Child of Zeus {Interactive Story} (PJO/HOO/TOA)

EIGHTEEN: Eternal Damnation

When Diana started leading us towards tortured screaming and a barb-wired electric fence, I knew we were in trouble.

"The Fields of Punishment?" Johnny bleated. He'd ditched his pants back in the fields of Asphodel, stuffing them in his bag along with his fake-feet shoes. ("I'm done acting human, these souls don't care if I'm part sheep -- I meant goat! Stop it!")

"Honestly, it's a good idea." Diana assured us, hurrying us towards an opening in the fence. "There's someone down here who can help. We just have to pass all the tortured souls first."

"Great." I muttered as we started walking up a steep hill. "Suppose we'll get a better view of the torture and where that awful disco music's coming from up here?"

"You're half right." Diana agreed. "I need to figure out which direction we're headed in. Though I guess we might have to ask the dead..."

I stopped her as we reached the peak of the hill. "Are you going to tell us what we're looking for? This is my quest, I ought to know."

Johnny nodded vigorously at my side, having scaled the hill like a goat - but don't tell him I said that.

"Okay," she put her hands up in surrender. "You know how Prometheus was bound with a chain to the rock, right?" I nodded. "Well it took a certain goddess of force to bind him there, because he was too strong to otherwise be subdued. I'm hoping to find Bia here so we can find out what the binds were made of, assuming we'll have to bring them, and also get pointers on how to get him on the rock."

A lump formed in my throat. "So it took a goddess of force to get him on that rock and you think we can do it by our selves?"

THUMP. THUMP. THUMP. Then, curse words.

I looked down the other side of the hill to see a man fighting against a boulder that no doubt had just rolled down the hill and flattened him several times over. How he was still standing, I figured already being dead had something to do with it.

"You're a daughter of Zeus, maybe you're strong like Heracles," Diana suggested, flinching at the vigorous cussing.

"Hercules, you mean?"

"That's his Roman name." She replied as we made our way towards the flattened and still cursing man. "Anyway, we'd better start asking where Bia is. Why not start with this guy? He's been here long enough to know - he's certainly tried to escape enough times that he might have even met her."

"And he is...?" I asked, Johnny rolled his eyes.

"Has to push a rock up a steep hill as punishment? Will only be free when the rock rolls down the other side? Cheated death at least a bajillion times? Come on, he's one of the first legendary beings we learned about in school!"

"Hence why I don't remember him." I replied. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I did.

Sisyphus looked like one of those troll dolls you'd find in a kid section at a store. He had a round orange-skin stomach, fiery stuck up hair, an ugly face, and a loincloth covering his man bits.

Looking around, I saw other famous people from Greek mythology; malnourished Tantalus, standing in a pond under a fruit tree but unable to eat or drink the supplements around him; Ixion, flying through the air on a spinning wheel that had been set ablaze; the forty-nine daughters of Danaus, each trying in vain to fill a broken jar with water from the river Styx through a sieve.

Then I saw other damned souls I didn't recognized, being in tortured in more horrendous ways: being mauled by hellhounds, burning at the stake, running through cactus patches butt-naked, boiling in oil, having to listen to disco-funk music for all of eternity (from the few minutes of music I heard, I decided that the guy being forced to listen to it probably did some messed up stuff. Disco music is torture beyond compare), there was even a guy sliding down a razor blade into lemon juice. Each form of punishment was separated from the others by a boiling hot lava stream.