Leo Valdez

Damn truancy officers.

I was actually on a roll. My goal was to actually make it all the way to Vegas, become a kid gambler, and get rich quick. But nooooo, stupid truancy officer just had to catch me and send me here. Where's 'here' you may ask? The Wilderness School, "Where kids are the animals".

Now I was sitting on a bus full of delinquents, on our way to the Grand Canyon.

Wilderness School wasn't all that bad. I had two awesome friends, Jason and Piper, and I had plenty of people to prank. I was beginning to forget about my troubles, slowly. One thing I couldn't escape was the hollow feeling I felt for my mother's death though. It still haunted me, no matter where I went. Sometimes, I could push the depressing thoughts out of my mind, but only for a little while.

Not to mention the thoughts of the hot chick at the convenience store that I had met that day.

Memories of her eyes were still etched in my brain and I couldn't help but to think about her. I don't know why but she seemed so important. I still had the three gold coins she gave me. I never let those out of my sight. They were special to me.

"I'm not supposed to be here," Jason said from the seat behind me.

I turned around and laughed at him.

"Yeah right Jason. We've all been framed! I didn't run away six times and Piper didn't steal a BMW"

Jason pretended like he didn't know what I was talking about. He acted like he didn't even know me. He must have been pulling a prank to get me back for putting shaving cream on his Jell-o. Except this prank seemed to last for a while. He said that he didn't know any of us or even who he was himself. Apparently, he had caught amnesia. Great. It was the perfect chance for me to reuse old jokes and to get him to do all my laundry for me.

As if Jason's whole I- lost-my- memory prank wasn't weird enough, even weirder things started happening on the Grand Canyon skywalk. And I mean REALLY weird things. Like evil espresso pretty boys trying to kill you weird.

And if falling off a cliff and having you goat/gym teacher save you wasn't weird enough, let's throw in some more evil espresso guys and your best friend flying.

After falling off the cliff and being thrown to the side by the espresso guys, I was out cold in the fetal position. Nice.

It wasn't until Jason and Piper woke me up that I started hallucinating. Flying horses came down from the sky and landed smack on the skywalk next to us. Two teenagers were on a chariot and one of them, a hot blonde, jumped off and started interrogating us.

"Where is he? Where's Percy," the blonde commanded. When we gave her confused looks she just sighed and started yelling at the sky.

So then we hopped on the chariot with the scary blonde and the huge buff guy on two flying ponies.

"Where are you taking us," Jason asked.

"Camp Half- Blood," the blonde girl, whose name was Annabeth, responded.

I sat at the very edge of the chariot, which was wide open in the back, and tried to process everything that just happened back on in the canyon. Our coach, Coach Hedge, had been sucked up into a nasty storm along with the evil storm spirit, Dylan, the same one who had been hitting on Piper. We were being taken to some camp where kids like us, demigods, would be safe. Cool, nothing crazy about that.

I looked up and saw a storm approaching the chariot. It looked like horses in the storm. Great, we were getting attacked, again.

"More venti," Jason announced.

"You don't say," I yelled over the wind.

One of the wheels on the chariot caught fire and I started to panic. Suddenly, the chariot jerked and it was like we went into hyper speed. At least we'd lost the storm spirits. I couldn't take being thrown off anything else.

Fortunately, I didn't have to worry about being thrown off anything. Instead, we crash landed into a dark ocean. Two girls with long black hair appeared in the water and hauled me and Jason up. I was shivering and sniffing. I shook my head as two kids came up with jumbo leaf blowers and dried us off.

"Thanks," I said to one of the kids.

"No prob."

We were surrounded by tons of kids of all different ages, all dressed in the same orange shirt. They all had confused or worried looks on their faces.

A blonde surfer looking dude jogged up, running his hands through his hair in a frustrated way.

"My chariot," he cried.

"Sorry Will," Annabeth said, although her mind seemed somewhere else.

There was a whole lot of talk about 'claiming' and stuff. "What's that," I asked. Some kids laughed in the background, as if I had made the funniest joke ever. Then everyone started staring at me. Maybe that was the funniest joke they'd ever heard.

"Hey, there's more where that came from," I offered.

But they didn't seem to be staring at me; more like above me. I was basked in a red glow, and when I looked up, there was a fiery hammer above my head. I swatted at it and moved around.

"That's claiming," Annabeth said.

"Vulcan," Jason said. "Your dad if Vulcan."

There were quizzical looks from people in the crowd.

"Aww man, I don't even like Star Trek," I whined.

"You mean Hephaestus," Annabeth corrected.

She'd said that Vulcan was the Roman version of Hephaestus, but Jason was correct.

"Well," Will said, clapping his hands, "Let's get to that tour eh?"