Annabeth
When we left the bubble, I tripped and almost fell face down in the water, but I was able to catch myself. Ok, maybe Percy helped. With the catching, I mean. Maybe, just maybe, he even was the only one who caught me. As he dried me up, he suddenly asked: "Do fish feel wet?" "Percy, it's two a.m." that was my automatic response, since that was when he usually came up with weird stuff like this. After realizing that it was very much not two a.m., I quickly added: "In Germany or something. Or maybe Greece? I honestly don't care" I started to actually think about the question. Did fish feel wet? Could they even sense whether they touched water, under all those scales. They probably know whether there is water in their gills, but did that count as feeling wet. And what about the rest of the body? "Percy, you're breaking my brain. Please, remind me why I'm still with you, because I can't seem to find a reason." Of course, I just wanted to tease him, tell him how annoying his random questions were, but he actually had an answer ready: "Because we are both heavily traumatized and our love for each other is the only thing that can even remotely neutralize our suffering. Ok, that came out more depressing than I meant to, but it is kind of true." In a way, he was right. We literally not live without each other. The first night back on the Argo II, nightmares had kept Percy and me awake. Only when I moved over to his cabin, we were able to get some sleep. And don't even get me started on Tartarus itself. It had taken us a whole week before we could sleep separately again, but luckily, everyone accepted it without asking questions. Well, everyone expect Buford, who would constantly tell us to put some clothes on. Of course, we did have clothes on, but the sentient table didn't seem to care about that. Weirdly enough, he had a tendency to stop working in our proximity. Leo explained that the salt from the air was building up in the circuits, but I'm not so sure that's where the salt really came from. Let's just say having "Captain Saltwater" as your boyfriend can be quite useful.
When it got late, I decided to go to bed. This time, I'd actually sleep in my bed, rather than just falling asleep in the early morning hours while trying to organize all the necessary repairs and potential nymph relocations. Turns out my hubris is not limited to strategies and fighting, but also includes my ability to stay awake. I walked over to Percy to tell him good night: "I think I'm going to bed now. Good night. Love you" "you're already going. Aren't you gonna try an all-nighter again and fall asleep while telling everyone what to do?" he teased me. "Actually, I won't be doing that today. Today, I'll go to bed on time. Good night" I gave him a quick kiss and walked towards the Athena cabin.
Now, there was only one thing left to do: find out whether there actually are insects that are born pregnant. Of course, I couldn't just use Google and had to rely on the Athena cabins vast stash of books, but at least I wouldn't have to spend hours searching for the right book, since my cabin, together with cabin 9, had developed a robot that could search all of our books for what you wanted to know, the same way a search engine would search all documents on the internet. Only in the last minute had I been able to prevent Leo from making the robot look like a spider. Maybe that runs in the family. I gave the robot, which I refused to call by its actual name, super small Mcshizzle, my instructions and it actually found a book and showed me the correct page. These insects actually did exist, and they were called aphids or plant lice. The best thing you could use against them were wasps (which are basically the Xenomorphs of the insect world), ladybugs and spiders, all of which had to be deployed over the infected plants. Why did it have to be spiders? I imagined a farmer walking around the fields with a bucket of live spiders and pouring them over his plants, which probably wasn't such a good idea. The imagining, not the pouring. I could almost feel the spiders crawling up my body. "Uh, small tip, don't look up how to fight aphids" I told my cabin mates and knew that falling asleep now wouldn't be easy.
Percy
I watched Annabeth walk to her cabin before deciding to go to bed too. I told everyone who was still there a good night and also went to my cabin to get ready for bed. Any other person might have decided to read a book or watch something on their phone, but as a Greek demigod, I could not do either of those things. Instead, I summoned some water to me and began forcing it into different shapes, just to pass the time. I had just finished replaying our first kiss at mount St. Helens when I heard a voice at the door. "Percy, are you here" "yeah, I'm here" I responded before realizing something. The voice had sounded like a young girl, no older than 9. I didn't think we had anyone this young at camp. Was this maybe a Cyclops, I knew there were excellent at changing their voice like that. I formed the water into a spear and froze the tip, ready to strike if needed. The door slowly opened.
That's it for this chapter. I could have made it a bit longer, but I know how much this fandom loves cliffhangers. Oh, and I might also not be able to post the next chapter on time, but I'll try my best.