Nah, they look too much like Aeson for my mc to be comfortable with them.
Also my mc can’t stand Hermes, the guy who cannot even properly supervise the/his “seekers”. Apollo is simply too much of a perfect “golden boy”, just like Aeson for my mc to ever be comfortable with.
Besides Ares can be the appetizer to Cronus himself. 
You and I have very different mages then, all I got was a cut on the arm against Virginia and brought her down easy. I couldn’t even fail a check. Also doesn’t allure and wisdom go together in the multiple stat increase choices? I’m pretty good for wit and strength together it should be even easier for allure, actually I’m sure there are more chances to raise allure than strength on top of that due to strength usually being foregone for stress instead.
I even ended with 60 strength and 74 wit. My wit could’ve been higher but I’m a combat magician.
20 allure… it will be forever before I give Zeus even a chance, allure is my dump stat nevertheless I have citizens betting on my success…
I may have been going about it all wrong, but feeling better about yourself isn’t up to other people. It’s up to you and how you choose to feel about yourself.
Of course people refusing to assist certainly wouldn’t help, but it sounds as if your MC places his self-esteem entirely on the shoulders of others. Which is not only selfish, it’s extremely unwise given the fact that people aren’t here to make you feel better.
That was the point I was making. I assumed it was implied, but okay.
Technically it does freeze our body in the way we receive it, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t allowed to change it. The aging process is slowed to zero, you aren’t contractually imprisoned in the body you’re currently in.
As long as it takes human form, I’m assuming you can change it to whatever you want. I doubt gender biases would really matter all that much then.
I understand that, but that also doesn’t excuse deliberately screwing your life and appearance (which your MC seems to take so seriously) up when simply waiting for a few months would give you everything you’ve dreamed of.
Obviously? Once you possess the Essence, the Gods will be unable to control you. That’s the entire point.
The Gods possess the power they do because they have tiny slivers of the Essence inside them, but the amount compared to the Bearer even when they’ve only just received the Essence is so minuscule you wouldn’t be able to see it under an electron microscope.
That’s the ENTIRE reason the Gods are so terrified and so divided about letting you actually partake in the Hero Trials; once you possess the Essence combined with the immortality from the Hero Trials, there is no way they’ll be able to rein you in because the power you possess surpasses theirs by an almost indescribable amount. When that happens, the title ‘God’ won’t mean dick.
Once you possess the Essence, you are effectively unleashed. Forget being ‘allowed’ to do anything, you can do whatever the hell you want; whether it be blowing stuff up or looking like a hero. Even if you don’t know the first place to start, if the Gods try anything at all, the sheer immensity of your power and your innate understanding of how it works means that you can slam down any effort of theirs before even the slightest bit of traction is gained in any plan of theirs.
Everything gets better with time. Not only is that applicable to real life, it’s even more applicable when you have ultimate power waiting for you.
Like you said I think that probably requires a strength check somewhere too. To only way to win on wit alone is to hang back, observe and observe again and then you’ll pass a Wit check somewhere and trick her into making a mistake and you barely win. Or at least the teacher scolds you for “taking your sweet time”.
Still it doesn’t take away the fact that currently the only “magic” we can apparently do on our own, without any magical items, amounts to blowing up a lock. In other words we may be able to barely “magic” our way out of a paper bag and that’s it.
Well I only know about me, but during my college bullying episode it did take a change of university for that to happen and moving is not an option for my mc.
Similar story with most of the rape victims I’ve encountered professionally they usually only begin to do “better” once they’ve moved to a new city or even another country entirely. Disassociation makes everything better, but it’s not an option for our characters.
Of course the last and most drastic option to make ourselves feel better, is to simply snap and go into full blown nonsense mode and for my mc to think he really is living in a bad dream and treat the whole situation accordingly. 
Yep, the environment on Olympus really isn’t conducive to his “happiness”.
This is perhaps true but it seems that on Olympus the other people are there to go out of their way to make him feel worse.
Well realistically he’s likely going to try his magic on his clothes first, as better clothes (and some foundation for guys, our current PM loves it. Makes all the worst wrinkles disappear before the camera’s) are more immediate “remedies” to try and mitigate that damage somewhat. Of course even that will likely be beyond our current, puny magical skills.
We’ve still got to actually figure out how to make it happen even then and I very much doubt it will be anywhere near instantaneous. A couple of weeks after that stupid birthday would probably be the absolute soonest we could realistically hope for.
Likely not immediately as it will still take (a lot of) time to figure out to actually wield the full essence powers and they always still have Aeson as a fail-safe.
The Gods here seem like big enough jerks to actually try and make it contractually so that we are and I somehow doubt they’d be willing to wait until my mc has made his body more to his liking.
Otherwise it will still take some time after our birthday to actually learn how to do so.
I do hope you’re right and we can change it, otherwise what’s the point of it.
Well we likely won’t know the “first place to start” and they will still have Aeson, who they could kill as a fail-safe.
Yes but when I was a teenager being bullied it sure didn’t seem so and that’s likely the same for my mc. Also you only get to make first impressions once and they did kind of ruin that for us.
The power also isn’t truly ultimate, there’s still Aeson, the Gods themselves and the fact that we’re apparently forbidden from ever truly shape-shifting, which is also likely to be a big deterrent to exploring the wider universe.
With creativity I’m pretty sure you can work around it.
Something is keeping us bound to aeson.
Something is forcing us to stay human.
With omnipotence and all that we can probably deal.
My MC will. He doesn’t care about clothes or looks. He just wants to win.
If only we had a clue of what to do, alas we don’t get the necessary omniscience to go with it.
So unraveling those mysteries and undoing that likely will take easily into the tens of thousands of years if we’re quick.
Well if “winning” means another victory parade where he can look like a beggar next to Aeson that really would suck the appeal out of it fast.
We literally have the essence as a soul.
It doesn’t get more innate than that.
Winning means complete and utter defeat of those who stand in my way.
Two words, “previous incarnation”, how do you suppose your Trojan War incarnation know how to use the essence? It just came naturally to them, just like @Rohie said (IIRC), so I suppose it’s more like an instinct more than a knowledge.
Though we don’t really know WHAT they did with it, we only got to see up until their “awakening”, so I can’t deduce if it’s just a simple display of magic (and by simple I meant overwhelming display of power) or a complicated and subtle things, like maybe, ensuring their future incarnation fate or something… (but that would meant they already manipulated probability and time to do their bidding)
I’m inclined to believe the latter, because the ‘Trojan War’ ended with the ‘Trojan Horse’, so I doubt they did some flashy magic thingies.
If it was Chronos that split the essence and the bearer maybe he knows a way to make you whole? Namely the mc considering the bearer just holds the power and isn’t the true owner of it
All our previous incarnations couldn’t handle the essence and “burned out” before they could accomplish anything significant with it, so I doubt they’d have anything valuable to add.
Their more practical skills from their human lives probably would come in handy right about now, of course right now we don’t have access to them, we’ll only gain that at the point where it becomes worthless. Which is a pity my mc could have used some of Leon’s combat skills when dealing with Calypso.
For all the good it’s ever done us, which is exactly nothing.
The essence is a curse that has thus far done nothing but ruin our lives, anything positive that comes out of it, if it ever does, will come too little too late.
Particularly since we’ve first got to survive the God’s death traps trials with nothing but the “magic” power to blow up a lock, against a pack of far superior opponents.
If we kill him that knowledge dies with him and I wouldn’t give us much chance to ever figure out how to undo what he did within any decent timeframe. If we don’t kill him the Gods will probably kill Aeson and by extent us.
We’ve literally not even scratched the surface.
We basically used a hammer to screw in a nail.
I’m pretty sure now that we know what we’re using it will be more useful.
Especially for my MC since he has a gun.
Since that “gun” obviously comes from Hades my mc wants nothing to do with it since he doesn’t want to owe that guy anything at all.
I doubt it as it still seems to be pathetically weak, except when we cannot control it and it decides to go “essence ex-machina” on us, but since that is by definition completely unreliable we cannot build a strategy for surviving those trials around it and it will probably stay that way until well after those trials.
My MCs face if he read that
Owe Hades.
And he was entirely useless after abandoning us.
And he promised he wouldn’t.
And all he does is give us a gun that probably has some stupid side effect.
My MC thinks that hades owes him.
With interest.
And plus the gun is usefull and pride doesn’t help when your dead.
When I first noticed the gun, I was like “isn’t this a little overkill? I’m so taking it.”
I saw no reason not to take it.
Except a possible side effect.(but dying is worse)
Or pride(but dying is worse)
I doubt any demigod is faster than a bullet, even if they are Hermes’s children
Fair point, though it is said that our previous incarnations did many great things in their life, is it with the essence help or not is up for debate, but that is still a plus.
First: the Bearer and the Bestower have the tendency to be born in important historical circumstances. We got told about that. So they most likely did accomplish things from significance.
And as far as we know only most died by being burned out by the energy of the Essence, not all. There are cases in which the Bearer survived their 19th birthday, at least this is what the history section is hinting at.
Ands there are also various possible explanations why by now it wasn’t more who stayed alive: the Bearer just not knowing about the Essence and thus not using it,the gods made sure that they don’t grow old enough or even “it’s not the power of the Essence that is deadly, it’s some other mechanism that Cronus used to make sure that the Essence wouldn’t grow too powerful, while he had no use for it”.
Considering that it’s also heavily hinted that there is more to the whole Essence deal/That there is some twist waiting for us to happen, and that we already have the confirmation that, yes, immortality given by the gods is not the only way to stay alive with the Essence, those theories aren’t unfounded.
And don’t forget that the Bearer never before was a demigod. That the gods thought it as important could have other reasons as just to justify their participation in the trials. It also could influence how their body will react to the power of the Essence.
Well the only one of our previous incarnations we know of was more skilled then our mc is now at least. Like I said I could have used the Spartan warrior combat skills of Leon when facing Calypso and my mc could sure use them in those trials, but the essence, no I don’t think he’d have any useful information to impart on the essence.
I’d err on the side that most of them did what they did without the “help” of the essence, they just had better material circumstances then we do, not being exhausted from nearly three years on the run from packs of psychotic little killers will do that to you.
I thought it was 18th, if it’s 19 the wait and being stuck in our current, useless, demigod body is going to be even longer then I thought.
Ignorance is bliss, considering the bits we can consciously use now are absolutely pathetic. Blowing up a lock is really going to come in handy when we must survive deathtraps against young and fit killers who have been training at least half their lives for the occasion.
Yep, the Gods and Cronus have screwed us over far more times than we could count is likely, but there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it since they’ll always have the Aeson-failsafe.
True, I doubt the twist will be very pleasant for us though and I sure as hell hope the “immortality” given by the gods doesn’t equate to immutability of our demigod body after that point.
If the Gods wanted it I doubt it’s going to be in any way “good” or pleasant for us. Then again my mc already absolutely hates his stupid demigod body.
Ah, the gods aren’t actually out to get you. Yes, half of them want to use you in their plans, and the other half want to kill you so you don’t mess up their plans, but it’s really not personal. It’s just business.