Prologue

Republic of Olympus Library of Records

Videotape # 435

Recorded 12 September 1985

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Static appears on the screen of the small video player for a few seconds, before a grainy video crackles to life. The camera is pointed at the face of a middle-aged woman. The picture quality is terrible (having been shot in the eighties), but it is possible to make out blond hair streaked with gray and a pair of silver eyes staring sagely at the screen.

The woman is Senator Annabeth Chase, one of the famed "Circle of Seven" who led the 1969 revolution against the oppressive Spartanist dictatorship that led the Republic of Olympus from 1957 to 1970. Senator Chase takes off a pair of steel-rimmed bifocals with badly shaking fingers.

ANNABETH CHASE: Goddamn Parkinson's disease...

She leans back in her chair and sighs, steepling her fingers. She takes a deep breath.

AC: I have decided to record this video as means of an explanation. An explanation, I suppose, for some of the comments I passed in public about a possible re-examination of the mythos following our own national nightmare.

Chase chuckles slightly.

AC: As those of you watching will likely know, that was exactly the wrong thing to say when trying to win re-election to my Senatorial position. I still stand by what I said; however, I must make it clear that my intentions were completely misunderstood by the population at large.

She leans forwards, and the angry fire in her gray eyes stands out against their dull color.

AC: The actions perpetrated by a certain... individual... whose name anyone from Olympus would know were heinous, unforgivable, and, for lack of a better term, evil. But...

Senator Chase leans back in her chair contemplatively. Her tone grows sharper, more urgent.

AC: But we have to keep in mind that the man whose name is so hated, so vilified, in our country was not always the way he was. I knew him, I worked with him, I was friends with him all through the 1950s. We all need to remember that he worked to overthrow Saturn Kronos's government in 1957, and that he was one of the original Circle of Seven.

Am I asking that we forgive him for the fear and oppression he wreaked on us in the name of order and peace? No. I am asking that we look at his crimes from a different light, one that shows him not as an inhuman monster, but as a human being with good intentions who, somewhere, somehow, sometime, was twisted and warped into the man we know today as High Chancellor Perseus Jackson.

Chase sighs.

AC: I suppose it's time to start yammering. I'm not going to be around a lot longer, so I've got to get this out. Maybe the only one who knew him as well as I do was Minister Underwood or President di Angelo, but neither have, and will ever, talk about Percy. So I suppose it's up to me. To start at the beginning of Jackson's story, we'll need to look back a very long way, all the way back to the 1950s.

Those were... troubled times. We were all ruled by a terrible dictatorship, whose primary weapon was fear and manipulation. Our "glorious" head of state, President-For-Life Saturn Kronos, didn't just exercise his control with an iron fist, he kicked dissent in the ribs with lead boots. This was the kind of atmosphere we all grew up in, one of fear and oppression. At the time, Percy Jackson was a young, up-and-coming politician in the rubber-stamp "parliament." He was one of the few actually trying to make a difference, but it could not have ended worse for him...

Hello, peeps! I decided to put this new multichapter story up, despite the fact that the original version was a History assignment. We had to write a story in which an unlikely character becomes dictator of a country, and guess who I wrote about?

Truth be told, this might also be an exercise for me; to see how well I can twist and warp a character who is, in general, a good person, to be a villain. if you don't lie that idea, don't read further, but if you do decide to read on, enjoy!

Thanks,

C