ATLOP: Lessons in Water

Please Listen to an Expert

Adding a bonus chapter to properly catch up again. Hope you enjoy <3

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OO OO OO OO

The confederates were... something.

They were perfectly polite to Annabeth, especially when she mentioned being from Virginia, but they... didn't like me very much.

Annabeth got in a shouting match with one when he said some... less than flattering things to me.

Clarisse ordered all of them to treat us with respect or they'd join the one who went off the side of the boat.

He was not retrieved.

I wasn't very upset about that.

Suffice to say I spent most of the time studiously ignoring the looks while staring out at the water.

Annabeth had decided she did not want to learn from these sailors and was instead going to buy books on ship engineering, ship manning, and all other manner of ship handling.

She promised to summarize them for me, so I could learn it too.

Tyson was upset that they weren't nice. He liked the boat and wanted to learn about it but didn't want to be around the people being mean to me.

Tyson tried to explain to the captain that it wasn't very nice to be mean to people for something like their appearance, but the captain wasn't very impressed.

Tyson had to pulled away 'cause he'd burst into tears and tried to backhand the captain.

The captain avoided Tyson from then on.

Other than the people running the ship, it was a nice ride. We got to sleep in hammocks, ride the waves, see the stars relatively untouched by pollution, wave to various sea creatures, and relax.

I read my curse breaking book a lot. It was elaborating on the nature of curses and how to counter them when it has yet to be tied in.

The best time to break a curse is before it can be fully placed on someone, before the layers are laid or the threads twisted or tightened. The hardest one to prevent are ones with overwhelming power, but the rest were at their most delicate when one is placing them.

I ran my finger over the lines detailing methods to counter curses.

They were all different. From stabbing out your power to break the web, to sweeping a physical barrier in place, to threading your own power in a different way so the curse threads get caught, to pushing them away, there were all kinds of methods to do.

Even a beginner curse breaker could prevent someone from cursing them if they could catch it before it set. They just needed to keep an eye out and practice controlling their power.

Annabeth groaned, dropping onto her hammock.

"The soldiers are so... infuriating."

I closed my book, peering at her.

"What did they do?"

She paused, glancing at me, then grimaced.

"It... just being nasty again. Clarisse is going over the maps right now so didn't hear it."

"They're already dead," I muttered. "They'll die again soon and go back to torment, or whatever else it was they had."

Annabeth nodded, huffing. "I wish we could've gotten on a boat with almost literally anything else. They're so horrible, it makes me feel icky just being around them."