Thursday, August 4, 2011

Here It Goes Again

"I guess there's gotta be a break in the monotony
But Jesus, when it rains, how it pours..."
OK Go, Here It Goes Again


11/17/2011

So. Gunnar and I are headed for giant-land, and for some reason I can't remember, Harlan is coming with us.
Kassandra and Ciara are getting Nevermore and Astrid (Kassandra's cat, who should totally be in one piece), and heading for the house in Berkeley.
Nate and Brendan are... doing something. Nate's checking in on Alison, said something about moving her. I told him they would always have room in Berkeley but I don't know if that's going to pan out. After Nate takes care of that, they're heading to Mag Mell for... I can't remember what. I've been meaning to check in on the place after that vision about the Morrigan and the digging but a) not my parents and b) other shit to do.

Speaking of other shit to do, the world is ending. I'm pretty sure that's the official conclusion. There are earthquakes all over the world, mirroring one another around the globe. Antipodal something or other. They're getting worse, they're happening regularly, and they're causing tsunamis.

One of the places that keeps getting hit is in Chile. Normally... well, there is no normally. This shit isn't normal. Anyway, the reason most of us raised our eyebrows over this is because the last time Chile got hit with a big-ass earthquake was when some of the Titans broke out of Tartarus. So... more good news there.
Plus the earthquakes and the tsunamis are causing riots everywhere and some genius released a color coded map trying to tell people where they're safe. Where are people safe? Well, there's the South Pole... in theory... and that's pretty much it.

There's a new volcano forming near the Congo too, a mount... something or other. They named it something to do with Titans, or good and evil or... something. Adroa I think. Anyway, makes me think of the way the food spoiled in New Orleans and there was an outbreak of the plague when Crom Cruach was brushing up against the world and that maybe this is the work of the fire titan. Muspelheim? I'm not really sure what to call it, besides bad and apocalypsey. "Some say the world will end in fire..."
Anyway.

Oh, and while we were gone, in September, Kane officially bought Jack's "dad's" company, and there was supposed to be some big announcement from Jack's dad right before he conveniently kicked the bucket. Something to do with pharmaceuticals. That's probably bad, too.

Oh, and Pan, that motherfucker, is up to something. How do I know this? Well, for one thing, he's still breathing. But more than that, I'm pretty sure that he's the arrogant asshole whose calling himself William Blake (religious poet-nut, and illustrator of the work which proclaimed it was "better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven"), and proclaiming himself a negotiator for that clusterfuck over in Eurasia. And combining that with the angel-bombs Frigg showed me, and what we saw when we found Horace in the desert of Mutavilya... well, it looks bad.

Speaking of that clusterfuck, yeah. It seems like China and Russia are about to bomb each other back to the stone age, and take the rest of the globe with them. North Korea's got something to do with it too, but... well, I hate politics and wasn't paying as much attention as I probably should have been.

And there's a soul-sink in the middle of the Atlantic, tons of ghosts just making like the exodus and it probably has to do with that machine Loki stole from us, the one that burns souls. And in a similar vein, Azzeza's gone missing. Well, her ghost. I feel like shit about that. I promised her I'd figure out what happened to her and make it right. That might be the first promise I've ever broken.

And I lost three months, somewhere down in Helheim. So, there's three months of checkups and shit I probably should have been doing to make sure the boys are alright.

And all of the overworlds seem to be under attack again. It's serious enough that Hercules went back to Olympus, right at the end of September. He left the kids (except Gunter, who's back in Berkeley) on the East Coast, which irritates me a little, but I guess that's just me worrying too much. I know they're smart and resourceful and if I've managed to live this long they'll probably be fine.

On the bright side, Gunnar said, in one of the brief instances we've had to talk, that he's okay. Just thinking. I hope he lets me in on whatever he comes up with, cuz between the asking me for no reason I know of if I was screaming in Guinnee, some crack about divorce that he later said was supposed to be a joke (at least he admitted it wasn't funny), going all silent before he went to find Jack, and treating me like I was burning in Nifelheim, I've been a little worried that the man is about to crack. Maybe it's everything, maybe it's stress. I mean, from our perspective we had normal lives back in January which was seven months ago, not eleven like the rest of the world would tell you. Then we started fighting crazy scions and trash frogs and we fought a fomorian war and watched a god die and we just had the most frustrating wedding ever about two months ago. A day later I knew I was pregnant and a week after that we both went "back to work," traipsing through underworlds and getting slapped at by mega-squid, before he went to convince someone we hardly know to take care of our kids so we could traipse through more underworlds and freeze our asses off. But he says he's okay.
Or he will be.
Or something.

I think I missed part of the explanation, there's a disconnect between why he's mad at Harlan and why he thought I was on fire. Harlan's only really been pretty nice to me, but maybe I missed something. I zone out sometimes on accident since the boys had that growth spurt.
Oh, yeah. When I said lost three months I meant that I lost three months of pregnancy too, and suddenly when I came out of Helheim I got a strong, surprising kick to the bladder and was five months pregnant instead of two months pregnant and the boys, like I told Gunnar, seem to have started a mosh pit and are now bodychecking my internal organs with distracting frequency. I'm not sure if I make noise when it happens, or if he can just hear them moving, but Gunnar asked if it hurt. It feels pretty much like you would expect it to feel if some small someone (or two someones, in this case) were occasionally assaulting you from the inside. It's not comfortable, and it makes it hard to concentrate sometimes, but it doesn't really hurt. At least not yet, but there's still four months to go.

I guess also on the bright side, since we just skipped three months of real time in the overworld, when we got out we had an assload of messages from Dorthen. Basement's done. Lab is done. Workshop is done. Etc.
Gunnar said he's giving Dorthen a raise.
I didn't know we were paying him.

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