MAYA REYES didn't exactly think of herself as popular.
I mean, she was nice, kind, and occasionally funny, but she didn't think of herself as popular. Considering the fact that her highlight of camp was Dionysus coming up to her in the middle of di...
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IF YOU HAD TOLD Maya an hour ago that she would participate in a monster game of hunt-and-seek, almost get killed by super-jumbo-sized lobster, then fall into a re-opened entrance of the Labyrinth with Percy Jackson, the most infamous camper around, she would've laughed in your face. Like, actually laughed in it. Totally not kidding.
Because I mean, 1) That would be totally crazy. Like, Luke-Castellan-going-off-on-a-demi-god-murder-spree crazy, 2) She didn't even participate in capture-the-flag games, so why would she want to go off on a murderous game of hunt-and-seek (which sounded like a total safety hazard, by the way), and 3) Those types of cosas didn't happen to her. They really didn't, she wasn't lying. Those things happened to the important people around camp, like Clarisse la Rue or Annabeth Chase. Everybody knew those campers. Sure, people knew Maya... but not necessarily as Maya. They knew her as the girl who'd fallen off of the Big House's roof that one day, or the one who'd tripped in the middle of the Apollo cabin's music lesson and came crashing into the drums, or the camper that had been chased out of the kitchens by the harpies, screaming and yelling, in the middle of lunch for trying to nick some more Pepsi.
See, she just wasn't the type of demigod to be put in a prophecy or get some great, life-changing quest. Those were left to the campers who'd got it into their heads that they were the main characters of one of Olympus's TV shows and loved going out of camp borders to kick some monster butt and save whatever things the world needed saving. Maya, on the other hand, didn't really want to save the world all the time, she just wanted a nice gaseosa once and a while.
So, that was why she hated when Chiron kicked her out of the Big House that afternoon to go participate in the Friday activity and "interact with her peers." Excuse her, but she already had peers, three of them to be exact and she didn't appreciate Chiron calling her lonely. The correct term was super-afraid-of-embarrassment-and-social-interaction. Anyway, she had just been in one very productive shooting practice with her shotgun, and she did not appreciate his interruption. (Don't worry, we will return to why a 15-year-old has a shotgun shortly).
There were very few times when her aim was good enough not to take somebody's ojo out, and that happened to be one of them, but of course, Chiron said she had to participate in the war games that day, and blah, blah, blah. Ηλίθιο άλογο.
However, instead of playing, she didn't know, capture-the-flag, like she was used to and had specific plans for escaping, Quintus, the new sword instructor (first off, what kind of job name was that?) decided that things needed a little shaking up. So instead of hiding in one of her secret hollows that her friend Aiden had helped her find and drawing stick figures en la mugre while Clarisse ran around screaming bloody murder, she was going to have to participate in monster hunt-and-seek for some stupid laurels. Laurels! This is what her whole, demi-god life had amounted to. Some gold-foil laurels. Why couldn't her father have kept it in his ropa?
