A/N (I recommend reading this): I'm going to MAKE THIS CLEAR. Just like I mention on my bio page about every other fanfiction I done: I DON'T OWN THE PERCY JACKSON AND THE OLYMPIAN SERIES OR IT'S CHARACTERS as the rights goes to Rick Rioran. Also I suggest you guys start paying attention to the Author notes and my warnings that I left on EVERY chapter of EVERY story.
Sorry if this chapter is too much like the book.
Due to the limited number of characters posted, I'm forced to post only the names of the characters telling their tales in this story. When I get to the House of Hades and Blood of Olympus, I'll list off the first four characters listed in the order they tell their tales. I'll post the pairings if the two of the four characters listed are a pair. Other than that, the Pairings stay the same for this story.
Jason x Piper
Percy x Annabeth
Frank x Hazel
If you haven't figured it out, each of the members of the Prophecy of Seven practically has a position. Keep in mind in the original series Juno started this when she told Percy he was the glue that holds the group together, so I thought to give the rest a title. But no matter what title they have they still depend on each other. Titles will be added for some as the series continue
Jason: Leader of the Group
Piper: Peacekeeper
Leo: Mechanic, Admiral, and Seventh Wheel (by Nemesis)
Percy: Glue that holds everyone together
Hazel: Youngest (Her title will change further into this story).
Frank: Muscles
Annabeth: Battle Strategist and Consultant
Lastly I want to make clear that once 'The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus' is done I won't start immediately on 'The tales of...' version of the Trials of Apollo until that part of the Percy Jackson series is done. Just as I waited for the end of the Blood of Olympus to start 'The Tales of...' series. By waiting until that series ends, it might help me come up with something to add to it.
Warning: Certain ancient Greek names matches words use of foul language but no foul language was intentionally used. Also I dropped the '& the Olympians' in 'The Tales of the Son of Poseidon & the Olympians' as well as replaced the '&' with ':' in the short stories of that part of the series. So if you haven't read them yet read before reading this story as stuff that happened in them will be mentioned:
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: the Early Adventures
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Lightning Thief
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Sea of Monsters
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Titan's Curse
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Magical Labyrinth
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: the Stolen Chariot
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: the Sword of Hades
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: the Bronze Dragon
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Last Olympian
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: the Staff of Hermes
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Lost Hero
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Quest for Buford
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Son of Neptune
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Mark of Athena
Lastly, any one who wants to do a Demigods and Olympian reads story using 'The Tales of the Son of Poseidon' is allowed as long as you inform me about it.
Full Summary of this chapter: Separated from their friends, Percy and Annabeth must travel through Tartarus against all odds to find the Doors of Death while facing monsters, Titans, and all sorts of enemies of the gods with a help of an amnesiac Titan and Rogue Giant. Meanwhile Argo II must find away to make it to the house of Hades is at while facing all sorts of new trouble and making new allies along the way. This is the Tales of the Prophecy of Seven.
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The House of Hades
Hazel's POV Part I
From the moment we left to meet our missing two comrades at the House of Hades and the Doors of Death, we already had three boulders thrown at us and during the third attack, I almost ate a boulder.
I was peering into the fog, wondering how it could be so difficult to fly across one stupid mountain range, when the ship's alarm bells sounded.
"Hard to port!" my brother Nico yelled from the foremast of the flying ship.
Back at the helm, Leo yanked the wheel. The Argo II veered left, it's aerial oars slashing through the clouds like rows of knives.
I made the mistake of looking over the rail. A dark spherical shape hurtled toward me. I thought: Why is the moon coming at us? Then I yelped and hit the deck. The huge rock passed so close overhead it blew my hair out of my face.
CRACK!
The foremast collapsed—sail, spars, and Nico all crashing to the deck. The boulder, roughly the size of a pickup truck, tumbling off into the fog like it had important business elsewhere.
"Nico!" I scrambled over to him as Leo brought the ship level.
"I'm fine," Nico muttered, kicking folds of canvas off his legs.
I helped him up, and we stumbled to the bow. I peeked over more carefully this time and saw what we were facing. The clouds parted just long enough to reveal the top of the mountain below us: a spearhead of black rock jutting from mossy green slopes. Standing at the summit as a mountain god—one of the numina montanum, Jason called them. Or ourae, in Greek. Either way you called them, they were nasty.
Like the others we faced, this one wore a simple white tunic over skin as rough as dark as basalt. He was about twenty feet tall and extremely muscular, with a flowing white beard, shaggy hair, and a wild look in his eyes like a crazy hermit. He bellowed something I didn't understand, but it obviously wasn't welcoming. With his bare hands, he pried another chunk of rock from his mountain and began shaping it into a ball.
The scene disappeared in the fog, but when the mountain god bellowed again, other numina answered in the distance, their voices echoing through the valleys.
"Stupid rock gods!" Leo yelled from the helm. "That's the third time I've had to replace that mast! You think they grow on trees?"
Nico frowned. "Masts are from trees."
"That's not the point!" Leo snatched up one of his controls, rigged from a Nintendo Wii stick (another modern technology I'm still trying to make sense out of), and spun it in a circle. A few feet away a trapdoor opened in the deck. A Celestial bronze cannon rose. I just had time to cover my ears before it discharged into the sky, spraying a dozen metal spheres that trailed green Greek fire for extra damage. The spheres grew spikes in midair, like helicopter blades, and hurtled away into the fog.
A moment later, a series of explosions crackled across the mountains, followed by the outraged roars of mountain gods.
"Ha!" Leo yelled.
Unfortunately, the mountain gods were—of course—gods, which means even Greek fire won't destroy them, but will annoyed them.
Just then another boulder whistled through the air off to our starboard side.
Nico yelled, "Get us out of here!"
Leo muttered some unflattering comments about numina, but he turned the wheel. The engines hummed. The magical riggings lashed itself tight, and the ship tacked to port. The Argo II picked up speed, retreating northwest, as we'd been doing for the past two days.
I didn't relax until we were out of the mountains. The fog cleared and below us, the morning sunlight illuminated the Italian countryside—rolling green hills and golden fields not too different from those in Northern California. I could almost imagine I was sailing home to Camp Jupiter.
Unfortunately, the thought seemed to weighed down on my chest. Ever since Nico brought me back from the Underworld nine months ago, Camp Jupiter had been my home. I missed it more than my birthplace of New Orleans, and definitely more than Alaska, here I'd died back in 1942.
I missed my bunk in the Fifth Cohort barracks. I missed dinners in the mess hall, with wind spirits whisking platters through the air and legionnaires joking about the war games. I wanted to wander the streets of New Rome, holding hands with my caring boyfriend Frank Zhang. I wanted to experience just being a regular girl for once.
Most of all, I wanted to feel safe. I was tired of being scared and worried all the time.
I stood on the quarterdeck as Nico picked mast splinters out of his arms and Leo punched buttons on the ship's control consol.
"Well that was sucktastic," Leo said. "Should I wake the others?"
I was tempted to say yes, but the other crew members had taken the night shift and had earned their rest. They were exhausted from defending the ship every few hours from every Roman monster that decided that the Argo II look like a tasty treat.
A few weeks ago, I wouldn't have believed that anyone could sleep through a numina attack, but now I imagined my friends and boyfriend was still snoring away below decks. When we left Rome we agreed to take shifts with three demigods (Plus Coach Hedge taking the wheel when Leo's shift is over) watching the ship and when our shift is over, I plan to sleep like a coma patient.
"They need rest," I said. "We'll have to figure out another way on our own."
"Huh." Leo scowled at his monitor. In his tattered work shirt and grease-splattered jeans, he looked like he's just lost a wrestling match with a locomotive.
Ever since our friends Percy and Annabeth had fallen nonstop, Leo had been spending every waking moment working nonstop. If it wasn't for Coach Hedge stopping him to get some sleep, Leo probably would work twenty-four hours. It was if he was even more driven than usual by his anger.
I was worried about him. But part of me was relieved by the change. Whenever Leo smiled and joked, he looked too much like Sammy, his great-grandfather… my first boyfriend, back in 1942.
Ugh, why did my life have to be so complicated?
"Another way," Leo muttered. "Do you see one?"
On his monitor glowed a map of Italy. The Apennine Mountains ran down the middle of the boot-shaped country. A green dot for the Argo II blinked on the western side of the range, a few hundred miles north of Rome. Our path should have been simple. We needed to get to a place called Epirus in Greece and find an old temple called the House of Hades (or Pluto, as the Romans called him; or as I liked to think of him: The World's Worst Absent Father).
To reach Epirus, all we had to do was go straight east—over the Apennines and across the Adriatic Sea. But every time we tried to cross the spine of Italy, the mountain gods attacked, making our journey difficult.
For the past two days we'd skirted north, hoping to find a safe pass, but with no luck. The numina montanum were sons of Gaea, my least favorite goddess. That made them very determined enemies. The Argo II couldn't fly high enough to avoid their attacks; and even with all its defenses, the ship couldn't make it across the range without being smashed to pieces.
"It's our fault," I said. "Nico's and mine. The numina can sense us."
I glanced at my half-brother. Ever since we rescued him from the giants, he'd started regaining his strength, but he was still painfully thin. His black shirt and jeans hung off his skeletal frame. Long dark hair framed his sunken eyes. His olive complexion had turned a sickly greenish white, like the color of tree sap.
I bet if our other sibling—Nico's sister from the same mother and my half-sister: Bianca di Angelo—saw him now, she probably hardly recognized him. Fortunately—or rather unfortunately—Bianca joined the Hunters of Artemis (to the Romans Diane) before Nico found me. Forever immortalized as a twelve-year-old girl I been told. In fact, I never met her, and if it wasn't for that dream vision Percy had involving the Hunters and the Amazons joining forces in Artemis—or Diane's—absence against a common threat, I would still be wondering if Bianca knows anything about me yet.
As for Nico, in human years he was barely fourteen, just a year older than me, but that didn't tell the whole story. Like me, Nico and Bianca di Angelo both are demigods from another era. Nico himself radiated a kind of old energy—a melancholy that came from knowing he didn't belong in the modern world.
I didn't know him very long, but I understood, even shared, his sadness. The children of Hades (Pluto—whichever) rarely had happy lives. Bianca was lucky enough to be welcomed by Artemis (Diane). But Nico still struggled from time to time. And judging from what he told me the night before, our challenge was yet to come when we reached the House of Hades—a challenge he'd implored me to keep secret from the others even though they might have an idea due since closing the Doors of Death was a test on the Prophecy of Seven.
Nico gripped the hilt of his Stygian iron sword. "Earth spirits don't like children of the Underworld. That's true. We get under their skin—literally. But I think the numina could sense this ship anyway. We're carrying the Athena Parthenos. That thing is like a magical beacon."
I shivered, thinking of the massive statue that took up most of the hold. We'd sacrificed so much saving it from the cavern under Rome; but we had no idea what to do with it. Piper's mom Aphrodite (or Venus) said if the Fates allow it, Annabeth will be able to return it the proper way that will bring peace between the Greeks and Romans. But Annabeth was in Tartarus with Percy and the Fates have yet send us a sign on what to do with the statue, leaving us with nothing to do about Athena Parthenos except having to deal with monsters that are alerted by its presence.
Leo traced his finger down the map of Italy. "So crossing the mountains is out. Thing is, they go a long way either direction."
"We could go by sea," I suggested. "Sail around the southern tip of Italy."
"That's a long way," Nico said. "Plus, we don't have…" His voice cracked. "You know… our sea expert, Percy."
The name hung in the air like an impending storm.
Percy Jackson, son of Poseidon… probably the demigod I admired most. He'd brought honor back to the Fifth Cohort (which probably was taken away when evil possessing spirits possessed Leo to attack New Rome and Jason Frank Percy and I left Camp Jupiter in the chaos), and saved my life so many times on our quest to Alaska; but when he had needed my help in Rome, I'd failed him. I'd watched, powerless, as he and Annabeth had plunged into that pit.
I took a deep breath. Percy and Annabeth were still alive. I knew that in my heart. I could still help them if I could get to the House of Hades, if I could survive the challenge Nico warned me about…
"What about continuing north?" I asked. "There has to be a break in the mountains, or something."
Leo fiddled with one of his bronze Archimedes sphere that he'd installed on the console—his newest and most dangerous toys. The other one was in his cabin (probably so he can figure out how to use it as well). Every time I looked at that thing, my mouth went dry. I worried that Leo would turn the wrong combination on the sphere and accidentally eject us all from the deck, or blow up the ship, or turn the Argo II into a giant toaster.
Fortunately, we got lucky. The sphere grew a camera lens and projected a 3-D image of the Apennine Mountains above the console.
"I dunno." Leo examined the hologram. "I don't see any good passes to the north. But I like that idea better than backtracking south. I'm done with Rome."
No arguments against that. Too be honest, I had enough of Rome from the moment Gaea tried to lock up Leo Frank and me underground so she can use Frank and me as her sacrifices.
"Whatever we do," Nico said, "we have to hurry. Every day that Annabeth and Percy are in Tartarus…"
He didn't need to finish. We had to hope Percy and Annabeth could survive long enough to find the Tartarus side of the Doors of Death. Then, assuming the Argo II could reach the House of Hades, we might be able to open the Doors on the mortal side, save our friends, and seal the entrance, stopping Gaea's forces from being reincarnated in the mortal world over and over.
Yes… nothing could go wrong with that plan.
Nico scowled at the Italian country side below us. "Maybe we should wake the others. This decision affects us all."
"No," I said. "We can find a solution."
I wasn't sure why I felt so strongly about it, but since leaving Rome, the crew had started to lose its cohesion. We'd been learning to work as a team. Then bam… our most important members fell into Tartarus. Juno once told Percy he was the glue that held us together, and I never realized how right she was until after he let go of the edge. As for Annabeth, she's our battle strategist, consultant. She'd recovered the Athena Parthenos single-handedly. She was the smartest of the seven, the one with the answer. Even Jason admitted that Annabeth was practically one of the leaders of our quest.
If I woke up the rest of the crew every time we had a problem, we'd just start arguing again, feeling more and more hopeless.
I had to make Percy and Annabeth proud of me. I had to take the initiative as daughter of Pluto once more. I couldn't believe my only role in this quest would be what Nico warned me of—removing the obstacle waiting for us in the House of Hades. I pushed the thought aside.
"We need some creative thinking," I said. "Another way to cross those mountains, or a way to hide ourselves from the numina."
Nico sighed. "If I was on my own, I could shadow travel. But that won't work for an entire ship. And even if I teach it to you, Hazel, it won't work in the land of the dead."
Nico had promised me that one day he would try and teach me how to shadow travel (if it was possible for me to learn). Since it was more of a power over shadows especially underground, there was a small chance I could do it. However, I been waiting until my brother was back in top shape after being captured by the giants to teach me to bring it up.
But the way Nico said that told me it wouldn't matter. Even calling on Pluto would be a very bad idea. And yet…
Please, Dad, I found myself praying. I have to find a way to your temple in Greece—the House of Hades. If you're down there, show me what to do.
At the edge of the horizon, a flicker of movement caught my eye—something small and beige racing across the fields at incredible speed, leaving a vapor trail like a plane's.
I couldn't believe it. I didn't dare hope, but it had to be… "Arion."
"What?" Nico asked.
Leo let out a happy whoop as the dust cloud got closer. "It's her horse, man! You missed the whole part. We haven't seen him since Kansas!"
I laughed for the first time in days. It felt so good to see my old friend.
About a mile north, the small beige dot circled a hill and stopped at the summit. He was difficult to make out, but when the horse reared and whinnied, the sound carried all the way to the Argo II. I had no doubt—it was Arion. And—although I wouldn't admit it right away—but seeing the immortal horse-son of Poseidon gave me a little bit of new hope in saving Percy and Annabeth—as if Arion was a new sign of hope in our quest.
"We have to meet him," I said. "He's here to help."
"Yeah, okay," Leo scratched his head. "But, uh, we talked about not landing the ship on the ground anymore, remember? You know, with Gaea wanting to destroy us and all."
"Just get me close, and I'll use the rope ladder." My heart was pounding. "I think Arion wants to tell me something."
A/N: Thanks for being patient everyone.