ᴄᴀᴠᴇ ᴄᴀɴᴇᴍ: ᴘᴀʀᴛ ɪɪ ᴏꜰ ᴛʜᴇ ᴘᴇʀᴄᴀʙᴇᴛʜ/ꜱᴏʟᴀɴɢᴇʟᴏ ᴘʀᴏᴊᴇᴄᴛ

ɪ | ᴀɴ ᴀʟʟ-ᴇxᴘᴇɴꜱᴇ ᴘᴀɪᴅ ʜᴏɴᴇʏᴍᴏᴏɴ

Imagine the best day ever. You're staying at a cabin in Montauk, spending days taking early morning walks on the beach with your girlfriend. She builds a better sandcastle than you, but when you compete to see who can find the tiniest seashell, you'll win every time. When you're both exhausted—or when you're both suffering from a bad sunburn—you'll go back to the humble cabin. While your girlfriend hums a John Lennon song in the shower, you'll make pasta with Alfredo sauce for dinner, and she'll tell you the food is to die for. After that, you'll open up the Ben and Jerry's ice cream pints—Phish Food for her, and Chewy Gooey Cookie for you—over a screening of Jaws even though you've forced her to watch it about a million times by now. She'll fall asleep on the couch before it's over, and you'll have to carry her to bed, but you don't mind because you love her that much.

Now take that beautiful scene and imagine the exact opposite. Suddenly, it's not so hard for Percy as he finds himself sharing a New Rome private honeymoon jet with his crazy ex-girlfriend on a potentially life-or-death quest.

Crazy isn't a word that Percy just throws around. People talk about their crazy ex-girlfriends all the time. Some crazy ex-girlfriends stalk you on Instagram. Others send you relentless text messages until you block them, only to send your nudes to your mother, not that he would know from experience. He was on several wrong sides of TikTok for a while after Leo got those new monster-proof phones distributed.

In Percy's case, his ex-girlfriend all but dropped off the face of the earth for ten years, only to then reappear having quit all aspirations of becoming an architect in favor of a job as a bartender at Hooters, and then showed up blacked out inside a Dutch windmill. That's a crazy ex-girlfriend.

So yeah. This is not the vacation he'd like to be on right now. Instead of cozy familiar Montauk, he's flying over gigantic Europe. Instead of Ben and Jerry's ice cream, he's watching Annabeth eat his package of peanuts because she asked if he was going to eat them and did not wait for a reply.

And instead of his comfort movie Jaws, he's listening to the sounds of Annabeth playing with her shiny new monster-proof iPhone from Leo.

"Percy, how do I send this video to Will?" she asks.

"Tap the arrow at the bottom of the screen," he says, only to be tuned out by—oh gods—she's found the ringtones.

"You mean this thing can fucking quack every time someone texts me?"

It's not worth answering. She's not listening. She's had her phone for less than twenty-four hours and she's glued to it like an iPad kid.

Percy doesn't want to sound ungrateful for the strides he's made patching up his relationship with his ex-girlfriend in the past couple of days. He's thankful that they don't spill drinks on each other anymore, and they can almost stand to be in a room together, but he's learned something else about Annabeth that's changed in the past ten years.

She's annoying. Like, so annoying that Percy's thinking about drinking, but he can't do that. He doesn't drink. That's against everything he stands for, and besides, Annabeth's the one with the small drinking problem. He's the one who'll drag her to bed and hold her hair back while she vomits at the end of the night, apparently.

Annabeth, who has been not so quietly enjoying the luxuries her cell phone and the New Rome private jet have to offer, rotates about ninety degrees in her chair so her legs are hanging off the top. So it's true what they say about bisexuals and not being able to sit in chairs properly.

"You know that thing people do where they try to have sex in as many countries as possible?" Annabeth asks. The devilish glint in her stormy grey eyes is a warning sign that he isn't going to like whatever she's going to say next.