Interlude

Of all the gods, Clyde was the biggest disaster.  Many of the gods had interesting powers, fertility, love, wisdom, warriors, true gods.  Clyde however, he was just a mess.  When Poseidon, Zeus and Hades fought their father Kronos and split the world into three realms that each took over Clyde had been taking a nap and missed the whole thing.  Zeus took pity on Clyde, who often got lost on his way to help people, or helped the wrong people creating  a lot of confusion.  One day Zeus thought he had an easy task and he asked Clyde to keep an eye on Persephone while she was picking flowers in the fields of Nysa.  Demeter, Persephone’s mother, figured it was a simple enough task.  The morning Persephone went to pick flowers Clyde found a bunny injured and decided to stop to heal it.  While his head was turned Hades popped up from the underworld and kidnapped Persephone.  This did not go over well.

Clyde was banished to the earth, still with his powers to grant people’s wishes (small ones). The only problem with these powers is often he granted wishes people didn’t know they had yet. For instance a young couple dreamt of having a family and wished they could start one.  Clyde heard their dreams came to town and after a quick party with Dionysus stumbled to a nearby barn and laid his hands on a bull granting him the dream of being able to become a father.  The next morning the randy bull escaped his enclosure destroyed the young couple's home and forced himself on an unwitting cow who was just minding her own business.  In the cow world this was unacceptable, however, the cow also wanted to be a mother, so she was quite overjoyed when she had twin cows not long after.  The cow belonged to the young couple and she was blessed, there were lots of calves that she beared, making the young couple rich beyond their wildest dreams.   Unable to have their own children they adopted as many village children as they could.  Clyde who felt bad about the whole ordeal tried to make things better so he sent the youngest of the family home with a big bouquet of flowers.  Turned out the mother was allergic to this particular kind of flower and she sneezed so much she bumped into a support beam that knocked the whole house over.

Clyde wandered earth trying to be helpful. One day in Pompeii Clyde was showing kids how to juggle clouds when he got distracted and dropped one.  The cloud bounced against several shops got angry and started to shoot lightning.  Clyde chased it down and finally contained it.  He smiled proud things hadn’t gotten out of hand.  The cloud was not happy at all.  Pissed that this god thought he could contain it, the cloud exploded in anger.  Clyde was worried so he ran up to the top of Vesuvius to get away from the humans that he loved dearly.  At the top there was a hole it looked safe enough to drop the cloud into to let it burn out it’s temper tantrum.  Proud of himself Clyde decided to go visit Medusa in a nearby town.  Well as soon as the cloud realized the plan it got angrier and had it’s friends join in to a tantrum.  Things got so out of hand they woke up the god Vulcan who slept in Vesuvius.  He was rather grumpy because he never got his morning cup of coffee so he started yelling at the clouds to calm down.   However, as anyone with kids knows, the worst thing you can do is try to negotiate with tiny terrorists, you only get angrier as they get more upset.  It’s a domino effect.  The best thing you can do is drink your coffee, take a deep breath and whisper.  Vulcan however, did not react like this.  Instead he stomped his feet and yelled.  Finally, he exploded in a rage.  When Clyde returned to Pompeii the town was missing.  He assumed he had merely gotten lost and went to find a really good pub.

At some point the other gods got really tired of humanities nonsense.  (I think this happened when people started looking into alternative religions)  So they decided they would take a backseat to the humans and leave them to their own devices.  Clyde however, continued to wander and help where he could.

One day he came across a nice man, van Gogh I think, any how, they became fast friends and started to drink together at pubs.  Clyde would tell him about his days at Mount Olympus and van Gogh would tell him about art.  The two colluded and plotted.  Van Gogh often talked about some girl he liked and how he wished he had the courage to tell her.  So Clyde smiled and gave Van Gogh the courage to tell the girl.  The next day Clyde saw that Van Gogh had a bandaged ear, when he asked about it he found out that Van Gogh had chopped his ear off and sent it to the girl.  This was not what Clyde had planned sad he decided it was in Van Gogh’s best interest not to hang around any more.  So he moved on.

Finally, Clyde settled on living in a modest home with goats.  They made the finest of goat cheese.  Occasionally, he meddled with the townspeople but generally he tried to just keep his goats in good health and make good cheese.  Over time he also started to make wine.  No one really knew he was a god, all they knew was that he had the best wine and goat cheese.  However, it didn’t take long for them to realize they shouldn’t invite him to any celebrations as his gifts often were quite odd and damaging to the town.