tech support

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Eurydice's disappeared, and Orpheus has absolutely no clue what's going on. He's asked his grandpa Apollo, Eurydice's nymph friends, even that jerk Aris-whoever-the-heck that was hitting on her for a whole month. (You would think that someone who claimed to love her oh so much would know something about her whereabouts, but nooo.) No one's seen a trace of her.

But there's no way Eurydice would ghost him two weeks after their wedding. She loves him! The only conclusion: Hades has seriously messed up.

Of course, Orpheus has got to get her back. No one messes with his girl like that.

Now, there's technically a way to send grievances to Hades — through the Underworld Customer Support Line — but does that ever actually work? Everyone knows that the Furies are terribly overworked, and rumor has it that the new system relies on a huge flock of trained Stymphalian birds, with no review by the Furies at all! Underworld marketing copy says that the birds are "highly accurate" and that they "provide efficient response times", but Orpheus doesn't like his chances. He isn't going to leave the fate of his beloved to some pigeons!

Luckily, he has a much better idea, which is to do what he always does — sing. People have always loved to hear his music, and he's confident he can gather an engaged audience. If that audience gets big enough, Hades will surely have to do something about it!

With his strategy planned and his lyre in hand, he begins to sing. He tells the story of how he met Eurydice, putting those love-at-first-sight butterflies into his music. He laments her loss, coaxing sobs out of his lyre and his listeners. He even experiments with different types of music to appeal to a wider audience: a dance song for the Maenads, an ode to Persephone; even a diss track aimed at Aris-what's-his-name, which is a hit among Eurydice's Dryad friends. But he always comes back to the love ballads, singing of Eurydice and his love for her.

It works; he amasses a huge audience over three days of singing. The trees die as the Dryads leave them in droves; one of the Arae catches him after a performance, furtive look on her face, and tells him that Asphodel is up in arms. Even Aphrodite makes a statement, sending her signature doves to commend Orpheus's love for Eurydice.

On the morning of the fourth day, Hermes brings a message from Hades. It's a small slip of papyrus with a simple message: Let's get in touch by direct conversation.

"You must have done something real crazy to get his attention," says Hermes. "He almost never talks to mortals."

Orpheus gestures vaguely at the crowd behind him. Hermes shrugs.

"Want a lift? Slip says you get a free ride with me," Hermes says, skimming over his papyrus scroll. He pulls out a bite-mark-riddled pen and sticks it in his mouth.

"Sure," says Orpheus, and as soon as the word leaves his mouth, Hermes sweeps him off his feet into a princess carry. Orpheus stifles a scream as Hermes' winged sandals launch them into the sky.

The journey to Hades is no simple task, mostly because of Hermes' reckless flying. Due to airsickness, Orpheus throws up not once, not twice, but three times. One of the episodes, regrettably, involves vomiting in the River Styx, which earns him a dirty look from the goddess of the river. He also has a near miss with Cerberus' maw (to which Hermes responds, "Whoops, sorry about that, dude.").

By the time they land in the throne room, Orpheus is just glad that he's not dead. In contrast to the rest of the joyride, Hermes puts Orpheus down gently, standing him up on his feet and straightening his lyre.

"Good luck, man," Hermes says, and poof, he's gone. His pen clatters to the floor.

Orpheus shudders. I'm going to need that luck, he thinks, as he looks around the cavernous throne room. There's no ceiling that he can see, but there's also no sunlight — instead, there's an omnious green glow hanging in the oppressive air. There's no mistaking the fact that he's in the Underworld.

Orpheus spots a figure at the opposite end of the room — Hades, seated on his jet-black throne. He's not as tall as Orpheus thought, and wait, is he sleeping? He is slumped over the throne's right armrest, and his eyes are definitely closed.

Orpheus creeps closer. He's here for an audience with Hades, after all.

But before he can get too close, someone stops him. It's a nymph — she smells of mint, and she's wearing huge golden hoop earrings that match exquisitely with her crisp black dress. Her shiny nametag reads Minthe, and underneath is her title…well, titles, because she has many: Chief Architect of the Underworld, Vice President of Souls, and Chief of Staff to Lord Hades.

"You're Orpheus, correct?" she says.

He nods. He doesn't know what else to say.

"Let me announce you." She turns towards the throne, then in a surprisingly loud voice, calls out, "Your Grace, this is Orpheus here for an audience by invitation."

Hades blinks his eyes open. "Welcome to the Underworld," he says in a sarcastic drawl. "How can I help you?"

"Well, um, Sir Hades — "

"It's Your Grace," Minthe whispers, as Hades wrinkles his forehead.

"…I mean, Your Grace…my wife Eurydice disappeared a couple of days ago. No one has seen her, and I'm starting to think that there was a screw-up — "

"— clerical error!" Minthe squeaks. Hades lets out an exasperated sigh and puts his head in his palm.

"…I mean, clerical error on the Underworld side. I was wondering if you could take a quick look?"

"Sure." Hades looks down at Minthe. She shrinks a little under his gaze, but bites her lower lip and pulls out a small clay tablet. The tablet emits a magical green glow that reflects off of Minthe's earrings.

"Let me see…mhm, carry the one…aha! She's not supposed to be dead, Your Grace. You see, we store every death time as the number of seconds since Aphrodite's birth from the sea —"

Hades lifts a lazy finger. "So Thanatos just got the wrong list," Hades says.

Minthe nods.

"Minthe, what's our policy for this? He just has to lead her back, right?" Hades asks. Simultaneously, he gets up from his throne, stalking away without bothering to hear Minthe's answer.

Minthe, to her credit, seems unfazed. She turns to Orpheus with her glowing magic tablet, a stylus in the other hand, and says, "You heard him! You just need to head back to the land of the living, and we'll send Eurydice to follow after you. Just a couple of routine release forms. Sign here and here" — she points at two lines on the tablet — "and we should be good to go!"

Under Minthe's watchful gaze, Orpheus takes the stylus and scribbles on the two lines. After looking it over, Minthe tucks the tablet in her pocket, then ushers him out of the throne room through the entrance he took with Hermes. She drops him off next to the River Styx — which Orpheus recognizes from his earlier bout with airsickness — and starts walking away.

Orpheus looks around, but Eurydice is still nowhere to be found. "Wait! Do I just go now, or…?"

Minthe pauses. "Yes, you can start heading back, just follow the Styx. Eurydice will be following you eventually. It just takes some time for our system to update. Besides, you can't talk to her until you get to the surface, so you should just focus on getting back up there." She turns her back to him and pulls out her tablet, striding back towards the throne room.

Orpheus shuffles his feet for a minute, then decides to get going. Following Minthe's directions, he walks along the Styx, thinking about how much faster Hermes' winged sandals were. As he goes, he looks back a couple of times, calling out to Eurydice, but she is never there.

He tries to keep his spirits up — surely Minthe knows what she's talking about — and focuses on getting back to the surface. It's a long walk, and he passes the time by humming a tune, his favorite of the ones he composed for Eurydice. It helps, and by the time he gets to Cerberus, he's feeling good enough to wave as he passes (though he gives the hound a big berth, of course).

"See, Eurydice, we're almost there!" Orpheus crows, looking back another time, and —

KRSCJK! Green light slices through Eurydice's skin. For one moment, Orpheus sees her face as he remembers it, before it shatters into a mosaic held together by glowing green light. Her eyes are in the wrong places — one where her chin should be and one where her ear should be — but Orpheus, with his intimate knowledge of those eyes, sees her abject fear in them. The rest of her body is just as splintered; it is a shattered glass statue reassembled by a toddler with a only crude sense of which limbs go where, and that same green light leaking from the seams between the shards.

As Orpheus stares in shock, Minthe pops into existence. She gropes around, disoriented, but starts speaking in an animated voice. "I just wanted to stop by to congratulate you for your sucessful audience with Lord Hades! Now, it's all in the release you signed, but I wanted to remind you that living souls trying to render dead souls is an edge case we haven't tested. Don't look at her until you get back to the surface! If you do, her soul might end up irrevocably corrupted and — "

Minthe turns, eyes meeting Eurydice's shattered form. She freezes in place, mouth hanging open. Orpheus would have mistaken her for a statue if not for the gentle sway of her golden hoop earrings.

"Are. You. Kidding. Me."

Orpheus throws his lyre at Minthe, but she vanishes with another pop! before it can hit her, and it clatters to the ground with a dissonant twang.