Jon found himself laying on a cold stone floor when he awoke. He sat upright with a start and found himself sitting on a ruined marble floor. It was with a start that he realized where he was, the Parthenon in Athens. However the popular tourist destination seemed to be deserted and the land below the hill on which it sat was surrounded by a deep fog. The only illumination came from the stars and full moon. Jon was beginning to find his feat when his attention was drawn upward by a massive chariot pulled by pegasi soaring down from the sky towards him. He stood, frozen stiff, as the cart landed and a fifteen foot tall woman emerged. She had an ethereal beauty, and cascading red hair flowed from beneath her hopilite's helmet. She was clad in ancient Grecian armor and stood with a great spear in one hand and a shield emblazoned with the face of Meduza in the other; the mythology nerd in Jon immediately recognized her as Athena and he unthinkingly fell to his knees.
"Arise, Jon" Athena's voice boomed. She began to stride towards him and as she did her form shrunk and her armor shifted. By the time she arrived she was of normal human proportions, though still standing 6'4. She looked like a mix between a librarian and an amazon. Muscles bulged below her red blouse and black skirt. Medusa's head had transferred itself to a locket around her neck and pince-nez sat on her nose. "There, this form is more appropriate for talking with mortals. I apologize if I frightened you, it has been many years since a mortal was summoned to my domain."
Jon stuttered out a reply "a-a-are you here because of my wish?" he managed to squeak out. The wishing stone had been one thing, but having the existence of the Greek Gods confirmed was quite another.
"Yes and no." Athena replied as she sat down on a comfortable chair that popped into existence. With a wave of her hand another chair formed behind Jon and he tentatively sat down. "I'm here because your wish on the artifact presented us with an opportunity that I fear will never come again, an opportunity to heal a world that has been grievously wounded. But, I'm getting ahead of myself, you need to know the history of that stone to understand what has happened."
Athena waved a hand and some of the fog surrounding the base of Parthenon shifted and floated over between them. It formed itself into a projector that pointed up and began to emit a hologram image in front of them. Jon gaped in amazement and Athena smirked, "I am the goddess of wisdom after all, consider this a sneak peak of where technology is going. The first thing you need to know is that the cosmos is divided into two realms, the realm of mortals and the realm of the gods." As she spoke the hologram presented images of two heavenly spheres, one golden and the other silver meeting in a brilliant point of light.
"They have had many names through the years, the mundane and the fey realm, the land of substance and the land of spirit, and so on. Whatever you call them these two realms were once connected. For eternity there was interchange between them, spots where one world grew thin and the other peeked through." The projector displayed humorous images of a man falling through a fairy circle into a leprechauns party and another of a dragon escaping its mystical peaks to soar over the English Channel.
Athena's voice grew grim, "This was the case until the rise of Adam Devaros, a sorcerer most foul. He was born with an innate connection to magic, but used it to terrorize the world. A demigod, one of Poseidon's many children, had stolen away the woman he loved and for that he swore vengeance on all Gods, spirits, fey and other creatures of the celestial realm." Athena paused as the images grew grim. Devaros, who Jon could swear looked familiar, stood in a dark cloak angrily casting lightning into the sea, dead sealife beginning to rot on the surface.
"What you must understand Jon, is that none of the pantheons seriously worried about Devaros. As mighty as he was he was merely a mortal and would be unable to challenge our power in the Gods' Realm. However, he developed a cruel and cunning plan. Through rituals dark and foul, he began to seal and sever the connections between the worlds. This proved devastatingly effective. By the time it was realized what he was doing, our ability to influence the mundane realm had begun to wane. Within the, short by our immortal standards, span of eighty years he had fully separated the two planes of existence." The hologram showed a much older Adam releasing a burning red light into the geographical Mount Olympus, severing it from it's mythological counterpart.
"However, the two realms were meant to be connected. Like yin and yang, balanced. Without our connection to the mortal world, the realm of spirit has lost much of it's substance. The weaker spirits turn whispy and unreal, and after these many centuries even the gods are beginning to feel weakness. My short sighted brethren may not have realized it in their arrogance, but Devaros had succeeded; he had condemned us to a slow death. However this was a wound that also harmed your world, though less obviously. Without it's connection to the realm of spirit, humans have begun to dull. Momentum has carried you far, but the longer the separation goes on the more the divine sparks of inspiration, courage, power, and so on will dwindle. Without the renewal of the gods your resources become finite. Most damningly, without the interplay of the realms, magic cannot replenish in the mortal world. Adam had, perhaps unintentionally, begun the end of his own powers."
Jon watched as the images of earth began to grey. Color leeched from the world without spirit and something ineffable was lost. The realm of spirit, conversely, grew insubstantial and ghostlike. Athena breathed deeply before continuing, "However it seemed Adam's genius was not at an end. Now that the magic of Earth was a separate finite pool, no longer replenished by the endless source of our realm, it could be manipulated in a way no arcanist had ever dreamed of. Adam cast a grand ritual which gathered and condensed almost all of the remaining magic in the world into a singular artifact, the artifact your grandfather found and left to you."
Jon's mind boggled. Despite it's immense power he'd been thinking of the stone as something like a toy, letting him play superhero. He hadn't paused to consider where it came from or who created it. Jon couldn't imagine letting something as petty as losing out on the girl you liked motivating someone to essentially ruin and doom two worlds. He grit his teeth and looked up at Athena, "So does the stone need to be destroyed?"
Athena waved her hand and chuckled as the hologram emitter powered down. "No, the stone is not evil in of itself, it is merely crystalized magic. It would run out eventually but not for several human lifetimes in its condensed form. Indeed, that stone may unwittingly prove our salvation. For, when your wish to become a champion was made, it allowed me to enact a plan I've been working on for several centuries. I mean to reconnect the realms, but to do that magic must reach out from either side. By fulfilling your wish, the magic of my pantheon can mingle with that of the stone and establish the first new connection through you."
Jon nodded along as Athena continued, "That is indeed what I have brought you here to offer. My fellow Olympians and I can imbue you with the power to be a superhero and in doing so forge a link. Your wish was already altruistic, wishing for power to save others, but by doing this you will be saving two worlds as well."
Jon began to agree, but Athena cut him off. "However, this power does not come without complication. In order to do this it will take the combined might of all the Olympians to bridge the void between the realms. Luckily I have either managed to convince my fellows of this plan, or made deals to secure their cooperation. The trouble arises from the fact that at the moment, you are an unacceptable vessel for that power." She put a comforting hand on Jon's shoulder as his eyes grew downcast. "I do not mean in terms of spirit, I could tell it was stout when you did not flee from my divine form. I mean your physical body. See, amongst the Olympians, the blessings of myself, Artemis, and Hestia may only be granted to a woman. As the virginal goddesses, our power is simply incompatible with the male form. We could grant you weapons, as I did in the past or Odysseus, or Artemis did for her hunters, but the magic could not bind with your biological form, and to fully combine the powers of the Olympians, it must be within your body that that power resides."
"So, what do we do? I mean, I'm not a woman..." Jon trailed off, unsure of how to fix this. Maybe he could make another wish for Karyn to become a superhero or something.
As if sensing his thoughts, Athena responded, "However the recipient must be you. We have already in part begun the process to even be having this conversation, and do not have the mustered power to reach out again. Still, hope is not lost. The magic of the stone and our divine power would have naturally reshaped you anyways, making you stronger and more durable. Changing your form to that of a female while the magic of change is in the air is an easy task, but the choice must be yours. While I personally abhor the male form, I know it is highly valued by some. Will you part with it in service of others and become our champion?"
Jon gazed up at the constellations, clearer than he'd ever seen them on earth. From what Athena had described, the world wouldn't end in his lifetime, but the longer the two worlds remained separate, the more doom began to embrace them. He knew the choice he had to make.
