A/N: I'd like to thank all those who take the time and review this story. It means a lot, and I even appreciate those who read but don't review—it's okay ;)

I'd also like to apologize for not addressing this sooner. This should have been warned way earlier, like in the first chapter, but I didn't want to ruin my storyline, so I'm saying this now. This will eventually turn out to be a PERLIA fic. There, I bolded it, italicized it, and underlined it to indicate how serious I am, and how I will not change this pairing. I'm sick of all the bashing I get for putting this two together. If you don't like this couple, then I guess you shouldn't be reading this story. If you want to go read a Percabeth fic, then go on. No one's stopping you, because I assure you, there are hundreds of Percabeth stories you can choose from.

I've read some comments on how some people don't necessarily like Perlia, but have agreed to grow used to it because they actually like reading the story as a whole, and for that, I thank all of you. All the original Percabeth shippers who still continue to read this story because they enjoy it—you guys are awesome.

Sorry about all of this. I ran across a comment and I couldn't ignore it. But aside from all of that, you guys are the BEST supporters, reviewers, and readers out there! I was literally jumping in joy when the reviews hit the 40 mark. That's how much your comments mean to me.

Chapter Ten: Macula In Intentio
Stain Upon Intention

Piper was having a horribly, rotten day.

She thought that getting paired up with Dylan, arrogant jock extraordinaire, would top all of everything else, but even that didn't put the icing on the cake. Beforehand, the usual happened in her everyday measly life. The other delinquent girls make fun of her— to this day she still doesn't know what she's done to them— and Coach Hedge had been giving her a long lecture for god-knows-what. Usually, on a field trip like this, she'd be jumping all over the place in excitement.

Lately, she doesn't feel like doing anything. Not since two weeks ago. Not since his disappearance.

Her day kind of pummeled the moment Piper had flown backwards when she had been observing some monument in the museum for the stupid worksheet she was supposed to be working on with her so-called 'partner'. She had slammed against the double doors, and luckily, she hadn't been knocked out. At first, she had thought that Dylan just picked up and threw her like that, because there was no absolute way he could have pushed her with so much force like that with just a flick of his wrist.

The tiny hurricanes of wind were so hard, the kids around her were screaming. They ran out of the building as the wind picked up their pencils and notebooks and threw them everywhere. Everyone left until the only two people in the building were Piper and Dylan. In the throbbing of her head, Piper hoped Leo was okay.

But once she had looked up again, Dylan wasn't the same boy who had been wearing a Dallas Cowboys jersey, Western jeans, and a pair of boots that made him look as though he had stepped from an old western movie. His huge body had been deformed into swirling mists of wind, with large wings, and eyes as black as storm clouds. Some electricity was sparking from his translucent body.

"Demigod," the Dylan-monster-thing hissed, and a gush of wind blew in Piper's face.

Piper was almost too shocked to even say anything. Her question hung in her throat but she coughed it out. "What…what the hell are you?"

"A ventus, darling," Dylan drawled, a bored hint to it. "Tsk, tsk, you really do need to know your monsters."

Dylan had raised his hand, arching it up, and Piper didn't know what he was doing when a spark of electricity traveled up the length of his arm and balled up in the middle of his palm. Clutching it, he threw it at her. Piper only had time to roll over before the bright ball of light nearly electrocuted her entire body.

She crept up, only to dodge yet another spark of electricity, and she was sure the end strands of her hair had been lightly singed since she could sense the burning smell.

Dylan's laugh was loud, but it sounded miles away, as though the winds were in the midst of carry it away. He was amused at her attempt to stay alive. But all Piper could think of was how earlier, this monster had been hitting on her! Her skin was crawling just by thinking of the thought.

Then, right when she knew she would be the brunt of a rather large electricity shock, the double doors burst open. Two girls around her age ran in. She was struck at how beautiful they were, and how much similar they were. They both had black hair, and pale skin, and were around the same height. Although, one girl had bright brilliant blue eyes, while the other girl had imposing brown. Also, the brown-eyed girl's hair fell down in waves as opposed to the blue-eyed girl's pin straight hair. The blue-eyed girl was skinny, but just because the brown-eyed girl wasn't that skinny, didn't mean that she wasn't athletic-looking with lithe muscles.

Piper felt totally inapt compared to these girls.

But it was the boy who took Piper's breath away. He had a kind and gentle face, and not to mention, very handsome. He too, was athletic looking like the brown-eyed girl, and his blond hair was cut in a militaristic style. Piper noticed that he shared the same eye color with the blue-eyed skinny girl, and there was that small scar on his upper lip. He looked exactly as she remembered him.

It was as though he hadn't been missing for two weeks now.

"Jason," she breathed. It was her Jason.

One thing the three teenagers had in common was that they all looked a bit windblown. They looked like they had just traveled through a tornado. And the fact that they were all armed with swords. Something told Piper these kids weren't exactly normal, but then again, Jason had a sword too.

Dylan sparked again, and shots of white light sprang out. On shot narrowly missed Piper by an inch. Although, when the electricity hit Jason, the light was just absorbed into his skin. Another electricity ball was heading towards the brown-eyed girl's way, but the other girl just stepped in front of her, and the light was absorbed into her skin naturally, just as it did with Jason.

"I could have deflected that!" the brown-eyed girl yelled in an accusatory tone.

"A simple 'thank you' would have sufficed," the blue-eyed girl muttered.

"How are you still alive? That was enough to kill twenty men!" Dylan felt outraged, Piper could see the red in his white, windy face, but then he gave a harsh laugh. "Ah. The offspring of Jupiter. I should have known."

Piper blinked a couple times. Did he just say…offspring of Jupiter?

"No matter. Always have a back up plan," Dylan winked at the teenagers playfully before his whole form turned into a twisting hurricane.

The tiny hurricane whisked towards Piper in a blink of an eye, carry her with the spinning hurls of wind out the door. She screamed in defiance, trying to wiggle her way out, but the winds that howled were even louder, blocking out her yells.

She was carried right out into the edge of the Grand Canyon, at the edge of the rocky cliffs. The wind pushed her off, her body flung into the air. Piper did the only sensibly thing she could do and her hand reached out and grasped out onto one of the rails of the empty abyss. Swallowing thickly, he allowed her eyes to look down. She supposed her body would no doubt crack into millions of pieces when she reached the bottom.

Looking up, she was amazed at how fast those two girls and Jason had been there after her. They were all distracting Dylan in all their cunningness and deception. Piper could have watched them all day if she hadn't been hanging off a cliff.

Right at the same time, the three teens struck at Dylan. The blue-eyed girl thrust her sword at his neck, the brown-eyed girl slammed her sword at his hip, and Jason had taken a swipe right out the outline of where the heart should be. Piper widened her eyes when Dylan exploded into gold powder, the substance falling all over their forms.

That's when Piper fell.

She screamed, of course.

The rock side of the canyons past her so quickly, and it was almost a blur. She felt as though her skin was peeling off her body against the currents of the wind and the pressure of her falling force. Piper was falling back-front, so she wouldn't know exactly when she would hit the ground.

A dark figure was falling in front of her. The figure had its arms tucked in and his head face first. Eyeing the determined face, Piper widened her eyes to see that Jason had jumped after her. He began moving his arms, in a motion to tell her to spread her own arms. Piper watched and she mimicked him, her arms spread out around her.

Jason dived forward, quickly gaining on Piper. She stopped screaming the moment he tackled her waist, his arms going around her and holding her to his hard body. The girl clung onto him tightly, arms suffocating his neck, and she would have wrapped her legs around his waist if her legs hadn't been so frozen in contact. Hugging Jason like this—it made Piper forget that he had been missing for nearly two weeks.

The wind that had been whistling loud in her ears, suddenly died down. The noise of the wind was lessening and lessening until it stopped altogether. Piper didn't mean to, but she gasped out loud. They weren't falling, she knew that, but they were actually floating in mid-air.

"J-Jason," she stammered.

His eyes trained on hers in response. "You know my name?" he asked, his eyes narrowing at her face, electric blue eyes glinting with heady suspicion.

"Of course I do," Piper reassured him, confusion starting to etch in her voice. "We—I—" She hated the way she was stumbling over her words. She thought she sounded completely stupid with him, which she shouldn't."You're my boyfriend."

Jason couldn't help but stare at her as though she was insane. Here this girl was, having never met each other before, claiming that she was his girlfriend. He couldn't deny that she was really pretty. She attained good looks on her own, considering no trace of makeup was on her face. Her brown hair was choppy and uneven with thin strands of braids down the sides. Her eyes were a beautiful mix of brown, blue, and green.

"I don't know you at all," Jason replied, floating up to the top of the cliff. When his feet touched the ground once more, he set her down quickly as though her touch was poisoning him. "I'm not your boyfriend."

The brown-eyed girl was suddenly standing next to Jason. "We have to go, Jason. The mortals are starting to come back, and the police are with them."

"You don't remember, Jason?" Piper asked, and the fact that she had been attacked by some wind monster didn't daunt her in the least. "You kissed me when we were out on the school patio that one time, when we were watching the stars. After that, we got together. You've been missing these past two weeks. Don't you remember any of it?"

The brown-eyed girl glared at Jason, looking ready to kill. "You have a girlfriend?"

"Hey, you never told us that," the blue-eyed girl teased with a grin.

"It's because I don't have a girlfriend!" Jason yelled back at them in frustration. His irritated face turned to the strange girl, but once he noticed her sad expression he softened. "Look, I don't know what you're talking about. I've never met you in my entire life."

Piper's heart dropped. What the hell did they do to him? She remembered that they were as happy as could be as any other normal couple in a boarding school for delinquents, and then he suddenly disappears all the sudden. Then he comes back and he has no recollection of her whatsoever.

"Do you remember anything at all? Leo? Wilderness School?" Piper felt the need to ask.

"You need to stop," the brown-eyed girl's icy tone shook Piper, but the girl didn't flinch. "Jason doesn't know you at all, so stop pestering him with your questions. He's been with us since he was two years old and he hasn't left our place, so there's no way he's been attending your school."

Despite Gwendolyn's harsh reply, Jason had to admit that she said whatever Jason had needed to say. "Maybe you're mistaking me with the wrong person," he added, much more gently.

"No, I know you're Jason," Piper said firmly, blinking back angry tears. "You have that tiny scar on your upper lip."

"And what does that prove?" came the brown-eyed girl's blunt question.

"I can prove to you that I know him," Piper snapped at the brown-eyed girl. She ignored the way the brown eyes flashed with an angry storm. "He has that scar from trying to eat a stapler when he was little."

Jason and Gwendolyn were shocked that this stranger girl knew the history of Jason's little scar. Thalia, however, stumbled back a few steps, as though someone had punched her roughly at her midsection. Usually, whenever she received flashbacks, it was never this painful. Sometimes she would get these feelings that would tell her that there was something that she should be remembering. The feeling would only agitate her until she remembered what it was.

Sirens wailed in the distance, signaling that the police were definitely here.

"We need to go," the brown-eyed girl ordered, yet that order was directly mostly at Piper. "Now."

"Why?" Piper asked immediately. Except for Jason, she barely knew these people. "Where are we going?"

The brown-eyed girl clenched her teeth. She pulled roughly at Piper's wrist. "Let's go."

Piper's protest died in her throat as she let the brown-eyed girl drag her away from the rocky cliffs. None of them actually cared that she was stumbling over her feet half the time they were dragging her. They finally stop and let her rest when they entered a white Chevy truck in the parking lot.

She was glad that Jason slid to sit next to her in the back of the seat, despite his strange lack of memory of his own girlfriend. Piper reckoned that if the brown-eyed girl sat next to her, it wouldn't have been much of a pleasant ride. Right now it wasn't really a pleasant ride since she was getting in a car with a couple of strangers. She thought she knew Jason—come on, he was her boyfriend— but now, she wasn't so sure.

"Step on it," Gwendolyn barked, irritated with the fact that Jason offered to sit with that girl.

"Yeah, hold on…" Thalia trailed off, her eyes ahead of her.

Walking out the front of the museum, looking very windblown themselves, were three strangers. There was this curly blonde girl with serious grey eyes. Next to her was a boy with dark curly hair. The tall boy trailing after them was what caught her gaze. He was the same cute boy in her memory, the one with the seawater eyes.

Seaweed Brain.

There was a shove on her shoulder. Thalia abruptly turned to an angry Gwendolyn. "Hello?" the other girl snapped.

"Sorry," Thalia murmured. Her eyes remained on that boy, as her hand unwilling started car.

"Well, that was rather fun," Annabeth smiled, wiping her hands on her jeans, as she walked out to front.

"Fun? Fun?" the curly-haired boy demanded as he followed the blonde girl. "In case you haven't noticed, we almost got killed! By some windy monster demon thing! Oh, and to top it off, you two are complete and total strangers!"

This would have been a normal day for Leo if the wind monster hadn't ruined his day. He would have explored the Grand Canyon if the two strange teenagers his age hadn't come barging in on time. It was as though they knew these monsters would be here at this place. What was even stranger was that they fought with medieval weapons like bronze swords and knifes that glinted threateningly. He knew he was dreaming the entire thing the moment the wind monster evaporated to golden dust.

Leo had seen Piper in the midst of it all, but she was pre-occupied with her own set of strange people. She was surrounded by other teenagers who were armed with medieval weapons too. There were two black-haired girls and a blond guy. But before he could yell out her name, they disappeared.

"C'mon," the boy with the seawater eyes, who's introduced himself as Percy, said. "We gotta go."

"Go?" Leo felt his eyes bulge out. "Go where?"

"To Camp Half-Blood," the blonde girl, Annabeth responded. "You'll be safe there."

"What?"

Annabeth's eyebrow arched at him. "Unless you'd rather stay here and go back to your boarding school."

No thank you. "Okay, fine."

But he didn't want to leave Piper all alone. Not with Jason having gone missing a few weeks before.

Percy couldn't help but feel this thought nagging at his mind. The last time he saw, there had been three storm spirits at the museum—one that was acting as a student, and the other two arriving just after. He and Annabeth had come on time with Blackjack to save Leo from one of the storm spirits. He wondered what happened to the other two.

His eyes roamed around, landing on the parking lot of the museum. For some reason, he looked over all the cars, looking for someone. His eyes landed on a white Chevy truck. A jolt sparked in him at what he saw.

Thalia was sitting in the front seat. He could see her beautiful face past the shaded mirror, and those electric blue eyes could shine through any dark exterior. Percy bolted for that white truck, ignored Annabeth's calls of his name. He dodged all the panicking people that surrounded the museum, only thinking them as nuisances because they were delaying him longer from getting to her.

Percy should have known he would feel dejected when he arrived. The white truck was gone.

He ran a shaky hand through his hair, letting out a frustrated sigh. Annabeth and Leo caught up with him, and when Annabeth punched his shoulder, he didn't feel it. Thank the gods for the curse he still beared.

"Why'd you run off for?" Annabeth questioned him, crossing her arms, her grey eyes lighted with anger and worry.

"I thought I saw Thalia."

When Annabeth instantly softened, Percy averted his hard gaze to the ground. "I'm not hallucinating this time. I did actually see her. She was in a white truck."

"Okay, Percy," she murmured, petting his arm, not wanting to upset him further.

She knew Percy was far from crazy. But he's been hallucinating a lot nowadays. He would run off the woods late at night just because he claimed he saw Thalia, or he would ditch dinner just because he saw Thalia making her way to the archery fields. To him, Thalia was everywhere, but in reality, she was still nowhere to be found.

It all made sense to Piper now. All these years, she had the strange ability to talk people into getting what she wanted. She just thought she was very persuasive. A kleptomaniac her father always called her. She didn't know that this type of convincing people was an actual power.

Piper was a charmspeaker. Judging by that power, they immediately assumed that she was a daughter of Venus. Piper had no idea who Venus was, until Thalia—the blue-eyed girl— pointed out that her Greek counterpart was Aphrodite. Now Aphrodite, Piper definitely knew. She was that goddess of love and beauty from those Greek myths she studied in school.

But they had been myths. She had no idea that they were real and that there were such things as demigods.

The other three teenagers were all demigods. Gwendolyn was a child of Hades or Pluto, and Jason and Thalia shared a father, who happened to be Zeus or Jupiter. Piper quickly learned that they were heading to a roman camp for demigods, to train ones such as herself.

Thalia noticed Piper's expression through the rear view mirror and gave a sympathetic smile. "It's a lot to take in. I was in your position a month ago, but you'll quickly get used to it."

"I don't know if I can," Piper leaned her head against the window. "I didn't think this stuff existed."

Gwendolyn looked slightly offended. "Well, they do."

Piper was just about ready to smack her.

Another thing she noticed was the dark tattoo printed on their forearms. They spelled the letters SPQR. The Jason she knew never had such a tattoo, which was why she was so flabbergasted upon seeing this Jason have one. They seriously looked as though they hurt.

"So this camp," Piper spoke up, willing herself not to think about Jason. "All you do is train there?"

"That's only if you pass Lupa's judgment," Gwendolyn replied with a small sneer at Piper through the mirror.

"Lupa?"

"She's the head of our camp," Jason explained kindly. "She's an immortal she-wolf that can be both wolf and take place in human form. Every time a new camper arrives, they are put to her judgment. You have to fight her in order to be able to have the privilege to train at the camp. You aren't allowed any help. If you don't succeed, she'll either eat you or feed you to the wolves."

Piper paled. "And…and have some of the campers beat her?"

"There have been very few exceptions who have beaten her in a short amount of time." To this, Jason shared a knowing smile with Thalia. "But all you have to do is last for at least one hour. If you're still living when the time is up, you're in."

You're joking.

"I don't think I can," Piper argued, panic in her voice.

She did not want to die. Fighting with Lupa or getting eaten by her—there was no win situation in that. She was never good at fighting in the first place. It explains her weak fighting skills, considering she's a child of Venus.

"You're a demigod," Jason reassured with a small smile that had Piper's heart fluttering. He may not have known her, but he was still doing certain things to her. "All demigods have the special instinct to fight. You'll do fine."

At his smile, Piper was reminded of her boyfriend, who smiled at her exactly like that.

Gods, why can't he remember her?

Gwendolyn was absolutely seething at the picture of Jason and Piper smiling shyly at each other.

"What's wrong with you?" Thalia asked with a lifted eyebrow, glancing over at the daughter of Pluto.

"Just focus on driving," the other girl managed through her gritted teeth.

Thalia shrugged it off and focused back on the road. Besides her own judgment, Thalia had never witnessed one of Lupa's judgments before as an audience member. She would like to see how it was from that point of view.

She figured out her major flaw. Beyond her pride and all that, she couldn't resist seeing someone in trouble. She would be mostly likely to drop all her things and save that one person, even if it meant breaking the rules. Thalia wondered what she would do if she saw Lupa hurting Piper the same way she had hurt Thalia. She's settled with the fact that she was an ultimate rule-breaker by now. She was a rebel for her own insane cause. She was sure she would get a special whipping from Lupa herself if Thalia tried anything.

If Lupa was on the verge of killing Piper, Thalia was going to jump in and stop her.