Hello everyone! I'm Magnolia and this is my original characters PJO story, which is also on AO3 under the same title and author username if that is your preferred reading website.
WARNING: MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS FROM ALL PERCY JACKSON AND HEROES OF OLYMPUS BOOKS, INCLUDING BLOOD OF OLYMPUS. PROCEED WITH CAUTION.
This story takes place AFTER The Battle of the Labyrinth at CHB, but BEFORE Percy turns fifteen at the end of the BotL book.
Mist picture used in cover from www_meteoblue_com (replace _ with .)

Look, we all know that I'd always wanted to be a dual-blood, so I might as well get this whole story off my chest.

And no, I'm not that stupid Peter Jackson guy or whatever his name is. I'm telling you that now because he got the story all wrong. He left out some important details that he really should've told you all about. But I'll get to that later.

So, Lamia is telling me that I'm legally required to notify you of this or something: Being a dual-blood is dangerous. Pretty scary too. But I guess that if you truly are one, you'd probably ignore my advice about that. We're all thrill-seekers on the inside.

That actually brings me to my next point: If you think you are a dual-blood, you might want to close this webpage now. Learning more about who you are just makes it easier for them to see what you are. Just go on jumping off cliffs, throwing yourself into fires, and keep up all those sweet stink bomb explosions in your school cafeteria. Anything besides reading this.

Of course, if you don't do all that good stuff on a regular basis, keep on reading. I admire you for being able to pretend that none of this ever happened.

But, if at any time you recognize yourself in these pages or if you feel the sudden urge to do something spontaneously violent, stop reading immediately. It's only a matter of time before the Mist is spread too thin.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

...

I really didn't get what the teacher was getting all worked up about. I mean, it's not like anyone had gotten genuinely hurt. Spiders are really just like ants with extra legs, if you think about it. And they kill other annoying insects. That's cool, right?

Well, that's what I tried to tell the rest of my science class, anyways. But, noooo. Little miss Chloe Adeline Everly—my ever-so-enjoyable lab partner—just had to scream her little blonde head off about creepy little insects, which she must've known would set me off, because spiders are definitely not insects.

"Can't you count?" I told her, holding the one we were supposed to be examining up to her face. The tiny arachnid balanced neatly on my fingers. "See? Eight. Eight legs. Not six."

"Freak!" she'd shrieked at me, backing away like I'd just sprouted an extra eye.

I shrugged and went back to making an enclosure out of pencils and textbooks for my new friend the spider. And that was when it got good: There I was, minding my own business, when all of a sudden, Chloe Adeline hit me across the back of the head with a hardcover novel.

Gods, I really hated books. Maybe that's why I'm publishing this online for free instead of printing it out and trying to get people to buy it.

"There was a spider in your hair!" she said, alarmed, like she really cared about my hair, spider or not.

"That's it," I growled, launching myself at her. She yelped and dropped her book, ducking behind some lab equipment to get away from me.

Except, she didn't account for the fact that I was probably the most agile person in the whole eighth grade. I jumped over the table, shattering glass vials and narrowly missing the tank of spiders we were supposed to be examining. We started rolling around between the lab tables, while the rest of the class stayed silent, except for a few brave ones who started laughing. That is, until the spiders got involved.

I really had no idea how it happened, but suddenly me and Chloe were both covered in creepy crawling spiders of every size.

Everyone in the class screamed as they realized that somehow, all of their test subjects had escaped from their tanks. Girls started climbing up on chairs, Chloe Adeline was trying hysterically to swipe the spiders from her clothes, and my best friend Kaia was laughing maniacally from the back of the classroom.

I stood up desperately and tried telling them it was no problem and that we could get them back in the tanks if they stopped freaking out, but they just kept right on screeching about bugs in their hair.

That's about when Ms. Paley, the science teacher, decided to waltz back into the room after taking a break that she wasn't even supposed to be allowed to do. I mean, who leaves a classroom full of kids alone with boxes of spiders, anyway?

"What is going on here?" she yelled over the chaos of the room. "Why are all the spiders out?"

It appeared as if Chloe had finally removed all the bugs from her hair, so she stood up and announced, "Ariadne did it! Ariadne let all the spiders out and then she attacked me."

I hadn't even blinked twice before Ms. Paley had the entire class out of the science lab and had called the office to say that Ariadne Weaver and Chloe Adeline Everly were going to be reporting there soon. She told us to take separate routes.

Walking past the rest of the class, I saw my classmates shaking spiders from their clothes. One girl was seriously freaking out and her hair was sticking up everywhere like she'd just run her hands through it a hundred times making sure that there weren't any spare arachnids left in it. And then there was Kaia. There was a fat spider sitting right on top of her head, but she only grinned and fist-bumped me as I passed. I thought about mentioning it to her, but it looked pretty content up there, so I just left it.

...

I was sitting on a chair that the principal had made me drag out into the hallway while Chloe Adeline told her side of the story to him and Ms. Paley when my dad walked up. My father tended to drag his feet when he walked, and he always had a look to him that somehow made him appear like an insect with a bent antenna, unbalanced and disrupted. He was sporting messy brown-going-gray hair with a patterned button-up shirt that belonged in a different decade. He had dark blue eyes, like me, which had probably been just as bright as mine at some point, if not for the exhausted gaze that filled them.

I guess the school must have called him and explained the situation or whatever, because he just looked at me with his tired eyes like he was asking, "Why?"

I hated when he gave me that look. You'd think I would've gotten used to it for all the times I've been sent to the principal's office, but every single time he did it, he managed to send my emotions to the back of my gut to sit in a dark corner for an eternal time out.

I shrunk back in my chair. "She called spiders insects. And she hit me on the head with a book!" I insisted, tilting my head towards the door. "You know how much I hate books."

"And what happened after that?" he sighed, raising his eyebrows at me.

I raised my eyebrows right back, daring him to make a guess at what happened.

He sighed some more, and nodded, and finally just pushed open the door to the principal's office, just like I'd seen him do so many times before.

Oh, no, this was definitely not the first time my dad had had to pick me up from school and talk to the teachers while I sat outside the door, wishing I could disappear. It's too bad they couldn't just expel me. That's just one of the many downsides of living in a small town with just one middle school.

I counted to a thousand while I waited for my dad to come back out. Now he was wearing a face that seemed more to say, "Really?"

On the car ride home, I decided to sit in the back seat instead of riding shotgun. I never really felt bad about any of the stuff that I started at school until he found out, and then I felt guilty. Really, really guilty. Maybe he won't try to talk to me, I thought.

But, of course, this is me we're talking about. And if you'll learn anything from this story, it'll be that I have the worst luck.

"You got suspended, you know," he said, glancing up at the rear view mirror to look at me.

"Yeah, I figured that."

"I saw that you forgot to take meds this morning."

"The meds wouldn't have made a difference." That was actually the truth. The Adderall that I took for my ADHD did almost nothing for me; it was like something inside me just really did not want it to work.

"Well, you wouldn't really know unless you took it, did you?" he said anyway.

I shrugged and tried to concentrate on the scenery by looking out the window. It was uneventful. I guess living in one extremely small city for your entire life will make you bored with your surroundings sometimes. The houses were mostly occupied by old grandmas and grandpas, because all of their children had grown up and gotten out of this stupid town. The streets were narrow and they went up and down small hills like roller coasters. Not that many people were driving on them, of course. Most people here just walked and biked everywhere in town, since it was so small. We had a grand total of one elementary school, one middle school, and one high school. Welcome to Porter, Indiana.

My house was on the north edge of town, nested right into the woods with no neighboring houses on our side of the street. There was a baseball diamond down the road from us, but almost no one except the Porter peewee baseball team ever used it. I was more interested in the woods that surrounded it.

As my dad pulled into the driveway, I glanced longingly at the tall trees casting perfect shadows around our house. I was definitely not going to be able to go out there again for a while.

"Ariadne Weaver," my dad enunciated. "Go inside and go to your room. Don't leave until I come back; I've got to go run some errands. You're grounded."

I was about to whine, "And suspended?" but then I decided it would be better to just let it go. Hefting my backpack on my shoulder, I slammed the car door behind me as I got out of the car. I was suddenly very angry. Angry at myself, mostly. I dug my fingernails into the palms of my hands. I was so stupid sometimes.

I retrieved my key from my backpack and unlocked the door, watching my dad pull out of the driveway again.

Our home was one of those small, one-story half-brick and half-wood type houses with the inside painted with yellows and oranges that always reminded me of a construction site. There was a basketball hoop above the garage door, but it didn't have a net and I never used it because I was really short and could never make a basket. It was a nice enough house, and it was cool because my dad and I had been living there since forever. He grew up there and had never thought to leave like all the other sensible people who used to live in this town.

That's right, just me and my dad in that house. No maternal figures in sight. I'd never really known my mom and I'd never really wanted to. My dad once asked me why I didn't ask more questions about her, but I just shrugged. "What's the point in you telling me about her if I'll never know her myself?" I'd told him. But that didn't necessarily stop him from telling me stories about her anyway. I think that they'd known each other for maybe a half a year or so before she'd told him that she had to go back to her family in Italy. No more than a year later, I show up on the front doorstep with no warning or explanation whatsoever. I've always thought that was kind of mean, but whenever my dad talked about her, he never seemed upset. He told me stuff about her, like what she liked or disliked.

"She didn't like birds very much, especially big ones. But she liked bugs," my dad would say to me. "And she absolutely adored Greek mythology. That's why I named you Ariadne, you know. You're the Greek princess who helped Theseus kill the Minotaur."

I loved Greek mythology, too. We had a big picture book full of myths, and it was one of the few books that I could actually stand. My dad and I would talk for hours on end about Greek mythology, and what the Greeks thought about science and nature. He works as a high school biology teacher, so he knows all about that kind of stuff.

But regrettably, we'd been talking less and less recently.

I went to my room and dropped my backpack on the bed with a thud. Sitting down on top of my pile of blankets, I swiped my yo-yo off my desk and began sending it up and down the string. There wasn't much space in my tiny, cramped room for fancy tricks, but I could certainly perform showy displays if I wasn't cooped up in this suffocatingly small house.

My bedroom was usually a dark place and the air in there was probably more dust than oxygen. I rarely bothered to open the one tiny window it had. There were posters for obscure horror films covering the walls, and a small, narrow bed with mismatched covers stuffed into the corner of the room between a dresser and my desk. I didn't do much in here besides sleep and occasionally sulk, like I was right about then.

I was almost always outside. In the woods, mostly. I loved to climb trees and jump down to the ground and maybe even try to jump from one to another.

You can guess that I've broken a lot of bones in the past.

It had been about fifteen minutes into my sulking session before a knocking sound came from the window and made me jump. The yo-yo hit the floor and I lost count of how many times I'd bounced it.

I went over to the dusty window and yanked the cord that made the blinds shoot up. Squinting at the sudden increase in light, I saw my best friend Kaia's face pressed up against the screen on the window, with her nose closely resembling a pig's. She beamed and waved at me with one hand while the other one remained tucked behind the strap of her backpack.

Kaia was really awesome because she had been my friend all year, and she didn't call me a freak even once! Most people can't get over my obsession with bugs and my ADHD and anger management issues and stuff. But, honestly, she's a little weird herself. If there was one word to describe Kaia, it would be snakelike.

Kaia's like a freaking ninja. She could sneak up on you wearing jingle bells. You'd think she'd be really clumsy and loud, because she walks kinda funny. She drags her feet a lot, but at the same time, she almost seems to glide down the hallways at school.

That makes her sound graceful, but, believe me, she's not. I mean, she's definitely not ugly, but you wouldn't exactly call her cute. She's got straight, sooty black hair and small, bottle green eyes that you would think should be able to glow in the dark like a snake's but evidently don't.

One other thing about Kaia that only further reinforces the reptilian air about her is this lisp that she's got that gets on everybody's nerves. She told me once that she's had it since she was a kid, and it was no big deal. It's not like she's hard to understand or anything, it's just something about the letter S that makes it seem like she's hissing at everyone.

I unlocked the window and pulled up the glass pane, feeling a breeze drift through the screen.

Kaia's mouth went off right away. "Oh my goshh, Ari! Everyone at sschool is ssaying you were expelled and Chloe Adeline Everly has pretty much ssworn vengeance on you now, you know? Sso, like, I wass telling them all how you could totally beat her in a fight, like, heck! You already did. But, oh my goshh! I'm talking too much. Everyone is ssaying you got expelled!"

I sighed. "No, not really. Just suspended. And, well, grounded." I motioned dramatically to my surroundings—or lack thereof—to show what I meant.

Kaia's giddiness evaporated and she leaned on my window sill. "Oh, ssorry. I guesss your dad didn't take it well, huh?"

I shook my head. "He pretty much told me that I'm a prisoner here until he gets home."

She tapped her fingers on the side of my house and I looked around my small, restricted room again.

"Want to take a walk with me?" Kaia asked. "I brought food."

"Yes, please!" I slid the screen open on the window and hopped out. After closing the window behind me, Kaia and I started racing off into the forest behind my house. You might be able to blame Kaia's weird limp, but I was always faster. I was faster than nearly everyone in our grade, for that matter.

I made a show of leaning coolly against a tree when Kaia finally caught up.

"That'ss not fair, you're, like, ssuperhuman!"

"Oh, I'm sure." I rolled my eyes.

Kaia shrugged off her backpack and sat down hard with her back against a tree. She dug around in her bag for a minute and pulled out a small orange box. She shook it at me.

"Your favorite," she said, beaming.

"Aw, yes!" I responded, pouncing on the box. I took it and tore open the top, pouring some bacon-and-cheese-flavored crickets into my palm. Just another thing to add to the list of why normal people aren't my friends. I stuffed the bugs in my mouth.

"Ariadne, you better make those lasst. You owe me like three dollarss for them."

"Yeah, yeah." I nodded and waved my hand, though we both knew that I would never pay her back. I was always broke, because my dad didn't give me allowance or anything, and I was only thirteen, so I wouldn't be able to get a job for at least a couple more weeks when I turned fourteen.

I didn't know it back then, but by that time, everything would be different.

"So," Kaia said, pulling a sandwich out of her backpack. "What's been up with you recently?"

"Ah, same old, same old." I reached up to a tree branch above my head and lifted myself off the ground. "You know, sometimes I really do wish that I was superhuman. That'd be tons better than just plain, old Ariadne Weaver." I swung my legs up on the branch and let go so I was hanging from my knees.

"Lissten, Ari." Kaia took a bite out of her sandwich and proceeded to talk with her mouth full. "If you are anything, you are definitely not plain. You eat cricketss like Cheetos and are the fastesst human I've ever met and you are currently hanging upsside down from a tree. Face it, you're not ordinary by a long shot."

"Um..."

"Gah!" Kaia dropped her sandwich and slapped her palm on her forehead. "That came out wrong. I meant it as a good thing!"

"That's okay." I smiled at her. "I know what you mean."

"Exactly." She retrieved her snack from the ground where she'd dropped it, dusted it off, and pointed to me with it. "That'ss why you're my best friend."

I shrugged, which was weird considering that I was upside down. "I guess."

"Hey, wanna race again? To the other end of the forest?"

I grinned. "It's not much of a race when you're dragging your feet all the time."

Laughing, Kaia got up. "Challenge accepted."

In one smooth movement, I flipped off of the tree branch and landed squarely on the soft ground. Kaia had already taken off, but I caught up to her in a matter of seconds. She shouted something after me that I couldn't hear. It only took a minute or two for me to decide to play a little trick on my friend.

Stopping, I looked around a small clearing to find a good tree. I scaled one easily, not minding the rough bark scratching my hands. The air smelled crisp and the trees swayed in the light breeze. I felt a little guilty for leaving when my dad had told me to stay inside my room, but I would be back before he even got home! And he didn't really expect me to stay cooped up in that little bedroom of mine all day anyway, did he? Pretty impossible if you ask me.

Kaia suddenly entered the small clearing. She cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled down the pathway that I probably would've gone down if I hadn't thought up my brilliant idea to climb the tree. "Ari! I give up! You totally win!"

She sighed and then laughed a little. I grinned as she slowly made her way to a tree next to mine and sat down underneath it. She started picking at the grass and I cautiously climbed up my branch. I would have to swing to the next tree over.

Hoping that she would mistake my noise for a squirrel or a bird, I carefully hopped to the next branch. I closed my eyes and bit my lip, praying that it would hold my weight. It did.

This is gonna be gold, I thought to myself, as Kaia continued to twirl a blade of grass around her finger. I felt a tickling at my ear, and I brushed my hand over the spot. When it came away, there was a tiny spider clutching onto my finger. Smiling, I placed it on the branch next to me.

"Come to watch, huh?" I asked it quietly. "You picked a great spot."

Below, Kaia snapped her head back to look up at the tree. I melted back into the leaves. She wouldn't be able to see me here. When she went back to her attempts at making a grass whistle, I started lowering myself down, branch by branch until I was within jumping distance from the ground. I counted down in my head. Three... two... one!

I tackled Kaia and she let out a yelp of alarm. I wrapped my arms around her head. I was laughing hysterically when I felt a pinching feeling on my right arm.

"Ah, Kaia! Did you just bite me?"

"Ari! What was— oopss, ssorry. I guesss I did bite you. Ssorry! Ssorry! Natural insstinct, I sswear!"

Oh well. Maybe my brilliant trick wasn't quite as good as I'd hoped. "It's oka—"

"I sseriously didn't mean to—"

"Kaia, really. It's okay, I was the one who scared you in the first place."

"Um... Oh my godss, Ari..."

"Yeah?"

"Your arm is, like, bleeding!"

"What?"

I suddenly felt an intense stinging sensation in my forearm where she had bit me. When I looked down, what I saw made me absolutely sick to my stomach. The flesh around the two small puncture marks on my arm was turning green.

Yelping, my first inclination was to rub the area where my skin was being zombified, resulting in my smearing the blood from the wounds up and down my arm.

"Sstop! Sstop!" Kaia told me frantically, grabbing my wrist. "You're only making it worsse by sspreading the venom around!"

Venom? What! I examined my arm through the blood. Where had those two marks come from anyway? All she did was bite me!

I screamed and waved my arm back and forth, like I could shake off the horrible burning feeling in my arm.

"Ari! Sstop it! You're only sspeeding up the processs by getting your blood pumping. It'll only sspread the venom to your heart!"

I had absolutely no idea what Kaia was talking about, I only had enough sense left in me to register what she was saying and stop flinging my arm around.

"Okay..." Kaia's voice sounded disturbingly soothing. "Now you have to calm down."

"How am I supposed to do that when—"

"Jusst. Calm. Down."

I took a deep breath, trying to do what Kaia asked. She obviously thought she knew something on the subject of poison.

"Good." She grimaced. "Your heart should stop beating any minute now."

"WHAT?" I screamed. Obviously, my heart rate would not be going down any time soon.

"I did not jusst ssay that!" Kaia yelled, beating her fists on the sides of her head.

"Kaia, what's happening? And since when do you have fangs!"

It was true. Kaia's face looked longer and sharper than usual, and when she opened her mouth to reply, her canine teeth were strangely elongated.

My knees were jelly. I sat down hard in the grass.

Kaia knelt next to me. "Ari! Ari, are you okay?"

I strained my neck to look up at her. "Is this some kind of joke?" I asked her. I had my good hand wrapped around the sticky, damp skin on the arm that she'd bitten. My insides didn't feel much better than my outsides looked. My breathing was shallow and any part of me that wasn't a sickly shade of green was deathly pale. Could I really be dying?

"No, it'ss really happening— er— I mean, nope! Thiss iss all jusst a prank! I got you, haha," she laughed nervously.

"You really suck at lying, Kaia."

"Okay, okay! Thiss iss real!"

"You better start explaining now," I commanded.

"Um, ssure. Okay. Sso, well, long sstory."

"Out with it! I'm dying over here!" I was really panicking now. But even more than that, I was furious. I got mad when I didn't understand something; and boy, was I not understanding the situation now. My anger management issues were really starting to show.

"Alright, sso, you know the Greek mythss, right?"

"Yeah, duh. I'm named after one!"

"Oh, right! I sshould've figured that out... Anyway! Sso, like, how do I ssay this? Well, they're real."

"Skip to the part where you have fangs," I spat through clenched teeth, not having time for the whole "Greek mythology is real" concept at the moment.

"Okay, so there are these Greek gods, right? So, one of them made this, like, monster. Named Echidna. And she, like, made all these other monsters, like the Sirens and the Chimera and—"

"I get it!"

"I'm one of those monsters. I'm a scythian dracaena... a snake woman."

"And you just bit me, and I'm gonna die?" I asked, because that was really the only detail I cared about at the time.

"Maybe not!" Kaia said hurriedly. "Not if you calm down and I can get you back to Camp and—"

"Fine!" I took a few deep breaths to show her that I could be calm.

"Great." Kaia forced a smile. "Now, drink this." She produced a plastic water bottle from her backpack. Only, I sincerely doubted that it was holding water. The sticky-looking liquid inside of it was a dark red color.

"What is that?" I asked, though I didn't wait for an answer. I just took the bottle in my trembling hands and popped the top open with my teeth. I hesitantly took a small sip. I couldn't tell you what it tasted like, because it didn't really taste like anything. Water, maybe. But even water has some taste. This was like drinking liquid air.

I took another sip, but this time Kaia tipped the bottom up and the entire contents drained into my mouth. I was choking and sputtering for a second, but then it evaporated in my throat.

It was a pleasant sensation. Until I blacked out the next second.