Week Twenty:
November 14 -15 (the first part), 2025
Fully clothed except for his shoes, David wakes with Cleo asleep alongside him in Jim and Candy Smith’s Seattle guest room Friday, November 14. Head pounding from last night’s reunion with Saul Crispin and the subsequent martini binge, he seeks water- -lots of water- -and finds Jim in the kitchen.
Jim has just returned from his emergency summons to Mount Olympus. He briefly mentions Stella’s coma and the traumatic delivery of Monique’s baby. To his relief, David learns that Hermes is the baby’s father, not David, himself, after his and Monique’s one-night fling.
Jim is exhausted, having flown back to Seattle under his own power at warp speed, by order of Veronica Zeta. She needs Jim on standby 24/7 for an urgent but unspecified task.
David returns to the guest room. Cleo stirs. He thanks her for taking care of him the night before and says for the first time “I love you.” She says the same. They kiss, and the rest of the world disappears. . .
Saturday, November 15, Clifford Essex, Veronica Zeta, and Clifford’s parents, Ralph and Briana, stand on the seawall overlooking Elliott Bay. Only Ralph is in good spirits. The rest are consumed with worry over his pending old-style structureling dematerialization into the seawall, the best solution for securing it against increasingly probable breach. Veronica performs the incantation that allows Ralph to dematerialize. His molecules successfully disburse into the seawall. All appears well. Until it doesn’t. Ralph can’t hold the wall alone! Clifford, also trained in traditional structureling craft, joins him. Though immortals, if the seawall gives before their physical bodies can be reconstituted, they will die. . .
Veronica summons Jim and orders him to transform himself into a sea mammal so he can communicate with Ralph and Clifford underwater. Jim, now an oversized seal, speaks by telekinesis with Ralph and Clifford. Ralph says the seawall isn’t breaching. It’s being sucked into a sinkhole! Jim dives deeper, to where Poseidon and two of his assistants brace the bottom of the wall. Poseidon says there’s no solution, short of someone burrowing under and expanding themselves to fill the sink hole- -something only Poseidon, himself, can do. . .
That’s the scoop from Seattle! Tune in tomorrow for real time happenings in the City of Mount Olympus. Or you can find the whole story here:
https://www.susandmatley.com/beyond-big-g-city/
