Rebuilding the World

14 Home

It must have been nice to stay in Camp for the summer. The place is comfortable, the people (and monsters alike) are nice and the place feels like home.

Anyways, after taking a rather long shower and changing into fresh new clothes, Jayson introduced me to our other siblings.

 “Hi, I’m Janine.” Greeted a beautiful girl who looks to be fourteen, her curly long brown hair brushed to one side. I shook her hand.

“Jen.” Said another girl who looks to be fifteen. Her short pixie black hair glinted with pink. I shook her hand too.

I met the others too, but they seemed to be bothered about something, they kept rushing around the cabin, preparing stuffs.

“Capture the flag game tonight.” Jen said to me. I must have been too silent watching everybody.

 “Seems important” I just said, watching Jayson check his breastplate in front of the mirror.

“Yeah well, it is important to us, it’s the only event we can show off that we can do something! We’ve been a laughing stock to the camp. Says we’re just all love and beauty and that we don’t do anything. Jayson’s pressuring us to do better ever since he became head councillor.” Jen added.

“That’s not right!”

“Well, we’re not really that much. I mean, Majella’s the only Zeus kid and even though she left for a year, everyone looks up to her as a leader. En and the Ares cabin are great fighters. The Athena cabin, they’re smart and they’re very great tacticians. Apollo cabin’s the archers and the medics, Hephaestus cabin provides the weapons. And what about us? We’re just the camp’s eye candy.”

I looked around and it does seems like everyone’s pressured to do their best, to show to the whole camp that they’re not just about looks, they can also do things.

“We’ll show them what we can do in the games.” I smiled at Jen.

As the sun was setting, Jayson led the group to the dining pavilion carrying their stuffs for the capture the flag game later. I already told them my plan for the game.

The dining pavilion looks like a picnic area with long wooden picnic tables, there’s an elevated table up front where Maria Makiling sat overlooking us and at the center of the pavilion is a metal brazier with a burning green fire.

We sat on our table and I looked around for Majella. She was alone in one of the tables across the pavilion, she wasn’t touching her food and she was looking outside, above the trees. Was she looking at the moon?

“Hey.” Janine called to me. Everyone was standing up holding their plate.

“What?”

“Get your plate and we’re going to offer some food to the gods.” She instructed.

Janine guided me to the big metal brazier and scrapped some portion of her meal to the fire while saying “To the gods.”

I did the same feeling kind of stupid, why do we have to offer food to them? A rush of cold evening wind passed by and the smoke of the fire turned to my direction. I was going to close my eyes and try not to inhale the smoke but to my surprise it smelt wonderful. I guess this is why they want food offered to them?

We returned to our table and I turned around to look at Majella who was offering half of her meal to the fire. She looks kind of grumpy in the distance, but kind of beautiful in the fire light too.

Majella returned to her table and began eating slowly, like she wasn’t interested with her pork barbecue.

“Don’t.” Jayson said, stopping me from getting up and going to Majella’s table.