A/N: I don't own the rights to any of the Percy Jackson series or it's characters. That right gaoes to Rick Riordan. I also don't own the rights to Animorph including it's title.
I am, however, the person who posted 'The Tales of...' series.
This is not a crossover of the Percy Jackson series with the book/tv series Animorph, despite what you might think from the title. I just thought it be a proper name for the ability to turn into animals since that's why the tv/book series 'Animorph' was called that in the first place.
Also, ever since I got my latest Laptop I been stuck using Google Docs and Copy and paste my chapters and for some reason when I save what I paste any formats I made is turn to normal format. I even have to bold the chapter titles, but as I'm sure you noticed sometimes I forget to do that. So anything I normally itallilize like thoughts come out normal text. A/N at the beginning and end of each keep the format changes because I add them without copying and pasting from google doc.
If you haven't read this yet, read:
Animorph Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
Animorph Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Sea of Monsters
Animorph Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Titan's Curse
Animorph Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Battle of the Labyrinth
Animorph Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Stolen Chariot
Animorph Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Sword of Hades
Animorph Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Bronze Dragon
Animorph Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Last Olympian
Animorph Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Staff of Hermes
Animorph Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Singer of Apollo
Leo: My Life Before Foster Homes
I didn't stick around after Piper turned beautiful. Sure, it was amazing and all⎯She's got makeup! It's a miracle!⎯but I had problems to deal with. I ducked out of the amphitheater and ran into the darkness, wondering what I'd gotten myself into.
I stood up in front of a bunch of stronger, braver demigods and volunteered⎯volunteered⎯for a mission what would probably get me killed. But now this is why Tía Callida had tried to kill me so many times before. She somehow knew I was one of the three who will go on the quest to free her.
I hadn't mention seeing Tía Callida, my old babysitter, but as soon as I heard about Jason's vision⎯the lady in the black dress and shawl⎯I knew it was the same woman. Tía Callida was Hera. My evil babysitter was the queen of the gods. Stuff like that could really deep-fry your brain.
I trudged toward the woods and tried not to think about my childhood⎯all the messed-up things that had led to my mother's death. But I couldn't help it.
...
The first time Tía Callida tried to kill me, I must've been about two. Tía Callida was looking after me while my mother was at the machine shop. She wasn't really my aunt, of course⎯just one of the old women in the community, a generic tía who helped watch the kids. She smelled like a honey-baked ham, and always wore a widow's dress with black shawl.
"Let's set you down for a nap," she said. "Let's see if you are my brave little hero, eh?"
I was sleepy. She nestled me into my blankets in a warm mound of red and yellow⎯pillows? The bed was like a cubbyhole in the wall, made of blackened bricks, with a metal slot over my head and a square hole far above, where I could see the stars. I remembered resting comfortably, grabbing at sparks like fireflies. I dozed, and dreamed of a moat made of fire, sailing through the cinders. I imagined myself on board, navigating the sky. Somewhere nearby, Tía Callidasat in her rocking chair⎯creak, creak, creak⎯ and sang a lullaby. Even at two, I knew the difference between English and Spanish, and I remembered being puzzled because Tía Callida was singing in a language that was neither.
Everything was fine until my mother came home. She screamed and raced over to snatch me up, yelling at Tía Callida. "How could you?" But the oil lady had disappeared.
I remember looking over my mother's shoulder at the flames curling around my blankets. Only years later I had realized I'd been sleeping in a blazing fireplace.
The weirdest thing? Tía Callida hadn't been arrested or even banished from our house. She appeared again ever times over the next few years. Once when I was three, she let me play with knives. "You must learn your blades early," she insisted, "if you are to be my hero someday." I managed not to kill myself but I got the feeling Tía Callida wouldn't have cared one way or another.
When I was four, Tía found a rattlesnake for me in a nearby cow pasture. She gave me a stick and encouraged me to poke the animal. "Where is your bravery, little hero? Show me the Fates were right to choose you."I stared down at those amber eyes, hearing the dry shh-shh-shh of the snake's rattle. I couldn't bring myself to poke the snake. It didn't seem fair. Apparently the snake felt the same way about biting a little kid or I now realize knew better than to mess with demigods. I could've sworn it looked at Tía Callida, Are you nuts, lady? Then it disappeared into the tall grass.
The last time she babysat me, I was five. She brought me a pack of crayons and pad of paper. We sat together at the picnic table in the back of the apartment complex, under an old pecan tree. While Tía Callida sang her strange songs, Leo drew a picture of the boat I'd seen in the flames, with colorful sails and rows of oars, a curved stern,m and an awesome figurehead. When I was almost done, about to sign my name the way I'd learned in kindergarten, a wind snatched the picture away. It flew into the sky and disappeared.
I wanted to cry. I'd spent so much time on that picture⎯but Tía Callida just clucked with disappointment.
"It isn't time yet, little hero. Someday, you'll have your quest. You'll find your destiny, and your hard journey will finally make sense. But first you must face many sorrows. I regret that, but heroes cannot be shaped any other way. Now, make me a fire, eh? Warm these old bones."
A few minutes later, my mom came out and shrieked with horror. Tía Callida was gone, but I sat in the middle of a smoking fire. The pads of paper was reduced to ashes. Crayons had melted into a bubbling puddle of multicolored goo, and my hands were ablaze, slowly burning through the picnic table. For years afterward, people in the apartment complex would wonder how someone had seared the impressions of a five-year-old's hands an inch deep into solid wood.
...
Now I was sure that Tía Callida, his psychotic babysitter, had been Hera all along. That made her, what⎯his godly grandmother? My family was even more messed up than I realized.
I wondered if my mother had known the truth. I remembered after tht last visit, my mom took me inside and had a long talk with me, but I only understood some of it.
"She can't come back again." My mom had a beautiful face with kind eyes, and curly dark hair, but she looked older than she was because of hard work. The lines around her eyes were deeply etched. Her hands were callused, She was the first person in our family to graduate from college. She had a degree in mechanical engineering and could design anything, fix anything, build anything.
No one would hire her.. No company would take her seriously, so she ended up in the machine shop that had been in the family for a few generations, trying to make enough money to support the two of us. She always smelled of machine oil, and when she talked with me, she switched from Spanish to English constantly⎯using them like complementary tools. It took me years to realize that not everybody spoke that way. She'd even taught me Morse code as a kind of game, so we could tap messages to each other when we were in different rooms: I love you. You okay? Simple things like that.
"I don't care what Callida says," my mom told me. "I don't care about destiny and the Fates. You're too young for that. You're still my baby."
She took my hands, looking for burn marks, but of course there weren't any. "Leo, listen to me. Fire is a tool, like anything else, but it's more dangerous than most. You don't know your limits. Please, promise me⎯no more fire until you meet your father. Someday, mijo, you will meet him. He'll explain everything."
I had heard that since I could remember. Someday I would meet my dad. My mom wouldn't answer any questions about him. I had never met him, never seen pictures, but she talked like he'd just gone to the store for some milk and he'd be back any minute. I tried to believe her. Someday, everything would make sense.
For the next couple of years, we were happy. I almost forgot about Tía Callida. He still dreamed of the flying boat but the other strange events seemed like a dream too.
It all came apart when I was eight. By then, I was spending every free hour at the shop with my mom. I knew how to use the machines. I could measure and do math better than most adults. I'd learn to think three-dimensionally, solving mechanical problems in my head the way my mom did.
One night, we stayed late because my mom was finishing a drill bit design she hoped to patent. If she could sell the prototype, it might changed our lives. She'd finally get a break.
As she worked, I passed her supplies and told her corny jokes, trying to keep her spirits up. I loved it when I could make her laugh. She told me I get my sense of humor from my great-grandfather, who use to tell corny jokes and make people laugh too and yet died sad for reasons my mother never explained. She then change topics and say, "Your father would be proud of you, mijo, You'll meet him soon, I'm sure."
Mom's workspace was at the very back of the shop. It was kind of creepy at night, because we were the only ones here. Every sound echoed through the dark warehouse, but I didn't mind as long as I was with my mom. If I did wander the shop, we could always keep in touch with Morse code taps. Whenever we were ready to leave, we had to walk through the break room, and out to the parking lot, locking the doors behind us.
That night after finishing up, we'd just gotten to the break room when my mom realized she didn't have her keys.
"That's funny." She frowned. "I know I had them. Wait here, mijo. I'll only be a minute."
She gave me one more smile⎯the last one I'd ever get⎯and she went back into the warehouse.
She'd only been gone a few heartbeats when the interior door slammed shut. Then the exterior door locked itself.
"Mom?" My heart pounded. Something heavy crashed inside the warehouse. I ran to the door, but no matter how hard I pulled or kicked, it wouldn't open. "Mom!" Frantically, I tapped a message on the wall: You okay!
"She can't hear you," a voice said.
I turned and found myself facing a strange woman. At first I thought it was Tía Callida. She was wrapped in black robes, with a veil covering her face.
"Tía?"
The woman chuckled, a slow gentle sound, as if she were half asleep. "I am not your guardian. Merely a family resemblance."
"What⎯what do you want? Where's my mom?"
"Ah... loyal to your mother. How nice. But you see, I have children too... and I understand you will fight them someday. When they try to wake me, you will prevent them. I cannot allow that."
"I don't know you. I don't want to fight anybody."
She muttered like a sleepwalker in a trance, "A wise choice."
With a chill, I realized the woman was, in fact, asleep. Behind the veil, her eyes were closed. But even stranger: her clothes were not made of cloth. They were made of earth⎯dry black dirt, churning and shifting around her. Her pale, sleeping face was barely visible behind a curtain of dust, and I had the horrible sense that she had just risen from the grave. If the woman was asleep, I wanted her to stay that way. I knew that fully awake, she would be even more terrible.
I cannot destroy you yet," the woman murmured. "The Fates will not allow it and my child has yet to risen to oppose them. But they do not protect your mother, and they cannot stop me from breaking your spirit. Remember this night, little hero, when they ask you to oppose me."
"Leave my mother alone!" Fear rose in my throat as the woman shuffled forward. She moved more like an avalanche than a person, a dark wall of earth shifting toward me.
"How will you stop me?" she whispered.
She walked straight through a table, the particles of her body reassembling on the other side.
She loomed over me, and I knew she would pass right through me, too. I was the only thing between her and my mother.
My hands caught fire.
A sleepy smile spread across the woman's face, as if she'd already won. I screamed with desperation. My vision turned red. Flames washed over the earthen woman, the walls, the locked doors. And I lost consciousness.
When I woke, I was in an ambulance.
The paramedic tried to be kind. She told me the warehouse had burned down. My mother hadn't made it out. The paramedic said she was sorry, but I felt hollow. I'd lost control, just like my mother had warned. Her death was my fault.
Soon the police came to get me, and they weren't so nice. The fire had started in the break room, they said, right where I was standing. I survived by some miracle, but what kind of child locked the doors of my mother's workplace, knowing she was inside, and started the fire?
Later, my neighbors at the apartment complex told the police what a strange boy I was. They talked about the burned handprints on the picnic table. They'd always known something was wrong with Esperanza Valdez's son.
My relatives wouldn't take me in. My Aunt Rosa called me a diablo and shouted at the social workers to take me away. So I went to my first foster home. A few days later, I ran away. Some foster homes lasted longer than others. I would joke around, make a few friends, pretend that nothing bothered me, but I always ended up running sooner or later. It was the only thing that made the pain better⎯feeling like I was moving, getting farther and farther away from the ashes of that machine shop.
I'd promised myself I would never play with fire again. I hadn't thought about Tía Callida, or the sleeping woman in earthen robes, for a long time.
...
I was almost to the woods when I imagined Tía Callida's voice: It wasn't your fault, little hero. Our enemy wakes. It's time to stop running.
"Hera," I muttered, "you're not even here, are you? You're in a cage somewhere."
There was no answer, but I already knew my answer. I was certain now that she was preparing me to free her from imprisonment. Jason's prophecy warned us to beware the earth, and I knew it had something to do with that sleeping woman in the shop, wrapped in robes of shifting dirt.
You'll find your destiny, Tía Callida had promised, and your hard journey will finally make sense.
I might find out what that flying boat in my dreams meant. I might meet my father, or even get to avenge my mother's death.
But first thing first. I'd promised Jason a flying ride.
Not the boat from my dreams⎯not yet. There wasn't time to build something that complicated. I need a quicker solution. I needed a dragon.
I hesitated at the edge of the woods, peering into absolute blackness. Owls hooted, and something far away hissed like a chorus of snakes.
I remembered what Jeffrey had told me: No one should go in the woods alone, definitely not unarmed. I had nothing⎯no sword, no flashlight, no help.
I glanced back at the lights of the cabins. I could turn around now and tell everyone I'd been joking. Psych! Nyssa could go on the quest instead. I could stay at camp and learn to be part of the Hephaestus cabin.
Or maybe I can get Jeffrey or one of the other Cyclops' help. That's what my siblings were planning in order to capture the dragon.
They cannot stop me from breaking your spirit, the sleeping woman had said. Remember this night, little hero, when they ask you to oppose me.
"Believe me, lady," I muttered, "I remember. And whoever you are, I'm gonna face=plant you hard, Leo-style.
I took a deep breath and plunged into the forest.
