AMARANTHINE-ɪ, pjo/hp

WE CAPTURE A FLAG

*PERCY P.O.V* 

(a/n: I shall be adding Percy's point of views every two chapters or so just to give y'all an insight as to how Percy is adjusting at Camp differently since Aurora is there.)

The next few days I settled into a routine that felt almost normal, if you don't count the fact that I was getting lessons from satyrs, nymphs, and a centaur. 

Each morning I took Ancient Greek from Annabeth and Aurora, and we talked about the gods and goddesses in the present tense, which was kind of weird. I discovered Annabeth was right about my dyslexia: Ancient Greek wasn't that hard for me to read. At least, no harder than English. After a couple of mornings, I could stumble through a few lines of Homer without too much headache. 

The rest of the day, I'd rotate through outdoor activities, looking for something I was good at. Aurora would often join me though I had a feeling that Annabeth had put her up to it. Chiron tried to teach me archery, but we found out pretty quick I wasn't any good with a bow and arrow. He didn't complain, even when he had to de-snag a stray arrow out of his tail, ignoring Aurora's muffled sniggering in the background.

Aurora turned out to be a pretty good archer though she mentioned that she preferred to use her twin blades and throwing daggers. She also seemed to have some sort of rivalry with a short son of Apollo named Michel Yew. 

As for other activities: Foot racing? No good either. The wood-nymph instructors left me in the dust. They told me not to worry about it. They'd had centuries of practice running away from lovesick gods. But still, it was a little humiliating to be slower than a tree.

And wrestling? Forget it. Every time I got on the mat, Clarisse would pulverize me.

"There's more where that came from, punk," she'd mumble in my ear.

The only thing I really excelled at was canoeing, and that wasn't the kind of heroic skill people expected to see from the kid who had beaten the Minotaur. Aurora joked about but I could tell that she too was a little disappointed by my performance.

I knew the senior campers and counselors were watching me, trying to decide who my dad was, but they weren't having an easy time of it. I wasn't as strong as the Ares kids, or as good at archery as the Apollo kids. I didn't have Hephaestus's skill with metalwork or-gods forbid- Dionysus's way with vine plants. Luke told me I might be a child of Hermes, a kind of jack-of-all-trades, master of none. But I got the feeling he was just trying to make me feel better. He really didn't know what to make of me either.

Aurora suggested that a goddess could be my other parent, but she debunked that theory since I was pretty sure that my mother was straight.

Despite all that, I liked camp. I got used to the morning fog over the beach, the smell of hot strawberry fields in the afternoon, even the weird noises of monsters in the woods at night. When I was bored, Aurora would pop out of nowhere and introduce me to various campers or just hang out with me, talking about random things. I would eat dinner with cabin eleven, scrape part of my meal into the fire, and try to feel some connection to my real dad. Nothing came. Just that warm feeling I'd always had, like the memory of his smile. I tried not to think too much about my mom, but I kept wondering: if gods and monsters were real, if all this magical stuff was possible, surely there was some way to save her, to bring her back...

I started to understand Luke's bitterness and how he seemed to resent his father, Hermes. So okay, maybe gods had important things to do. But couldn't they call once in a while, or thunder, or something? Dionysus could make Diet Coke appear out of thin air. Why couldn't my dad, whoever he was, make a phone appear?