Chapter Text
Homeric Hymn 22 to Poseidon (Greek epic 7th or 6th century B.C.)
"I begin to sing about Poseidon, the great god, mover of the earth and fruitless sea, god of the deep who is also lord of Helikon (Helicon) and wide Aigai (Aegae). O Shaker of the Earth (Ennosigaios), to be a tamer of horses and a saviour of ships! Hail Poseidon Holder of the Earth (gaienokhos), dark-haired lord! O blessed one, be kindly in heart and help those who voyage in ships!"
I once made the argument that Percy Jackson & the Olympians was a better and more entertaining book series than the Harry Potter series. To my surprise, several people in the room with me immediately gasped in shock and horror, like I'd just declared a holy war on their beloved childhoods. That was the moment I realised such a statement wasn't exactly… universally accepted as divine truth. How was I to know that I had befriended a group of Harry Potter-stanning heathens?
It was after several rounds of beers and poor gambling decisions later during the night that an acquaintance of mine, whose name escapes me now, made a rebuttal to my argument that stuck with me more than the rest. He slammed down his half-finished glass of Vodka Red Bull and made a series of dramatic gestures. He was a car dealership Tube man brought to life.
"Mate, let's be honest here," he said, shaking his head in drunken disbelief. "What you said earlier? Just isn't true! Percy Jackson has always been just a cheap knockoff of Harry Potter. How can you actually think that throwing a hodgepodge of those old Greek myths and fairy tales into some boring ass American summer camp is better than the magic of Hogwarts? It just doesn't live up to the hype."
Now, ignoring how objectively wrong that statement is, I do think it's worth unpacking why Percy Jackson mattered so much to me, and to a lot of others. My own lifelong love and fascination with ancient Greek and Roman history helped get my foot in the door, but come on! What's not to love about the dynamic cast of characters? Or Percy's hilarious first-person narration? How many young kids were introduced to Greek Mythology through those books? Where else has ancient myth so seamlessly blended into a modern setting? How many fell in love with Annabeth Chase before they even hit puberty?
So why exactly am I gushing about a YA book series I'm now technically a decade too old to be seen reading? Because… well, one particular aspect of those books has become startlingly relevant to the unforeseen circumstances that I now find myself in. Above all else, Percy Jackson & the Olympians was about divinity, about the gods. Their flaws, their pettiness, their flashes of humanity wrapped in impossible power. Each book, through Percy's young eyes and dramatic experiences, stripped away the grandeur of Olympus and asked what kind of people the gods really were.
In those stories, Kronos, the King of the Titans, was painted as the ultimate villain and primary antagonist that Percy and his allies had to overcome. He was cruel, power-hungry, and openly manipulative. He was the kind of bastard who'd openly point and laugh at a child's funeral. I always assumed Riordan exaggerated that for effect. A villain made cartoonishly evil for the sake of plot and a younger audience, just like how Zeus was reduced to mostly an arrogant jerk rather than a serial rapist, and Hera's jealous harpy tendencies were made less vindictive, merely resulting in petty acts of annoyance.
Well, as it turns out, if anything, he undersold it.
You see, I'd grown up human, ordinary, boring, and 100% mortal, with a father who'd perfected absence into an art form right from the jump. I'd barely made it to Pre-School before he was power-walking his way out the front door. I wish I could honestly say I got over it, that I was able to easily move on as I grew up into a man and experienced various kinds of love, loss, triumphs, and defeats.
Yet… well, in the end, I went to my deathbed still carrying that familiar ache of an abandoned son all the way from childhood, thinking in my final moments that at the very least death might bring me a kind of peace. As I felt the cold spread through me, I had frantically inventoried my forty-something years. No white-picket-fence dream achieved, no beautiful kids to call my own, my dreams of being a famous architect never realised, just poor, meagre circumstances and a story cut short. In that final, fading moment, all I could do was try to convince the pathetic, dying man that was myself that he had, somehow, lived a life of significance. That it hadn't all been a waste of time and effort.
So without my consent, the universe decided I wasn't off the hook. No 'game over,' which, frankly, was a swindle. I'll admit, I was an atheist my whole life, but in those final seconds? You can bet I crossed my fingers. I was hoping I'd done enough good to squeak into heaven. And, as a man of... particular culture... I wasn't just hoping for harps and clouds. I was hoping for the High School DxD version. The one where angels are as bountifully blessed in the chest as Gabriel, and the logic is less holy and more hentai. A guy can dream, right?
Well, my dream turned into a nightmare. There was no fan service. No heavenly 'plot.' Just... awareness. I remember even now the terrifying fact of my persistent consciousness when there should have been nothing. I was still here. That dawning shock, however, had been cut short by the violent, shocking slam of rebirth.
After a brief period of disorientation, my new eyes had flown open, and that's when I saw her. The most radiant, grief-stricken woman I'd ever laid eyes on. Even then, a dormant instinct I couldn't yet explain allowed me to recognise her instantly: Rhea, my mother. Her terror was a mirror to the fear that gripped me. Before I could even draw a breath, a shadow blotted out the light. A colossal jaw unhinged in a way that was utterly vile and unnatural, wider than any nightmare, a living cavern of meat-covered teeth. The dormant instinct returned once more to identify the monster.
It was Kronos. Leader of the Titans. Child of Gaia and Ouranous. Greek God of baby-eating. My new Father.
The universe or some malevolent entity had looked at that old wound from my first life and decided to twist the knife. It gave me another chance at having a father, only this one was far more terrible than the first could have ever been. Imagine your first act of existence, or more accurately, re-existence, being digestion. One heartbeat, you open your eyes in a new world; the next, you're being shoved down your own father's humid, suffocating throat into a living tomb. Stomach acid sears your skin while your bones try to regrow faster than they melt. You desperately try to find some purchase to slow your rapid descent, but find your unfamiliar baby hands are too weak and stubby to grab onto anything of substance.
Let me tell you, falling headfirst into a Titan's stomach is a uniquely terrible experience. The darkness isn't just an absence of light from the sun; it's a genuine physical presence that you can feel on the back of your neck, thick and hot and smelling of bile. The only sounds I heard for what could've been hours had been the deep, groaning rumbles of my father's divine digestive tract as I was slowly acclimatised to my new surroundings.
And then, voices. Faint, trembling, young. My new siblings. Four of them were already there, having been consumed one after the other, nine months apart. Each whisper carried fear and exhaustion, but also innate recognition. Even without my new innate instincts, I knew who they were. I should've been horrified. Instead, I felt something shameful, relief. Relief that I wasn't alone. That someone, anyone, could understand this nightmare and share it with me. After the first awkward greetings, the nervous questions, and the disbelief, they eagerly embraced me in a group hug. Not as a stranger, but as family, five broken lights flickering against the darkness. And in that brief, fragile warmth, I almost forgot the horror that had brought us there.
By the time we all let go of one another, I had no forgiveness left in me, not for my first father, and certainly not for the second.
My new siblings were exactly what I expected from the mythology, and nothing like it at all. They weren't gods yet, not really. Just frightened kids stuck in the dark, grasping for meaning, desperately seeking an answer to the one question that echoed in the stifling air: Why?
Hestia quickly proved to me that the slogan about her was undeniably true. She is truly bestia. As the eldest, she tried to be the brave one. She'd hum lullabies to me and the others to help us sleep, her voice a fragile light against the crushing dark, but I could hear the tremor in it. She was singing to keep herself from shattering. Demeter just paced, an endless, frantic rhythm of bare feet slapping against moist flesh, wringing her hands so hard I thought she might grind them to dust. Her terror wasn't loud; it was a deep, frantic vibration, like an earthquake waiting to happen.
Then there was Hera. She chose rage as her shield. She'd snap at any sound that she found unsensible or annoying, her anger a blistering force that was so obviously a mask for absolute, gut-wrenching terror. It became obvious fairly quickly that she was scared of the dark but would rather combust than openly admit it. And Hades… well, Hades was already Hades. He'd found the darkest, quietest corner of our father's stomach, don't ask me how he knew, and just stayed there, brooding. His silence was heavier than all their noise combined.
And I, apparently, was now Poseidon. The God and Ruler of the Sea. Now, said title was still pending, as I was currently trying my best to avoid being submerged in Divine Stomach Acid, and the Titan Oceanus was the current ruler of the Ocean. Though I knew he wouldn't have that position for much longer, not if I had anything to say about it.
Compared to my older siblings, I was different. My mortal memories hadn't faded; if anything, they gave me a perspective they couldn't possibly have. They were born into this nightmare and knew nothing else. I remembered sunlight. I remembered freedom and all the wonders that life had to offer beyond these walls of meat and bone. I remembered what it was to comfort someone, and that, it turned out, was the most useful memory of all.
"He's going to digest us!" Demeter would occasionally wail, her pacing growing faster. "We'll just… eventually dissolve into nothing!"
"Then dissolve quietly," Hera would hiss back, her voice sharp enough to cut. "Your whining is insufferable."
That's when I'd step in. I'd take both their hands in mine and put on all the brotherly charm I could muster. "He can't, sisters," I'd say, my voice calm. It was a guess, but a confident one. "If he could, we'd be gone already. We're… indigestible in our current forms. If I had to guess, it must be quite taxing on his resolve to keep all five of us contained."
My calmness was a foreign object in that chaotic space. Hestia had tried her best, but at the end of the day, she was still a child herself. I managed to find several ways to cut through their panic. I quickly learned to play to what I knew of their natures. I'd talk to Demeter about things I remembered, fields, seasons, the way things grow and die and grow again. The concepts were alien to her, but the idea of cycles, of things continuing, seemed to soothe the frantic energy in her soul. She started looking at me with a wide-eyed fascination, a sort of desperate reliance that was equal parts flattering and heartbreaking.
With Hera, I took a different approach. I didn't challenge her anger. I acknowledged the injustice of it all. "You're right to be furious, Hera," I told her once after a particularly nasty outburst. "What he has done to us... It is a grave betrayal. To be given life only to have it trapped like this… It's the work of a monster, not a father."
She fell silent, staring at me in the gloom. I hadn't just heard her anger; I had validated it. From then on, her rage, while still present, was less often directed at us. Instead, she'd watch me, a strange, calculating softness in her eyes. I noticed she would try to take the seat closest to me and seek out my hand to hold when we all hunkered down to sleep, not that we had any grasp on a sense of what time it was. Somewhere between the acid burns and the existential dread, and despite being the youngest, I became the older brother I'd never had the chance to be.
To keep their minds from fracturing or getting lost in boredom, I told them stories. Stories from a world they'd never know. I changed the names, of course. I told them of Lorc Starkiller and his light-blade, who took on a galactic empire. Of the Black Knight, Battyman, a mortal who weaponised fear against the evil criminals of a perpetually dark city. They'd listen for hours, their own nightmares momentarily forgotten, lost in worlds that weren't a suffocating prison. To them, it was just my surprisingly vast imagination. To me, it was a eulogy for a life I'd never get back.
I came to cherish story-time above all, as it was one of the few times that Hades would leave his brooding corner and come and sit with us. He liked to act like he was above it all, but he could never fully hide the look of abject wonder in his eyes when I described these fantastical worlds and their inhabitants. Deep down, the future Prince of Darkness was just a big softie. We grew to love each other in that disgusting, fleshy prison. I saw past the myths to the people they were: Hestia's fierce, quiet strength; Demeter's deep, wounded empathy; Hera's terrified, desperate need for order and love; and Hades's profound, solemn integrity. They were my family I'd never had but always wanted.
Then one day, everything changed. There was a lurch, a violent spasm from the stomach walls around us. And then, something new tumbled into our world. It wasn't divine. It was heavy, lifeless, and utterly out of place. It was a rock.
And it hit me. Squarely. On the fucking head.
My sisters panicked and began to fuss over me, but I just sat there, seeing stars, rubbing the spot. That's when the clarity hit me. A rock. Swaddled. Rhea. She'd done it. She'd saved one of us. Our baby brother, Zeus, was out there. Free.
A wave of hope washed over me that everything was going according to plan... or well, fate, followed immediately by a burning, petty resentment. Because of course. Of course, the one to get out of being trapped in here is the one who immediately finds a way to make my existence more painful. He wasn't even in the stomach, and he was already being an annoying little shit of a brother.
For the first time in months, I laughed. A real, genuine laugh that echoed weirdly in the close confines.
"What is it?" Hestia asked, her voice filled with hope.
"It's our ticket out of here," I said. And under my breath, I made a solemn vow. "And I am going to dedicate the rest of my immortality to annoying that little shit right back. He has no idea what he just started."
When Zeus finally tricked Kronos into vomiting us out, wine and mustard, courtesy of Metis, we didn't come out as children. We emerged fully grown, radiant, and divine. And the moment our feet hit the earth, we were at war.
Ten years of chaotic war followed. Titans shattered mountains. We answered in kind. Oceans boiled, skies burned, and the primordial world learned what the word divine really meant. After a decade of that, I had naively assumed overthrowing Kronos would taste glorious, like ambrosia on the tongue. Instead, it tasted like ash. The final battle had been hellish as our father had refused to go down quietly.
Throughout the fight, a harsh psychic vibration had rattled deep in my skull, as if my thoughts were being flayed raw. The air, the stone, and even the space between atoms, had howled with the same awful pitch. The scream of reality itself being cleaved apart in countless ways, it was not able to handle. It hadn't taken me a decade to learn that a battle between the Gods was a truly awful thing.
And now, as Zeus raised his arms to the heavens, lightning flickering around him like a crown, I realised how little had changed after all this time. "Let this be the fate," he thundered, pausing for effect, "of all tyrants!"
I fought the urge to roll my eyes. Gods, he was milking the moment for all it was worth, ever the drama queen.
Somewhere in that cacophony, Kronos's soul was being carved into countless fragmented shards. He screamed like a dying pig while Zeus hit him with lightning again and again. Each strike split the horizon. I stood silent, my handy trident buried in scorched earth, watching ichor pour like molten gold. For all the spectacle, I felt nothing. No relief, no triumph. Just the kind of bone-deep fatigue that sinks into your soul after being on your feet too long. Even my formidable divine body and constitution had its limits.
For a moment, I almost pitied Kronos. Almost. Then another bolt hit, and I remembered what it felt like to be swallowed alive. Remembered my sisters crying in the dark, and with that, all pity for the bastard fled me.
Kronos' physical form dissolved into light, his immortal essence scattering like dust. The Former King's shattered existence would spend eternity flayed beyond consciousness in the Deepest Pits of Tartarus. The silence that followed was worse than the cacophony of noise. I looked out over the scarred land, rivers steaming, forests burned to bone, and tried to tell myself it had been worth it. But for the first time since waking up in a Titan's stomach, I was free.
The Titans were defeated. The Titanomachy was over. The Golden Age of the Gods had begun. Lucky us.
It was hours later, after ensuring the Titans were all secure in their imprisonment, that a ripple stirred the air, a summons. Zeus. It was time, then. Time to carve up the world. As I climbed toward the designated meeting place, my sisters waited below the rise, the tension thick as storm clouds. Demeter, even free from her confines, continued to pace like a caged lioness, her eyes fixed on a valley of ash where a gorgeous emerald forest once stood.
"We've scraped the green from the bone of the world," she murmured, her voice trembling with fury and grief.
I followed her gaze and saw the corpse of the earth, our victory written in scars.
"Victory requires sacrifice, sister," Hera said coolly, smoothing an invisible crease in her gown. "If anyone has earned the right to lament, it's me." Of course. I'd tried my best to... encourage Hera's disposition into something less overtly antagonistic and had only somewhat succeeded. Despite the changes my own unique personality had caused in all of my siblings over the course of the war, she still tended to always make it all about herself.
"Do you know how many of those Titan dogs I had to charm and mislead into making a mistake with my succulent body?" she went on, as she gestured to herself. "They just make it too easy! Too focused on getting a peek under my skirt, overblocking my strikes. Their lucky I refrained from cutting their puny pricks off!"
I held back a fond sigh, while I'd long wished Hera would move away from using her physical beauty to lull her opponents into a false sense of security, I couldn't argue the point that she had grown into quite the looker. I'd thought Rhea had been the most beautiful woman I'd ever seen, but as my sisters came into their early twenties and physically matured, I'd been proven wrong. Drastically wrong.
Hestia, Demeter, and Hera were Goddesses and their appearances reflected as such. Even after hours of battle, Hera looked radiant. Majesty Incarnate. A bronze body of succulent curves, with tits bigger than her head. Her hips flared out and swayed with what, at times, I swore to be a genuine gravitational orbit of their own. After years of war, her thighs were thick with muscle yet did not lose their shape, leading down to a pair of legs impossibly long, perfect beyond what was possible in my previous life. She often openly teased Demeter and Hestia over the fact that her ass was so fat that no clothes could ever try to fully hide it.
Why Zeus would ever cheat on this woman with mere humans at times utterly baffled me. But in all honesty, it wouldn't surprise me if I one day found him trying his best to seduce a rock to suck his dick. I'd never met anyone else so led around by their lust in all my two lives.
Demeter's control finally cracked. "Look at you," she snarled. "Speaking of vanity while the world lies dying around us! Sister, can't you feel the silence where there used to be song? What of all the creatures that we've brought to extinction with this war!"
Hera flinched, barely, but I caught it. Her mask slipped for half a breath. Before Demeter could drag me into it, I stepped forward.
"Before you ask, Demeter," I said quietly, "You are not wrong for feeling as you do. I know how much preserving nature means to you." I met her gaze. "You're right to grieve. I do too. We've lost wondrous flora and fauna that will never return for as long as we live." Then I turned to Hera. "And you're right as well. Victory cost us all something. I'm particularly proud of how you dealt with Hyperion; that roundhouse kick was really something to see."
That stopped them both. I tried my best to ignore the way they both preened like peacocks.
"The real question is what we do now. We can mourn, or we can rebuild. The world will heal if we care enough to help it."
Demeter's fury dimmed to exhaustion. Hera looked between us, uncertain. I could almost hear Hestia's voice from our time in the dark: You always find the calm in the storm, that's why you are so precious, my beloved little brother.
"The Titans shaped the bones of the world," I said, inclining my head to them. "We'll outshine them by giving it a soul."
Then I turned toward the summit, where Zeus and Hades waited.
The air on the summit reeked of ozone and burnt Titan. Zeus stood slightly apart from Hades, already radiating an aura of command that was just a little too practised. I watched him subtly shift his divine will, making himself appear a fraction taller than the pair of us. Always the showman, I thought. Dealing with Zeus was exactly like managing a theatrical, yet somehow always horny, toddler who'd stumbled into godlike power. To be fair to him, his ambition was a fierce, bright thing that had led us through the Titanomachy relatively unscathed. He'd led alongside me and Hades without vying for outright dominance, and for the most part, he'd led well.
But the seeds of that infamous pride, the arrogance that would one day cause so much grief, were already sprouting. Honestly, there were moments during the war when I genuinely considered whether a well-aimed smack to the back of his divinely thick head might do him some good. I'd refrained… for now. Mostly. Patience was the key with Zeus, especially when a significant part of me found him utterly insufferable. A gentle nudge here, a carefully worded suggestion there, he'd usually take the advice, thinking it was his own brilliant idea, which gave me a quiet, enduring satisfaction.
Hades, on the other hand, was even after all this time still a figure of still intensity. Shadows seemed to cling to him even in open daylight. The war had carved new lines of grief and understanding onto his young face. Our eyes met, and a wordless acknowledgment passed between us, a shared memory of Mount Othrys, of fighting back-to-back when all seemed lost, the metallic tang of ichor sharp in the air. That grim camaraderie, forged in the terror of being un-made, was a bond I'd surprisingly come to cherish.
The silence on the ravaged plateau grew thick with unspoken purpose. Zeus, letting the dramatic pause hang in the air, finally spoke. His voice was clear, carrying an innate authority that I knew would soon become command. "The Age of Titans is over," he declared. "A new dawn breaks. The cosmos awaits its new masters." He swept his gaze over Hades and me. "It is only right that the three of us, who bore the weapons that shattered their reign, shall divide the dominions of the world."
I saw Hades's expression tighten. A flicker of grim understanding, or maybe resignation, passed through his eyes. He knew. Of course, he knew what role he was destined for in this grand, cruel theatre of fate.
"We shall draw lots," Zeus announced, producing a battered bronze helmet taken from a fallen Titan, still scorched from battle. Another piece of theatre. "Fate shall guide our hands."
I had to give him points for political savvy, even as it grated. The lots made it all seem so impartial, though I'd bet a significant piece of my non-existent godly domain that Zeus had already tried to 'encourage' fate in his direction. He pulled three smooth, grey stones from the helmet. They looked like any other pebble, but I could feel a subtle thrum coming from them, the condensed power of unformed dominion. Whoever claimed one of these stones would have free rein to take its corresponding realm and godly aspect upon themselves without interference from the others.
"The Sky, the Seas, and the Underworld," Zeus intoned, holding the helmet aloft. "The three great realms. Let the eldest of us freed, Hades, draw first." A magnanimous gesture, on the surface.
Hades stepped forward, his movements soundless. He reached into the helmet, his hand disappearing inside before emerging with one of the grey stones. He closed his fist around it and simply nodded, his face unreadable.
"I'll go next," I said, stepping up before Zeus could engineer the sequence any further. I plunged my hand into the helmet. My fingers found the two remaining lots, smooth and identical.
As I touched them, a faint resonance pulsed from one of the stones, a subtle, rhythmic pull, like the deep, patient cadence of a tide. It was a calling. A recognition. In that instant, I knew. This one, humming against my fingertip like a forgotten memory, was the Sea. Which meant the other, silent and inert beneath my thumb, was the Sky.
For a heartbeat, I pressed my thumb down on the silent stone. I could resist the pull and take it. The heavens, the throne, the whole damn show would all be mine. The thought was calm, certain, and utterly without ego. But it held no appeal. Height has no allure for a soul that now craves depth. With a deliberate act of will, I let it go and closed my hand around my destiny.
I didn't look at the stone. Instead, I met my brother's eyes. I saw the flash of triumph in Zeus's expression, but then watched it shift, complicated by a slow, reluctant understanding. He knew. He knew I'd had a choice. He hadn't cleverly won the Sky. It had been conceded.
A flicker of something, annoyance perhaps, passed through his eyes, but he stepped forward without a word and pulled out the final stone. "The Fates have decided," he said with a faint smirk. He gestured to Hades. "Reveal your portion, brother."
Hades slowly uncurled his fingers. The grey stone transformed. Shadows coalesced around it, deepening to the black of a starless void. An intense chill bled into the air, and the light on the plateau seemed to dim. "The Underworld," Hades stated, his voice a low rumble of finality. No triumph, just a heavy, dutiful acceptance. A familiar helm of pure darkness flickered around his brow.
Zeus then turned to me, a challenging glint in his eyes. I opened my hand. The stone pulsed once, a soft blue light, before shimmering into a luminous, sapphire hue that mirrored the deepest ocean trenches. The faint scent of brine touched the air.
"The Seas," I said. As I spoke, I felt a visceral click, as if a long-misplaced piece of my soul had finally slotted into place. A simple circlet, like solidified seafoam shot through with pearl, rested on my brow.
Finally, Zeus unveiled his. White-hot light erupted from his fist, so bright we had to shield our eyes. The sharp scent of ozone filled the air as the first true thunder of this new age echoed from the heavens. "Ha Ha! How glorious! The Heavens are mine forevermore!" he proclaimed, his voice booming. A crown of jagged lightning solidified above his head.
He gave us both brief, formal congratulations. "Go forth, my brothers, and establish your reigns," he said, already swelling with authority. "Our other siblings told me they wish to wander and bask in their new freedom. We shall all convene here again at the summer solstice. Let our domains be shaped by then."
With a deafening crack of lightning, he was gone, a streak of light soaring toward the highest peaks, no doubt already coming up with designs for a throne as big as his forehead and ego.
Hades lingered. He stood in silence for a long moment, his gaze fixed on me. "Brother, you could have taken what he wanted," he said, his voice low. "I felt it. You chose not to. Why?"
I turned to him, one brow arched. "Because," I said dryly, "if Zeus hadn't gotten his precious sky, he'd have been an insufferable, whining little shit about it for all of eternity."
A beat passed. Then I shrugged, glancing out toward the unseen horizon. "And honestly? The ocean is vast. Ancient. Full of potential. I think I came out ahead amongst the three of us."
For a moment, Hades just looked at me, then gave a soft, sardonic huff, the ghost of a laugh. With a final glance, he stepped backward into the lengthening shadows, his form dissolving into the dark like ink into water.
For the first time in a long time, I stood alone. After having become so close with my Olympian siblings, it was somewhat disconcerting. The quiet of the mountaintop returned, but it was a quiet transformed. The faint call I'd felt from the wind, the scent of distant waters, was now an irresistible tide pulling at the core of my being. My duties as a soldier were over; my true work was about to begin. An instinctual pull resonated with the sapphire circlet on my brow, and without moving, I found myself standing on a colossal, wave-lashed cliff, the roar of the surf a welcome home. It was time to get to work.