Percy Jackson: CHB Again?

Chapter 9: Jason Grace, the Untold Story

Obviously, I had changed into a CHB shirt and a pair of jeans before going to the pavilion. I was not going to sit at my table in a bikini. I found myself slipping what I had wrote down earlier into my pocket, despite the fact that I wasn't sure I was going to look at it again.

Percy sat alone at his table, and I felt a strong urge to join him there, but an even stronger one to sit beside Annabeth.

"Tera," she smiled at me, her blonde hair pulled up into a ponytail. "I heard you hit your head. Are you still the smartest in the cabin?" She mocked.

"Nope." I popped the 'p'. "Second smartest. Nobody could compare to you."

Speaking like this with Annabeth came naturally. The more I thought about my problem with the memory thing, the more I wanted to discard it. Not only was I living the great life here, but I was almost completely certain that I had been here the whole time. Percy was right, I must've hit my head and momentarily believed something else had happened. Besides, I had so many great memories at camp, I had no clue what I was thinking when I was 'remembering' a quest to save Apollo.

Annabeth's plate was piled high with various types of food, and soon our whole table stood to make offerings to the fire.

On my plate, I had a mountain of breakfast sausages and rice, and I picked out the perfect pieces to offer. When it was my turn, I scrapped my food into the large fire, and muttered under my breath to my mom.

"Thanks for another great day at Camp Half-Blood, mom. I hope you can forgive me for being with the son of Poseidon."

That was a line I said every time I offered up a meal. I knew mom hated Percy's Dad, and visa versa, but Percy and I didn't really care. As we sat back down at the table, I found that there were two blue cupcakes: one in Annabeth's spot, and one in mine. We instantly looked at each other and knew they were from Percy. We were all the bestest of friends, along with Grover and Thalia.

"I love this guy," I told Annabeth, scarfing down the muffin before even touching my real meal. Annabeth laughed, and soon the whole cabin was in a heated discussion with the Hephaestus Cabin.

"Schrödinger's cat: a cat, a flask of poison, and a radioactive source are placed in a sealed box. If the Geiger Counter detects radioactivity, the flask is shattered, releasing the poison that kills the cat. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics implies that after a while, the cat is simultaneously alive and dead. Yet, when one looks in the box, one sees the cat either alive or dead, not both alive and dead. This poses the question of when exactly quantum superposition ends and reality collapses into one possibility or the other." I explained for the newer Athena campers who weren't familiar with the story and most of the Hephaestus children.

"Basically," Annabeth dumbed it down for those who wore confused expressions. "A cat was place in an enclosed box with a bottle of poison and a radioactive source. If an internal monitor detects radioactivity, it triggers a contraption that breaks the flask, releasing the poison and killing the cat. For a brief moment, the cat is both alive and dead since nobody can see if the poison killed it. The experiment is ruined when someone opens up the box, because they reveal if the cat is one or the other."

"So, you can't figure out it's point of death?" Elisa, a member of the other cabin, asked.

"That's the theory," Charlie, my half-brother, nodded.

"But," Quintos, Charlie's twin brother, cut in. "If we can get enough facts, we may be able to pin-point an exact time for the reactor to go off and kill the cat."

"But how would we know if it died at that exact moment? It could be dead far before the estimated time, and we'd only figure it out if we opened the box." I told him.