Hephaestus; Martin Whitton, NASA's Ace Engineer.

When Zeus went looking for the other members of his Pantheon one of the first he found was Hephaestus. Now known as Martin Whitton Hephaestus was a major land owner, including three museums and dozens of rental properties across the USA. He also ran a small but expanding architecture/engineering/programming firm and had eleven base patents to his credit, plus more than twenty derivative ones. At the time Zeus still very much thought he could re-assume command of the Pantheon like he had in the old days and it was the simplest of matters for him to arrange a leveraged buyout of "Gods-Forge LLC".

At first Hephaestus didn't mind losing control of his company much: being head of the R&D department for Olympus Unlimited gave him access to resources he never could have had at his disposal before: and no longer being CEO of a company meant he had more free time to pursue new projects: but this only lasted about two years.

As time went on Zeus came to rely too heavily on Hephaestus genius, asking him to oversee and drive forward more and more projects that he had little interest in, to the point that seven years to the day after Gods-Forge was bought out by Olympus Unlimited, Hephaestus stormed into Zeus's office and slammed his letter of resignation on the head of the pantheon's desk.

He was of course under a "Do-Not-Compete" contract but that was easily solved: armed with a glowing letter of recommendation from his 'mother' Hera which laid the blame for his departure squarely at the feat of Raymond Karras, Olympus Unlimited's CEO, Martin Whitton got a job at NASA as an engineering team leader.

However the move to the public sector was where most of the problem's in Hephaestus life began: he was to sell a lot of his properties in order to take advantage of the stock options he had with Olympus before they expired, he found himself increasingly frustrated with the limitations of NASA's budget and political position, and Aphrodite started screwing around on him.

Hestia had warned him that dating Aphrodite was a bad move, and he remembered that it had been one in his previous life too, but he just couldn't stay away from her bewitching good looks and insatiable sexual appetite. Now, 3 years after his move over to working at NASA, he was regretting not taking Hestia's advice. He knew about Aries, and Zeus, and suspected she was sleeping with several other men, but he still couldn't bring himself to break it off. He loved 'Dite, and even though she hurt him constantly he always forgave her. However in the past month or so that was changing: there was a new woman on the NASA staff that kept drawing his eye, and he hers because they had caught each other looking several times now. Her name was Fa Mai and she was an Ex-Chinese National, who had defected from the Miami Consulate last year and claimed political asylum.

Hephaestus suspected she was one of the Reborn Deities, like himself, but he was having a hard time telling WHO. It could be she was from another Pantheon, they were always harder to spot than your own, and she was Chinese; it could be that like Hera tempting Zeus she was concealing her divine nature, and if so the reasons were unclear: but Hephaestus was convinced they marked in each other something more than human. This was why he had developed a sort of 'Divine Geiger Counter': and was about to bring it in to work...