Hera: This Is My Son Ares And His Brother Hephaestus

Hera: this is my son Ares and his brother Hephaestus

Hestia: aren't they both your sons? why is Hephaestus not given the son title?

Hera: i don't like him

Literary Illusions

“It’s ironic,” Palpatine said, shaking his head. “He could save others from death, but not himself.”

Anakin frowned.

“And this is something the Jedi wouldn’t have told me?” he asked.

“Of course not,” Palpatine replied. “Is it a story you’ve heard?”

“Well, yes,” Anakin said. “Just now, from you. But not before then… and that surprises me, Chancellor.”

Palpatine shrugged. “I think you’ll find, Anakin, that the Jedi have not been telling you everything.”

“Maybe not, but… honestly, that sounds like exactly the kind of thing they’d tell me,” Anakin said.

Palpatine frowned.

“...what?” he asked.

“You know,” Anakin said. “Some Sith Lord works out how to bring people back to life from the dead, but his apprentice kills him and doesn’t bring him back to life because the Sith are inherently self destructive. If the two of them had worked together and been able to trust one another, they’d have been immortal.”

He shrugged. “It’s a good illustration of the inherently self destructive nature of the Dark Side, and it’s the dichotomy of how the Dark Side leads you to seek power in order to achieve goals that you then discard as irrelevant, because they’re not directly related to gaining power… hold on a second.”

Palpatine was a little distracted by trying to avoid mentally kicking himself, so it took him somewhat more than a second to notice what Anakin was doing.

“...Anakin?” he said. “Are you getting your comlink out?”

“Yeah,” Anakin replied. “Going to text Obi-Wan, ask him what he thinks of the story. Maybe there’s some kind of detail I missed which makes it less of a good illustration of the different worldviews and mindsets of the Jedi and the Sith.”

The Knight shrugged, his thumbs tapping away at his comlink. “He probably knows it, he knows all of the old stories.”

Palpatine blinked several times.

“...don’t,” he said, then very discreetly scrambled for a reason why. “It’s the middle of a performance. We don’t want to interrupt them.”

“Yeah, yeah, it’s on silent,” Anakin replied, with a shrug. “Or vibrate. Did I put it on vibrate… hang on, Chancellor, I’ll make sure it’s on silent…”

He turned the comlink over, then a loud bwing sounded.

“Oh, right, I forgot to set it to do not disturb mode,” Anakin said. “Hang on… uh… yeah, there we go, I forgot I added all these custom modes. I’ve been missing a lot of sleep lately.”

“Perhaps-” Palpatine began, but Anakin spoke over him.

“Huh,” he said. “He says he’s never heard of it either. Wants to know where I heard about it, it looks like he’s really interested… or maybe he’s trying to tell me about a death stick vendor, he’s terrible with multiglyphs and he thinks he’s good at them.”

Anakin glanced at the Chancellor, hoping for some solidarity, then visibly noticed that the Chancellor was several decades older than him and abandoned that.

“Is there a book I can get the whole story from?” he asked, instead. “Obi-Wan is better at nuances, like I say.”

“That is not the point,” Palpatine said, trying not to get visibly angry. “The point is that there is a way to save your loved ones!”

“Maybe there used to be, but not any more,” Anakin shrugged. “Like you said, this was a Sith thing and the Sith are all dead. Well, unless General Grievous is a Sith who knows how to heal people, but I doubt it given how much he got hurt, and I’m not sure Dooku knew it either… hey, if this story needs to be publicized more then maybe we could have them do a play of that instead?”

Palpatine blinked several times, as he tried to keep up with a Jedi with possible undiagnosed ADHD and found himself discovering a lack of talent for podracing.

“What?” he asked.

“You know, a play,” Anakin explained. “Dramatic betrayals, lost loved ones, it would probably do numbers. It’d be better than this, anyway.”

He waved his hand at the ongoing performance of Squid Lake.

“...what is wrong with Squid Lake?” Palpatine said, before reflecting that that had really been a stupid question for him to ask and that he should have asked a much better one.

“Well, uh,” Anakin began, looking a bit abashed. “Actually now I say it out loud this might be really culturally insensitive of me, but to me this play might as well be eighty minutes of people boasting about having enough water to swim in.”

“It’s a ballet,” Palpatine told him, now completely having lost control of the conversation.

“It’s just a less scary version of Sarlacc Pit,” Anakin went on. “Someone tried to drown me in a lake once, because they thought I couldn’t swim, but floating on sand is much harder, you barely have to do anything to escape a lake. You just float.”

Very belatedly, Anakin caught sight of Palpatine’s look of total befuddlement, and shrugged.

“Watto was a lot of things,” he said. “But he had culture.”

Palpatine’s hands twitched, as he very seriously considered the idea of abandoning literal centuries of Sith planning and decades of personal political advancement in favour of stabbing Anakin somewhere it would hurt.

It was extraordinarily tempting.

“...hold on,” Anakin said, slowly. “I guess… the thing I’d like most at the moment is for… and that means… this is literally one of those times when I could fall to the Dark Side because of it, like Darth Plagueis.”

He bestowed a grateful smile on Palpatine. “Thanks, Chancellor! I need to make a call, I guess the ballet won’t mind.”

Palpatine was so thrown by the swerve that he couldn’t think of a way to stop Anakin in the few seconds he had.

“Love?” Anakin said, into his commlink. “I… think we need to come clean, because otherwise I’ll fall to the Dark Side.”

Palpatine’s eye twitched.

"Maybe the real Silmarilli were the in-laws we killed along the way."

---- Fëanáro, probably

Set: I'm revers necromancer

Anubis: you just kill people

Set: shut up

Good point.

Allow us to take a moment to appreciate Spotted Hyenas (Crocuta Crocuta).

Thank you for your time.