Hi everyone. Sorry about the long wait. I'm actually not sure what's been taking up so much of my time, other than the start of school... I mean, it's not like I've been reading tons of fanfics, I've written a few other things but not constantly...

Oh.

Castle.

That's it. I've gotten hooked on Castle. For those of you who know what I'm talking about, do you understand my problem? And I have an entire three and a half seasons still to go.

Guest: Holly will not be in this fic, but I think I may do a slightly shorter sequel, in which she will be the main character.

Astar8: You got me. I'm both of them. Yeah. They got involved in a futuristic accident which blended their writing skills and transposed them into a middle school girl. Why someone invented such a machine? I have no idea.

Although I am neither, thank you very much! That's quite a compliment!

Anyway, here's your chapter. I'm sorry about the Frazel fluff, I just couldn't resist. Frazel's my PJO OTP.

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Butler wasn't sure why the teen was so shocked at his being cut with the sword, but he could tell by the narrowing of the kid's eyes that it probably wasn't good.

"All right," said Percy at length. Terse voice. Contained anger from apparent betrayal. Butler could read voices as well as he could read faces. "What are you?"

This was not the sort of question Butler had been expecting. "What?" he said, wiping off his hand on the damp grass.

"I don't have time for games. Which pantheon, which species?"

Behind Percy, the boy called Leo looked deadly serious, quite unlike his previous air of jocularity and sarcasm. "I don't think I follow you," Butler said slowly, using the two boys' careful scrutiny of his face to ease out of the half-cut bonds without attracting attention.

"What," Percy said slowly, his tone promising retribution if no answer was forthcoming, "Is your name?"

Butler looked at him, mystified, and for once he let it show. Play ignorance, play miscomprehension, and the interrogator spills more than he extracts.

"Butler."

Suddenly Percy was pulled back and he came face to face with Leo, who snarled:

"Stop wasting our time, tell us who you are, and then take us to Hazel and Frank!" Butler trained his gaze on the boy's hair. It was on fire.

"Leo…" said Percy tiredly. "Please extinguish yourself…"

Leo tried to look at his own hair, but didn't quite succeed and only ended up cross-eyed, although he did manage to stop his hair from flaming.

"Right," he said. "Sorry to burden you all with the awesomeness of fiery hair. Now…" he looked back at Butler pointedly.

"My full name is Daniel Butler, if that's what you mean," the bodyguard said, jerkily, as though he was loath to divulge his first name. It was a delivery he had practiced many times. He only hoped it would serve him now. By the look Percy gave him, he wasn't sure it had. "And I am quite at a loss as to what you are talking about."

The duo sat and stared at him for a long time, although Butler got the impression Leo was just sitting still because Percy was.

"All right," Percy said finally. "We'll deal with this later." For a moment his almost military façade broke and there was just a teenage boy, his very bearing wrought with exhaustion. He sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "Just bring us to Fowl, will you?"

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"Ow… Ow…"

"Hold still, Frank."

"Okay. Ow!"

"Shhh..."

Hazel padded gently at the wound on Frank's arm with a strip of fabric she'd cut from the bottom of her pants. The blood wasn't as heavy as it had been half an hour ago, but the wound was still deep and there was a high possibility of infection.

The vampire kid and the short man hadn't counted on Frank turning into a grizzly bear, or Hazel manipulating the silver in their watches—but the two demigods hadn't expected the short man's skill at turning anything at hand, up to and including a ruler, into a weapon; hence Frank's injury.

The man had been bound to the desk with a chain made of Hazel's enchanted watches. With the boy, however, they had run out of watches (neither Hazel nor Frank understood why there was such a plentiful supply of watches in the office, but there was, and it had turned out to be quite useful), and so he had been bound with the apparently indefatigable store of computer cords.

Hazel and Frank were confident that this strange, short man was a power to be reckoned with, but they were also confident in the power of computer cords.

"Stop moving, Frank!" Hazel scolded him.

"I'm just trying to check if they're conscious!"

"They're not." Hazel couldn't explain how she knew, but she did. Probably some weird Pluto logic on the theme of 'unconsciousness is close to death'.

"Okay." Frank looked around warily, as though he were a player in a spy thriller. "Hazel... can I ask you a question?"

"Yes." She gave him a small smile.

"Well... you know I respect you and your brother..."

"Yes."

"And that I understand you value your privacy when it comes to Pluto stuff..."

"Yes."

"And that-"

"Frank, what is it that you wanted to ask me?"

"Well..." He looked down, slightly mollified after his tirade of 'and that's. "I was wondering how earlier, you know, when we were in the tunnel, how you managed to get Nico to your exact location. On top of you, in fact."

Hazel's face was a mixture of bewilderment and amusement, and she felt a sudden surge of affection for Frank, with his odd ways and queer times to be shy.

"Frank, there's no reason for you to be timid about that. It's very simple. I thought really hard about him, and because children of Hades always have a sort of a connection with each other, he followed the- how to describe this- the 'thought path' back to me. And shadow traveled there." She smiled at him again.

"Oh."

"You know, Frank, if there's something you're really curious about, just ask. We don't bite. Well, I don't, and I'm pretty sure Nico's had his rabies shots."

It was an unusual move for Hazel, mocking someone else, and it caught Frank completely off guard. He spluttered for a few seconds, with the air of a puppy caught raiding the trash can, and then looked at her hopelessly. She chuckled.

"It's okay, Frank, and I know this has been the world's most trying vacation, but I'm sure it'll all be over soon and we'll have a rest." He still looked pathetically clueless, and again her brain, which was probably not in the best of conditions due to exhaustion, linked him to a puppy. She sighed. She really needed some sleep. And a sandwich. "Come on. Hug."

"We should probably decide what we're going to do about these people," Frank said, his voice muffled by her voluminous hair. When she hadn't brushed it for a while, Hazel's hair resembled nothing so much as some sort of taxidermy experiment gone wrong.

"Probably. But I think it can wait. Let's call Jason, tell him where we are, and see about finding the kitchen."

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Michael Yew was pretty sure he knew these people.

He wasn't sure of very much- only that his name was Michael Yew, he was around twenty years old, and that he should do everything the voice told him. The voice loved him. The voice was on his side.

But lately, the voice had been lacking in conviction, and he was beginning to suspect that he knew the people he had earlier been ordered to shoot at. Take the blonde girl- what was her name? He knew it, right? It was on the tip of his tongue. He just couldn't think of it at the moment.

At any rate, he was certain he'd spent quite some time around her. Grown up with her, even. And if he had grown up with her, then he cared about her. So why did the voice want him to hurt her? Could the voice... be wrong? No. It couldn't be. It had to be a misunderstanding. Had to be.

The owner of the voice walked back over to him. They were in a secluded corner of the gardens, which was a good thing, because if they had been nearer to the other people someone would have overheard them. Or the owner, anyway. He had been pacing back and forth, occasionally stopping and delivered violent rants to apparently harmless vegetation. Michael heard the word 'Mummy' very frequently.

But now the owner of the voice had apparently calmed down enough to attempt coherent conversation, or at least coherent orders.

"Okay," he said. "This is what we're going to do. we're going to call a truce." His right hand twitched, and he slapped it, then hissed at the errant fingers: "Yes, we are, we've got to, otherwise we'll be in trouble, and Trouble will tell Mummy."

Having apparently performed sufficient disciplinary actions on his digits, he addressed Michael once more. "Now, I'd release you, but you'd just go all blank again, and we can't have that. I'm sorry."

He sounded so ernest, but Michael was having a hard time believing that the owner would ever have anything to be sorry about.

"Don't just stand there looking at me like a goblin in interrogation! Say something!"

"Okay," Michael said. "I can say stuff. That's easy. It's all good."

And it was all good. Michael was good. The owner was good. The blonde girl was good. Everything was good. There was nothing whatsoever wrong with the world.

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There you go. Okay, I hope that was good enough.

Now, this chappie's question:

If you were to assign the characters theme songs, which songs would they be? Why?