<strong>Location:</strong>Sailing on a boat<br/><strong>Tagging:</strong>JD<br/><br/>Herakles smiled when she checked over the chamber.  "The real gift from your dad is the bolt inside.  He wanted you to know you were special, give more hints, try to show you that you were ready."  A bit of smirk crossed his features.  "Be grateful you didn't have to deal with vipers in your crib as an infant."<br/><br/>Chiron nodded his concern.  "Hera is still an issue.  She's been watching Onogoro-Jima Island and was hoping to sew some dragon's teeth to summon forth undead if you ever left the safe parts of the island.  Like with Sarge, it may be possible to sate her ire, and it may not."  He would offer what help he could, if JD desired it.<br/><br/>Chiron answered about the rest, "Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanos, has Chosen Gilbert Garfield as a Scion.  She wants him to sacrifice humans to the volcano so it will erupt, so the island will grow, which will keep it from being submerged by the rising oceans.  At sunset, if he's not stopped, he'll kill Hitomi as another long line of victims.  Nor can we help you beyond the ride there: this fight is yours and your friends'.<br/><br/>Herakles nodded at JD's realization that things were strange, and he moved to the edge of the boat to point at the wicked sky.  "Here's the deal.  Zeus and Hera are arguing over his thunderbolt, not truly warring the way it'd go in a movie, but an old married couple trying surreptitiously to one-up the other.  She's stopping him from being here.  Sooner or later, they're going to hit the ship, and what happens then depends on who's in charge.  Either way, it's going to fucking hurt.  Chiron will be okay because he'll turn back into a constellation, and I've dealt with worse."<br/><br/>Herakles looked to her with compassion.  "Nothing about all this is easy to recognize, but I think you know who your dad is, why you take after him, how he at least claims he cares about you even if you can't see it, just as others you've dealt with have thought you were much more cruel, callous, and incapable of being in love.  In a better world, you'd be given more time to come to terms with all this, be able to recognize it for yourself and accept it on your own terms.  Fate isn't always kind."  He knew, and he sympathized, because he'd gone through what she had as well.<br/><br/>Herakles' look said that he knew how awful her father could be firsthand, and there was only one realistic way he could feel exactly the same for his own father as she did for hers, how they could be so uncannily identical: if they both shared the same father.