"So, what do you wanna do next?" Paul asked. "Fight some monsters?" "You know," Annabeth said. "When you're a demigod, you're pretty much forced to fight monsters constantly, so I'd rather just relax and do nothing dangerous" "Second that" I added. I sensed an opportunity to grow my ever expanding list of things you can do with water. "I recently heard of this thing where they put a lot of salt in water, and then you can't feel your own weight anymore. It's supposed to be super relaxing, even meditative." "Sounds great, any ideas what that would cost?" "Depends" "Depends on what? Seriously, why do people always say 'depends' without stating on what it depends" "On whether you are dating a demigod child of Poseidon and are near an ocean. If you answer both questions with yes, it's free." "Ok, so it's free for me. Are you just going to take water from the ocean?" "Correct. Now, if you mix water at ocean temperature and maximum salt saturation with salt free water such that the mixture has the correct salinity to float a human, how warm would that second water have to be if you want the mixture to be at a comfortable bathtub temperature?" I asked. "Annabeth, do math" I jokingly added.
"Probably hotter than your bathtub gets. But I can just set it to maximum." "And if that's too cold, I can warm it up. Since you explained how temperature works, I've been practicing a bit. Look!" I froze and then unfroze the top layer in my glass of water. "So, are you two gonna do that like right now?" My mom asked. "Sure, why not. One of you can fill the bathtub while I get saltwater. How much will I need?" "I'd say about 150 liters if you concentrate the salt. That's about this much" She made a rough sphere shape with her hands. "Ok, I'll get that. I'll probably have to go to the river though, but the bathtub takes ages to fill up anyways, so I'll be back before that." And just like that, I went to the east river for the third time in three days. Once there, I forced the salt to collect in one place. I had only used this ability once when someone whose last name may or may not begin with 'con' and end with 'oll' had poured a bunch of salt into my drink. Once I couldn't concentrate the salt any more, I lifted a sphere of water about the size that Annabeth had shown me out of the river. I then made the water collect behind me and pushed it forward, which then pushed me forward. I got pretty fast for a few meters before falling flat on my face. I got some bad scratches, but I could just heal myself with the water. I then tried the same technique again, just this time I lifted myself up a bit, enough for me to not actually walk, but not enough for Zeus to get mad. I reached the front door and rang. "Hello, water delivery service here." I said with a distorted voice. "Come on in seaweed brain" Annabeth laughed as she opened the door for me.
With the water following me like a swarm of air support bees (you can thank my dad for that analogy) I made my way to the bathroom and dumped all the water into the already mostly full bathtub. Like Annabeth had predicted, the water was now too cold, so I focused on increasing the individual particles' kinetic energy (Look Annabeth, I can do science talk) in order to make it more comfortable. "Okay then, the bath is prepared." I called over to Annabeth
Annabeth
"Okay then, the bath is prepared." I heard Percy call from the bathroom. "Well, time for me to chill." I went to Percy. "So, how are we going to do this? I'd say I'll just get undressed and go into the tub?" "Pretty much. I'm assuming you don't have a swimsuit here? Well, even if, I think wearing anything ruins the experience." "I don't have anything with me, so I guess I'll have to go naked. What are you going to do? Stay with me?" I realized that he'd be seeing me in the bathtub without anything on. I'm relatively certain that I blushed heavily at that thought. Percy definitely did. "Uh, I don't think my mom would approve of that" he eventually said. That was true. "She definitely wouldn't. So I guess you leave now?" "Yeah, uh, see you in like an hour or whenever you finished relaxing" Percy said, still blushing a bit before leaving the bathroom. Time for me to see whether this was really as good as the advertisements claimed.
I took off my clothes and stepped into the tub. It felt really weird; I had never been in water this salty. I instantly floated to the top. I actually could not feel my own weight anymore which was a really weird sensation. Okay, the weight was gone, time for the light. Upon inspection the room, I noticed that the Jackson's apartment had not been designed by a psychopath, meaning that the light switch was inside the bathroom. I grabbed the showerhead and swung it in an arch towards said switch. Unfortunately it hit the upper half, meaning that the light stayed on. On my next attempt, I swung the head with a very slightly decreased speed, which meant that centrifugal force was weaker and gravity could pull the head down just a few centimeters more, causing it to hit the lower portion this time and turn off the light. Of course, it wasn't completely dark, but some light came in through the doorframe. I don't like being in complete darkness, I prefer having some point of orientation. The last time I had been unable to see, I had almost fallen into the river of pain. And the time before that, I had almost fallen off a cliff. Two memories I didn't particularly like. As I lay there, I gradually lost my sense of time. Had I been here for a minute or five hours, I could not say. Logically speaking, I knew it was probably far less than five hours because after that much time in the water I would have needed to go to the toilet long ago. I changed my statement to one minute or one hour. The slow sloshing of the water (did you know that every body of water has its own specific sloshing period? The larger the body, the longer the period, though for oceans, this process is overridden by the tides. In the Bay of Fundy, sloshing and tides actually boost each other, resulting in the water level rising and falling by 14 DeLoreans. That was science hour with Annabeth, now back to me in the bathtub) was almost hypnotic and my consciousness seemed to slip into darkness.
When I opened my eyes again, I was laying in green grass. It looked a bit too green to be real, almost neon green. It was also quite foggy, even by the standards of someone who lives in San Francisco, but the fog was much darker than it would normally be. Was this a dream? While I had been searching for Percy in my dreams (Which actually sort of worked btw) I had gotten quite good at recognizing dreams and this didn't feel like one. But if this was not a dream, what was it? I recalled something Piper had once mentioned with regards to DID. Inner worlds. From what I understood, it was basically like a dream world in your head, except it was permanently there and all alters could access it. Maybe I had somehow reached it. I got up and looked around. Next to me was something that looked like a black earth dam. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that it looked like a root. But what kind of root was black and over a meter thick. Looking at the color of it, I couldn't help but think of Thalia. Now all that was missing was someone etching "death to Barbie" into the wood. I followed the root in the direction I assumed the tree to be. When I looked up after a hundred meters or so, my breath was taken away.
Before me was a massive tree. It looked like pine, but it was black as the night. A normal night, not as black as Nyx. A portion of its top was blue though. Was this what Chris had been talking about a few days ago? He had mentioned a blue branch. Also, it was massive. Easily as big as Hyperion. The tree Hyperion, not the titan. And it was a good 15 meters in radius. Most surprisingly, all of this didn't seem sinister or evil. I didn't feel intimidated by this behemoth of a tree. I felt… safe. Safe in the way a small child feels safe in their mother's arms. Maybe it was because this tree reminded me of Thalia who had made me feel extremely safe. Well, extremely safe relative to how I had felt before she and Luke had found me. And in a way, Thalia had been like a mother to me. One thing I had realized a few years ago was that some cultures and languages don't differentiated between the words aunt and mother, and Thalia and Athena were half-sisters, so someone from that culture could truthfully refer to Thalia as my mother. That was another (very short) science hour with Annabeth.
As I look at the tree, I suddenly thought of a story my aunt Natalie had told me when I was around five. It was about an unimaginably huge tree named Yggdrasil that connected different worlds. I think it stems from Norse mythology. As I thought about the possible implications of the fact that other mythological stories existed, I heard the Percy-Thalia-mix-voice say "It's magnificent, right? I turned around and saw someone that looked pretty much how I would have expected based on their voice. "Oh, uh, hi" I stammered. "Are you an alter?" "Correct" they said. "I'm a protector. I was originally modeled after Thalia, because she made you feel safe. Ever since Percy showed up, I've been slowly changing to be more like him, because Percy currently gives you far more comfort than Thalia." They were right. Not that I didn't trust Thalia, she had just lost her status of being almost twice as old as me. In fact, she was about 383 days younger than me and just didn't make as good a protector as Percy did. So it made change for this alter to change. "So, if you're Thalia and Percy, then are you a boy or a girl? Or something else?" "By now, I'm a boy. It took me a while to change, but now it's settled. Oh, I think there's something happening outside, is anyone fronting?" "I don't know, this is the first time I'm not unconscious while not fronting. As far as I know, I'm in a bathtub basically asleep. But it's saltwater, so we can't drown." "Well, I think I'll just check if anyone is fronting." A moment later, he disappeared. It looked a bit like a video of him walking away had been replayed at 100X speed. Or maybe like a ship from star wars entering hyperspace (Percy had once watched one of the movies with me. It had been quite evident how much he loved me since he stayed for the entire movie while no one else had ever managed to put up with my complaints for more than twenty minutes) I was alone again and I hadn't even been able to ask for his name.
I circled the tree once, which took over a minute. I didn't notice anything interesting besides some small dents in the wood, like someone had climbed up the tree and put their hands and feet on the exact same spot every time about ten million times. "Hey Annabeth" I heard a child's voice from above. "I'm coming down" I looked up just in time to see a young girl about ten meters above me sitting on a branch. She jumped down and landed on the ground seemingly unharmed. She looked a lot like me, only about ten years younger. Also, her hair was a bit darker than mine, still light enough to be called blonde but not enough to match the 'dumb blonde' stereotype. (I know this didn't sound like it should make sense, but it did. Later, I'd find out that that was a common theme here.) That was one thing I had often felt insecure about. I knew I was not dumb, I was in at least the top five smartest people I knew, but I still cared about what others thought of me.
The girl said something, but I wasn't listening. "What did you say, I was thinking" "You think a lot. I asked how you got here. Is this your first time here?" "Correct, never been here before. Is it always this foggy? I can barely see the other side of the tree" "I don't think it's foggy, maybe you can't see well because it's your first time here." "Makes sense. Probably. I don't really understand how this DID stuff works." Not wanting to repeat my mistake, I added "Oh, what's your name by the way?" "I'm Annie. At least that's what Percy called me. You still didn't say how you got here" I hate when that happens. You ask two questions, one gets answered, the conversation continues and the second question remains without answer. "Sorry, I took a bath in salt water because I heard it's relaxing and I ended up here. It was kind of a birthday present, I celebrate that today." "I know, I helped build the Lego set" So she was who did that. I only remembered looking at the panda Percy had gotten back and then sitting on the ground building with Legos.
So, Annabeth does have an inner world, who would have though. Also, I'm finally caught up to schedule again. What do you think of the tree? Or the rest of the world? Hoping to receive some feedback. Also, I just now realized that sensory deprivation might actually leave you quite vulnerable to your own trauma, or maybe not, I'm no expert. Well, let's just say Annabeth was protected by *The magic of fanfiction*.