The first ending - so far

I knew what I had to do, there had been a major miscarriage of justice, and I had to sort it out for Eurydice - well, for Orpheus too, but he was less important to me than she was. So I had to decide pretty quickly who to approach first - if I picked the wrong person, then I could see me ending up where she was - gods tend to stick together and this involved at least 4 of them....not an easy choice.
In the end, I played it safe and went to see Calliope, Orpheus's mum, to let her know what had happened and ask her for her opinion on what to do next....where do you find nymphs these days ? Took me a while, but eventually I tracked her down to the springs at Pieres where she lives
She was really surprised to see me, she hadn't had many visitors for a while, and she was really pleased to see me at first, asked me lots about how things had been going since she last saw me that day, and after a while I started telling her the story - as she listened she put a hand over her mouth in shock as I told her what I'd found out, then she burst into tears - first, she said, for her poor son, who hadn't done anything wrong, but then for Eurydice, who was not only wronged, but dead - and she had absolutely nothing to do with any of it.
Once she'd pulled herself together, she suggested that we both go to Zeus with the story. Apart from being top god, it had been his decision to involve Calliope in my judgement, so he was in some way responsible for all this. I thought that might be a bit of a big step, going right to the top, but she pointed out that Hades and Ares were pretty high up the pecking order, and so it needed to be someone with a bit of clout to make things happen, and you couldn't get a cloutier god than Zeus. So we set off to Olympus to visit him.

Get On With It !!

Your audience awaits, hanging on your every word, with bated breath and tissues ready......I wish !!
So GET ON WITH IT !! they are saying - you've got a story to finish here - and you've got two or three handbooks to get sorted too - and you haven't really started yet....so which ending ? The one that fits the myth as told, or an alternative....one that says what I would want to happen - if it was me that was Eurydice, which is a bit of a transformation to make....can't get shoes to fit, for a start....surprising how many people ( well 3, actually) have said I sound female writing as her, so that's OK, I suppose - not quite Grayson Perry territory.....not at all - persona not clothes....so let's make a start on Ending Number One.....my choice.

Is it decision time ? probably not

Greek myths are all well and good - but there are rather a lot of them, and having introduced Penelope and Odysseus into a myth they don't belong to, what's to stop me letting Medusa loose on them all - or having Adonis meet his match in Helen of Troy - who he falls in love with, disastrously , and that stops him spilling the beans about the Gods plotting with Eurydice.....sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.....as Faustus said....and I know someone called Helen too.....but not that one....so it's still no clearer how to end it all - and I've still got to do the counselling manual and rules for gods - the Mortal Rights Act stuff - both of which will require a bit more research....do you get the impression I'm procrastinating here, putting things off to whenever ?? Trying to avoid finishing the story??
Maybe the answer is to write all the endings separately and see which one works best - I reckon that way I've got years......or as long as I stay interested in doing it, anyway....we'll see.....
Maybe I'll start doing one later - maybe I won't ....that's all for now

So now what - more alternative endings

So now, for those of you who are still reading (if that is anyone) we come to the vexed question of endings. I am now faced with a number of options which could challenge the Orpheus / Eurydice myth - Adonis knows what has happened, and that it breaks the rules for gods / goddesses so he knows he can do something about it... but what does he do, and what is the result ? There are a number of possibilities - and I'm torn between them - one of them is right for the story, but I don't know whether I'm allowed to rewrite the myth's ending - where Orpheus and Eurydice are reunited in the underworld after his death.
That ending is a possibility in this story too- either Adonis bottles it, or gets stitched up by the immortals, or they decide the rules haven't been broken, or Eurydice decides to stay down there, whatever - whole range of possible ways of getting to that point ...and that might keep the myth with it's traditional ending - Orpheus dies / is killed whatever - and ends up with Eurydice down there - and they remember each other in spite of what I said earlier about memory and time and death.....but is that a happy ending ? Not sure if it is, or if that's how I want the story to end....onr option could be that even though Eurydice is allowed to go back up, Orpheus has just been killed and she decides to stay so they can be together...ahh! true love rediscovered....

The alternative is to drop the myth's ending entirely and have Eurydice escape - be allowed back up - because of the plot by the immortals - and she then decides whether she finds and gets back together with Orpheus and changes his mythical ending too - or whether she runs off with Tony (Adonis) or whether she does neither and settles for a new life without either of them....

There are far too many options and I need some help to decide - am I a myth-buster or do I go along with it....could do either - still haven't done the guide book or the bereavement counselling manual yet either....what am I like...

So what does a snake do, then ?

So now I've got their attention, what do we talk about ? Have to think quickly, although they've promised not to run off, they won't hang around for ever either.
Decide to be a bit cunning (maybe) and try to see if they'll do for me what they did for Eurydice not long back.
Say to them that I've got a girlfriend who, I think, is going off me - doesn't pay me attention, that sort of thing, and needs a bit of a shock to make her realise how important I am to her. Tell them that I've heard that getting bitten by a snake ( like a viper in particular) while out walking can almost kill you, but not quite, and after a few days you wake up with a bad headache, but still alive. Tell them that I think this might bring her round, and ask what do they think ?
So they think about it for a while, I can hear them whispering to each other, and eventually they tell me that it's a good idea, but you need to be careful. It can go wrong they say.
So I ask them, all innocently, what could go wrong ?
And they tell me all about Eurydice and what happened to her. And the one with the milky eyes says " Got me killed too, I was dead as well, and if it hadn't been for those nice gods and goddesses I'd have still been down there"
Now that was the beginning of what I wanted to hear - so I carry on playing the innocent and ask "Which Gods and Goddesses would that be then ?" and he tells me - swears me to secrecy first, I've got to promise not to tell a soul, but it was - well, there was quite a list - and he tells me it was all because of some nymph or other, who had annoyed them about some Adonis bloke, so they'd decided to sort her out by making her son so miserable he'd probably kill himself. So who was it ? Well, if I said that Mr H, Ares, Aphrodite and Artemis were all part of it, that would just about sum it up.
He said they didn't go into all the details with him, but that he had been approached by Artemis first, who had explained to him that this girl would turn up and ask him to bite her, because she would be set up by Mr H to get bitten by a snake, and that the others were just out for revenge and she was doing a "hit" for them. She said she'd done it before, too. She had explained that she'd be firing a poison dart at the same moment as he bit, so it would look like a snake bite had killed her, and that as long as he did what he was told, he'd be all right. Part of the deal was not to tell her, the target, anything about it, even if it went wrong - and that was why they sorted it out for him - why he was back up here - because he'd kept his side of the bargain.

This was dynamite - what I had suspected had been confirmed - and they were all in it together - so now what could I do ? I'd promised milky-eyes that I'd not tell anyone, and that promise had to be kept, but it was really unfair that Eurydice was still down there, dead, because of a plot by a lot of gods that wasn't even about her ! And the fact that a lot of it was about me made me fel really guilty too - if Orpheus's mum hadn't done what she did for me, Eurydice could still be alive.
So who could I talk to ? Zeus ? Apollo ? Got to find a way to get it sorted.

Anway, for now, tell the two vipers that I'll have a good think about what they've told me - getting bitten to make my girlfriend notice me doesn't sound quite as much of a good idea as it did to start with now, I said, and I tell them they can go, and their secret is safe with me. So off they go, quick as a flash, into the bushes, and I head off back to base, thinking all the way there about how I can make something happen to sort it out and make it fair.

Not an easy thing to manage, that, I'll tell you about it next time.....

Talking to snakes revisited

I'm quite lucky, in a way, because although I'm alive right now, I'm also dead some of the time so I can go between both places without too much fuss. OK, so I have to keep Aphrodite sweet, make sure she doesn't think I'm visiting Perspehone down here, or one of the other "ladies" she keeps getting told I see, but that's not too difficult, well, not compared with getting permission to visit upstairs (in triplicate) from what you might call the dead hand of bureaucracy - and believe me, they are both dead and bureaucratic.
So I'm on my way back up again, having asked Eurydice where she was when the snake turned up out of the blue. I reckon he's gone back there, after all, they don't have a lot of imagination, snakes, and he has got to find someone to do his biting for him ( unless they gave him his sacs back when they sent him back up - the records don't say so, but you never know) or he'll starve. Ask her for a description of him, a bit more detailed than "he looked a bit of a snake in the grass at the time" and she does manage a bit more- apparently when he lost his sacs both his eyes went a bit milky - he can see fine, they just look a bit unusual.

So it takes me a few days to find the house where Eurydice lived - where it all happened - he isn't around, so at least that's consistent with what I'd been told, so all I've got to do now is keep out of Penny's way as best I can. She's still there, still waiting for her other half to come home - maybe she needs to realise there might be a reason he doesn't want to be there, and a mirror might give her a clue why that is, and she's still trying it on a bit with blokes, there's quite a few of them hanging around - but I manage to put her off. So off I head into the hills to look for snakes. Can't help feeling that I'm being followed, or at least watched - maybe it's just paranoia, but the trees seem to be talking to each other, and I can't quite catch what they're saying, and when I turn around, sometimes there's a shadow with no light to cast it, and there's a bit of a breeze blowing in the branches that didn't seem to be there when I was outside the wood...it's all a bit creepy....anyway eventually I get out of the woods and back into the sun, and then, just as I'm coming round the corner of a big rock, I see them - two snakes, vipers by the look of it, fast asleep in the sun. They're still soem way off, but I can see that one of them's got milky-white eyes...it must be him. So now I have to come to a decision - how do I play this - first off, how do I avoid getting bitten - there's two of them, and even though I've got a stick with a fork in the end ( no, not that sort of fork !!) that's only going to work for one of them. I may be able to travel between the two lands pretty easily, but right now I'm alive and a snakebite could kill me, which I certainly don't want to happen. It would be really difficult to explain down there, for a start, can't imagine Mr H believeing any story I came up with and I don't need to make him suspicious.
Don't think that they put back the sacs on our friend, as I said, didn't say so in the records, but you never can be sure...how big a risk is it ?
Then, assuming I'm still alive and unbitten, how do I find out what I want to know ? Do I do it straight away and ask, or try to fool him into a confession of some sort....Decide the latter is likely to work better, at least as a starting point...so, pluck up the courage and walk towards them - that wakes them both up and one of them goes for me straight away - the other one kind of hangs back a bit. Fortunately, I can put the forked bit of the stick down on the head of the one that's having a go, and hold himdown, and the other one, the one with the milky eyes, just watches me, a bit warily. Obvioulsy not had the sacs put back in, or if he has, he doesn't know...
So I say to them that I'm not after hurting them or anything, just want to talk, and if they promise not to bite me I'll let his mate go, as long as they don't make a run for it - so they agree to that, and I do it. Now I have to work out what it is I want to ask them.
And that's it for now.....

Tony as Hercule Poirot ? Chapter 2

So all the stuff about snakes was a set up. Obviously planned with the "hit" in mind - plus finding a snake - and specifically a viper - that hadn't got any poison sacs just has to be too much of a coincidence - there really aren't many of them out there, and to find one just then, with the plan she had in mind, really had to be fixed somehow. So do I try and find the snake involved ? Eurydice tells me he got killed the same time she died, so he must be down here somewhere - I go and look in the snake records, and he is in there - but when I go to find him, he isn't - all that the custodians will tell me is that "someone" came to visit him, someone important, obviously, cos they gave him a second life up there. I am now convinced that it was a stitch-up, no question about it. The records don't say who did it, though, nor who the "visitor" was....so it's all more than a bit odd. So now what do I do ? Sounds to me like he could be the key witness - the key to sorting this out once and for all After all, it's pretty unlikely that Mr H will admit to anything, if he was involved, nor will the other immortals either, so that is pretty much a dead end for investigation - unless they say something by accident. I reckon I've got all I can from my visit down here for now, so after saying to Eurydice that she's being watched by the bereavement counsellors and to tread carefully because Mr H may run out of patience at some point, I make my excuses and leave. I report to Mr H that Eurydice is coming to terms with being dead, so he may not have to worry too much - just back off a bit, and give her the time to sort it out for herself, keep up the counselling, but not too heavy. She's no risk.

Then I go - maybe I can catch Aphrodite in a careless moment - maybe she'll say something in her sleep, maybe she won't. Have to see later.