Since that fateful Tuesday in February, I want to say my time at Camp has passed swimmingly. After my conversation on Olympus and that little stunt with Ares, the Ares Cabin began to respect me.
"He arm-wrestled our dad at full strength and won?" I overhear Gordon say. "We may be his great-great-great uncles or something, but none of us could do that. I know every somewhat powerful son of Ares gets this initiation ritual, but he's not even a demigod!"
More campers began trickling in. By the end of April, every cabin except for the Big Three had at least four occupants. Of course, Apollo and Aphrodite are now packed. These gods are the epitomes of loose morals.
I spent the lest few months acting like any other camper. I practice swordplay, play volleyball, do archery tricks, anything they had to offer. Of course, I settle into my old pattern of being way better than everyone else at everything. I can be a combat medic as well as any other Apollo child, build stuff as well as a Hephaestus camper (though that might be due to my previous hobbies of combat engineering and masonry), and beat Ares campers armed to the teeth while I only wear a tank top and shorts at fighting (seriously, learn some mano a mano).
The classes that truly had me in trouble were the language classes. I learn Greek from Malcolm, the head counselor of the Athena cabin, and Latin from Chiron. When I told them I had dyslexia, they took that as a good sign. It apparently means my brain is hardwired for Greek or Latin. They also admired my multilingualism, saying that Greek or Latin should be pieces of cake. My gods they were wrong.
"I have never seen anything like this," Chiron states, clearly drained. "You say that this happens all the time when you write English?"
Chiron points at the Latin text I attempted to copy. It is, once again, written in a mix of Cyrillic, Latin, and now Greek letters.
"Can you read this text to me?" he asks.
I strain my eyes at the text. Latin is so much like Spanish in some ways, but I can't read that particularly well either. My pronunciation was on-point when I could actually see what I read, but most of it was a flying mess of ink.
"You're even dyslexic reading Latin!" Chiron exclaims. "Did you just say that Aeneas is the son of a deer?"
"I spoke seven languages since I was born, and I have never been able to keep them straight," I say, flushing with embarrassment. "My teachers often made me rewrite my essays because I kept writing words from either the wrong language, in the wrong script, or even both. You can only imagine the headache my English teacher had when I had inserted Chinese characters into my essay."
"Well, Arthur, seeing that you're clearly excelling at all your other activities, I believe it's high time for you to spend all your efforts learning Greek and Latin," Chiron declares. "I admire the spirit of the Chinese mother, always pushing their children to be well-versed at everything."
"Perhaps that's why Hermes took such a liking to China during the nineteenth century," Chiron continues, now clearly off-topic. "When we were based in Britain, all of the gods were flung to places on Earth new and far from Europe. Hermes took a liking to Hong Kong, its nice harbor making an excellent trading post for his operations. We encountered more of our pagan compatriots and co-rulers than ever before. Soon, Apollo had deals with all sorts of African gods who wanted to borrow the Sun Chariot and Aphrodite was fighting over men with the other love goddesses. That was our longest period of interacting with other pantheons. The Romans had nothing on this level of connection.
"Of course, a minor prophecy in godly terms emerged. Apollo foresaw the rise of Germany and its resulting consequences. Soon, we had to make the decision to relocate Olympus once more. Hades, Dionysus, and Hermes argued heavily in favor of the future nation of Germany. Zeus and Poseidon favored America. Athena argued neither would be wise, for we still didn't know if Prussia or Austria would succeed, or if either will grow powerful. After a few decades of argument, we decided on America, and set our deadline for 1860.
"We moved here in time for the American Civil War, which had a harsh effect on gods. Their previous escapades here left children both Greek and Roman, whose rivalry have incapacitated gods for centuries. Only fifty years later, the events of the prophecy came to pass. The First World War, as mortals now call it, was a brutal affair for them: the first global war. What the Olympians don't want to remember to this day was the Great War that paralleled it in the godly world."
"The gods had their own Great War?" I question.
"Gods don't measure wars in deaths, for they can't die. They measure in the amount of pain they suffered or by how many god they had to free from Tartarus or other oblivions. Do you remember what happened in the First World War?"
"One of my great-grandparents fought in both world wars. He fought on the Eastern Front, the Turkish Front, and at Gallipoli with the Australians. When Russia was defeated, he fled and fought on the Western Front for the French. I remember his war stories, passed down to me so lovingly by my grandfather, about the first time he encountered African soldiers. In particular, he described what I now know were African demigods. Their magic was unlike anything he had ever seen. He called their magic 'barbaric,' and its effects on the battlefield was just that."
"There is the problem, Arthur," Chiron explains. "The British, French, and Germans were drafting hundreds upon thousands of African and Indian demigods to fight in Europe, depriving the African and Hindu gods of their ability to defend against their own enemies. They blamed us and the Norse for depriving them of their children. Pretty soon, the conflict was rippling through all the world's pantheons. Gods in each took sides. Whether you were Norse, Greek, Indian, or Igbo didn't matter. The worst battle happened at what mortals call the Somme. Here, Zeus, Hermes, Frey, Osiris, all the big-name European gods, fought gods like Chukwu, Vishnu, Shiva, and other non-European gods. These battles raged parallel to the demigods' clashes, what mortals call the French Army Mutinies, and the mortal machine guns of the Somme. Artemis and Dionysus have nightmares about that war even to this day, a whole century later. Greek or Hindu, Allied or Central, Mortal or Immortal, the 1910's were a time of great horrors. That decade was so bad us immortals hardly remember the war just two decades later."
"How did the gods not get struck down?" I ask.
"The gods can only be struck down to their own dominions. Greek gods can be cast down to Tartarus. Egyptians can be sealed off in the Duat. Every god can only disappear to their own version of oblivion. When Vishnu tried casting Zeus off to Shiva's realm, nothing happened except for a really angry god of the sky."
"That wasn't the only consequence of the war, right?" I question. There just had to be more to this story.
"You're a prime example of the other major issue, Arthur," Chiron answers. "Notice that you are born of three pantheons: Greek, Roman, and Egyptian. Those lonely young men in the trenches had chances to visit lots and lots of lonely women. Many of their favorites were demigod children of Freya, Aphrodite, and the other beauty goddesses. War babies were shameful enough for mortal women. Demigod women raised many children of dual nature with conflicting morals and hybrid power. Regrettably, most of them met an untimely end, being unable to control their conflicting natures in time to fight off an outrageously diverse array of monsters."
"The gods really take on traits of their host countries, don't they?" I muse. "The worst war in British history was the First World War. It was as horrible for the gods who lived there too."
"It's amazing how much mortals can change the gods with just a bit of thought," Chiron says. "Some fuss Apollo had when powdered wigs were in style."
"Chiron," Conner calls out. He strolls in the room as though he's brimming with excitement.
"There's someone who would like to meet with you."
"Tell them to come to my office," Chiron replies. "Arthur, I think I know who it is. Come with me."