When someone sends down a snake to kill a baby, it can be pretty easy to label them as the bad guy.
Okay, really easy. I mean, who tries to kill a baby? But, listen, it's more complicated than that.
Jennie (Hera) was the goddess of marriage and matrimony, a domain she considered to be one of the most powerful in the pantheon. And she was.
She looked after the bonds and hearts of everyone joined for eternity, be they human, god, or beast. She was dedicated, well-respected, and even feared among the other gods for her great power.
Jennie had a problem, though.
You see, Jennie was married, naturally, in the most important union to the most powerful man
in creation: Zeus, the king of the gods, lord of lightning, god of the sky, and the most unfaithful, lascivious, deceitful, untrustworthy, philandering, perfidious, and down right adulterous creature that ever has or will exist.
You might say this had Jennie nettled.
The issue was that the gods could scarcely take vengeance on one another. Not that they didn't want to. Zeus and Poseidon, Hades and Demeter, Hephaestus and Ares, the gods were full of rivalries and bad blood that ran, literally, to the beginning of time, but, if they were to act on it, the incited conflict had the potential to rend the whole of creation asunder.
So they acted through proxies, people or beings that barely mattered to the inner workings of high divinity. And nobody mattered less than mortals.
Jennie provided the most famous examples of these punishments, or at least the most, overall.
She always took vengeance on Zeus' mistresses and the demigod's they produced. She did this so often that her name became all but synonymous with cruel retribution from the gods.
It cannot be said that Jennie was innocent in this, nor that she was not cruel to these unsuspecting women and their innocent children, but, in a way, she was a victim too. She too
was hurting. She too was betrayed.
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Los Angeles was muggy in the summer.
People there liked to complain about it, despite spending the entire rest of the year bragging about how mild and consistent the weather was. It was pleasant at the coastline, but pretty
much everywhere else that cool sea breeze hit the low elevation temperatures and turned it into sticky humidity.
The locals still went about their lives, but in a trudging manner, wearing tank tops and breezy shorts and generally dashing from one spot of shade to the next as the California sun turned against them.
Jennie enjoyed it. It reminded her of summers on the Mediterranean.
She strode down Santa Monica Boulevard past the bright and colorful West Hollywood storefronts. She had bravely donned a full length maxi dress of autumn orange that plunged
low in the front, and layered in the skirt so that a glimpse of toned, chestnut skinned leg peaked out on every other step.
Her head was loosely wrapped in a lacy, brown headscarf that
auburn curl tumbled out of like a waterfall.
The midday sun felt glorious, almost enough to distract from the memory of Zeus' bastard son Apollo driving it across the sky. She calmed herself. Jennie had long since made peace
with the children of Leto, having found Artemis a shrewd and interesting young woman, but
Apollo's cockiness and brazen commitment to acting a fool in every situation made him harder to tolerate.
But she had no time for leisure, today. She was on a mission.
Her destination was down San Vincente Street, in a square, post-modern building that mixed
glass and white paint to make it look equal parts sleek and exactly like every other building in LA.
