The Rain of Poseidon :D

        Far back in time, when even some gods were young, there was no rain and water stayed in its place in rivers and lakes. The people of Earth enjoyed perpetual sunny days (marred only by a cloud here and there) but eventually came to take it for granted because they knew no other kind. The gods also enjoyed fair weather, and from their cloudy perch (back then being perches was the clouds’ only job) they never even considered such a thing as rain. The only time anything like rain might be useful to them was to bathe.

It was this lack of appreciation for water that made the young god Poseidon so unpopular. Sure, he could make a few frightening splashes from the seas to keep the beach-dwelling humans on their toes, but any people not living directly next to a body of water were more difficult to reach. It took an enormous amount of concentration to bring water any distance inland. His peers jeered at his weakness. “Your power may be vast, but it’s vastly useless as well!” they said, smirking. Poseidon wondered dejectedly if his power was really that useless. Why, he thought, couldn’t he have developed a power like the one his older brother Zeus had, the power of thunder and lightning? At least those things could influence humans.

As the years passed, Poseidon’s sad situation got even worse. Zeus and all the other young gods were falling in love and getting married- all but Poseidon. He did his best to make fearsome waves and giant floods, but they failed to impress anybody. “One who rules over such a useless element is not worthy of us!” exclaimed the goddesses. With even minor deities thinking such things about his powers, he began to believe more and more that they were right.
Eventually, Poseidon became lonely and desperate- enough to go to his older brother Zeus for help. If Zeus, who was now one of the more respected gods in the area, couldn’t help him he was afraid nobody could. He found his brother on his usual throne of dark clouds. He told Zeus of his problem (although due to all Poseidon’s complaining Zeus was already well aware of it) and the two of them sat and thought for a while.

“I cannot think of anything that can be done,” said Zeus after a while, pulling at his beard. “Your problem would be solved if you could change their opinion about you, but you can’t even impress humans, let alone gods. The only way for you to get a wife might be….” Zeus looked reluctant to finish the sentence, but Poseidon stared at him until he did. “The only thing I can think of is for you to find a human wife. If you want, I could mention it to the higher-ups.”
Poseidon had never heard of such a thing. Sure, gods sometimes used humans for something or other, but it usually had more to do with entertainment than marriage. Then again, he had heard stories…

The elder gods made their decision eight Earth-days later. Zeus sought out Poseidon to give him the news, and found him looking through the clouds to Earth.
“They say you can try it”, announced Zeus suddenly, frightening Poseidon and causing him to yank his head out of the clouds to quickly bits of it clung to the water droplets on his long, wavy hair. He gestured for Zeus to elaborate as he shook them off.

“They say you can find a human wife. But you can only bring one up once a year and they need to approve of her. They also said you must find one by yourself, with no help from us, using only your powers. You need to convince her to come of her own will. Oh, and you can only take them from inland areas.”

“Why all these rules?” asked Poseidon.

“I suspect the elders are very bored,” explained Zeus gravely.

“And they’re hoping I provide entertainment?”

“We’re all sure you will. Good luck!” And with that, Zeus walked off to smite some unfaithful humans.

The next day, Poseidon was feeling very hopeless. He saw no way of gaining a human’s acceptance or even attention with only the sea to aid him. He looked again through his little cloud window and watched a small town bustle with lively activity. These people, he thought, would probably not like him much either if he was to live among them. To add to that dismal thought, he was still drawing a complete blank plan-wise. Self-pity began welling up inside him until he felt like he could cry. And he did- a single tear slid off his cheek to the ground. Actually, no, it didn’t make it to the ground; it instead plopped onto the head of one of the villagers upon whom he spied.

The man on whom the tear had fallen stared up in surprise. Never before had water come spontaneously from the sky. But there was nothing there but clouds. He uttered an exclamation and a few other villagers made puzzled faces.
From the clouds, Poseidon observed this little reaction, and his mind began to form an idea. Little drops of water were not as hard to control as enormous blobs. And just one little droplet had caused a fuss. Experimentally, he gathered a few more droplets on his fingers and flicked them down to the village. As they landed on and around the people, there was more surprised and confused chatter. Everyone was looking at the sky. Poseidon smiled. He was on to something.

Later, when he and Zeus were lounging luxuriously as you might expect gods to do, Poseidon decided to do some research for his plan. Zeus would be the perfect one to interview, he thought, because he seemed to know how to handle his godly duties exceptionally.

“Hey, brother, how do you get the people to respect you and worship you like that?” Poseidon asked.

“They worship me because they are afraid of me. They think if they don’t treat me with respect, I’ll smite them. And I do.”

“So I need to harm humans for them to like me?”

“Harm them or scare them. Or impress them. They respect anything that seems dangerous.”

      Poseidon manifested a pool of water in his hand. He studied it, wondering whether it would inspire fear and thus respect in the villagers below. It didn’t look that terrifying to him.

“You’ve got a plan, then?” asked Zeus, watching his little brother muse.
Poseidon furrowed his bluish eyebrows, got up from his pouf of cloud, and started back to his window to the Earth, which Zeus took as a yes. He watched with amused concern as his hapless younger brother went off to most likely make a fool of himself. Hopefully that conversation hadn’t counted as helping him, he thought.
Back at his cloud, Poseidon prepared for his plan. He summoned a swarm of drops from lakes and streams up to the sky. He hid them in the clouds so anyone who might look up wouldn’t spot the immense collection of shining water particles. Soon, he had collected so much water he was running out of cloud to put it in.

When the clouds were full to bursting of water droplets, he carefully let a few fall. They landed, as the others had before, among the people of the village. Again, they were baffled by the sudden bombardment of water from the sky. But this time, it didn’t stop with a few drops. Poseidon let more and more water loose, until the ground was covered with spatters of water and the villagers were scattering and trying to find shelter in their makeshift houses (which, of course, were not yet waterproof).

The plan was working! The humans were afraid! Poseidon was too exited to end the downpour. He replenished his stock of water as he let it fall, and for days it rained nonstop in the little village. Poseidon was overjoyed that he had finally found a way to scare the people. Now, for sure, they would respect him and he would find a wife, human or even goddess.

But after a few days, he got tired of constantly manipulating the water in and out of clouds. He went to brag about his innovation to Zeus and the few gods who would still talk to him. And when he came back to see how the humans were doing after his marathon of ‘rain’ (as he had decided to call it), he found something most unexpected.

The villagers were not still cowering in their leaky homes, nor were they frantically waterproofing them for any future downpours. They were running around in the damp fields, joyfully looking about. The children were playing and dancing in the puddles and eating fresh fruit. How could this be? They had been so afraid of the rain, but now they were rejoicing? Was it because it had stopped? He threw some more water to them test their reaction.

As the water hit their upturned faces, the people only became more exited. The children in the puddles twirled and tried to catch some in their mouths. Everyone cheered.

This was the strangest behavior Poseidon had ever seen from the humans, which was saying a lot. How had their opinion of the rain changed so greatly? The only way to find out, Poseidon thought, would be to ask one of them. He moved down to a low cloud and, summoning all his power, transported a young human girl up to it. She looked to be a few years younger than he would be as a human. Her round eyes still held joy from the festivities, turning quickly to confusion and fear as she tried to get her bearings.

As she recovered from the initial shock of instantly being on a cloud, he decided it was a good idea to introduce himself. “I am Poseidon, the god of water,” he told her. She jumped a little, having not yet realized his presence. She stared, the confusion and fear still there in her eyes. Then she smiled a little, as if she understood something.

“Are you the god who has given us the gift of water from the clouds?” she asked.

“It’s not a gift!” burst Poseidon.

“But of course it must be! What else could it be?” the girl said, smiling in a slightly confused but grateful way.

“Does it not inspire fear in your hearts?” said a somewhat defeated Poseidon.

“Oh, at first it did,” said the girl, “but now it has given us so much green grass and so many delicious crops! We see now that your ‘rain’ is not something to be afraid of, but to be celebrated! Never again will we go hungry, as long as the water continues to fall!”

This was definitely not what Poseidon was going for. The rain that was meant to gain him respect and fear from the humans had instead made them happy! Surely this would only make his social standing even worse.

He bid the girl a halfhearted farewell and sent her back to her people, and stared glumly into space. He sat there for hours. There was no hope. Nothing he did would convince anyone of his greatness. His mind whirl-pooled into depression. He truly was useless. He slouched on his cloud, splattering rain onto himself as a reprimand.

After a few weeks of this (such time is nothing to immortals), Poseidon was soggy, depressed, and thoroughly worn out. He figured it was about time to return to the main level of clouds and report his failure to his brother. Then he planned to sit and eat grapes in a corner until hopefully everyone forgot about him and stopped laughing at his complete lack of use.

But just as he was getting up to leave, he glanced down and noticed a peculiar difference in the town from his last real inspection of it weeks prior. Right in the middle of the town square, the villagers appeared to be in the final stages of constructing a…. a something; some sort of decorative wooden statue, maybe. It was simple and angular, and had the beginnings of carvings on the edges. He drifted his cloud to another vantage point. It wasn’t so much a statue, he gathered, but a monument. He began to read the inscription.

Poseidon laughed. He smiled a little. This was completely unexplainable. Crazy. But also quite flattering. He felt rather nice inside, like he hadn’t since before he was a laughing stock. He read the inscriptions again. Even from this height he could clearly see the name mentioned several times- his own. They were making a monument of sorts, a tribute, just for him. And he hadn’t even needed to kill anybody.

The question was, why, exactly?

Among the people happily working on the monument, he saw the girl whom he had questioned earlier. She was bringing flowers to set by the foot of the tribute. Idly, he brought her up to the cloud once more, hoping she had the answers to the new questions in his mind.

This time, it took her only a few seconds to acclimate herself to the sudden change of location. The moment she saw Poseidon, she grinned a grin reserved for especially important people. That’s definitely not fear, he observed.

“Have you seen our monument? It’s to thank you for the rain!” said the girl, who obviously never learned about polite greetings.

“Does this mean you… respect me?” asked Poseidon bluntly.

Thinking the question was rather strange; the girl replied “Well, yes, I suppose it does. How could we not respect a great god such as you, who brings us such riches?”

“And the villagers like me?” Poseidon asked, this time bluntly and incredulously.

“Yes! Yes, we love you. And we thank you for being kind to us as other gods have not.”

So, thought Poseidon, maybe Zeus’s violent tactics were not the only ones useful for gaining human followers. They seemed just as loyal to him as they were to Zeus when he threatened to zap their sheep. And now, possibly, one of them would marry him….

“Being in these clouds all the time must be amazing! You can see everything from up here!” said the girl, briefly interrupting his train of thought. That remark gave him an idea…

“What is your name?” He asked the girl.

“Kaya” She replied, still smiling.

“Would you like to marry me, Kaya?” asked Poseidon, realizing too late how strange it is asking that out of the blue. Kaya stared.

“I… will have to think about it… and ask my family…” said Kaya when she was done staring at Poseidon in shock.

“Okay… Okay.” Poseidon said, and quickly sent her back, before he collapsed in a heap at his own tactlessness.

Soon, Kaya came to a conclusion. Poseidon spotted her at the monument, staring expectantly up into the clouds. He took a deep breath, not really wanting to face her after his overly embarrassing thoughtless outburst, and brought her into the clouds once again.

“I’ve decided that it would be an honor, Poseidon. As long as it’s okay with the other gods, I suppose. My family and I agree that I should marry you- with one condition if I may be so bold. Please share your gift of rain with everyone, everywhere and continue to make our crops grow as best you can.” said Kaya in a stuttering rush.

“That… that sounds reasonable,” said Poseidon, shaking his head in disbelief. He hadn’t expected to find a wife in this way at all.

Now, after many monotonous arrangements and pacts signed by the gods and Kaya’s family (because such a marriage had never taken place before), Poseidon and Kaya live in the clouds, doing their best every day to spread the benefits of rain all over the Earth. As long as the two of them are living happily in their cloudy utopia, the rain will continue to fall to the Earth and bring prosperity.

And also, Poseidon finally has some respect.