MAIN TITLE: The Keeper of Fate

WARNINGS: See first chapter for warnings.

NOTES: Thanks to KittyKat, Queen Alexandera's Birdwing and PurpleandBlackPandas for reviewing this chapter!

In response to KittyKat's review: Yes, Luke is on his quest. Hopefully next chapter will clear up any confusion about the timeline.

DISCLAIMER: I don't own PJO. Rick Riordan does. The song "Achilles' Last Stand" is by Led Zeppelin. Chapter title is taken from chapter 18 of The Lightning Thief 'Annabeth Does Obedience School'.

Chapter Three: My Half-Brother Does Military School

The next day I sit at table nine at the dining pavilion with my half-siblings (after waking up at a reasonable hour and taking a shower) and listen to them discuss the possibility of crafting a mobile cannon that can launch cannon balls at enemy forces over fifty yards away. I can tell they're having trouble with this; normal gunpowder can't tear through celestial bronze, which is the material that the cannon balls have to be made out of if we want them to have any effect on monsters whatsoever.

Jake is suggesting that we use Greek fire, but Gareth shoots down that idea instantly by pointing out how volatile the stuff is. The celestial bronze can contain it, but if even a speck of the green powder makes contact with the actual cannon itself, it's curtains for everyone in a twenty metre radius.

So yeah, not exactly the best option. They decide that they'll go over all of the blueprints later, the same ones Beckendorf and Gareth were looking at last night before I came in. For now they're just going to enjoy their breakfast while mocking me incessantly for inhaling my food so rapidly that they're surprised I'm not choking to death. It's not like it really matters if I do choke. Zeth knows the Heimlich maneuver. After all those nights going to bed hungry because my mother pressured me into throwing up my dinner (and sometimes my breakfast and lunch too), I've decided that I'm not going to let other people's image of me keep me from eating.

Yeah, my mother's a bitch. Lots of demigods have that problem. But we learn to deal. And as I listen to Jake tease me and watch Pollux and Castor (Mr. D's twins, the poor boys) being tricked into drinking a normal looking fluid (which probably has laxatives in it) by the Stoll brothers, I realize that life could be a lot worse.

It's generally very hot in the forges, what with the blast furnaces and everything, but today even more so than usual. That's probably because we're all so frustrated and tempers are running high. In fact, Gareth and I got into a fight just a few minutes ago about whether or not we should just call it quits for the day. He's still nursing his black eye.

Jake and the others are just as irritated. They've been at this for three hours, trying to find a solution to the problem I was telling you about earlier. Experiment after experiment, and nothing has worked. Littered all over the table and the floor are diagrams upon diagrams, some scrawled hastily on small scraps of paper and others meticulously drawn on huge sheets of unwrinkled insert-name-of-fancy-paper-here. The former are drawn by the boys themselves and the latter are drawn by various members of the Athena cabin. My half-siblings enlisted their help a week or so before I got to this camp, but so far not even Xavier–the head counsellor of the Athena cabin–has had a brain wave.

Jake has a natural instinct for forging (I swear, he doesn't even know the names of the pieces and techniques he uses to create his master pieces, he just sort of goes with his intuition) and Zeth has the mechanics of it memorized (he loves to take things apart and then spend hours putting them back together) but it's Beckendorf who has been putting out the most suggestions.

Beckendorf is good at metalworking too, of course, but he's absolutely brilliant at coming up with innovative ideas and finding inventive solutions to problems like this one. But even Beckendorf is having trouble with this.

Meanwhile, Gareth and I are pretty much useless, which is probably why we both lost our patience and got into that fistfight–which I won, just wanted to point that out–in the first place. All Gareth has done so far is bark orders at everyone and shout out reprimands every time one of the other boys (usually Jake) blows something up. At one point he even screeches at Zeth to "Drop down and give me twenty!" because apparently the reserved boy isn't participating enough.

In reality I should be the one doing push-ups, because I have sat quietly (for once) at the table my half-brothers are working at and not given any input whatsoever. I thought I got all of my self-pity out of my system yesterday, but apparently not. I've been brooding the whole time about how I can't craft weapons the way the rest of them can. Well, Gareth can't either, but he makes incredible shields and almost impenetrable armour so that makes up for it.

The only thing I'm good for is making the regular form of a weapon. For example, Chiron has this sword, Ripwave or something like that, that starts out as a ballpoint pen and turns into a wicked celestial bronze blade when the cap is removed. But you can't just make the weapon; you also have to make the pen. You create them separately, swear a sacred oath to the gods and then merge them together by using, well, it depends. Sometimes water from a river in the underworld is used; sometimes the two objects are thrown into a volcano; sometimes both. I've even heard of someone dipping a shield and a gauntlet into a pool of blood.

So I make the object that transforms into the weapon, and when my brothers aren't looking I forge jewellery. Yes, I did just say jewellery. Just because my father is hideous doesn't mean I don't appreciate beauty. I'm nowhere near as obsessive as the Aphrodite girls (and boys, for that matter) but I still shower and brush my hair and shave my legs and pluck my eyebrows on a regular basis just like most girls do. I don't wear make-up, though. Even just picking up a tube of lip gloss makes me feel like I'm surrendering to my mother, adopting her 'you-must-sell-your-soul-so-you-can-be-as-beautiful-as-humanly-possible' mentality.

If there's one thing I know, it's that I don't want to be anything like my mother.

Which is why I read Hamlet. It's the one Shakespearean play she hates, because that's where her parents got her name, Ophelia. She absolutely loathes that name. And I suppose that's the one area where she and I will always be the same. She got my name from the female lead in Othello, her favourite play, and because I hate both my name and my mother I also despise Shakespeare's Othello.

But anyways, I make necklaces and bracelets and stuff, which I then hide from everyone, especially my brothers who would probably die laughing if they found out. I'm hoping that if I ever get a chance to return to the real world for a while I can sell some of the jewellery like I did before I came to Camp Half-blood.

I'm getting so off topic, aren't I? To recap the important things: we want to build a cannon to annihilate monsters, we can't find a suitable replacement for gunpowder, and Gareth and I are totally useless and haven't been helping at all.

"Vires, maybe we should take a break," I tell him again, because we've all had enough disappointment for one day.

Beckendorf, Jake, and Zeth all tense, like they're expecting Gareth to snap and start another argument. I'm expecting this too, to be honest, and for a second it looks like our head counsellor really is going to explode.

Then his shoulders seem to slump in defeat and he admits, "Yeah, I know." Before I can reign in my surprise and banish it from my features, he continues, "I'm sorry I've been working you guys so hard, it's just that–I don't know, it's just that our cabin gets a lot of crap from everyone and I thought that maybe if we pulled this off the other campers would finally give us some respect for once."

"Gareth, you know we don't care about our image," Beckendorf says. The older boy raises an eyebrow and Beckendorf amends, "Well, we don't care that much."

"Yeah," Jake agrees, "The constant snide remarks about our appearance and the not-so-harmless jokes about our dad are annoying, and it would be nice to shove a spectacular cannon in peoples' faces to shut them up, but that doesn't mean you're allowed to go all evil dictator on us."

"He's just exaggerating," Zeth says hastily, at the same time elbowing Jake in the ribs.

"No, he's not," Gareth smiles wryly and continues, "I kind of was acting like an evil dictator. I just feel like I should be doing more for you guys. Especially you, Dess. I've heard some of things that Brookes girl says to you and–"

"Dude," I interject, "it's not your fault, how the others treat us. Cheryl and all the other people who make fun of us are just really shallow." He still looks doubtful, so I add, "If it really bothers you, you can deck the next Hermes guy that makes a comment about my bra size, okay?"

Despite his obvious discomfort at the word 'bra', Gareth grins and replies: "Will do. Now let's get out of here before we all melt from the heat, or worse, before we start pouring out our darkest secrets and innermost feelings to each other like we're at some girly sleepover."

The rests of the guys snicker appreciatively and laugh even harder when I punch Gareth in the arm with enough force to bruise him. They're still laughing as we exit the forges, and Gareth and I join in when we see two Demeter boys looking at us like we're completely psycho. Which isn't true. We're only partially crazy. And someday, maybe that rest of the campers will see that.

"Wandering and wandering, what place to rest the search,

The mighty arms of Atlas hold the heavens from the earth."

The Apollo kids sing this last bit at an extremely high volume, just to piss off Mr. D. For once, I don't really blame the wine god for being annoyed. Normally we sing demigod songs when we're in the Amphitheatre seated around the campfire, but today one of the sun god's children, Lee Fletcher, decided to switch things up a little. Somehow he managed to convince Chiron that instead of singing 'This Land is Minos's Land' like we usually do, we should sing his shortened version of 'Achilles Last Stand'. Fletcher's a huge Led Zeppelin nut. He went on and on about how the song was all about Achilles and his triumphs, and guess what? Achilles' name isn't even mentioned in it once.

The part about Atlas is really the only part that mentions Greek mythology, which sucks because to be perfectly honest, none of us really care about Atlas at all. If you've watched the Class of the Titans–and I'm not talking about the movie 'The Clash of the Titans', I'm talking about the cartoon TV show–than you might've seen the episode with Atlas in it. You might also remember that the show portrayed Atlas as a nice guy. Yeah, he's not. He's like a military general, and there's nothing he loves more than commanding other people to obliterate us demigods. So you don't have to pity him because he's stuck holding up the sky. Trust me, he deserves it.

So anyways, as soon the ending of the song fades, Connor launches into the story of his cabin's previous camp counsellor, who wound up in jail because she got caught stealing a–well, Stoll won't tell us what she took. Apparently that's 'classified information'. He ignores Clarisse's glare, which seems to be saying: 'fight me one time on the wrestling mat and we'll see how classified your info is then', refusing to rise to the bait–probably because he knows he'll get his butt handed to him if he fights her.

I don't pay much attention as his big/little brother–I can never tell which one of them is older–chimes in and explains that the prison the daughter of Hermes was sent to is haunted by restless ghosts from the underworld, which ironically makes it safer for half-bloods instead of more dangerous. Even monsters don't like to mess with the dead.

The rest of the story passes right over my head, because I'm too busy thinking about the note in my pocket. Apollo sent it to me earlier–and when I say he sent it, I mean that it just appeared in my hand when I woke up this morning. I'm not going to tell you exactly what it says, because it's long and boring and filled with the poetry god's horrific haikus, but basically this is the gist of it: 'Just so you know, that whole I-want-you-to-save-the-world-so-that-fabulous-people-like-me-don't-die thing? Yeah, I forgot to mention it earlier, but you don't have to worry about that for at least two more years. So stop freaking out and just relax. I'll let you know when the time comes."

I love how he tells me this after I have a (mild) mental breakdown. I'm pretty much okay with it now though, 'cause I thought most of it through when I was brooding while walking along the beach yesterday. Of course, that doesn't stop me from having dreams–and I don't mean the demigod kind, I mean the normal kind that people insist tell you about your secret troubles that are buried deep within your subconscious.

Though to be honest, my dreams are more like nightmares. It really sucks, dreaming about the people you love dying and then coming back as ghosts just to tell you that it's your fault they died. Oh well. I'll take Apollo's advice for whatever it's worth and stop panicking. I can enjoy two years of peace, right? There's nothing wrong with that.

So I push away my guilty conscience and instead listen as Grover and the other Satyrs play music on their reed pipes, though they stop every few songs to snack on tin cans. I watch as the campfire grows bigger and bigger, the flames brighter and brighter, and I decide that sitting back and enjoying the peace while it lasts is the best idea I've ever had.

Author's Note: There's way too much stuff about the Hephaestus kids, I know, but Dess lives with them and for the time being interacts with them more than she does anyone else. Eventually they mostly just fade into the background.

Anyways, hope you like it. Reviews are appreciated.