A/N: Hey Guys, I am finally back after what felt like an infinitely long hiatus. To those of you who are still waiting for a Falling For You update, I am really sorry but I don't think that is happening any time soon. When I was writing that fanfiction, everything after the prologue just felt and sounded like a piece of crap. It felt like a chore to write even a sentence, and I owe it both to you the reader, and to me the author to not put you through that. Maybe someday I will rewrite it, but not right now. On a more positive note, I have my new story Illusions I am really excited to be sharing this with you. I have been toying with this plotline for a while and I am really excited to be finally writing it.

I am on summer break right now, so chapters will be much easier to write, but I have school in the fall, and for those of you who are in high school you understand how much workload is placed on us. I also have swimming so it will be hard to update. I will update every two or three weeks, and sooner if I can. There may be some times where I don't update for more than a month, and it's not that I don't want to write, but more of a I don't have any time. I will try my very best to finish this fan fiction unless my writing becomes even more atrocious than normal.

Make sure to follow me, my story, favourite me or my story, comment, PM, read or whatever you feel like. I love feedback both positive and negative, just try not to write anything that will make me cry for hours on end. (20 minutes max). (I'm kidding please don't make me cry, I'm just a teenage girl). Seriously though, I read every single comment over and over to the point where it gets a little creepy. Anyways, sorry for the megalong Author's Note, I'll try to keep them shorter. Without further adue here is the first chapter of Illusions.

Disclaimer: I don't own any of the Percy Jackson characters, plots, etcetera excetera. I only own the plot to this story and a pair of very comfortable sandals.

Prologue

William Shakespeare once said, "Hell is empty, and all the devils are here." At first I thought this was absurd, but now, I'm starting to believe him.

The world is a complicated, terrifying place sometimes. We have to deal with things that we have never had to deal with before. We're feeling our way through life, blindly searching for something. Half the time we don't even know what that something is. Some people think that we're searching for safety, success, or happiness. If it's happiness that we're trying to find then I'm not so convinced that we're going to get it. With all the bad going on in the world it's hard to think that there is anything left that is good.

I know what you're probably thinking. What is this sick twisted girl babbling on about? She doesn't know pain, she doesn't know fear or sadness. But the thing is, I do.

I have a better understanding of pain and grief than of happiness and contentment. I know the creeping feeling of depression better than I know the back of my own hand. Life is a twisted card dealer with a fetish for handing out fucked up cards, and I have been dealt a full house.

It's hard to know when exactly my life started spiraling downwards. One day I was completely normal, oblivious to the terrors that hid behind the thin wall of my reality. I suppose that I was never completely normal, the pedestal that I was knocked off of wasn't as high as I thought. But then one day it all changed. The paper thin walls were torn down and I had a clear view of what really went on. I used to see small fragments of the horrors from the cracks in the walls. Now, I have a full view, and I don't like what I see.

No one knows exactly when it all began. When I went from the whole, if not slightly superficial person that I was, to a broken empty shell. Different people each have their own theories of what exactly went wrong. My mom and brother, even my therapist have different ideas, and believe that if somehow they can find the root of the problem, they can help me.

My brother believes that it began the day the first note appeared in my locker. My mother completely disagrees with him, convinced that it started the day that Silena Beauregard drove her car off of the freeway hurtling to her quick but gruesome death.

But I know better. I know that all of this, this brokenness for lack of a better word began a long while before that. All of this pain and grief and whatever else I have had to endure began the day Percy Jackson first walked into my life.

I met Percy Jackson in middle school, and it was then that I realized that I hated him. We were polar opposites, I was level headed and practical, while he was impulsive and irrational. He knew of my disdain for him and sought to make my life miserable. I suppose that in a way I encouraged him, after all I never really tried to stop it.

His schedule could be filled to the brim, it seemed like he didn't have a spare second in the day, yet he still sought to make my life awful. It gave him a special glee when he succeeded. Watching my blood boil was better than any sort of pleasure that he could receive, or so I thought. Making someone miserable was an art, and Percy Jackson had perfected it. It wasn't just me that he broke, many people became anguished from the Jackson charm.

Percy was a player, to put it simply. I suppose that's why I detested him so. He would feed off of the longing of innocent girls, reeling them in slowly, then once he got what he wanted he would drop them. No one ever blamed him. No, Percy Jackson, the God of Goode High was nothing short of perfection. All of the guys wanted to be him, all the girls, and even some of the guys, wanted to be with him. I don't think any of them realized exactly who he was. I don't even think that he knew who he was. Maybe that's what made him do all of those things.

Percy's life was nothing short of hell, even before everything happened. He was miserable and he believed that the only way to be less miserable was to drag everyone else into the darkness that he had become accustomed to. So he would play those girls. It was an art really. I watched from afar as girl after girl found their way to him, believing that she would be the one to change Percy Jackson. He would let them think that, and once they were in deeper than they could handle, he would throw them away as if they were a shirt that was no longer in style.

When he would break those girls they would never blame themselves. It was their fault that he hurt them, never his. I pitied them. I pitied the spineless fools who got entangled in Percy's web. I pitied them because I was one of them.

Percy Jackson was a selfish, narcissistic sadist, but that didn't stop me from loving him. Every time I thought that I was done with him, I'd get a glimpse of someone completely different, a person worth loving, and I would come crawling back like the naive girl I was. That naive girl died a long time ago, and I have no idea what lives inside of me now.

Percy Jackson was an enigma that I found myself trying and failing to decipher. He was sick and twisted, and I was exactly the same, I just didn't know it yet. I guess that was what drew me to him. The thrill, the mystery. I craved mystery like an addict craved their fix. Or at least I thought I did. It wasn't until my entire life became a mystery, the point when I couldn't decipher between reality and illusion that I realized how much I craved the normality of my old life.

Like I said, it wasn't always like this. There was a time when my biggest worry was whether or not the grade I scored on a test would be acceptable to my mother. I was so caught up in my whirlwind of petty self righteousness that I failed to notice the horrors that wrapped around me.

The person I am now, what I am, and what I believe in didn't only change because of the string of events that occurred during my senior year. Before that there were little shifts. It's like those mechanisms at a train station that connect certain tracks so that the train can switch to a different path. The day my father left my mother, was a switch to another track. The day Percy came into my life for the first time was another. The day I realized I loved him, that was a big switch to another track. It wasn't until the accident, the notes, and the mystery that ensued that the final switch happened. I switched from the tracks that would have lead me to an ordinary life, to the tracks that lead me to the enigmatic life that I now dwell in.

I don't miss the person that I was. I may be dispirited and hurt, but at least I'm not the egotistical naive girl that believed that good things happened to good people and karma would sort everything out. Good things don't happen to good people, bad things happen to them.

Good people are so annoying with their optimistic ways, it's emotionally and physically draining. Good people get hurt, and sometimes the bad people remain unscathed. The bad guys win sometimes, and the heroes don't rise. If you still believe that good will prevail then I urge you to stop reading, please, live in this little bubble that you're surrounded in for as long as possible.

I once lived in a bubble where I thought people had what was coming to them. I thought most everything was black and white, right and wrong. But you see, in between black and white is grey. There are so many shades of grey that it would take forever to count them. If you think that there are fifty of these shades of grey then oh my god put down the damn erotic novel because you have it so wrong. There are so many shades of grey, you can't possibly count them. Nothing can be black and white, we have these shades of grey, because they represent perspective.

Nothing is ever right or wrong to the same two people because there is always the matter of perspective. To a drunk a 10am brandy is completely okay, but to a bible thumping Christian it is most certainly not. Perspective gets in the way of everything, the nasty little ass. Wars are fought, crimes are made, all because everyone is trying to define the shades of grey, the perspective.

My perspective has changed so much over such a short period of time that my shades of grey could be completely different colours. I've become so aware of all the bad that goes on in the world that I have almost forgotten the good. Ordinary people go around, oblivious to all of these terrors, but I have a clear view of it.

Sometimes, I miss the obliviousness of it all. I miss the mundane ways that I used to participate in, but I don't think I could go back to them. Things have changed too much, I have changed too much. It wasn't long ago, infact it was only just over a year ago that everything really changed. The day that Percy Jackson waltzed back into my life and decided to make it a living hell.

A/N: AAAAHHHHHHH! So now that I'm calm(ish) that was the prologue of Illusions. Obviously, thanks Captain Obvious! Sorry, I only speak sarcasm, I'm thinking of teaching a class to help people become fluent in it. I'll call it "Wow, you want to be bilingual, that's great," (Get it, because the title of the class is going to be sarcastic!)

Anyways, thank you so much for reading. Make sure to follow, favourite, comment, whatever on my story. You are all so great, and I will try to post soon!

-Xoxo RedHeadReader22