A/N: Sorry for the delay; I was, ironically, in Greece.
It's All Greek To Me
Despite the fact that every source in the region for weather forecasting had predicted clear sunny skies, the next day dawned damp and stormy, and Puck had a feeling that either Lauren's father or uncle had something to do with it. Again, Lauren had appeared in his bedroom to wake him up at an ungodly (no pun intended) hour, dragging him out of the warm haven of his bed and into the unusually chilly air outside.
"Please don't tell me we have another practice session," Puck complained as he trudged behind his girlfriend.
She shook her head, her knit red hat shifting a little as her hair moved. "Nah, we need to keep your strength up. I'm taking you to Denny's."
Puck was so happy that he wouldn't have to endure another rigorous morning of training without being allowed to eat, he could have kissed her, and he would have if she hadn't been striding along the sidewalk five feet ahead of him.
It wasn't until they slid into a booth at Denny's and the thick fragrance of greasy sausages, moist pancakes, sizzling bacon, fried eggs, and buttery toast clogged his nose and mouth that Puck realized just how ravenous he was, and his stomach rumbled loudly to prove it. When the waiter came to give them their menus, Lauren immediately ordered an obscene amount of food that would have fed at least four people before the menus were even set on the table. Once he'd finished writing her order on his notepad, the waiter looked at her askance.
"Are you... waiting for others?" he asked.
"No, it's all for him," Lauren replied, casually nodding her head in Puck's direction.
The waiter left to give their order to the cook, but not before turning his bewildered and slightly grossed-out expression on Puck.
"...You know I'm not gonna be able to eat all that, right?" Puck said once the waiter was gone.
"Yeah, you are," Lauren stated matter-of-factly, as if how far Puck's stomach could stretch was a commonly known point of trivia. "Look, my uncle transferred some of his powers to you yesterday, remember?"
Puck quirked an eyebrow. "Is that really a question? You're asking me if I remember a gigantic dude wrapped in a sheet zapping me with his Spear of Freakishness-"
"Okay, shut up," Lauren snapped. "And he carries a trident, not a spear."
"Trident's a kind of gum."
"I'm not even going to bother correcting that one. Anyways, having those powers drains a ridiculous amount of energy, so you have to eat maybe seven to ten times the normal daily amount of food for a human."
"But...why?"
"If you don't keep your batteries charged, you could spontaneously combust. Literally."
Puck blinked. "And neither of you thought to warn me about that?"
Lauren shrugged, not at all concerned by the fact that her boyfriend was potentially explosive. "It's not like you're going to have these abilities permanently. It's just until you either defeat my sister, or she kills you."
"Oh. Awesome," Puck said dryly. "And if she kills me?"
"Then I'll have Persephone make sure you get a good spot in the Underworld."
"That's not exactly helping, Zizes."
Lauren rolled her eyes as she picked a tiny piece of dirt out from under her thumbnail. "Relax, Puckerman. You'll be fine. You might be facing down an Olympic goddess, but you've got three more of us helping you directly, and a bunch of others who just want to see Athena lose a fight."
Puck huffed through his nose, but didn't respond until her words had fully sunk in. "Wait, three of you? Who?"
She counted off on her fingers. "Me, my uncle, and my dad."
"Your dad's helping me?"
"Uh, yeah. Wouldn't exactly be useful for you to be able to control water if there's no water."
Puck relaxed a little, glancing at the storm clouds brewing over the treetops outside. The previous afternoon, once the Spartan training session had ended, Lauren had forced him into an impromptu lesson on Greek mythology. Not much of what she'd said had stuck, but he did remember that her father was known as the King of the Gods for a reason, and he supposed that it was probably an advantage in the upcoming fight to have two of the most powerful gods on his side.
His train of thought was derailed when the waiter arrived with their food, his face still wearing the bewildered expression he'd left with. "Enjoy," he said tightly as he turned to go, and Puck was pretty sure that the waiter was debating whether or not to film him eating and then post it on YouTube.
By the end of the hour, every plate on the table was empty, and Puck ordered seconds, which made the waiter's eyes widen in astonishment and not-so-subtly glance at the table, as if he was looking for a secret trap door where Puck was dropping the food he'd supposedly eaten. "A-and do you want anything?" the waiter stammered to Lauren, even more confused by the fact that she hadn't eaten at all when, judging by her physique, she clearly ingested a lot more calories than her boyfriend.
Puck was able to finish more than half of the second round of food by himself, and then he sat back, a little stunned by the fact that his stomach was apparently filled with super-acid. Either that or he had an intestinal worm. A really big one.
Finally, with Puck's stomach rapidly breaking down the Olympus-sized mountain of food he'd inhaled, Lauren paid the bill with a few ancient Greek drachmas shoved into the waiter's hand.
The befuddled waiter, who at this point was most likely wondering if he was dreaming, glanced nervously back and forth between the gold coins in his palm and the odd girl who'd given them to him. "Um...these aren't..."
"There a problem?" Lauren asked, her tone both casual and cold at the same time (she seriously had to teach Puck how to talk like that).
The waiter gulped and shoved the coins into the back pocket of his jeans. "Uh, no. No. Not at all."
"Good." Lauren quirked an innocent-but-slightly-freaky smile and then turned to leave with Puck, but stopped and turned back. "Oh, and Eric, is it?"
The waiter glanced down at his nametag. "Uh, yeah."
"Sorry, but Amanda? She's cheating on you with Joey from the Lima Bean."
With that, Lauren and Puck exited the restaurant, leaving Eric standing in the middle of the floor with his jaw dropped, pinching his arm as hard as he could.
When the two of them finally arrived at the "arena" Athena had mentioned (really just the McKinley football field with a wide circle of marble Ionian columns where there had been only open space the day before), they found Donny waiting for them at the edge of the field. He gave Puck a hearty clap on the shoulder that made Puck's teeth rattle. "Remember, boy - get her helmet, then unleash the fury of Ares on her," Donny said with a toothy grin, his black eyes twinkling.
Flanked by his girlfriend and her uncle, Puck headed for the column ring. The clouds overhead had picked up speed and were rolling across the sky like ocean waves, the wind spiraling down and buffeting as they walked, and thunder rumbled in the distance, confirming Puck's prediction that he would have to fight in the rain.
Grouped by the columns were several sixteen-foot-tall people, all in ancient Greek attire and a few of them holding spears or similar symbols of power. Some of them Puck recognized immediately from the night at the restaurant, as their god-forms weren't so drastically different from their human selves, while others required a second or third look. It took Puck nearly half a minute to realize that the enormous and fully-developed blonde woman with the hunting bow strapped to her back was in fact the tiny and prudish Missy that he'd met at Breadsticks, and that the lean but muscular man in the short toga standing beside her was Paul (even in god-form, they were identical). There were also a handful of people that Puck had never seen before, but he knew that they were all gods and goddesses just by their sheer size. It had been a long time since Puck had last felt short, but here in the shadows of the twenty-odd giants, he felt as small as a bug, and the knowledge that any one of said giants could squash him like one only served to make him feel even more so. He glanced behind him to see that he hadn't been followed by Lauren and Donny, but rather Aphrodite and Poseidon.
"You're late again, Dite," said the fidgety giant who was hovering a few feet off the ground, since, Puck noticed, there were tiny fluttering wings sprouting from his leather sandals.
"Dammit, Hermes, give it a rest already," Lauren/Aphrodite snapped, making the smaller god flinch and float a few yards away. "Hold on," she said a few seconds later to no one in particular. "What is she doing here?"
Puck followed her gaze to a goddess he hadn't noticed before, a woman who was considerably shorter and more odd-looking that any of her other relatives. At only eleven feet, she was dwarfed by her kin but still towered over Puck, and her short hair, dark brown with prominent streaks of blonde and bright ginger, was cut at several different lengths and stuck out every which way in a chaotic imitation of a bramble bush. He face was shrew-like and her eyes beady but bright green, her grin sinister and her teeth slightly pointed and crooked. She continuously shifted from foot to foot in a shuffling dance like a Doberman pulling at its chain. Upon hearing Aphrodite's question, she decided to answer it herself and turned her green gaze on the love goddess.
"You know I never miss a conflict if I can help it," she smiled. Her voice was honeyed but also rough, as if she'd been chain smoking for the past thousand years or so.
Aphrodite's lip curled. "Whatever. Just don't throw any golden apples into the ring. We aren't going to fall for that crap again."
The shorter goddess chuckled and grinned even wider, and Puck was pretty sure that not even divine beings were supposed to have that many teeth. "Of course not," she purred. "You're much too smart for that." Before Aphrodite could voice a retort, the pointy-toothed woman abruptly turned her attention on Puck. "So you're Aphrodite's hero," he said, her smile stretching and her eyes darkening from bright green to a glittering obsidian. "Noah's a Biblical name, isn't it? Damn new-age religions. You can blame Jesus for the ruin of the Parthenon, not to mention the ruin of everything else with any value."
Aphrodite butted in again. "You're one to talk, Miss I-Caused-The-Trojan-War-And-Bragged-About-It-For-Millenia. Excuse us." She pulled Puck towards the column ring, Poseidon walking along with them. As they left, the strange-looking woman continued to watch Puck with a wide sharkish grin, her eyes blooming from black to piercing ice blue in the space of a single blink.
"Who was that?" Puck asked once she was out of earshot.
"That would be Eris, goddess of strife, chaos, and discord," Poseidon said distastefully. "A minor goddess, yet quite powerful by minor god standards. How she gained so much influence, I'll never know."
"Anyways," Aphrodite cut in pointedly. "Time to focus."
"Right. Remember, boy, if you feel at any time like she's trying to get you to go to a certain spot or make a certain move, do the opposite."
Puck took a deep breath. "Okay. Do I get like, armor or anything?"
Aphrodite's thin eyebrows shot up. "You really think armor going to protect you from the goddess of warfare?"
"Um..."
"It'll just weigh you down. Here." She handed him a human-sized spear with a barbed tip. "There's your armor. Now get out there and kick my sister's divine ass."