Not Quite As Planned

"Name's Freyr, kid, but we don't really have time for introductions. I've got a feeling if I don't get Heim here out the door, he'll blow a gasket. We'll leave you two to...talk." He coughed and winked at Chad, steering the much larger god back towards the elevator. "Be safe, son, and I'm not just talking about in the next few minutes." Laughing, he pushed the grumbling and clearly furious Heimdall into the elevator, giving a short wave as the doors closed.

Nils could honestly say he couldn't ever remember being as relieved in his life as he was to hear that Chad's father was Freyr, and therefore he had not, in fact, been banging someone he was related to. That was a very real possibility in myth, and one that he hadn't realized he'd been worried about.
He came out of his reverie just in time to blush at the last passing comment Freyr made. "Why do gods ALWAYS have to have the last word?" He asked no one in particular, taking a long look at Chad before drawing him back into their room and bolting the door. "Look, Chad, I think we need to have a chat here. You look like you're about to pass out."
Nils moved swiftly to the bed to spread his sheet over it before motioning for Chad to sit down with him. He did NOT want to take any risks of having to explain THAT to Chad, also. "You feeling alright?"

Chad sat down. "Yeah I'm ok. Just processing. I feel like Harry Potter."

Nils smiled comfortingly at his lover, reaching out to hug him. "I know, I know. I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to warn you. I heard... some of this earlier. You remember how on the phone I'd mentioned a weird night?" He sighed and kissed Chad on the cheek. "I don't know what Freyr told you, but there's something after us. That's why I had to get you out of there. They got our friend Chrys, before we knew anything about what was going on. Bea has a big hole in her arm from where they tried to get her. I just wanted to make sure you were safe."

Chad blushes at Nils' affection but pushed past his embarrassment. "What exactly happened last night, and where do we go from here?"

Nils sighed. "Alright, really, the story starts a couple weeks ago. Chrys had this douchebag boyfriend named Steve, and they'd been fighting, as per normal. Our friends Bea and Esperanza, you met them earlier, live right upstairs. Chrys had asked Bea to check on her after Steve left. She did, and no one answered the phone or the door, but they knew she hadn't left. They used the spare key, and found Chrys dead in the bathroom. From there, everything went crazy.
The police said it was suicide, but we kept finding weird things that didn't fit, like a live webcam feed that had a chunk of the recording missing from the time when she died. Eventually, we tracked down Steve and got our first real lead. He thought he was a vampire, and he was crying blood and moving way faster than any human ought to be able to move, though he didn't quite know how or why. He warned us that we were in danger because we knew too much, but not everyone took him seriously. Then last night, Esperanza got home from her gig and called Bea because their place got broken into. We all rushed over, and then we found that Aimee and Connie's place and my place had been broken into as well.
We figured that Steve might've gotten into trouble too, so Aimee and I went to check on him. His place was deserted, and there was a big chunk of plaster missing from his wall. It was then that Rachel showed up. She busted in looking worried, and she matched the description of the one he thought had turned him into a vampire. She said a lot of things that didn't make sense at the time, but they do now.
Simon sent us a text message saying Steve had shown up looking like a bat out of hell, and told the others they all had to get out, to a place he knew that would be safe. He told them he'd told us to meet him there, but Aimee and I never got anything about it.
We rushed out there only to find Connie's car trashed, and Bea driving her truck away from... something, I couldn't really tell. They said it was like three dimensional shadows later. Esperanza did something and a bright flash of light went off. All the shadows vanished and Steve was burnt badly.
Rachel had us take him to the Administration building on campus, then down an impossibly large flight of stairs.
When we got to the end, this... dwarf was there, and let us in. He had a bunch of other dwarves that tended to Steve and to Bea's arm. The first guy's name was Eitre, but he's going by Peter here in the States. He and Rachel told us we were the children of the gods, and that Chrys was too, and that's why she was killed. They also told us about the Jotunn, or Titans, or whatever the fuck else you want to call them. I don't know what myths you're most familiar with. They're loose and trying to start a war with the gods. I guess that's where we come in."
It was at that point that Watson flew over to perch on Nils' shoulder. Or more wrap around, as he seemed to be enjoying not having to hide what he really was. "So, that's what's been going on. I didn't know what to tell you, because I didn't know if you'd want to be involved. I guess the choice was made for me."
He looked very tired all of a sudden as though his past lack of sleep caught up with him all at once.
"As for where we go from here, I don't know. I, at least, need to get some sleep, and then the others wanted to meet up. We should both go, let them know what happened. I imagine at least one of the others got visited, since Heimdall showed up." A nasty thought crossed his mind. "Crap. We've got Baldur's daughter, Heimdall's child, and me, the son of Loki. This is gonna be awkward. Sorry my dad killed and is going to kill your dads."
He shook his head. "Sorry, how much do you know about mythology, anyway?"

Chad looked at Nils for a moment and tried to collect his thoughts. "I really don't know much of anything about mythology. Well, not anything non-Greek. Who exactly is Rachel?"

Nils sighed. He was going to have a lot of explaining to do. "Rachel is a Svartalf. Translates more or less to dark elf. She's not a famous elf or anything, just one that was supposed to be guarding Chrys. Of course, she kind of crashed and burned on that one, but hopefully there's strength in numbers now. Alright, just to give you a loose idea of the major gods and factions in our birth pantheon, there's the Jotunn, who are more or less the same thing as the greek titans, there's the gods, the elves, and the dwarves. The Jotunn and the gods are always at odds, and that war is said to lead to Ragnarok, where Loki is supposed to lead the Jotunn against the gods." He sighed. "So, my dad's apparently the Norse antichrist. Lovely."
He got up, pulled a bottle of wine out of his bag, uncorked it, and took a long swig before continuing. "As far as the other gods, there's Odin and Frigg, who are the chief gods. Odin is the god of war, among other things. He only has one eye, as he gave up the other for wisdom. Frigg is the goddess of marriage and motherhood."
He took another swig. "Then there's Freya and Freyr, who's your father. They're twins, gods of beauty, love and fertility. Then there's Baldur, who died at the hands of his brother due to a trick of Loki's. He's the god of light, joy, peace, innocence, and reconciliation. Being dead, he lives in the realm of Hel, goddess of death. She is half beautiful woman, half corpse. Not sure which way the halves go, if we're lucky we won't find out for a long time. Of course, she's Loki's daughter, which makes her my... half sister? God that's strange."
Another, much longer swig. "Then there's Heimdall. That lovely fellow who choked the ever loving shit out of me earlier. He's the guardian of the gate to Asgard, where the gods live. He's destined to be the last god alive at Ragnarok, where he and Loki are supposed to kill each other. I guess that's why he disliked me so much."
Yet another long swig. "Then there's Thor, who's not horribly bright but a fierce warrior, and his wife, Sif, who literally has golden hair. And then there's Tyr, who was the chief of the gods before he got lured into letting Fenrir bite off his hand."
He sighed and put the now half full bottle on the side table. "This is going to absolutely without a doubt RUIN my thesis."

"So do we know if Loki actually has intentions of starting this war?"

Nils sighed and flopped down on the bed, causing Watson to flit away angrily after swatting his master with his tail. "He says no. He says he's trying to stop what's going on that he never has any intention of siding against the gods." He paused to tug Chad's arm until the boy lay down with him. "Everyone seems pretty convinced that it's just the Jotunn acting among themselves. But I don't bloody know if I can trust a damn thing from his mouth. Loki's a trickster god, after all. Whether or not Loki's helping them, if they get too active without interference, there's a very real chance that, at the very least, the human world will get pretty well destroyed. And I'm not quite sure how the resonance among the nine worlds works, but I'm pretty sure it would echo through Yggdrasil and affect other worlds. Like the world of the dead, or the world of the elves, or Asguard, where the gods live."
He turned to hug Chad tightly. "So somehow we're supposed to stop it. You know, along with all the other 'heroes' out there. Fuck."

At this point Chad was a very confused boy. "What do you mean 'Nine Worlds'?"

Nils sighed. He would have to loan Chad some books so he could learn more about what their lives were turning out to be. "Well, no one- no human scholar-is quite sure which worlds count as one of the nine worlds or how they're connected. The basic principle is that the whole universe is connected by Yggdrasil, the world tree. There's Asgard, the world where the gods live, there's Midgard, which is our world, and then seven other worlds that really aren't horribly important right now. We'll have to ask one of our parents at some point what the actual layout is. Really, the point is that all the worlds are connected, and what happens in one, in theory, affects other worlds."
Nils resisted the urge to reach for the wine again, and satisfied himself instead with kissing his lover.
"I don't know about you, but thinking is the last thing I want to do right now." He commented suggestively. "Should we pick up where we got interrupted?"