"That is my purpose" R said. "I make sure we don't feel too horrible about bad things happening, and apparently monotony is included in that. Probably has something to do with the t- with where I come from" Once again, I didn't push. She'd tell me when she was ready. "So, where are we?" "We're in the Labyrinth of Daedalus. Do you know what that is" "Yeah. I love the way it's kind of alive. So interesting. It reminds me of the labyrinth of lord De- never mind, you wouldn't know who that is. So, how long have we been here" "Almost 24 hours now, and by the looks of it, we're gonna stay in here for a while longer" "Well, stressful situations are great for bonding. I'm sure we're gonna become best friends" "Sure, best friends"
Apparently, R's positive outlook on life was strong enough to overpower the will of the labyrinth, as our surroundings became nicer again. "Look, the concrete's gone. This is so cool. There's even flowers here" She was right, despite the low light level, small flowers sprouted from cracks in the ground. The whole thing looked less like an underground tunnel and more like a regular sidewalk. As we kept walking, that impression just got stronger as now, the tunnel widened to the size of a one lane street with sidewalks on both sides and asphalt in the middle. Eventually, the walls turned into house facades and the ceilings turned blue like the sky. Even the ominous glow that illuminated the labyrinth was stronger here, somewhat resembling natural sunlight. "Wow, your positivity is really strong. I've never seen the labyrinth look even remotely as nice as this"
The nice look of my surroundings caused me to relax a bit- so much so that what happened next caught me completely off guard. A door to the side opened up and a centaur came galloping out. Something told me that he was not a party pony. He raised his bow, ready to fire. Then, without warning, he let go of his arrow, sending it straight towards R's face. I the last moment, I intercepted its course with riptide and sent it flying back at the centaur. I missed horribly and only scratched his back, but he was distracted for a moment. "Okay, what do I do?" R asked. "Normally Annabeth is the one who comes up with plans" "Yeah, but Annabeth isn't here and I have no idea how this world works. How about you deal with this and I hide somewhere" "Okay, I'll try my best to not die"
Moments late, the centaur turned towards us again, another arrow drawn. He let go and I froze, unable to move as I saw the arrow glide slowly towards me. In the last moment, R pulled me down. "Thanks" I said before rolling forward as the centaur nudged his next arrow. Before he could shoot it though, I got close enough to stab upwards with my sword, severing the bowstring. "You'll pay for that" The centaur roared. He pulled back a front leg, ready to kick me, but I jumped out of range. This repeated a few times before he eventually managed to get in a kick into my stomach. He almost missed, but the impact was still strong enough to knock me over and send riptide sliding over the floor. Next thing I knew, I had a hoof on my head and it was starting to get heavier. "Now you die" The centaur said, slowly shifting his weight onto said hoof. Just when I thought my skull was about to crack, I heard a scream from the side. "No one kills my friend!" R came running in and stabbed the centaur with riptide, causing him to dissolve into gold dust. "You dropped this" She said as she gave me my sword. "Thanks. How does my forehead look?" "It's only bleeding a little bit. Do we have anything to heal you? If we don't, it's probably fine. That scar is gonna look really good on you" "We should have some ambrosia" I tried to get up, but the pain in my head immediately exploded, so I stayed on the ground. "I think there's a blue lunchbox with golden squares in it" R searched through the box for a moment before finding the correct box. "Here, I got it. Wow, it almost looks like they're glowing. So beautiful" "Great. Now give me one" "Right, sorry" She fished one square out of the box and gave it to me. As the familiar feeling of healing filled my body, she began to hum a little melody. It sounded so nice it almost felt like the song was healing me instead of the ambrosia. After a few seconds, I was ready to get up again.
"Thanks. I guess you just saved my life twice" "Friends have to take care of each other. When they don't, it can have all sorts of consequences, such as an ancient evil being convincing one of them to take on an ancient power to get revenge on those who treated them badly, but in reality the ancient villain is just trying to create hate in order to strengthen their grip on this world" "Yeah, that kind of sucked" R gave me a confused look. "Are you not talking about Luke? Because that exact thing happened with him" "Oh, yeah, I am, now that you say it. It's just that I didn't remember where that sequence of events came from. You know, dissociative amnesia" I felt like that wasn't the whole truth, but who was I to judge. Also, we'd only known each other for like ten minutes, so why would she trust me? The whole system had trust issues and from what I could tell, R had been locked up somewhere for so long that fighting boredom had become part of her job. When stuff like that happened to you, you might want to think twice before trusting someone. But then again, she'd predicted that we'd be best friends. That seemed a bit inconsistent, but I couldn't expect everyone to be as logical as Annabeth, especially if they were… "R?" "Yeah" "How old are you?" "I'm not sure. Something between 17 and 20 I'd say, but the exact age will probably stay a mystery. Oh, I love mystery" "How are you this excitable? I think not even Annie could keep up with that. This is not a criticism, I'm just wondering how" "Well, when your life is as bad as mine, it's helpful to focus on the good things and amplify them. It's kind of essential for survival" "Well, I'm alive and I'm not this excitable" "Well, you don't have DID. If you took all of your emotions and divided them up into several piles, you'd also get one with a lot of excitability" "So you're essential a concentrate of a specific trait" "Kinda. But I am a lot more than that. I am just as much of a person as anyone else in the system. Or even outside of it" "Sure. That's why I respect all of you equally" "As you should. So, what do we do now?" "We keep walking until we either find an exit or die" "Sounds fun. Maybe we'll find something interesting"
We did find something interesting. It was a circular room with a massive human skeleton on the ground, surrounded by about 40 regular skeletons. "What is that?" R asked. I inspected the central skeleton and noticed that it had horns. I knew those horns, in fact I had one of them hanging above my bed. "If I'm not completely mistaken, we have found the center of the labyrinth" "Why is this the center?" "Well, when the labyrinth was built, it was meant to contain the Minotaur, so the Minotaur was placed in the center. This is most likely the room with the Minotaur, meaning it's also the oldest part of the labyrinth. Annabeth would love this" "Maybe we can share the memory later. But since while this might have been the feeding place in ancient times, but there doesn't seem to be anything edible here right now, I'd say we should keep going and explore new places." "Yeah, let's get going. I'll be honest, I genuinely admire your enthusiasm" "Thanks. It's a coping mechanism, but you already know that" "I do"
We continued through the labyrinth. While it was no longer looking like a lively street, it was still definitely reacting to R's emotions and refrained from getting too depressing. After a while, R noticed something.
"Are you hearing that as well?" I listened. "Yeah, flowing water. We should check that out" We followed the corridors to the source of the sound until we reached a ledge. In true Annabeth fashion, R almost fell down, but I caught her shoulder in the last moment and pulled her back. Then I looked down.
The ledge wasn't very high. In fact, water was rushing just a few centimeters below it. It was flowing through a pipe made from bricks, just over two meters in diameter, that it filled about halfway. The whole design looked like a sewer, but fortunately didn't smell like one. "I'd say we go in there" "Looks dangerous, and not in a way that gets me excited" "Not with me" "What about you makes this less dangerous" "Right, you don't know that. I'm actually the son of Poseidon, so in water I'm home courting" "In that case, let's build a boat. The last boat I was on got me stranded on an island, but that's not really a possibility here, so I'll go for it" I opened the backpack and got what I needed: a waterproof tarp and some rope. Within seconds, I had created a makeshift boat. "Let's get this thing to water" I put the boat into the water and climbed in. After R had joined me, I let go of the ledge and we drifted down the pipe. I should probably note that the boat was not remotely strong enough for these rapids and I was only holding it together with sheer willpower. After a while, the pipe widened into a wide but shallow lake. I only knew this because of my son of Poseidon sonar as it was completely dark here. Since the water was now much calmer, I allowed myself to relax a little and trusted that the boat would keep itself stable.
Our boat scraped along a sandbar or something similar. What happened next was the most beautiful thing I had seen in this labyrinth. The collision must have stirred up some bioluminescent microorganisms which were now beginning to glow. This set of a chain reaction, making the entire lake glow faintly. I was now able to make out the surrounding a bit better. Apart from our inlet, the lake was surrounded by about a meter of rocky shore. After that came a cliff that formed a massive dome over us, at least a hundred meters tall and twice as wide. It was absolutely stunning, but it became even better when the microorganisms began to move. They collected in small cylindrical swarms. The way there were moving underwater almost made them look like floating lights that were above the water and just reflecting in it. The light also allowed me to see R's face again. She seemed to be very happy with the situation. "It's like the floating lights, but underwater. They're so beautiful" She began flapping her hands but quickly stopped when she realized I was watching her. "You can continue with… whatever that was, I don't mind" "Oh, it's fine. I don't really need to do it. But thanks for taking me here" "Of course" Of course it hadn't been intentional, but I didn't want to ruin the atmosphere by bringing that up.
"This world is absolutely amazing. There's just no other way to put it. I love it" "I have to agree, this is one of the most beautiful things I've seen in my life" Suddenly, the surface of the water rippled. I sonar'd the lake and found three entities approaching. "Okay, something's coming and statistically speaking, there is a high chance it wants to kill us" "Oh. To the beach?" "Probably" I steered us to the beach and pulled our makeshift boat ashore. Just seconds later, the entities I had spotted emerged. They were telkhines" "Yup, they probably want to kill us" before I had a chance to pull out riptide, R had already grabbed a rope from our bag pack and now swung it at the telkhines. Somehow, the rope wound itself around all three of them multiple times. I used the water to reel them in and R quickly tied the two ends of the rope together. I began the interrogation. "Where do you come from" "There's an underwater tunnel that leads to another lake" "Are there any more monsters there?" "Not that we'd know of" "Can you reach the tunnels from there?" "Yes" "Do you swear on the river Styx that you were telling the truth and that you won't attack us once we let you go?" "What if we don't?" I swung riptide just shy of his chin. "In that case, I swear it on the river Styx" "So do I" "Same here" "R, release them"
R opened the knot and put the rope back into our bag. As promised, the monsters didn't attack. "How are we gonna get through the tunnel though. I doubt I can dive for that long" "Don't worry about that" We put our boat back into the water and climbed in. When we were above the tunnel entrance, I created an air bubble that carried us through. On our way back up, I made sure to rise very slowly so as to not kill R with decompression sickness. When we eventually broke through the surface, we found ourselves in an even bigger cave. A thunderous noise made the walls shake. I looked at R, she looked back at me, fear in her eyes. "Hey, want emotional support?" I asked. "That would be great" I slid closer and she put her head on my shoulder. I put an arm around hers. I honestly couldn't tell you how often Annabeth (or alters) had sat in this exact position because one of us had gotten scared.
The noise sounded again, making a stalactite (gmite?) Fall into the water. I had to use my powers to prevent a wave from crashing over us. "Where is that coming from?" R asked. "I have no idea"
As we drifted along the water, we eventually drifted past the source of the sound: a lone cyclops hammering something on his anvil. When he saw us, he swung his hammer at us and barely missed due to my quick maneuvering. He raised his hammer again and I once again dodged it when it came down. This would work for a while, but I knew we needed a different plan. The third time the hammer fell, I noticed that something was engraved in it: a trident. Of course, most cyclopes were children of Poseidon. I tried something I had never done before (not that that was a bad idea, it usually worked) and pulled water from the lake. When I formed it into a trident symbol, it began to glow and the cyclops stopped attacking. "You are my brother?" He asked. "Yes, I am your brother, so please don't kill me" "Won't kill brother" He nodded. "We need to get to the shore where we can go back into the tunnels, can you help us with that?" "Help you to the tunnels" he confirmed. "Bye brother" "Goodbye big brother"