Short Story: Modern-day Gods

In a world where gods live among humans, a young goddess wishes to join a select research center in order to learn from the best scientists in the world and their leader: the god of research. The only problem is that he refuses to have any other gods "interfere" with his affaires, forcing her to hide her status and power.

World

The gods

In this world, gods live among mortals, rule over them, and use them like pawns in their conflicts.
The gods are mostly all in conflicts together, although not always in an open war, and alliances are made and unmade regularly. This is fascinating for mortals and creates a lot of fascination and gossip - they even have specialised newspapers and gossip rags that focus on this.
In the past 2 centuries, in the region of the story, there has been an attempt to avoid destroying buildings and infrastructure and to kill "unrelated" mortals during those conflicts. This was not supposed to last long at first, but this gave the region a unique opportunity to progress and shine, and now the gods settled locally like it that way and are invested in maintaining this agreement.

Magic

Some mortals have some magical powers, and powerful ones can even rival with weak gods (although most mortals prefer to buy magical artefacts from gods, making them dependent on the gods). The difference between mortals and gods is that gods can find nourishment from prayers and become temporally more powerful. Moreover, If gods pay attention, they can hear all the prayers currently being offered to them and go through the trouble of granting some of them so as to encourage more prayers to come their way.
Each god declare a "divine domain", a field of specialty or that interests them the most and for which they are ready to offer patronage to mortals. No domain is truly unique to a god given their relatively big population, however all gods are jealous by nature and do not like "rivals" with the same or similar domains, and they all always compete to establish themselves as the most important god for their specific domain.
Young gods get a lot of pressure to "help" them decide their domain - from mortals who wants gods of specific things they like, and from other gods who do not want rivals for their fields or for other gods to gain a lot of powers.

Characters

MC

MC is the daughter of a goddess who had bad relationships with her daughter's father and so hid her existence from him. She made her daughter an artefact that hides her divinity and made her pretend that she is a mortal.
As the story sarts, MC has finally gained some independence from her mother, and she has finished her studies and gotten a PhD. She could now stop hiding her goddess status but has gotten used to being hidden among the crowd of mortals. She also has not yet decided what her divine domain would be, and so she prefers to wait a bit more before revealing her status to avoid the pressure that goes with being undeclared.
She wants to get hired by a research company owned by another god because they have the best state-of-the-art equipment for research. However, gods are jealous of their turf and he would not want any gods to get into his business and spy on him. Since she is determined to do it anyway, this means she has to hide her status as a goddess.

Love Interest

The owner and leader of a big research organisation that develops magical artefacts to be sold to mortals. Meanwhile, a "secret" branch of the company also develop special innovative artefacts for gods based on new magical techniques, but all people working there are magically bond to secrecy to keep these techniques in house.
LI is a powerful god and is considered the god of research despite there being more gods of innovation, creation, forge... He is considered the most powerful, clever and talented of them all, and even if mortals pray to one of the other ones too, they will also always pray to him first. Even other gods pray to him and negotiate with him for him to invent new artefacts for them.
He is very jealous of his influence, domain, and organisation, and he does not tolerate any spies in them. When one get caught, they are very unlikely to survive the encounter...

Young goddess

A young goddess who come to LI to beg for his artefacts and his help in dealing with her feuding parents and to get back at the both of them. She is younger than MC and expected to declare a divine domain soon, and both parents are pressuring her to choose the one they want.
Domains of the young goddess' parents:

Mother is a goddess of "diplomacy", i.e. persuasion (of doing anything).

Father is the most important god of war (at last it is the opinion on this continent; he has rival for the title on other continents).

MC's mother

A goddess of art. She has given MC an interest in creating beautiful things. MC has taken this to her creation of magical artefact and does not simply make them functional—this differentiates her from LI's other employees and garners her the satisfaction of their clients.
MC's mother can be vindictive and spiteful and has not forgiven MC's father for cheating on her, which is why she hid her daughter from him. With MC, however, she has been a good mother who, apart from insisting she hid her status, has supported her interests and helped her thrive. Nevertheless, this would not go so far as to approve of her daughter sneaking into the turf of another powerful god.