PANDORA 7

Ah, here we are at the end. And what an end! 

Pandora's final journey takes her to the Underworld, where she runs into various personages before finally locating the final big evil: Fear. 

Cerberus is there for a brief time. Sisyphus. Tantalus. The lesser known Ixion and the Danaids. The Danaids scene was gross but I loved it. 

Persephone, easily my favorite immortal in this series, makes several appearances. I KNOW!

Achilles is a slightly more featured character, though I really don't like how she portrayed him. It seems stereotypical. I'm not going into further detail, but it wasn't a good idea.

The human characters have to pass through the Styx to get into the Underworld and it leaves each of them with a metallic coating of some trait of theirs. Alcie is copper. Pandy is bronze. Homer is iron. And Iole, with her very large, dense brain, becomes lead, which makes her sadly dull-witted. With Persephone's help, they break Iole out of her leaden skin, making her more confident in her genius and less worried about what people will think of her being so smart. My only problem with this scene is where she says "I can't get any smarter." We can always learn, Iole. You're not omniscient. Homer loses his iron coating in the Danaids scene and basically becomes more mature and gentlemanly. Alcie loses her copper nearer the end and just gets more beautiful. And Pandy? Well, Pandy doesn't lose hers until the very end, after being frustrated that all her friends are new and improved and she's still the same. I don't believe there's any mention of her changing at all, unlike the other characters. So she does get a little shafted. 

So there's a final battle with Hera and Pandy defeats her by finding Fear and completing the quest. Then everyone is whisked away to Mount Olympus where the heroic foursome is rewarded and the treacherous Demeter and Hera are punished. Demeter's punishment is to live forever without her goddess powers, being forced to watch how humans fuck up the planet. Hera, Juno and Ceres are depowered and transported to the future to work as maids in Caesar's Palace in Las Vegas. 

I love this series. It's always fun to reread.