Chapter 3: Secret Plans

Kestrel Trine read the stories (Lianna didn't, but she has heard of him), but she didn't believe they were true. From what the archives said, Perseus Jackson was supposed to be...a stupid coward who died at the hands of Hyperion and disgraced the name of Poseidon by wielding red energy. By that description, she expected a lazy, clumsy, and bloated man with walrus hair who can't even hold a sword properly. She didn't expect a young man with exotic sea green eyes with red rings, a massive burn on the right side of his face, a face women would kill to kiss, and a deadly skillset and cybernetic armor, that would make those women run away screaming, begging for their lives. On his left ring finger was a golden ring with red and blue inscriptions that somehow fit over his metallic finger. The woman who married him must be brave and skilled enough to match him.

"Judging by your mouth hanging open, I'd say you've heard of me." he said.

"You're...You're...Perseus Jackson?" Kestrel asked full of disbelief as Percy could tell by how her brown eye was twitching.

"What? Not expecting a more than average demigod turned part machine?" he asked the "sister" of Lianna Trine.

"The stories I've read about you were...different." Kestrel admitted, snapping out of her look of shock. "I was expecting you to be...pudgy."

"Pudgy? Anything else those stories said about me?"

"They claimed you were...a coward who died at the hands of Hyperion and disgraced the name of Poseidon." she said quickly out of fear. Instead of sending her to kingdom come with that strange looking cane, Percy just sighed.

"Typical arrogance of immortals." he muttered.

"You were born...like in the 90s. Wouldn't that make you...40 or something?" Kestrel asked him.

"Believe me, Kestrel. Like select people from my current home planet, I'm older than I look. Now, come on. We need to plan our next move."

"To do what?"

"Save my son, gods damnit!"

"You mean the prisoner I've been hearing about?"

"Prisoner?"

"I heard the gods who sided with Poseidon torture him everyday along with the rest of the Olympians. Hades and Hestia weren't captured."

Percy gritted his teeth and out of rage, almost blinded Kestrel with the Fatelight sphere that burned really hot.

"Then let's go." he said as the sphere dissipated and the entire cellar faded to black. Thankfully, Kestrel still had her sight.

West Terrace Park...

"Wha...What do you mean you're Percy's daughter?" Grover asked, struggling to stand using his club as a cane.

"Do I not look the part?" Elise asked as she entwined her fingers to her shoulder length black hair and took a good look at it.

"Percy's...dead. How are you born?" the old satyr asked. "Are you the child of my least favorite seaspawn?"

'Least favorite seaspawn?' Elise thought. 'He must be referring to my...ex-uncle.'

"He has brown hair, but mine is black." she said to Grover.

"Bah. Alright, come in." he snorted grouchily as he walked into the bowels of the tiny little shack with Cherry. Shrugging, the raven haired woman followed suit. As she expected for a small shack in the middle of a park, it was...well, small. It was only around the size of her bedroom back in the Orynth Royal Palace if it didn't have the bathroom. There was a little cot in the corner, where Grover sat down. He had a bowl of what looked like cold rations.

"It's not much, but it's something." the old satyr said weakly.

"It's fine. Thank you." Elise replied, taking the bowl in her hand. She took a piece and chewed on it.

"Terrible, isn't it? The war's effects?" Grover asked the young assassin, who sat on the floor while Cherry eyed her with her childlike curiosity.

"Yes, sir. What happened to you when all this happened?" Elise asked.

"Lost my wife, Juniper. They burned her tree down as she passed off. Poor Cherry couldn't bear watching her mom die in front of her." Grover explained.

"I lost my father, but I never really saw him die. I was only a few days old when it happened."

"You miss him, don't you?"

"Do you? Do you really miss my father?"

Grover winced a little and sighed, stroking his goatee (Pun not intended).

"I've missed your father for as long as I can remember. Can't say I've been quite a good friend to him. I was so busy being Lord of the Wild that once I got back to Camp, he had already been replaced."

"Well...I never would've been born had it not been for those events." Elise pointed out.

"Only problem was what was happening here after those events. Even with Kronos gone, before all this happened, the whole world was still in complete disorder. The mortals never felt safe anymore. Even with so much help scattered across the globe, the peace between the mortal and the magical world was rather faulty. Poseidon promised them peace."

"Well, this isn't peace. It's oppression." she bluntly said.

"I know, but, everyone's so afraid of standing up for those they killed for no good reason." Grover said.

"They need to be inspired. They need to be given hope so that all their suffering can fade away."

"There is no hope." the satyr groaned as he threw his head down to look at the floor in shame.

"Do you not have any faith in yourselves?" Elise asked, though she was pretty close to screaming. "Is there anyone out of all of you who hasn't given up hope?"

"Look, if you want to do something about it, be my guest." Grover offered with the tone of a cranky old man who just got out of bed. "I've lost enough family already."

"Was my father not family to you?" Elise huffed before storming out of the shack. "And if he was here, he'd do something about it and not be useless like you, you old goat."

"So...any bright ideas?" Percy asked his new and only friend at the moment as he twirled his energy revolver and checked his belt of tricks and deadly tools, his right gauntlet, which was modeled after the Frye Twins', and his left bracer, modeled after Arno Dorian's. His metallic hands were fitted with brass knuckles, too, and aside from his cane, he had a strange curved knife on his belt that Kestrel recognized to be a kukri. She looked at him incredulously as he did so. They were hiding out in a nearby alley.

"Are you bloody joking?" she asked him. "You came all this way to find me and ask what me what to do?"

"It's not like I had a lot of Intel to begin with."

"If there was one thing that the archives got right, it's your stupidity."

"Sad, but true." Percy sighed. "But, I have heard rumors that they're capturing dangerous demigods to...reeducate them."

Kestrel suddenly widened her eyes. From a cartoonist's perspective, she clearly has a lightbulb over her head, which means a crazy idea.

"I think I just remembered something." she said.

"What?"

"We just might have some help. Come on, we're going to a reeducation camp." Kestrel said.

"And by that, you mean a prison for dangerous demigods?" Percy asked.

"Pretty much. Come on."

She began to climb the fire escape. Percy observed the young woman with interest, clearly thinking she would make a great member of the Chaotic Assassin Order. Anyway, Percy raised his right arm and fired his rope launcher. He managed to reach the rooftop before Kestrel did. She looked at his bracer in awe.

"Any chances you still have one of those?" she asked.

"I could call my friends, but something was blocking my signal when I called for help. When I adjusted my PDA to hack into Atlantean communications for a little while, there was no problem." he replied.

"The Planetary Barrier..." Kestrel muttered as they continued to freerun their way to wherever they were going.

"I thought that thing only stopped meteors from getting in and spaceships from getting in and out." Percy noted.

"I don't know how, but apparently, it can prevent anything outside the mesosphere from passing through except solar rays and moonlight. Clearly radio waves are no exception." she noted.

"So I have absolutely no way of contacting my probably angry wife right now. Damn it." he cursed. "Might as well save her the trouble of finding out I'm part machine underneath these plates."

They both stop to hide from a group of Atlanteans on the rooftop by hiding behind a penthouse.

"How many?" Kestrel asked, hand on her katana's handle.

"Three. I'll take out two, and you follow and finish off the last one quickly and quietly." Percy said. He peeked out the corner and now, all three soldiers turned away from their direction. He gives a thumbs up signal for him and Kestrel to act. Percy rushes out of the corner and sinks his hidden blades on the first two. Before the third one could even react, his head was plopped off by Kestrel.

"You sure you know where we're going?" the ex seaspawn asked.

"We're nearly there, Sir Jackson. Don't worry about it." Kestrel replied.

"'Sir Jackson'?" Percy asked incredulously.

"Lianna told me that 'Sir' is a means of showing respect to a man."

"Kestrel, I maybe around 40 something years old, but I still feel like I'm 21 or 23 at best. How much experience do you have when it comes to the outside world?"

"I know my way around England."

"Nothing else?"

"Sadly." Kestrel hung her head down in shame. Percy put a cold metal yet comforting hand on her shoulder. From his point of view, he saw what Earth had become: a battleground, not a home for its mortal and magical citizens. Percy clenched his other hand into a fist as his red Fatelight manifested in the form of a menacing aura around his fist and as it slowly became purple, Kestrel looked up.

"There it is." she said, pointing somewhere as Percy quickly made his Fatelight disappear.

"What?" he asked.

"The prison."

Percy looked at where Kestrel was pointing, and he saw the prison. It was more like a circular building surrounded by a bunch of steel cargo containers turned into makeshift cells. Atlantean guards appeared to be roaming around the perimeter. Large steel walls with barbed wire on the top surrounded the prison. The prisoners appeared to be either being beaten down for brainwashing sessions, or kept in strange pods. From the foggy interior, those pods appeared to put them in cryosleep.

"They're either getting brainwashed or frozen." Percy noted. He also noted Kestrel shivering when he said that last word.

"We have to help them." she said.

"We will, but I have a plan. Wait here. I'll be right back." Percy told Kestrel before zipping his way off the rooftop.

Meanwhile, Elise strolled around the ruins of Kansas City, kicking small stones here and there, obviously frustrated at Grover's senile attitude. It just...frustrated her.

"I suppose I'll have to find gas then." she sighed. She walked all the way back to wherever she parked her car, only to find it gone. Elise slammed her fist on the nearest brick wall in frustration. She activated her Eagle Sense to find out what happened to her car. From the looks of the two parallel gold tracks, her car must've either been stolen, or towed, or probably both.

"Give me a break." Elise huffed as she followed the trail. She walked for around ten straight minutes when she bumped into a hired Atlantean thug.

"Where do you think you're going?" he snarled.

"Have you seen a car around here?" she asked.

"Towed like the rest. Why?"

Elise mentally sighed, but the thug grabbed her by the throat.

"Come on, girly. Pay up." he growled.

"We...could go somewhere private..." she choked. Not surprisingly, the thug let her go. Said thug smirked at her evilly.

"There is a little alley over there." he said, pointing to an alley with barely anyone around. He dragged Elise by the arm to the alley. She feigned innocence and fear and thought,

'If I have to use my body to get out of these kinds of situations ONE MORE DAMN TIME, I'm going to throw up, both physically and mentally.'

Back in England...

Kestrel sat on the roof of the building, waiting patiently for Percy while cleaning her katana. She sat there for hours when the ex son of Poseidon returned, with a clean set of Atlantean officer's armor. The former assassin shot up from her spot, a little mortified.

"Woah, what in blazes are you planning to do with that?" Kestrel asked out of complete confusion.

"I'll turn you over to the Atlanteans so you can gather up some demigods for a break out, which I will signal with a bunch of explosions." Percy explained.

"What? No." Kestrel said firmly. "I respect your idea, but I do not agree with your plan."

"Well, do you have a plan?" Percy asked.

"Anything that doesn't involve any Atlanteans seeing my face."

Percy groaned, so he dropped the officer's armor and zipped away somewhere, again.

One dead thug in Kansas later...

Elise continued to follow the golden trail with her Eagle Sense. She felt like she had been walking for hours until she heard noises. The sound of crying, the crying of an adult male. Elise turned around to see that the golden trail of her car ended up in an impromptu junkyard. She noticed a bunch of Atlantean thugs constantly hurting a tall man in an American Civil War slave outfit. Elise sneaked in and hid behind an abandoned car.

She had to do something. The poor big guy was getting hurt by these thugs. Before she made a move, the big guy revealed himself.

Obviously, he was no human, he was a cyclops. His big brown eye was dripping tears of pain and sadness, and his hands were read from pulling something that was heavy for normal humans. Clearly, they were using the cyclops to tow cars, and that pissed her off.

"I should let them know slavery is illegal, no matter who the hell they are." Elise softly snarled, brandishing her hidden blades.

She jumped out of her hiding spot and performed a double assassination on two of the thugs, causing them to drop their taser spears. The other two thugs notice this, only to drop dead courtesy of a tomahawk and a crossbow bolt. The cyclops fell on the ground, visibly injured.

"Are you okay?" she asked the cyclops.

Back in England...

Percy got back to the rooftop, with a set of Atlantean soldier's armor.

"Okay, we'll both sneak in, then we'll figure out what to do." he told Kestrel.

"Shouldn't you take off your cybernetic armor first? I mean, it's just armor, right?" she asked, making Percy frown.

"I suppose you're right. Last time, I barely fit all this in. Okay, give me a second. Stand back."

Kestrel stood back as Percy got on his hands and knees on the ground when hidden flaps at the back of his armor, from the helmet all the way to his boots, opened up until he could get out. When he got out, Kestrel was even more shocked, and no, it was not from the fact that Percy's black hair was still intact after so long.

He didn't look...fully human. In fact, he looked different than what she expected. His right arm was clearly a prosthetic, given that it was pure black from the shoulder to his fingers. On his right shoulder, the number 00 was printed in digital form. His right pectoral was also covered in a nearly similar way and so was his entire belly, but Kestrel couldn't tell if his body from the waist down was also affected, as he was wearing white and red pants.

"Weird, huh?" Percy remarked. "Even without the armor, I'm still part machine."

"O...Okay...Let's do this then." the clone stammered, still in shock.