As I drifted off to sleep, I thought about what had happened today. Apart from having to deal with the usual cabin 10 drama of course. Seeing all the cute Percabeth moments had been great, as well as comforting Nico as he was trauma dumping about Tartarus. From what he had told me, either he had had it worse than Annabeth, or her really bad Tartarus memories had been locked away way quicker. Interestingly, Annabeth had retained her memories of Tartarus for a few days, long enough for her to tell me what happened and she'd only lost them after over a week. Anyways, assuming she had told me everything, Nico had been through even worse things. Despite visibly being emotionally wrecked, he wouldn't accept a hug from me. Instead, I told him that everything would be fine and that he'd recover and all that stuff. My Charm speak didn't work nearly as well on him as it did on Annabeth and Jason, but I still think it helped. After I left his cabin, I walked around camp for a while. When I walked past her cave, I saw Rachel making a painting of the cabins. "Hi Rachel" I said. "Oh, hi, didn't see you coming" "I was just taking a stroll around camp. Do you know what the topics on my next exam will be?" I half-jokingly asked. "No, but I can tell you you'll need a child of Gaia to defeat it" "I'm assuming you're not referring to my exam" "Probably not, but I honestly don't know. Prophecies are always a bit confusing, and since the battle it's been getting even worse. It's like the oracle is getting weaker. But I'm probably just making myself crazy. Maybe there's just nothing big coming our way that would justify speaking a prophecy" "Probably" I said goodbye to Rachel and followed the feeling of Percabeth down to the lake.
When I woke up the next morning, my roommate was already awake and sitting on the bed. "Morning. Who is it?" "Mostly Annabeth" "Ready for school?" "I'm a bit dissociated and my brain is only running on like 50% capacity, but school usually only takes like 10% so it's fine." "Good. I'm not ready but maybe I'll stop being tired by the time the first lesson starts. Why am I even tired? If tiredness is the need for sleep and I just slept, shouldn't I not be tired? Shouldn't you be most tired in the evening? It's like if you didn't have to pee but then you go and after that you do have to go. It doesn't make sense" "I'm not sure. Maybe tiredness is less of the need to sleep and more being in a state very close to sleeping" "I guess that makes sense." We got ready for school without any trauma related incidents. The only thing that happened was when I stole some of Annabeth's food (as I always do). "Stop" She told me. "Stop what? Stealing your food?" "It's a bit too much. Look, I don't have that much left" "You're not going to starve. It's only a few hours till lunch" "Who knows. I might not have the chance to get that" I then had to convince Annabeth that she would definitely have several more chances to eat today. She explained her behavior with "Homeless instincts", which of course made sense. I guess this does count as a trauma related incident since Annabeth's trauma was ultimately the reason why she had acted this way, but then again that applied to most of what she did. Annabeth hadn't had a flashback, panic attack, breakdown or anything similar and that was all that mattered. Well, it also mattered that I didn't have any of these things, but that was beside the point.
Annabeth
When the first lesson started, I was still a bit dissociated, but my remaining brain power was still sufficient to participate in the lesson. Towards the end of the lesson, I overheard some words from the inside. "Pipes, someone just mentioned a 3D model, do you know what they're talking about?" "Yesterday, Chris suggested making a 3D model of the inner world so you could show it to me, but he didn't know how the 3D modeling program worked" "I'll consider it" I went back to listening to the teacher explain primer-annealing and didn't think about the model for a while.
Once the lesson was over, I went outside for the break. I kept myself busy by planning out the best escape route in the case of an attack of flying monsters. After the break, we had some more lessons, English and philosophy, followed by another break. I decided that the previous lesson hadn't contained enough metacognitive activities, so I got out my laptop.
"Inner world as a 3D model. Let's see what I can do." I opened blender and began designing. After a few minutes, the bell rung again. "Why is it ringing?" I wondered "Do they have an announcement?" "It's the end of the break" "Uh, no, I've only been here for like…" I checked the time. The entire 45 minute break was over. "Did I miss something because of a switch" "I don't think so. You were just really focused on what you were doing" "Then I can't blame it on my disorder. But I can blame it on my other disorder."
I'll admit it, I wasn't really paying attention during the next lesson because my project was way more interesting, but I think I made a sufficiently good impression. After school, I quickly did my homework and then continued working on my model (I might be a little bit obsessed with this) and didn't stop for another ninety minutes or so. I could probably have kept going for days, but there was only so much of the inner world I had actually seen, so I ran out of task before running out of motivation. "Okay, I'm done" "Good. Not having long conversations with you was starting to get boring. Want to give me a tour" "Sure" I started the simulation. "I made this little first person character because it makes showing everything much easier. Then I thought you wouldn't fully get immersed with just a floating camera, so I added gravity. But then I remembered that gravity works differently in the inner world so I had to rewrite the physics engine a little bit. Then I also had to code in non-Euclidean physics and geometry because the inner world isn't entirely Euclidean. I guess I can show you everything now" I started walking around the inner world. I first showed Piper the cockpit and the tree. "Is it really this big?" "I obviously don't have exact measurements, but this seems about right." I proceeded to show her Annie's tree house, followed by the main house. "The stuff here isn't completely accurate. It's based off of mostly quick glances I had over a week ago. I am pretty sure however that I got the things that exist pretty much right, just not their layout." "So you actually need food and sleep and stuff in there?" "We definitely need food, sleep also makes sense and I didn't yet dare to ask about the bathrooms, but they're probably not just there for decoration" I then showed Piper the garden which was technically more like a farm but smaller. "After harvesting, you just throw everything in this hole and it's ground into flour" "Isn't that a bit too simple?" "It's the inner world, things don't have to make sense. But at least the grind stones have an energy source" I went up to a massive cliff. "Behind this is a water reservoir. The water leaves through this opening and drives this water wheel to a few hundred rpm" "I heard about this. Not sure when though. Oh, right, Annie told me about it on Saturday when she was talking about things that had happened in the inner world. She also talked about the great Euclidean collapse of last week." "I think I heard that. She asked me if it was my fault. Of course it was. I'm like a baby in that world" "A baby" "I meant it in the avatar way" "What is that supposed to mean?" "In the movie, there's a scene where someone is compared to a baby since he is not used to the world he is in, so he doesn't know things, needs help and makes many mistakes, like a baby would, and also like I do in the inner world" "But why would you use the word like that?" "I guess the movie is important to me. Not even because of the content, but I watched it with Percy. On its own, that's not much of a reason, but it was one of the last things I did with Percy before he was kidnapped by a certain goddess, so when I thought about everything I did with Percy, this was at the top of the list and it stayed that way for over half a year, until eventually being replaced with the judo flip. But it also is a great movie. Very realistic" "Realistic. It's a movie about blue people with USB hair" "That isn't actually that much different from the way that hyphae networks exchange information, and life on Pandora might work vastly differently on the cellular level, so it's not completely out of the question. Actually, sharing of knowledge via spontaneous physical contact is also a thing here, slime molds do it. But that's not even what I meant. I was talking about what the humans were doing. They were so irrational in everything they did. And blatantly disrespectful of the native species. It is also one of the few movies that shows violent attacks from the perspective of the victim." "So, the humans are irrational, disrespectful and greedy. Matches our experience pretty well" "And who exactly is we?" "I was gonna say the Cherokee, but it applies to pretty much every native tribe ever anywhere on this planet. Okay, what about unobtainium? What makes it so valuable? Is that still realistic?" "Ever wondered why the hallelujah mountain float?" "No" "Because of the maglev effect caused by the unobtainium's superconductive properties. Unobtainium is a SPT superconductor, something science has been searching for for decades and that would revolutionize basically every technology ever"
"Fine, it's realistic. So, we were talking about a water wheel?" "Exactly. The wheel spins very quickly. This rotation runs into a gear converter, making this rod rotate slowly, but with immense force. Enough force to for example grind wheat into flour. As far as I know, that's everything that exists in the inner world. Well, there's almost certainly a lot more than this, but this is everything I have seen. It's actually really foggy in there, at least for me, so I haven't really seen a lot of it" "You'll get there eventually" "Hopefully. There's probably so much left for me to discover. Learning more about the inner world will probably also help me with my trauma healing" "That's certainly a good thing to be helped with, but first could you help me with this task?" "I'm assuming I won't receive the same reward from you as I got from Percy yesterday?" "What was that?" "He gave me a hug and told me about how much he loved me and how he would always be by my side." "I could also give you a hug, but for the rest I don't think I could ever keep up with Percy." "Let me see what you have, then I'll decide" "It's the philosophy homework." "Oh, that's not hard. But first, let me…" I switched to the alter communication program and typed out a message. After that I explained everything to Piper free of charge. "You know what, you still get a hug. You look like you need it" "my mental stability is at like twenty five percent. I don't need a hug yet." "So twenty percent is good for you? If you say you don't need a hug, I'll believe you. But I do have your permission, right?" "Uh, sure" A fraction of a second later, her arms were wrapped around me. "Fine, maybe I did need that. Thanks" "Anytime"
"You know what else I could make a model of?" "The place I won't say the name of?" "Too traumatic. I was thinking of our school. Having a model would also help with planning out battle strategy in case of a monster attack" "Because that's totally gonna happen" "It would be the third, not counting any potential ones that I'm simply not aware of due to amnesia. All I need are the plans for the building" "How will you get those? They're probably not available, assuming they still exist" "I might not get the original plans, but what I do have access to are the evacuation plans because they are literally everywhere. I just have to get good pictures of them. Then I'll also need the height of each story, but I can get that from the height of the stairs. It's all really simple if you think about it. I'll get everything I need. Be right back."
Fine, maybe that was a lie. I had to go through every floor of every building and take a high quality picture of the evacuation plan in addition to having to count the stairs. I also initially forgot to take my phone with me since I never really do that and had to go back, which I guess technically means that I did return quickly, just not for long. After getting my phone, it took me almost half an hour to collect all the information I needed. Once I got back to our room, I began working on the model. I used some shortcuts to create a model in under five minutes. This one was still very simple and detail deficient, but it would at least serve as a good basis for everything else. Once this was set up, I began working on the details