TIMELINE ROUND TWO, completely unabridged!!!! { Round one:)) }
I recognize that I have perhaps not fully discussed the beforetimes ft the death of Melanie or— maybe I have in bits and pieces but - following the previous arc, our first non Taci character shift was onto Meli, Epi and Eury so. many things happen but you’ll notice this is mostly about them!!!
PLEASE mind the content warnings this is among the darkest plots we’ve ever done in here,, and so, behind the cut presentinggfg
Glaukos and Oiolyka announce that they're expecting! Quadruplets, actually oh my gods (Klonie, Anthedon, Telephousa, Termessos).
Baby fever sparked by the quads plus watching Eury and Epi with Meli inspire Tory and Maci to try for a baby.
Laphi formally moves into the palace, and soon after he and Jesse announce they're officially dating.
Maci is pregnant with Neo! She, Tory, and company soon discover Neo is Fated to be the future Goddess of Death due to the awful side effects involved with that: specifically, Maci falling into a disturbing death-like unconsciousness every single time baby Neo is awake in-utero.
As part of baby-proofing the palace for the impending Death Godling, Jesse is immortalized into a god.
In the meantime now that Thanatos has been rendered harmless (they think), past victims Sophie, Amey, and Hess are found and healed. Through Lethe, each chooses to erase their memories of their time with Thanatos.
Maci's rough pregnancy becomes too much for her and Tory to bear as Neo's powers increase. With the help of childbirth goddess Ilythia, they magically accelerate her pregnancy to induce a much earlier due date.
Neo is born at the end of July! - OoC - circa. 2011 - BUT IN-UNIVERSE, it's the year 2006!
Laphi and Jesse are now trying for a baby - soon Jesse is pregnant with Lenore.
Thanatos snaps and really goes off the deep end once he learns that Maci and Tory's daughter is set to replace him. He talks Ker into having a child with him and secretly, Chal is born. They immediately artificially age him up to 11 years old and begin to train Chal as a puppet in acts of villainy.
Uncontrollably smug over his new secret weapon, Thanatos gloats to Hypnos about the existence of Chal. During this meeting he injures and threatens to further harm his son Icy (age 2 at the time) if Hypnos tells anyone that Chal exists. In desperation, after Thanatos leaves, Hypnos secretly curses Chal with eternal insomnia.
Meanwhile, obliviously, baby fever continues to spread and now reaches Eury and Epi. Epi soon becomes pregnant with Melanie.
Becoming sloppier as he slips further into cocky madness, Thanatos parades Chal to Nyx to gloat some more, used to his mother letting him get away with whatever. But this time after Thanatos leaves, Nyx calls Maci and Tory, and tells them about Chal’s existence.
Everyone is ALARMED. With Epi weakened by his pregnancy, Maci and Tory insist that he move his family out of their home in Tartarus and into Elysium. Maci fiddles with the Elysium barrier to get Epi in, and he, Eury and Meli move temporarily into the palace for safety.
Bracing this whole time for whatever Thanatos is planning with Chal, instead everyone is surprised when Thanatos resurfaces to attack Lethe as an act of revenge for assisting his former three victims. Arguing that this is a violation of his Styx oath, Tory and Maci send the Furies after Thanatos.
Realizing he’s running out of time, Thanatos makes a move and unleashes Chal, ordering him to kidnap baby Neo and bring her back to him.
Infant Neo is kidnapped. Thanatos locks her in a cage in his Tartarus cave and… just waits, with Chal and Ker. On cue, Maci shows up to save her daughter. A standoff ensues that ends in Maci grabbing Thanatos’ scythe from him and hacking him to pieces.
Tory shows up with the Furies, peels Maci off of Thanatos, and they break Neo free. Thanatos (maimed) is arrested by the Furies and dragged off to a Tartarus cell. Ker holds Chal back from intervening with a claw straight through Chal's shoulder and they both disappear off the grid "forever" (or... do they?).
Epi, who had been twitchy inside Elysium this entire time, takes Eury and Meli and promptly moves back to their Tartarus home, now that Thanatos is gone and all seems safe again.
Jesse and Laphi’s daughter Lenore is born.
Tory finds an abandoned griffin kitten and takes it home to the palace with Maci. They name it Flint! …I promise this is important, but not until the next section of timeline.
While everyone's guard is down, chaos goddess Eris ambushes Epi and Eury's household for shits and giggles, though also irked that her pal Thanatos had been arrested. She physically separates Meli's internal two beings into separate bodies for the first time - "eMel," the evil entity, and "gMel," the good one.
Immediately, eMel turns on Epi and kidnaps him, as his pregnancy is still affecting and weakening his powers. She and Eris together stash him in the Cronus pit while Eury and gMel flee back to the Elysium palace.
Tory, Maci and company search for Epi. Alena, Epi's long-time best friend, makes her first appearance in canon.
While the palace searches for Epi, eMel terrorizes him. She tears the unborn Melanie from Epi's womb and murders her, as she had tragically not yet developed her divine immortality. When Melanie dies, eMel uses her powers as Goddess of Ghosts to physically rip apart her shade into scattered fragments, leaving almost nothing left of her. Epi shatters.
eMel resumes her old hobbies of terror as Epi suffers, like murdering mortals again in the upper world, even briefly meeting loose supervillain disaster Chal. Eris starts trying to brainwash Epi using stolen Lethe River water into reverting to his full daemon form, to use him as a weapon against the palace.
With Epi still missing, Tory, Jesse, Eury, the rest of the palace, begin experiencing vivid dreams and nightmares. They realize this is Epi trying to contact them through his realm and soon realize where they've been keeping him -
- but eMel discovers that Epi's been reaching out and moves them to a secondary location before the palace can catch up. Maci and Tory arrive at Cronus' pit. They don't find Epi. They do find Melanie's remains.
Maci and Tory return Melanie's ashes to Eury.
In an ambush set-up, Epi is finally located - but by this time his memory has been mostly erased by eMel and Eris, making him uncontrollably dangerous while trapped in his daemon form. As Tory and Alena fight and subdue him, gMel appears and defeats her other half, reabsorbing her back together. Epi is taken back to the Elysium palace and healed.
Blaming herself for the attacks, Meli disappears from the palace. Secretly, she also sets out to find the scraps of Melanie's lost shade.
Epi discovers he's pregnant again, though this time unintentionally. Meli returns with Melanie's shade, patched together; Epi allows the new unborn child to absorb Melanie's soul, reincarnating her... unaware that this time around, he's actually carrying twins Ty and Bel. Fearful of the threat of her other self, Meli tries to run away again to protect her unborn sibling(s), but Epi and Eury beg her to stay - they can't lose another child.
Meli agrees to stay. Epi, Meli, and Eury move permanently into Elysium.
During Epi's pregnancy, the palace discovers first that Epi is carrying twins; second, that Ty and Bel are telepathic, discovered on account of the twins poking around inside everyone's head from inside Epi's womb.
Ty and Bel are born! Even as newborns, they are immediately able to communicate telepathically with their family while just a few days old.
Thanatos, from his cell in Tartarus, is filled in by Eris of the drama of the months past, the release and recapture of Melinoe and the trauma inflicted upon Epi. Learning that Epi and Eury now have vulnerable children of their own, and in his slipping insanity deciding that while post-partum, surely Epi is less of a threat to fuck with, Thanatos seeks out a different previous victim to terrorize - Eury. Eris hacks the Elysium barrier to shut it temporarily off, and break Thanatos out of his cell.
At Thanatos' orders, Chal reappears from wherever the hell he'd been, to break into the palace and kidnap Eury to drop at Thanatos' feet. While in the palace, at the guidance of Eris Chal also manages to slip a poison in Meli's vicinity for the purpose of later chaos. With Eury deposited into his grasp, Thanatos manages to attack him but briefly before Epi shows up, furious that Thanatos would dare harm his mate and challenge him so directly.
Epi is not any less of a threat post-partum.
Thanatos is re-imprisoned, much worse for the wear. Chal disappears off the grid again. Epi revisits for good measure, leaving Thanatos cursed with vivid insanity-inducing nightmares.
Laphi proposes to Jesse, they become engaged.
Meno makes his first canon appearance when summoned for tattoo purposes.
Meli finally accidentally drinks the lurking poison that Chal had planted. eMel escapes their physical body again, but when she beelines straight to harm the twins gMel rushes after her and they both vanish...
And when Melinoe soon after reappears, reunited together again as one... despite acting same as ever, this Melinoe is now being secretly puppeted by her evil half. This very temporary version, "MelE" puts on a weepy show of wanting to guard and protect the baby twins from harm especially given Thanatos' recent events. There is no visible reason not to trust her.
The second she's left unattended, MelE approaches the twins in their crib with malicious intent and tries to harm them. Before she can, the extremely powerful months-old-mindreaders Ty and Bel forcibly slam her back and yank the correct Meli back into consciousness, locking the evil half buried much deeper inside of her. Everyone is uhh, a little taken aback by how easily they managed to do that, but overall a happy ending is had.
Alena and Meno start to date each other on-off.
Meanwhile... though unbeknownst to most of the the residents of the palace, a commotion begins in the mortal world within one of their cities, as a deity from another realm stages a hostile takeover. Though the event resolves itself topside, it perks on Tory's radar due to the sheer weirdness of it all and the brief influx of shades; though there's always strange things happening in the mortal world, and no one thinks anything else of it.
Several realms above the mortal world, following the aforementioned hostile takeover event - rather than be taken to his home world humiliatingly as a prisoner, the god Loki decides he once again has nothing left to live for. He jumps for the second time.
This time, Loki lands further underground.
AAAAAAND tee hee the end for now!!! I don’t actually know when I’ll be uploading the next part since I. We actually have to redo a ton of stuff I think in the Loki era but. I will eventually
Also- if u somehow read all that and ur like ?!!! ELYSIUM ERIS?!?!? yeah huh I’ve never drawn her and she’s…. Ummmmm currently under construction so. shshshsh. parts of this may still be retconned yet ANYWAY. she's right here:)