No More Olympus

Chapter 13

Athena's sleep had been restless once again.
The conversation she had secretly overheard between Ares and Aphrodite had remained at the centre of her thoughts, keeping her awake throughout most of the night.
It was because of this that she now found herself in the hotel dining room at six in the morning for their breakfast buffet service, slowly sipping on freshly brewed coffee and a small plate of scrambled eggs she was forcing herself to eat while doing the newspapers morning crossword.
She was nearly successful in completely distracting herself with the puzzle before she was violently ripped from her trance by the crashing of a glass plate against the wooden table. This shock nearly caused her to leap out of her chair and have a heart attack, the latter of which was thought to be an impossible feat for a god.
"Good morning Gray," Hermes greeted as he sat in front of a massive plate piled high with an absurd amount of eggs, pancakes and sausages, "How'd you sleep?"
"I slept fine," Athena replied, coming to her senses, "Are you seriously gonna eat all that?"
"Of course," Hermes chuckled, tucking his napkin into his collar, "I'm an athlete and an Olympian. This is me eating light."
He grabbed his knife and fork and quickly began to eat. If anyone else were eating as fast as he was, they would have likely been hospitalized or at least had the world's worst case of hiccups. But of course, he did everything fast, he was used to it.
Hermes soon noticed that Athena was staring.
"Oh, I'm sorry. Did you want some?" He asked.
Athena waved her hand to reject his offer.
"Actually, could I get your advice on something?" She began.
"Offer wisdom to the Goddess of Wisdom?" Hermes marvelled as he continued to eat, "That's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, hit me."
"I don't need 'wisdom,'" Athena corrected, "I just want to pick your brain."
"Oh, be careful, it's scary in there," Hermes warned.
"Are you... mad at me for not wanting you around my family?" Athena asked hesitantly.
"Not really," Hermes answered without skipping a beat, "Your kids, your husband, your choice, and you're Athena. Who knows better than you?"
"Wow," Athena remarked, taken aback by Hermes's sentiment, "Um, thank you for your trust in me."
"And besides," Hermes added as he continued to eat, "I have super speed, and I know where you live now. So I can kidnap you whenever I wanna hang out."
"How do you know where I live?" She asked.
He pulled her driver's license out of his shirt pocket and slid it over to her.
"And there's the Hermes I know," Athena said dryly, sliding it back into her wallet.
"It'll be fun," he assured her, "We'll go and play mini-golf."
"Mini golf?" Athena questioned.
"Yeah," Hermes nodded his head, "It's like regular golf, except the club is smaller, and all the holes are decorated with weird knick-knacks."
"I know what it is," Athena defended, "But you go to the trouble of kidnapping me just to play mini-golf?"
"You ever been?" He asked.
"Well... no," she admitted.
"Then that's settled it," Hermes declared, "We're going mini-golfing."
"You seem oddly committed to this," Athena observed, unable to keep herself from smiling.
"Well, you see, it's all part of my evil plan to convince you to intermingle both sides of the family," He explained, "Is it working?"
"At the moment, no," Athena said honestly.
"But I've planted the mind virus," he said, pointing to his temples, "As abstract as it may be."
"Mind virus?" Athena questioned, "Does that work?"
"Oh, all the time," Hermes assured her, "Remember that time Hephaestus was convinced someone was hiding in his forge and stealing his smithing tongs whenever he wasn't looking, but really, they just kept falling behind his worktable."
"You were behind the tong-stealing nymph?" Athena questioned.
"Mind virus," he answered.
"That drove him nuts for years," Athena remembered, "He was getting ready to bring down Mount Etna to kill it."
"I know," Hermes grinned maliciously.
"Know what?" Aphrodite asked as she sat at the table with a rather fancy-looking omelet in one hand and a glass of juice in the other.
"That Hermes is a shit disturber," Athena answered.
"Well, we already knew that," Aphrodite agreed, "Need we bring up Ares's jar incident."
"Not while he's so close," Athena warned, pointing to Ares, who was only a few feet away loading his plate at the buffet table.
"Are you kidding me?" Hermes laughed, "I'm gonna be telling that story till the day I die."
"What story?" Ares demanded as he approached the table, seemingly refusing to sit down until his question was answered.
Hermes's face immediately went pale.
"The one where he dyed my hair green," Athena answered casually, "And I chased him all the way to Troy."
"Ah yes," Ares smiled, finally sitting down, "I love this story. Please, continue."
"Well..." Hermes began, unsure of where to start and still clearly nervous, "I dyed her hair green, and she chased me to Troy."
Ares looked displeased.
"I remember that being more compelling," he remarked with disappointment.
"So..." Athena began, breaking the silence, "We should talk about our plan for today."
"Yes, please," Hermes whimpered.
"Our best plan of attack would be to go in with maximum stealth," Athena began.
"The coward's way," Ares mumbled under his breath.
"No comments from the peanut gallery," Athena demanded, pulling out her tablet and showing a birds-eye view of their camp, "Now their camp is at the bottom of Mount Olympus. It's heavily guarded and surrounded by a fence which I can only assume is equipped with cameras and electricity to keep out intruders, so my idea is this. We send Ares in dog form in. He leaps the fence and uses his nose to track the box by scent, the gorgon eye should be more than enough to provide a trail."
"And the gorgon eye became useful after all," Ares floated, "I wonder whose idea it was to keep it?"
"Yes, yes, you're very smart," Athena rolled her eyes, "Don't dislocate your shoulder patting yourself on the back. Now I will be in the sky getting an owl's eye view to help you maneuver past the guards. Hopefully, if they see you, they'll just chase you off rather than shoot or try to capture you, but we can't take that risk Once you track down the box, you're going to bark like hell, and Hermes is going to rush in there, grab you and the box and rush you out before anyone even knows we were there in the first place."
"Why don't I just rush in there and search myself?" Hermes asked, "It's a big camp, but I can be in and out in minutes. It would be a lot less complicated."
"We don't know if the group at large is aware that we're real," Athena explained, "We don't exactly need to go and give them proof of the godly by having you running around their camp at top speed, leaving a magic golden trail down every path."
Hermes sighed.
"That's really annoying," He remarked, "Remember when we used to just be able to give a mortal a magic sword or something, and he would do it?"
"I do," Athena agreed, "Most of them died horribly."
"What?" Hermes questioned, "I don't remember that."
"Because the boys like Perseus overshadowed all the others," Ares answered, "His stories were spread more than the untrained warrior from the small shoreline town gutted by a Cetus."
"Maybe that's why some of us didn't bother in sending someone else to do our dirty work for us," Aphrodite said, sounding very proud and full of herself.
"And how is Eros?" Hermes mocked, immediately receiving a dirty look from the goddess. He turned back to Athena, "Wait does this mean no big fight?"
"No big fight," Athena confirmed.
"That's a shame," Hermes sighed, "No honour, betrayal, tragedy, that stuff used to make for some terrific stories."
"I agree," Ares nodded stoically.
"Of course you do," Athena sneered, "Hermes, tragedy is the one thing we're trying to avoid out there, which means no killing any mortals, period. We don't really know who these people are. Monsters are one thing, but if we start murdering people, we go from a nuisance to a legitimate international threat. So we do not kill. That's the rule from now on."
Ares looked visibly annoyed by the declaration.
"Fair enough," Hermes shrugged, "Hey, do you remember that thing you used to say before a battle?"
"No, no, I don't," Athena lied unconvincingly.
"I do, 'To Hades with you!'" Aphrodite mocked, repeating Athena's infamous battle cry in a scary-sounding voice, "I bet you felt so cool saying it too."
The cry held a strange place in Athena's life. It held particular relevance to her that no one on this table knew of, it was a phrase of power in the past. A declaration that she used to feel represented her determination, spirit and reputation on the battlefield. But as she looked back on it in the twenty-first century she realized that phrase actually represented all of the regrets she had about who she used to be, her rage, her destructive nature, her pride, all things she wished to let die in the past.
In short, that particular battle cry was not something she was proud of.
"It was cool," Hermes defended, "You saw how many grown men would piss themselves when she said it."
"That was more who was saying it rather than what was being said," Aphrodite argued, "If the seemingly all-powerful goddess of strategic warfare was shouting that she was sending you to the realm of the dead wouldn't you piss yourself?"
Hermes nodded in agreement.
"It was simply a tool to intimidate foes to make her seem grander than she truly was," Ares sneered, "Unlike some of us who did not require such tools."
"Then what was the black armour for dumbass?" Athena snapped, "Or you constantly bringing around Deimos and Phobos, your pet thugs?"
"My sons are great warriors," Ares argued, "I made sure of it myself, so it only makes sense to bring them to battle."
"And the armour?" Athena insisted,
"Would you rather I fight naked?" Ares shrugged.
"He's got you there," Hermes leaned over and whispered,
"Hey," Aphrodite interrupted, "Speaking of theatricality, why don't we go with the old Dionysus strategy?"
"We are not doing the Dionysus strategy," Athena rejected.
"Why not?" Hermes asked, quickly jumping on the bandwagon, "It has literally never not worked. It's clean, it's easy."
"I am not doing the Dionysus strategy," Athena insisted, "It's stupid and humiliating, and I'm not doing it."