Firstly, I'd like to apologize for the delayed upload of chapter 42. I edited and uploaded it on the 3rd, but didn't realize I hadn't published it until today, hence why this note isn't in the last chapter

We spent the rest of the evening outside at a campfire. The wood came from thin branches produced by the local logging industry. They were considered a waste product and the companies would have to pay someone to dispose of them, so giving them away to the homeless here actually saved them some money and we had firewood, so everyone won. The fire was far from the one we had at camp half blood, but the atmosphere was still great. We sang songs and told each other stories. Ironically, Annabeth and I were the ones claiming to have boring lives and telling made up stories about the children of the Greek gods. When it got late and everyone went to bed, Jimmy showed us an empty tent. "Whatever you two do now, just remember that you're in a tent, which is not sound proof, so don't do any, uh, loud couple things." "We weren't planning to" Annabeth said, turning her hand to show Jimmy her black ring. Only now did I notice that he had one too. He left the tent and closed the door behind himself.

Annabeth waited until he was gone before saying what she had probably been wanting to say for hours. "I feel like Ellie might be a demigod" "Could be. The whole get-her-pregnant-then-leave thing her father did sounds quite godly to me. But that's not enough evidence, what else do we have? Also, she has an appropriate amount of trauma" "She didn't even seem that traumatized to me" "Maybe she's good at hiding it, or maybe it all happened way too early in her life to be traumatic. Wasn't she like half a year old when her mom died? That would be even earlier than my very first encounter with Gabe" "Makes sense. If only we had a satyr here. He'd be able to smell if she's a demigod" "Unless it's Underground. But to be fair, if Grover had smelled the chimera, I wouldn't have received the pearls for returning from the underworld." "Monsters can also smell us. If small Bob was here, he'd know. We could also test whether she knows ancient Greek. That's how Chiron found out Jason was roman. He asked something in Latin and Jason didn't even notice." "That's sounds like a great thing to do tomorrow. Good night Annabeth" "Good night Percy" I gave her one last kiss before falling asleep. It had been a hard day, traveling through the country on a less than ideal route at multiple times the speed of sound had been very draining, especially since it had been fresh water.

My dream started out rather boring, with me walking through the city slaying monsters. I didn't know what city it was or why there were so many monsters, but dreams have that annoying tendency to make you not question things. After a few minutes of this, the front door of a house at the side of the road opened and out of it came Annabeth. "Hey Percy, how's it going?" she asked. "I'm a bit busy at the moment" I swung riptide, dissolving the last monster into gold dust. "Nothing much, just a regular day. Killing monsters and whatnot" Annabeth chuckled and I was almost certain I had just said something stupid. "I know Percy, a perfectly normal day, with a perfectly normal amount of fingers on your hands" believe it or not, but this wasn't even remotely the weirdest thing she had said to me in our lives, even in the past few weeks. I looked at my hands and counted ten fingers, which would have been normal if those fingers had been equally divided among my hands. In this case, my left hand had four fingers while my right had the remaining six. That was definitely a bit strange. "Let me guess, I'm dreaming" "Would you look at that, seaweed brain's figured it out. To be fair, I think I have a little more practice in noticing dreams. Anyways, I just realized I'm dreaming, and since being alone is boring, I decided to go find your dream" "When you say that being alone is boring, do you actually mean boring, or do you mean unbearable due to severe abandonment issues?" "Hey, don't make fun of my Zeused up mental state. Yours isn't much better" "Anyways, we got the power now. Whatcha wanna do? Overthrow some heavely buttholes?" "How about you a date at the bottom of the ocean?" Annabeth suggested. "Sure, why not?" I focused on the door Annabeth had come through and imagined it led to said place. "Follow me" I said before walking through it.

We arrived in a room made from a shimmering blue stone. The floor was sand, with some seashells spread across it. In the middle was an empty table with two chairs, made from olive wood. "What good is a date without something to eat?" I said before making a plate of spaghetti appear. "You'll have to pick out your own food" "Sure, but it's going to take a while." Annabeth began to focus, which doesn't happen all too often. Well, it probably happens all the time, but it's rarely long enough for me to notice. "I know this is like the biggest stereotype, but…" A plate filled with garlic bread appeared, next to it a small cake. "Now, you're probably wondering what took me this long" I was, in fact, not wondering that, but decided not to tell Annabeth, since she'd tell me anyways. She took a fine piece of string from gods know where and cut the cake in half, revealing a demi flag on the inside. "The tip isn't in the middle of the purple stripe" I teased her. She focused again and the black triangle moved upward a few millimeters. "Here, it's centered now. Also, you know how hard it is to get the demi flag right."

We began to eat. Due to dream logic, this didn't hinder our ability to talk at all. "So, who do think Ellie's dad is" "Well, he could just be some random allo mortal" She emphasized the word allo like it was an insult. "Seriously Annabeth, you have to stop hating on what is considered to be the norm. I have a feeling that that's gonna make you very unpopular" "It's not my problem that the so-called norm is so weird. And don't come with that argument that allosexuality is an evolutionary advantage, being demi is perfectly sufficient to reproduce enough." "When have I ever used arguments that invalidate asexuality? Also, that's not the topic right now." Annabeth took the first bite of her cake. "Oh, this stuff tastes good. Anyways, her dad might just be some al- some mortal guy. Or maybe a god. How about this: We write a text along the lines of 'you're a demigod and you should go to CHB', but we write it in ancient Greek. We then tell her parents to give the text to her if something happens to her that cannot be explained, like a monster attack. If she's really a demigod, she'll be able to read it. And if not, it'll be yet another mystery." "Sounds like a great plan." We sat in silence until we had finished our food, which was like ten seconds later.

"So, what do we do next?" Annabeth asked. "I don't know a whole lot about dating, my only experience is with you, but I think this is the part where things move to the bedroom" "Well, the thing is, the bedroom activity you're probably thinking of is usually very exciting and has a high chance of waking you up, so how about no." "Sure, how about no"

"So, what mentally harmless thing do we do next?" Annabeth repeated her question." "Someone once said that if you're in some country's restaurant, that doesn't count as visiting the country, and I think the same thing applies to the bottom of the ocean, so-" "I'm pretty sure that it's airport, not restaurant" "and the best way to not be in a building is to destroy it. Don't forget to be able to breathe underwater" "Percy, what are you-" Before she could finished her sentence, the pressure of the water around us decided to exist (hey, it's dream logic) and the walls collapsed. As they were falling, they dissolved into the water. Once the dust had cleared, we saw a whole lot of nothing. The ocean was just too deep for sunlight to reach us. Not wanting to repeat the double flashback incident in the lake, I created a light source about 100 meters above us. Now we could see a little bit better.

We were on a small circle of sand surrounded by corals. "Why don't we get a better view of the area?" Annabeth suggested before swimming up. I followed just behind her. Around us was a massive coral reef with every color of the rainbow and probably also some that weren't on the rainbow. Annabeth probably knows exactly what the difference is, something about monochromatic colors and those that aren't monochromatic. Here's a bit of advice: don't learn Greek, at least not to the point where you barely notice it's a different language, otherwise professional language will sound really stupid. For example, monochromatic color literally means single color color. And chromosome means colored thingy. Anyways, many corals in many colors. "When you said bottom of the ocean date, is this what you meant?" "This by far exceeds my expectations, but yes" I had a feeling that Annabeth really wanted to complain about how corals didn't grow this deep, but couldn't because she was way too impressed. I might be bad at some things, but don't you dare underestimate my ability to give Annabeth a good time, or, in the case of the Arachne's-cave-situation, a slightly less terrible time. "Hey Annabeth, did you know that this is a special kind of coral? During its slow growth, it collects carbon and collects it in the form of gemstones." "You just made that up, didn't you" "If I made it up, explain this" I dived down to a red coral. Once I touched it, it released a ruby and set off a chain reaction which made the other corals do the same. "technically, this entire world is made up by you, so I'm not wrong" "Technically, yes" Annabeth had this ability to always come out on top whenever we disagreed on something.

We continued to do whatever romantic things you could do at the bottom of the ocean. "You know, this is kind of boring" Annabeth suddenly said. "I think I can fix that, just wait" I didn't know what the dream would create next, I only focused on dangerous. Suddenly, the floor began to rumble. "What is that?" Annabeth asked. "I'm not sure, but it's most definitely not boring." I had a feeling that Annabeth didn't like my means of dealing with boredom. Said means now caused the sand between the corals to bulge upwards as a cone shaped fleshy thing emerged. It grew bigger and bigger, until it reached about seven meters in diameter. Judging by the large circles on the surface, the thing emerging here was probably the arm of a massive octopus. The arm continued rising from the sand until it towered more than 100 meters above us. "Maybe we should retreat to our ship" Annabeth suggested. "What ship?" "This ship" she pointed behind us where a twenty meter long and about half as wide and tall submarine was waiting for us. We entered through an opening in the bottom and made our way to the front. Before us, a hill began swelling, like a 100 meter long balloon inflating below the sand. After a few minutes, the balloon began to deflate which resulted in two things: 1) water shooting out from the sand and hitting our submarine with the power of a small bomb and 2) an octopus head about 100 meters in diameter rising from the sand. It swam past us and its eye filled the entire front window. But that wasn't even the weirdest part. That was the fact that its eye looked just like a human's eye. "Are you still bored?" I asked Annabeth. "No, not really. So, what do we do with this thing now?" 'This thing' wrapped its tentacles around our submarine and dragged us towards its mouth. "Fire" I called out. "But we don't have weapons on this submarine." "well, we didn't have a submarine at all five minutes ago, so summoning weapons out of thin air shouldn't be too hard" "Right, this is a dream, I forgot." I didn't get to ask how one could forget that they were dreaming as a big red button appeared on the control panel before us. I pushed it.

Just as we were about to become octopus food, four torpedoes separated from our submarine and hit the octopus in its massive face, causing it to let go of us and flee. "Wow Percy, that was… intense. I totally appreciate you not wanting me to be bored, but maybe next time go a bit smaller. Or maybe a whole lot smaller. A board game would have done" "But if we did that, you'd win no matter the game. Except maybe poker." "You know poker?" "Of course, I had an excellent teacher. Well, at least he's excellent at poker, at teaching not so much." "Are you talking about…" "Smelly Gabe? Yes." "And he taught you poker?" "Yes. If I recall correctly, he was doing one of his favorite things: shouting at me. Specifically, he told me I was useless and didn't even know poker and I shouted back 'then teach me' And even he understood that if he didn't like something and he was best suited to change that out of everyone he knew, that maybe he should do so. And so, he decided to teach me how to play poker. I didn't enjoy it and he got to brag about his skills, both things that he loved and that motivated him to continue. He got bored of it after about two weeks, but I did learn enough to beat most people. No, you are not most people"

"Why did I expect you to say that?" "One question, slightly off topic: if this is a dream, how does that play out in relation to your alters? Do they each have their own dreams?" "Honestly, I don't really know. That's has been becoming worryingly common ever since Piper diagnosed me." "Speaking of Piper, I've heard you prefer her school over mine." "I'm not. I'm preferring the school I was already going to last year, which happens to be the one Piper goes to, over an I-have-ADHD-and-missed-eight-months-of-school school, which happens to be yours. But I just remembered something else-ish. You'll have to visit my school sometime soon to… What was the punishment for people hitting on me again?" "I don't think I've ever had to come up with one, but if you're saying that people did that I will of course come up with one." "Maybe just showing up at the school will be enough. There were a bunch of people who just wouldn't believe that I had a boyfriend. If you could convince them of your existence, maybe that will be enough to stop them from hitting on me. Honestly, that whole thing was really annoying." "Got it. I'll show up at your school, convince everyone that you're taken, and maybe hand out some punishments."

So, another dream scene or, as I like to call it, a scene steering dangerously close to crackfic territory. No, that doesn't mean I was actually on crack or any other drug while writing this. The only influence I was under was being a bit tired (I think, but I'm not sure since it's been ages since I wrote this). See you next chapter.