Oh, so THAT’s what I’m forgetting to bring to all my dates! I sort of thought machetes were passe.
Well, everyone’s got to de-stress somehow. I don’t have finals coming up, but CoG allows me to keep from being overwhelmed by things like job hunts and/or certification exams.
Well, some people like a girl who knows how to hold a grudge with discretion, unlike certain children of Hermes. 
Over Calypso’s shoulder, you watch Sage swing her machete dangerously close to Santiago’s face. He doesn’t even flinch. When she catches you staring, she sinks the blade into a nearby tree trunk.
Gods.
My reaction: Perfect 
That might not be that much of a problem for my Evander. His opinion towards the gods are complicated, to put it simply, and, at least from a role-playing point of view, is still coming to terms with Earth and Olympus. Discussing his feelings about it with her–assuming that’s an option–is something that I’m looking forward to reading.
As for the child of Hermes… Again, from a role-playing point of view, he understands her anger, but he’d still prefer to avoid her whenever possible. I can’t imagine him being attracted to someone that hot-headed without plenty of work on both sides.
Oooh, I rembember that. A minute of appreciation for the zero fucks given by Santiago. 
Santiago’s my favourite character, lmfao. I already know I’m going to love him.
Way I read it Aeson, at the very minimum retains the small part that makes up his own soul, also the MC was never meant to get the full essence, because Aeson (possibly Saint as well) and the Gods keep hold of the small slivers that are the basis of their souls/powers.
Not that getting the essence will be much cause for celebration since in-game our mc’s can already barely handle the teeny, tiny sliver they’ve got right now that forms their own “soul”.
Eh, most demigods don’t even have flashy power abilities, I believe they’re just naturally tougher, stronger, smarter and more healthy, but for most it kind of ends there.
As for the mc, I think our “demigod” core/powers (whatever those might be) were ironically used to power and/or sustain that blocker spell around our demigod “core”. Besides after that coma all our “reawakened” demigod core seems to do is interfere with our already feeble control of our “normal” essence powers, so it seems to be more of a curse then a blessing at the moment.
To answer your question however, had the mc not been under the blocker spell they likely would have manifested some weak powers during childhood, something useless and silly like animating the hand of dead person at a funeral to wave at the crowd or something. It probably wouldn’t have been all that impressive, our mc’s real powers lie in their “normal” essence abilities anyway, if only we had even a modicum of control and finesse over them. 
Re: Aeson dying. Idk if it’s a confirmation or not, but @Rohie liked my post about Aeson dying when he gives you his half of the Essence, so…
Now I’m just super confused, lmfao.
You and Aeson Baeson share a soul.
He literally completes you (#OTP)
If one of you dies before the Transfer, you both die. My understanding is that Aeson is destroyed during the Transfer, because he cannot exist without a soul. He becomes part of you, his Mortal coils gone.
This hasn’t been outright confirmed, but it is the only logical explanation, to me.
…But didnt we already saw a Bestower survive after they gave their half of the Essence to the Bearer? During the past life (Isn’t that what the vanishing of the circular birth mark indicated)? Or got that retconed?
The Bestower also just dying would basically lead the whole Bearer-Bestower deal to be basically useless. Why do you need the Bestower if they anyway die as soon as the Bearer gets all the power? Really just to keep the human body from detorating (What would be a really insecure way to keep the Essence under controll as we got told that ways exist to extend their lifetime after the Bearer got the Essence)? Why not keep part of the Essence seperated from the rest at the same place the Essence goes back to as soon as it goes in hibernation? It also is in contrast with all got to hear by now about the whole Bearer-Bestower deal.
Rohie also liked a few of my crazier theories that by now got jossed, so…(I think she likes to see us suffer and panic because of our theories…
)
I learned how Apollo punishes humanity in the modern era.
He puts together the set for Kidz Bop.
He is a monster.
[details=Nadira and Hades]It was a summer that sent the dizzy, half-giddy pulse of fever high into the clouds. You close your eyes, and imagine a sky that swells with the burgeoning weight of the heat. A saffron sheet, taut.
A summer in which even the rules and laws that governed your life grew limp, like cheap paper whose structural integrity has been compromised by watercolour paint. The heat softens and spreads the faces of the children in your neighbourhood into shriveled, sun screened blurs peering at you from behind the windows of their homes like so many convicts on house arrest. It melts the grease in the icecream man’s moustache so it droops and uncurls, casting shadows on his presence. The bees fly drunk on nectar that has turned alcoholic; the neighbour’s cat sleeps all day in the shade of their drapes. You rest your head against the coolness of a melon before cutting into it, hold a glass to your cheek, watch aunt Alice’s hair go slack and cling to her face.
“This heat is deranging,” she says and rubs sunscreen on your skinny-as-an-afterschool-special arms.
The ivy-aunt. Yours are the tendrils that clutch.
Uncle Henry’s Audi rushes through the green midday heat, slick and shiny as a scarab. Gleaming so dubiously you can barely stand to look at it. Freshly waxed, with coins of sunshine dancing on its hard, black body.
In the dappled light, filtering in through the blinds, aunt Alice watches uncle Henry bend and lift you effortlessly into the air, as though you are an inflatable child, made of air. On your face, she sees the shy delight of airborne young. It is your smile that reminds her of Priscilla, that you have deep dimples that stay on for long after the smile leaves your eyes, that your skin shines, and that your face is small and wonderful and that even now, when you are 7, what she can see is the lasting glamour of a face that both does and does not know its impact. It makes her soul subdued and measured when she sees the alarming, sudden twilight of your eyes, blasts every atom of air out of her lungs when you turn those eyes on her and say, with near complete indifference, that you sometimes wonder about your mother. Your apathetic grace is frightening to her, as she watches you, and contemplates what the world might exact from grace. You are gravely curtained, then, aunt Alice adopting a tone that seems to say, bright rain of my love, look at me, and slough off your mother’s skin.
She is unsurprised at the extent of your physical ease with him, alarmed that you seem to have a sub world that excludes her entirely. A pliable, downy world of smiles and laughter that she, the aunt, had no part in. She recognizes, acutely, that a delicate, purple tinge of envy hangs round the periphery of her thoughts like an ominous storm cloud. Heavy on the horizon.
She doesn’t allow herself to consider whom it is she envies. The child, or the man.
From the front seat window, with the wind in your hair, you watch a band of parrots, vibrant as methai, plunge out of a Maple tree, tumble in the sizzling air, then sort themselves into formation and streak away across the sky. Uncle Henry points them out to you, smiling a startling, white smile. It gives his brown, almond shaped eyes, crinkled, happy edges. His hair is clipped close, dark and thick, facebones like something cutting standing out in sharp relief against the soft curve of an almost feminine mouth. Sometimes, he’s the most handsome man you’ve ever seen. And sometimes, he isn’t.
“The sky looks like a mandarin.” You say, distractedly, having discovered a lime sweet in the glove compartment.
Uncle Henry frowns at you. “We’ll be eating after the show, Nadira. Please don’t ruin your appetite.” He lifts a slender finger, points out the window, and then rests his hand on yours. “Do you see that cloud? Over by the streetlight.”
“A transparent, spotted snake.” You say, and then reconsider. “The staff of Asclepius.”
He looks at you with such keen eyes that it must have been a strain on your good humour (you are not a very good humoured girl, to tell the plain truth) to sustain the pressure of that gaze. “Mi amor,” he says, laughing, “the trees are sea anemones.”
“Waving their tentacles.” You flex your hands, tendrils of silver snaking upwards and dissipating.
“Trying to trap the clouds,” he agrees. “Are you reading about Asclepius?” His knuckles, on the steering wheel, are turning white.
You, unsure of the politics of this, shift uncomfortably. “I was. Our history teacher told us to pick a figure from mythology we admired, or wanted to be like.” “I was going to write about Athena, but I don’t like what she did to Arachne.” He looks at you. “I mean,” you say, “she was a better weaver. It wasn’t her fault that Athena was too big headed to admit it.”
“Did you say that to aunt Alice?” He asks, eyes glittering like glass, cool hand still overtop your warm, slender, one. His talk like a creature next to him, a crow of his singular expression.
“Yes. She was the one that suggested Asclepius instead. He’s O.K.” The trees and streetlights fly past. Inky. Sepulchral.
It grows darker, as the light grows softer, fuzzier, turning to a kind of crumbling yellow pollen. The sky outside is a series of oblong shapes between the crowns of the trees, the roofs of houses, balconies, flowerpots. It looks like a jigsaw puzzle.
The Phoenix theater has a newly painted high dome that you haven’t seen from the inside, yet. It’s painted like the ocean, white stippled and warm, tiny, green-gray fish like whizzing jet planes, leaving bubble trails. A whale coasts, fatly baffled, by the chandelier.
How strangely it makes you feel, how strangely you think of beauty. You are greedy for it, insatiably greedy, you might watch it forever, staring intently, watching everything about you with a fierce urge to take it all and imprint it within yourself.
You are the girl, who sees and knows. And later, the girl who doesn’t know. The girl mired in uncertainty, stranded in doorways, your own inability crippling you.
You are here to see Cain, your favourite play, for the first time.
The theater smells of breathing people and floor polish. A magical, theater smell that you love and treasure. Smells, like music, hold memories. You breathe deep.
It may be thou shalt be as we.
And ye?
Are everlasting.
At night, you would stand on your bed with a sheet wrapped around you and say “‘And the unfathomable gulfs of Hades, and the interminable realms of space, and the infinity of endless ages, all, all, will I dispute!’” and crash into bed without bending your knees, like a corpse. Aunt Alice would frown, crossing her arms. Left over right. “I won’t allow you to stay up this late with uncle Henry next time he makes a nighttime visit,” she would say, each time, and leaving you to contemplate this dreadful promise, would kiss your cheek and pull the duvet up to your chin.
Gainst all external sense and inward feeling:
Think and endure, — and form an inner world.
Memory, in all forms, had turned into an impetuous sort of regret.
The loss of uncle Henry grew robust and alive. Like a monsoon rain. Every season.
Numbed by the loss of the uncle was not an uncle (unbeknownst to you, the girl who saw and knew) you look out at everything with a vision smudged by a half-grief. A grief like a broken plaything, tucked away into a glass paned cupboard. Cozy and contained. Private and narrow. The girl comes away, seared, laughing mutely at her effrontery.
By a most crushing and inexorable destruction and disorder of the elements
Which struck a world to chaos, as a chaos subsiding has struck out a world such things, though rare in time, are frequent in eternity.
Pass on, and gaze upon the past.
“Your voice could cut straight through a man, Nadira.”
With a whimper, grief bursts through the white hot crack, falls on its knees, gets up and stumbles on benumbed legs out of the room, weeping heartily. A snot nosed child. You watch, astonished.
You were born fit; you rendered yourself unfit. A sharp, steely slash of hysteria — you swallow the knot in your throat that threatens strangulation and watch Hades watching you.
At first glance, you appear to have settled into the skin of your mother. Slim hipped. Thick, dark hair coming free from your plait in soft, unruly wisps. A chiseled, heavy browed face, straight, sharp nose and luminous nutbrown skin. Your white, sudden smile gives way to twin dimples and your eyes have the pinched, hunted look of the very unlucky. By the corner of your delicate, fine mouth there is a small birthmark that moves as you suck in your lower lip.
Only your eyes are incontestably entirely yours. Large. Dewy. Dark as an aged roof grown mossy with rain.
In New York, on the train, across the aisle from you, a woman with chapped lips blows her nose at regular intervals, dropping each tissue at her feet like a flock of improvident doves.
Memory is that women on the train. The tissues at her feet. Fucked in the way she draws from the recesses of your cupboard, and emerges with the most incorporeal article. A fleeting look, a feeling, the sky on a hot day. The dome of a theater. An uncle’s knuckles.
She knows him, this god of loss. This god of grief locked in glass paned cupboards. This god of memory. Of course she does.
You see your face reflected in his gaze and the specter of your future in it appears to mock you. You tire of grief’s proprietary handling of your body. You want it back. It’s yours. Grief laughs a hollow laugh and dances cheerfully out.
He leaves no footprints, no ripples in water, no photographs. [/details]
In my literature class, we were given a list of topics and told to pick one and write about it, and there was an option to write about a parent/guardian’s relationship with a child (that was the literal prompt, it was super vague) and I wasn’t interested in the others, so tht’s wht I chose. Originally I intended for this to be a re-write of smth else I did for Nadira tht I hated, but it spiralled out of control. Anyway! I hope y’all don’t mind me dropping it here. It’s sort of a short piece on Nadira and Hades.
I’m still more worried about what she’ll do in a trial then what she’ll do to me. I don’t want it to turn out like OJ (criminal he won, civil he lost) Actually this pretty much is what I think she’d do at the trial I need to win, minus(?) the slurs.
Another reason to romance: to prevent legal trouble.
All the “wanting to kill me” though? She clearly just can’t handle a crush 
I like it look at it this way- The Essence created Gaia, who then bore the titans, who in turn bore the Greek gods.
So the Essence’s great grandkids are trying to recruit the Essence against the Essence’s grandchildren.
I’ll be disappointed if we can’t find our fellow primordials like Eros, Nyx, and Gaia to tell the titans and gods that it’s time to get off our lawn.
It’s all Greek to me.
Edit: I just realized how terrible that is. I’m sorry for this.
Problem is that most of them are either asleep due to them yielding to the Titans or killed as in Ouranos.
Gaea is known to be fully asleep due to her yielding to the Olympians after Typhon failed to bring them down. Tartarus doesn’t leave his Pit, Nyx is chilling in her swanky mansion, Erebos is chilling in the Underworld, Day is doing her thing, Elpis is being the spirit of Hope, and Pontus is in the deep waters with a gentleman’s understanding with Poseidon that he doesn’t wake him up. The Primordials are basically omnipotent as long as they remain in their domains. Which is why they hesitate to leave them. They all know what happened to Ouranos. They wouldn’t risk getting merked when they can just chill in their domains and not die.
Typhon was the closest to bringing them down then any other threat. He swatted Poseidon into the seas and pummelled Selene so hard her personification the moon has craters in it, and then the rest of the Olympians fled in terror. Except for Zeus who had his Divine tendons get ripped out after Typhon took a grade ten lightning bolt directly and just laughed and proceeded to do what I mentioned.
So if you ever want to scare the Olympians, mention Typhon. Who is still probably trapped underneath a mountain because, his mother would make him practically unkillable as long as he’s touching the Earth.
Evander’s Honest Reaction: What am I doing here? 
(He already feels very disconnected toward demigods and the idea of Olympus being his home. Seeing her act like that and watching Santiago take it in stride just reinforces how out-of-place he is among the others).
Damon’s Outward Reaction: Oh, I’m going to have SO much fun with you. 
(He wouldn’t verbalize directly his true thoughts about how he finds her childish nature downright ridiculous and her recklessness almost embarrassing to watch. But the fact he’ll treat her like a child and relentlessly snark/tease her will state his views clearly enough).
I don’t know; she was crushing our throats just fine, if you ask me. 
Who knows? We might be able to strike a deal with him. Either he helps us destroy the gods or we poof him out of existence.
O.K, I know I’ve posted abt this theory before but, we know Priscilla gave Saint his name because it was ironic, right? One of Saint Augustine’s attributes was the dove. ‘The death of the dove’? Is Saint going to die 
? This might explain why Priscilla gave him up, too. Why’d she want to raise him and grow attached if she knew he was going to die?
Iirc they are also attributed to Aphrodite.
[Am hoping for this since I rather like Saint and want him around]
Which, if that does happen, raises a lot of questions like who gets the mantle of being the god(dess) of love if she kicks the bucket? And if the timing of her death (if it is indeed her who dies) is just around the time for MC’s legal trial, imagine getting slapped with having to defend 2 murder charges O: