Be the change you want to see.

Dionysos grinned like a cat licking cream from its paws. Nobody else has seemed to notice that subtle little tag he has scratched into the wall beneath the lamp post at the home his parents have up in the Berkeley Hills. For those with eyes to see, it is an invitation. More than an invitation, it is a celebration. D can not wait to see the look on his siblings’ faces when everyone in the know shows up for the party.

Midway through the evening, Athena and Apollo start to notice people who they don’t recognize coming through the gate at the garden party, filtering through the more civilized throngs. More to the point, many of these people are dressed in not garden party kinds of clothes. They look like (Athena shudders delicately) BURNERS. There are boots and hiking sandals at the bottom, veils and scarves and ridiculous hats at the top, and a variety of fabrics intermingled in between: leather, lace, tulle tutus, sarongs, silk, satin, gears and fobs and monocles and OH DEAR the steampunks seem to have arrived as well (think of some of the things Delirium wears in the Sandman scenes of the Deathless, go research that later elephant elephant). These … PEOPLE are mobbing the bar and the waitstaff, eating all the canapes and drinking all the champagne cocktails and demanding more and more. Apollo glances at her, an eyebrow raised in well-bred horror. Artemis is leaned against a pillar with her champagne flute, amused as all get out. Of course she is dressed in such a way (elephant elephant) that a couple of women with … interesting and unnaturally colored hairstyles have come over to have a rather intense conversation and are offering to share the contents of a flask. Apollo would be jealous but he is more interested in feeling INVADED.
“Do you think we can get rid of these persons without causing a scene?” he demanded of Athena in a barely audible whisper.
“If it were MY party, I should say yes” whispered Athena, “but it is not MY party, it is Dionysos’s. I mean LOOK at them, they MUST be the people that go to his shows, and he MUST have invited them!”

Dionysos is wearing the faintest hint of a smirk behind his usual gold-tinged sunglasses, and the colored lights swing and flow all around him, moving with the beat of the music as he DJ’s and blends seamlessly from one song and rhythm to the next. Athena scowls in his general direction because while his music may not be her THING, family is family, and family TRIES to support one another. She knows that usually his face is Buddha-like, lost in concentration and a zen like flow state. He loses himself in the music, usually. All that needs to happen now is something like Dita showing up with an entourage…

“Well, if this isn’t where the party started, it sure is where the party is now?” Athena avoids putting her face in her palm in sheer awkward embarrassment, but it is a damn near thing.

Dita Cypress slinks into their yard, an arm around a gorgeous young man on one side and around a brilliantly laughing incandescent blonde on the other. She unwraps from the one to collect a flute of champagne, gives him a thought provoking kiss that he returns with interest before she turns him, pats his bum, and nudges him into the throng. Arm around the lovely laughing lady at her side, she quirks an eyebrow briefly at the three Olympians (middle aged? hrm how to describe them and I need a family name for Zeus’ direct descendants for this fic, middle generation? I do not know this yet elephant elephant elephant). quirks an eyebrow briefly and flashes a brilliant smile at the three of them before kissing the woman at her side with the same level of interest and focus as she had shown the young man a few moments before, and with a caress to the girl’s cheek and a wink, sends her off into the party as well. Dita waggles her fingers at the trio who really aren’t all that much older than she is, really she is NOT that much younger than they are, how scandalous how DARE she… and she heads toward the podium or dais where Dionysos is holding court or rather is being worshipped by a sea of bobbing, dancing and flailing bodies under the flashing flowing colorful lights.

Athena gestures to one of the waiters to bring her more champagne. She is going to need it.