EVARA // wtm (DISCONTINUED)

6

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ɪ ʙᴇᴄᴏᴍᴇ ꜱᴜᴘʀᴇᴍᴇ ʟᴏʀᴅ ᴏꜰ ᴛʜᴇ ʙᴀᴛʜʀᴏᴏᴍ (ᴘᴛ.1)

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The screen fades back in as the murmuring comes to an end.

Once I got over the fact that my Latin teacher was a horse, we had a nice tour, though I was careful not to walk behind him. I'd done pooper-scooper patrol in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade a few times, and, I'm sorry, I did not trust Chiron's back end the way I trusted his front.

"That is the funniest thing I've ever heard!" The Weasley twins chorused with their father Hermes.

Percy looked at Chiron's offended face and just shrugged

We passed the volleyball pit. Several of the campers nudged each other. One pointed to the minotaur horn I was carrying. Another said, "That's him."

Most of the campers were older than me. Their satyr friends were bigger than Grover, all of them trotting around in orange CAMP HALF-BLOOD T-shirts, with nothing else to cover their bare shaggy hindquarters. 

I wasn't normally shy, but the way they stared at me made me uncomfortable. I felt like they were expecting me to do a flip or something.

All the campers had the decency to look sheepish and apologise

I looked back at the farmhouse. It was a lot bigger than I'd realised—four stories tall, sky blue with white trim, like an upscale seaside resort. I was checking out the brass eagle weather vane on top when something caught my eye, a shadow in the uppermost window of the attic gable. Something had moved the curtain, just for a second, and I got the distinct impression I was being watched.

"What's up there?" I asked Chiron.

He looked where I was pointing, and his smile faded. "Just the attic."

"Somebody lives there?"

"No," he said with finality. "Not a single living thing."

Apollo glared at Hades a bit, but Astrea got him to calm down

"Truthful lies" spoke Luna Lovegood 

I got the feeling he was being truthful. But I was also sure something had moved that curtain.

"Come along, Percy," Chiron said, his lighthearted tone now a little forced. "Lots to see."

We walked through the strawberry fields, where campers were picking bushels of berries while a satyr played a tune on a reed pipe.

Chiron told me the camp grew a nice crop for export to New York restaurants and Mount Olympus. "It pays our expenses," he explained. "And the strawberries take almost no effort."

He said Mr. D had this effect on fruit-bearing plants: they just went crazy when he was around. It worked best with wine grapes, but Mr. D was restricted from growing those, so they grew strawberries instead.

I watched the satyr playing his pipe. His music was causing lines of bugs to leave the strawberry patch in every direction, like refugees fleeing a fire. I wondered if Grover could work that kind of magic with music. I wondered if he was still inside the farmhouse, getting chewed out by Mr. D.