Breaking the Gods

chapter 9

Nico's new room was a cell. Like a prison cell. Or maybe more like a cell in a mental institution for the criminally insane. There was a door instead of bars, but the walls were padded. That seemed a little contradictory, with them putting a nice metal set of bunk beds in the room for them.

Also, Nico had a roomate. He was a little concerned about this at first or several reasons. The first being that his roomate had those creepy blue eyes that he'd seen in the pictures, and on that son of Kratos. The second was that his roommate was kept strapped down to the lower bunk with restraints. The third was that those restraints didn't really appear to be necessary. His roommate seemed to be catatonic. All he did was lie there, staring straight up with those freaky blue eyes of his, blinking every once in awhile, but aside from that not moving at all. He didn't respond when Nico spoke to him or gave his shoulder a shake. Nico considered undoing the restraints and seeing if that had any effect, but ultimately decided against it for now. He didn't know why the guy had been strapped down, and didn't want to find out why when the guy went into a Piers-reminiscent raging fit, ripped the bunk beds up from where they were bolted to the floor, and proceeded to beat him to death with them. That would suck.

Nico tested the strength of the door, its frame, and the lock and quickly realized he wasn't going to be able to break the door down. Not with his demigod powers being weakened by whatever this place was doing. Whatever kind of power dampener they had wasn't hurting Nico, at least not that he could tell, but it was cutting off his access to all of his demigod abilities. His boosted strength was gone, he could clearly tell, and by the way his steps had been lagging in the hall, on the way down, he was pretty sure whatever bonus his demigod blood gave to his speed had been knocked out as well. He couldn't sense the dead anymore, couldn't feel the shadows. Even his ADHD was gone.

Never had he been more grateful for the god that was stuck in his head. He still had access to his Egyptian magic, as he discovered when he had Anubis help him pull a candy-bar out of his Duat stash, and his blood still acted like nectrotic acid. He tested it to make sure. On the camera in his room. Nico didn't appreciate people spying on him.

He tore the camera apart, partly to hide evidence of the acid damage when they inevitably took it away from him, but also partly out of curiosity. He wasn't sure if whatever was suppressing his powers came from one big source that covered all or most of the Blue Ward, or if it came from a bunch of tinier sources scattered throughout the complex. He didn't find anything suspicious or mystical looking when he broke apart the camera, or anywhere else in his cell that he searched, but that wasn't enough to make Nico rule out that theory. He wasn't sure which would be easier. If it was one source, then he'd only have to destroy one thing to get his powers back, anywhere he went in the Blue Ward. But if the suppression came from smaller sources scattered throughout the ward, he'd be able to restore his powers in certain areas, which might be all that he needed.

They came and took away the broken camera less than half an hour after he dismantled it, but were at least smart enough not to try and replace it because Nico would have broken that one to pieces too. Winning his privacy was no small victory. After that he searched every inch of his room looking for, well, anything. He found that the floor had a slight slope toward the center underneath the linoleum, and it sounded slightly hollow when he rapped his fist against it. There was probably a drain underneath it, but not a big enough one to escape through. Percy might have been able to summon water through it if he was there and there wasn't that power dampening thing going on, but it was pretty useless to Nico.

There was a decent sized ventilation shaft on the wall across the room from the bed. A normal kid or demigod wouldn't have been able to reach it, unless they were an extremely good athlete even without the boost of power their god blood gave them, but even if they could, it was bolted in place. The room was well and truly secure, which left Nico with no doubts that a demigod without his or her powers would have no way out. He was just lucky that a demigod wasn't the only thing he was. There were two ways out that Nico could think of for himself, even without access to his shadow traveling. The first was using his blood to burn the lock off the door. The second was getting Anubis to use a hadi spell and just splitting the door in half. So he wasn't worried.