ᴄᴀᴠᴇ ᴄᴀɴᴇᴍ: ᴘᴀʀᴛ ɪɪ ᴏꜰ ᴛʜᴇ ᴘᴇʀᴄᴀʙᴇᴛʜ/ꜱᴏʟᴀɴɢᴇʟᴏ ᴘʀᴏᴊᴇᴄᴛ

ᴘʀᴏʟᴏɢᴜᴇ

Will so badly wanted to be a party guy back then. When he realized that wasn't realistic, his attitude was more that he wanted to be able to last at least three hours at parties, and then just two hours, and then suddenly he was doing it! He was going to frat parties and clubs and drinking bad beer and having an awesome time doing it!

But back at Camp Half-Blood, as a sixteen-year-old kid, parties weren't his thing, no matter how badly he wanted them to be. Everyone else who had fun at parties drank the cheap beer the Stoll brothers got from the gas station down the street until they were sick. They played truth or dare and jumped into the freezing canoe lake in just their underwear.

Will couldn't get behind any of that; he just wanted to dance to Taylor Swift and have a good time. Drinking underage is a bad idea, peer pressure is never a good thing, and jumping into the cold canoe lake can give you hypothermia!

Usually, Will retreated to the infirmary around nine and waited for someone who got hurt in a boozy accident to stumble in looking for a bandage, which of course, he would happily provide.

So that particular August night wasn't any different. He left the end-of-the-summer party around nine—nine-fifteen, actually, because he was feeling rebellious that night. He had less than one drink in him and had almost lost one of his Adidas slides when Sherman Yang flat-tired him because Pitbull music started playing.

He got his slide shoe back but with some casualties.

After he'd had enough, Will threw his strawberry stems into the compost and started heading out of the north woods.

"Hey, Willy! Leaving so soon?" Connor shouted over the music.

"Uh, yeah," Will said. "I should probably head over to the infirmary."

"Hey, listen," Connor said, lowering his voice. "Have you seen Annabeth?"

"No," Will said. Why would he have seen Annabeth? Annabeth hated him because he got mad at her for wrecking the Apollo cabin's chariot, which she did. She wrecked his chariot and didn't even apologize because she was too busy being sad about her missing boyfriend!

They didn't speak again after the incident, and Will isn't sure if it was because they didn't have anything to say to each other, or if she was still mad about the whole thing. Why would she be mad? It wasn't her chariot that was completely destroyed!

Will had always been a good guy, and if there was ever a reason to be concerned about someone, he would always be concerned, even if he didn't like the person who may or may not be in trouble. "Why?" he asked Connor. "Is she okay?"

"Uh," Connor started. "Well, we uh..." He scratched the back of his neck awkwardly. "Yeah. Everything's fine."

Something about that made Will feel like everything was not fine, so he took the long route back to the infirmary.

He wasn't being nosy, per se, but... Well, he was being nosy. When the baddest, toughest bitch at camp is in trouble, you want to know about it!

The walk back took him through the Grove of Dodona, over a couple of sleeping satyrs, and past someone's trap from a game of capture the flag. He tripped over a rock and came face-to-face with a couple making out in an overgrown bush. He did not play off his embarrassment well.

"Be safe!" he said to them.

He emerged from the grove into a flat open terrain usually used for archery practice or a faster game of capture-the-flag. Will couldn't see himself playing capture the flag and doing well; he could have been a decent battlefield medic except he wouldn't be able to keep himself from healing the other team's players.