Martian years and Martian arithmetic. If it's time or figures, I keep track
of it for him."

Except, you know, without the excuse of having spent most of my life on Mars.

So, young woman hopefully not traumatized.  And the same goes for Lonespark's children.  He was able to sniff one, but never the other, and so he never stopped barking and had to be put in his room, which is unfortunately also the bathroom which made things somewhat difficult when the children had to go before leaving.  Also he tends to be afraid of people who are afraid of him, which really doesn't help at all.

(Because he barks as things he's afraid of.)

It would be much better if he were afraid of people who were not afraid of him because, mentally, they'd be much better equipped to weather the nonstop barking.  (On the other hand, it does make sense.  Someone who is afraid is much more likely to do something rash like attack the dog than someone who isn't afraid.)

-

The die is cast.

I've applied for Greece.  First hurdle: Do they accept me?  Second hurdle: if they accept me I have to make a down payment of $500.  Third hurdle: Then I have to pay the remaining $3,500.  Fourth hurdle: Then I have to pay airfare there and back.

If I can't make the money in time I'm pretty sure I lose that down payment.  Can I make the money in time?  I think so.

I've compared it to a bottle drive.  You can make a lot in one push with a bottle drive, but you can't go out and do the same thing the next day.  I think I can make a $4,000 push even though I don't think I could make enough to support myself.  Because I think that after the push I will have dried up the market so much that there's not another $4,000 left in it.

-

Speaking of stuff, there was a last little bit of each part of the resin in my old containers.  I decided to use it.  Huge mistake.  The stuff in the unopened new containers appears to be fine.  (Though testing will tell.)  But the stuff in the old containers was visibly off to begin with.  Think of curds separating from whey and you'll have some idea, but worse.  I tried to mix it back together,  I thought I had success.  It took a long damn time but I thought I had success.

Either I was wrong or it was so far gone that even remixed it wouldn't work.  Some of it never solidified, some of it partially solidified.  I'm still trying to figure out how I'm going to clean out my molds, which I definitely need to do.

-

The person who was picking on me, appears to have stopped.  I don't know if the intervention of a teacher played a role.  Teacher made it clear that she'd rather not intervene as we're all adults and should be able to sort things out ourselves but also that things had gotten to toxic to the point that she was considering changing the rules for how we do things, which would definitely be an intervention.

She never did change the rules.

I don't know what happened (or didn't happen) behind the scenes, but from my angle it looks like person has largely stopped being an ass, and the things that remain are so low key that I'm not sure if they're really her being an ass or they're just things that I'm inclined to interpret that way based on past experience of her being an ass.

My hope is that she hasn't just picked a new target to direct her assholicness at but has really stopped being an ass.

It was brought up to me after the whole thing calmed down that the teacher was the wrong person to speak to about it.  (I only spoke to her because someone else brought up the possibility that maybe the student in question was doing it to someone else and since I wouldn't be there for that but maybe the teacher would, I should let the teacher know that this was something to watch out for.)  There are other people and other means and a zero tolerance policy for bullying and whatnot that I apparently could have invoked like fire from the sky.

My ultimate decision on learning this was one of wait and see.  If she keeps behaving herself then I see no benefit to make an official mess of things.  If she reverts to past behavior then I'll go to the proper authorities and see what can be seen.

-

I'm probably going to make a whole post on it at some point, but the idea I bring up here is one that I think would be awesome and I think would never happen.  The audience would be the overlap between people who like actual classics enough to catch reference to the style of good and bad translations alike and people who like Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess.  Not exactly the biggest audience ever.

Also, not yet developed idea, MST3K like silhouettes for each episode of both but instead of a hapless human and two robots, of a panel of classicists who actually know by heart the history/myth/both being butchered in the episode in question.  Or maybe not.

-

I've noticed that often when I try to type "think" I type "thing" and that the reverse is true as well.  I have no objections to typos (of which there are usually many) being pointed out in the comments, but until/unless that happens and I make a correction, if a sentence with think or thing in it is making no sense, try swapping it out for the other word.

-

I'm behind in all my classes and I think I just got the lowest grade on a test in years.  Though it was a respectable passing grade I feel like someone I once knew who said, "I got a B," and then had to explain, after receiving congratulations, that that was a bad thing.  Of course the grade I got was probably pretty good considering that I was trying so hard not to forget the signs (I mostly succeeded) that I completely overlooked the fact that deaf culture and history were going to be a not-negligible portion of the test too.

-

Did I mention that the Greece thing is with Harvard and they asked for a copy of my transcript which shows that last semester ended with three incompletes and a failure?  Yeah, suddenly wondering if getting accepted in the first place might be a bigger question than whether or not I can raise the money.

-

I like Roman Holiday even though it's the kind of film I normally wouldn't.  Even though I haven't seen all of it.  (Missed the beginning and haven't been able to catch it since.)  No one gets a happy ending, that's generally not the film for me.  But it's also referenced in .hack//Sign so now I get the reference (not that not getting it was a big deal because it's pointed out to be a reference to Roman Holiday and you really have everything you need in the scene) and more than that it's the perfect illustration of why I want to go to Greece.  It's the idea that having that one good day is worth it even if you have to return to your crappy life afterward.  Because you have the one good day, and you have the memories, and you've got stuff and stuff and stuff.

Were I not completely aware of my duty to my family and my country, I would not have come tonight. *pause* Or indeed ever again. 

-

There were probably other things to throw in here.

-

* For example it is known that if there is a rent subsidy in an area the minimum rent usually rises to meet that subsidy, so it would seem like a very good idea to have any subsidy for rent cordoned off from other forms of aid otherwise the minimum rent might rise to a level that prevents people from getting enough of everything not-housing.  Thus I see it as valuable to have housing aid be only able to be spent on housing, and non-housing aid only able to be spent on non-housing.

** John Oliver, from Terrifying Times, which I recommend you buy***:

Now, I don't understand economics.  I don't fundamentally get how it works.  I've lived for 30 years on this planet... two elsewhere, and I still don't understand how the system works.  To me, economics is like the Dutch language-- I'm told it makes sense, but I seriously have my doubts.

But I want to understand economics. I feel like I have to.

So I bought this book recently which is designed to explain economics to someone who does not have the capacity to understand it.  And I learnt a key lesson in it, and that is that any nation's economic strength is solely in the hands of its citizens.  In your ability to consume.

Or if you want to be really great, in your ability to buy shit.

That is why America is the greatest economy on earth-- because you people cannot be beaten. 

As a citizen of the world, let me tell you, it is intimidating.  I have been to your malls.  They are cathedrals to bullshit.

I was at a mall in Connecticut and I saw an item in a shop window which stopped me dead in my tracks.

And I mean that.  I was moving, I saw this item and all of a sudden I wasn't moving anymore. 

It was, and I promise you this is true, an inflatable barbecue. 

*Audience laughs a lot* 

You're right.  *beat*  We should take a moment together to let the gravity of that sink in-- an inflatable barbecue. 

It was a full functioning barbecue with inflatable material around the outside of it so that you, like the man on the front of the box, could cook while swimming. 

Is there any greater example of what it is to live in the freest nation on earth than that?

*** As if ever anyone has bought something on my recommendation.  I can see whether anyone bought something by clicking through my links.  A few people have, or one person has a few times, and there's one universal truth.  What is bought is never, ever, what I actually recommended.  It would seem that someone, or someones, click my links, look at the thing I linked to, say, "I'm not going to buy that," and then found something they were going to buy while still in the same session thus earning me the 68 cents [correction] $1.64 (I should check more frequently because I'm rolling in the money now) [/correction] I have to my Amazon affiliate account.

On the other hand, the fact that my most dedicated readers are not Americans might play a role too.  I have a deal with Amazon, not Amazon Canada or Amazon UK.

† And I am somewhat pissed off that I can't post a link to it.  How the hell is the series not out on DVD?  With a total run-time of a little under ten hours it's a series that someone might actually be able to afford to buy unlike Hercules and Xena.

The line of Theia and Hyperion Part 1 (Helios)

This is another place where it would be really quick if I stuck to Hesiod's description which is as follows:


θεία δ᾽ Ἠέλιόν τε μέγαν λαμπράν τε Σελήνην
Ἠῶ θ᾽, ἣ πάντεσσιν ἐπιχθονίοισι φαείνει
ἀθανάτοις τε θεοῖσι, τοὶ οὐρανὸν εὐρὺν ἔχουσι,
γείναθ᾽ ὑποδμηθεῖσ᾽ Ὑπερίονος ἐν φιλότητι.

And Theia begot great Helios[1], bright Selene[2], and Eos[3] (all shine on earth and are immortal gods, they have their home in the broad sky[4]) having been overpowered[5] in love by Hyperion.

[1] The sun
[2] The moon
[3] Dawn
[4] or "heaven" if you prefer.
[5] or whathaveyou the word can mean a lot of things.  Seduced being the option I was originally going with.  It could actually say that she tamed him for herself.  One thing that is clear is that it really means love.  The world translated as love does not just mean sex, it means love, affection, friendship.  You have to go to the big dictionary (the Great Scott) to even get sex mentioned.

And furthermore, it could just mean that they married while in love.  I might go with that.

So that's... not a lot.

Here we go:

------

Once upon a time there was only Khaos.  Neither light nor dark, neither colored nor colorless, neither something nor nothing.  In Khaos probability and possibility ruled, and there was no such thing as "is".

But from Chaos sprang Gaia, the solid foundation on which all is built.

Other gods sprang from Khaos.  Misty Tartaros, who dwells within Gaia, in the empty space beneath her surface, Eros, who first brought gods together in love.  Finally Erebos and Nyx, the first gods Eros brought together.

Nyx (night) brought darkness to the surface world while Erebos (the gloom of Tartaros) brought the same to to the subsurface, but their daughter Hemera (day) brought the first light to the surface and so the cycle of Night and day was born.  But not night and day as we know them because there was not yet a sun, not yet a moon or stars.  It simply was day when and where Hemera covered Gaia and was night when and where Nyx did.

Gaia, inspired by Nyx's example brought forth children of her own.  Ouranos (the sky) mountains and islands (though they were not islands yet as there was no sea) and finally Pontos (the barren sea.)

Eros brought her together with Ouranos and the two had more children.  First the ones who would later be known as the Titans: Okeanos, Koios, Krios, Hyperion, Iapetos, Rheia, Themis, Mnemosyne, Phoibe, Tethys and Khronos.  Ouranos shoved her later children by him back inside of her, sealing them in misty Tartaros.

So Gaia came to her free children for help.  Kronos overthrew Ouranos and made himself king of the universe and the other Titans lesser rulers of various subdomains, but he didn't free his trapped siblings.

Theia was given dominion over light and sight, while Hyperion was made a watcher and given dominion over observation.

The two loved each other and married. They had four children.  Their first three included one son, Helios, the sun, and two daughters, Selene, the moon, and Eos, dawn.  All three made their homes in the sky.  Their youngest child, Titan, was given the name Ouranos had branded his parents with.  He chose to dwell on the surface of Gaia.

Eos, along with the daughters of Nyx who were responsible for creating evening, completed the daily cycle of night, dawn, day, evening, and then night again.

Helios rose with his sister Eos, provided direction to the light of while Hemera covered the surface of Gaia, and set when seven of Nyx's daughters brought evening.  He never intruded upon Nyx's domain.

Selene was more open to change than her brother.  She changed her appearance, and she changed the times when she came out, feeling free to traverse the domains of dawn, day, evening, and night.

-

Helios mated with various people at various times.  In no particular order [putting this in order is going to be hell, by the way.  Not just Helios, I mean the whole thing] these are his mates and descendants:

Perseis, daughter of Okeanos and Tethys, bore Helios four children.  Witches all.  The female witches were Pasiphae and Kirke (who Odysseus once encountered) and the male witches were Aeetes and Perses.

Pasiphae married  King Minos of Krete.  Their children were Ariadne, Androgeus, Glaucus, Deucalion, Phaedra, and Katreus.  Unfortunately for Pasiphae, Minos managed to piss of Poseidon, the story goes like this (more or less):

Minos was having some dispute about whether he should be king of Krete, and prayed that a perfect bull would appear as a sign he deserved the island nation, which he would then sacrifice to Poseidon.  The bull did come, and was indeed perfect, but Minos was so impressed with its perfection that he kept it for himself and sacrificed on of his own herd to Poseidon in its place.

Poseidon noticed this, and was pissed off.  But rather than attack Minos directly he decided to come after him sideways and so went to Aphrodite for help.  Aphrodite made Pasiphae fall in love with the bull.

Some time after this Pasiphae could resist the love, which Aphrodite always couples with lust, no longer and went to Daedalus, the greatest inventor there was, to find a way for her to... uh, how do I put this?  Have sex with the bull.

Daedalus created a fake cow in which she could disguise herself and some months later a child was born.  His name was Asterion, which means starlike.  Most of Greece didn't think part animal part human with the head of a bull was all that starlike.  They called it the Minotaur (the bull of Minos.)

As the Asterion came of age Minos contracted Daedalus to construct the labyrinth in which to keep the beast.

Now Androgeos went to Athens to participate in games there, but after he won every single prize he was murdered by jealous Athenians.  Eventually it came to pass that the gods demanded that the Athenians give Minos whatever he asked for as a means of reparation.  What he asked for was a regular shipment of Athenian youths to feed to Asterion, the Minotaur.

Eventually Theseus, prince of Athens, went off as one of the youths intent on killing the Minotaur.  This is a task he would have failed at utterly if he had not gotten help from one of Minos and Pasiphae's daughters, Ariadne.

But Theseus had promised not to take on a foriegn bride, so one day he stopped at the island of Naxos, slept with her on a bed he created on the shore, and then ran away before she could wake up.

At this point the furious, shocked, and distraught Ariadne ran out of hope.  She knew she couldn't go home, even if she had a boat, and the likelihood of anyone else stopping on the island treating her fairly was low, if anyone else stopped on the island at all.

Then Dionysus came by, they hit it off, and got married.  But, Ariadne being mortal, she eventually died.  So Dionysus went down to the underworld, took her back, made her into a god, and they dwell together on Olympus to this day.

Those are the stories of Ariadne, Androgeus, and Asterion

The stories of Glaucus, Deucalion, Phaedra, and Katreus are left to be told.

Glaucus, while still a child , was playing with a ball one day.  Some say he played with a ball and a mouse.  That's not important, all that matters is that the ball ended up in a vat of honey and Glaucus, in trying to get it out, fell into the vat of honey.  There he drowned.

Minos and Pasiphae looked all over for their son, but were not able to find him.  Thus the journeyed to the Oracle at Delphi.  She told the two that an incredible being had been born amoung them, whoever could explain it would also be able to return their son to them alive.

They returned to their land and discovered a young bull that changed color three times a day.  None of their own soothsayers could explain it, but a traveling soothsayer named Polyidus (son of Coeranus) observed the bull. at the start of the day it would be white, later it would turn red, and by the end of the day it would be black.  This much was known to all, but what Polyidus realized was that this was like the fruit of a mulberry tree, first white, then red, then finally when it is ripe, red.

Minos considered that a satisfactory explanation and assigned Polyidus the task of finding Glaucus.  He observed many omens, but the only one that mattered was an owl who sat over the wine cellar and put bees to flight.  Knowing that this was somehow significant  and that the owl of Athena shared the same name as the missing boy, he was able to locate the dead Glaucus (and his ball) in the vat of honey.

Minos and Pasiphae were obviously not satisfied as they'd been promised the return of their son alive.  Polyidus tried to explain that soothsayers lack the power to restore the dead to life, but Minos wasn't satisfied and locked Polyidus in the cellar with the body of Glaucus.

Now while soothsayers may lack the power to restore the dead to life serpents have no such limitations and so it was that a serpent was Polyidus' salvation.

A serpent entered the cellar through a hole of its own making and, on seeing the honey dipped corpse of Glaucus headed straight for it.  Polyidus, trapped in the cellar with the serpent and the body quickly killed the serpent with his sword.

Soon afterward a second serpent came and restored the first to life with a special herb.  Polyidus was able to steal some of the herb.  Not much, but enough to revive the boy.

That secured his release from the wine cellar, but Minos demanded that he not return home until he taught Glaucus the art of soothsaying.

Polyidus did this, and did it to Minas' satisfaction, but before he left he made a strange request of Glaucus, he ordered that the boy spit in his mouth.  This disgusting act caused the boy to forget all he had learned of soothsaying.  Minos, for his part, accepted this well and when Polyidus returned home it was with many gifts in honor of him restoring Glaucus to life.  Later, they say, Glaucus led a military expedition against Italy.

Phaedra married Theseus (yes, the same one who left her sister abandoned on a deserted island.)  Katreus and Deucalion became kings of Krete, in that order, after Minos died.

-

Kirke, the second daughter of Helios and Perseis, made an island her home and was known for changing the men who came there into animals.  A practice she continued, until Odysseus (with the help of Hermes) proved immune to her power.  She was able to keep him on her island for a full year, and in that time became pregnant.  She bore three children: Agrios, Latinos, and Telegonos.

She also mated with Poseidon and bore the minor god of forests, Phanos.

-

Aeetes, the first son, married the Okaniad Idyia, and became King of Kolchis. Most famous for possessing the Golden Fleece and then, you know, losing it.  It was given to him by Phrixus in response to hospitality, and taken from him by Medeia, his daughter by Idyia, and Jason, son of Aeson.

Aeetes had other consorts as well.  Before he met Idyia he mated with Asterodeia and she bore him the son, Apsyrtus.  Who would be killed by Medeia with the help of Jason.

Chalciope, also a daughter of Aeetes and Idyia married Phrixus.

-

Perses, the second son, became king of the Persians.  He deposed Aeetes, but was deposed by Medeia.

--

By the younger Klymene he fathered Phaeton, and then made the mistake of swearing by the river Styx that he would grant Phaeton a favor without knowing what that favor was.  The favor was to drive Helios, the sun, across the sky.  By this time Zeus was in charge and Apollo traditionally steered the sun, which was a largely ceremonial job as Helios had never had much trouble finding his own way through the sky.

But the horses did need to be directed as they were capable of pulling Helios around this way and that if they weren't.

The favor Phaeton asked for?  To direct the horses.

He lost control, scorched parts of the earth, and some said he would have set the air itself aflame and boiled the seas if he hadn't been removed.

And so he was removed.  Zeus from his seat of power on Olympus sent out a single lightning bolt.  His aim was true, and Phaeton died before he knew what happened.  With him out of the way, his desperate attempts to regain control no longer tugging them this way and that, the horses calmed down and Helios was able to salvage the situation, but not to save his son.

Helios and the younger Klymene also had a daughter, the nymph Astris who married the river Hydaspes and gave birth to Deriades, emperor or the Indians.

--

With Neaira he had two daughters, Lampetie and Phaethousa.  Both tended the herds of Helios on the island of Thrinakie.  Phaethousa tended seventy flocks of 50 sheep each, to control these 350 animals she used nothing more than a silver shepherds crook.  Lampetie tended seven herds of 50 cattle each.  To control them she used a simple copper staff.

These animals were ageless, their numbers never decreased by death or increased by birth.  The simply lived well.

Until Odysseus came.  His men slaughtered and ate many of the fine cattle of the sun.  Lampetie was justifiably pissed off and ran to her father to tell him what had happened.  As punishment for their crimes every single one of Odysseus's men were killed off.  Odysseus himself did not die, for he had not participated in the crime, but he also did not escape punishment because he had failed to stop it in spite of being warned twice and theoretically in charge.  Shipwrecked he washed onto Kalypso's island and spent the next seven years as the goddess' sex object.

--

That he is the father of the goddess Ikhnaie, tracing/tracking, is remembered.  What no one remembers is who her mother was.

--

Aloeus, another son whose mother is forgotten, was the mortal king of Korinthos.

--

Nausidame, princess of Elis, bore Helios a son, Augeas, who became king of Elis.

--

Ocyrhoe bore to Helios a child about which nothing is remembered except that he was named for his uncle Phasis.  This caused some confusion, as common names often do.

--

Leucothoe, a princess of Andros, bore to him Thersanon, one of the Argonauts.

--

Loving the Island of Rhodes produced the Heliaidai, the seven kings of Rhodes, as well as Elektryone, a princess of Rhodes.

--

That might be it for Helios.

-

* Anyone else have "I fell into a vat of chocolate" by the Smother's Brothers in their head?

The Daphne and Leukippos story in one post.

Because it was spread over two.  (One.  Two.)

Peneios married the nymph Kreusa and they had Hypseus, Stilbe, Daphne, Menippe, and Orseis.

Hypseus became the king of the proud Lapithai.

Stilbe with Apollo bore Lapithes and Kentauros.

Apollo wanted Daphne as well, but Daphne did not want him.  Actually, that's getting ahead of myself a bit. Daphne didn't want any man, and there aren't a lot of patrons for such women, especially if you're not interested in going to war and Athene is probably the least woman-like goddess in the pantheon for myriad reasons, many of which can probably be attributed to being stuck inside of Zeus' head for a while on her journey out of his body.

Anyway, most women/demi-gods/whatever who aren't into standard Greek sexuality tend to take a sort of Artemis way out of things.  So this is what Daphne did.  She kept only the company of women and lived as a hunter.  Artemis took notice and blessed her with the ability to shoot straight.  Not shoot very well; shoot straight.  Perfectly, impossibly, straight.

That is in no way important to the story, but as gifts go it's pretty nifty.

It came to pass that Daphne and her company of hunters were passing through Elis and there crossed paths with Leukippos, the son of Oinomaus (prince of Pisa).  Leukippos is said to have fallen in love with her, but how much love there could be when Daphne was avoiding interaction with men as much as possible is sort of subject to debate.

What is true is that he wanted to be with her and was willing to change his entire life to do it.  It was the custom in those times for boys and young men to grow their hair long, dedicating the uncut locks to the local river god.  Leukippos was growing his hair long for Alpheios.  He braided it the style of women, he bought women's clothes, and he left his male life behind.

He introduced himself as his father's daughter, and asked to join Daphne on her hunt.  He was allowed to do so and as time went on the two did become close and the feeling between them could truly be described as love.

Indeed they had become inseparable, Daphne would scarcely let him leave her sight, and they had many warm embraces.

Exactly what would have happened had the relationship played out is impossible to say, because it never got the chance.

Apollo did something very, very stupid.

Seeing the younger Eros, Aphrodite's son, he took a single look at the winged god's bow and laughed.  Then he boasted.  He spoke of how his aim was true, and how his arrows wounded.  He spoke of the damage he could do to beast and man, of a battle recently won.  And he told Eros to lay down his bow because only he was worthy of being a god with a bow.  (Had his sister been listening she doubtless would have shot him in the back of the head there and then.)

While he was the younger Eros, and while his form still resembled that of a boy, save for the wings, he was a much older god than Apollo and understood his own power far better than Apollo did.  He quickly said that his arrows could bring down Apollo, and fired one straight into him.  No wound was produced, what was produced was a lust that could only be quenched by Daphne.

At first Apollo tried to fight Eros' power over him, that lasted about thirty seconds.  Then he tried to channel it into more rational means.  He thought about what needed to be done to get her and the first thing was to get the person she was already in love with out of the way.

So he instilled the group of huntresses with a desire to bathe and swim.  The nearest spot was on the banks of Ladon, Daphne's uncle.

Leukippos was very uneasy the entire way there, trying to find some way out of what was coming, but he saw none, and as the rest of the party stripped to bathe they started to notice that Leukippos wasn't joining them.  At first there was curiosity and teasing, but the more he avoided revealing the truth, the more they wanted to know what was being hidden under those clothes, and finally some were torn from him.

First there was a moment of shock.  Then a mad scramble for weapons.  Everyone in motion except Daphne and Leukippos.  She simply stared.  He hung his head.  He made no attempt to run.  It wouldn't have mattered and he didn't care.

As Apollo had hoped, many spears were thrown but then, by the will of gods other than Apollo (and the younger Eros for that matter) Leukippos disappeared spears passed through empty space where he had been, and landed harmlessly on and in the ground.

And it was at about this point that Apollo lost control of the fire the younger Eros had lit inside him.  He rushed toward Daphne and words didn't even need to be exchanged.  She saw the look in his eyes and swam across the river as fast as she could.  As she pulled herself up on the opposite bank, she stole a look back and saw Apollo not far behind.

She quickly considered her situation and found it hopeless.  Her bow, her knife, her spear all lay on the far shore.  As did her clothes.  She couldn't hope to outrun Apollo, and she had nothing in the way of resources, though divine herself, she couldn't fight him off while he was armed and she was naked.

So she ran anyway, and said a prayer as she did: That she not be taken by Apollo.  Just as he grabbed her and stopped her motion, the prayer was answered.

Her feet sank into the earth, lengthening as they did, her toes grew long and thick and branched out beneath her, her skin grew tough, her body reshaped itself, he legs joining together as one, parts growing, parts shrinking. The bark that her skin had become sprouted new branches, and where first just the hairs on her head had been turning green and widening into a flat glossy green lances, now all of her branches sprouted leaves, especially her arms.

Apollo was confused when his lips touched bark, but still in raging lust he didn't want to leave her, and so he made a crown of leaves.  To this day the laurel leaf is associated with Apollo, and the Greeks know the bay laurel as Daphne.

But this story has been told a thousand times.  And one question always seems to linger.  What the hell happened to Leukippos?

It says quite clearly in texts dating back more than two thousand years that he disappeared, and that was quoting earlier texts now lost to us.  It says it was by the will of the gods.  Which gods? Certainly not Apollo.  Nor the younger Eros, who had prepared a second arrow (gold for love, lead for the opposite) but in truth never needed to use it.

And what did Leukippos do after that? The gods don't just pluck someone out of certain death to then have them do nothing.

Kalliope, a little help here?

In a barren stretch of land that might as well be the middle of nowhere though it was far enough from anywhere important that its distance had never been measured, Leukippos awoke with an aching body and a mind that felt like it was on fire.  At first he didn't remember who he was, or was it she? The second felt more natural these days.

Memories came back that definitely tended toward he, but she decided she was going with she, even as the memory of betrayal in the various huntresses faces returned when they saw his body.

She gathered her clothes, quite torn, as well as she could, tying knots here or there to try to make them cover the disagreement between "he" and "she" and when she finally decided that half naked was as good as she could hope for, slowly, unsteadily got to her feet.

She tried to get her bearings but failed.

"Well, that went well," came a sarcastic voice from behind her.  She spun to see a woman she'd never seen before.  A strange glow about her.  Impossible.

Just as her mind was beginning to process what that meant: Goddess, another voice, "What the... the... eleleu eleleu just happened?" Again behind her, though this time more off to the left than straight behind.  Another woman she had never seen before.

Also glowing.  Also a goddess.  A bow, a quiver, arrows tipped with silver points.  Artemis.

"I do believe-"

"Oimoi," she said, why did they always have to appear behind her.  A man.  With wings.  Also glowing.  Also armed.  Big bow, probably doesn't like being interrupted.

"that we all tried to move the mortal out of the way at the same time," he continued without any indication of annoyance.  Perhaps he didn't mind being interrupted.

"In different directions," the first goddess said, a sort of glee in her voice.

"What are you even doing here?" Artemis asked.

"Mostly I was messing with Apollo, but don't think that screwing around with your namesake," the first goddess gestured to the male god, "wasn't an incentive too."

There was a pause.  Then the same goddess asked, "What are you doing here?"

"I happen to like Daphne and she would have felt bad if he died right in front of her."

Leukippos weakly said, "She."

"That's an understa-" the male god began.  Then he quickly asked.  "What was that?"

Leukippos looked at the ground as she answered, "I'm 'she', not 'he'."

"Well that simplifies things," Artemis said.

"Disharmony between body and mind," the first goddess said. "I love it."

"You would," the male god said.

All the spinning to look at the divinities speaking was making Leukippos so dizzy she was worried she'd collapse to the ground, and she still had no idea where she was or who these divinities were.  Two thirds of them at least.

"Only when she acts on it, if she just went on pretending everything was fine there'd be no me in it."

That made so much sense.  So very much.  If by "so much" one meant "none at all."  Leukippos wanted to scream, and decided, 'Where am I?' was a better question then, 'Who are you?' but when she asked it wasn't a scream, it was a soft, meek, question.  "Where am I?" in the broken voice of one who has just lost the love of her life, left with nothing but looks of shock and betrayal and more than a few deadly weapons hurled, and is now surrounded by ones who could destroy with no effort at all.

"That's not important, what is important is what to do with you now," Artemis said.

So much spinning they were blurring together and the ground was becoming dangerously unstable: wobbling this way and that.  "Who are you?"

"Well," the first goddess said, "I'm Eris.  He's the reason you fell in love with-"

The male god interrupted, "I had no more part in that than you had in making Apollo mouth off to-"

"Oh I know, it's wonderful when it happens on its own isn't it? It's you, but it's you without effort.  It's like a perfect moment."

The male god made a low guttural sound, almost a growl.  Then he turned to Leukippos, "I'm Eros."

"Hence the golden wings," Eris said at the same time Artemis said, "The Elder, not to be confused with Aphrodite's kid."

"I'm Artemis, by the way."

"I'd actually guessed that," Leukippos admitted, now looking at the ground again, when surrounded by gods she should know her place, "It's the other two I..." a place that probably didn't involve calling them 'the other two'.  "What do you want with me?"

"Well," Artemis said, "Once we turn your body female I don't see any reason why we can't put you right back where we found you."

"Uh..." Eris started.  "You do realize that Daphne's been turned into a tree."

"What!" Leukippos shouted.

"That's not good," Eros said.

"Relax." Eris said.  "It's just her body.  She was a nymph anyway, why not be a tree?"

"Because trees can't hunt." Artemis said.

"Or love." Eros said.

"Who says trees can't love?" Eris asked.

"You know exactly what I meant."

"Yes.  But I'm not going to let you get off without saying it."

"The two should have sex."

Eris turned her attention to Leukippos, "He's talking about your sex life right in front of you, how does that make you feel?"

"Stop trying to ... to ... to be you.  This is a serious problem," Artemis said.

"If a spirit isn't enough for you we can always make her a second body, the first humans were made out of clay or some such," Eris said.

"Prometheus is still chained to a rock," Artemis said.

"Yeah, I should do something about that."

"Zeus would kill you."

"I mean I should get someone else to do something about it."

"Can we stick to the matter at hand," Eros asked in a way that was more of an order.

"How did she become a tree?" Leukippos asked, trying to make sense of the strange conversation happening around her.

"It's a long and boring story," Eris said.

"Not that long," Artemis said.

"You're the one that didn't know it happened."

"We haven't been here for that long."

"Fine," Eris said angrily.  "Apollo wanted your girlfriend, she didn't want him, she prayed he wouldn't get her, someone or other turned her into a tree by way of answering that prayer." She turned to Artemis, "Happy?" she snapped.

"Delighted."

"Oh, the me in you is strong."

"It's about time you're on the receiving end for a change."

"You have no idea what I've been through."

"The point!" Eros interrupted.

"We can make Daphne a new body and she can live a human life with her lover, all is well." Eris said.  "Or we could take Daphne's soul and lover here down to Taratros and they could spend eternity together there, all is well.  Just promise me I get to tell Apollo that his would-be love is living happily ever after with someone else."

"You do realize that the only people who actually like Tartaros are your blood relatives," Artemis said.

"Hades doesn't seem to mind."

"Ok, your family and my weird uncle."

"The point?" Eros asked.

"The point is that it's not exactly a noted social venue," Artimis said.  "Only Eris could see that as happily ever after.  I didn't save Leukippos just to send her to the afterlife while still alive."

"Neither did I."

"Then we make her a new body," Eris said.

"Why can't you just turn her back?" Leukippos asked.

"That's like asking why there can only be twelve thrones on Olympos."

"It's magic woven deeply into the world from ages long ago," Artemis explained.

"Otherwise known as stupid rules put in place by stupid gods but so powerful that overturning them would do more harm than good," Eris said.

"For once we agree."

"We do?" Eris couldn't hide the shock in her voice, and didn't think to try.

"So we make Daphne a new body," Eros said.

"Then we transfer the soul."

"But that would have the side effect of making her mortal," Artemis said.

"Leukippos already is.  So what? Their lives end and they come to Tartaros like everyone else," Eris said.  "It's a long way off." She turned to Leukippos, "And don't worry about it.  My whole family lives there, it's a fine place."

There was a pause.

"I'll go to Prometheus," Eris said.

"He'll trust you?" Eros asked.

"He and I can stir up trouble like no one else.  We're close."

"Fine.  I'll distract Zeus," Artemis said.

"No," Eros said, "I can do a better job of it.  You should look after Daphne and this one."

"It's agreed then?" Artemis asked.

The other two gods nodded, and then disappeared.

Artemis approached Leukippos, "Let's get your body into better shape, and get you some better clothes." She placed her right hand on Leukippos shoulder, and her left hand on her hip.

The changes were gradual, and Leukippos had no real sense of what they were coming to.  Then Artemis smiled.  "Come with me." She grabbed hold of Leukippos.  A blur of colors and shapes, then they were at a pond, its water perfectly still.

Artemis gestured for the young woman to look at her reflection.  The face was the same, but not the same.  Small changes in almost imperceptible ways made it more feminine, the way her body moved as she bent forward to look at the reflection was different too.  The sensations on her chest stood out, of course, but so too did the change in her center of balance.

She almost regretted that Artemis had replaced her torn clothes with garments perfect as if freshly made.  She wanted to see what her body actually looked like.

"Bathe," Artemis commanded.

And suddenly she was much less concerned about what her body looked like beneath her clothes, and much more concerned with modesty.  "What?"

"Bathe.  It's what made things go wrong in the first place, let's see how it would work now."

Leukippos looked around, the small pond was empty except for them.  There was no one to see her but the goddess.

She took a moment.  Took a deep breath.  Took another moment.  And then did as commanded.  She was clearly female in body now.  But her body hadn't been all that worried her.  She looked up at the goddess, standing on the shore, and asked, "What if she doesn't forgive me?"

"For what?"

"For lying to her about... who I was, what I was.  What if she doesn't love me anymore?"

"What if Metis claws her way out of Zeus, bears a son, and we have to deal with a new ruler of the universe? What if Eris betrays us all and we're imprisoned like the Titans who sided with Khronos?"

Later, Leukippos, fully clothed and cleaner than before, and Artemis came to the first bay laurel in existence.  Artemis placed a hand on it and spoke, "From one granddaughter of a Titan to another, the person I bring with me is a woman, and she's very sorry for any deceit she may have used in the past and any pain she may have caused.

"The two of you will be together again.  I'm working with gods older than my father, and we have a plan."

[And then I went to sleep at a time that on most days I might be waking up.  Got three hours or so.  Continued that day.]

Kalliope, I'm going to asking for some help again.  Clearly there's a bit more to tell.

Leukippos sat beside the laurel tree that had been Daphne.  Looking across the river at the spot where everything had gone wrong.

"I'm sorry," she finally said.

A tear formed in her left eye.  "I'm sorry that I lied to you.  I'm sorry that I never told you the truth." The tear became too large for her eye and dripped down her cheek.  "I just- I never- I didn't-" tears were coming out of both eyes now.

"I didn't know how to tell you I'd been lying from the beginning because... because it meant that everything between us was built on a lie and I was worried that..." she had to catch her breath.

"I thought that if you learned about the lie you'd think that everything true was a lie too and you'd never forgive me, and I'd never see you again and that would be unbearable."

There was a long silence.

Leukippos looked at the laurel, "And now you're a tree."

Another silence.

"Can you forgive me?  Because it's not a lie anymore, and that was the only lie I ever told to you."

The tree said nothing.

Eris' voice intruded, "...and did you get the-"

"Yes!" Artemis interrupted.  "Whatever you were going to ask, yes.  I got everything on your list of ingredients."

"Prometheus' list."

"Whoever's list.  Stop acting like I don't know what I'm doing."

"Did I miss anything," the Elder Eros asked, descending from the sky on golden wings.

"We're ready to start," Eris said, kneeling down and beginning to gather loose earth and clay. "Assuming silver bow here," she gestured to Artemis, "got the right ingredients."

"How is that even when you're helping you're still an ass?" Artemis asked, joining her on the ground, and helping to form the growing pile.

"An ass is a noble animal."

Eros joined them, saying nothing.  Artemis and Eris continued.

"You just bray bray bray all the time hoping that if you do it enough someone will snap and-"

"Prometheus was very specific about how he-"

"He didn't create women, only men. It was my family that-"

"Don't you dare suggest that I've forgotten Pandora," Eris snapped.  The shape they were creating began to take on a vaguely recognizable form.  "She freed many of my children when she opened that jar.  Some of my siblings too.  Pandora will always be honored by the line of Nyx."

"Only you could see opening the jar as a good thing."

Eris rolled her eyes, but ignored the statement.  "The thing about Pandora is that she was created by all the Olympians working in unison, we're just three."

"This was your idea."

"More than that the most important to the task was the lame god."

"He has a name."

"Your father's wife's son.  With whom you share no relation.  Both of you bastards, after all."

"Hephaistos." Artimis' voice was sharp.  "His name is Hephaistos."  Beat.  "And if you think he's necessary I could have convinced him to come."

"No, start telling others and soon we'll have the whole of Olympos knowing, your twin will find out, he'll come after Daphne again, she'll have to be turned into a tree again, and we'll be right back where we started."

"Bray, bray, bray."

The figure they were working on was now distinctly human in shape, and along the way Artemis and Eris had been adding ingredients from Prometheus' list.

"My point is not that we should have more company, Prometheus created man by his lonesome, it's just that we should be very careful to get things right."

"Your point is to be annoying."

Eros got up and walked over to Leukippos, who hadn't moved at all or made a sound.  "Are you ok?" the god asked.

"What if she doesn't-"

"She does," Eros answered.  "If you want something to be worried about, be worried about this working.  Not feelings.  She feels for you as you feel for her.

"And be worried about those two," Eros gestured with a wing toward Eris and Artemis.

"She can't feel the same way," Leukippos said.  "She never betrayed me."

Eros considered describing how many successful relationships had begun with a bit of dishonesty, but decided it would teach the wrong lesson.  That good can come of bad is true, but it can be seen to excuse the bad.  Instead he simply put a arm and a wing around Leukippos, and warmed the young woman with the friendly embrace.

The constant back and forth between Artemis and Eris washed over them unnoticed.

They stayed there until Eros said, "It's almost time.  Stand with me."

They stood and walked toward the clay figure the goddesses were molding, now almost an exact replica of Daphne.  Eros said, "You know, if there's anything about her body you'd like to change-"

"I just want her the way she was."

"That's the plan anyway. I remember exactly the way she was," Artemis said.

"Taking a peek under the maiden's clothing were we?" Eris asked.

Artemis didn't even use words to express her disdain for Eris.  A rough exhale was enough.  The finishing touches completed Artemis walked to the bay laurel.  "You understand, Daphne, that this might not work, and if it does part of you will always be in contact with this tree, while the rest of you will live a mortal life in that body.  Are you sure you want to go through with this."  She placed her hand on the bark of the trunk.

If you've ever felt a tree give assent with the fullness of its being, you know what Artemis felt when she placed her hand upon the trunk.  If you haven't, it's one of those things you just have to experience first hand.

"Of course she won't age." Eris said.  "This recipe for human being predates old age.  I'll have to ask Geras leave that one," she pointed at Leukippos, "alone, otherwise they'll be terribly mismatched in the end."

"You can do that?" Artemis asked.

"One of the benefits of being an ass is that asses can have children unlike certain other beings."

"I can have children, it's just that-"

"Like my ability to sprout rainbows from my fingers you've never felt the need to show it off."

"I took an oath of chastity!"

"As I recall you also were granted the right to change your mind which calls into question the validity of any oath you swear."

"You don't get to question my integrity!"

Eros had finally had enough.  "If the two of you don't stop bickering I swear by Khaos whence I came that I will make you both fall in love," neither goddess seemed to notice, "with each other."

Eris and Artemis' attention immediately snapped to Eros.  Then to each other.  Finally they said, "Truce," in unison.

"Now," Eros said, "Let's do this."

"Once we do the Moirai will know," Artemis said.  "In essence we're creating a mortal life, and they are present at the beginning of every mortal life.  That doubles the amount of gods who know."

"They're my sisters, they can be trusted," Eris said.

"And my relatives can't?" Artemis pushed the anger from her voice and quickly said to Eros, "Sorry."  Eris' eyes grew wide with fear when she realized why Artemis had felt the need to apologize to Eros.

Eros smiled, "You haven't crossed the line."  After relief settled over the two goddesses he added, "Yet."

"I'll separate the soul from the tree," Eris said, "I'm good at driving things apart."

"I'll put the soul into the body," Artemis said.

"And I'll breathe life into the body," Eros said.

"What do I do?" Leukippos asked.

"Carry the body closer to the tree," Artemis said.

"And stand her upright," Eros said.

The body, a clay duplicate of Daphne, was naked.  Leukippos had been trying, rather hard, not to look at it.  She stammered at the gods, "I... I'm... it's not my place..."

Eris giggled when she realized what the problem was.  "You've seen her naked before.  You must remember.  Your clothes torn from you, deadly weapons rushing toward you, and then the three of us saved you." Beat "In different directions and inelegantly, but we did save you."

"I'll conjure up some clothes," Artemis said.

"I still shouldn't..."

"How many times have you handled each other when hunting together?  To help one through difficult terrain, to pull one out of the way.  All you have to do is move her from the good clay, to the tree."  She knelt beside the body, placed a hand upon it and clothing appeared.

"You made them match," Eris said in disgust, looking at the clothing of Leukippos and the clay Daphne.  Artemis locked eyes with Eris, then turned her eyes toward Eros, then looked back at Eris.  Eris hastily added, "Which is a perfectly wonderful thing to do."

Leukippos picked up the body and carried it to the tree.  The gods silently prepared themselves.  Eris placing one hand on the tree and the other in Artemis' hand.  Artemis placing her free hand on the body, Eros getting ready to breathe life in through the body's nostrils, took the longest to prepare.  When he was ready he took the body from Luekippos, who took a few steps back.

Leukippos would never be able to describe what she felt, but everything around her was somehow charged for a few moments, then Eros stepped aside,and where the clay body had been stood Daphne.

Daphne exhaled, then opened her eyes.

She ran to Leukippos and hugged her.  Eros smiled and then turned his attention to a newly arrived god.  Neither Daphne nor Leukippos noticed.  Suddenly, still embracing Leukippos, Daphne exclaimed, "I have a voice!"  There was a pause then, "Thank the gods-"

"Three in particular," Leukippos said.

"There's been so much I've wanted to say.  I forgive you, how are you not dead, when did your sex change, I love you too, why those three gods?"  The sentences ran together she spoke so fast.

"Um... Those three because Artemis likes you, Eros likes our relationship, and Eris wanted to screw up Apollo's plan.  I don't know when I became female, but my body did when Artemis made it that way.  I didn't die because all three tried to spirit me away to different places, and I uh, were there other questions?"  Leukippos said.  Then Daphne silenced her with a kiss.

-

Meanwhile, the gods were dealing with a new visitor.  The Moirai did indeed notice the creation of a new mortal.  Only Lakhesis made an appearance.  Eris and Artemis went to greet her immediately, Eros soon followed.

After greetings were exchanged Lakhesis said, "Interesting project you've got here."

Eris said, "We were hoping to keep it quiet.  There's only one god we don't want finding out, but the fewer who know the less likely it is he'll find out."

"That's not a problem."

"Thank you," Artemis said.

"The only reason I came was to ask how long you wanted the thread to be."

"As long as the other mortal girl's," Eros said.  "Let them both pass at the same time, whenever that may be."

"Simple enough to do."

"Thank y-" Eris started, but Lakhesis silenced her with a gesture.  She looked Leukippos, with a growing sense of confusion and recognition.

"Wasn't she a baby boy when I saw her last?" Lakhesis asked.

"It's a long and boring story," Eris said.

"Not that long," Artemis said.

"We've been here before."

"Yes, we have."

Then, as they prepared for a bout of verbal sparring, they simultaneously remembered Eros's threat.  They said, "Sorry," in unison.

"I turned her body female," Artemis explained.   That seemed to satisfy Lakhesis.

"Thank you sister," Eris said.  And then Lakhesis was gone.

The three gods returned to the two mortal women.

"You'll have to leave your old lives behind," Artemis told them.  "If my brother finds out you're still alive he'll come after you again."

"No one will recognize your equipment," Eris said.  "Which is, for the record, exactly where you left it."  She gestured to the opposite bank of the river.  "But you'll need new names."

"Stay together and you should be fine." Eros said.  Then he took to the air on his golden wings.

"Keep up the hunt," Artemis said, before leaving herself.

"And promise me that after you've lived out your lives I get to be the one to tell Apollo that he lost his great love to another woman," Eris said.

"Why are you helping us?" Daphne asked.

"Two young women running off into the woods together, loving each other and shunning male society?  You stand in opposition to everything that the dominant culture says is the way things should be.  You practically are me.  I hope you live a long happy life, I really do."  With that Eris walked off.

The two women were now alone by the river.

"Bathe with me," Daphne said to Leukippos.  And Leukippos did.

-

Artemis materialized beside Eris and said, "Wait a minute.  Geras isn't your son.  He's your brother."

Eris burst out laughing, finally managing to say, "It took you this long-"

"Why you little-"

Both suddenly froze in place.  Then they looked around frantically and when they spotted Eros flying high above shouted, "Sorry!" in unison.

Eros idly wondered how long the two would remember his threat.

-

If you were wondering about Daphne's siblings:

Menippe's son Phrastor became king of the Tyrrhenians in Italy.

Orseis married Hellen, the only [or is it eldest? need to dig deeper on two other names] son of Deukalion and Pyrrha, the two survivors from the third age of humanity.  Every mortal not descended from those two descends from the stones that became men and women after being thrown by them as the rest of humanity had been wiped out by flood.

Orseis and Hellen ended up ruling most of Greece.

-

[Rewriting Greek Myth Index]