December 25th, 2:36 AM
Mount Olympus

This wasn't going to work.

Before now, she had always had the backup of Ted and his friend, but now Karen was all alone against a literal God.

He, ironically, didn't seem to want to be here any more than she did.

"Just stand still already," Ares grumbled under his breath. "It'll be much less painful for you that way."

Swinging his divinely constructed xiphos sword down at her in an effort to cleave her vertically in half, Karen only narrowly avoided such a fate with a well-timed leap, a few strands of her blond hair notably being less fortunate as they parted with her. Leveling the flats of her palms at the God of War, a wave of red-hot flames poured forth over Ares, which he dully strode through as if he had just been hit with a mildly annoying gust of wind.

"Really now," he said, "what's the point of all this?"

"Oh, I don't know, how about saving the world?" Karen snapped, turning her flames on the golden floor at his feet. It softened around him, and he sank down into it. Even as it began to harden, however, he simply ascended into the sky, forcibly ripping himself free in the process.

"Gaia's doomed," he stated flatly, "you're doomed. Your friends, too...as am I, all thanks to that horrid bitch you met in the throne room."

Karen was rather surprised to hear the vitriol lacing his words when he referred to his apparent wife. Just what had she done to him, exactly, to make him loathe her so and yet simultaneously refuse to turn against her?

"If you hate her so much, why do you-hgghk-k-keep fighting for her?" Karen asked, not-quite-dodging a horizontal strike, which sliced into her shoulder, staining the gleaming floor beneath her red as small globules of blood poured from the wound. Raising her hand to it, a heavy shiver of pain ran up her spine...words couldn't describe how much she missed her invulnerability.

"She has the God Wave Spark from Tartarus," he said, shrugging. "She's invincible--took out the whole pantheon, father included."

He cast his eyes towards the incapacitated forms of the Gods nearby, each suspended in midair by five silver lances--one through each of their limbs and a final one through their torso. Zeus' situation appeared to be unique, however: the lance through his torso was obsidian in color, and from the end that protruded from his chest shot a wide, almost blinding bolt of lightning into the roof of the palace and presumably into the infinite cosmos beyond it.

"She also made some very...compelling threats towards my person, should I either harbor thoughts of betrayal or disappoint her," he finished, eyes briefly falling to his crotch. It was covered by what could only be described as a very ornate piece of black armor that seemed partially designed to draw ones gaze to that particular region of his body.

Having found out far more about their marital relationship than she had ever wanted to know, Karen once more partially dodged a slash from Ares that bit into her waist. By this point she had several gashes across her body, and was starting to feel light headed. There didn't seem like much hope for her achieving any kind of victory against this guy.

As much as she hated the idea, she may just have to flee and regroup with the others. Maybe with Ted and his friend back on Earth, they could all figure something out now that they knew who was behind everything that was happening.

Resolving to do just that, Karen steadied herself and prepared to sprint with all her might for the exit. She needed Ted to teleport out of here, so hopefully he would still feel up to it. There was no telling what he and his friend had been put through by this point at the hands of this guy's wife.

Turning away from Ares, he seemed to have not yet grasped her plan, instead thinking it was yet another ploy to delay the inevitable. Good, that meant he would probably--

"Uh?!" Karen gasped, reaching up to clutch at her head as a bizarre and overwhelming sensation washed over her. So strong was it that she felt her knees betray her as she collapsed onto the floor, her stomach doing cartwheels. She would've surely been easy for Ares to kill in this moment, if he didn't appear to be having the exact same problem, if not worse.

What was going on? It felt like something had...changed, but she couldn't pen down what exactly that meant.

"S-somebody has altered the flow of hypertime," Ares growled, still trembling. "Eris, not even you would be so foolish, surely?!"

He seemed transfixed on the exit, as if trying to figure out if his wife was the culprit behind whatever was going on. Despite her own queasiness, however, Karen couldn't help noticing that he seemed rather vulnerable right now. As much as he ever was, in any case.

Extending the middle and index fingers of each hand towards that ridiculous section of armor, she focused not on producing the biggest blast of fire she could managed, but rather the most concentrated beam. Sure enough, two tight--almost laser-like--lances of crimson flame shot towards his crotch, the black armor soon beginning to glow red.

It took him only a moment to feel the growing heat, his focus on the temporal event violently broken. With a horrified scream, he began frantically trying to remove the armor. Using that opportunity to dash past him with every ounce of augmented speed she possessed, Karen encased her left arm in the hottest fire she could produce before slamming it into the black central lance impaling Zeus.

Shattering like glass beneath the power of her blow, the lightning pouring from the King of the Gods vanished in an instant. Her lips turning into a smile, she was suddenly able to understand exactly what had happened just then: somebody had rewritten history, and--
they erased Jimmy Chong from it!

Why would they bother doing that? Why him? And who was this so-called "Velocity" who was trying to take his place in her memories?

"HUGHH--!" Karen gagged, a searing pain lancing through her gut and rapidly working its way through the rest of her body. Carried forward and off her feet by the force of the attack, she noticed--as she fell--the blood-stained sword that now protruded from her stomach.

Shit, she had gotten too caught up in the revelation, just as Ares had earlier.

Slamming hard into the golden floor, she was almost immediately staring up at Ares, having discarded his protective armor and looking pretty livid to boot. Harshly tearing his blade from her gut, Karen vomited up a river of blood at his feet.

"You insolent little worm!" he snapped. "How dare you seek to mar the perfection of a God!"

She had never felt this kind of pain before. It was almost maddening. When she had been shot, she had hardly felt anything--that was anything but the case here. Worse, she was passing out from the blood loss...but neither of those things mattered, not anymore.

Leveling his sword at her neck, Ares sneered down at her. "Do you have any last words before I extinguish your pathetic existence, brat?"

"Yeah..." she replied, staring up at him with the best grin she could muster.



A white lance of spiraling lightning instantly fell upon her, causing Ares eyes to go wide in horror. Glancing up at Zeus, he only then realized what had happened:

"The lightning blocking her signal...!"

"It's gone," Lady Arcana said, stepping forward as the light faded. "And I'm back."

Her uniform was mostly the same as before, but she realized it was just a little different--rather than purple, it was now a more reddish-violate, and around the hem of her bell sleeves there was now an orange-yellow flame pattern. Reaching a hand down to her stomach, she was happy to feel that her wounds had completely vanished.

"D-damn you...!" Ares hissed, raising his sword again. When he swung it down at her, however, she merely raised her hand to catch it as it fell, her fingers coiling around it. A moment later, the shards of the broken blade clattered to the ground as the God of War staggered back in horror.

"Alright, Ares," Lady Arcana said, smiling, "Let's see you walk off these flames!"

Leveling only a single palm towards the War God, a blinding wave of pure blue fire engulfed his screaming form, the gold beneath them immediately liquefying. Rising high into the ceiling above, it--too--melted instantly as Ares was sent howling into the heavens with burns so severe that even his godly healing factor would take a good long while to bring him back to fighting condition.

"Now," Arcana glanced to the pantheon, "Let's get you guys down."

December 25th, 2:40 AM
Mount Olympus

It was over, more or less.

Eris had been...mildly upset when Prometheus and Atlas had melted her armor through their trickery, not to mention giving her hair a bit of a sing. But she was feeling better now. Her frizzy ends had long since repaired themselves, she had taken out her frustrations by beating “Ted” to within an inch of his immortal life, and had been entertaining herself by trying out various inventive ways to injure his nominally invincible brother.

“Hmm, let’s try a space-time drill to the eye,” Eris chirped, foot placed firmly on Atlas’ chest. Pointing a finger straight at his eye, time and space began to distort between them as the fabric of reality was twisted into a rapidly spinning point that began to press down into his right eye socket.

“I do so love testing the limits of divine immortality, don’t you?”

”Fuck… your… self…” came Atlas’ strained reply, oddly eloquent for a guy that was having his eyeball bored out by the very fabric of time-space. Gripping onto Eris’ ankle in vain and trying to lodge himself free, even as his head lay partially submerged in the semi-solid, still cooling liquid gold.

The invasive thought that perhaps the mortals were onto something with that whole ‘dying’ thing did make it’s way into some ugly part of his mind he prefered to ignore, as he gnashed his teeth in pain and anger and began outright slamming his mammoth fist into the side of Eris’ knee as hard as he was able while still holding onto her ankle with his left in a no-doubt vain effort to snap the damned thing and get her off of him.

Behind them and across the room, Ted lay motionless and silent, face-down in the melted floor and as far as anyone could tell, rather dead.

...Save for a slight twitch of his hand that occurred when his brother began to scream as Eris began forcing her ad-hoc magical drill deeper into his brother’s eye-socket.

“My, I think it’s working this time!” Eris exclaimed in delight, “after this, I think I’ll try it a bit lower, if you know what I mean.”

Though, in honesty, after that she would probably just lance the both of them and be done with it. This game was beginning to lose its entertainment value. Still, no sense in stopping it until she’s managed to extract every ounce of agony possible from them both.

She had almost finished boring all the way through to Atlas’ skull when the delightful crescendo of agony was disturbed by what briefly sounded akin to thunder. But this wasn’t coming from the air--no, the she could feel entire palace trembling beneath her feet at the booming voice. A moment later, a…thing riding what looked to be a dragon made of vines and bark burst into her throne room.

Craning her head to the door, Eris ceased her excavation. “...And what are you supposed to be now?”

Harris stood in a hunched over position, scratching the back of his neck as Eris approached.

”...You know I made up that whole speech in like… the five minutes it took me to get here… I guess that’s cool,” he muttered, shrugging as the god approached. He felt like he should have been intimidated, but with his newfound memory, he recalled Eris to be little more than a spoiled brat.

A spoiled brat with omnipotence and the power of one of the many shards of the power that created… everything, and with two Titans half dead at her feet, but still a spoiled brat.

”I uh… just said, that er… I’m your sire,” he stammered out, coughing in an attempt to regain his composure. ”Well, er, by that I mean, I’m Gaia… kinda, it’s tough to understand, even for me,” he tried, and failed to explain his identity. ”But yes, I’m here now, Hades sent me, and I’m about to open a can of whoopass!... No, he was right, that does sound stupid when I say it...”

“You’re Gaia,” she monotoned. “Right. Well, ‘Gaia’, I’m afraid that I’ve about had my fill of intruders today. Goodbye.”

Raising her hand in his direction, a stream of putrid-looking green gas poured forth in the room, quickly enveloping the entire area in which he was standing. Upon making contact with his body of plant fiber, his normally green tone rapidly began to change to brown as the cloud of death eroded even the hardiest of his bark.

Harris watched as his lively green flesh turned a sickly dying brow, his extremities curling inwards and shrinking to tiny sizes. He watched less out of fear and more out of astonishment.

”Woah, that’s fascinating! I’ve never seen anything quite like this before!” he said, almost giddy.

The fact that his body was technically dying was just a bit scary, but with the heel of his foot, he discreetly drilled a hole in the golden ground below, depositing a small plant, protected by the dying flesh from his body.

He could have just sent his consciousness somewhere else, but this was far more intriguing. He watched in awe as his body dried out more and more, twisting and curling and turning a pale brown before he finally crumbled.

Wow, that’s something else! Kinda terrifying to everyone who can’t just grow back, I should stop her lickity split!... God I’m old.

He transferred his consciousness into the small plant below the surface, no longer in direct sunlight, he began to feel a bit tired, but waiting out the cloud of death was a little more important to him than getting some sun.

Eris symbolically dusted her hands off, turning back to Atlas. “Well, that was weird. And aww, your eye’s already healed, I’ll have to start anew.”

Conjuring her drill for the second time, she was about to once more set to work on her quest to break the unbreakable when yet another sound gave her pause. This time it was far more subtle--approaching footsteps from the hallway to her left.

“...Husband? Did you finish--”

But standing in the doorway was not Ares.

Rather, it was a face she had rather hoped to never see again, one that she was almost certain was gone forever--Lady Arcana.

”...Ted! Lady Arcana gasped, dashing to him with such speed that Eris had raised her arms in defense, thinking for a moment that the Wizard was rushing in for an attack. Instead, she had flipped Prometheus onto his back, and was lifting his head slightly so as to check on his condition. ”H-hey, you’re still alive, right…?”

Any other God she would’ve asked that question to, probably wouldn’t have answered in that moment. At least, not after a long recovery.

Prometheus, however, an immortal deity cursed by Zeus to regrow entire limbs and organs fast enough so that he could be awake and tortured again in no time flat, was another story.

Still, all he managed at first was a slight gurgling hiss as his jaw reconfigured itself back together before finally locking back into place with an abrupt ‘Snap!’ and his eyes blearily fluttered open.

”Oh… hey, Kid.” He rasped, some mix of pain and his usual irreverent humour colouring the edges of his tone. ”...Don’t suppose ya got the number on that fucking truck that just hit me, did’ja?”

”If it’d been a truck, I think you’d be alright,” Lady Arcana replied sympathetically.

Exhaling, she lowered his head back to the melted floor and turned her focus to Eris. The Goddess of Discord had stepped down from Atlas and began approaching her, her black lips twisted in a deep frown.

“How did you defeat my husband?” Eris demanded. “Surely even he couldn’t be so foolish as to lose to a child with just a sliver of divine power? Wait…”

Lady Arcana watched in silence as Eris glanced up at the ceiling, as if searching for something beyond it. It was that same expression Ares had carried earlier.

“Did it have something to do with that temporal disruption earlier?” Eris said, her eyes snapping down to the Wizard again. “Did you somehow defeat him by altering the flow of time? Are you truly capable of such a thing?!”

”It wasn’t me,” Lady Arcana stated. ”It was...a woman, older than me. I know her, somehow, even though I don’t--Velocity.”

Eris reached a hand up to touch her temple. “Velocity...yes, she fought with you against the Arab Fed--wait, no, she didn’t! What is the meaning of this?!”

”Beats me,” she shrugged. ”I’ll figure it out later, after I’ve beaten you.”
Harris thought that the cloud would have cleared by now. From the small little spudling, a great number of thin vines sprung from the ground, twisting around each-other to form into tissues, then flattening to form into skin, then hardening to form into armor. He let out a soft yawn, stretching his new limbs.

He opened his eyes and was… not surprised, but… something, to see Arcana speaking to Eris. He knew she had to be around somewhere, Greek gods were her thing after all. He thought about saying something, but then realized that with Eris distracted, he could prepare a sneak attack. His body deformed just as quickly as it had formed, and the little spudling began to sprout powerful roots, which tore through the molten gold ground like nothing. Finally he had positioned the roots right behind Eris’ feet, burrowing up a small flower in order to be able to hear the conversation further.

The confusion etched onto the new Queen of the God’s face had immediately vanished at Lady Arcana’s words, replaced with that same disdainful rage from earlier. “Oh, you’ll beat me, will you? You think regaining your powers is enough to allow--”

The goddesses words were cut short by the fist of Lady Arcana driving into the side of her jaw, causing Eris’ lips to distort from their tight frown, spittel flying as her head flew back--followed shortly by the rest of her. Blasting through the roof of the palace in much the same fashion as her husband before her, Lady Arcana immediately lifted off the floor to pursue her.

”The rest of the Pantheon are recovering in that room over there,” she explained to Ted and Atlas. ”I’ll deal with Eris from here on out, you guys try and get them to do something about the Earth!

Without waiting for their response, she vanished through the opening Eris had made in pursuit of her opponent.

Harris’ flower picked up the sound of a powerful fist thwacking its way into a jaw. He knew that he had waited too long. His body reformed, and he watched as Karen took off into the sky through a god-sized hole in the ceiling.

That was quite a punch. Well, Harris didn’t have much else to do but follow them. He sprouted a pair of wings from his back and took off into the air after them at… a less than reasonable speed.