(WWE, 1/9/13, Greek Child) More About Walter

Pam’s prompt this week: continuing from your submission of last week, tell the story of the child you created, the offspring of a Greek god or goddess and a mortal.

~~

Listen boy, sit down, stick one of those in your mouth and shut up. You’re a bloody demigod now, and you’ve got some learning to do.

Walter, at least as far as Walter was concerned, was cursed.

Sure, others might not see it that way. Others might think that being the progeny of an actual Greek god was pretty cool. But then they weren’t demigods, so they didn’t know what they were talking about.

For starters, Walter had to come to terms with the fact that he was the bastard product of a night of drunken debauchery. And for someone of Walter’s sensibilities, that was pretty hard to take. The smallest, coldest comfort he could take from it was that at least Dionysus wasn’t like Zeus when it came to seduction. He couldn’t stand the thought of his mother getting it on with a bull.

Once Walter was old enough to appreciate his deific parentage, he began researching what demigod-dom was like. He read up on the likes of Heracles and Achilles, Theseus and Perseus, the powerful superhuman figures in those musty textbooks who were the inheritors of godlike strength and talent, the slayers of Hydra and Medusa, the kings of Mycenae and heroes of the Trojan War.

Once he had finished, Walter felt somewhat short-changed. I mean, take Dionysus, his own father. He had transformed into a lion to escape from slavers. He had granted King Midas his ultimate, fatal gift. He had driven the King of Thrace to madness and rescued his mother from the underworld. He was the god of wine and madness and ecstasy. And all Walter had to show for it was...

Well...

Bugger all, actually. Far from being a hell-raiser like his father, Walter couldn’t even bear to leave the second button on his button-down shirt undone. He liked bow ties. He abhorred alcohol. Of the, maybe, three gifts he inherited from his father, two of them, his perfect taste buds and his impeccable style, had done him no favours at all.

When he had been three he had been expelled from preschool when he tried to feed caviar to the other children one afternoon tea. How was he supposed to know that four of them had a seafood allergy? And things hadn’t gotten any better as he got older: blazer-wearing aesthetes do not fare well on the playing fields of Eton, or anywhere else for that matter. His perfect taste buds landed him in trouble again, when he tried to get Sloppy Joes removed from the high school cafeteria menu. Even in areas where he excelled his luck was no better. His tenure as leader of the debate team ended prematurely when after the regionals, the members of the St Regis team tried to staple him to the wall of the green room. No matter how diplomatically or how tactfully he tried to impart his knowledge and taste to others, he always ended up worse off.

That was why the job at the newspaper was the perfect place for him. There, as the food critic and agony columnist, those who appreciated him never actually had to meet him and those who did meet him, with the exception of his editor and boss, did not matter. For once he thrived.

That was until now. Now, at the behest of his mother, whom he rarely consulted, and his father, who until recently did not even know of his existence, he was hauled in front of Zeus, the ruler of Mount Olympus, like he was a naughty schoolboy in the principal’s office.

Ferrero Rocher?

Seriously? Isn’t that a bit of a cliché?

That probably wasn’t the best first impression he could have made, but it was the truth.

Listen boy, sit down, stick one of those in your mouth and shut up. You’re a bloody demigod now, and you’ve got some learning to do.

What followed was a two-hour diatribe, the point of which... well, Walter didn’t really care what the point of it was. Something about responsibilities, strengths and weaknesses, and generally the fate of those who pissed off the gods. He nodded. He agreed. He said whatever needed to be said. Then he got up and left as quickly as possible.

Whatever. Walter said to himself.

Because what Zeus didn’t know, what Dionysus and his mother didn’t even know, was the third gift he had inherited. One that Walter had kept a close secret his entire life. The one he called, for want of a better term, gastronomic alchemy, the ability to subtly change the chemical composition of any food into something better or, far more often, into something worse. It was the magic he had used to turn the preschoolers’ sandwich paste into caviar, the one he had used to turn the St Regis debate team’s water into laxative, and the one he had used on the lunches of school bullies and the creations of the more arrogant chefs that he had reviewed.

He hoped that Zeus liked his new store of parmesan-flavoured Ferrero Rocher.