Tender Love

That's the definition of fucked up

Later that day they got a call from Diana who came back with Arthur from a meeting they attended. They gathered the whole League, Young Justice but even Red Hood and Arsenal. One thing led to another, and they were now standing in the lobby of the Empire State Building.

Jason was used to weird, crazy things, he lives in Gotham for gods' sake. However, when he woke up that morning he wouldn't have thought that this was how his day would go. At the same time, he wasn't exactly surprised. It did kinda make sense that the old gods from the myths still existed. At least now he had someone who he could blame for his fucked up life.

Before they got there, Diana and Arthur explained to them the basics. How are the gods still alive, why are they now in America, and so on.

Jason knew some things beforehand from the books he read. And he didn't even need that knowledge to know that the whole Greek mythology was pretty fucked up. Like, that guy they chained to a mountain and sent an eagle to eat his liver every day? That's the definition of fucked up.

Diana went up to the guard at the front desk and said, "Six hundredth floor."

He was reading a book with a picture of a wizard on the front. It must've been good because the guard took a while to look up.

"No such thing, ma'am."

"I have an audience with my father."

"Name?"

"Diana Prince."

The guard fumbled around his desk for a key card, then handed it to Diana.

They followed her to the elevator and since there were too many of them to fit into the elevator, they split into three groups. Jason and his family were the first to go. As soon as the elevator closed, Diana slipped the key into the slot. The card disappeared and a new button appeared on the console, a red one that said 600.

She pressed it and they waited, and waited. The few seconds it took the elevator to get to the top were the longest in Jason's life, having to listen to the terrible music.

"Raindrops keep falling on my head....."

Finally, ding. The doors slid open. Jason stepped out and almost had a heart attack.

They were standing on a narrow stone walkway in the middle of the air. Bellow them was Manhattan, from the height of an airplane. In front of them, white marble steps wound up the spine of cloud, into the sky. Jason's eyes followed the stairway to its end, where his brain just could not accept what he saw.

Look again, his brain said.

We're looking, his eyes insisted. It's really there.

From the top of the clouds rose the decapitated peak of a mountain, its summit covered with snow. Clinging to the mountainside were dozens of multileveled palaces-a city of mansions-all with white-columned porticos, gilded terraces, and bronze braziers glowing with a thousand fires. Roads wound crazily up to the peak, where the largest palace gleamed against the snow. Precariously perched gardens bloomed with olive trees and rosebushes. Jason could make out an open-air market filled with colorful tents, a stone amphitheater built on one side of the mountain, a hippodrome, and a coliseum on the other. It was an Ancient Greek city, except it wasn't in ruins. It was new, clean, and colorful, the way Athens must've looked twenty-five hundred years ago.

This place can't be here, Jason told himself. The tip of a mountain hanging over New York City like a billion-ton asteroid? How could something like that be anchored above the Empire State Building, in plain sight of millions of people, and not get noticed?