"That was so cool!" A younger Hufflepuff boy shouts out!
Percy smirks at this and the other looks he recieves from the wixen. Apprehension and some show fear.
"Thanks buddy" Percy says.
MY DINNER GOES UP IN SMOKE
Word of the bathroom incident spread immediately. Wherever I went, campers pointed at me and murmured something about toilet water. Or maybe they were just star-ing at Annabeth, who was still pretty much dripping wet. Anthea had a field day, she giggled almost all the time and nudged me with her elbow. Annabeth showed us a few more places: the metal shop (where kids were forging their own swords), the arts and-crafts room (where satyrs were sandblasting a giant marble statue of a goat-man), and the climbing wall, which actually consisted of two facing walls that shook violently, dropped boulders, sprayed lava, and clashed together if you didn't get to the top fast enough.
Many mouthes was open at the last statement.
Finally we returned to the canoeing lake, where the trail led back to the cabins. "I've got training to do," Annabeth said flatly. "Dinner's at seven-thirty. Just follow your cabin to the mess hall."
"Annabeth, I'm sorry about the toilets." "I'm not" Thea muttered under her breath. "Whatever." "It wasn't my fault." She looked at me skeptically, and I realized it was my fault. "Totally your fault" Thea smirked at me. I'd made water shoot out of the bathroom fixtures. I didn't understand how. But the toilets had responded to me. I had become one with the plumbing.
"You need to talk to the Oracle," Annabeth said. "Who?" "Not who. What. The Oracle. I'll ask Chiron." I stared into the lake, wishing somebody would give me a straight answer for once. I wasn't expecting anybody to be looking back at me from the bottom, so my heart skipped a beat when I noticed two teenage girls sitting cross-legged at the base of the pier, about twenty feet below. They wore blue jeans and shim-mering green T-shirts, and their brown hair floated loose around their shoulders as minnows darted in and out. They smiled and waved as if I were a long-lost friend.
I didn't know what else to do. I waved back, Thea did too but more enthusiastic and with a big smile. "Don't encourage them," Annabeth warned. "Naiads are terrible flirts." "We were just being friendly, no need to be a bitch about it" Annabeth glared at her and I tried to hold in my snicker.
"Naiads," I repeated, feeling completely overwhelmed. "That's it. I want to go home now."
"But you haven't seen anything yet" Clarisse smirked at him.
"Hey! I was twelve!" Percy defended himself.
"So was I but I had seen more" Thea snickered at him.
"Not fair you belong to the wizarding world too!"
"So?"
Thea just did this to rile him up. It was so much fun.
"Enough children" Poseidon stops their bickering.
Thea puts out her tounge towards Percy and he starts to gesture towards her in a meaning 'see what I have to deal with'.
Annabeth frowned. "Don't you get it, Percy? You are home. This is the only safe place on earth for kids like us." "You mean, mentally disturbed kids?" "I mean not human. Not totally human, anyway. Half-human." "Half-human and half-what?" "I give up how can I be related to this guy!" Thea slung her hands up in the air. "I think you know." I didn't want to admit it, but I was afraid I did. I felt a tingling in my limbs, a sensation I sometimes felt when my mom talked about my dad. "God," I said. "Half-god."
"I still can't believe it" Neville a Gryffindor whispers in awe.
Annabeth nodded. "Your father isn't dead, Percy. He's one of the Olympians." "That's ... crazy." "Is it? What's the most common thing gods did in the old stories? They ran around falling in love with humans and having kids with them. Do you think they've changed their habits in the last few millennia?" "But those are just-" I almost said myths again. Then I remembered Chiron's warning that in twothousand years, I might be considered a myth. "But if all the kids here are half-gods-"
"Demigods," Annabeth said. "That's the official term. Or half-bloods." "Then who's your dad?" Her hands tightened around the pier railing. I got the feeling I'd just trespassed on a sensitive subject. "My dad is a professor at West Point," she said. "I haven't seen him since I was very small. He teaches American history." "He's human." "What? You assume it has to be a male god who finds a human female attractive? How sexist is that?" "Very" Thea didn't look impressed at me. "Who's your mom, then?" "Cabin six." "Meaning?" Annabeth straightened. "Athena. Goddess of wisdom and battle." Okay, I thought. Why not? "And our dad?"
"Undetermined," Annabeth said, "like I told you before. Nobody knows." "Except our mother. She knew." "Maybe not, Percy. Gods don't always reveal their iden-tities." "My dad would have. He loved her."
"I did" Poseidon looks towards Percy and Anthea.
Annabeth gave me a cautious look. She didn't want to burst my bubble. "Maybe you're right. Maybe he'll send a sign. That's the only way to know for sure: your father has to send you a sign claiming you as his son. Sometimes it happens." You mean sometimes it doesn't?" Anthea looked incredulous at her, Annabeth ran her palm along the rail. "The gods are busy. They have a lot of kids and they don't always... Well, sometimes they don't care about us. They ignore us."
Many of the gods looks down in shame. They wanted to meet their children and acknowledge them but with the hierarchy and the rule that states that you can't meet them, it's hard.
"Shame on you! Ignoring your kids!" Molly Weasley huts her finger at them.
The gods and demigods looked at her like she had grown a second head. The Weasley twins whispered together.
"Hypocrite"
They looked down in sadness, they had often been ignored by their mother and just been scolded that they weren't good enough.
I thought about some of the kids I'd seen in the Hermes cabin, teenagers who looked sullen and depressed, as if they were waiting for a call that would never come. I'd known kids like that at Yancy Academy, shuffled off to boarding school by rich parents who didn't have the time to deal with them. But gods should behave better.
"So I'm - oof - we're stuck here," I said while massaging where Thea had elbowed me. "That's it? For the rest of our lives?" "Not me" Thea denied. "I have to go back to school on september first" I looked at her horror struck. "And now without my sister most of the time!" "Aww you love me!" Thea teases me and kiss my cheek.
"It depends," Annabeth said. "Some campers only stay the summer. If you're a child of Aphrodite or Demeter, you're probably not a real powerful force. The monsters might ignore you, so you can get by with a few months of summer training and live in the mortal world the rest of the year. But for some of us, it's too dangerous to leave. We're year-rounders. In the mortal world, we attract monsters. They sense us. They come to challenge us. Most of the time, they'll ignore us until we're old enough to cause trouble-about ten or eleven years old, but after that, most demigods either make their way here, or they get killed off. A few manage to survive in the outside world and become famous. Believe me, if I told you the names, you'd know them. Some don't even realize they're demigods. But very, very few are like that."
