July 29th - August 4th, 2011

Ф July 29, 2011

That bath I said I was gonna take?  Divine.  The room they have for me here is just awesome, set up like a nice New York brownstone, not too big, not too drab, just the right amount of pink.  They even had my favorite bath salts, and I would be worried about how they knew except they're the best bath salts ever and everyone should carry them always anyway.  I spent today just hanging around and relaxing, ordering room service, watching TV (they literally have every channel), and chatting with some friends from college over Skype.  I told them I'm working on a new gig but didn't give them too many details. I'd worry about all that, but not today!  Today, I don't worry about a damn thing.


Ф July 30, 2011

I started getting a little restless after a whole day of doing nothing (a deserved nothing, mind you!), so I got to work setting up Andrew.  I asked him if he wouldn't mind coming with me to a few bookstores and the library in Manhattan to help me pick out a reading list so I can catch up about all this stuff, which I really did want to do, but I also made sure to touch Aphrodite's ring whenever we got near a girl I thought would look good with Andrew.  I wasn't really expecting to find his One True Love that way or anything, but you know, you gotta start somewhere.  No hits yet, but we'll see.  I did get a big stack of books, though, so I'm going to go page through those now.  It occurs to me that I've never been to Greece and we only went to Rome that one time when I was five, so maybe I'll see if I can use MIST's cool ferry system to see the "land of my birth," so to speak.


Ф July 31, 2011

I found out Aphrodite is especially associated with Cyprus and Kythia, so I started there.  Gosh, I have a lot of traveling to do if I'm going to see all of Greece and Italy and there's no way I'll be able to even hit the highlights in our week off.  I guess I'll just hit what feels right.

Paphos is an amazing city.  The summer here is eight months long.  I wonder if Aphrodite was born here because of the beautiful weather, or whether the weather here is beautiful because this is where Aphrodite was born.  I walked through the ruins here and almost teared up.  They are beautiful, and such bright mosaics even after so many thousands of years, and I can hardly believe my own mother walked here before they were made, and even though they're old and broken they're still here-- There I go again.

I was walking by the seaside and just had to play.  I found a more secluded spot so I wouldn't gather a crowd and started something quiet and deep; this was personal, just for me.  I don't know how I played, but the sun had started setting by the time I opened my eyes.  I learned things while playing again, things about Andrew and Cindy and what had happened in the caves.  Worrisome things, but I'm so glad to know them.

Tomorrow I'm going to Florence.  I should probably go to Kythia next, but the famous "Birth of Venus" Boticelli painting is in the Uffizi in Florence and I've never seen it in person.  I also need to talk to Andrew about what I learned from the music.  I'm not sure where to go from here.  We should probably tell Cindy too, but maybe not right away.

Gosh, these are going to get cluttered with all the pictures I want to pin in.  Oh well.  Deal with it, journal!


Ф August 1, 2011

Boticelli was creepily accurate.  Obviously the painting's proportions are a little weird and she isn't nearly as beautiful as she is in person, but her face... her face is right.  Her face is what it would be if he drew her in his style.  Her hair is exactly right.  A nice old lady who was there with a tour group said I have her hair, though I guess that makes sense even though dad's hair was black (so's mom's, which should'be been a tip-off).  I couldn't take any pictures, though, so I'm pasting in a postcard I bought at the gift shop.

This city is not what I had expected.  It's more serious, not business-like but well-aware of its craft.  Artists little the street like discarded soda cans.  I wandered for hours and got fewer stares and Italian cat-calls than I had worried I would.  The people here are so used to beautiful art that they're less off-put by me.  I feel like I could just disappear in the city's streets forever.

I spotted Cindy and Claire paling around by the pool today.  I almost went over to say hi, but they looked so content together, I didn't want to disturb them.  I haven't seen either Hal or Ken since we finished the mission, though, and I really want to know what happened on their date!


Ф August 2, 2011

I finally ran into Andrew back at MIST!  I told him what I had found and he was suitably concerned.  We decided to keep researching it, and as part of that I went to Athens.  I wasn't expecting to find too much, and I didn't, but I'm still glad I went.  I stood in the Acropolis, in the Agora, and I could feel the thrump of time and fate that had come before me and brought me to that point and flowed forward into the future, almost like I could reach out and touch it and wield it like a violin string or a sax's dying strain.


Ф August 3, 2011

Venice is beautiful and lovely and amazing and all that and I should probably go back and talk about it more,  but but but ohmygosh I got to see Hal and Ken's DATE and it was aDORable!  I had been wandering the city and it's tiny little footpath streets and jaloppity, ancient beauty all day and night had started to fall, when I found a nicely lit little section of the street and decided to play for awhile.  An amazing mandolinist I'd met earlier had inspired me, so I put out my sax case and played the happiest, most agile tune I could think to play.  I could feel the notes jumping higher and higher, filling the street and the canal and flowing outward back into the world until they reached MIST island, even situated in a beyond space as it is, and I saw in flashes and jumps Hal and Ken sitting on a clifftop eating a picnic and talking deeply and truly to each other about things that mattered.  Then, Hal fulfilled every little girl's fantasy of dating Superman and flew Kennedy up into the air to see the best vista imaginable, and they kissed as starlight seethed and fell all around them (or maybe it was only the starlight that made it through -- I'm not sure of the time of day, only that the time felt like dusk and dawn together).  Hal asked Ken where she'd like to go next, and wouldn't you know it, she had a terrible desire to see his bedroom.  Every girl wants to see the room of the guy she's sweet on, as it's the fastest way to learn what kind of person they are, but Ken had something a bit more physical on her mind as well.  The vision, if that's what it was, didn't show me too much explicit, but it showed enough for me to know what I saw.

I love this city.

Ф August 4, 2011

Oh jeez, I only had a few hours in Rome before I got the call that we were meeting back at MIST and I had to book it out of there.  I snapped a bunch of photos, though, so I'll toss them in to help make up for it.  That's the Trevi Fountain from the side, by the way, and the one with the mural is an ancient Etruscan ruin.  The Etruscans were in Italy even before the Romans.  They were probably my birth mother's old neighbors, or possible her and the family's enemies.  I don't even know.  Amazing.


I made it back just after the briefing had started.  We were going to a castle town in Germany because a bunch of people were being grabbed by wolves and it looked really suspiciously like something supernatural, making it our problem.  Brynhildr also thinks there's a mole in MIST and that whoever it is has some nefarious business with this Werner guy in the area who makes weapons.  We're here to stop the wolf attacks and try to smoke out the mole.  We're posing as a documentary film crew, which is SO MUCH FUN!  I'm pretending to be Hal's production assistant and it means I get to be pushy to the hotel staff and extra peppy.  Ken's busy on a mission for her pantheon, though, so we're waiting the night for her to arrive before proceeding.  Hal's been texting someone who I don't think is Ken, though, and he's acting all shifty about it so it's probably something worth looking into.  I really, really want to know who it could be.  Hopefully not a girl.  Hal and Ken were so cute together on their date!

Andrew and I also managed to talk to Claire and tell her what we know about Cindy.  It took some convincing, but she's going to help us keep tabs on Cindy's state of mind in case anything starts to look bad. We're going to try to figure out a way to cure her, but I really hope we don't have to use Claire's connection to Ares, which is even worse than I thought: apparently they've been rivals online for years, which means getting Ares out of her life is probably not going to be as easy as switching games or avoidance.

Well, there's probably other things to do, but I'm bushed.  See you tomorrow, journal!

Happy endings and inkling problems, Part Five

Allright, I'm gonna finish off this entry real quick so I can go take a SHOWER and follow it with a BATH and top it off by SLEEPING for a thousand years.

The dragon had woken up and we'd found out Hal's mom knew it's dad from their college days or something, so Andrew strode into the cavern and announced Hal like he were a court herald.  The rest of us walked in after him and it turns out the dragon, Graback, was actually really nice and gentlemanly, and was really jazzed to hear about how we'd killed Rigvar so he offered us a boon.  We were trying to figure out how to free him (it turns out Rigvar had chained him to the wall with magic chains -- I've heard stories that some dragons can change their shape to make them look like humans and be human-sized, so I wonder if the chains stopped him from using his magic powers too?) when Cindy got impatient, let got of Harkson (who got away safe, thankfully), and up and slammed her chard of Utgard-Loki into the chains.  The shard disappeared and so did the magic in the chains (which is weird -- we should look into just what happened there), so the Graback and Hal were able to break them.  He looked exhausted after his long ordeal, so I decided to cheer him up a bit and it seemed to work, almost a little better than I'd intended, if you know what I mean. We all said our goodbyes and then went back to MIST headquarters.

So what did I think about my first adventure as a Scion?  I'm still conflicted, I think (see how conflicted I am?).  The others are so quick to leap to violence, I'm worried I won't be able to convince them to try talking first.  I'm not against violence all the time, but I mean, can you imagine how awful it would've been if we'd run into the cavern swinging weapons and shooting guns at the dragon?  We might've killed him, or been killed, and for no reason at all.  I know you can't talk your way through everything; goodness knows it hasn't usually worked for me in the past.  But sometimes it works, and those sometimes are the most important times of all.  Graback was such a nice dragon, and it seems he was inclined to be our friend anyway.  With Hal and Cindy holding the line, we don't need to strike first to win by violence.  We have time to see if we can make an ally instead of just kill someone.  Even Harkson could've been an ally, if I had known what I was doing and we hadn't spooked him so badly.

Uhhhh, it's all so over my head.  I'm still not ready for all this talk about life and death and killing or not killing. I really just want to play my sax and hang out with my friends, come home and sleep next to someone who's good when it matters.  Oh, don't give me that look.  You know I didn't mean that lasciviously.  Though, that wouldn't hurt.

I wonder if Graback can shape-change, and is single...