Dear Readers: Back to the modern day, to follow Cloe flying off to Greece :)

______________________________

Scene 6: Scholar and Journeyer

A.D. 2015

She blinked at the screen, and then chose to look out the window instead. The blue beyond the pane was full of promise, with a floor of cloud below, the sun above a little closer than it was from on the ground. An open skyscape bright with hope.

Unlike the image on her monitor. The opposite: a series of death sentences pronounced against her dreams.

In less dramatic terms, emails from literary agents. All rejections.

It was silly to revisit them like this, over and over again, Cloe knew. Emotionally masochistic, really. To relive the sting of rejection. Not only of herself, but also and more painfully for Cloe, of her characters. Of Eldor, the lovingly crafted hero into whom she poured her dreams.

This was a royal waste of time, besides—she was on her flight to Greece. She shouldn’t have been spending it rereading old, unwanted mail. True, the airline had free Wi-Fi; but she didn’t have to use it.

Cloe shut her laptop, slipped it back into her bag. Leant the side of her head on the seatback and let her eyes follow the airplane’s tiny shadow as it soared across the clouds.

Once she had done that long enough to momentarily forget about her manuscript rejections, she decided it was time to start her job. It couldn’t hurt to get a head start—this summer was set to be a lot of work, what with researching hundreds of hotels, hostels, restaurants, and tourist attractions; writing reviews of each of them; and posting daily entries on the travel company’s blog, to boot.

On top of this, as her mom never stopped reminding her, she had to come back in one piece. When Silvia had learned that Cloe was to roam the streets of Athens and the Greek islands after dark to research nightclubs, she had nearly ripped the job contracts to shreds.

Cloe had managed to assure her mom that she would find ways to stay safe. Making friends in the hostel to barhop together, for instance. Silvia was skeptical, given Cloe’s college track record of making friends. But Cloe pointed out that her problem was never with making friends—rather, with realizing which ones were real, before it was too late. And for European nightlife purposes, friendships didn’t have to be real; most wouldn’t last beyond a week. She basically just needed temporary bodyguards, which she was certain she could find.

For these and other reasons, Silvia had let her daughter go, granting that the decision wasn’t hers to make. Cloe was all grown up. Or almost, at the very least—the rest was sure to happen on this trip.

Cloe reached into her bag, pulled out a book: last year’s edition of the travel guide for Greece. The company had provided travel-writers with the previous year’s guidebooks, for their respective routes, to be used as a starting point for their own work this summer.

She had to visit each establishment reviewed in this edition—to verify information, form her own impressions, and update the content accordingly. She was also supposed to delete unremarkable listings and discover new places to list in the upcoming guide.

It was all quite exciting. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be fun.

Thumbing through the guidebook, she mentally mapped out her agenda for the first few days. Her itinerary, organized by the research managers back in the States, allowed for ample flexibility. They had booked her flights and lodging, but aside from that—and as long as she completed all her work along the way—the course of her summer in Greece would be entirely up to her. Tom had urged her to take full advantage of that, based on his own travel-writing stint in Europe.

She identified the monuments and the museums, the clubs and the cafes, that she should visit early on in her first week. By the time she had planned it out, the plane was almost set to land.

She tucked the book away, peered out the window again. And then beheld a view of mythic majesty beyond her grandest dreams.

The sight was not what she’d expected or imagined; she was not sure what she had. She’d known this land to be the stuff of legends, a birthplace of both divinity and humanity, in many ways. And yet she hadn’t been prepared for how deeply the sight would strike her heart. How it would lift her soul and strip the breath straight from her body.

She was in love with Greece already, and she hadn’t even landed.

Mountains towered tall and proud, receding into rolling hills, leading into lush lowlands lined with trees, littered with little houses, then the signs of city life as they descended toward the capital. And when at last the craft touched down upon the earth, she could’ve sworn she felt a part of her come home.

She had been nervous, when she’d waved her mom goodbye and taken off toward a summer spent abroad, all on her own.

But all her nerves were suddenly at peace, as she arrived. And as she set foot off the plane, sailed through the airport, swiftly found the shuttle to the city center. Everything came to her like second nature, on her first time in this foreign place.

The shuttle sped straight to Syntagma Square, the happening hub and heart of Athens. A massive plaza paved in marble, with a circular stone fountain at its center. Behind the cascades, a broad set of stairs built up to a peach-colored former palace—presently, Cloe knew, the house of the Hellenic Parliament. The opposite end of the square opened into a wide, inviting avenue, and on all sides of the plaza stood colossal trees and taller buildings: extensive offices, big businesses, fancy hotels far exceeding her humble travel-writer budget.

And the whole place hummed with life. Tourists from all corners of the world, either wide-eyed or squinting at their maps, sweating profusely in the heat of the Athenian summer. Easy to tell apart from languorous locals lounging under the same sun.

Though Cloe felt at ease here, she was nonetheless well aware of her apparent status as a foreigner. She was shouldering two separate backpacks, for starters—cherry red and bright aquamarine, both from embarrassing phases in her childhood—since she didn’t own one large enough to carry two months of her life. Atop the red knapsack she balanced a big beachy hat, which Silvia had instructed her to wear throughout the streets of Greece to ward off sunburn, in addition to a slathering of SPF 300 and a half.

Ever the dutiful daughter, Cloe donned the wide-brimmed hat, and then slipped on her white-rimmed sunglasses, thereby marking herself as the most obvious out-of-towner in the square.

She didn’t mind. She was confident that by the summer’s end—especially with shades to shield her ethnically enigmatic half-Asian eyes—she would blend seamlessly into the sea of Greeks.

Navigating Athens’ neighborhoods and arriving at her hostel, the Scholar & Journeyer’s Inn, Cloe found it to be even more charming than its name suggested. The staff was uncommonly friendly and eager to treat her like family. Life-size stickers of cartoon characters and tulips and butterflies dotted the walls—very tacky but terribly cute. The hostel’s ‘cafe’ was a central courtyard filled with potted plants and tiny tables, partially shaded by a trellis twined with vines, and of course presided over by a random resident parrot.

It was a quaint and quirky overdose of adorable. Even her room, a tight space for six guests—which should’ve been stifling and utterly unappealing, even more so with the snotty snores and slight BO emitting from a beefy guy in an upper bunk—featured a sticker of a stylized rose and a lyric from a love song, on the wall beside the bed that she now claimed. The bed farthest from said snoring bunkmate.

She settled in quickly, changed into a summery floral dress, and attended to her first order of business in Greece: meeting Prof.

Aside from Mom and Tom, her dear professor had been one of the happiest to hear the news of Cloe’s job offer, on Commencement Day. She’d called him right away to let him know. And as soon as she’d firmed up her ETA in Athens, they had made plans to meet for lunch.

He and his fiancée had already been in town for a few days now. Trevor had suggested a taverna down the block from the Scholar & Journeyer’s Inn, which supposedly boasted the most fantastic feta. Cloe couldn’t wait to see his fond, familiar smile in the sea of foreign strangers.

As for his fiancée, though… the thought of coming face-to-face with platinum perfection once again set all her nerves on end. She couldn’t begin to make sense of the effect Miss Primor had upon her mind, her soul—an impact that seemed to extend further into the past, and the future, than Cloe could fathom. An impact that seemed to transcend time and space. It was… quite strange. To say the very least.

She saw the couple seated at a shaded patio table. Charliese’s steely eyes caught hers, glinting with more than mortal recognition. Cloe crossed the street, sweltering from more than summer heat, and steeled herself to face the strangeness.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Hope you enjoyed landing in Greece! This scene is inspired by my own arrival in Athens, when I wrote for a travel guide a few summers ago :D

In real life, I stayed at a charming hostel called the Student & Traveller's Inn, which featured each one of these quirks! Including the random adorable parrot ;)

Anyway - next scene takes us back to the Cave, picking up with Chaos's account of what transpired on Olympus... And if you liked this one, please don't forget to vote! :)