Chapter 9 #3
She did need to do actual thesis work, as she told Plutus.
She always had thesis work she could be doing.
Such was the life of a grad student. Today it was sifting through digital surveys she’d received the previous week.
She’d gotten her last batch in and, after plopping the results in her massive spreadsheet, she’d finally be able to aggregate the results and think through what they all meant.
She’d long ago completed the theoretical and critical sections of her thesis.
The section devoted to her own work experience were done.
She’d gotten her methodology finished, too.
The only thing she had left to do was parse through the responses she’d received.
There were a lot for qualitative library research, so she was extra proud of her participation rates.
But it also meant she had a lot of opinions to comb over and interpret in light of her theoretical and experiential positions.
Thankfully, she had almost two months to do it.
She managed to get the last of the survey results into her makeshift database in a little over an hour. E could start running numbers and reading written responses for common factors or ideas.
Or she could do a different type of research.
She was good at research and more than handy at a library database filled with primary sources.
The perfect place for her to look for answers about a particular god who was, presumably, chilling in her apartment that very moment.
She had plenty of time for surveys. Plutus was the more pressing issue.
She pulled up several databases from the NYU library site and started scouring. An hour later, she had a few answers but also new questions.
When she looked up the Greek god of wealth, she found Plutus.
Not him, or at least not all the glory of him.
She didn’t find any images of old pottery or paintings that showed him as a massive, muscled, horned god with gold-dusted skin.
Instead, there were weird representations of babies and blind dudes.
Plus, there were some with wings. The baby stuff at least explained the odd, bejeweled broach of a baby he sometimes wore on his toga.
There were also cornucopias everywhere he was depicted, which, fair enough.
Horn of plenty and all that. Maybe that was where the horns came into play? Something to think on later.
She found out he was the son of Demeter.
The idea of him having a mother, much less a goddess very famous for being a vengeful and sometimes sad mother, made her nervous.
Although she did wonder what Persephone, and by extension Hades, might be like.
Erasmus apparently wrote about Folly being the son of Plutus, which made her stomach churn slightly.
After that, she stopped looking into family connections.
He apparently popped up in Dante’s Inferno, which she hadn’t remembered from her reading of it years ago.
Reminded, she looked up Canto VII and was thrown back to a vaguely familiar debate about meaning.
Dante’s Plutus said the famously ambiguous line “Pape Satan, Pape Satan, Aleppo.” In the epic poem, Plutus was a demon, though, not a god.
Maybe the horns helped mold that representation.
Still, E snorted a little at the way Plutus seemed a mystery to readers centuries later.
Fitting for the sly, clever dude she met only a few days before.
Other bits and pieces filtered through, but after an hour of solid reading, she moved to her second personal research subject: The Book of Desires.
The book brought him to her, gave her what she wanted just like the title implied, and she wanted to know more.
However, there was nothing. Nada. No record she could find at least. No trace of a spell book titled The Book of Desires.
Maybe if she contacted a local coven they could tell her more.
The idea of witches hovered in her mind for a moment.
She’d cast a spell. Successfully. Anyone could read a spell book if they could read the language in which it was written.
Not just anyone could successfully work a spell.
Unless they were a witch. Mainly because of all the supernatural and humans on the planet, witches alone had access to magic.
But that wasn’t true, was it? Plutus proved it false. She’d seen him, a god, perform magic in front of her. Humans didn’t know gods existed, so the idea of witches having sole access to magic held for most.
All of this made her mind circle and circle. Logically, it left her with only one avenue of thought. She was either secretly a witch or a goddess. An idea she might not mind, per se, but one she’d really have to come to terms with.
Worried, she started packing up her laptop.
Her back and neck hurt. She had the worst posture.
A safety hazard directly related to her line of work.
Throwing everything in her bag and untwisting her headphones, she hurried, head down, out of the library, wishing all the while Plutus wouldn’t be there when she got home.
Midway down the circular staircase, eyes downcast and lost in thought, she moved to the side when she heard another person ascending the stairs in front of her.
Only they didn’t pass in the narrow gap.
They stopped, looming large before she could even look up.
They purred, “Looks like your work is done, little one.”
Guess Plutus wasn’t in her apartment after all. E really needed to be far more mindful about the wishes she made.