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chapter seventeen. ( battle of the labyrinth ) ❝ hero returns, empty handed! ❞
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Cercopes are stupid. The original Kerkopes—two monkey men who were turned into the monsters they were now after stealing from Zeus—were annoying, but they weren't stupid. Their long distant cousins, are just so stupid it was sad. I have had enough of these dwarf monkeys laughing and chitter-chatting away about how they will win and serve their master and eat us for dinner. They reached no taller than my knee, with chubby little ape bodies, like chipanzees with big fluffy white beards. It was like talking to a child Santa, except I received no presents and I want to kill them right now. However, Hermes told me they would give me the answer I sought. Trust the god of thieves to send me to thieving monsters.
So yeah, I wasn't allowed to kill them.
It was Cain's idea to let them win. To let them tie us up and boil the fire they were going to burn us on. He looked like he wanted to murder them too. Will kept pulling away from them picking at his golden hair, telling them to "Shove off!"
The thing about these little pesky mongrels, is that they loved shiny things. They absolutely loved them. Their whole nest was covered with jewellery, plates, armour and swords. Hermes told us to give them shiny objects in return for answers. We each found something shiny to give them, for three questions and three answers. One; where was Nico. Two; how will I find my powers. And three was just incase we needed to ask an extra one. Because I've been in too many scenarios where we got the question we wanted answered, and then had a million more to ask that we couldn't.
At the start, we were going okay. We thought we could head in, give them the objects, ask the questions and then get out. We were in New York again, and I wanted to finally head back and say hello to Percy after his high school orientation. High school, wasn't I like eleven not long ago? I haven't thought about high school. In fact, when I told Hannah about what I wanted to do—(Not the find Nico bit, but the maybe-there's-a-way-to-bring-back-my-powers bit)—she and Cory decided that it would be better that I'd be homeschooled. Originally, they were planning it even before I told them about the quest. They had thought it best considering the amount of monsters that were showing up because of Luke and Kronos, and how strong my scent was. They sold the family home to Hannah's cousins and now we lived at Camp. Well, they did. I just did what I always did, stayed all year round, until Will, Cain and I left for our quest that we didn't know how long would take. To be honest, though, I didn't know it would take a whole summer, autumn and winter, plus spring—so yeah, a whole year. That's a long time.
It wasn't as if we were on the road for a whole year. We came back to camp every now and then. Stopped and visited Percy. Caught up with Thalia and the Hunters. We had to search out further from the New York region for Nico, which sometimes got all over the place when we got leads for other things. (Aka Light's Kin stuff).
