Okay, so, I thought it would be really fun if I could depict all the Greek gods and stuff as high schoolers, and put all the myths into just drama-filled stories (mostly because I’m pretty much inspirationless at the moment and I NEED something to WRITE!!!). So… I just want to see what you all think of my first attempt at one of the stories. Y’see, I’ve been drawing pictures of some of the gods and goddesses and thinking of cute little quirks they could have, and I eventually want to make this into a comic, because I think it would be better if it were a comic, rather than a story, but anyway… I’m starting off with the story of Persephone and Hades (By the way, I realized that there is a user on here named Hades. It is a mere coincidence that I want to post a story about Hades on here, where there is somebody called Hades. Also, I seem to have noticed a trend recently where people have these really creepy, dark names… Skullduggery… Hades… Flame… How much happened during the time that I was gone???)! I decided to do this because it seemed like a really cute story, if portrayed correctly… so, here we go!
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PERSEPHONE AND HADES (not the WE user) 
I was sitting at a lunch table with my brother Poseidon, Hermes, and Artemis, eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when I saw her. She was pretty, all right. She was really pretty. Her hair was light brown and fell halfway down her back, and down her forehead, too, almost touching her eyes, which were a deep shade of green. She was sitting at the same table as Demeter, my brother Zeus’s ex-girlfriend, with whom I just never got along well. She was into sunshine and daisies, and I was into fire and books about zombies. She hung out with the Honor Role girls who wore dresses and heels and were perfect, and I hung out with the outcasts, the formerly popular, the stoners (though I never did drugs or alcohol, myself), and the depressed poets. There weren’t a lot of us, so all those adjectives overlapped one another on the different students in our group. Demeter and I were pretty different, and I had no idea what Zeus ever saw in her. But, hey, she wasn’t my girlfriend, so I didn’t need to like her.
Now, if this beautiful girl was sitting with Demeter, what made her stand out to me? What made her any different? What made her any good? Was it the way that she clumsily tripped over the handle of her bag when trying to get up, that I thought cute? Was it the way she only had three fingernails painted (they were green, for the record, and it was her middle, ring, and pinkie fingers) on each hand, that made her stick out as an individual? All I know is that we locked eyes for a moment, and the whole world stopped. My heart skipped a beat, my hand slipped on my carton of milk, and I spilled all over the table.
I broke away my gaze from her when I heard, “Hades!” explode from Poseidon’s mouth. I stood up immediately and looked around desperately for napkins.
“Napkins are over by the food, H,” Artemis told me sourly, while trying to get her English homework to safety and her backpack out from under the waterfall of milk running off the edge of the table.
“Right,” I said, and silently searched my brain to remember which direction to go for the food and napkins. Man, the cafeteria was huge, to compensate for the giant student population at Olympus High. It was my first year there, and it had only been a week, so I was still getting acquainted with my surroundings.
Then I realized that, in order to get to the food, I would have to walk past the table with Demeter and the pretty girl.
“What’s with you, H? Get going. This milk isn’t going to dry up itself!” Artemis prodded me in the side.
I internally shook myself into awareness. “Don’t cry over it; I’m going.”
So, I made my way, squeezing between chairs and tables and dodging the occasional piece of garbage on the ground, over to the food area. Along the way, I made sure to take a detour, so I’d be as far away from Demeter’s table as possible. I was already embarrassed enough. I didn’t want any more eye contact with anybody, especially that girl. Unfortunately, avoiding her table involved walking by Zeus’ and Dionysus’ and the rest of their crew’s table. I avoided looking at them as well, and, luckily, they didn’t notice me. But I could feel the eyes of my friends on me, probably wondering why I was taking such a long route.
By the time I’d gotten back with an enormous stack of napkins and an extremely embarrassed face, most of the milk had fallen off the table and onto the ground, and had almost soaked my backpack. Artemis had moved it to where hers was, though, so it was okay. Poseidon was eying me suspiciously, though.
“Why’d you slip up there, H? I’ve never seen you drop a drink before,” he questioned me.
“I wasn’t paying attention.” It wasn’t really a lie; I just didn’t tell him the reason why.
Nobody interrogated me any further, as we cleaned up the mess and threw out all the saturated napkins. We continued lunch almost as if nothing had happened.
“So, who’s that girl sitting at Demeter’s table?” I asked during a break in conversation.
“The one in the pink flower dress?” Poseidon asked. We knew every other girl there. They had all dated our brother.
I confirmed.
“That’s Persephone. She’s new, immediately abducted by Hera and the gang.” Hera was Zeus’ current girlfriend, the one he’d had for the longest, even though he’d cheated on her several times. Somehow, she still loved him. “You know, she’s in your grade. She lives near Athens Pizza.”
“Why do you know where she lives?” Artemis inquired.
“Hera was telling Zeus about her when I saw them walk into the house last night. I didn’t hear much past that, ’cause they were making their way up to his room. I’m no stalker, and I know my place in this school. I wouldn’t mix groups.”
“Fair enough.”
So, here’s what I knew about her: Her name was Persephone, she was beautiful, and she was friends with a bunch of people pretty much the opposite of me. What was I trying to do?
+ + +
Poseidon and Zeus always took the bus home, but I usually had things to do after school, like extra help with the math teacher, or just doing homework in the library. You know, it was just to be out of the house for longer. I was always about decent at math, but sometimes there was just a concept around which I couldn’t wrap my mind, no matter how hard I tried during class. Mr. Makshee is never awake for the morning classes, thus he never can teach well in the morning, so, when we have math in the beginning of the day, that’s when I know it’s an extra help day. That day was a media center day, though.
For some odd reason, when I entered through the big wooden doors, there were very few people in the media center. Usually, it was populated by at least fifty kids, plus the kids coming from detentions, who would later appear. I took a vacant table near the mythology section and slung my backpack onto the ground, sat in a chair, unzipped the largest compartment and took out my bio binder. I flipped open to the homework and took a pencil from my pocket. It was getting blunt– really blunt. It was almost time to sharpen it again. After digging around for a minute or so in my backpack for the sharpener, I started to turn the pencil around and around, watching shavings accumulate in the clear green plastic compartment. Assuming I was done, I pulled it out.
The tip had broken off in the sharpener. This happened every so often. I rolled my eyes, moving the pencil back in the general direction of the hole in the top…
Only to stab myself when I locked eyes with Persephone again. Oh, come on! I thought.
This just could not continue to happen.
+ + +
“Hey, Cerena, Berry, Russel,” I said, tossing each little fluffy black dog a treat as they greeted me at the front hallway when I arrived at home.
“What about me?” Poseidon called from the kitchen.
“Hey, Poser.”
“Funny.” He was being sarcastic.
“Is Hades home?” I heard Zeus saying, his footsteps echoing off the kitchen floor. He’d just walked through the archway.
“Yeah,” I answered.
I rounded the corner into the kitchen to see Poseidon, sitting with his feet on the table, reading the science section of the newspaper, and Zeus opening the cabinet, pulling out a bowl.
“So,” Zeus started, “Hera tells me you had a horrific accident today at lunch.”
“A-ha-ha, not as funny as you wish it were,” I told him.
“However, it was just as horrific as she said it was,” Poseidon mumbled, “It was quite weird, though. What made you do that, H?”
“I lost my grip,” I avoided telling him the full truth.
“Well, obviously,” the two of them said simultaneously.
I struggled in vain for just a little while longer, trying other barely-related reasons, until I had to say, “I locked eyes with a cute girl.”
My brothers made noises of approval, then stopped abruptly when Zeus asked, “Who?”
“I don’t know,” I lied. This would only have been the truth if I had kept myself from asking her name.
“Yeah, you do,” Poseidon contradicted me. Unfortunately, it runs in the family to be a good lie detector.
“Well, I don’t know her. I know who she is. She’s new, I think.”
They were silent, so I turned around to face them after a few seconds, only to realize that they were staring at me, expecting a name. I sighed, defeated.
“Her name is Persephone,” I let out.
“Persephone!” Zeus erupted into laughter: mockery. I knew this would happen. “Excuse me,” he said after calming himself slightly, “I think I misheard you. You can’t have meant to say Persephone’s name. Perhaps you meant Hestia, or someone.” Everyone in the school knew that Hestia was the least interesting girl around, from here to Mars. All she did all day was bake. And, while baking is cool, she just didn’t care about anything else, kept to herself, and nobody invited her anywhere, nobody talked about her.
“I do not mean Hestia.”
“So you seriously had context when you asked about her at lunch?” Poseidon asked me, smirking.
“Sure. Whatever. Fine.”
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You don’t want to get to know Persephone.”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“She’s popular. You’re not. She likes flowers. You like punk rock. She wears dresses. You wear a spiky collar. You’re as different as Heaven and Hell. Respectively.” I guess I did give off the look of the lord of Hell… on bad days. “But most of all, she’s Demeter’s underling.”
“Underling?” I’d never heard the term before.
“You know: a new kid she’s decided to take under her wing. Whatever the case, you need to forget about her. She’s no good for you, especially if she’s Demeter’s. Demeter’s a drama queen, and, if she keeps Persephone, then she’ll be a clone– a copy –of her. She’s going to be a second Demeter.”
Zeus looked bitter, as if contemplating whether or not to stand up for his ex. I sat down at the table and started tracing circles with my right-hand fore-finger, Poseidon looked back to the newspaper, and Zeus continued to the refrigerator, took out some salsa. The conversation was tensely deteriorating.
As the eldest opened a bag of chips, he stopped, as though still pensive about what Poseidon had said regarding Demeter. He clearly still thought she was beautiful– likable, even.
“She’s not that bad.”
Poseidon looked up over the newspaper, and I stopped tracing circles on the table. “Huh? Who?”
“Demeter. She’s not horrible.”
“I didn’t say she’s horrible. I said she’s not someone Poseidon wants to get to know.”
“I don’t want to get to know her,” I said.
“I know. I said that. And also you don’t want to get mixed up with Persephone.”
I didn’t argue. This would probably pass.
“And anyway, what are you doing defending her?” Poseidon egged him on. This was a game he played often. It was fun to watch Zeus struggle to figure out which girl he loved the most. Well, it was that way for Poseidon. I did not enjoy this game. “You guys aren’t dating anymore. Won’t Hera get mad about this? Tsk, tsk, no bed for you tonight.”
“It’s not like you have someone to brag about, Poseidon!” Zeus broke. “I get all the girls that you don’t. Isn’t that hilarious? Hilarious.” This happened a lot. “So suck it.”
With that, Zeus left the room with his chips and salsa, and I resumed my circles, and Poseidon resumed reading. At this point, as these conversations had happened like this for at least two years, there was no discussion afterwards, no “you shouldn’t do that because he really doesn’t like it,” no real regrets on his side, or mine, really.
“So… this Persephone girl. Don’t chase after her. Put as much distance between you two as possible. If you don’t make an ocean between you two, then I’ll do it myself. And I don’t mean an Indian Ocean; I mean a Pacific Ocean. I don’t want this to get ugly,” Poseidon warned me.
I didn’t answer. He took that as a yes. I really just didn’t want to agree to it.
Talk