Notes: Slightly edited version. to take into account the local weather. Sometimes I forget that not everybody lives in the tropics
Disclaimer: Not mine. Not for profit
1.
1130: Shadow travel thing didn't take an hour. According to the guy downstairs, it took a week. Nico's freaking out. Understandable, considering the circumstances.
1140: Cash works perfectly fine, but credit cards don't. I have no idea why.
1143: Re: "Here". Not too sure, but I think we're trapped in an alternate universe.
1150: Suggested above to Nico. Was not very receptive to the idea. Can't blame him.
1153: ... we need a Plan.
- Excerpt from Rachel Elizabeth Dare's Journal, Dated September 14th (Home)/September 21st (Here)
Chicago
12 noon, September 21st
Nico had been in Chicago before (he'd also been to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Rome, Venice and other places he hadn't really kept track of- there wasn't all that much he could do to fill up the days where his dad more or less exiled him from the Underworld), and to his utter frustration, fake Chicago was pretty much exactly like real Chicago. Same buildings, same landmarks, same semi-frozen huge-ass lake. Nothing at all suggested that this Chicago wasn't anything like normal Chicago (Well. Almost nothing at all. But maybe the Mist was throwing a fit or Chicago had a mass population of clear-sighted mortals or something, because everything else did look exactly the same), and Nico was starting to wonder if his Underworld-GPS was the malfunctioning thing here.
Rachel backed up his this-is-not-home theory, though; and he figured it wasn't all that smart to argue with the Oracle.
"We should try and contact Camp," Rachel told him, "See if we can reach Chiron. Or Annabeth. Annabeth will probably have answers."
Nico conceded that "when in doubt, ask Annabeth" was a good strategy, and pulled out his prism. After fifteen minutes of him staring into (and flipping drachmas through) a rainbow, Rachel took out her notebook and scribbled something in it.
"Right, plan B," she said, "Mundane methods of communication. I can't get through to Annabeth- but maybe that's because my phone is busted. Maybe if we can find a payphone or something- beg a call out of an innocent bystander..."
Nico squinted over her shoulder at the notebook, "Did you make an actual list?"
"Being systematic is a good thing," Rachel said, "Or so I'm told. Is locating payphones one of your superpowers?"
Nico stared at her.
"Didn't think so. Right, so let's-"
"Why is 'pray to Apollo' third on the list?" Nico squinted at the notebook, "And why's there 'despise machines' written next to Shadow travel? Why is Shadow travel seventh?"
"It's desperate measures," Rachel corrected, "And it's a desperate measure because I have no idea where we're going to end up if we try to teleport out of here. For all we know, it could be Medieval Hawaii. Or Krypton."
Nico bristled. Okay, so this whole shadow travel thing was not an exact science, but this was positively the one and only time he had ended up in an entirely different planet. Or something.
"This doesn't usually happen to me!" Nico snapped, "I haven't even accidentally ended up in China for ages! I don't know why we're here! It makes no sense!"
"No, it doesn't," Rachel agreed, "Which is why we shouldn't try something possibly irreversible till we've exhausted all other options. So come on."
Chicago
4 pm, September 21st
Annabeth's number worked just fine when they found a payphone to dial it from. Unfortunately, the person who picked it up had been cheery, polite, understanding and male. Which was really sortof an anti-Annabeth. Other numbers got results which were wide and varied (a gravelly bass for Mrs. Jackson, for example), just not anything they wanted to hear.
Praying to Apollo? Didn't work. Which was something of a disappointment because everyone knew Apollo positively doted on his first not-a-mummy Oracle in half a century, what with that thing he had of pelting her with random gifts like improved aiming skills (which Nico thought was kindof overkill, given the Blue Plastic Hairbrush incident) and the world's only professionally decorated cave.
Praying to his Dad? Didn't work either. But Nico could have told her that without trying. Lord Hades expected his children to take care of any non-monetary crisis by themselves, thanks.
The Dare Enterprises Branch in Chicago? Apparently did not exist. Rachel had dragged him along on a two-block radius search just in case she'd mixed up the address. It had been a complete and total waste of more than an hour.
The last-ditch desperate effort involved finding the venue of Rachel's Charity Ball and working up from there. That went about as well as expected (the Ball held a week ago had been hosted by a Mrs. Astor, and apparently no amount of begging or subterfuge was going to get them a Ms. Raith's number because she liked her privacy; Nico was still trying to figure out what one of them had to do with the other), and they were back to glumly sitting in front of the building and staring at nothing.
"So," Rachel said eventually, "Can you try and get us back home?"
The day had not been too good to Nico's self-confidence. In addition to being stranded and lost in territory that should have been familiar, his skeletal minions were refusing to respond to his summons. He'd learned long ago that like teddy bears, skeletal minions made everything better- losing them were like losing a metaphorical security blanket.
"I don't know," he growled at Rachel, "I can't summon anything. This place is ridiculous- I can't even carry my sword!"
"You are carrying your sword."
"In a gym bag! If some monster comes at me, I doubt it's going to wait for me to get it out."
"Look," Rachel sighed, "considering all the things we've seen and felt so far, or not seen or felt so far, I doubt we're going to encounter anything while out here. But you're right- this place gives me the creeps and we really should be getting home so can you try getting us back?"
Nico hesitated. Most demigod powers weren't too exact to begin with, and when you were continuously running for your life, you tended to use your powers more than you thought about how exactly they worked. The Athena and Hecate cabins had managed to cobble together a few rudimentary theories about how some of the more common abilities worked, but Shadow travel was not one of them, not like ranged-missile throwing or healing or charmspeaking. Something to do with the rarity factor, apparently.
All he knew about the power were things he'd learned himself, mostly by trial and error. Thinking about happy meals when travelling made you end up in China. Concentrating too much on the destination made you puke. Distance was not an issue, but do it two times in a row and you became catatonic. Taking people along was really more of a matter of taking mass along, and he'd discovered that while it had taken him a while and a few disoriented skeletons to perfect it, travelling two people was not all that different from travelling one person. Three and above was a problem, though.
According to what he knew, taking Rachel along wouldn't be a problem, but this world wasn't really bending over itself to conform to his knowledge base so far. It would be safest if he could do a trial run by himself, check and see if it actually worked and all that.
But if he did somehow end up in Medieval Hawaii, he would be all alone there and Rachel would be all alone here with no way of contacting each other and nobody they could talk to or plot with or- he could end up spending the rest of his life as a fisherman in Medieval Hawaii and that would not be fun.
Maybe if he was Percy.
But still, it would not be fun, and one look at Rachel told him that she was thinking the same thing. Maybe. Maybe she was thinking about the possibility about shadow travel ripping her apart into individual atoms and-
"Stop overthinking things," Rachel ordered, "I am coming with you. I refuse to be left alone in freakago."
Oh, so it was that first one.
He supposed really should not be feeling all that relieved about a harbinger of doom refusing to leave him out on his own, but Rachel's hand clutched in his was the only thing that felt even vaguely comforting as he stepped into suddenly unfamiliar shadows.
Empire State Building, New York City
05:22 pm, 21st September.
The Empire State Building looked exactly as it had the last time he's stood in front of it, down to the tourists with the cameras. The little shadowed corner he'd travelled them into even had the same graffiti on the trashcans.
"That was anti-climatic," Rachel noted, "Olympus be praised."
Nico told his heart to slow down, and tried not to collapse in sheer relief. Then he closed his eyes and felt for the Underworld, and groaned when he turned up a blank yet again.
"We're not home," Rachel mirrored his groan, "Would there be any point in trying to get to the 600th floor?"
"It's not like we're bursting with options," Nico sighed, "Come on."
Predictably enough, the guy at the reception gave them a lecture on the evils of stupidity and fake information on the internet when they asked him for keys to the 600th floor. Rachel was not happy about giving up that easily, but Nico pointed out that the Pegasus Express was not a viable option at this point.
"Camp," Rachel decided, "We can take a taxi to Long Island."
The Grey Sisters did not respond to Nico's drachma, so they had to hail a normal cab and spend ages pondering on the possibility of a mirror universe Camp complete with an evil Chiron. At least, that was what Nico did. Rachel, a far as he could tell, was napping.
When they finally got to Camp, it turned out that they were Strawberry fields. As in, actual Strawberry fields with no sign of dragons or pine trees or training camps. Rachel and Nico exchanged long-suffering we-totally-expected-that looks, while the cabbie hung around and darkly warned them about evil times and kidnappings and the perils of a kid and his babysitter being out on their own in the dark, which was enough to make Rachel snicker and Nico scowl.
"So, what do we do now?" Nico asked, once the cab had driven away and left them (again) someplace which should have been familiar but was almost achingly nothing of the sort.
Rachel stared towards where Camp would have been for a few moments (if he -the guy who tried to avoid the place as much as possible- was feeling like this, he suspected he wouldn't want to know what Rachel felt like at the abrupt nonexistence of her one haven) before she jerked her head towards it.
"How do you feel about going to the beach?"
It was steadily getting both darker and colder- it would have been much more sensible to try and go back, find someplace with an actual room. But they didn't actually have any place to go to, shadow travel worked better when he took a break between two trips, and Rachel looked depressed. So he shrugged, and started walking.
Long Island Sound, New York
07:47 pm, 21st September
The night was chilly enough that Nico had been forced to put up a wall of rock to stop them from being buffeted by direct winds, but neither of them were doing anything more than staring at the sea or the sand and making random inane comments. Nico knew - and he was pretty sure Rachel did too- that sulking on the beach wasn't doing anything to help the situation, but he'd decided that the situation excused it. Monsters you could fight- the center of your reality being shifted- not so much.
"We should go back to Chicago," Rachel said after a point.
"Why?" he asked.
"I think Chicago's the key," she told him, "Something in there is- I'm not sure. Involved in all of this."
He groaned.
"Obviously, there's nothing for us here, and I think we might get something of a clue there," Rachel said, "I'm not sure- the Oracle is- I don't think it's ever been this unambiguous before. It's stran-"
Rachel would later swear that she'd heard something- footsteps, breathing. The Oracle occasionally gave her warnings, but it never really acted overtly, not this way. Nico, however, insisted that she'd just gotten up all of a sudden, wide-eyed and wild and thrown herself to the other side of their wall. He yelped and followed, demanding to know what on earth was wrong with her.
Rachel was standing in front of the shelter, staring at the surf.
"Rachel?" Nico said, "It's windy out here."
"Do you see that?"
Her voice was subdued and grim. Nico looked from her to the shore, and saw the army of men rising up from the water.
"What the-"
"They want us," Rachel said, her breathing just slightly faster than usual.
"What?" he turned to her, and saw that she was paler than usual.
"They want us," Rachel repeated, and took a step backwards, "The want to take us. To torture us- use us. They have something planned, and they need people. Practitioners."
"What?"
"We need to get away from here," Rachel looked at him, "We can't let them capture us."
Nico closed his eyes, felt for their lives-
"They're mortals," he spluttered, "They can't-"
"They're not mortals," Rachel scrambled briefly in the sand and came up with her backpack and threw him his new gym bag, "They're not demigods, but they aren't mortals. They're something else. And don't ask me how I know- I just-"
"You're the Oracle. I can suspend my disbelief," Nico dragged out his sword, "Look, stand back and-"
The men were about thirty feet away, so Nico wasn't expecting one of them to appear next to his face, brandishing a knife. Mortal steel, but that could kill him just as easily as celestial bronze. Nico intercepted the slash with his sheath, drew and brandished his sword in the same motion.
The man hadn't apparently been expecting resistance, and didn't make any move to stop him, so the sword went (with a sickening snick- he'd never slashed at anyone human before) straight into his chest.
What Nico didn't expect was the pattern of black spreading across him from the cut, quick and smooth, covering torso and neck and gills in a matter of seconds-
What the hell, gills?
"Nico!" Rachel yelled from a few steps behind him.
NIco stared at the black and the gills, and the way the man's- the thing's face contorted into an agonized expression before the whole of him collapsed into dust.
"It's," he said, to himself or Rachel- he wasn't sure, "It's never done that before."
The other men (things) had hesitated at Nico's first stroke, and a few of them had taken a cautious step backwards. But now, a steady murmur was rising from their direction, and Nico thought he heard the distinct clack of a gun, of all things-
Rachel's arms wrapped around him, warm and tight in the cold air.
"Take us back to yesterday's hotel room," she said, her voice even and commanding and with a vague hint of a three-part harmony that was never her as much as the thing she hosted, "Now."
The last thing he heard before he stepped into the shadows was a roar, and then he was back in the room, just as ordered. It took him three deep breaths to get his heart rate back to semi-normal, and five more breaths to find his voice.
"What," Nico said, "in the name of Hades was that?"
0030: So, Nico's dropped (possibly literally, but at least he aimed for the bed) off to sleep, I'm vibrating too much to follow him and thank god this room doesn't have a card key or we'd be shivering little wrecks in the dark at this point and I am nowhere near comfortable enough to be okay with that.
The Oracle is quiet. Never been conscious when it hijacked me before. Never actually felt it before. Mostly it's just green smoke and vague headaches and amnesia.
It's supposed to be a disembodied all-knowing voice which needs a body to attach itself to.
It's not supposed to be alive.
To quote; what in the name of Hades was that?
- Excerpt from Rachel Elizabeth Dare's Journal, Dated September 15th (Home)/September 22nd (Here)
Notes: This is the first time I'm writing in this genre. Mistakes, it turns out, are likely to hit me over the head with frightening regularity. Feel free to point them out.