The Twins Of Poseidon

I Finally Have An Actual Family...

It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality. Chiron had told me that when I first started at Camp Half blood. According to the L.A. news, the explosion at the Santa Monica beach had been caused when a crazy kidnapper fired a shotgun at a police car. He accidentally hit a gas main that had ruptured during the earthquake. 

This crazy kidnapper (a.k.a. Ares) was the same man who had abducted Percy, his sister and two other adolescents in New York and brought us across country on a ten-day odyssey of terror. Poor little Percy Jackson wasn't an international criminal after all. He'd caused a commotion on that Greyhound bus in New Jersey trying to get away from his captor (and afterward, witnesses would even swear they had seen the leather-clad man on the bus—"Why didn't I remember him before?"). 

The crazy man had caused the explosion in the St. Louis Arch. After all, no kid (that they know of) could've done that. A concerned waitress in Denver had seen the man threatening his abductees outside her diner, gotten a friend to take a photo, and notified the police. 

Finally, brave Percy Jackson had stolen a gun from his captor in Los Angeles and battled him shotgun-to-rifle on the beach, (I knew that was what they were seeing, called it). Police had arrived just in time. But in the spectacular explosion, five police cars had been destroyed and the captor had fled. No fatalities had occurred. Percy Jackson, his sister (said to be named Alexandra) and their two friends were safely in police custody. 

The reporters fed us this whole story. We just nodded and acted tearful and exhausted (I deserve an Oscar, whatever that is), and played victimized kids for the cameras. 

"All I want," Percy said, choking back tears, "is for me and my sister to see my loving stepfather again. Every time I saw him on TV, calling me a delinquent punk, I knew ... somehow ... we would be okay. And I know he'll want to reward each and every person in this beautiful city of Los Angeles with a free major appliance from his store. Here's the phone number." 

The police and reporters were so moved that they passed around the hat and raised money for four tickets on the next plane to New York. Percy and I knew there was no choice but to fly. I hoped Zeus would be asleep or just not notice us hopefully. It was still hard to force myself on board the flight. I had never been on a plane before for obvious reasons, but I realized I was scared of heights, not mountain heights cause I've been on many of those, but flying heights. 

Takeoff was a nightmare. Every spot of turbulence was scarier than how Annabeth viewed spiders. Percy grabbed my hand as soon as we got onto the plane and neither of us let go until we landed safely in La Guardia. 

The local press was waiting for us outside security, but we managed to evade them thanks to Annabeth, who lured them away in her invisible Yankees cap, shouting, "They're over by the frozen yogurt! Come on!" then rejoined us at baggage claim. 

We split up at the taxi stand. Percy and I told Annabeth and Grover to get back to Half-Blood Hill and let Chiron know what had happened. They protested, and it was hard to let them go after all we'd been through, but we both knew we had to do this last part of the quest by ourselves. If things went wrong, if the gods didn't believe us... We agreed that we wanted Annabeth and Grover to survive to tell Chiron the truth. So we hopped in a taxi and headed into Manhattan. 

Thirty minutes later, we walked into the lobby of the Empire State Building. I looked a little torn up but Percy definitely looked like a homeless kid, with his tattered clothes and his scraped-up face. It didn't help that neither of us had slept in over twenty-four hours. 

We went up to the guard at the front desk and I said, "Six hundredth floor, please." He was reading a huge book which I recognized as Harry potter, I loved those books so I understand why the guard took a while to look up.