Game Night

Iris showed up at exactly the wrong time, as usual.

There was a rather large amount of screaming as a forrest worth of nymphs stampeded out of the room in surprise, leaving Zeus scrabbling to obscure himself from the giggling eyes of the rainbow goddess.

"What?" he snapped, humiliation lending his tone a tempestuous edge.

Iris, in an uncharacteristic display of self-control managed to scale back the giggling and say "It's Wednesday. You know what that means."

Zeus groaned with that peculiar whine native to all those facing down the business end of an evening in with the Spanish Inquisition's most eager new employee, and said "Must I?"

"She insists" said Iris, turning on her heel and exploding out of the hotel room in a burst of colors that would've made a bird of paradise cry.

Snapping his fingers and materializing a fresh suit of clothes from essentially nowhere in impertinent disregard of physics or logic, he groaned and resigned himself to his fate. Why? Why did it have to be tonight?

Steeling himself so that the others wouldn't see the Thundering King of the Heavens shivering like a frightened girl, he put on his best King-face, and vanished to Olympus.

He threw in the obligatory fanfare/thunderclap/chorus of winged avengers singing the praises of the king from a stormcloud and walked into the grand marble living room of the Palace.

"Oh how shocking" said an entirely-too-familiar voice, placing enough venom on that last word to kill the leviathan, the behemoth, and have enough nasty left over to scalp a good-sized portion of the Amazon Rainforest, "he has graced us with his presence at last."

Regretting for the umpteenth time that decade the decision to teach Hera to speak in such sarcastic italics, Zeus bent down to kiss his wife on her irate, unforgiving forehead. "hello my dear," he said, turning the ol' thunder-god charm up past its maximum setting, only to be greeted by the goddess-queen's ever-more-powerful glare of disapproval.

"You smell like tramps," she said, her words a lance that glanced off the impenetrable armor of Zeus' infallible ego.

"And you, my dear, smell like lilacs. Is everyone here?"

Her answer was a turn of her head so dignified and threatening that the entire Borgia clan would have killed each other just to replicate it once. Zeus followed her gaze and saw that the various Olympain sofas and love-seats were occupied by the rest of his family, all watching the little domestic vignette spill out with varying reactions.

"Ah..." he said, "well...oh"

"Right," Hera snapped, no longer talking to him, but adressing her...for lack of a better word 'family,' "we all know why we're here. I know that we all come from..." a pointed glare at her husband, "...mixed backgrounds, but it is important for a family to bond..."

Apollo rolled his eyes. She gave the same speech every time, he practically knew it by heart. He slipped his earbuds in, noticing with a glowing smile that Hestia was doing the same thing across the circle from him. She looked up and caught him smiling, blushed, and looked away.

Hermes gave him a roguish nudge in the side and a wink, and Artemis gave Hermes a ruthless jab in the side and a glare.

"...and it is to this end," Hera continued, pretending not to notice that she had lost her audience an hour ago, "that the institution of a Family Game Night is so essential. Now, what shall we play?"

A side door opened and Ganymede and Hebe entered, staggering under an elephantine collection of carelessly-stacked board-game boxes. They deposited the pile in the center of the room, and booked it back out, knowing the sort of things that were going to happen.

Athena quietly raised her hand, and Hera nodded imperiously at her. "How about chess?" she asked quietly.

Aphrodite clapped her hands to her face in mock innocence, basically the only innocence she had left, and said "gosh Athena, that sounds like fun, because we all enjoy sitting there and watching you win."

There were some derisive laughs from the assembled group, and Athena flushed dangerously. The last group of people who had seen her give this look had gone on to spend the rest of their lives searching for their limbs at the bottom of the ocean, but Aphrodite just smiled disarmingly. "what would you suggest then?"

Aphrodite shrugged, involuntarily increasing sales of florid perfumes and gaudy chocolates the world over, "Twister?"

Responses to this were mixed. Several of the male gods expressed their preference for this course of action by whistling and emitting strange, animalistic sounds. The females expressed their distaste by smacking them sideways.

Aphrodite produced a compact from somewhere and powdered her nose in triumph.

Hephaestos attempted the impossible, and tried to shift the room's attention away from his wife. "Well, we could play Monopoly..."

"Yeah no," said Artemis, rather more snarkily than was probably appropriate, "remember what happened last time?"

Everyone assembled found themselves involuntarily staring at a large, fairly recent and rather violent-looking scorch mark on the marble floor. When they noticed, they all reflexively looked innocuously in random directions.

"So that's out" said Artemis, as a largely superfluous and painfully awkward afterthought.

"Well then what?" asked Hera venomously, "we have to play something. It's Game Night."

In a rare but stunning flare of brilliance, Zeus offered "Hide-and-seek?"

There was a general susuruss of thoughtful discussion. Olympus was an enormous complex with an infinitude of complicated hallways and passages and a panoply of hiding places. This could actually be fun...fancy that, a fun Family Game Night.

Hera, however, still thought this a bit dodgy, until Zeus played his trump card:

"You can be 'it' first, dear"

She had been sold at the word "first." "What should I count to?"

Zeus considered this at some length. "I'd say one thousand should do. But you have to close your eyes, no peeking."

Hera gave a reptilian smile of triumph, shut her eyes, and began counting. "One...two...three..."

Zeus turned to the other gods, winked, raised a finger to his lips in a shushing gesture, and sneakily teleported out.

Two hours later, as most of the Olympians were slowly losing their battle of wits with the drink menu at Dionysus' Place, Athena approached her father.

"Daddy, that seemed rude. Don't you think she'll be upset?"

Zeus merrily downed his glass, and said "honey, we do the same thing every week. It's her own fault that she didn't see this coming."

He tapped the side of his head, as though to say he were smarter than his daughter, the goddess of knowledge, who rankled at the suggestion, and stalked off.