Everyone likes a good adrenaline rush once in a while. They're not very hard to get, all you have to do is something slightly risky or dangerous to feel like a superhero. Most of the time, no one gets hurt, you don't get caught and everything turns out fine. You have a good story to tell your friends, you think of yourself with pride and the knowledge that you are a rebel. You hold a title.

But no one ever talks about those stunts that went awfully wrong. The ones that ended up failing miserably usually go on some fail video, accompanied by the usual angry parent or broken car. But people tend to keep their grief and regrets to themselves, and if a stunt brings you that, not many people are going to hear about it.

That's what happened to Emery Nelson and Nico di Angelo.

Emery was not your typical teen. For one thing, he didn't talk very much and had very little friends. He knew he had no one to blame but himself for that, but he liked the "mysterious kid" title that he had been given by numerous classmates. Another thing was his style. Emery had pastel purple hair and loved to wear combat boots, which isn't something you see every day in a fourteen-year-old boy. He didn't consider himself emo or gothic, but he liked to express himself through his fashion choices.

Lastly, Emery's father was a Greek god. He had only found this out two years prior when rescued from a sticky situation involving… mythological creatures, let's put it that way. By another person just like him. It had come as quite a shock, and the fact that he had to leave his mom for whole seasons at a time to go train himself against those creatures at a camp in Long Island was hard for him. But, if he were to survive, the girl who rescued him had told him, he had to train the best he could. And because he knew his mother would be devastated if he died, Emery agreed.

He didn't need to be there all the time, like some campers. His father wasn't a god that tended to give his children monster-magnets for body odor, thankfully. His father was Hermes, god of thieves and merchants. And travelers. And mail. And WiFi. Basically, it would have been faster to name the things Hermes wasn't the god of.

Of course, Emery knew something was odd about his family from an early age. First off, he didn't have any siblings, which is more or less uncommon. Secondly, he had never, ever seen his father. He had not heard his voice, smelled him or been able to tell which color were his eyebrows. Absolutely nothing.

His mother didn't help on that matter either. Every time he brought it up, she would get very angry and avoid the topic like meat (she was vegetarian). The first few times he had mentioned it, she had sent him to his room for no reason but had quickly apologized and warned him not to ask. But because Emery also considered himself an asshole, he had kept on asking, never yielding a different result. Soon after he gave that up, though, weird things started happening.

He was first attacked by a creature from Greek origins at the age of ten. There was this one, super annoying pigeon that kept on pooping in places Emery was most likely to step, and it always squawked when he needed to concentrate on something, not helping at all. He had been too young to realize that pigeons don't normally squawk and also don't normally have reflective feathers, but heck, he was just a kid, right?

Anyways, the pigeon had been doing this for about a week before it attacked. Emery had been in the play yard climbing on the monkey bars when it flew down and bit his finger.

Normally, he could have brushed something like this off, but it was that pigeon so he was already angry even before it had decided to snack on his blood. He dropped down from the monkey bars and leaped unnaturally high, caught the pigeon by its metal foot- wait, metal foot?

Before he had time to process that, it had already escaped his grasp. So he lay there, on his knees, absolutely very confused until it came back for another bite at his flesh. This time, though, he was both angry and scared, because as ignorant as a ten year old should be, he knew that pigeons were not normally also cyborgs.

So he went with his instincts. He grabbed a branch from the nearest tree and ran forwards, turning around to look at where the demon pigeon was at now. He waited, waited, and swiftly scootched to the side. The branch backlashed and hit the pigeon full in the face.

Emery had then decided that the pigeon was not, in fact, a pigeon, but a metal toy. Its head was smashed in and its wings beating with no particular sense of direction, almost like a broken toy. So, he had grabbed it by its metal tail and threw it in the trash can. He had never told a soul.

Yeah. So that happened. Again. And again. Every time, though, it was a different creature; a tiny little pig with a tail made of thorns, a snake with two heads, and even a cat with rock-hard hair.

By the time these events evolved into something actually life-threatening, he had realized something was awfully wrong with his life, but being the silent kid he had always been, he had kept quiet until that girl saw him at it.

And by "at it", I mean full-blown fighting. That night, it had been the biggest creature he had ever encountered; it was both a crocodile and absolute darkness. It had the jaw and teeth of your everyday gator, but the rest of it was ever-lasting shadows, woven so tight together they formed claws, spikes, arrows, anything. He had been terrified but fought with all his strength in the only dark alley leading to his house. Fortunately, a girl of about sixteen years had run unto the scene, jabbed a pointy metal object at it and saved Emery who had been very badly hurt at the time. And that was when his career as a demigod officially started.

Now, back to where I was at the beginning of the story, where I was talking about stunts and how they can sometimes go wrong. Usually, you need two people to get the most out of a dangerous activity, right? Well, when Emery woke up at this mystical demigod training camp, built specifically for the children of both gods and "mortals", or, normal human beings, he made his first ever real friend a few months later. His name was Nico.

This is one of my first stories, I honestly hope this chapter was an OK first chapter, feel free to tell me what you thought of it! I'll try my best to update this weekly. Thank.