More on the Current State of Things

Welcome back, welcome back!

Glad you enjoyed the first chapter, here's the second.

More world-building, same as probably next chapter, so bear with me. The meat is coming.

Wait, no. Piper's vegetarian, so the vegetables are coming.

Disclaimer: I don't own PJO

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Piper's walk through the halls was decent. From where she was in the cafeteria, her geometry class was on the opposite side of the school. She passed by the odd student or sparse group of friends, and they either paid her no heed, gave her a curt nod, or pulled their things closer to their bodies because they thought that was funny.

Piper was very much looking forward to when the humor in that died out.

She made it to her classroom, and was completely unsurprised to find the guy she considered to be a good acquaintance already sitting at their table, staring intently at the screen of his school-issued Chromebook. He heard her footsteps and looked up. He arched a brow and sat up in his chair, raising his arm in greeting while making the Vulcan salute or whatever it was called when you splayed your fingers.

Intentionally, he butchered the Cherokee language like he always did when he noted Piper was in a funk.

"Ozda sanalay."

The heavy Southern drawl he forced into the greeting made it even worse.

Piper sighed, though her lips did slightly quirk up.

"Ah! There it is! Made you smile."

Since Piper would never give him the satisfaction, she said, "That wasn't a smile. That was a pained grimace from the regret I feel over teaching you Tsalagi. It's pronounced OHS-duh sah-nah-LEY-ee. Osda sanalei. Good morning, Billy."

"Eh, same difference," Billy said dismissively.

Piper rolled her eyes and sat next to him.

"You look like shit today. What's up?"

Ladies, and gentlemen, William "Billy" Jones. Piper honestly needed to lower her standards when it came to her criteria for friends, because Billy honestly was a friend, a great one, but Piper had been spoiled by the likes of Leo, Annabeth, Percy, Frank, Hazel, and…you know who else. Based on what they all went through together, they were friends, and Piper was being unfair when she put Billy in the "acquaintance" category, but he was never going to measure up to the Seven.

Piper didn't want him, too, either, because standing shoulder to shoulder with them would mean he'd have to be a demigod facing life-threatening danger day in and day out, and Piper didn't want that for Billy. She also didn't want to be attacked by a monster with him nearby, or a monster attack him because her demigod scent was smothering him, and so she kept him at arm's length.

Her definition of a friend had gotten spoiled by the likes of the Seven, and she didn't want to endanger Billy. That's why he was an acquaintance and not a friend.

Despite that, after almost three weeks, Piper was immensely glad to have him in her life right now.

Billy was somehow the demonic lovechild between Leo, Annabeth, and Nico. He had all the sarcastic and cheap whit of Leo, the sharp intelligence of Annabeth, being the number one student in the sophomore class, and Nico's fashion sense, because Billy never wore anything besides black. Like an anime character, every time Piper saw Billy, he wore the same outfit: black polo, black cargo shorts, black socks, and black shoes.

Billy was also more on the pale side, and he had dark brown hair that he let grow out to the point he started standing it up with gel, only to eventually get it all cut down to a military buzz style, and his eyes were a difficult color to place. A greenish blue with a dash of yellow around the pupil, and faint, grey rings around the iris. He had showed her his Texas driver's license, and the little card officially listed his eyes as "hazel."

Yes, Texas.

Good lord did Billy have one hell of a story.

For starters, he had killed a boy.

Billy used to play football. With his stout frame, he had been the linebacker. During a game, the running back of the other team had the ball and was on the move, pulled off a spin move to get out of bad tackle, and with that spin, he spun the broad side of his helmet straight into the charging Billy's facemask.

Piper had seen the video on YouTube, and she had jumped in her seat at the mighty CLACK! that came through the speakers. A big, collective OOH! went through the crowd of the high school varsity game as pieces of helmet went flying everywhere. Billy had come in with a full head of steam and the running back spun right into his trajectory.

The poor kid officially died on his way to the hospital of intense cranial trauma, but the truth was that he had died almost on impact.

Billy hadn't so much as watched a football game since the incident last October.

Piper had been confused over her changing feelings for Jason while Billy had been coping with the fact that he had killed a person.

However, given how Billy usually behaved, you'd never know that about him. He had only told Piper about it last Friday, almost a week ago. Piper hadn't told Billy about Jason, though. Not yet.

After quitting the football team for very justifiable reasons—he wasn't kicked off or brought to trial, as where there had been a panel that reviewed the footage of the hit, they all agreed there was no malice or intent, just a horrifying, one-in-a-million kind of impact—that being trauma, Billy's dad conveniently got a promotion at work that required the family to move north to Tahlequah, and Billy's mom was able to work remote every day, so there was no issue there.

Billy once had a little sister. And he once had two cousins.

Cousin Tori had been out driving with Little Sister Kaycee when a drunk driver crossed the median of the highway and hit them head-on at over 90mph. All three of them died, and the funerals had closed caskets. Tori's younger brother, Axle, joined the Army and was deployed to Afghanistan. After a routine patrol, Axle came home in a box.

Aunt Wendy was doing better these days, but it had been looking grim for a few months.

Starting six years ago, Billy had buried each of his grandparents one year after another.

He had no uncles, neither by marriage or by blood. His dad only had his sister, Wendy, and Wendy had divorced her husband for two reasons: he was caught embezzling from the company he worked for, and it turns out he was gay. He had married Wendy and had kids with her in an attempt to cover that up, but Wendy caught him in the middle of his affair.

On Billy's mother's side, she had two younger sisters, the middle one having never been married, and at this point probably wouldn't ever, and the youngest one had been married and divorced twice, and was currently not looking to be in any relationships ever again. Billy had three cousins on that side, but he hardly ever saw them, hardly knew them, and only considered them family because of blood. And they were still down in Texas, anyway.

That was Billy. Over the course of six years, all four of his grandparents died, his little sister died, both of his older cousins died, he had little contact with his aunts and living cousins, he'd killed a running back by sheer accident, and been uprooted from Texas to Oklahoma.

Oh, and he didn't like sweet tea.

Despite all of that death, Billy was able to grin deviously, and intentionally mispronounce Cherokee words because he saw she was upset and knew it exasperated her. He knew how to take her mind off things. And he could say things like You look like shit today. What's up?

After having been told all of these bits and pieces, Piper, completely bewildered and flabbergasted, asked him how he managed to ever smile.

"I know where they're at," was his flat, borderline derogatory response, as if Piper had asked him what the square root of nine was, and he was making fun of her stupidity. "I know they're doing just fine, and I'll see them again, and then I'll kick Axle in the nuts for dying on me."

Piper wished she could have that kind of optimistic outlook regarding the afterlife, but she honestly didn't know where Grandpa Tom was, or just what had happened to Jason. She'd been looking and hoping for an answer with how to cope with dead loved ones and their memories, but Billy's answer didn't apply to Piper.

At this point, with how much Piper knew about Billy given his testimony, all of that deep stuff, you might be wondering if Piper was harboring potential romantic feelings for Billy, and vice versa. Well, not even close. In a rare twist, Billy had friend-zoned himself.

The Wednesday after Piper started school on Monday, and it became clear that she and Billy were going to be spending a lot of time together the rest of the semester due to the fact that they had two classes together and sat next to each other in those classes, Piper had shot him down before he could even think about asking her out, and what he said in response left her too stunned to speak for a while.

"Look, Billy, you're a really great guy, but I'm not looking to be in a relationship right now. My ex and I…" Piper trailed off when she saw Billy's expression.

"I wouldn't date you right now if someone was holding a gun to my head."

Piper was by no means a vain person. She left vanity to her sisters, namely Drew. Even still, being told so strongly by a boy that he wouldn't date her triggered some kind of strange, unexplained eldritch instinct that manifested as a little voice in Piper's head, and it went Um, excuse you? What about me is such a turn-off that you wouldn't go out with me on pain of death?

Piper phrased her question with more tact than that. "Um…why not?"

"Because you're a girl."

"You're gay?" Piper blinked.

"No," Billy rolled his eyes. "I don't want a girlfriend. I want a woman. Someone mature and settled, not tossed around by her whims and hormones. I want lifelong commitment, someone that, when we have problems, we'll work our asses off to fix them, not dump me because it's just too hard and not the same anymore. I don't want someone who I'll spend months and years with, spend thousands of dollars on her, just for us to break up. Waste of time, effort, energy, and money. I'm not looking for that, and that's what I see in you. Yeah, you seem like a great girl, too, but still a girl. Young, wild, reckless, impulsive, and this is high school. I'm dating you for a maximum of two more years before I got to College X and you go to College Y or something, and we never see each other again. I'm looking for commitment, and that's hard to maintain across distances. So, no. I'm not even going to entertain the idea of dating you right now."

After that speech, Piper did not know what to say.

She eventually just settled on taking the good and disregarding the bad. Billy, this seventeen-year-old whose life she had saved by defeating Gaea, this human that she could snap in half, saying she wasn't mature enough to be considered a woman? Yeah, disregarding that (and ignoring how that hit really close to home). But the part where Billy had no interest in making moves on her and dating her?

Running away with that one.

It hadn't even been two weeks since Jason died, and Piper was not over that. The impending nightmares certainly hadn't helped matters.

Now, after a conversation like that, you might be wondering how Piper even remotely considered Billy to be an acquaintance, and that went back to their very first conversation the Monday morning Piper started the next chapter of her life.

"Class, this is Piper McLean," the teacher introduced. "I will not tolerate any bullying or harassment, and I expect all of you to follow Thumper's Golden Rule. Let's recite it together to make sure you all remember."

Considering there was a poster up at the front of the classroom on top of the whiteboard depicting the classic bunny, it wasn't a difficult endeavor.

In disjointed harmony, the class kind of recited the Rule. "If you can't say something nice, don't say something at all."

The teacher nodded. "Now, the only open spots we have left are back there."

Back there being the very back of the classroom, where the table only had one occupant, who must've been distantly related to Nico. Piper made her way back there, the other students already disobeying the teacher's instructions not to harass her by clutching their things with sly grins. Piper ignored them.

The tables were rectangular with big, black tops, and instead of chairs there were stools. D- for comfort and A+ for back pain.

"Uh, hi," Piper greeted.

"Hello," came the uncommitted grunt of an answer.

The black-clad young man was more interested in what was going on his computer than small talk.

Piper looked, and she blinked. "Are those…stocks?"

"Penny stocks."

"Oh, cool….Um, mind if I sit here?"

"There's literally nowhere else for you to sit."

"You're just a ray of sunshine, aren't you."

That earned her a twisted smile. "The brightest of all."

Piper sat down on her stool and propped her bag against the table leg, digging out her spiral and a pen. "Well, sorry to cramp your style."

"My style," he echoed blankly.

"Yeah. You've got this brooding bad boy air around you, and now I'm sitting next you."

"…who are you, again?"

"Piper. As in Piper McLean."

A blank stare. "You say that like it's supposed to mean something to me."

Piper furrowed her brow. "You've never heard of me?"

"No."

"McLean? As in Tristan McLean, the actor? Jake Steel? King of Sparta?"

What Billy said next made Piper's day. "Who the fuck is Tristan McLean?"

In all honesty, Billy was like the perfect friend for Piper. He had traces of Leo and Annabeth, and a little bit of Nico, all people that Piper knew. He had zero interest in television, movies, and social media, and so had zero idea as to who Tristan McLean was and what had happened to him, therefore meaning he had no preconceived notions about Piper. He had firsthand experience with death, had buried several of his family members already, meaning he knew what kind of pain Piper carried with her. And he wasn't at all interested in dating her.

Now here he was, able to pick up on her distress, make her smile, and then offer his undivided attention to her problems.

Piper had always avoided talking about her problems to Billy. Comparing her story to his always made her feel worse, because in Piper's mind, he had it worse than she did. All of his grandparents were dead, his little sister was dead, his older cousins that were like his older siblings were dead, he never got to see his other family because of how far away they were, and he carried the burden of having accidentally killed a boy. Granted, both of his parents were alive and enjoyed a happy, stable marriage, which is Piper where "won out" over Billy.

Piper's mother was a goddess which automatically eliminated her from the equation, and her father was a neglectful workaholic. Also granted was the fact that Tristan only worked so much to make what he considered to be "enough" money to ensure Piper's happiness. Piper had also been there to witness the brutal murder of her ex-boyfriend, but still. Overall, Piper felt that Billy had it worse than she did, and therefore she couldn't complain, but that never stopped her from complaining anyway.

Made her feel slightly better to be able to vent it all.

However, where Billy had told Piper so much about him, she had only told him so much about her. He knew the story about her dad, how he had a breakthrough and got rich, then never had time for her, how she got sent to alternative school for stealing a car, how she'd gone to a summer camp for kids with ADHD and dyslexia, met a boy there, dated him for almost a year before her heart broke as she broke up with him, and then said ex-boyfriend died a few weeks ago due to a surfing accident.

Which is where the scar on her upper lip came from.

Obviously, a lot of missing stuff in there, but there was only so much she could say without sounding crazy, and only so much that she wanted to open up about.

This morning, though, after wetting her bed, the funk she was in, the dark thoughts that floated through her mind, Piper welcomed the attention Billy offered.

"I drank four wine coolers mixed with a can of Sprite last night, had this really scary dream of my dead ex-boyfriend, and I woke up screaming. I also wet my bed for the first time since I was eight." Piper shrugged.

Without even a moment of hesitation to process all of that, Billy said, "That's rough, buddy."

Piper blew a rush of air from her nose as the corners of her mouth twitched up. "I admit to getting drunk and wetting my bed after having a nightmare about my ex, and all you've got is a Zuko quote?"

"Sounds to me like you've got some deep psychological and emotional trauma going on about your dead boyfriend's death, like there's a lot of stuff you wanted to say to him, then suddenly you couldn't, and now your subconscious is feeling the burden, manifesting as a nightmare. Also, you drank too much beer. If you do that again, go to the bathroom often to make sure your bladder is flushed before bed, or perhaps invest in some teen diapers. Or some of those maximum, overnight pads."

"Billy, you are a wellspring of good advice."

"Aren't I, though?"

"Definitely."

"Anything else going on, or is that it?"

"I feel neglected by my dad," Piper said flippantly. "Our lives came crashing down around us back in California, and when we moved here, I was hoping we'd be able to reconnect since he was hardly ever around because of his movies, but now he's hardly ever around because he works three jobs around the clock."

"Moving from California is always an improvement," Billy said sagely.

"Indeed," Piper nodded solemnly, imitating Billy's wise tone.

"Is he working so much to stay busy, out of the house, and away from you, or because he feels responsible for your financial situation and is owning up to it by working his ass off at real jobs?"

"He feels responsible."

"Have you talked to him about it?"

"I don't ever have the chance. He's gone literally all day long Monday through Friday, and he sleeps the majority of Saturday and Sunday. The handful of hours we do have on the weekends, I don't want to spend it arguing about our current financial status."

Billy nodded. "I know this will be hard for you, since you're a girl—I think, anyway-"

"I can confirm I am a girl," Piper said seriously. "I'm reminded of that fact every time I shower, use the toilet, and a specific seven days every month."

"-but grow some fucking balls. Sounds like most of your pain right now is self-inflicted because you won't sit down with your dad and tell him how you feel about him working so much, and about your nightmares. As far as your boyfriend goes, use some of that ancient Cherokee spirit magic or whatever and summon his soul so you can kiss, hug, and screw each other one last time, and finally move on."

Piper blushed a little at Billy's insinuation that she and Jason ever had sex. "That's not how that works. That's not how any of that works."

Billy shrugged. "I'm not Cherokee so I wouldn't know. But you are. How's that coming along?"

With that, Billy seamlessly changed the subject.

Piper brightened ever so slightly. Finally, something she had some positive reports on. "My language lessons are still going great, and I'm learning about making my own blowgun."

Since the one her granddad made for her was practically incinerated by Medea's Helios flames.

"Perfecting your oral technique, I see."

Piper rolled her eyes and nudged Billy's arm with her elbow. "Mind out of the gutter."

"It's actually up in the clouds right now. I just made two hundred dollars."

Piper looked at his computer screen, and sure enough, he traded in one of his stocks and was two hundred dollars and some change richer. Far more so than Piper was, since all the money she had to her name was whatever her dad spent on her. Piper watched as Billy then switched tabs to what she presumed wasn't penny stocks, but the "big league" stocks, and put that two hundred into another stock.

"I will never understand how the stock market works," Piper said.

Billy offered a sideways grin. "Buy 'em red, sell 'em green. Look at the charts, determine a pattern if there is one. Not too much thought to it."

Piper shook her head. "Still not helpful."

"Smooth brain."

"Dickhead."

Billy snorted. "Touche."

The bell rang, signifying that the student body had five minutes to get to their first period class or else they'd be late.

And, yeah. Piper could use foul language. She'd shouted and muttered her fair share of explicatives before, during, and after the Giant War. She was a teenager under duress, after all, and this isn't a children's story where "(insert name here) cursed" is necessary for the sake of the target audience.

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Did Piper struggle with her classes? Not really. She actually pulled low A's and high B's. She had no problem with grasping and understanding the material, or applying it. The real problem was mostly her dyslexia.

Was that a 3 or an 8? A 5 or a 2? Was that number 23 or 32?

Piper could run numbers through a TI-84 all day, but the snag was whether she had the right numbers.

ADHD didn't really bother her that much. Yeah, her attention was constantly shifting from the slightest twitch of someone's muscle to the ticking second hand on the clock, and she missed stuff on the board, and sometimes she'd get hyperfocused on something and lose all track of time, but she could digest the lecture notes well enough and catch back up to the material.

Her "disabilities" were still there, but manageable. At least the school wasn't suggesting she take Adderall.

Tahlequah High's bell schedule called for six periods and first and second lunch placed in the middle of it all. First period started at 8:05 and ended at 9:05, then five minutes to get to the next class which started at 9:10, and the pattern repeated until the school day ended at 3:05 in the afternoon.

Luckily for Piper, all the classes she was taking in LA were mirrored in Tahlequah, only the times were obviously different.

First Period Geometry.

Second Period General Chemistry.

Third Period U.S. Government.

Then she was one of the lucky students that got to have First Lunch, and then her Fourth Period class was Business I. Since the American high school pushed students into picking their potential career paths, Piper had just shrugged her shoulders with raised palms and went with Business, possessing all the energy of I guess this sounds cool. Of course, this was back when she was still in love with Jason, they were going to school together, he was going to be pontifex maximus, and she had access to her father's millions and therefore didn't really have to worry about getting a job. Then everything fell apart, but Piper was two semesters into the program and couldn't turn back now.

Fifth Period was English II, and this was her second class of the day with Billy.

Piper's sixth and final class of the day, pathetically enough, was P.E.

April was the Spring season, seeing soccer, baseball, softball, track, tennis, and golf. Piper, transferring in as late as she did, missed tryouts, but that wouldn't have mattered anyway. She hadn't been doing sports back in LA, and neither had Jason. For that matter, most demigods stayed out of sports for the exact same reason that Dash from the Incredibles wasn't allowed to play sports:

Demigods would kick way too much ass way too hard.

Billy, to Piper's knowledge, was just a regular human, but even he had managed to kill another football player with helmet-to-helmet contact. Imagine a son of Ares with a full head of steam slamming into a human—they wouldn't have to call an ambulance so much as a hearse.

The demigod's physical superiority over a human was staggeringly terrifying when examined. Their strength, speed, and reflexes, all derived from the fact that they were all half god, made them beyond anything any human would ever achieve. Usain Bolt's top speed of 28mph? A light jog for a demigod. Žydrūnas Savickas, regarded as the strongest man currently alive, and his squat of 970lbs? Lightweight for a demigod.

In physical contact games like football, basketball, and soccer, demigods would unwittingly be shattering bones on impact. In games like baseball and softball, the ball's getting knocked out of the stadium. In a game like volleyball, a spike to the face could very well crack the cranium. Chiron didn't explicitly state that demigods couldn't play sports, but he heavily stressed that if they did, they had to be super careful to keep their power capped.

Percy being on the swim team in Alt High was a prime example. Perhaps one of his greatest overlooked feats is how he, a son of Poseidon, managed to keep his victory streak mostly believable. Granted, he was drug tested literally every other day and the results always came back negative, but still. Percy was having to keep his power controlled in the exact same way that Dash did during his track meet at the end of the movie.

Piper was no different. In fact, if the idea that parentage had an impact on how physically strong a demigod was (i.e., Clovis, son of Hypnos, versus Sherman, son of Ares), then Piper was right there underneath the likes of the Big Three kids, since her mother was Aphrodite, older than the Olympians, born of Ouranos's blood mixing with the ocean, with the most accepted myth considering the ocean to specifically be Thalassa, the Primordial goddess of the sea.

Born of two Primordials, Aphrodite was more comparable to the likes of a Primordial herself, or a Titan. As a goddess, she was in a class of her own. Piper even identified with that during the Battle of Athens when she was going up against the whole assembly of Giants and was holding her own with charmspeak, size disparity, and her own physical strength.

Piper and Jason had stayed away from sports because they didn't want to accidentally kill the other kids, or outperform everyone so badly that too many difficult questions were raised and too much attention was drawn.

As such, Piper was relegated to P.E. with…the rest of the girls.

It was so stereotypical it honestly hurt what pride Piper actually possessed that she was lumped in with the P.E. girls. The nerds with the braces and big glasses, the chubby girls, the fat girls, and the chubby/fat nerds with braces and/or glasses, and the weird goth girls obsessed with anime.

P.E. was supposed to be a time of physical activity, but the teacher of the class was one of the football coaches who also doubled as one of the baseball coaches, and he, by shuffle, had gotten saddled with sophomore girls P.E., a position he couldn't care less about compared to his real job as a real coach. What he did for the class was get a big ballbag out of the supply closet, one with basketballs, volleyballs, and tennis balls, and just left it by his desk next to the closet.

If any girl wanted a ball, they could go up and ask him.

In the almost-three weeks that Piper had been in P.E., she had not seen a single girl ever get one of the balls and exercise. They all sat on the bleachers that lined the perimeter of the gym, on their phones and Chromebooks. Piper always sat by herself a short distance from the teacher, also on her Chromebook.

Yes, she had her own school-issued laptop.

It was the fourth one in less than three weeks.

Just for some unexplainable reason, the computers the school kept giving Piper malfunctioned in one form or fashion and required extensive repair. Nothing could be brought against Piper, because examination of the devices revealed no physical damages—nothing to suggest Piper was throwing her computer around, or letting stuff drop on top of it. There was nothing Piper could do if the CPU or battery melted.

However, miraculously enough, this fourth computer had survived since last Friday, April 22. What this told Piper was that Apollo had done something in the West. He must've defeated Caligula and somehow undid the emperors' communication spell, which enabled Piper to use technology like computers without it breaking down on her.

Thankfully, the communication problem only affected communications technology. Piper didn't know what she'd do with herself if she couldn't use the microwave, stove, oven, refrigerator, TV, washer, dryer, shower, or toilet.

However, the problem wasn't entirely fixed. Piper still had trouble sending emails. About one out of every eight she sent actually went somewhere, while the rest just came up with error messages telling her the email had failed to send.

As for actually using a computer for any purpose, Piper did recall what Chiron had told her a year-and-a-half ago when she was still fifteen, fresh from her quest to rescue Hera. The old teacher said that surfing the web was dangerous because it could attract monsters, with his example story being about a boy in Cincinnati who was attacked by gorgons after he Googled gorgons.

Piper didn't get the specifics on that, but she refrained from Googling anything remotely mythological, and instead focused on YouTube videos. Piper would definitely be up a creek if a monster attacked, though, since she didn't have Katoptris on her or in her bag. The Student Handbook was very clear that knives of any kind were strictly prohibited, and Piper was certain that included Ancient Greek ceremonial daggers, and the last thing Piper wanted was to be caught with Katoptris and expelled.

She really needed to talk with Hazel about learning how to manipulate the Mist, that way she could always have her dagger with her and just make it look like a pen.

Except that Piper couldn't reach Hazel because Iris Messages still weren't working.

Everyone in P.E. left Piper alone, and if it wasn't for the fact that she didn't have a car, she probably would just leave early and not have her time wasted.

Well, also if her charmspeak was working and she could just charm anyone who tried to stop her, but Piper did not want to start going down that line of thinking, especially after Billy cheered her up, if only slightly.

Being in P.E. wasn't what burned Piper's waffles, though. No, what drover her up the wall was that, at this very moment, there was a class going on called Cherokee I.

Cherokee I.

Which was followed by Cherokee II and Cherokee III.

Straight from the Tahlequah High School website:

In Cherokee I students will learn about the Cherokee syllabary and its origin, basic words and phrases in Cherokee. They will also learn the basics on Cherokee history and culture. Students will also get to experience Cherokee activities, such as stickball and marbles; Cherokee art, such as pottery and basketry; and traditional Cherokee foods. Material will include information from reputable sources and from personal knowledge of the instructor and guest speakers.

The proceeding two classes expanded and built upon all of that.

Good gods, that was perfect.

For Piper, a girl struggling to find her identity within the tribe, those classes were perfect. But LA obviously didn't offer Cherokee classes, and being a sophomore, she wouldn't be able to finish the whole course since she'd be a junior next year, and each class took up a whole school year. It was okay, though; a compromise had been reached, in that Piper would take what basically amounted to an accelerated summer school course on Cherokee I, that way she could take Cherokee II in the coming Fall.

Piper was looking forward to that, but it was still aggravating having to waste a whole hour in the gym.

It did come to an end, though. The bell did ring, and Piper was finally through another day of school.

Which meant she had to trek back through the bustling halls, through the cafeteria, out to the busses, and deal with the overflowing energy of her peers. Billy could drive, even had a car of his own, but Piper didn't know what his Sixth Period was, or where he lived in relation to where she lived to see if asking for a ride home was a viable option.

Yes, Piper knew that Billy had killed a kid, his cousins and little sister were dead, all his grandparents were dead, he was from Texas, all his family were still down in Texas, but she didn't know his school schedule or home address.

It had never come up in conversation.

So, bus it was.

Piper made a mental note to ask Billy about it tomorrow.

For now, she had to march.

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Piper walked in through the door. "Hey, Dad, I'm home!"

Then, lowering her voice to mimic her dad's, "Pipes! Welcome home! Great to see you! How was school? Are you hungry? I'm thinking about sandwiches tonight. How does that sound?"

"Sounds great, Dad!"

Piper sighed and collapsed on the couch after unceremoniously dropping her bag to the ground. Now she had approximately seven hours before her desired bedtime. Seven hours to occupy her time.

She didn't have homework, since any homework she may have had came in the form of unfinished assignments, but since she'd finished all her schoolwork, that meant she had no homework. She also had no projects or extra curriculars, so Piper had zero school-related tasks to thinking about.

Leisure time, then.

She could study her language some more. She wasn't in the Cherokee I class that school offered, but the Cherokee website offered online classes for free. All that was required was an email address and a bit of your time, as the online classes were self-paced with no due dates. The webpage had a tab that showed all the active participants and how long since they'd been on the module, which, while interesting, was also depressing, because there were students who hadn't been online in over 270 days.

Piper hoped those people were okay.

That class had been the primary way Piper had been learning her tribal language. She'd been six when she moved to LA and was still struggling with English. Dad had never taught her Cherokee because he barely knew it himself. Things that helped Piper learn her language were that approximately three-fourths of Tahlequah was covered in Cherokee—road signs, restaurant menus, banners, the names of places, and more—and, once again, Billy.

When Piper had told him she had started language lessons, he'd asked her to teach him what she knew. Teaching Billy had helped reinforce what Piper had learned. Like Billy had said, quoting Phil Collins from Tarzan, "In learning you will teach, and in teaching you will learn."

Piper agreed.

And you know what the best, and scariest, thing about Piper learning Cherokee was?

Her dyslexia didn't kick in.

It was the best thing because she could read and write her language without the characters bouncing and flipping all over the place, and the scariest thing because…well, Piper could read Ancient Greek just fine because she was a Greek demigod. If being a demigod meant Greek bypassed her dyslexia, what did it mean if Cherokee also bypassed her dyslexia…?

Back in LA, when Piper, Apollo, and Meg had fought Medea, Piper had fired one of her blowgun darts at the sorceress while she was defending herself using a wall of Helios's flames. By all rights, Piper's dart should've been incinerated, but it had gone through the fire, pierced Medea, and Grandpa Tom's poison recipe had even brought the ancient sorceress to her knees. Along with pandai, too, actually.

You would think that someone like Medea, and monsters, would be totally immune to a Cherokee recipe of diluted coral snake venom and some herbs, but they weren't. As for the dart going through Titan fire, Apollo had shared his speculations with Piper, that either the flames of Helios didn't recognize a blowgun dart as a legitimate target the same way Celestial Bronze didn't recognize mortals, or that, being a Cherokee weapon, it bypassed Ancient Greek magic.

Piper had not had any opportunities to test any theories, and she was just fine with that.

Speculations over potential mystical Cherokee powers aside, if Piper didn't want to study her language some more, her other options were TV or video games.

Her stomach rumbled in a way that told her lunch was finished, so she got off the couch and went to that bathroom to enjoy being a queen for a few minutes, and after she dried her hands after washing them, Piper knew what she wanted to do with her evening.

She went into her room and sighed in annoyance at the sight of her stripped bed, the baking soda from this morning having dried after so many hours. She'd forgotten about all that.

Piper transferred her laundry from the washing machine to the dryer, then got the vacuum cleaner to clean off her bed. The baking soda had done its job, absorbing all the pee, and her mattress looked good as new.

Piper then plopped down on her beanbag chair and booted up the Xbox One. Another of the many things the tribe had given the McLeans, though this one had the story of having once belonged to a boy that overdosed on heroin. His father had given the console away, figuring Piper would find better use for it.

And she did.

Since she operated the system offline, she had no way to communicate with it, meaning the emperors' spell didn't fry the circuits, so Piper could actually play the games that game with the system. Among them being Assassin's Creed III.

Piper's favorite videogame because A) she had played barely any videogames in her life, and B) because she got to play as Connor, a Native American.

That was it.

It was that simple.

Piper had no idea who Desmond Miles was, or Abstergo, or the Templars, Assassins, or anything, and she hadn't cared enough to do any research into the previous games of the franchise, or the games that came after, like Black Flag, Unity, and so on.

Piper just liked playing as a Native American that was an absolute beast with a tomahawk.

Piper had a tomahawk of her own. Well, it was Grandpa Tom's, but now it was hers.

Piper played through the rest of the day and into the night, when her eyes were red and burning. She hit the home button on the controller and sighed when the clock on the TV read 11:14. She'd gone 45 minutes passed when she wanted to go to bed, and she still had to go get her bedding out of the dryer.

A few minutes later, Piper was in her pajamas and under her covers.

"Please," she prayed to one in particular, "let me have a nice, dreamless sleep where I'm not tortured by Jason's corpse."

Piper had tried insomnia before. It didn't work out very well.

With a defeated sigh, Piper reached over to shut off her lamp, bathing her room in darkness.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

She woke up with another scream after another nightmare, and based on the time on her clock, Dad was once again already at work. Switching on her lamp, Piper removed her covers and let out a relived sigh at the distinct lack of pee this time, and then she palmed her face with a groan.

"You are about to be seventeen," she berated herself, "and you're getting excited over keeping your bed dry."

That realization put Piper in a sour mood for the morning. Not as bad as the one yesterday, but still sour.

Then, because she was in a bad mood, the Fates decided to make it even worse by having someone Piper had never seen before sitting in her seat on the bus.

A girl with short dark hair, and a rhinestone nose stud.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Enter Shel.

For those that don't know, Shel is Piper's girlfriend as of the end of Tower of Nero, and I've butchered how stupid that is already. But that's okay, I'm fixing it.

Now, when it comes to Shel, all I've got to work with is a vague description, and literally three lines of dialogue.

The description is above, and Shel's only lines are "Who's this?" referring to Apollo popping in on her and Piper kissing, "Your dad has a boyfriend?" referring to Apollo's appearance at the time, that being his muscles, blonde hair, and toga, and "Uh. Sure.," when Piper excuses herself from her to talk privately with Apollo.

To quote that scene from Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Pt. 2,

Harry, back in Hogwarts, talking about the Horcrux: I realize that's not much to go on…

Seamus: That's bloody nothing to go on.

Since we don't have any other information to go, and probably never will, unfortunately, Shel is a completely open book in terms of characterization. However, based on what we do have, I see Shel as being similar to Thalia.

Her appearance, with her short hair and nose stud, belay a rebellious, punk-like nature. Her first two lines indicate inquisitiveness and snarkyness, and her last line implies a kind of possessive nature, not being happy that Piper was temporarily sidelining her during their romantic moment on the rooftop.

Lots to play with.

Some fun facts because I feel like it:

The Tahlequah bell schedule is not made up. That's the most recent document I found on the school website. Likewise, Piper's classes are also from the website, with the exception of "Business I." Tahlequah does have Business classes, but one that is expressly called Business I. They do have the Cherokee classes, though.

And a driver's ed class. With limited enrollment per semester.

On the Cherokee website, you can, in fact, enroll for free in language classes. I did it myself, and then completed the first two quizzes on the syllabary. Unlimited attempts with the answers given.

Knock yourself out.

In the meantime, Fav, Follow, and Review please!