Okay so the previous chapters have been a bit boring so I added some action and slight mystery to this one, enjoy :) -Kaerneif
As always, I woke up in the middle of the night, sweat trickling down my face like crazy. I noticed my bedsheets were all over the place so I must've been moving a lot during that dream..
I felt like breaking up into tears for Erin right now. I mean, really? Gaea thought she was someone else so she tried to murder her with a pickup truck? What the heck was wrong with society? And then they wonder why pollution exists..
Anyways, I was completely restless right now. I climbed down the ladder to pick up my fallen bedsheets. My ring nearly slipped down, giving me a mini heart attack, considering what had happened with that vending machine in New York I didn't want the ring to go sword form and kill Aeneas. I saw the son of Venus calmly snoring, his worry lines gone, giving him the look of a baby. No worries, no need to kill a demon snake to save camp, no need to find missing campers..the list could go on forever. I quickly picked up my bedsheets, climbed back up and tried to sleep.
Eventually, we arrived to Virginia. After showering ourselves and changing clothes, I went to the Iris-messaging room to contact Chiron. Erin's hair was still messy, so she stayed in the bathroom "fixing it" while Aeneas and I went to the I.M room. It was a small cabin, with a small, Imperial gold Cupid fountain spouting a jet of water, while the light on the, also Imperial gold windows passed right through it, making a small rainbow. It was the first time I've actually used an Iris message, and romans like Aeneas didn't really use this method of communication. I knew what to do, because luckily I had paid attention to class that day. I flipped a golden drachma into the rainbow, then prayed to Iris, goddes of the rainbow.
-"O, Iris goddes of the rainbow, accept my offering!" I prayed. The drachma shimmered into gold and vanished. Aeneas stared at it in awe and astonishment. "Camp Half-Blood." I finished, and the rainbow shifted, showing us Chiron playing a weird board game with some satyrs and Mr. D, who instantly fell back on his chair as he saw us.
-"Agh! Always at the worst moments.." he chided angrily, prompting Chiron to laugh, though the satyrs tried to keep it in nervously.
-"Chiron!" I called, and the centaur looked at us.
-"Ah, Bryan. I was expecting this call from you. Well, how has it been in your quest?" he calmly asked, as if he had all the time in the world. Aeneas shifted around uncomfortably. I was sure the poor kid missed Camp Jupiter and his family.
-"Uh..both vampires and gorgons have tried to kill us, but other than that it's been quite..normal." I replied. At hearing this Chiron's face remained the same. Maybe living for two millenia has made nothing surprise him. I didn't tell him about the meeting with my father, thinking this wasn't relevant to the quest.
-"Impressive. Where's Erin though?" he asked, and I explained to him the whole hair messed up story. Mr. D got up and glared at me angrily, his eyes turning into two balls of purple fire.
-"Well, it's Mr. Rodriguez then. I hope the god Eurus is in a good mood when you find him. He's..quite volatile, like all the wind gods." he said.
-"Ah yes, taming the east wind will be your next task if you are to find the earth-serpent. If you manage to convince him, he will take you across the Atlantic and to Delphi, where the Python awaits you." Chiron explained.
-"Where can I find this wind god, then?" I asked. The image was starting to fade, probably because I was running out of time.
-"That, I don't know, Bryan. It's up to you to locate him. But it won't be hard, you see.." Chiron said. "The wind gods aren't really hard to find. They usually have wind spirits, the anemoi thuellai, to help them. If you find one of those and tame it, you'll get an audience to see Eurus."
Taming a wind spirit? I thought. That's more the job of a son of Zeus, not a son of Hades who can't even talk to the dead. Heck, I probably can't even summon a rat skeleton if I wanted to.
Before I could answer, the image shimmered and vanished. -"Deposit another drachma to continue the call." the fountain said, though it was enough information for me.
-"You know, I can just charmspeak the wind spirits to take us to the east wind, don't you think?" Aeneas commented.
-"Yeah, that's my plan to get them. Maybe, we can even convince the east wind himself to help us out." I added. Then, the door slid open and Erin came in. My eyes widened as I saw her wearing a sunlight-yellow blouse, her usual headphones, denim jeans and sneakers.
-"Well, what did they say?" she asked. I explained everything to her and we picked up our backpacks and got off the Imperial Gold Amtrak. Aeneas thanked the train guy with some denarii and we arrived at the Amtrak station in Alexandria, Virginia. I admired a few antique neighborhoods, some boutiques and restaurants completely old-styled. It was barely midday, and the weather was very calm, even if the so-called east wind lived here. Taxi's, cars and buses alike passed by the old-styled streets while couples and adults had their lunch breaks at the cafe's. We all stopped by a small bench outside the Amtrak station. Erin had grabbed a city map for tourists, though I wasn't sure if mortals would list "Palace of Eurus" as a tourist go-to place.
-"We are here." she said, pointing to a small spot in the middle of nowhere. Or that was just my dyslexia messing around with me.
-"Ooh, maybe he's in the mall right there." Aeneas pointed at another random spot. Seriously, were these guys demigods too? Why weren't they dyslexic then?
-"No..that's not even a mall Aeneas, that's Chesapeake bay!" Erin replied. Okay, nevermind the dyslexia. They kept arguing on where Chesapeake bay and other places were actually in for quite a while. Finally I couldn't take it anymore.
-"Why don't we just ask people where he is?" I blurted out angrily. Then I realized how stupid that had sounded.
-"Okay then, let's do that!" Erin said and she called for a random man on the street. He was a pale middle-aged adult with short, black hair, executive clothes and a brown briefcase. He totally didn't wonder what three middle-school kids were doing sitting in a bench outside a train station.
-"Yes, young lady?" he said with a smile. His teeth were bright white, reflecting the sunlight straight into my eyes. I had to rub them and then cover them to avoid getting blind.
-"Erin, stranger danger!" I muttered, though she ignored me. The man had sky-blue eyes sparking with electricity, that looked similar to Jason Grace's.
-"Do you know where to find the east wind?" she asked. I felt the need to slap her in the face because of the stupid question.
-"Of course I do!" he answered happily, which surprised me even more. Aeneas looked at me completely eye-wide, which must have been my expression also. "Ah...you must be our special guests! Another demigod has advised us of your arriving here, so we were on the lookout.."
-"Okay..demigod? Our? Special guests? You have 5 seconds to tell me who the heck you are before your soul goes straight to Tartarus." I demanded boldly, though the words seemed to come out on their own. The man laughed demonically, then let open his briefcase. A blast of wind sent all three of us and the bench back into the grass.
-"You should respect your elders, Mr. Rodriguez." the creepy man said. Why does everybody that attacks us seem to know my name? I wondered.
The man's executive clothes were ripped apart into wind, turning him into a swirl of dark vapor with smoky gray angel wings, his crooked smirk and sparking blue eyes crackling with madness.
-"You're an...an Anemoi!" I stuttered, my index finger playing around with my black ring.
-"Just call him Ventus." Aeneas said, his Imperial gold gladius already out. Erin had also drawn her bow, and was ready to shoot the storm spirit to Tartarus-ness in a second.
-"Yeah, whatever. Ventus." I replied, and slipped of the black ring, which shifted into two feet of wicked Stygian Iron, which seemed to draw in the light surrounding us.
-"You're very bold to fight me, son of Hades. Only a child of Zeus or Jupiter would be able to take me on, you're seriously no match-" he started but was interrupted by a well-timed slash of my sword to his left wing. He simply lept back.
"Alright then, you asked for it, child of the Underworld." he said and snapped his dark smoke fingers, which logically made no sense but so didn't most of the things in this world.
On the clear sky, lightning crackled down to the grass, instantly setting it on fire. Erin fired some arrows which seemed to phase through the Ventus. The lightning had hit Aeneas and instantly knocked him out.
-"Aeneas!" I shouted, but the Ventus blurred in front of me, his limbs crackling with arcs of static electricity. I slashed, but it again went through him. Pain shot up in my stomach as he zapped me violently, making me drop my sword. I gasped, and as he approached to finish me off, Erin shot a a volley of light into his face, blinding him as he cursed in ancient greek.
-"Fight him, I'll attend Aeneas!" Erin ordered and went over to the fallen son of Venus. I picked up my sword while the Ventus rubbed his eyes, and closed my eyes, concentrating on the ground. I had a crazy idea, but it was my only option if normal attacks didn't work. I opened my eyes, remembering something else Nico had taught me.
-"Serve me." I ordered. Nothing happened for the first few seconds, and the ventus was about to zap me to death. Then suddenly, the ground under the storm spirit cracked open and skeletal hands and claws latched onto it, making him wail in horror and pain.
I stabbed it with my Stygian blade, and this time it did work. It started absorbing his essence, the electricity and the wind fading away.
-"Please, no! I'll do anything you want!" he pleaded, and I obliged. If he tried anything, the skeletal hands would draw him under, never to come back again.
-"Take us to the Palace of Eurus. Don't do anything and you'll remain alive." I demanded, and he nodded meekly. The skeletal hands let go, and the storm spirit shifted form, turning into a dark smokey horse that crackled with electricity. He neighed, which made the hairs of my back stand up from the static. I turned back to Erin, who picked Aeneas up. Still unconscious, he had a nasty burn on his left shoulder.
-"He will be fine, he just needs some ambrosia and nectar. So..are we riding that thing? How do you know we won't fall off?" she questioned.
-"Ahh..trust me. We won't." I replied. We all got on the ventus horse, and no, we did not fall off. And no, the electricity didn't zap us either. Imagine riding a Rapidash, just without the fire.
-"Okay, just tell him to be slow-" she started but was quickly interrupted by the ventus horse galloping across the street, as if about to crash in to a car. Erin started screaming like crazy so high it shattered my eardrums. "Bryan it's too fast! Tell it to slow down!" she kept screaming, but the ventus just keep going faster. The wind horse grew back his angel wings and took off flight. "AHHHHHHH IT'S TOO FAST!" Erin kept screaming.
-"This is awesome!" I shouted, which could be heard across the entire city of Alexandria. I grabbed onto his vaporous mane which surprisingly enough was solid. Erin held Aeneas' unconscious body while screaming. We went so high that the cars and trucks looked like toys, though I had no idea where we were going. The horse flew above the clouds, so high that I couldn't see the city anymore.
-"Seriously, where even are we?" Erin asked, now calm. An airplane casually passed by and I saw a kid no more than two years old looking at us weirdly. I waved to him and he waved back, then we sailed past the plane.
-"Uh..no idea." I replied. The clouds seemed to part as we flew, revealing a huge castle that seemed to float in the air. The castle had a small entrance with a bunch of black spots in the clouds. I looked again, and realized the black spots were actually other venti in horse form, flying around and doing tricks in the air. Harpies and wind "ghosts" or so they seemed to be, passed by like a bustling city.
-"They must be Auras, the wind nymphs." Erin remarked as if reading my thoughts.
-"Oh..like Mellie." I remembered. Mellie was an aura at Camp Half-Blood married to a satyr. I deducted these wind ghosts must be her cousins or some relative, so they should be of help. The horse ventus neighed again, as his wings folded back in and he stopped, in the middle of the clouds in front of the palace. It didn't have any stairs or a bridge leading into it, only clouds and more clouds.
-"Sorry, but I'm not getting off." Erin said nervously. An aura passed through my body, making me shiver.
-"I think we can step on this. Like the horse's mane." I guessed, then looked at Erin. "Ladies first."
She sighed, then cautiously put down her left foot, and didn't slip or anything. She put her other foot down and seemed to float on the clouds.
-"Oh, it works! Your turn."
To be honest, I was completely scared about falling, but knowing she was standing on the clouds, I quickly got off. Sure enough, I didn't fall through the clouds to a horrible death. Before I even thanked the ventus, it dissolved into the air.
-"Great, before we do anything, we need to heal up Aeneas." I said. Erin got her backpack out, took out a Ziploc bag of ambrosia and force-fed it to Aeneas. Quickly, the son of Venus opened his eyes.
-"Ugh..Bryan?" he asked groggily. I gave him my hand and he got up, hugging me. It felt really weird, but I let him do that since he just got hit by lightning and that surely hurt.
"Where are-" he began asking, then started freaking out as he noticed he was standing in the air. "AHHHHH, WE'RE GOING TO FALL! CALL THE 911 OR MAYDAY OR NASA OR, OR.. OR.." then Erin calmed him down.
-"Okay, look. We're in the Palace of Eurus in the air, and we need to ask the East Wind if he can hitch us a ride to Delphi so we can get this stupid quest done and my siblings don't die. That's the summary, any questions?" Erin explained, completely irritated. "Fine then, let's go and get this done with."
And so we entered the palace.