Riptide by Annabeth Chase

Chapter Eight: Capture the Flag

 (The Lightning Thief pg 83-126)

I continued watching Percy as the week went on. I needed more information if my plan was going to work. He didn't excel at most camp activities which helped to rule out other parental options. He almost killed a few people when he tried archery and had a similar experience with forging. He was decent at most forms of hand-to-hand combat, but he wasn't amazing. He was good at making friends, even though he didn't seem to notice this. He was really good at canoeing, and he did spend a lot of his free time on the beach or by the lake.

He was sitting on the beach one evening and as I ran past trying to pretend I was just jogging casually. He seemed to realize I had been watching him more closely than the other councilors and glared at me.

"Are you stalking me?" he asked.

"Yeah, I suppose you could call it that," I conceded.

"What else would you call it?"

"Observing," I decided as I stopped jogging and backtracked a bit to answer his questions. "Stalking has a sinister implication. But you wouldn't be able to tell the difference so yeah, stalking works."

"Why?"

"I told you I wanted you on my team for capture the flag. I needed more information to formulate my plan. You're the wild card this time."

"Do you always talk about people like they're game pieces?"

"I try not to. Sometimes I forget people are people, I guess." I decided it might be acceptable to sit next to him.

"That makes no sense," he stated.

"I just forget that people are not like me, that humans aren't robots. Sometimes I even forget that I'm not a robot."

"I guess that's a problem I don't have," he said.

"I've noticed," I said, and he smiled a bit, "you like sitting on the beach?"

"Yeah, my mom loves - loved the ocean." I knew he was grieving so I managed to refrain from rolling my eyes at how literally true that might be. "She would always take me to the beach, and we had the best times there. I guess it's just nice to be here and the waves are calming."

"Waves are nice, they are calming and predictable," I agreed as the conch horn for curfew sounded and I jumped to my feet. "We better get to our cabins if we don't want to get eaten."

"Eaten!?" He asked as I helped him up and we made our way back to the cabins.

"Has no one told you about the harpies yet?"

"Uh no!"

"Yeah, it might be more of a threat than an actual consequence since I haven't actually seen it happen but apparently if you get caught out of bed by the harpies that clean and enforce curfew, they will eat you."

"Man, I guess we probably shouldn't be caught," he said calmly although he looked a little terrified.

"Probably a good idea, see you around."

"I definitely will if you keep stalking me."

"Ha, ha, I think I have all the information I need," I told him.

"Maybe I should just start reminding you I'm a person when you seem to forget," he said, and I thought I detected a joking tone.

"Probably a good idea," I said in response as I waved and headed towards my own cabin, and he headed to cabin eleven.

---

The next day I told my siblings about my plan to use Percy as bait (although I kept the part about his potential parent a secret). We would use the Ares pride against our opponents meaning that as long as we could get the Hermes cabin on our team winning would probably be laughably easy. In fact, a couple of my siblings were worried that winning that quickly would actually be less fun and we all bemoaned not having a better strategic opponent. But for now, I needed to go convince Luke to be on our team.