A/N: As always, thanks to jarhardar290, DrakonOwl21195, Calefe, stormystorm123ziggy, ConnorPerson (that was borrowed from the Amanda Show, heard about it from raveclawjedi's 150 things I'm not allowed to do in the Underworld), thedauntlessamity, Guest, Wonderlandian Me, and Vexy Minion.
The following is an idea I had for a long time, but wasn't sure how to implement it. But, here goes.
For this task, the contestants will be visiting the Roman dining halls. The only twist is that while they will be given plates, all the food that they are to get must be from other people's plates. They have a time limit of fifteen minutes.
At the end of the game, they will have to weigh whatever they have gotten. The one with the least weight in pilfered food loses. Also, they must not get caught, otherwise that as well is an automatic loss.
Leo looked at the people buzzing around him and the empty plate he was holding. Well, it was now or never.
Unfortunately, he spent five minutes standing around and staring, not sure who to go to.
"Come on Leo," Frank said. "Don't worry too much that the Roman punishment for stealing is to be crucified."
"Then again, you know what the Hermes cabin says," Percy said. "'Food tastes better when it is stolen,' though they usually say that right after you discover the food they're selling is stolen."
"The Hermes cabin also says that food tastes better when it is near its expiry date," Jason pointed out. "Though strangely, that's usually when the food they sell is near the expiry date."
At long last, an opportunity seemed to present itself to Leo. A legionnaire was going for some croutons, so Leo slowly moved his hand towards a brownie he was carrying in his plate.
As Leo was about to touch it, the legionnaire said, without looking at him, "Touch one of my brownies and your hand comes off."
Leo slowly withdrew his hand.
He did manage to get lucky though, and swiped a can of Coke from someone. That person looked around when they realized that it was gone, but Leo was far away by then.
Next, Leo had an eye on a rather weighty steak that someone was taking. Leo was looking for an opening for a long time, when the girl suddenly turned around and said, "You've been staring at me for the past five minutes. Is there something you want?"
"Ohh! Busted!" the others all said at once.
"Yes, there is something that I want," Leo said. "I need mission report, December 16, 1991."
"What?" the girl asked.
"Leo, that's not how you ask a girl that," Frank said. "You have to first say longing, rusted, furnace, daybreak, seventeen-"
"Yes, we get it Frank," Percy said.
"Hey look everyone, there's Zeus!" Leo shouted, quickly changing tactics and pointed somewhere. While everyone was distracted, he managed to get as much food as possible from their plates.
He kept looking for another opening, but by then his time had run out.
Result: Leo managed to get 1.45 pounds of food.
Next up was Percy. Percy had learned from Leo that he couldn't just stand around waiting and needed to not look at other people's plates for a long time.
As such, while stealth was not Percy's main suit, using water was. As such, whenever a poor, unsuspecting soul walked near the water fountain, a burst of water suddenly entered their eyes. While they were drying themselves out and couldn't see, they were usually too busy to notice that someone had taken something from their trays.
"Hey that's cheating!" Leo complained. He turned to the others. "That's cheating, though, right?"
"I don't think so," Jason said. "You're just mad it is kind of obvious that you're losing."
While Percy was careful enough to not take too much from a single tray at a time, it became all too apparent to various people that their trays were strangely empty of a carton of juice or a cookie.
As such, several of them had now realized (or at least suspected) that Percy had taken these food items. To hide from them, Percy had to leave his criminal headquarters near the water fountain and take refuge away from prying eyes.
"It looks like you're cover's blown, Percy," Jason said. "What're you gonna do now?"
Percy took a good look at his plate. It was obvious by now that he wasn't going to lose, so he considered just ending it right then and there. Plus, there was the fact that if he got caught, he would have lost.
But, he did realize he was on a comedy show, and as such, being funny was more important than making sense. As such, he decided to risk it just so that he could rub it all in Leo's face.
Percy tried several tactics to get people to willingly part with the food they had on their trays. One of his involved literally just going up to people and saying, "Hey, that looks good. Mind if I take some?"
As you can imagine, this was not something that normal people every said to each other or something normal to do, and while most people just said 'no' straight away, a few of them seemed to think 'why not' and gave Percy something.
"He's not even stealing stuff anymore," Leo said.
"The rules don't say we have to steal, Leo," Jason said. "They just say that the food has to come from other people's plates!"
One of these new demigods by the name of Bryan was so polite that he decided to say, "Sure, why not? You can take as much as you want, mister."
Clearly, Bryan wasn't like some other rude or selfish demigods. No, Bryan thought that if a weird guy wearing a t-shirt that said 'Keep Calm and Look for Nemo', well, he might as well hand it to him.
What Bryan wasn't expecting was for Percy to take his entire tray and dump it on his own.
"Look at that kid's face!" Leo said. The others were too busy guffawing to say anything.
Percy later decided to try and top this off by saying that he was collecting food for the homeless, but the end result of this was that his time ran out before he could.
Result: Percy managed to collect 9.56 pounds of food.
Next up was Jason.
Jason kept trying to think of things to say, and the problem was that he couldn't copy what Percy had done because obviously people would notice if two people had come in successfully and said almost the very exact same things.
Now, a rather large problem with the dining halls of both Camp Jupiter and Camp Half-Blood was that as the kids were free to choose whatever foods they wanted, they were all carrying pizzas, sandwiches, cokes, and other things without a brussel sprout in sight.
One person in particular who caught Jason's eye was a kid who was carrying a plate full of M&Ms.
"Don't you think that's a little too much M&Ms for one person?" Jason asked.
"Yeah," the kid shrugged. "I got all of 'em. My favorites."
Jason realized that meant that the snooty kid wasn't going to care, and so therefore he would have to rely on some other strategy. Thankfully, he was able to make up one on the spot pretty fast.
"You see, I need some M&Ms for training," Jason said.
"What?" Percy asked.
"What?" the guy asked.
"Well see, what I do is that I, uh, take two M&Ms in my fingers and I squeeze them against each other until one of them breaks. Then… well, the broken one is eaten and the other one is the champion. I keep doing this over and over until I've eaten all the M&Ms and only one of them remains. I name this one to be the 'champion', and um, I send it to the M&Ms headquarters with a note that says: 'This M&M was the strongest. Please use it for breeding purposes.'" Jason said.
The kid had to put his tray down so he didn't drop it while laughing.
At the very same time, Jason's ears nearly got damaged as only blank laughter came into the ears.
"Okay, that was really funny man, but you're still not going to get any of my M&Ms," the kid said and walked off finally.
With this amazing plan out of the picture, Jason was now forced to instead go the 'stealing-while-no-one-looks' route of approaching this problem and so was making some success. However, he couldn't stop people from noticing, and they did. And so, he decided to take up another plan.
He yelled loudly for everyone to stop what they were doing for a second.
"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. So, as you all know, I'm Jason, son of Zeus, and former Praetor here. As such, I need to inform you that the eagles around our camp have been unable to hunt because um, mobile phones ringing have scared off all the prey. As such, they have appealed to me to gather as much food as possible in order to feed them and to fend off disaster that will obviously come if they're not fed well," Jason said.
"Is no one going to point out that Jason can't hear what birds are thinking?" Leo asked.
"Nah, they'll probably believe anything that he says," Frank said. "By the way, how come Percy can hear what fish are saying but Jason can't hear what birds think?"
"That's just because I'm awesomer that Jason is," Percy said.
"Awesomer isn't a word," Frank pointed out.
"Nerd," Leo said.
By the time Jason's time was up, he had already had a tiny feast collected before him.
Result: Jason managed to collect 39.56 pounds of food.
Last up was Frank. Now, Frank, by this point, had realized that he only needed to beat Leo and not get caught in order to be spared the negative point.
As such, as he was a bit too bulk to try and steal anything successfully, he decided to rely on another weapon: deceit.
He suddenly pulled out his weapon and screamed, "Okay everyone! Lock the doors down! No one gets out or gets in until I say so! This is a surprise food inspection, and you all have the right to remain silent! Anything you do or do not say can and will be used against you in a court of law!"
Following this proclamation, a large amount of pandemonium ensued, far more than that which should be expected following a normal food inspection.
"How is it possible to use something that someone hasn't said against them?" Jason asked.
"Oh, that's easy," Leo said. "See, imagine that I'm going to arrest you and I say that. What do you say?"
"Nothing," Jason replied.
"Okay, Leo, Frank said nothing, which means that he isn't protesting his innocence like an innocent person would," Percy said. "We should write that down to use against him."
"And if I say that I'm innocent?" Jason asked.
"Only someone who's guilty would say that," Percy said. "We should write that down to use against him."
"Okay, I get it, you guys are terrible judges," Jason said.
And so, with Frank waving his sword around, he managed to collect a large bundle of food.
"Hmm," Percy said. "Frank was asked to collect food, and he does so by forcing everyone to hand it over to him at sword point."
"Do you know what that means?" Leo asked.
"What?"
"Frank's the only true Roman here," Jason said.
While Frank was congratulating himself internally for his victory, the door suddenly opened up and Reyna walked in. "What's going on in here?"
Leo nearly had a heart attack. "Oh no! Reyna's on to us! If she founds out…"
"She'll tell Annabeth!" Percy said. "Quick! Frank! Abort mission! Abort mission!"
This was unfortunately very difficult for Frank now that he had his sword out and there were lots of witnesses. "Nothing," Frank said, trying to sound normal. "Uh, this is just a food inspection."
Reyna raised an eyebrow. "I wasn't told about anything like that."
"I uh, you must have missed the memo," Frank said.
"Anyway, I was here about some weird food mess ups here," Reyna said. "Some people are saying their food has been mysteriously vanishing."
"And hence the food inspection," Frank said. "We have reports that um, a certain bacterium called um, Seamoure buttsis responsible for the rapidly dissolving food. I'll just have to send some samples to the lab and get back to those people."
There was a very long awkward moment in which Frank wasn't sure his story would hold, until a fire had conveniently broken out somewhere and Reyna was called to check.
"Well, that was close," Percy said.
"You're telling me," Jason said. He looked around. "Hey, where's Leo?"
Result: Frank managed to collect 24.5 pounds of food.
A/N: Thanks for reading! As such, Leo has three negative points, Jason and Percy have one, and Frank has two. So, Leo will be getting punished next chapter.
Thank you for reading, and do please review if you liked.
