Sun kissed - Apollo.

1: Percy pulverises Mrs Dodds.

Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood.

If you're reading this because you think you might be one, my advice is: close this book right now. Believe whatever lie your mom or dad told you about your birth, and try to lead a normal life.

Being a half-blood is dangerous. It's scary. Most of the time, it gets you killed in painful, nasty ways.

If you're a normal kid, reading this because you think it's fiction, great. Read on. I envy you for being able to believe that none of this ever happened.

But if you recognize yourself in these pages-if you feel something stirring inside-stop reading immediately. You might be one of us. And once you know that, it's only a matter of time before they sense it too, and they'll come for you.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

My name is Percy Jackson.

I'm twelve years old. I have a twin sister that's about a day younger than me, Daphne. Until a few months ago, I was a boarding student at Yancy Academy, a private school for troubled kids in upstate New York.

Am I a troubled kid?

Yeah. You could say that.

I could start at any point in my short miserable life to prove it, but things really started going bad last May, when our sixth-grade class took a field trip to Manhattan- twenty-eight mental-case kids, Daphne and two teachers on a yellow school bus, heading to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at ancient Greek and Roman stuff.

I know-it sounds like torture. Most Yancy field trips were.

But Mr. Brunner, our Latin teacher, was leading this trip, so I had hopes.

Mr. Brunner was this middle-aged guy in a motorised wheelchair. He had thinning hair and a scruffy beard and a frayed tweed jacket, which always smelled like coffee. You wouldn't think he'd be cool, but he told stories and jokes and let us play games in class. He also had this awesome collection of Roman armor and weapons, so he was the only teacher whose class didn't put me to sleep.

I hoped the trip would be okay. At least, I hoped that for once I wouldn't get in trouble.

Boy, was I wrong.

But, i shouldn't get too far ahead of myself, this isn't even my story.

It's my sister's, can you imagine? A thin little girl with lots of black wavy hair, sea green eyes and her nose always stuffed into a book. We both have heavy dyslexia and words fly off the pages, but she doesn't seem bothered much by it. It takes her a week to finish a book with around 250 pages and two weeks if it's close to 500 pages.

Maybe, i should let her tell it.

🔱🍓🌻🌞

Hi, I'm Daphne Iris Jackson.

Don't let Percy fool you, I'm sure he has told you that we're twelve and that he's a day older than me. But that's not entirely true, he's one hour and twenty minutes older, he was born an hour before midnight on the 18th of august and i was born twenty minutes after midnight on the 19th of august.

Now, i wouldn't say that school is necessarily bad but me and Percy never seem to be able to stay at one school before being kicked out.

See, bad things happen to me and Percy on field trips. Like at my fifth-grade school, when we went to the Saratoga battlefield, Percy had this accident with a Revolutionary War cannon. He wasn't aiming for the school bus, but of course we got expelled anyway. They always think we do things together, because i always stick up for him. And before that, at my fourth-grade school, when we took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Marine World shark pool, Percy sort of hit the wrong lever on the catwalk and our class took an unplanned swim. And the time before that... Well, you get the idea.