The flying chariot clattered down right by them with a clang.

Beneath the baby blue sky, blinding bright sun, and cigarette-smoke wisps of cloud the flying vehicle, drawn by winged horses, was pretty hard to miss.

In fact, had it not been for the vicious storm spirit, the Venti, it was unanimously and wordlessly decided between lance, Leo, piper, and Jason that they would have noticed the hardly subtle method of transport much sooner.

It just so happened that they were not s fortunate and piper was still shaking, Jason just beyond confused, Leo not sure whether to think the situation was disastrous and terrifying or just plain incredible, and Lance still confused about pretty much everything - he didn't know a thing about his life but was sure this was not a piece of it. But he did know, regardless, that this probably didn't exceed the barriers for strange he had set up for his life, whatever that was.

It turned out, the chariot that decided the laws of physics were beneath it was being driven by two teenagers who were perhaps just as bewildering as their vehicle.

The first was, they realised after hesitantly and dazedly piling in with them when instructed to do so, a towering boy, beyond buff, with a hard face and a name to match: Butch. But then there was the juxtaposing personality - and was that a tattoo of a rainbow? Lance felt like he was swimming in a world of in between, like everyone here fit the archetypes of the people he was semi-familiar with only when there was something to bring the blurred, hazy memories he had out of their locked-up boxes momentarily.

Then there was the girl, grizzled and hardened and somewhat desperate, pretty but intimidating, eyes as torn by war as ones, again, Lance was sure he was familiar again. She looked sad and, as previously mentioned, desperate, like she was looking for something and had gotten to the point where she had become tired and irritated with the unrelenting search.

That desperation and frustration had only increased when she saw Jason. He had lost a shoe at some point in the battle and she had stared down in disdain and disappointment. Staring down at his shoeless, dirtied, once-white sock, Jason failed to see what was wrong.

She had fallen back heavily with a displeased exhale accompanied by a grunt.

They had asked Butch (or Leo had), as they sat with him and the grey-eyed girl who was stewing in her own silence, why she was acting in such a way, still weirded out by the fight with the nonhuman being.

It had been is turn to sigh "look," He spoke softly in a voice that didn't fit his visage "She's been having a hard time lately - her boyfriend is missing and she was told that the boy with one shoe would be her answer."

It began, right then, to make a lot of sense as to why she had been unable to mask her frustration.

The chariot clattered downwards as the sky melted from baby blue to a darker shade, as the burning sun dulled and the wisps of cloud thinned in places and thickened in others. They dropped in a controlled manner, trusting Butch at the reins to guide them towards the overgrown, luscious, slightly dewy grass below.

But then it went out of control, moving this way and that as it soared forwards and went plunging into the lake. They were soaked, suddenly, with the cool water, surrounded by teenagers and canoes who had dived out of the way in haste.

A group of campers rushed to their aid with towels ready but paused for a minute as the saw the warm orange glow emitting from above leo's head.

"What?" he asked with a raised eyebrow "Why is everyone staring at me?"

Lance lifted an eyebrow of his own, jabbing his finger upwards in a very obvious gesture as he stared there himself. Suddenly leo went slightly crazy, feeling as though he were ablaze, ducking his entire head beneath the coolness of the clear water, accomplishing nothing but soaking his hair as well as the rest of him. Persistently, the glowing symbol continued to hover above his head, bobbing and dipping as it gradually grew dimmer.

"Vulcan." Jason mumbled when he saw the symbol.

"What?" Leo yelled in his rushed, comedic action "I don't even like Star Trek!"

"He means the god." Annabeth told them from the shore where all but leo now sat, wrapped in towels with droplets of water dripping from the darkened-with-moisture ends of her hair. "We use the Greek names," She sent a look at jason the boy could not quite decipher and was not sure if he wanted to "So Hephaestus."

After that was cleared up they took a moment to admire the environment in which they had found themselves.

It was like another world, green and lively, a clear, glimmering lake over to one side, a climbing wall to the other - was that lava? - and a ring of more distinctly themed cabins than Leo cared to count. There were teenagers running around, some casually in jeans and obnoxiously bright orange t-shirts and tank tops, doing pretty normal camp stuff like wandering around in clusters of friends, playing basketball and volleyball, most likely with a disregard to the official rules, shooting bows and arrows in archery ranges, climbing up the rock wall, or swimming or canoeing in the lake. But then there were the abnormalities: the kids wearing battle armour and wielding swords that they slashed at one another without hesitation, a few holding guns that they shot almost expertly at a line of targets, a group of younger children crowding around a teenager, chorusing things in a language Leo, Piper, lance and Jason were unfamiliar with but all but the last of them seemed to be able to understand, there were a few walking in and out of a building, carrying bundles of bandages and other such things in their arms.

From the top of the tall, green hill they stared down they stared down at the camp in awe.

Off in the distance, in the direction in which Annabeth was leading them, seeming a bit brighter, there was a big, blue-painted house.

On the porch there were two men playing a game, pinochle, they had said. One was a kindly older man in a wheelchair, the type of man that looked like the friendly teacher you would look forward to having a lesson with. The other was less friendly looking, with eyes of a deep purple that were both captivating and terrified, a beer belly hidden beneath an awfully loud leopard print shirt, and unkempt, greying dark hair that stood out from his head in frizzy clumps that almost looked as though they had never been brushed down. To his side, there was a can of diet coke he drank from periodically with a look that almost seemed to be contempt pasted across his features.

"Annabeth," the first one smiled, looking up from his cards "Have you got the new demigods? Good, good, follow me in." He rolled his wheelchair over the porch and through the door, into the building that was much cooler than the humidity of the air outside. The other man followed reluctantly at the tail of the group, grumbling from over Lance's shoulder and making him feel slightly uneasy. The man seemed to realise that.

They stopped in a room with the head of a leopard mounted upon the wall. The kind man began to speak again, introducing himself and his companion "I'm Chiron," He told them, the name ringing a bell to all but Lance "And this is Dionysus." he gestured to the man behind Lance whose attention had since been devoted entirely to the leopard head.

Leo stared between the two as though one had suddenly sprouted an extra head and the other's head had been replaced with the leopard's "Like the God." He deadpanned.

"Yes mortal," he was just as fed up in voice as he was in expression "Like the god," His eyes blazed as he stared Leo down.

"And Chiron," Jason picked up where Leo, too scared under the blazing gaze of the god to do so himself "Like the trainer of heroes."

He took the declaration in a much calmer, more open and welcoming way "Yes. And would you, by any chance, happen to know where you fit into this?"

Three of them froze as Jason's head span. They were sure, Lance, Leo, and Piper, that whatever possible explanations they could come up with (not that lance, clueless as he was, really had any at all that would make any sort of sense in the real world outside of the wanderings of his mind) were too utterly ridiculous for them to dare to say them aloud.

Annabeth sighed. "What happened," she shook her head, the soft curls in her hair shifting around her head "What happened to the promise to have them all claimed by thirteen?" She sounded angry and was clearly directing her anger towards the god.

"Relax mortal," he sounded so nonchalant it was insulting, even to Lance, leo and piper in their dazed state of confusion and Jason through the spinning of his head.

"I will not!" she was understandably defiant. Dionysus just tutted. She sighed again, Piper had the feeling she had done a lot of that recently "Well, come with me - we'll show you the initiation video; I'm sure, because the God's can't stick to their promises," the last part of the sentence was nothing if not accusatory "That you're pretty confused."

"Wait," Chiron instructed as they began to follow her on legs that were still shaking slightly "I would like to continue speaking to you, my boy." So Jason stayed behind as the world began to spin faster, melting into a whirlpool of colour that suddenly fell out of discernibility before falling back into it, completely and unnaturally still.

Within the image before him there was something that had not been here before. There was a woman standing saliently before him. She was cloaked in goat skin, tall and proud and with an air of importance that made him aware of what he should probably be doing at that moment. He dropped to his knees respectfully.

"Rise demigod." she commanded. The title did not feel odd to him as it probably should have, it came with a sense of familiarity that did not make him pause for a single second. "We do not have much time," she continued,speaking quickly as, just for a second, her image faltered "My cage grows stronger."

"You're imprisoned," he confirmed "But are we to help?"

"Of course! If you do not help me before time is too scarce for action, you shall not help yourself!"

"What?" he felt chills tracing the length of his spine.

"You wish for your memories to return?" her image fazed and fizzled down to nothing more than a wisp of colour, tan skin and dark eyes and hair, grey goat skin and white clothes.

Then, in another dizzying loop, reality resumed from exactly where he had left it. Chiron paused in his actions, looking at Jason with worry as the boy's skin was plunged suddenly into a sickly pallor of white.

"What is it?" The concerned man asked.

And so Jason explained everything. Chiron listened and did not criticise or doubt a word that left his scarred lips.

"The goatskin?" He asked "Juno, perhaps?"

"Perhaps."

"We shall talk for a while longer, but I believe it would be in your best interest to take up an inquiry with Clovis."

"Clovis?"
"A son of Hypnos," he clarified "I believe he may be of help in terms of your memory."

"Annabeth mentioned something about being claimed by thirteen?" Jason switched the topic.

"A promise," he confirmed "made by the gods to her boyfriend, percy jackson, after the war."

"The missing one."

"Yes." he sounded regretful. "But you have already been claimed, have you not?"

Jason hesitated "Yes, Jupiter."

"Zeus." Chiron told him "We use the Greek names."

"So Annabeth said."

"I'm curious as to why you are so inclined to the use of the Roman names?"

Jason closed his eyes lightly as he shook his head "I know about as much as you do."

Piper, leo, and Lance had been left alone in a room for a while, one wall of which was decorated with a cork board which was, in turn, adorned by a series of polaroids of children of different ages, all wearing the same shirts, some pictures so old they were printed in black and white rather than colour. In a few of these pictures, there was a girl of astounding familiarity, a boy with ginger hair, acne and a weak goatee in a few of them with her, a boy with tan skin, ebony hair, sea green eyes, and an ever-increasing number of scars in each of them. The latest picture was of Annabeth and the latter boy, arms wrapped around each other, smiling through blood, cuts, plasters, bruises, and bandages, like none of them mattered.

Piper knew, looking at them, that this boy was the Percy jackson she had spent the day hearing about, from Annabeth, the other kids she walked past, even the initiation video. She was surprised, honestly, that he was not more impressive in appearance. She had been expecting something different, someone who looked less like a trouble skater, a skater boy, someone a bit more like Jason who was nowhere near as lean, whose features were more heroic and less boyish, who looked more well kept, who looked more intelligent.

Piper had had more than enough trouble in her life.

She had been told, both her and Lance, that they would probably be claimed, the comedic thing that had happened to Leo upon their less-than-ideal upon arrival, at the campfire tht evening.

That turned out to be the case.

Piper had, as she sat before the warmth of the fire that blazed a colour it should not have, been transformed all of a sudden into someone whom she was not.

At the same time, lance himself had seen a glow. Slowly and uncertainly, he looked upwards, shoulders braced to his ears and expression clearly showing his complete state of confusion and disease.

A/N

And what do we think shall happen at the beginning of next chapter?

I'd like to clarify quickly that I've been writing this chapter from my memory of The Lost Hero so it's almost definitely going to stray somewhat from canon.

I'd like to thank everyone quickly, for reading, reviewing, following and favouriting. I hope you enjoy the chapter.