The Stars Are Burning [PAUSED]

0. Community Service

THE GODDESS OF Wisdom stood before her bronze globe, watching the mortals below get along with their lives as she hunted for a girl. She narrowed her search and zoomed into Upper East Side, Manhattan. Upon finding the girl drinking beer and laughing with her friends outside a dimly lit bar, Athena sat back down, relieved.

"Bingo," Athena said to herself, frowning when she realised that she had used a mortal expression. She decided that she liked the way it sounded, and the frown dissipated. She had a more important task at hand than to analyse the origins of "bingo".

Satisfied with her find, Athena called for her owl, which flew to her shoulder from its perch when it heard her voice. With a barely-there weight of her owl on her shoulder, she bent down to her desk and reaching for one of her business cards then wrote in neat cursive on the back:

Sloth, your presence is required. Come at once to my Athens office. You owe me.

"Glauca, you'll find him at Club Med Bali," Athena instructed as she capped her fountain pen. She held the embossed card up in the air, and the great owl snatched it up with its beak, flying away.

A few minutes later, the door of her study burst open and a tall man in a dress shirt and shorts strode in, an expectant look on his chiselled face.

"You asked for me?" The man closed the door behind him, walking over to Athena and tousling his mop of golden blond hair.

"Greetings to you too, Cassian." The goddess rolled her eyes, taking a seat in her office chair.

"I'm busy, Thena." Sloth used her nickname, earning him a stern glare.

"I don't care. You owe the world a year of community service, and I think I'm going to make you cash it in now." Athena's cold blue eyes continued to pierce the most laid back of the seven sins, the glare so strong that even the deity had to look away.

"Seriously? Now? I'm in the middle of convincing someone to sell his car for a jacuzzi."

"I really don't care," Athena repeated.

Sloth rolled his eyes but let the goddess continue.

"There's a girl who is partying day and night and barely scraping through classes, you need to get her life back on track. It's not that hard."

"Seriously? I've made Alexander the Great, Margaret Thatcher and Benjamin Franklin—now a random nobody?" Sloth said.

"She isn't a nobody." Athena gestured for Sloth to go to her computer screen as she typed in "Fletcher Cheung'' into the Google search bar.

Athena had been keeping an eye on the heiress for a few months. She knew what sort of things Fletcher had been up to, from her apathy towards her studies to countless DUIs. She knew that Sloth liked exciting people with exciting stories, so she found the video that made Fletcher infamous, hoping it'd make Sloth, well, interested.

Sloth walked over and leaned over the goddess, giving a low whistle upon reading the search results. There were a lot of Fletcher Cheungs on Earth, but the same picture came up repeatedly, showing a tall girl staring right into the camera with unnervingly steely eyes that almost made the god shudder. "Shit, she's famous."

"And for all the wrong reasons," Athena sighed. "She's destined for greatness, but she's wasted, literally, if she continues to live like this. She just needs a little... push in the right direction."

"Greatness? She's probably going to get married off to another rich bloke and be forgotten in a decade." Sloth scoffed. His eyes widened with a hint of respect when Athena clicked on a video with the thumbnail "Heiress of Entity Enterprises Fletcher Cheung drunk driving". It showed Fletcher crashing her convertible into a stationary van and driving away with her friends, each teen with a bottle of craft beer in their hands.