Quest of the Half Gods

Chapter 1: Απόλλων

Apollo wheezed, glancing behind him as he ran. What if I just puked, laid down, and let her eat me? It would be much easier than this. He thought miserably, struggling to breathe air into his lungs. He tripped over a tree root landing on his knees. Oh! Looks like we are following my plan! He began giggling uncontrollably as the accepted his fate before a hand locked around his wrist and yanked him to his feet, dragging him along the forest floor.

"What is wrong with you?" Galatea hissed, pulling him alongside her. Apollo giggled again, "I have a long history of having mental breakdowns in forests only to be rescued by powerful women who hate me." Galatea pulled him behind a tree, placing both of her hands on his shoulders to steady him. Apollo poked his head out from behind the tree. "We should probably keep going." He giggled. Galatea glared at him, "I know, I just had to do this really quick." She slapped him across the face as hard as she could. "OW! WHAT WAS THAT FOR?" Teia smirked, "Did it work?" Apollo sighed, "Yeah, I mean it did-" "Good," She said, bracing herself to run again, "Because I've never been great at trivia." She took off running again, Apollo grumbling behind her.

"Mean girl slaps my face,

Ow, that was uncalled for, why?

I hate my life tons."

Apollo formed the haiku in his head as a distraction from the extreme physical exertion that he was being put through. It was terrible, though it was a coping mechanism that he'd developed over the years to ignore various things that he didn't enjoy like Artemis' voice and Zeus' voice, and...what was he thinking about?

"Come on guys, it's just a game of life or death! Apollo, I know you want to play." Called a sing-song voice from behind them. "No, I really don't." Apollo wheezed. "Can we play rock-paper-scissors or perhaps a friendly game of hop-scotch instead?" She laughed, "No sweetie, only answer questions work for me! Maybe a math problem?" "Oh, gods no!" Galatea gasped, the suggestion of doing math making her look more nauseous than Apollo felt just in general. "I'm sure we can come to a compromise!" The creature persuaded. Though Apollo appreciated her manipulating skills, he did not appreciate the fact that she was trying to kill them.

He opened his mouth to reply that he didn't want to play any games and that he just actually wanted to lie down and die, when the creature pounced over their heads, blocking their path.

"Now, where were we?" The sphinx asked. "I do believe we were picking a trivia category, weren't we?" Apollo raised his hands, "Listen, can we at least do something easy like...Harry Potter questions?" "Of course!" "WAIT NO THAT WAS A SUGGESTION FOR ONE CATEGORY I ACTUALLY DON'T KNOW ANYTHING, GIVE US A SEC." The sphinx raised an eyebrow and laid down.

Galatea and Apollo turned away from the creature and put their heads down as if they were in a football huddle except it was a trivia huddle. "What do you know?" Galatea asked. "Literally nothing," Apollo admitted, realizing that they were finally going to be brought down by a trivia-spouting lion woman.

Throughout the last couple of weeks, since Galatea had last been mugged by Delphi, they'd fought all kinds of monsters and somehow had survived all of them without losing anything but a few chunks of hair (harpies were dirty fighters) and their will to live. Their path had ended in the woods somewhere in Canada, where they'd gotten about an hour of peace before they started being stalked by a local sphinx who had nothing better to do, or so she said. Four days of evasion later, they were here.

"Okay, I'm tired of this game of chicken." The sphinx said, "I'm choosing now. Your category is chemistry." Apollo forced his tear ducts to suck the tears that wanted to come out back in. "You gave us less than a minute!" Galatea complained. "Yeah, well you asked for a second and I gave you thirty so..."