It was dark, she'd have to say about midnight, maybe later. Despite the light coming from the hotel's lobby and the street lamps, the darkness was still oppressive. Alexa's eyes weren't taking in the sights very well, in fact they strained to see more than a few feet ahead of her.

Her joints felt stiff and sore, making her walk down the sidewalk little more than a shuffle. She walked a block away from her starting point, slowly taking a step from the curb towards the park. She could already see her favorite pigeon, gray with a breast the color of spilled wine and a devilishly intelligent stare. It cooed insistently and she quickened her step.

The large flat grill of a car roared towards her out of the dark, it's headlights glowing like the eyes of a great monster! She stumbled back as the horn blared in her ears. She tensed, bracing for impact...and then...

Alexa awoke with a start, bumping her head on the low ceiling of her bunk with a soft "Ow!"

She rubbed the now all too familiar spot where her head had impacted, grimacing slightly.

"You okay Lex?" Sapphire asked groggily, sticking her head out from her own bunk.

"Yeah….sooner or later that screw'll loosen and I'll finally get a good night's sleep." Alexa half-joked. She had been waking up like this for the better part of a week now. Always the same nightmare, the walk, the pigeon, and the car. There had to be a deeper meaning that she wasn't seeing…

She sighed and shook her head, and got dressed, picking up her camp necklace last of all. Two beads hung there, and the third, she knew, was somewhere in this cabin.

Three years she had been at Camp Half-blood. In that time she had fought with sword and shield, sung goofy campfire songs, played capture the flag and just learned to love this place. The dreams… were weird. She had had the unusual dream or two in her time here, but none quite so consistent as these recent nightmares.

She headed out the cabin's front door and stared out at the camp, glancing up at the big house. The paint had been redone last year, after an incident involving paintballs and siege weaponry. After nearly 11 months she had finally gotten used to it's new blue shade, but she still missed the red that she had first been introduced to.

Alexa yawned, standing outside and waiting for the rest of Cabin 9 to go to breakfast.

"Hey Spits." Jazz smiled, sliding in next to her.

"Hey Jazz." Alexa muttered sleepily. Jazz took notice and frowned.

"Happened again?" She asked

"Same dream." Alexa confirmed. "Can barely walk, there's a pigeon, hit by a car."

"Morpheus must have it in for you" Jazz chuckled.

"Maybe… but I dunno what I did to tick him off" Alexa groaned, her hand going up to the spot she had struck on her forehead. Jazz shrugged in response and began to head to the dining pavilion, joining Cabin 9's procession as she did.

"Anything fun on the activity sheet to take your mind off it?" She asked.

"... swimming." Alexa grunted. She had been excused from swimming and canoeing lessons since last year when it became obvious that Alexa couldn't go out in water higher than her hip without serious risk of drowning. Every time she went out into the water her limbs would freeze up, she'd feel like she had a body wide brain freeze, and she'd sink like a stone. Since then anytime Otto scheduled their cabin for swim practice it was as good as giving Alexa a free day.

The campers made their way to the dining pavilion, Jazz splitting off to join her own siblings. As per usual, Alexa started to perk right up after some food, blueberry pancakes with some home made syrup always made her feel better, despite the ethical questions about where the syrup came from. How dryads made syrup was too confusing for Alexa to think about too hard.

After breakfast she and the rest of Hephaestus' cabin went back to their bunks, her siblings to grab their swimsuits, and she to grab her latest book and sunchair.

The cabin headed out to the lake and Alexa set up her chair on the pier and started to read. The book was turning out pretty interesting. It was written in ancient Greek, and it was all about the great scientific minds of the past few centuries, written by famed mytho-historian and mytho-biologist, Charles Riley. The man was mortal, but he was so deeply tied to their world that the point was moot. He wrote about the mythological in a way that people, mortal and not, loved. To mortals the guide books were just a fascinating bit of fiction, to demigods they were illustrated guides to monsters, history, and anything that was touched by Olympus or monsters. If anyone had the power to discover it, he did.

Athena's Cabin had a whole shelf dedicated just to his books…one girl had a signed poster, and most of them had adopted the nickname "Uncle Chuck" when discussing him. It was really weird.

It turned out, a healthy amount of inventors and scientists the world had known were demigods. There was a pretty reasonable split between Athena and Hephaestus, though one surprise was that George Washington Carver, the man supposedly responsible for Peanut Butter, was a son of Dionysus.

She had been reading for about 20 minutes when she heard something; a soft coo coo noise. Alexa glanced up from her book. No one was around...the closest one was Otto leading the backstroke.

Alexa turned back to her book, but before she had gotten through more than two words, there it was again!

"Coo...coo…" This time it was accompanied by the soft flutter of wings. Alexa looked up and froze in her chair. There, resting on one of the pier's supports was a pigeon.

Not just any pigeon, but the same one she had been dreaming about for the past week! Smokey gray, with a breast like spilled wine, and an eye the color of bronze and just as bright. Alexa stared at the bird, and it stared right back, it's head turned so it could focus one bronze colored eye on her.

Just when she thought the staring contest would go on forever, the pigeon leaped at her! She yelped and fell back in her chair, her book falling to the dock. The bird fell upon it and began kicking at the pages with it's little feet.

"Hey! Don't do that!" Alexa cried stumbling to her own feet. "They'll kill me!"

The pigeon clicked it's beak as she brought her hand close and continued to flip through the book. Finally it stopped on a particular page, about three quarters of the way through. Alexa couldn't see the text on one page, since that was what the bird was standing on, but she could see what was on the unobstructed page; the picture was slightly grainy and black and white. It was a wide shot of a long low one story building with a tower like something from a sci-fi movie standing behind it, all shiny metal lattice work with a big dome on top.

The pigeon cooed again, looking up at Alexa, then driving it's beak downward, pecking at the picture of the building. It did this twice more before it flew off, leaving Alexa behind.

Alexa frowned after it...the dreams and now the bird... something wanted her to do... something. She picked up the book and read the caption under the picture.

"Wardenclyffe Transmission Tower. 1901-1902." Why would a bird be so concerned with some fancy radio tower? She flipped to the start of the chapter to find the face of the inventor who had constructed the hulking steel monolith. He was a pale man in a wool suit, turned slightly towards the camera. His dark hair was neatly parted, and an equally dark and trimmed mustache decorated his upper lip. The chapter's title proudly declared "Lightning Maker: Nikola Tesla, 1856 to 1943."

It clicked then, Tesla was a bit of a legend in Hephaestus cabin, both one of their greatest and most embarrassing siblings. An inventor and child of the forge god who had dabbled a bit too much and had lost his mind as a result. Near the end of his life, he had been struck by a New York taxi, and claimed he was receiving radio transmissions from Mars, had built a death ray, and had fallen in love...with a pigeon.

Alexa stared at the bird, with a thousand questions buzzing around her skull ranging from "How long do pigeons live?" to "What would the kids look like? Would they be little harpies that ate bird seed?" Finally something else settled in her head. She had to tell Chiron!

She got up from her chair and ran from the dock as fast as her legs could carry her. She found the centaur teaching his archery class, walking behind his students and adjusting grips or stances with soft presses of his fingers. When he saw Alexa running he paused.

"Alexa, my dear. What's wrong? You look pale." He said as Alexa skidded to a stop. Alexa took a second to catch her breath before launching into what she had figured out. Chiron didn't interrupt, content to listen to her describe her dream and what had happened on the docks.

"And then the bird flew away! I think it wants me to go to Wardenclyffe!" She finished breathlessly.

Chiron took some time to consider before replying.

"It...does sound like something important." He conceded. "Visions and an animal sign shouldn't be ignored…"

He pawed the ground with one hoof, frowning as he thought it over.

"Normally I wouldn't let you do this alone, I'd call for a quest and send you out with someone...but given its location...I think a quest is unnecessary. We'll call this a day trip." Alexa's face fell slightly.

"Aww...I wanted to set a record for fastest quest completion." She huffed. Chiron smiled down at her sadly.

"Quests are important things, my dear. It's nearly impossible to do them right and quickly." He said, giving her a pat on the shoulder. He turned and pointed at one of the Apollo campers "Garth, I'm going to need to step away for a few minutes, keep these students going until then. I expect to see a better grouping when I get back."

About an hour later, Alexa was hopping out of the camp van in front of a church in Shoreham. A satyr sat in the driver's seat, quietly munching on a bran muffin, paper and all.

She was to start her search in the building alone and he was supposed to wait there for 2 hours. If she wasn't back by then the camp would be contacted and then a rescue mission would be undertaken.

"Just be careful okay?" Said the satyr as Alexa turned and headed down the street.

The world outside camp felt so...alien to Alexa. No rock wall, no cabins, no pegasi, no nymphs, just mortals, cars, people going about their daily lives without a care. It all seemed different now, after so long at camp. Even at Melody's house, there were hints of what was really out there, but here? It was just not the same.

Alexa tried to remember how to act normal as she headed down the village's quiet street to the only major landmark. The tower had been taken down, but beside that, the building was exactly as it looked in the picture, brown and red brick and wide. There were some people hanging around, with a woman leading the pack with the unmistakable tour group aura radiating off them. They were easy enough to avoid, the group only had 6 people and they were already headed inside.

"Coo coo." Alexa spun, her eyes searching for the bird. It took a few seconds to find it, but she eventually spotted it, sitting in a tree near the edge of the property. It looked down at her imperiously, then it flew off. It only flew a yard or so before landing, glancing over its shoulder. Alexa followed, the bird taking her around the building until the got to a concert section at the back where she was sure the transmission tower had once been.

The bird flew several more feet from the concrete block and landed. It stared at her for several seconds before dipping it's beak down as if it were pecking seed from the dirt.

Clink...clink…

Alexa stepped closer, the bird moved back from the spot it had been pecking and Alexa squatted to get a look. There, hidden in the grass and dirt, was a bolt unlike any Alexa had ever seen before; it was a nine sided polygon, and tucked inside that was a hexagon with little pressure latched on each corner, and within that was a stylized letter T. Frowning, Alexa touched the bolt. It was old, maybe iron, and covered in rust.

She pulled the omni-wrench out of her pocket. She had never used it on a bolt like this, but her father had said it worked on any fastener known to man. She began pulling out different tools, a hammer, several different types of socket wrench, until she found what she was looking for. It grew to the proper size several notches in both the hexagon and the T showing her where it'd connect with the bolt.

The thing didn't want to move at first, but after breaking through the first layer of rust it turned easily. She removed the bolt and grabbed hold of what the bolt had been fastened to and pulled.

A circular section of grass lifted with her hand. Grass and dirt clung to a metal disc, like a manhole cover, Alexa could see the roots and bugs digging through the dirt without a care for what she had lifted. Part of her knew the grass probably wasn't supposed to act this way, but she was distracted by the bird. The pigeon flew past her down the hole and out of sight.

"Hey! Wait up!" She calls. She climbs down a set of metal rungs set into the side of the narrow opening, pulling the manhole cover over her as she descends. Lightbulbs clicked on over her head as she hit the floor of a short tunnel, the walls and ceiling all dirt reinforced with steel I beams. It felt like a mineshaft.

She hurried down the shaft, after the bird, until she reached the door, also steel, with one big rotating latch like one you'd see in a ship. She grabbed it and pulled the door open to find...a workshop.

Several compact generators were cluttered on old wooden tables, a bent sword was set in one corner, a contraption that looked like an old printing press was pressed against a wall, and up on a wall behind one of the tables was a set of pictures. One showed an old man with a huge mustache and bushy eyebrows quizzically holding a light bulb. Another showed a group of three, one girl I a long dress holding a parasol in one hand and a knife in the other, on the left a larger boy dressed like the stereotypical New York news boy with a flannel shirt, brown pants and the hat to go complete the look, and on the right a taller thinner boy dressed in a white button up, suspenders, and black pants. She immediately recognized him as a young Tesla. The third and final picture was of an older Tesla, mid to late 50s, standing next to a grinning boy of about 14.

"Coo…" The bird cooed forlornly. Alexa turned to the final work table where the pigeon perched. The pigeon dipped it's head down and lightly pecked at a faded note, attached to an old fashioned leather journal, and a sword. The sword was what caught her attention first; it's blade was longer than average, but thinner, with a subtle almost imperceptible curve in the middle, like it was trying to imitate both a fencing saber and a Xiphos. The grip was wrapped in leather, the blade was celestial bronze. She couldn't help but wonder what it would feel like in her hand.

She reached for the grip, hesitated, then thought better of it. Instead she picked up the note. It was hard for her to read, the writer preferred a form of densely packed cursive, but eventually she worked out it's meaning.

"To whom it may concern,

I leave to you my notes and the sword before you, in the hope that you find use of an old fool's processions. As I near the end of my time here, I find myself living more so I'm the past than the present, now that my future seems so limited. So much left to do, and yet Thanatos will not wait. I entered this world with nothing and yet the gods see fit to strip me of further; Esther and Paul have both long since found their place in the underworld, my life's work has been laid to ruin by a thief and a scoundrel. My brother, little Jeffery, is lost to the sea, and the whole of the world sees my brilliance as madness. The gods' curse of Cassandra lays heavy upon me but I am determined to see some good continue after I pass. I am leaving Kerauno in the care of Camilla, my feathered friend. She will wait as long as it takes and listen to all rumors before she passes on my inheritance. If it is true, dear demigod, and you do possess the blood of mountains as my brother did, please find in me a teacher and a friend.

Yours sincerely,

Nikola Tesla, December 20 1942"

Alexa blinked at the paper in her hand, then she looked back at the pigeon.

"Camilla?" The bird puffed up it's chest and Alexa smiled. "You did good...you wouldn't happen to know why he called the sword Lightning Bolt, would you?"

As Alexa took hold of the grip she got her answer, a bolt of electricity shot from the sword's tip, arced through the air, and fried one of the generators before Alexa got it under control.

"Oh...that's why…"

"Coo" the pigeon remarked cooly.

Alexa hurried back to the van, the tunnel resealed behind her and Lightning Bolt disappeared the moment she needed it to, folding into a charm bracelet, similar to Jazz's own. The only charm looking similar to a cartoon bolt of lightning.

"Well… great minds…" Alexa chuckled, climbing back into the van, eager to get reading.