Stefan tried not to stare at Cody, but it was difficult. He had never met Heidi before the other entity had taken root inside of her, so her intensity just seemed like a part of her personality. Cody, on the other hand, he had known for almost a year. The change from a relaxed rebel teenager to supercharged demigod with eyes that could pin you to the wall was stark. He wasn't sure if Cody was even aware of how different his countenance appeared now.
Autumn and Aria were also watching Cody closely as they tried to adapt to his augmented aura of gravity. Shortly after Heidi's arrival in the game shop, Ullr's presence had grown stronger. The other gamers in the store had stopped staring at the three young women to observe Cody with varying levels of perplexity as their minds tried to come to grips with the sudden change. Heidi appeared to be able to suppress her god mode much better than Ullr when she wasn't doing anything extraordinary.
Heidi seemed to be communicating with Ullr without speaking, if Cody's distracted expression was an accurate gauge. As the silence between the two of them grew, Stefan turned to Aria and Autumn.
"Still human?" he asked them with a raised eyebrow.
Aria's lips curved into an amused smile as she nodded, and Autumn rolled her eyes. He was only half-joking.
Stefan noticed two women with shoulder length hair casually walk into the game shop. They strolled around the store like they were interested in the merchandise, but they spent too much time not looking at anyone else. They looked slightly familiar, as did the car they had parked on the curb in front of the shop.
As soon as the two of them walked back into the arcade area, they came to a dead stop, staring at Cody in shock. He was still carrying on some kind of unspoken communication with Heidi as the two of them watched him warily.
"Hey, Barreto, Lynch," Aria waved at the two of them casually with a friendly smile.
"Aria," the taller of the two women answered with a curt nod. "Is it my imagination, or is there more than one deity in here now?"
Stefan blinked in surprise. They knew?
"Aye, that there do be," Aria replied in a perfect Scottish accent. "And it warms the cockles of me heart to see that ye have finally acknowledged me status, lass."
The woman snorted derisively. "Nice try, shorty. What's up with Cody?"
"He's playing host for Ullr, a Norse god," Autumn told her with an amused look at Aria. "Fair warning; you two could be sharing headspace with a deity of your own at any time. Events seem to be accelerating and there are a lot of deities that need hosts."
Both women frowned, looking distinctly disgruntled. "I'm not sharing headspace with anyone."
"Oh come on, Barreto," Aria made a tsking noise. "I thought soldiers were all about the whole team player thing."
Stefan stared at the two women in sudden recognition. He had seen them parked near Heidi's house more than a few times. He had assumed they lived near her. Were they some kind of bodyguards?
"Do you mind keeping the whole soldier thing to yourself?" Barreto asked with a pained look. "This isn't supposed to be public knowledge, after all."
"Trust me, that will be the least of your concerns," Aria told her smoothly. "People are going to be far more interested in other events soon enough."
Barreto tilted her head, studying Aria intently. "Care to elaborate?"
"I wouldn't want to ruin the surprise," Aria told her with a cheeky grin.
"Kids," the other woman muttered with a patient sigh.
"Hey, I'm almost seventeen," Aria retorted indignantly.
The two soldiers shared a longsuffering look before turning back to them. "What's up with those two? Why don't they just get a room?" Barreto asked dryly.
"You know how those decadent gods of mythology are," Aria replied with a shrug. "They probably don't understand the meaning of privacy."
Stefan had to bite his lip to keep from laughing as Heidi's withering gaze finally broke away from Cody to glare at Aria.
"Decadent?" Heidi demanded acidly. "Really, Aria?"
"Hey, I'm just going by what the history books say," Aria replied defensively. The innocent act was slightly spoiled as her lips began twitching into a smile.
"Our history really is messed up, isn't it?" Cody said quietly, his face introspective. "I thought we were doing pretty well technologically, but we're barely a step above monkeys playing with sticks."
Stefan stared at his friend, wondering what memories he was receiving from his new tenant. His eyes were wide and unseeing as he stood in front of Heidi.
"Barely," Heidi agreed with a nod. "There is a point of accelerated advancement that occurs once a civilization learns how to harness the power of artificial intelligence, but even that plateaus within a few decades. Most of the people alive today are severely limited in their ability to grow intellectually as a result of a renegade sect of Truth Keepers who were supposed to keep civilization from advancing too quickly. Instead of using the knowledge imparted to them for the protection of humankind, they used it to subjugate and rule over them."
Cody was grimacing in disgust as Heidi spoke, his eyes radiating disapproval. "They need to be dealt with."
"They will be dealt with," Heidi assured him placatingly. "But not yet. I've already let them know that they are living on borrowed time. Their machinations are slowly but surely grinding to a halt. Should they attempt any further interference, they will be dealt with immediately."
Her voice left no doubt as to what being 'dealt with' would entail. Stefan shivered at the icy finality in her tone.
They had acquired a small audience around them as they spoke. The other gamers in the shop had slowly gravitated toward their party while trying to appear uninterested. Heidi gave the room a cursory glance.
"Lethe," she muttered, followed by a small, inverted boom.
The gamers around them blinked in confusion for a moment before wandering away, their eyes glassy.
"How's the water content holding up?" Cody asked Heidi intently.
"Critical," Heidi replied with a sigh. "We arrived just in time. Another decade and the information layer would have collapsed. It's going to take every trick in the book to get this world back into a state of symbiosis. Thanks to the Truth Keepers, this civilization has wreaked more havoc than any other civilization before it. I often wonder if they would have fallen so far if we had given them more information about the higher realms."
"I'm pretty sure we wouldn't even be here if you had given them that much knowledge," Cody replied bleakly. "They would have broken the link and awoken the Titans."
"Quite possibly," Heidi nodded with another sigh. "I can't help but feel responsible, since they were my idea."
"It was a good idea too," Cody assured her. "But adding the human propensity for mischief is a variable nobody can account for, no matter how good the modeling is."
Stefan watched Cody curiously as his friend switched personas with no warning. Hades seemed to have a lot more respect for the host she inhabited than Ullr did. Of course, it might just be that Ullr was new to this. Stefan hadn't been around to see what Heidi was like when she had first been joined by Hades.
"You two know that you're speaking pure gibberish, right?" Aria asked them pointedly.
"Is there any other kind of gibberish?" Heidi asked Aria playfully.
"In your case, bastardized gibberish could work," Aria retorted loftily.
"Touche," Heidi grinned as Hades faded into the background. "So did you have a question, or were you just enjoying the sound of your own voice?"
"Would you hold it against me if I said both?" Aria asked with a smirk.
"I might," Heidi replied dryly.
"What does water have to do with anything?" Autumn inquired quizzically.
"Water is the medium where consciousness binds the world around us to the higher functioning processes of reality," Heidi answered. "The ability for the higher functions that govern reality to work requires the water content to remain relatively untainted. The sheer amount of pollution produced by this civilization has corrupted the water content so severely that the glue holding reality together has begun to crack in some places."
"Crack?" Autumn repeated with a frown. "What does that mean?"
"It means anything could happen," Heidi replied, taking a deep breath. "The laws of physics begin to break down. Gravity might not work properly; people might see things that aren't really there. They might also run into things they can't see that really are there. Sometimes thoughts might become reality. It's only happened once, and it completely destroyed the world. It's what contemporary history knows as the Devonian extinction event."
"Is there any way to stop it," Aria asked, all traces of humor gone.
"Now that I'm back, of course," Heidi replied with a whimsical smile. "It will require a lot of hurricanes and tornados, but we'll get things fixed."
"Hurricanes and tornados are going to fix the polluted water?" Aria asked with a puzzled frown. "How?"
"It's all in the motion of the spiral," Heidi replied cryptically. "The spiral is nature's stabilizer, bringing equilibrium and order to chaos."
Stefan sighed deeply. "So not only do we have to worry about Titan's destroying us, but we also have to worry about reality falling apart. I sure liked living in ignorance."
"Would you like me to wipe your memory?" Heidi asked, her face serious.
"Uh, no, I don't think so," Stefan replied quickly. "I was just being dramatic."
"There's a first," Aria drawled. "Stefan being dramatic."
"So have you heard anything about us putting on a concert at the fairgrounds?" Stefan asked Heidi, ignoring Aria.
"Should I have?" Heidi asked with a raised eyebrow.
"Apparently Miss Devons got a call from one of the county commissioners about a planned concert at the fairgrounds," Stefan informed her with a wry smile. "I think some of your fans are trying to set up a concert in hopes that you will show up if they set the stage."
"We don't really have time for this kind of trivial nonsense," Cody scowled irritably. "We have a whole world to defend in a very short time."
"This is important too," Heidi told him seriously. "Remember, a lot of those who are returning are new to the cycle. They aren't going to know how to find us or what to do. A level of global prestige will help them find their way to us."
"So you're going to reveal who you are to the public?" Stefan asked in surprise.
"Of course not," Heidi scoffed. "Those who are looking for me will recognize who I am without a public fanfare. They'll be looking for each other as well. Anyone with unusual abilities will likely be one of us."
"So some of them have never incarnated inside other hosts before?" Aria asked intently.
"Correct," Heidi nodded with a glance at Cody. "Quite a few of them have only done it once or twice. We kept our numbers small in the beginning. The process of capturing a person's consciousness is extremely difficult. I've grown far better at it throughout the ages, but there are less than a hundred of us who have been through more than a dozen incarnations."
"How many have you been through?" Stefan asked tentatively, hoping it wasn't rude to ask.
Heidi stared at him silently for a moment, and the antiquity in her eyes would have been answer enough. "Millions of times."
"Millions?" Stefan gasped disbelievingly. "Humans haven't been around long enough to have incarnated a million times. Have they?" He finished lamely.
"Contemporary historians are far off of the mark on the true history of this world on many levels," Heidi answered with a sigh. "Humans have walked this world for over a billion years."
"A billion?" Stefan blurted, and he wasn't the only one. Both soldiers were staring at Heidi in shock. Aria and Autumn were mirror images of astonishment.
"When you say a billion, do you mean homo-erectus, or do you actually mean modern humans?" the soldier Stefan guessed was Lynch asked with a frown.
"Humans as we are now, though the word modern is certainly not accurate," Heidi replied with a wry smile. "While subtle changes have occurred, most of it has been superficial, like skin color, eye color, stature, and other less obvious attributes."
"How could we possibly not change more in such a vast amount of time?" Lynch asked in perplexity.
"You can thank the Titans for that," Heidi replied dourly. "Humans typically control nature enough that they do not need to adapt to it. However, before they have a chance to develop beyond their current state, the Titans awaken and reset their progress."
"Where are all of the remnants of these former civilizations?" Lynch inquired, studying Heidi curiously.
"Destroyed by the Titans," Heidi shrugged. "They don't just smash things. That's just the initial phase of destruction. There is more than one kind of Titan. They don't want humans picking up the pieces of their former civilization and rebuilding it in a hundred years. Some Titans specialize in seeking out and destroying any kind of record that would lead to another advanced civilization. That's one of the reasons it has taken me so long to defeat them. Cataloging all of the Titan classes before my host is destroyed was my primary goal for the first half of my extended life. The last half has been finding the weakness in each class of Titan."
"How old are the other...um...demigods?" Lynch asked, obviously hesitating to refer to them as gods. "The older ones, that is."
"The rest of us are babes in comparison," Cody answered with a grin. "We've only been around for a few million years."
They were all staring at Heidi in awe. While she might claim she wasn't a goddess, she was the closest thing to it that humanity had ever seen.