Demeter's Tempest

Kevin's 18th birthday was quiet, a small cake with his dad and girlfriend, Tina, mostly because it was a Thursday night and they'd planned his party for the next night, Friday, to have more time and more friends, a more senior-year type shindig.

With only 5 weeks left in the school year, all his friends had already had their 18ths. Kevin's was second to last and each of the parties leading up to this had gotten more and more odd as people tried to come up with new party ideas.

Tina's mother was a stickler for being 'home-on-time', so after some modest present openings Tina kissed Kevin on the porch and drove off.

Reflecting on this as he walked back in the house, Kevin knew the reason for the day's delay, but still was disappointed at the anticlimactic actual-18-day. He'd built it up in his mind, and he knew it was out of scale, but the disappointment still crept in.

Kevin's father, David, had seen them go out the front door together and hoped they got some good kissing in. His marriage had ended 6 years before, badly, due to his ex-wife's opioid addiction. The divorce was barely finalized when she passed from an interaction-overdose, and her death weighed on him. He'd always thought there was something more he could have done for her, a different way he could have handled things.

Of course, addictions aren't decided on. They happen, a combination of brain-vs-biochemistry and chance, a medical tragedy confused with morality, and frequently aren't fixable. Aftereffects keep the tragedy rolling, lives stolen or shat upon by what's happening inside someone else.

David knew from tragedy, he felt the pain, and he tried to keep moving, but it was harder and harder, physically, but mostly emotionally. He had choices but few that appealed to him, and even fewer that he felt could make a measurable difference in his life. That said, he loved his son, and he delighted in Kevin having at least a little good-stuff in his life.

For his part, Kevin came back inside and sat on the couch next to his dad for a moment, and got a hard pat on the shoulder of welcome and sort-of congratulations. They both didn't say things, partly from shared pain at the loss of a person not there, and partly from just not knowing what to say.

Patterns of what to say, and not say, are sometimes Set in Stone.

Preoccupied enough to discount his dad's show of affection, Kevin said goodnight and went upstairs.

His dad worried him, more and more as time passed. The weight problem just kept building, and the pre-diabetes made him more a fixed blob of furniture than the armchair he sat in.

At least the armchair knew that it was furniture.

Back in his room, Kevin answered the congrats texts from a couple of friends and then got ready for bed, settling in to read before he slept. The book for the night was a very odd book he'd gotten at a garage sale a couple of weeks before.

Kevin's party, he'd decided, was going to be a 'Roman Toga' party. Since the book he'd found was written in Latin, he opened randomly and started trying to translate some of the text using his phone's 'Translate Latin -- English' feature. He wanted some cool phrases to speak to the crowd, like he really knew Latin, even though he very much didn't.

The phrases were oddball, reading more like a cookbook than a novel in places, but had long sections of text decorated with fancy doodles that partially obscured the words. The book had no title, but the first page had words that read, "Satyrical Dionysian Symposia".

Misreading Styrical as 'satirical' instead of relating to Satyrs, Kevin just felt (mistakenly) good that he knew what it sort-of meant: satires were comedies that overplayed a viewpoint on one side, over-agreeing, to make fun. And Symposium meant lecture, so this obviously was a satirical lecture about some Greek god or another -- he'd heard of Dionysus, vaguely.

Kevin's history teacher had once said (in reference to Plato's pamphlet) that "Symposium" really meant 'drinking party', a memorable fact that delighted his students and motivated them to read the work, which mostly concerned the nature of what-is-love-really.

Getting out a set of post-it-notes, Kevin put markers under phrases that were set apart from the others and looked pretty easy to read out loud. He'd use those at the party to make it sound like he was all Roman or whatever.

The fact that Symposium, Dionysus, and many of the words were Greek, and not Roman, didn't matter to Kevin one whit. As far as he knew, everybody back then wore bedsheets and sandals, so it still worked.

The hard work of pronouncing the long, unfamiliar, and calligraphically-written words was paying off, though, as he found he could definitely get better at the phrases if he repeated them several times.

Eventually, he got tired and went to sleep, warm thoughts in his head about Tina's boobs (which he'd recently seen and played with) and the prospect of Doing It, as they'd planned for the night after his party, Sunday night.

Tina's controlling and over-possessive mother was going out of town for work the next week, so they'd have time to repeat it, they hoped. Tina, as a mostly pre-approved thing, would be staying with a friend. Little did her mother know that her friend, Cassie, was Completely Onboard with Kevin going over to sleep with Tina at her then-empty house and 'Having Fun'.

Kevin suddenly felt tired and turned out his light.

He didn't fall asleep, exactly. It was a rushing blackness, an overwhelming sense of motion, but without wind. It wasn't a dream-state, he hadn't fallen out of bed, but he wasn't where he started, and he was Really Really Sure he hadn't done this himself.

Where "here" was resolved slowly as he managed to open his eyes, his actual eyes, not some dream version of eyes. The difference was clear.

Yet, where he was? It made ZERO sense!

Blinking the 'sleep' out of his eyes, Kevin looked up to the underside of a tiny, thatched roof mud-brick hut. He had a sense of calm about him, but he knew the rest of his logical brain was just going berserk over how he could be where he was.

He technically knew he was dreaming, or he wasn't, because of what he saw, but the sensations were genuine, not dream-state, not disconnected and jumbled like dreams are.

It had the tangible, definite feeling of actually being in a place.

He heard birds chirping and felt a slight breeze through the window overhead.

He couldn't be where he was, but... he definitely Was Somewhere.

He thought, "How in the fuck?"

Turning over on his side and pushing himself up from the floor mat, he knelt on the dirt floor and took stock of where he was. For one, he was very naked. He usually slept in his (tighty-whitey) underwear, so that was different. But, looking down his body, what he was seeing was NOT the soft, over-pudgy roundness of body, the very-not-fit and not-trim yes actually fat version of Kevin that he didn't particularly like about himself.

He'd always sort-of blamed his dad for giving him the genetic "gift" of mega-pudgy.

Instead of that fat body, he saw a very different one, that still felt like himself. He could move his legs, his arms, open and close his mouth and fist, these were HIS, but they looked very different.

For one, he had Serious Muscles, plus a pretty deep tan... with no hair on his arms?

And... Wow - He Was now UNCIRCUMSIZED. That's a change!

Getting to the less obvious things, his hairy chest was gone, too. It was bare instead. He'd had a patch of thick hair there since 8th grade and didn't quite know if it was manly or just unkempt.

In fact, he was almost entirely hairless. Reaching up, he found he still had head-hair, but it was cut far shorter than he normally kept it, almost to a flat-top.

A strange sound was coming from outside, kind of a repeated squishing or sloshing sound.

Whether the gravity was less or he was just overpowered, his push up to stand went very fast and he almost found he'd jumped. A window was in front of him, small and at eye height, just enough to see the reddish dusk- or dawn-like sky. He didn't know if it was morning or night, but it kind of felt more morning-ish. Maybe it was the birds that were the clue, he thought.

A doorway stood at the head of the bed, but instead of a door, the way was blocked by several sets of Venetian-blind-like mats made of twigs pierced by two strings.

The problem of his being naked was very front of mind for him, despite all of this being odd beyond measure.

Casting his eyes about for just anything to use, he even considered the mat he'd awoken on. It had no sheet or blanket, just the thick sewn-shut bag of straw, not a viable garment.

The door/blind didn't look detachable. He shrugged and decided he might as well go outside.

Peering out, he saw a pretty, early-20's woman, clad in a top-only tunic barely reaching her mid-thighs. She was standing, or rather stomping, in a wide knee-high barrel of grapes, maybe 15 steps away.

He had to pause -- the small bit of her legs he saw looked like they were glowing.

More than that, he didn't want to come out of the hut. He was naked.

The woman looked over at him, peering from behind the door-mats, and half-smiled. She was preoccupied with her task, but fully acknowledging his presence. "Come here, mortal, and stand beside my apo tez leuos, my treading-vat of the world."

Kevin found himself moving, not entirely under his control, doing what he was told. Walking up, he stopped and just stood there, looking first up at her face, but as that got to be overwhelmingly beautiful, he couldn't look anymore and had to avert his eyes to the dark red grapes she was stomping and squishing.

She looked at him and said, her voice beautiful and ethereal, but overwhelmingly clear in a way that rang through his head. "Kevin. I have need of your mortal form. My name is Demeter."

"I ... cannot look at you, it's like... it's too bright out..."

Demeter laughed. "Of course. I am a God. You are a mortal. Let's fix that..."

Kevin suddenly inhaled strongly, smelling the grapes and the hay, the summer air, the wind of a recent rain, and was filled with a fresh power. His thoughts compared it to coming out from under a thick blanket to suddenly breathe fresh air. His inhale, though, kept going! It alarmed him, that even though his lungs were full, he still kept inhaling, each microsecond feeling better than the last!

The fifteen-second full impossibly-overfilled inhale made him bug-eyed, but just as quickly his breathing settled into normalcy again. With that air came some kind of internal assurance and fortitude, such that he was able, after all, to look at her face without flinching.

To say he realized who she was would be massively underselling the reality that banged his brain.

It's said that education is, 'Perspective'. Kevin's sudden perspective change was as much internal as external, feeling the way his body moved and felt, how he occupied the space in front of her, and who she was in comparison.

The power he was feeling was coursing through his body, unlike any he'd never felt before, except maybe once running down a hotel hallway as fast as he could in brand new tennis shoes -- speeds heretofore previously unfelt. It didn't stop, it was still moving, and the rush settled into being a new-normal, a sensation of power.

Demeter was a GOD. That's not a light and trivial thing, he got that!

Kevin had grown to know her as a GOD, by the inhalation. The strength he'd gained coursed through him, yet the humility that he needed to show also flew there and gained formality. He suddenly knew the way he must address her, acknowledging the vast gulf between a mortal and a Goddess.

Some of what he'd gained was an understanding of her, the vast reserves of power and capability, her history, her strengths, her purview, her needs, all these ideas suddenly clarified in his head.

She was the Goddess of the Fertility of Plants and Animals. One conception of her power limited her to 'the harvest', but really that was a small part of her focus. The entirety of Earth's ecosystems were her charge and her 'professional' preoccupation, if one can say that being a Goddess is a 'profession'.

She continued, "Kevin. That book you read? I ensured you would get it, and inspired you to read it. That book allowed you transport here. This was difficult. I had to interfere in your free will, and for that I had to get some assistance from some other Gods. I called upon you for a reason. Your planet is dying."

Kevin's heart dropped, his mouth opened, and a huge chill ran up his spine. To hear her words was to know the truth of them. It wasn't just WORDS that flooded to him as she spoke! Her voice put the IDEAS in his head at the same time, in Fullness and Richness, a massively overlapping set of complex images and interdependency links between all living things!

Her saying the planet is dying wasn't just a statement of fact, it was a library of knowledge that flooded into Kevin's brain as she said it.

To get that, to contemplate the large-scale death of a biosphere that includes billions of years of evolution, and all of human history -- that tragedy flowed in both as intellectual and emotional overtones. Kevin's individual fear of death rang insignificant and tiny in the scale of horror that confronted him.

What would vanish would be not just him, or his friends or family, his town, but ALL people, Everywhere, forevermore, the stopping of all possible futures, Done. Over. Dust and Emptiness, Hundreds of BILLIONS of people yet to be born, Effectively DEAD, from never having the chance to live.

That kind of torment chopped him to the quick, opened a hole in his heart. He couldn't talk, just looked up at her.

Demeter felt his pain and fear and nodded at him, affirming this was appropriate. "Yes. Humanity is killing itself. It is filling the vital spaces with poison, and these will come around to kill all the humans. As a Goddess, I don't like that very much. You're hurting the things I love, making my job a lot harder. The universe is vast, and if you expand, you will carry the Earth and her creatures with you, taking my domain with you out into the cosmos. Or, Earth will stop. Maybe there will be another intelligent species there, but probably not."

He understood that implication, too. The Absolute-Worst, and the Grand-Expansive-Beauty Best, and it hung on a knife-edge, moving steadily towards a fall to despair and ruin.

Again, she smiled at him and waved her hand towards him slightly, easing his pain enough for him to return to rationality. His pain ebbed, and he was thankful.

He asked, "How... How can I help?"

Demeter stopped treading and sat on the low wall of the vat, looking at him. "I have given you strength of body. I have inspired you with strength of mind and the knowledge of past deeds and the inter-relations of living things, which might lead you to wisdom if you examine it."

Kevin had enough self-awareness at that point to see the truth in what she said.

She continued, "Lastly, though, I must give you another proto-armament. It is the MIDDLE third, the triune, the thing I can dispense only the start of, by my gifts, but that your free will must use to rebuild and reconnect your world. Do you know what a catalyst is?"

This he knew, grade school science class. "Catalysts? Things not consumed that help a chemical reaction..."

"Yes. I am going to give you a catalyst. You must use it to build real power yourself, power too vast for me to just transfer, power that has to be channeled and directed more than gifted as a wineskin. You must create, instantiate, fertilize the power, from those around you. If you are wise, you can channel it usefully, and stop this poisoning. Make my land, your land, fertile, giving, complete, correct... a return to how things Should Be. Not all of the Earth will return to the before-time, before-man, before civilization. Man has a necessary place in this biosphere and in others he could create off-Earth, but man's place while a part of Earth must be more balanced and stable."

"How much time do I have?"

"We'll see. Maybe, 2 centuries, at most. Or, less, sooner if short-sighted or selfish people dominate your world too strongly. It will all be over by then, or not, a world continuing and reborn, or a world reborn in glory and life, depending on what You can do."

She squinted slightly, considering him and the task ahead. "You must know, though, at the end of this, there will be a judgment. And, if you have acted ethically, I may then grant you a boon, a wish."

Kevin was honored, but very confused. "Uh... how? I feel I'm more powerful? But... how do I ...?"

"You must raise an army, to fight by your side. There are forces of greed and wanton dominance. There are plans within plans and subterfuges to undermine those who seek healthy balance with altruistic intent. Most problems, if you think through the interconnectedness, are built from individually small but collectively mass-scale patterns of ignorance, laziness, and complacency."

This made some sense to him, it was fitting together, but... "An army?"

"To raise an army, you must be fertile, in the way that nature herself is fertile. Your ethics shall be those of growing things, things that kill and eat, things that soak in the sun, things that embody cycles of life and death. As you build life, you gain further life-power."

He got that, he had to help things grow.

"Giving gifts to those around you, creative boons, will help you build further. Your decisions MUST create love, though that love sometimes results in eddies and tidepools, rearrangements into non-life so that massive blooms of new life may follow."

That was just plainly confusing to Kevin.

She clarified, "You might have to kill some jellyfish to make way for seaweed and sea bass, but you should strive to never murder or maim a human. You can dispense justice, but only very carefully, and never with intent to cause pain for the sake of pain."

He got that.

"You can dispense boons to those around you -- gifts of love and wholesomeness, peace. The hard-edge sword of those boons are lust and attachment. These are constants near you, but wield them carefully. Fix your wrongs with conscience and what grace you feel flowing through you. Your gifts will start with giving freedom from illness and disease to those who serve your cause, at least until they wean your offspring and fly them free to align the world."

This took Kevin some mind-wrapping. Her words, as ever, threw images of complete scenarios of what all this could mean, the power and the helpfulness, and what 'your offspring' meant, too.

She continued, "You shall have power from wine and song and touch, but only to those who see you, your mates, or your progeny in person. You MUST have many children! Your army, and especially your army's children, will take the world to this better place we know can happen. Your fertility will grow and cross the Earth."

"I ... get power from... having kids?!?"

"Yes, or to some degree from the attempt, the sexual joining act generates power, multiplied if there is affection involved. This power will give you far-sight, flight, small changes at a distance, understanding of those around you - several handy abilities. You can pay your army to do things for you, from harvests you reap. But there are severe warnings I must give."

Kevin's eyes narrowed in worry. It always paid to know the rules, video games had made that abundantly clear.

"You must not do things that are for your sole gain. If you are selfish, your power decreases, and if you do it enough, I will punish you in ways no book you've read ever has described. Altruism is your key, but as you manifest any of the seven sins, that would serve to defeat you from within. Your will, your compassion, your ethics - personally! - will raise or unwind the whole of your species. You, my tool to save humanity, would be undone by mistakes, and by that, the Earth's future."