When Maddie Goldberg was hit in the head with a pillow at 7:00 am, it could only mean two things: one, her half-brother, Spencer Garfield, was waking her up, or two, her best friend from Apollo had decided to use yet another creative wake up so that she would "rise with the sun" with her. It was most likely the second option, since Spencer was not a morning person either, but he was even more so than Maddie would ever be.

"I swear, Kate, if it's you I'm going to slice you up with my dagger so you'll be unrecognizable as a human being," she murmured through her pillow, her voice muffled so she wasn't even sure she could be understood.

"I love you, too," Kate's also muffled voice said. "You're such a pleasure in the morning, aren't you?"

"Stop sounding like my dad."

"Well your dad is right, if he also says that with sarcasm, which I'm assuming he does since you said I was sounding like him." Maddie could practically hear her grinning. "It's time to rise and shine sleepyhead!" Another pillow was hurled at her defenseless head.

She could hear groans and a few muttered curses throughout the Athena cabin now. The next voice she heard was Spencer's. "Kate, if you're going to wake up with the sun every morning, then don't try to wake up a cabin full of people who were up all night reading or working." His voice was groggy and scratchy, and Maddie figured that's how her voice had also sounded.

"It's not dawn, silly," Kate said with a laugh somewhere between dolphin and witch cackle. On any other occasion, Maddie would laugh with her and threaten anyone who said her laugh was weird, but right now it just sounded obnoxious. "The sun rose an hour ago! Ish."

A chorus of "I don't cares," "Shut ups," and a few not-so-nice words were heard. "Ok you bunch of grumpy nerd brainiacs," Kate huffed, finally. "I'm going. But don't complain when the conch horn sounds and you're forced to drag your lazy butts out of bed for breakfast."

"Lazy SMART butts," Spencer chimed in drowsily. A few tired and half-hearted snickers sounded, Maddie's included. She peeled one eye open just in time to see Kate walking out the door.

Taking the opportunity, she promptly fell back to sleep. Hey, she had about another hour and a half before breakfast. Might as well get some more sleep.

Another pillow was thrown at her head around 8:00, and this time it was Spencer.

"Wake up, Maddie!" he called. "Half hour before breakfast." Maddie rolled onto her back but made no effort to get out of bed.

"But I don't want to," she complained.

"We were all up late last night now get up."

Maddie groaned and rolled off the bed, then she put on her glasses before she stood up and dragged herself to her trunk of clothes and other various belongings.

"We were all up late last night now get up," she mimicked as she saw Spencer roll his eyes.

"Hey Spencer?"

"What?"

"Have you seen Eli?"

"Wasn't here when I woke up."

Maddie pulled out a pair of shorts and sighed. "Okay, thanks." She stood up and took her clothes into the bathroom. She threw on her camp shirt and shorts, tying her pink sweatshirt around her waist. She then proceeded to wash her face and put her hair up.

She walked out if the cabin and started to walk towards the arena. Eli liked to sit there sometimes, she knew. She had pretty close relationships with most of her siblings, so she knew most of them well enough to know their habits, Spencer, Eli, and Evelyn, another cabin mate, especially. The only ones she was particularly distanced from were Annabeth Chase and Malcolm Pace.

Her suspicions were correct, and Maddie found Eli sitting by himself on one of the rafters. He was leaning up against the wall, staring blankly out into empty space. Maddie started climbing up and joined him, situating herself so that she was on the rafter next to his. She drew one leg up and rested her elbow on it, leaning her head on the wall.

"Hey," she said.

"Hi."

"Good morning."

"You too."

They sat in comfortable silence for awhile, and Maddie studied him like she did with everyone. She always liked to take in someone's features. It was a weird thing she did. His black hair was cropped in the back, but it hung over his forehead in the front. It was getting longer. He was wearing his usual blue jeans with a black T-shirt, but today he was wearing an unbuttoned blue button up. She smiled a little. She always liked when he wore that button up. It gave him a little splash of color on top of his usual black attire.

"So…" Maddie tried, gaining Eli's attention. "Wanna pick up that game of alef knoll questions?"

He smiled a little. "Sure."

Alef knoll questions was their thing. When Eli first came to camp, they annoyed the heck out of each other. Maddie hated how he was always such a grammar nazi and he just found her irritating. But eventually, they opened up to each other. Maddie actually started to make an effort to be friends with him, so she asked him what his interests were. Now, Eli had never been a very good conversationalist, so he ended up typing it out later and printing it out to give her, with some help from a kid from cabin nine.

She responded by writing her interests on the back of the small paper, which was quite a difficult task with her friend Leah from cabin eleven poking her perfect nose in Maddie's business. (Not that Maddie considering her nose as perfect made Leah some snobby brat or anything, she was just crazy pretty, with a perfect little nose and perfectly shaped eyebrows. She could've been mistaken for a daughter of Aphrodite rather than Hermes.)

But anyway, this started a chain of notes they exchanged with each other, some as long as seven pages of loose leaf. One day, when Maddie was sitting against the back wall of the Athena cabin, Eli joined her and she convinced him to sit with her, despite his evident fear of getting dirty. They talked for a few hours, and to get to know him even better, she started up a game of 20 Questions. After Maddie explained what the game was and how to play it, Eli brought up the point that they were limited to only, well, twenty questions. So she suggested they play infinity questions instead, but he proposed a way to count past infinity (hey, the kid was smart. Maddie had, though Eli humbly and a little self-doubtingly denied it, started thinking of him as no less than a genius; a child worthy of Athena herself.), and alef knoll questions was born.

And so the two sat on the rafters of the open-ceilinged arena together, throwing questions back and forth to each other. Actually, Maddie was asking most of the questions, since Eli claimed to not be very good at coming up with questions. When he did ask questions, he usually said "What about you?" asking her the same question she had asked him. But Maddie enjoyed it nonetheless. (Honestly, he was probably her favorite siblings, but she could never tell anyone that; she was too nice.)

They kept at it until the breakfast horn sounded. She hopped from the rafter onto the ground while he climbed down, and they made their way to the dining pavilion.

The rest of the Athena kids were just arriving when they got there.

"Good timing, eh?" Maddie asked, prodding Eli playfully in the ribs. Her smirk widened into a grin when he smiled and laughed, a thing he tried not to do but always ended up doing when he was with Maddie. She always tried extra hard to make him laugh, and it always made her happy when she was successful.

The pair sat at the table, with Eli on Maddie's right and Spencer across from her.

"Hey Spencer," Maddie said, realizing someone was missing. "Where's Evelyn?"

"Sleeping," he replied. "She was up later than anyone last night, and you know how hard it is to wake her up. And painful."

Maddie rolled her eyes. "Let me guess, she was up reading mangas and binge watching anime on her laptop, right?"

Spencer nodded. "And reading her new H.I.V.E. book. She tore through three Black Butler mangas, the book, and watched a season of Blue Exorcist."

Of course. Besides Spencer, Maddie had known Evelyn the longest out of all her cabin mates. She was always watching downloaded animes on her laptop (even though those were strictly forbidden, but Evelyn had always been a rebellious rule breaker) and reading both books and mangas. Anime and manga were pretty much a good fifty percent of her life.

Maddie shrugged, deciding to let the fact that Evelyn got to sleep in and she didn't go, and started eating her breakfast.

Hey! Thanks for reading! All the characters that are not canon are based on friends of mine or people that go to my school. Naturally, Maddie is based on me. As you may have ready from the summary, this is told from the PoV of a demigod and what her experiences throughout the series. Hope you enjoy!