Yeah, pretty much!

Ok, I see how I could realistically pull that off. What are we actually going into the Labyrinth to do, and what's the pay like?

Mostly we use the Labyrinth to travel, and then when we get to our destination we fight monsters. When we do have missions entirely within the Labyrinth, they're mostly artifact retrieval.

Base salary is $250k/yr, plus another $100k worth of stock in our front organizations; the biggest name there is, well, Amazon.com 😅. Free room and board at one of our bases; we have locations on both coasts, the rooms come with an automaton to do your chores, and the cafeterias accommodate all major moral and religious dietary restrictions. Health, dental, and vision insurance—in addition to all the normal mortal stuff including laser eye surgery and anything politically controversial on either side of the aisle, those cover our range of proprietary intelligence- and strength-enhancement drugs, and if so desired the use of our uterine replicators for one kid. Those are a rare resource; the only daughter of Vulcan who could make them has passed on to Elysium. Finally, you get one free magic item from our armory, and an employee discount on any additional items.

Holy shit. She knows this is probably a trap, but that's tempting. 

Religious dietary restrictions? There are people who know about all this stuff still practicing Islam? I guess Judaism wouldn't be as much of a contradiction, from what I'm aware the Hebrew Bible actually indicates that other gods are real, they're just the enemy, but like, it sounds like you guys are kind of working with them, which is a big no-no.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I don't know what goes on in the heads of monotheists, if I were gonna worship anyone other than our gods it'd be the West African ones and those are also, as far as I can tell, just guys you can talk to.

Also, you guys own Amazon the corporation? If you were gonna have a man be the figurehead stooge, couldn't you have at least picked one who doesn't look like a goddamn Roswell alien?

😂 gods that's definitely a description 

But really, "sees through the Mist", "unquestionable loyalty to the Amazon cause", and "passes a psych eval for intelligence and emotional stability with sufficiently stellar scores to silence any traditionalist grumbling about the ethics of letting a man play CEO" isn't a set of constraints that leaves a lot of additional room to steer for personal charisma. :Þ

Hm, yeah, one notices people kind of stopped caring about him after Elon Musk became infamous, rather than him doing even crazier shit to keep the spotlight. Is Musk a demigod or whatever, by the way?

Yes! Demi-Titan, specifically. Grandson of Prometheus, sided with his grandfather and joined the army of Kronos when they challenged us and our allies a few years back, the SpaceX-Blue Origin race is a bit of a proxy continuation of that conflict.

huh, from what i know of greek myths i'd expect the Titans to be too eldritch abominationy to be banging mortals

Nah, the Titans are pretty much just guys, like the gods. Same with the giants. It's the generation before them, the primordial gods—Nyx, Gaea, Ouranos, Tartarus—where things start getting eldritch, entities existing as both places and people.

Tartarus is the principal enemy of the Amazon nation and our allies, the Twelfth Legion Fulminata and Delphi Strawberry Service. As a place, it's where monsters come from, where they go when they die, and where they eventually crawl up out of once again to kill more humans. As a person, he can't be killed, and regards humanity with the utmost malevolence and monsters as disposable cells of his own body.

...If we're gonna be talking about supernatural beings with this little respect, could we move the conversation somewhere with better encryption? My Signal username is WitchRaven.777

Raven drops links in the chat to the Google and Apple app store download pages for Signal.

ugggghhhhh this WORK you're making Katie do WORK. Fine. Whatever. She jumps through all the hoops and types in Raven's username.

oh yeah, Nyx and Chaos, those are the guys from Hades I was remembering

but you said some monsters are like, sapient and shit, right?

and apparently capable of not doing what Tartarus, which is apparently both a place and a guy, wants

i swear to god if you guys are pulling some shit where you're genociding innocent monsters because their kids might grow up to be magic jihadists or whatever

 

Our goal is to only kill monsters who pose an active threat to humanity or have served in the armies of our enemies. We employ people of all species; demigods, monsters, nature spirits, and clear-sighted mortals are all represented among upper management at our front orgs and in the Queen's Cabinet. Monsters respawn some years or decades after death; the only ways to destroy one permanently are to dump it in the abyss of Chaos or eliminate its name from the collective memory of civilization, both of which have been done only a handful of times, and never by us.

We are allowed to make judgement calls based on statistical tendencies. If you see an empousa hungrily eyeing the neck of the drunk and brainwashed mortal man she's leading off to her bedroom, and you have the expertise to be reasonably confident that's in fact what's going on, you don't have to wait until she's actually started sucking his blood before you whip out your gun. We're not perfect, but we take it seriously. Good judgement is our highest value.

There aren't many monster juveniles—the fastest growing populations are empousai and eidolones, both of which form from the ghosts of fully grown adult mortals—but for what it's worth, we don't kill kids. We've only done collateral damage that even might've harmed them during active conflict with an enemy threatening thousands of mortal lives.

We are also allowed to marry prisoners of war who are of legal age and consenting, and to punish prisoners who have taken human lives by setting them to forced labor, including as personal servants. Full disclosure: Gwen's husband, Cooper, was raised by a Cyclops clan that opposed the gods. They met when she captured him in the war with Kronos. She also has a storm spirit slave she carries around in a flask, who serves as her attendant on the battlefield where she can't bring her husband or automaton. I don't like it, and if it's a dealbreaker for you wrt joining my team I understand.

But what you should know is that Gwen had to give Cooper that name; the clan patriarch called him and his dad "Runt Jr." and "Runt" for having the physical deformity of being only six feet tall. Zoë—that's Gwen's storm spirit slave, though for inscrutable Gwen reasons she calls it Mountain Dew—was responsible for the 2011 Joplin, Missouri tornado that killed over a hundred humans, and was gathering allies in preparation for another attack of similar scale. The alternatives to keeping it under her close supervision would've been letting it go kill more or sending it back to Tartarus.

I won't pretend it's all sunshine and rainbows, but we're the best the world's got.

And why is opposing the gods, as in, the Greek gods, a bad thing?

Especially in the eyes of a matriarchy

You do know about all the stuff, like, most of the male Olympians did, right?

The catchphrase you'll hear when you ask about that topic is "As above, so below".

What it's officially supposed to mean, when the higher-ups say it, is something like this: Juno, not Jupiter, is the rightful ruler of Olympus, and Ares is her special little boy just like Athens saw Athena as Jupiter's special little girl. All the screwed-up stuff she's done that's unbecoming of the dignity of a queen isn't her fault, she was driven to it by her rebellious and unfaithful husband.

Just as the gods developed disassociative disorders when Rome started sacrificing and praying to them under different names, when we take over, reinstate paganism, and restore the rightful roles of women and men, the gods will wax in power, and the rightful roles in their marriages will be restored too. Juno's standards of behavior and judgement will rise to match her new level of power and responsibility. A rightly ordered Olympus, fed on the sacrificed cattle of eight billion people, will triumph over Tartarus and fix the Mist once and for all, and we'll finally be able to release all our once hidden and hoarded magic and science to a grateful and adoring public.

What we mid-level grunts know it really means, when we use it amongst ourselves, is something more like this: Western civilization, for all its flaws, is the most successful and prosperous collection of humans yet standing on the surface of this planet. Seattle (that's where our capital is currently located), for all our flaws, is the most effective defender Western civilization has against the endlessly respawning hordes of Tartarus. And the Olympians, for all their flaws, are the least bad advocates Seattle could ask for, among the whole fucked-up family of classical divinity.

Maybe world domination—excuse me, world optimization—is more than a pipe dream, or maybe our leaders are just blowing smoke up our asses to pacify us while we play defense forever, eternally beating back the forces of Tartarus like weeding a garden. Maybe someday Olympus really will get its shit together, or maybe the best it'll ever be to us is the farmer that fences off his cattle and shoots the wolves, the declawed indoor cat owner who at least keeps the coyotes away from her pet.

But either way, it wouldn't be better if we gave up the fight and let the storm spirits run loose to do more Joplin tornados, leave the centaurs and hydras free to cause more hundred-car pileups, the rogue empousai unimpeded in leaving behind them a longer string of drained and wilted beautiful young flowers of Western manhood. It wouldn't be better if we redirected our prayers and sacrifices to the Titans and primordial gods, looking up at them pleading facedly as they stomp us like the bugs they think we are.

...I'm gonna be honest, this time the essay in your inbox wasn't entirely mine; I copy/pasted some of that from old group chat messages by Gwen. She's way better than me at the whole inspirational war speech thing.

If I go find a cyclops and ask for their side of the story, will they say that the Titans may not be perfect but they're better than those barbarous Olympians who want to genocide or enslave them all?

Believe me, if I were married to a cyclops woman, she could easily tell stories about my family that would make humans sound like we deserve to be wiped out.

Honestly, most monsters on the opposing side say stuff like "predators and prey is the way of the world, the human cattle deserve to die at our hands, bwahahaha!". Sometimes even before Hope gives them the truth serum to loosen their tongues and really get 'em yapping! Prometheus could give a compelling pitch, but it's worth noting that he went into hiding when Kronos died, and his old teammates laugh at him for being such a rube as to think Kronos could give civilization a better deal.

But if you don't believe my words, you'll be able to observe the differences in our conduct and tactics. They don't worry about causing collateral damage that could kill kids; they preferentially hunt preteen demigods because that's when they're at their weakest and most vulnerable, not to mention juiciest and tastiest. They don't care if their war-spouses are consenting or if age. They don't concern themselves with upholding honor or avoiding perfidy; they gleefully backstab one another and shamelessly betray deals.

And if, once you get the chance to see for yourself, you still think both sides are equally evil—just remember which one is offering you $250k cash and a personal android! ;)

She wouldn't entirely disagree with the monsters on that, she'd just prefer to be the predator if possible.

well that does sound pretty damned tempting, but how do I know you're telling the truth about either the perks or the ethical aspect and aren't just gonna kidnap me?

Incentives! If you set someone up to succeed when your org succeeds, you can count on them to do their best work for you. If you're honest with someone up front, they're not gonna turn right around and leave because they found an unpleasant surprise. If you apply coercion or fraud, you have to keep doing the coercion or fraud over and over, and looking over your victim's shoulder to check their work. You're a currently unaffiliated party with a rare and valuable ability; we have every reason in the world to be nice to you.

People only have to be nice to people with rare and valuable abilities because if they don't, they'll defect to another faction. That doesn't really apply if the other faction are a bunch of baby-eating serial rapists who'll probably torture me just for the hell of it.

Our allies are happy to poach people from us if we're not paying them enough, and vice versa! We don't march in perfect lockstep, and indeed, for mid-level people like us the healthy internal competition is one of the best things about the alliance. The legion have a city called New Rome, it's in Berkeley. And Delphi Strawberry Service is Dionysus and Chiron's organization, on Long Island. They'd each be happy to send a recruiter to talk to you as well.

but my source for all of this is just you, so for all I know it could all be lies to justify getting me in the van

If we wanted to kidnap you we simply could!

...do you want me to trace your location, to demonstrate that we can pick you up whenever we want and have chosen not to do so without your invitation?

go ahead

Raven sends Katie an address. It's in Austin, Texas.