The Dinner with the investors was a disaster
It was always going to be a disaster - those guys are jerks - but it was just uncontrolled chaos
I hadn’t seen the investors in person but considering what I’ve already said about them not caring it’s not much of a surprise to see them being an all round difficulty… but this was extreme. They were generous to lend us time to sort out our mental capacity but got fed up and gave us a date and said that for every consecutive cancel after that they’d dock our funding - we just couldn’t afford that - Professor Inkling may be from generational wealth but his pockets are not deep enough. So we agreed: that time, that date, on the very dot.
I’d made a new dress for the occasion and whilst we couldn’t just rid of the gods as Kwazii suggested, we ensured their places at our table at home as a substitute, saying that they were too good for our humble politics and that Bacon would call upon them if ever so needed.
I just had a bad feeling the whole time as people were talking: one of the investors said I was too dressed up for a child, another made a rude joke about mankind and the like, and for once I was glad Kwazii was in charge and not the 400kg amnesiac who won’t take the outright slander of his friends and children.
We’d checked beforehand and Bacon brought over a Hestian recipe of what’s best translated to “Diplomacy Sauce” it’s somewhat of a religious practice he’s taken on to always have it at the table and it’s always the right kind of sauce for everything. Like, if you’re having dessert it’s sweet, for your main it’s savoury, and I’ve been told that over certain pescatarian dishes (fish) it’s citrusy like lemons or lime but he’s the only one who tried it like that. A long time ago.
Obviously, they can’t deny someone their religious rights so they just begrudgingly allowed it, put some on their plates and had it passed around (some of them even seemed to enjoy it) and all was well until the food in front of Shellington caught alight.
You see the sauce is not just diplomatic because it goes with everything, it also has the divine power to detect poison, the stronger the substance, the brighter the flame.
“Perhaps it was a fluke, we all know Dr. Otter’s highly allergic. Fetch him another plate and please keep the urchins away.”
Dish after dish, flame after flame. Bacon’s was the brightest, mine the weakest. He’s not allergic to anything.
The bad feeling became less a vague sense and more a clear vision: their sudden interest, the monsters, the sensation of sorrow. There was a rift in the waters and they found it before us.
A couple weeks before this we’d received a distress signal but never managed to decipher it, it was Lemon.
The investors now had to answer to the ashes that were laid out in front of us, some of them were staring at each other with frightened faces, the leading investor glared at Bacon.
It seems like I was once again the only one who knew what was going on.
“They invaded Ithica - for pity’s sake Daniel they have your wife!”
Not my most shining moment revealing that a member of the crew was keeping secrets but in my defence my whole family was poisoned.
The gloves may have come off a little… this is Daniel Bacon Verman, King of the Ithican region, Nobody of 2019, Ambassador to the Olympians, etc, etc, but he had the rest of us escorted out before we saw anything so what he did to the investors and what he couldn’t do to save them is beyond our collective comprehension.
One thing he did manage to save was the files of what they had planned: not everyone knew about the rift to Ithica or the following attack on the land however they were frustrated with the lack of returns from funding us and the expansion into the agency. So they decided that if they could spin a tragic tale about the deaths of some oceanic heroes they’d get their cake and eat it too. Didn’t know what kills a human so just gave Bacon every poison they had and used a sedative in my dish in case anyone found out about the plot and they could just pin it on me and my “monstrous nature”
We’re still not sure what exactly happened to them and I’ll admit I don’t know if that was necessary or pure rage on Bacon’s end, but I’m glad they’re gone. They were jerks.
