The Unexpected Two: Part I
I knew I was different from the day I was born. Maybe it was the three-headed dog that I always played with or the fact that I have red eyes. In fact, it was probably just everything about my life that made me realize I was definitely NOT normal. My name is Alice and my father is Hades, God of the Underworld. I've got pale, olive skin with long, straight black hair. My eyes look like blood and they burn bright when I become angry. They're fierce and pretty much scare everyone I look at.
From the day I was born, my father took me in. I know that's completely unusual because most the time, the Gods don't give a rat's ass about us, but when my mother found out that Hades was a God, and the God of the underworld to be exact, she got scared and disappeared. I was raised in the underworld by Hades and Persephone and although it may seem pretty awful, my life was great. My parents were great, I had a pretty awesome dog, and eventually, I got the best brother.
My brother's name is Derek. He has tan skin with jet-black hair. He has the eyes of the deep sea and although they sound dark, they are actually very bright but they change colors based on his mood: the angrier he gets, the darker, more brutal they become. Together we look dangerous… which is great, because we are.
See, Derek isn't actually a child of Hades… from the way he looks, you can probably guess that. His father is Poseidon. When Derek was born, his mother died from labor complications and Poseidon had no interest in raising him. He had another child that he knew was going to be important therefore, he felt no need to keep Derek. Amphitrite saw the situation and, although bitter that he slept with another woman, she took pity on Derek. However, she knew that if Zeus found out about the baby, it would merely upset him because of a promise the three had made to never bear children so, she decided to try Hades. Derek needed to be hidden and the underworld was the best place to do it.
Unbeknownst to her, I was roaming around the underworld, kept a secret because of the promise. I heard the issue she had raised and, though hidden to her, my father knew I was there.
Originally Hades was not willing to take him in, he found no interest in wasting his time to raise a child of Poseidon but then he saw it as an opportunity, something to always have against his brother… and he saw the puppy dog eyes I gave to him. I wanted a brother so badly, someone to play with besides Cerberus. Having been raised by Hades, Derek considers himself a child of Hades.
Hidden away from everyone, we grew up in the underworld and was trained every day to control our powers and learn to fight. We took turns constantly exhausting ourselves to the brink of death just so we could build our stamina and become powerful demigods.
Whenever we turned ten, Hecate took us on as her "trainees", so to speak. We learned how to control the mist and use many deceiving spells that would help us in fights. Since I was a child of the underworld by blood, using magic came much easier to me than for Derek but, since he was a child of Poseidon by blood, he eventually learned to control the 5 rivers of the underworld.
At the age of twelve, we bathed in the River Styx to become stronger and once we were fourteen years old, our father moved us into a small house in New York where we continued to grow up and train. Hades visited us frequently and we visited the underworld frequently (Cerberus tends to get lonely without us). We still felt like a family but he wanted us to be exposed to the real world.
Now that we have the background information out of the way, let me tell how I met Percy Jackson.