On the way back to our room, I saw the guy from earlier. "Hey, what's your name?" I asked. "Why do you want to know?" "Because if I don't know, our conversation will get awkward" "Fine, it's Jonas" "Okay Jonas, I wanted to apologize. Maybe I shouldn't have been so aggressive with you" "Well, I did drop your food" "But not because you're evil. No, you were way too easy to break emotionally for that. Bullies like you usually have some personal issues that they try to cover up by being mean to others" "What are you, a hobby psychologist?" "No, I'm more into architecture, but I know a thing or two about psychology as well" We had reached our room. "Want to come with us I said as I opened the door. A quick glance from Piper confirmed she was okay with it" "If you don't lock me up inside" "Look, the last thing I want is that you're scared of me. I can't help you if you're scared" "Fine, I'll come in" We sat down on my bed, Piper on hers, and I continued the conversation.
"I'll start with the most important question: why do you feel the need to go after other people? Is it because it makes you feel stronger than them?" He nodded. "And without that, you'd feel…" "Weak I guess" "Low self-esteem I'd say." "Probably" "How are you doing in school?" "Honestly, not great. I only ended up here because my dad is really rich, I don't really have what it takes. And I guess gifted kid burnout" "Really, you seem intelligent to me" "Yeah, but I have severe ADHD. Not officially diagnosed, but I'm pretty sure. Makes it hard to focus in school" "I know" I gave him some tips on how to survive school with ADHD.
"You know what, I'll try that. They seem like they could work so why not?" "I hope they do. It's always good when I get to help people" As he left Piper added "Because she has severe abandonment issues and is clinging onto anything that makes her think people like her" "Piper!" "What, it's true" "It is, but you don't need to call me out like that in front of him" "Yeah, sorry" Piper stepped out onto the corridor and shouted "Annabeth is completely fine mentally" She almost convinced me I was fine as well, but a little voice in my head reminded me that I was not. I don't mean that metaphorically, someone was talking near the front (and if I really was fine, I wouldn't have DID), but I didn't understand them. After that, we got ready for bed.
I slammed through the wall and fell. I didn't know what I had been expecting, but it wasn't a three meter drop. After landing, I continued, over a small channel and crossing a wide chasm and a woven bridge. The bridge ended in a tunnel. Once I got closer to the end of that, I started to feel very uneasy. Suddenly, I saw a large statue wrapped in spider webs. Despite it being in a way concealed, it radiated a lot of energy, which made me at least a bit more comfortable. That feeling of comfort was instantly shattered when I heard an ancient and definitely not human voice saying "I've been waiting for you" as a massive human-spider-hybrid-thing slowly crawled into my field of view.
I woke up in my bed where I belonged. I was breathing quickly and my heart was pounding loud enough to hear. Normally, my next line of action would have been to sneak to where Percy was sleeping and have him comfort me, but he wasn't here right now. He wasn't gone, he hadn't abandoned me, he was just at a different school. It was important that I made this differentiation, especially since I was already in a triggered state. I knew I'd have to ground myself or else I'd risk a panic attack- or worse. In the light of our daggers, I could make out my necklace. I reached for it and went through the pearls until I arrived on the sixth one: the trident. I thought about the event it represented, Percy sleeping in the big house, drooling. Instantly, my emotional state got a lot better. I kept one finger on the trident while continuing with the other. In addition to symbolizing Percy, the sensation of the rough clay was great for grounding. Eventually, I found the coral Percy had brought me from his father's palace. I held both of them like it was some kind of ritual to summon Percy. While that did not work, I did manage to "summon" at least a bit of the comfort that he'd give me. I checked the time. 5:45, so there was no point in going back to sleep now. Not that it would have worked. Adrenaline and sleep don't really go together. Instead, I began working on an essay I had to write. Of course I couldn't actually write it without turning on the lights and waking up Piper, so instead I just came up with the text and memorized it to write down later. After I had finished a few paragraphs, my alarm went off, so I began getting ready for breakfast. A few minutes later, Piper's alarm also went off. Seeing her slowly waking up reminded me of Friday morning last week. Something about her looking at me, her eyes barely open, just seemed very cute to me and after the nightmare I had just had, I wouldn't complain about a bit of free dopamine. Once Piper was fully awake, the usual routine started; getting dressed, eating breakfast, minor traumatic incident. I was just casually walking back to our room when I saw a guy with dark hair and an eye patch. Don't ask me why he had one, maybe he had had eye surgery and it had to be covered for a while. Either way, the eye patch caused some unpleasant memories. At first, I felt a stabbing pain in my shoulder. That made sense because said unpleasant memory had been a stab wound. Then came the poison, spreading through my shoulder. I winced in pain. "Are you alright?" "Yeah, just a flashback, it's only physical. For now at least" I picked up my pace, barely making it to my room before collapsing on the floor. Piper gave me a weird look. "What, I just got stabbed in the shoulder with a poisoned knife. I know it's not real, but it still hurts a lot" I managed to get up for a moment and reach for my grounding hairbrush. My plan had worked and the tape had attracted a bunch of small particles that provided a great sensory input, strong enough to overpower the feeling of the Brooklyn Bridge below my hands. It took a few minutes of grounding plus Piper telling me (and me telling myself) that it was over, but eventually the pain in my shoulder subsided. "Okay, what just happened?" "Ethan Nakamura. During the battle of Manhattan, he tried to stab Percy with a poisoned blade, but I intercepted it" "Wasn't Percy like immortal during the battle?" "Firstly, he wasn't immortal, just invulnerability. That's not the same, just ask the Nemean lion. Secondly, Achilles spot. Ethan was just lucky and aimed perfectly, so I had to protect Percy. Whatever the case, Ethan had an eye patch, just like the guy we just walked by. That similarly, along with his hair, was enough to trigger the flashback. In retrospect, stabbing me damaged the other side more than ours" "Why?" "Well, what does Percy do with those who hurt me?" "Makes sense" "And at that point he was practically invulnerable and not weakened by the pit, so he was an even better fighter than he is now" "I almost feel sorry for the titans now. But seriously, what did Percy do?" "Have you ever been to Central Park at sunrise?" "Once. It was a date with Jason" "Did you notice any tree that stood out?" "Well, there was this one tree that almost seemed to glow in the morning light" "That's because it was. The tree used to be Hyperion" "Like the eastern titan?" "Exactly that Hyperion. Percy went full on hurricane at him." "Just because someone stabbed you?" "I'd like to think so, but the fact that Kronos wanted to wipe out humanity probably also helped a bit. And of course the prospect of getting a kiss from me. But yes, it was partially to avenge me" "Don't you think he's a bit overprotective?" "By normal standards definitely, but my wants and needs are far from normal. You can be as protective as you want, as long as you don't prevent me from doing the things I want in order to protect me further, I won't mind." "Good to know. I think we should probably go to our lesson now"
After having a minute of silence, we continued learning about, as Piper had put it, circles that spin, some Greek letters and forces that don't exist. The first few lessons passed mostly without anything interesting happening, or maybe I just didn't notice. The flashback had stirred a few things up in the headspace so I was quite dissociated for a while. I kind of listened to the teacher and took some notes, but since I was pretty much on autopilot, well, let's just say the ω and π for angular velocity weren't the only Greek letters in my notes. During the break, I decided to do something about that "Piper?" "Yeah" "I'll try to sort things out in my brain. You make sure nothing bad happens" "Sure. It's not like anything will happen though" "Almost a decade of monster attacks changes your perception of danger. I probably shouldn't be talking about that, I'm already triggered enough from the eye patch thing" "Okay, I'll protect you" I sat down on a bench and tried to reach inward. After a few seconds of focusing, the outside noises began to fade. Hey, who's there I asked. I heard at least three voices answering me, followed by their individual names. Okay. I'm assuming seeing the guy with the eye patch triggered you to come to the headspace. Yeah, Ethan. I'll deal with him if you let me switch. Don't worry, that wasn't actually Ethan, the boy just looked like him. How can you be so sure if wasn't him? Ethan died like a year ago. Makes sense, dead people usually don't walk around school hallways. Okay, you heard what Annabeth said, no danger, no need to switch, everyone get out the headspace. Slowly, I felt my thoughts clearing up again. I mentally returned to the real world again. "Okay, everything is cleared up. The guy and the subsequent flashback brought a bunch of people to front because they thought we were in danger, but it's resolved now."
After the break, we went to our next class because where else would we go? The next few lessons followed the usual structure of me correcting my teacher. At some point I'd probably get in trouble for that, but so far I could rake in good marks for knowing everything. Also, I wasn't emotionally attached to my teachers, so my abandonment issues were incapable of triggering my people pleasing behavior, but you probably figured that out on my first day of school when I insulted the entire American school system on account of having too much hubris. Maybe that had been a bit hypocritical, but I acknowledged it so it doesn't count. After finishing the last lesson, we walked around the school for a bit before going back to our room.
"There's one question I've asked myself today every year since I was eight, with decreasing seriousness" "What is it?" "Could you make a plane-proof building?" "Now that I think about it, that's pretty much the only question an aspiring architect would ask herself specifically on this day" "But like, could you?" "I mean, the building would have to withstand immense forces" "Actually, that's not the big problem. The impact wasn't actually what made the towers fall. It probably weakened the structure, but what actually caused the collapse was the kerosene leaking and catching fire which melted or at least weakened the steel supports. I think I even made some designs when I was young and luckily, I have all of my old drawings digitalized. Let me just…" I went through my scanned images and eventually found my old plans. I first converted them into height maps, then took the corresponding 3D models and imported them into blender where I used some modifiers to merge the different perspectives into one model. "So, how exactly is this plane-proof?" "I'm glad you asked" "Oh no" "Why oh no?" "Because now you're gonna hold a two hour presentation" "True. So, I considered replacing the steel beams with tungsten because of the higher melting point, but I figured it'd be too heavy and probably also too expensive, though I'm not sure by how much. Let me look it up"
"So turns out if you buy tungsten trioxide, the price for the actual tungsten is still less than a third the price of steel. Don't ask me why, but the internet doesn't lie. So, I still didn't do tungsten supports. Instead I opted for a cooling system inside the beams. The idea is that the beams are insulated with aerogel and wrapped with another layer of steel so it won't get ruined by liquids. Inside the inner beams, pressurized water is slowly circulating. Now that I think about it, the aerogel is probably also expensive, but the raw materials actually aren't, so you could probably scale the process cost effectively. Then, there's also CO2 based extinguisher systems which use thermal cameras to identify fires. The gas is released in bursts long enough to kill fire, but not long enough to kill humans. The final adaptation I made is in the structure of the beams. They follow a beta plead sheet" "Annabeth, no biology please" "Fine. The beams are arranged in a sort of zigzaggy structure that will be better able to absorb strong impacts" "If this design is so great, why aren't people building it?" "Because I've hyper focused on making it plane-proof while completely neglecting every other quality a building should have. I usually don't make mistakes like that, but in this case I focused specifically on this aspect and also I was eight and maybe I overestimated the demand for plane-proof buildings. Plus I had to process that event somehow" "Makes sense. I mean, 3000 deaths just a few kilometers away, that's pretty intense" "Sure, that's what I meant. But in addition to that, the destruction of the buildings also sucks. One of the reasons I like architecture so much is because it allows you to create something permanent. Permanence is one of many things I lacked in childhood. Buildings, especially ones at that scale, always give me a sense of comfort and safety because they have this factor of permanence to them, so seeing them destroyed hurts almost as much as a betrayal because it shows me that even if something seems permanent, that might not be the case" "I don't think I've ever heard someone talk this deeply about buildings" "I think there's a lot of things about me you haven't seen in anyone else yet" "Like having multiple personalities?" "For example, though the term 'personalities' is misleading so maybe don't use it" "I'll try to remember. I also don't know any other girl who'd be so chill about being five weeks overdue" "I am always so stressed about everything that I just appear chill. But regarding that, I actually am not that concerned for obvious reasons" "But weren't you also conceived without…" "Valid point, but Athena was also never pregnant, so still no" "Fine. No Percabeth babies" "Wasn't planning on it either. I'd say Percy and I first finish school and university, move in together, I get over all of my parenting related trauma and then we can consider it. Unless Leo ever actually leaves the friend zone and has children, then Percy and I need to hurry up to, uh, produce some supernatural firefighters" "That's something I never thought about. What would your kids be capable of" "Good question. This is godly genetics so Mendel can go jump out of a window. They might have extraordinary water powers because in Addition to being grandchildren to Poseidon, they'd also be grandchildren of Athena, who is herself the granddaughter of Okeanos and Thethys, both of which are titans associated with the ocean. They'd probably also be very good at knots because that's related to both seafaring and weaving" "I wonder how mine and Jason's children would turn out" "Probably very horny" "Okay, that's fair. Honestly, the fact that our parents don't have any children is nothing short of a miracle. Wait, isn't there a version where harmonia is their daughter?" "Some versions say Aphrodite is her mom, sometimes Zeus is her dad, but it's never both of them" "Okay. So I guess me and Jason will be the first ones to mix those genes" "No, Harmonia's daughter dated Zeus, resulting in Mr D and the invention of Mpreg" "Um, what?" "Remember, the thing with Zeus' thigh? I think that counts" "Probably. The Greeks where up to some weird stuff" "Yeah. Daedalus invented the fursuit" "I don't even want to know how that happened"