νεκρός || Annabeth Chase x Fem!OC

Vol. 2-7: I get an Emotional Support Animal

TEMPEST

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I was pretty miserable the rest of the day.

I mean, to be honest, I hadn't even been planning to come back to camp for winter break like Percy and Annabeth were. I just wanted to limit myself to the summer. This demigod stuff is whacky enough for my secret to spill out at any given moment. If I limit my time at camp, it lowers my chances a little bit.

Now, I have to stay. I don't care if Mr. D turns me into a bullfrog (will godly magic even work on me since I'm dead?), but I'm absolutely going to fight and get a quest to find Annabeth. Usually, I would do it myself, but- as much as I hate to admit it- I know I can't do this by myself. I've already asked the ghosts where she is, but they can only tell me she's shrouded by magic and they can't see her. Helpful, I know. And I can't have prophetic dreams like everyone else, because I'm dead, so I figured I would at least take someone alive with me for that purpose. Really, that would be their only purpose. I can do everything else on my own. They'll basically give me a daily clue and we'll go from there.

I kind of stalked around the woods aimlessly the rest of that day. I never get lost, since I go in there so much and I've been navigating crazy terrain for over ninety years. I'm at home in dense trees where everything looks the same. And, like I said, when I stay at Camp Half-Blood, I go in these woods every single night. I know my way out by the smells and the sounds, as well as, of course, the visuals. I can find my place just by the way the ground feels beneath me. I've always wondered how people get lost in the woods for so long, some even to the point of starvation. Do they not know how to forage, or are they just stupid?

It's not even that I need to forage anymore, but I still like to keep my skill exemplary. Maybe I should teach Annabeth how to forage when she comes back. Then again, she's crazy smart. She probably knows how to forage even better than me. I'm mostly good at it because this was how my family survived when I was a kid. Back then, fresh produce was a little harder to get, as well as fresh meat. Where you were from kind of decided your diet for you. We existed off of a lot of freshwater animals, like alligator and catfish and crawdads, and plants you could find scattered around, like blackberries and snap peas and cucumbers.

I remember when I first started traveling through America. See, unlike other ghosts, I'm not bound to the general vicinity of my corpse. If I want to go somewhere, I can, as part of Melinoe's blessing. At first, I was too scared to use it. I stuck around in New Orleans, since it was all I really knew, but I had changed my physical appearance so people didn't recognize me as the girl that killed her whole family. Over time, I got very good at lying. I was able to rob and steal in disguise, then immediately change form halfway down the street so I was no longer a suspect. I used my money to travel, eventually.

I remember how crazy it all was. To see the different cultures and the way people spoke. I mean, back in those days, I had such a strong New Orleans accent, you'd think I was speaking a different language- which I did, sometimes. It wasn't uncommon to see me slip into my Louisiana French mid-conversation. So I remember when I first traveled a little further west, towards Dallas, Texas. There, they had much more twangy accents. I remembered how shocked some of the people were when I opened my mouth, but I was shocked by them. And I remember being weirded out, because at that time, Dallas didn't have much of a night life. In New Orleans, everything awakened at night. It was hard for me to walk at night in Dallas and not hear the music anymore.