Hey everybody! Sorry for leaving for so long again, I just took a break from writing. Anyway, Guess what!? I'm off for summer break, so that means more updates for you all to read and enjoy! Don't forget to leave a comment and tell me what you want or hope to see in future chapters. Now, let's do this!

Word of the bathroom incident spread immediately. Wherever I went, campers pointed at me and

murmured something about toilet water and magic.

Annabeth showed me a few more places like the metal shop,

the arts-and-crafts room and the climbing wall.

Finally we returned to the canoeing lake, where the trail led back to the cabins.

"I've got training to do," Annabeth said flatly

. "Dinner's at seven-thirty. Just follow your cabin to the mess hall."

"Annabeth, I'm sorry about the toilets."

Whatever, at least it didn't touch me. Plus, Clarisse and her gang had it coming."

She looked at me skeptically again; it was as if she was trying to read my mind.

"You need to talk to the Oracle," Annabeth said after a few seconds of staring

"Who?"

"Not who. What. The Oracle. I'll ask Chiron."

I stared into the lake, wishing somebody would give me a straight answer for once.

I wasn't expecting anybody to be looking back at me from the bottom, so my heart skipped a beat

when I noticed two teenage girls sitting cross-legged at the base of the pier,

about twenty feet below.

They wore blue jeans and shimmering green T-shirts, and their brown hair floated loose around their shoulders as minnows darted in and out. They smiled and waved as if I were a long-lost friend. I didn't know what else to do so I did the normal thing waved back.

All of a sudden, I felt a sharp pain in my gut and my brain automatically told me that these girls were Naiads and that they were a part of the sea.

"Don't encourage them," Annabeth warned. "Naiads are terrible flirts."

"Naiads,"

I wrote, trying to fake the feeling of being completely overwhelmed by my facial expressions since I had no voice.

"That's it. I want to go home now."

Annabeth frowned at me like what I wrote was the craziest thing she had ever seen.

"Don't you get it, Percy? You are home now. This is the only safe place on earth

for kids like us."

"You mean, mentally disturbed kids?"

I asked her mentally rolling my eyes.

I knew what I was, from...experiments and research, but I knew from the beginning that acting like I already knew everything would be suspicious.

I choose a while ago to just play dumb and that's exactly what I'm going to do now.

"I mean not human. Not totally human, anyway. Half-human."

"Half-human and half-what?"

"I think you know, Percy."

'It's scary how right she is sometimes', I thought to myself.

"God," I wrote.

Annabeth nodded. "Your father isn't dead, Percy. He's one of the Olympians."

"That's insane."

"It may sound insane at first but you'll get used to it."

I looked off into the distance, thinking everything over. It seemed logical enough and now that he had his new powers he could easily tell that his father is a god that deals with water, sleep, or magic. Thinking even harder and using my knowledge of Greek gods from school, I can tell already tell you that no god deals with all three or two of them at once. Mentally shaking my head I looked towards Annabeth with a new question in mind.

"If you're a daughter of Athena, who is your father?"

Her expression darkened quickly after that and her hand gripped the pier railing a little harder.

"My dad is a professor that teaches American History at West Point, but I haven't seen him in a long while."

She looked out into the lake and I did the same. The area around us grew quiet.

I started thinking about my father again, and a thought popped in my head. I wrote on my notepad and tapped Annabeth on the shoulder.

"Do you think you know who my father is?"

"Undetermined," Annabeth said, "like I told you before. Nobody knows, not even me."

"Except my mother. She knew."

"Maybe not, Percy. Gods don't always reveal their identities."

"My dad would have told her. I can tell that he loved her."

Annabeth gave me a cautious look. She didn't want to burst my bubble.

"Maybe you're right. Maybe he'll send a sign. That's the only way to know for sure: your father has to send you a sign claiming you as his son. Sometimes it happens.

"You mean sometimes it doesn't?"

Annabeth ran her palm along the rail while looking down into the water.

"The gods are busy. They have a lot of kids and they don't always ... Well, sometimes they don't care about us, Percy. They ignore us."

I thought about some of the kids I'd seen in the Hermes cabin, teenagers who looked sullen and depressed, as if they were waiting for a call that would never come. I'd seen other kids like that while attending Yancy Academy. They would be shuffled off to boarding school by rich parents who didn't have the time to deal with them. But I still think that gods should behave better.

"So I'm stuck here for the rest of my life then?"

"It depends," Annabeth said

. "Some campers only stay the summer. If you're a child of Aphrodite or Demeter, you're probably not a real powerful force. The monsters might ignore you, so you can get by with a few months of summer training and live in the mortal world the rest of the year. But for some of us, it's too dangerous to leave. We're year-rounder's. In the mortal world, we attract monsters. They sense us. They come to challenge us. Most of the time, they'll ignore us until we're old enough to cause trouble-about ten or eleven years old, but after that, most demigods either make their way here, or they get killed off. A few manage to survive in the outside world and become famous. Believe me, if I told you the names, you'd know them. Some don't even realize they're demigods. But very, very few are like that."

"So monsters can't get in here?" Annabeth shook her head.

"Not unless they're intentionally stocked in the woods or specially summoned by somebody on the inside."

"Why would anybody want to summon a monster?"

"Practice fights. Practical jokes."

"Practical jokes?"

"The point is, the borders are sealed to keep mortals and monsters out. From the outside, mortals look into the valley and see nothing unusual, just a strawberry farm."

"So you're a year-rounder then?"

Annabeth nodded. From under the collar of her T-shirt she pulled a leather necklace with five clay beads of different colors. It was just like Luke's, except Annabeth's also had a big gold ring strung on it, like a college ring.

"I've been here since I was seven," she said.

"Every August, on the last day of summer session, you get a bead for surviving another year. I've been here longer than most of the counselors, and they're all in college."

"Why did you come so young?"

She twisted the ring on her necklace. "None of your business."

"Oh, okay, sorry."

I stood there for a minute in uncomfortable silence.

"So ... I could just walk out of here right now if I wanted to?"

"It would be suicide, but you could, with Mr. D's or Chiron's permission. But they wouldn't give permission until the end of the summer session unless ..." She trailed off.

"Unless?"

"You were granted a quest. But that hardly ever happens. The last time ..."

Her voice trailed off again. I could tell from her tone that the last time hadn't gone well.

"Back in the Infirmary when you were feeding me Ambrosia you asked me something about the summer solstice..."

I stopped writing and showed her the page hopping she would fill in the missing information for me.

When she read what I had wrote down her shoulders tensed and she looked at me with a hopeful expression on her face.

"So you do know something?"

"Well... no. Back at my old school, I overheard Grover and Chiron talking about it. Grover mentioned the summer solstice. He said something like we didn't have much time, because of the deadline. What did that mean?"

She clenched her fists.

"I wish I knew. Chiron and the satyrs, they know, but they won't tell me. Something is wrong in Olympus, something pretty major. Last time I was there, everything seemed so normal."

"You've been to Olympus?"

"Some of us year-rounder's-Luke and Clarisse and I and a few others-we took a field trip during winter solstice. That's when the gods have their big annual council."

"But, how do you get there? Would a god have to assist you?"

"No, you don't need a god. You just use The Long Island Railroad, of course. You get off at Penn Station and in the Empire State Building there is special elevator that takes you to the six hundredth floor."

She looked at me like I should have known this already.

"You are a New Yorker, right?"

"Oh, sure."

As far as I knew, there were only a hundred and two floors in the Empire State Building, but I decided not to point that out.

"Right after we visited," Annabeth continued, "the weather got weird, as if the gods had started fighting. A couple of times since, I've overheard satyrs talking. The best I can figure out is that something important was stolen. And if it isn't returned by summer solstice, there's going to be trouble. When you came, I was hoping ... I mean- Athena can get along with just about anybody, except for Ares. And of course she's got the rivalry with Poseidon. But, I mean, aside from that, I thought we could work together. I thought you might know something."

I shook my head. I wished I could help her, but I felt too hungry and tired and mentally overloaded to ask any more questions.