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(5x04) Pantheon Genesis: Part 2, Episode 1

Metis continues narrating to her interviewer. The surviving immortals who had escaped their crashing starship into the ocean eventually swam their way to the northern shores of a small continent in the southwestern Pacific – a continent that, Metis notes, is now all but submerged except for its highest mountaintops. They dubbed their newfound home Auei – and Metis notes that yes, that is the origin of the traditional name of the larger continent to the west of the sunken one. Because Met, as she was then called, was the rabble-rouser stirring rebellious sentiment among the third generation of the immortals, and her youngest cousin Xio was the spark that finally set it off, they together were seen by the third generation as the leaders of the revolution, and so in absence of their former leadership, as the new leaders. In contrast Met's father Osan, as the eldest present, began to insist that he should be the rightful heir to the figurative throne; but Xio's mother Rhea, as wife of the now-deposed ex-ruler Kron, thought that rule should rather pass to her, and most of the wives of Kron's allied brothers agreed that she deserved it. Oron, still in telepathic communication with them all, insisted that it be put to a vote and not come to violence, and suggested that joint rule by Met and Xio, favorites of the grandchildren and heirs to both claimants to the throne, would be a reasonable compromise. The matter was put to a vote and, the third generation being much larger than the surviving second, Met and Xio were chosen as the new leaders of the family.

They soon encountered the local mortals who already lived on their new homeland, who witnessed the great strength and knowledge of the immortals (evidenced in the relatively advanced agricultural techniques the immortals quickly employed to feed and shelter themselves in this primitive wilderness), as well as their undying permanent youth, and soon came to worship them as gods, bringing them offerings and begging them for aid in alleviating one or another of the many hardships of living they all suffered. As the immortals contemplated what their plans were going to be now that they were stranded in the furthest reaches of this primitive world, they eventually decided to leverage the locals' cries for help to their mutual advantage: they would teach the locals, improve their lives and technology and civilization, and in doing so develop them, over many generations, and in isolation here on this smallest and most remote continent, into a spacefaring civilization. The immortals would then go back to their old way of life, taking the locals with them and leaving the rest of the world unperturbed as their creator intended.

To unite themselves with their new people and secure leadership over them, Xio and Met each mated with some of the locals, and then fed the first son of Xio and the first daughter of Met the superfood that reset their nanites, which the immortals had managed to cultivate small batches of in carefully controlled conditions even in this primitive world. To their surprise, the children not fed the "food of the gods" did mature anyway, but they also suffered injuries that did not quickly or completely heal – in other words, they remained mortal – while the ones fed the food became immortal – for so long as they continued eating it, making them beholden to the "gods" for their continued longevity, an unexpectedly advantageous turn of events.

Next: Pantheon Genesis: Part 2, Episode 2