νεκρός || Annabeth Chase x Fem!OC

Vol. 1-1: I'm gonna be real with you; I'm not gonna be real with you

TEMPEST

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My name is Tempest. I am a liar, a fraud, a "little shit", if you will.

Oh, and I died.

Crazy, right? I'll go ahead and tell you right off the bat; I lie. I lie a lot. Some might consider it a disorder. But I'm so fluid at lying, it's nearly impossible to tell when I'm not lying, which is weird, because I'm actually a fairly honest person. I just lie when I'm bored or in trouble or want to make someone mad.

Yeah, okay, so maybe that happens a lot, but honestly, I'm telling the truth. In fact, I'll swear it on the River Styx that nothing I tell you guys will be a lie.

See? Thunder just rumbled. That means the oath is binding.

Now, if I'm talking to another person, you should keep your eyes peeled for a lie.

I suppose I should start at the beginning of the story, which is gonna suck, because it's long, and frankly, a little bit boring. I mean, who cares about my life? But, I gotta do this anyway. Full transparency, y'know? [This is an audio recording and Annabeth keeps telling me to stop stalling. Shut up, Annabeth!]

Basically, it all started with my dad, Silas. He worked at this textile place- this really shitty factory that was actually built on old plantation land in New Orleans. The factory made cotton products. Ironic, isn't it?

My dad was a great guy, y'know. That's why I hate this story so much.

He met a woman at the docks, one day- a Japanese woman, fresh from immigrating. She told him her name was Sagi, and my dad instantly fell in love with her. Naturally, he didn't know this was actually a goddess in disguise. Lo and behold, I was born, and "Sagi" dumped me on my dad's steps in the middle of a damn storm on November 1st. He named me Tempest in honor of that storm. I researched the storm in question when I was little, and found out it killed like half a dozen people or something (back in those days, death by storm was actually really common). I asked why he would name me after that, but he just smiled and said that I was the little jewel in the eye of the storm. I used to wonder why he wouldn't name me jewel, but he said I was too powerful just to sit still and look pretty.

I guess I lived up to my name, because I was a storm myself. I fucked shit up left and right, which, in retrospect, wasn't fair to my dad. He was a single father, but he actually wanted to be a good father, so he had to juggle me and his job (keep in mind that being a single father was not common in those days). We didn't have any other family. My dad was an only child and lost his parents eons before my birth. So, we were poor when I was a kid. I remember my dad really well. Despite how poor we were, my dad kept that hidden from me (well, he tried to. I'm smart, so I always knew, but it was nice to pretend we weren't poor). I had a full three meals a day, I was enrolled in a decent school, and I had a bedtime story each night. I didn't find out until a lot later that my dad would forego his own meals so I had enough to eat. I always figured he was just naturally skinny- like me- but looking back on it, my dad was actually starving.

I also didn't know how bad things were for a while. See, in those times, we had this little thing called segregation. I'm not black, you see. In fact, I'm technically white. But my stupid mother took the form of a Japanese woman, so guess what? I appear half-Asian. And back then, if you weren't fully white, you simply weren't white at all. If you had one-sixteenth non-white blood in you, you were sent to some shitty school and forced to deal with racism your whole life. And even though I technically had white-only mortal blood, I didn't look white. I always hated my appearance. Just another lie born from deceit.