ARIANNA
1: When you're on the run and mythological creatures are chasing you… its never a good sign!
I met Jessie and Atalanta one day, on the run. Yes, I was on the run. My mum had never really been there for me, so when she got home one night after being gone for about two weeks, with a guy I didn't know, claiming he was my new step-dad, that pretty much did it.
It's always the same thing with us demigods: we run off at about twelve or thirteen years of age, and we either find the others or we die. I was thirteen when I left. I had no idea where I was going, all I knew was I was never going back to that hell hole and that I would never forgive my mom for treating me like that!
She wasn't always that uncaring. I remember times, when I was 9, when she would put me to bed at night telling me she loved me and she would never hurt me. But then one day, after I'd gotten home from school, a man stormed into our house, he was wearing a weird pinstriped suit, he had a long beard and behind his well combed hair, we could see eyes as blue as the sky on a clear summer's day. My mom was afraid, but this was still the time when she loved me more than anything, so she put herself between me and the large man. The man spoke to her:
"Let me see her!"
"NO!"
"Is she my brother's?"
Mom paused.
"No…"
"DON'T LIE TO ME!" he had said to her in a menacing voice. I don't know what hit me, but I got extremely mad at him. I jumped in front of my mom.
"Leave her ALONE!" I screamed. Then to my great surprise he crouched down so his face was next to mine. He brushed my wavy dark hair out of my face, grabbed my chin, and gazed into my eyes.
"You have his eyes, as dark as the night, and as piercing as a blade… How could this have happened!" he stood out and left. My mother and I tried to get on with our day as if nothing had happened.
At dinner I asked her who my dad was and if that was my uncle. She screamed at me that my dad was dead, and he was never coming back! That night there was the biggest thunderstorm I'd ever experienced and ever since that day my mum had gone to bars every evening, and when she got caught doing something illegal, I'd have to call my neighbor and ask her to drive me to the police station to bail my mother out jail.
The day when I ran away, I was deep in my thoughts, so I didn't realize that someone was following me. It was only when I sat on bench in an alley that I became aware of this man. I know what you're thinking: 'what kind of an idiot sits down in a dark alley alone!' .Well I might as well be an idiot, but if I hadn't sat down there, I probably never would've found camp half-blood.
So, the guy who was stalking me was wearing a long coat and the collar of the coat was placed in a way that we couldn't see the dude's face; he even had a hat to cover his eyes. That should've been enough to prove this guy should not be someone to stay in a dark alley with, but I was too pissed to care. I was just sitting there when a gust of wind blew my hair in the direction of the awkward stranger. He sniffed the air as if he had just smelled something: a chocolate cake cooking in the oven or something. Then, he looked at me. It happened so fast. One second I see a weird creep staring at me, the next he pulls his coat off and jumps at me. I had no idea what was happening. I didn't know if I was dreaming, or if I was really being attacked by some freak. That's when I looked at the guy's face. He only had one eye! I was sure I was dreaming, I had to be! Unfortunately, I wasn't, and the 'man' assaulting me was in fact a Cyclopes.
I thought I was going to either die or wake up, but then three people leaped out of nowhere: a boy and two girls, all of them more or less my age. One of the girls, the blond one, who I soon find out, was named Jessie, grabbed me by the wrist and ran, while the two others, an auburn haired girl and a blond boy grabbed metal poles that were lying in a corner and used them to slaughter the beast. It didn't bother me too much, I had already seen death, and to be quite honest that thing was about to kill me so… he asked for it.
That evening I found out that the other girl was named Atalanta, and that the boy was Jessie's brother, Kris. Atalanta was my age, Jessie and Kris were twins and they were almost a year older.
"I still don't get what's going on!" I exclaimed after we had eaten dinner (we bought some Mc Donald's with the money I had brought with me.)
"Neither do we!" answered Jessie.
"All we know is that we are followed by mythical creatures and there's nothing normal about that!" added Kris.
None of us had a clue of what was going on. We pretty much traveled around the country for a year chased around by monsters, I learned to defend myself, and all four of us became like a family.
Atalanta was a cute girl whose amber hair fell unto her shoulders. She had grey eyes and a dazzling smile. She'd never met her mom, and her dad was a stuck up rich guy who was disappointed to have a dyslexic daughter. That summer he had told her that he was sending her to an All-Girls boarding school in England! She had gotten upset and told her dad that if he didn't want her with him, he could just say it instead of shipping her off halfway across the world. She left her father behind, but, he called the police, so she had to leave Michigan, where she came from, and she's been on the run ever since.
Jessie's red hair was always falling uneven in front of her stunning honey eyes. Kris had the same eyes and hair as his sister and he seemed almost as lively and energetic as her, though he tended to think things through more. They lived in Ohio and just like me they didn't know their dad, but their mom had left them to pursue her life long dream of becoming the next American Pop legend. She only came back for Christmas, and that year she told them she was going on tour in Europe. At first, Jessie and Kris thought they were going with her, but, turns out she wanted to force them to live with their grandmother for a whole year. Once their mother's plane had taken off, they left, not looking back.
Then one day we ended up in New York. We'd pretty much hitch-hiked all over the country so ending up in New York wasn't so much of a surprise. What was a surprise was that seconds after getting out of the bus, we look up and see this man. At first not all of us saw it but then Atalanta pointed out that something was kind of weird about him and we all saw his millions of eyes. And as you know I had an encounter with a guy with a strange number of eyes and it freaked me out, but this time it was different. As the guy stared back at us, he didn't seem to be mad, or want to bite our heads off, he seemed rather intrigued. We just left, if he didn't attack us what was the point in attacking him. Even though the multi-eyed man didn't look like he wanted to kill us, we still half-ran away from where he was. We never actually had any idea where we were going, but this time it felt different, for some odd reason I felt like 'home' was close. I shook off that feeling, thinking it was silly of me to think I'd ever belong somewhere, and continued pacing forward.
Like I said earlier, we had no clue where we were going, so we didn't know where to avoid. This is the reason why, within hours, we were surrounded by at least 10 drakons, who were ready to kill us. We tried to defend ourselves, but they were to numerous and strong for us. That's when, out of nowhere, a white SUV crashes into a bunch of the drakons. Out from it come three people: a brown haired boy and girl and the weird guy we'd seen earlier. They shoved us in the van, and closed the doors, we could here the sound of swords being swung around, and a few minutes later, our three rescuers got in the front and took off.
"WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?" asked Jessie, she tends to be quite dramatic, but his time I agreed with her. I mean, how would you react if you'd been on the run for almost a year and a half, being attacked by mythological creatures on a daily basis and just been thrust in the car of some dude who's got a zillion eyes?
Unfortunately, the three people in the front either ignored, or didn't bother to listen to Jessie. The girl seemed tense.
She had light brown curly hair and gray eyes as if a stormed had formed behind her eyelids and that lightning bolts were going to disintegrate us if we ever tried to cross her.
"This is bad… this is real bad… Daniel are you even listening to me?" she exclaimed to the boy sitting next to her. He had short dark brown hair, hazel eyes, and a smile that seemed to be permantely stuck on his face, though it didn't make you want to trust this boy. It actually made you want to ask him "What did you do?"
"Eli! I thought you knew me better than that. For all these years you actually thought I listened to you!" he said with a smirk on his face.
"I'm not kidding! What are four demi-gods doing alone in Manhattan? Where is their protector? Why were they here? What were they doing?"
"Well, started Daniel, you could always ask them!"
Both of them turned to face us.
"Hi!" said the boy and he smiled at us.
"Who are you?" the girl asked, she seemed to think that greetings were a waste of time. We answered one by one.
"Atalanta Cook, from Michigan. I'm 14. "
"Jessie O'Connor, from Ohio. I'm 15."
"Kris O'Connor, from Ohio I'm 15."
"Arianna Black, from South Dakota. I'm 14."
"You guys are quite far from home. Why is that?"
"Hey, interrupted Kris, Why should we tell you who we are if you don't tell us who you are?"
"I guess that's fair, answered the boy, I'm Daniel Sailing, from Manhattan. I'm 15."
Daniel nudged the girl.
"I'm Elisabeth Richardson but you can call me Eli. I come from Manhattan and I'm 14. Now, why are you here?"
"We're on the run." Replied Atalanta.
"All four of us ran away from home a year ago, and we found each other." I added.
"See! Eli, there was nothing to worry about; they are just lost demi-gods. We see them all the time, you have got to relax."
"DEMI-WHAT?" all of us exclaimed at the same time.
"We'll tell you later just wait till we get to camp. Chiron will explain everything."
"Chiron? You mean the centaur who trained Hercules, that Chiron?" asked Atalanta.
"Yep! That Chiron!" this time there was no trace of humor in Daniel's voice.
Arianna.B