Nyctophilia

7||MY DINNER GOES UP IN SMOKE(part 1)

"Star, will you be okay?" Riki asks Celeste, noticing her downcast eyes.
"Yea... hey don't look at me like that in telling the truth"
Riki raises his eyebrows
"Fine...these books will surely have a lot of mentions of him, it sucks you know, I could have saved him had I been a bit stronger or a bit-"
"Like chose his path Celeste there was nothing you could have done"
"But-"
"No buts" he cuts her off the second time making her sigh, frustrated.

|Ch-7 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 staring at Annabeth and Celeste, who were still pretty much dripping wet.
"I wish I knew I could use my wand at that time, we wouldn't have to be shivering and wet at that time" Celeste comments.
She 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.
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."
"Whatever."
"It wasn't my fault."
She and Celeste both looked at me skeptically, and I realized it was my fault. 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 two 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
shimmering 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.
" They most probably knew at that time don't you think?" Percy asked no one in particular
" Perce.... No spoilers and i think they most probably did, you have an aura of power like that" Celeste answers.
"Don't encourage them," Annabeth warned. "Naiads are terrible flirts."
"Naiads," I repeated, feeling completely overwhelmed. "That's it. I want
to go home now."
Annabeth frowned. "Don't you get it, Percy? You are home. This is the
only safe place on earth for kids like us."
"One of the only, Rome's there too" Jason and Riki say in unison.
"You mean, mentally disturbed kids?"
"I mean yes" Annabeth muses
"I mean not human. Not totally human, anyway. Half-human."
"Half-human and half-what?"
"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," Celeste said. "Half-god."
Annabeth nodded. "Your father isn't dead, nor is one of your parents.
They're 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 two thousand 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?"
"That's sexist Percy, you should ask her who her godly parent is instead" Celeste scolds
" You assume it has to be a male god who finds a human female attractive? How sexist is that? And you're right Celeste that is the correct way to ask"
"Who's your mom, then?"
"Cabin six."
"Meaning?"
Annabeth straightened. "Athena. Goddess of wisdom and battle."
Okay, I thought. Why not?
"And my dad?"
"Undetermined," Annabeth said, "like I told you before. Nobody knows."
"Except my mother. She knew."
"Maybe not, Percy. Gods don't always reveal their identities."
"My dad would have. He loved her."
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?"
Percy noticed the looks he got from the wizarding world
"Hey don't give us that look, we get determined before 13 now!" He exclaimed
"And how did that happen?" Professor mcgonnal asked
"Ah well...we asked the gods" Percy said looking at celeste who corrected him
"Nope we straight up fought for them and took that as a favor"
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,
Percy. They ignore us."
"That's not true Annabeth, we're quite busy, we do care" applo says
"Busy?" Celeste scoffs " doing what? Hades is one of the only gods I've seen actually doing his job. What do you do which is more important than your children? The same ones whom you ruined the lives of? The children you don't claim. You neglect, hope that they get claimed and as time passes that hope turns into resentment, that's what drove him to the point of doing what he did, his point wasn't wrong"
Celeste was talking about Luke, of course she was and she wasn't wrong the gods had demigods fighting for them, the children slowly resented their parents.
As she snapped at Apollo, she got looks from the other world. They were surprised at how she snapped
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 we're stuck here," I said. "That's it? For the rest of our life?"
"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."
"I'm sorry I didn't mean that, it's just that monsters tend to-" Annabeth started explaining quickly knowing that she would get pulverized if she didn't.
"It's alright child, we understand, '' Demeter said kindly.
"So monsters can't get in here?" Celeste asked looking intrigued.

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Im sorry for being gone so long 😭
Idk why I'd didnt update like I finished writing this 3 days ago idk, oh m I'm reading trials of appolo:hidden Oracle again so lemme just say.
I have a headcanon that Hades was quite a fun uncle to be around when he was allowed to meet Apollo and the others.
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