Those blue eyes. A.C x oc fem

1.6- Aunty Em.

☆☆☆☆☆☆Victoire Avery☆☆☆☆☆☆

After tripping and cursing and generally feeling miserable (For my purple hodies) for another mile or so, I started to see light up ahead: the colors of a neon sign. I could smell food. Fried,greasy, excellent food.I remembered I hadn't eaten anything unhealthy since I'd arrived at Half-Blood Hill, where we lived on grapes, bread, cheese, and extra-lean-cut nymph-prepared barbecue.

We kept walking until I saw a deserted two-lane road through the trees. On the other side was a
closed-down gas station, a tattered billboard for a 1990's movie, and one open business,which was the source of the neon light and the good smell.

It wasn't a fast-food restaurant like I'd hoped. It was one of those weird roadside curio shops that sell lawn flamingos and wooden Indians and cement grizzly bears and stuff like that. The main building was a long, low warehouse, surrounded by acres of statuary. The neon sign above the gate was impossible for me to read, because if there's anything worse for my dyslexia than regular English, it's red cursive neon English.

To me, it looked like: ATYNU MES GEDRAN GOMNE MERPOUIM.

"What the heck does that say?" Percy asked.

"I don't know," Annabeth said.

She loved reading so much, I'd forgotten she was dyslexic, too.

Grover translated: "Aunty Em's
Garden Gnome Emporium."

Flanking the entrance, as advertised, were two cement garden gnomes, ugly bearded little runts,smiling and waving, as if they were about to get their picture taken.

Percy crossed the street, following the smell of the hamburgers.

"Hey . . ." Grover warned.

"The lights are on inside," Annabeth said. "Maybe it's open."

"Snack bar," Percy said wistfully.

"Snack bar," she agreed.

"Are you two crazy?" Grover said. "This place is weird."

"Even if I would love some hamburgers right now. . . Grover's right, I mean, statuary? In here?" I said.

They totally ignored us.

The front lot was a forest of statues: cement animals, cement children, even a cement satyr playing the pipes, which gave Grover the creeps.

"Bla-ha-ha!" he bleated. "Looks like my Uncle Ferdinand!"

We stopped at the warehouse door.

"Don't knock,"Grover pleaded"I smell monsters."

The smell is actually pretty nice. . . But three demigods in one place, two of them being big three kids, how can we know we won't find the owner of the shop thinking that, they are being robbed, when it's a monster waiting for us? But if we think like that we're gonna starve. . . Well the summer solstice is like in ten days, I don't think we can starve in ten days.

"Grover's right, we shouldn't knock." I agreed.

"Your nose is clogged up from the Furies," Annabeth told him. "All I smell is burgers.Aren't you hungry?"

"Meat!" he said scornfully. 'I'm a vegetarian."

"You eat cheese enchiladas and aluminum cans," Percy reminded him.

"Those are vegetables. Come on. Let's leave. These statues are . . . looking at me." He glanced nervously at the statues, I followed his gaze, mine stopping in a boy with a toga and a sword, but the toga didn't looked greek. . . It looked Roman? I looked at the sword again, realizing it looked just like a roman gladius.