Clockwork

29

"Hera... What have you done?" Zeus asked his wife. Percy, too, wondered what curse the jealous goddess had inflicted on the mother and what could have been a child. The Queen looked away, her aura becoming smaller as she became the target of everyone's attention. Well almost everyone. Apollo took this chance to go check on the unconscious mother.

"I-I..." Hera started, her voice sounding shocked. Did this not have the same effect she thought it would?

"Why is anyone surprised? She was the reason Dionysus' mother was incinerated, she refused Leto a place on land to give birth, then we have Heracles' entire life pretty much, then there's Io, poor girl, we've got you playing with modern demigods' lives... Need I continue?" Athena pointed out. "Uh... My Queen." She quickly added at the end.

"It's Zeus' fault too!  He tries so hard to get married to the goddess of marriage but refuses to remain true! He didn't last a century." Hera said in her defense.

Percy sighed. He thought Hera's temper was getting under control. Yes, the whole thing with switching Jason and Percy along with tampering with Percy's friends' lives was a terrible thing to do, but she not only chose Jason as her representative on the demigod council but she also was beyond pissed when Zeus disowned Thalia.

"I thought your days of making life miserable for children was over," Artemis said, a frown forming on her face. "Hey, mom has a temper, we get it, I mean she did give birth to the god of war. So lay off of her." Ares said, defending his mother. Hephaestus sighed. "He's right. Mom can be really crooked sometimes, but shouldn't we actually hear her out?" He said.

"Actually, no," Apollo said. He was examining the mortal's body. "This woman, under normal circumstances, would not be able to give birth. She has an inability to get pregnant and give birth. She has fertile eggs, but the only way she could've been able to produce a child from them is if she removed those eggs from her body and had another woman carry the fetus until birth." Apollo stated.

"Hey Apollo I'm confused," Hermes said, looking at his brother strangely. "The importance of that mini-lesson is that her body is still not able to produce a child, even if the father did happen to be Zeus. Hera used her domains to let the pregnancy happen, and she cast some curse on it. The mortal wouldn't have been able to survive the birth even if the child had turned out normal without godly assistance. Her plan was to curse the child and kill the mortal, correct?" Apollo said.

He had taken the form of a twenty-something-year-old man with flowing blond hair and bright blue eyes, and he wore a white doctor's coat with a stethoscope around his shoulders. Percy only began paying attention to the details of the sun god's appearance because the calm and laid back look that form portrayed was immediately burned away by the look Apollo had on his face. It was one between a 'wtf' face and a 'I'm so done with your B.S.' type look.

Percy couldn't help but agree.

"How would one explain that?" Hestia said. Hestia sounded genuinely disgusted, but not much. The goddess in the eight-year-old form had been around before all of them, even though now she was considered the youngest.

"We've got to find that child--" "If you can even call it that anymore--" "before it kills something," Aphrodite said, not letting Hades' comment detour her sentence.

Or before it manages to get itself killed. Percy thought. His birth signals that the prophecy has begun and Percy still has little to no knowledge on how to prevent Doomsday.

Percy turned to Hephaestus. "Remember that prophecy I told you? The one that Selene said?" Percy said to Hephaestus. Percy only mentioned the prophecy to Hephaestus because he honestly didn't know how the gods would handle it, especially Zeus. "What prophecy?" Zeus asked suspiciously.