Lost in Foreign Seas

Lost in Foreign Seas ThatGit

Summary:

Months after the end of the Second Titan War, Percy Jackson is lost and despondent. They won the war, but victory came at far too high a cost. Then, while exploring the depths of the sea for monsters to fight and secrets to discover, Percy finds himself sucked through to a strange new world without gods and monsters. Where is he? What is going on? And why are all these crazy mortals with super powers running around fighting each other in silly costumes?

Chapter 1: Cast Adrift

Chapter Text

I awoke to crashing waves, cold rain, and the soft creak of aging wood. There was something digging into my shoulder. It didn't really hurt, very few external things did these past few months, but I could still feel a very unpleasant sort of pressure that I had grown very familiar with.

I felt… sore. That was the best word I could think of to describe the sensation, but it doesn't really capture the bone-deep ache that pervaded my entire body, the constant throbbing of my muscles, and the knife-like sensation of air tickling my lungs. The closest thing I could compare it to was the horrible moments I remembered from when I'd first washed up on Calypso's island, but more… earthy. Okay, that made more sense in my head. Think less fire and more… earthquake? Ugh.

I groaned softly, the gentle pitter-patter of raindrops splashing against my skin sending waves of soothing chill through my body. The waves beneath me moved in time with my heartbeat, rising up to cover my legs and then crashing down and sending a pleasant splatter of seawater over me. Despite the falling rain, raging sea, and the heavy fog, I was completely warm and dry, the waters around me refusing to even soak into my clothes, much less harm their prince.

I'm not quite sure how long I laid there. The pain wracking my body gradually receded minute by minute, hour by hour. Slowly but surely, the sea settled and the rain subsided. A warm trickle of sunlight fell across my face, painting the inside of my eyelids with a rosy glow. I stiffly raised a hand to shield my face and was surprised when the motion didn't send renewed waves of agony radiating down my spine.

I sat up slowly, celestial bronze plates clinking softly against one another. Refreshing seawater tickled my toes. The tide had gone out and waves that had once reached almost up to the bottom of the pier now struggled to brush against my dangling sneakers.

Without having to open my eyes I knew exactly where I was. Massachusetts, a few hours north of Boston. A son of Poseidon was never lost at sea and sitting on a pier extending out into the bay was good enough to qualify.

On the other hand, how I'd gotten here was a much more difficult question. I had been exploring the depths of the ocean a few hundred miles off the coast of Florida and then…

"Aghh!" I winced and clutched my head, a cry of pain wrenched from my lips by the sudden stabbing pain in my skull. I could remember darkness… a woman's voice, booming like thunder in my ringing ears… and pain.

The memories burned, each static image outlined in stabbing knives and scorching flames. Something had swallowed me, chewed me up, and spit me out… here? No, a few miles away from here, deep under the ocean. I could remember commanding the waters to bring me to shore, but that was it. A friendly pod of dolphins had dragged me most of the way and then the ocean had risen up, depositing me gently on the pier before withdrawing.

Without really thinking about it, I commanded the sea beneath me and the waves rushed to obey. I gasped in relief as a huge wave crashed over me, dousing me in a deluge of icy, refreshing seawater. The ache behind my eyes receded slightly, my migraine going from actively debilitating to simply agonizing.

I collapsed back onto the pier breathing heavily and instantly remembered why I'd decided to sit up. Bright light plus piercing headache. Certainly not in my top ten favorite sensations. I hadn't felt this terrible since the day after our victory against the Titans. Drowning my sorrows in godly wine had seemed like a good idea in the moment, but the aftermath of so much nectar and divine spirits had left me a groaning, whimpering husk for hours.

It was almost ironic: fighting Kronos had hurt so much less than celebrating his death. I could almost see Annabeth's crooked smile, hands on her hips as she stared down at me with her beautiful, stormy-gray eyes. 'Why the hell did you think that was a good idea? Even a Seaweed Brain like you should know better!'

My heart clenched, phantom pain momentarily overwhelming the very real pain in my head. It had been nearly six months now, but hot tears pooled at the corners of my eyes. Oh Annabeth, I would have died for you ten-thousand times over. That wasn't how it was supposed to end. It was supposed to be me. My choice, my soul, my life…

Another wave rushed over me, shocking me out of my downward spiral. My mind cleared for a moment and I forcefully shoved painful thoughts and memories down into the lightless depths where they belonged. I had already spent long weeks drifting in the ocean currents, lost in hopeless thoughts and wracked by pain and guilt. Now was not the time.

I struggled to my feet and opened my eyes. I needed to gather my bearings and get back to camp, or, barring that, Atlantis. I had no idea what Tartarus-cursed horror I had stumbled across, but anything that could leave me half-dead was serious bad news. I didn't like to brag, but I'd fought a titan to a standstill and this time I'd literally been in my element. Hopefully Chiron or Dad would know something.

Looking around, I found myself standing on a dilapidated wooden dock surrounded on all sides by some of the worst urban decay I'd ever seen. On one side there was a long stretch of beach covered in debris. Bits of scrap metal, broken bottles, and a small mountain of other washed-up junk almost completely covered the sand and the crumbling concrete road running along the shoreline was littered with deep potholes and trash.

On my other side, a number of boxy, dilapidated warehouses led to what had once clearly been a busy cargo dock, complete with a number of cranes and massive concrete docks extending out into the deeper waters of the bay. The majority of the cranes looked completely inoperable, broken in places and horribly rusted. Only one in the far distance seemed to be in any sort of working order.

One of the docks was occupied by an enormous, rusting hulk extending half out of the water. The former container ship lay on its side in waters far too shallow for it. A number of empty, badly damaged containers were just barely visible on its upper deck and there were several gaping holes in its hull. I could feel its history singing to me, a proud career of two decades ended in passion and tragedy.

Where was I? I wasn't exactly a great student––between my dyslexia and getting kicked out of every school I'd ever attended my education had been rather spotty––and geography was in no way my best subject, but I didn't remember learning about any city like this. New England was dotted with ports, some much busier than others, but this was a massive installation that I'd never heard of. I'd spent the better part of five months swimming up and down the east coast of the United States and I would have absolutely noticed a place like this.

I turned around, intending to dive into the sea to get a better sense of where I was, and my jaw fell open as I beheld the massive structure standing proudly at the center of the bay. A refitted oil rig rose from the sea, surrounded by what was unmistakably a giant force-field––like something out of those goofy science-fiction movies my stepdad Paul loved too much.

Arches and spires gleamed oddly through the force-field, the bright morning sunlight making the entire structure shine like one giant, prismatic jewel. A glowing bridge connected it to the mainland, one long line of color supported by nothing at all, along which a small convoy of black cars inched along, each one looking barely larger than an ant from this distance. If not for the way the force-field seemed to refract the light shining through it, I might have thought that they were flying.

What in Amphitrite's lacy panties was that? Had Hephaestus decided to move one of his workshops out of a volcano and slapped it right off the coast of some big city?

No, that didn't feel right. There was no way he would use a disguise like this. Even the dumbest mortal wouldn't ignore that. Rachel and Chiron had been giving me some lessons and I couldn't feel a single bit of Mist clouding my eyesight. This wasn't some trick of the eye or anything like that, and those cars were cars, not chariots. Somehow, this was a mortal construct. Di immortales, what was going on?

I spun around and quickly hobbled down the dock towards shore. Taking a deep breath, I stuck two fingers in my mouth and gave a New York whistle; the whistle a cabby could hear from a block away and over the ever-present din of pedestrians and honking cars.

There was no response. I reached the shoreline and leaned heavily against a half-rotten wooden fence, unreasonably exhausted by the sudden exertion.

I frowned and tried again, my piercing whistle echoing down the empty streets and bouncing off the sides of boarded-up buildings and crumbling masonry. Mrs. O'Leary had never failed to come when I called her before. She'd been one of my most constant companions these past few months, happily meeting me in every port I visited and even descending into the depths of the ocean to visit me while I stayed at Poseidon's court.

Maybe she was busy? Or perhaps the distance from here to Florida, the last place I'd seen her, was just too far for her to hear me? It was probably that. Yeah, definitely that. Or maybe it was just taking her a few minutes to get here, shadow travel was fast but not really instantaneous.

I waited for several minutes, doing my best to stretch out my sore muscles without taking off any of my armor or dropping my guard. Riptide's pen-form was a comforting weight in my back pocket. The sword had never truly failed me, no matter what Ares had said or done.

Now that I was away from the water I realized that it was actually pretty cold, the wind blowing off the ocean biting into the exposed skin of my face and hands. I was very glad for the jean jacket and gray hoodie I always wore over my armor. In the aftermath of the war, I never really felt comfortable walking around without it, but the Mist could only do so much to hide what I was wearing from mortals. Sure, they didn't see me decked out like a hoplite, but kevlar and cosplay were both rather distinctive regardless.

I was just considering trying for another whistle when I heard something––no, someone–– approaching. I turned around slowly, wincing in pain as my back protested the motion, and saw a sickly looking man in a ragged brown coat and too-big boots hurrying towards me.

Seeing me turn around, he sped up, a wild look in his bloodshot eyes and a strained smile on his nearly emaciated face. "You! You!" he cried out, his voice high and reedy. He reached behind him and pulled out a large handgun, brandishing it in the air in my general direction.

"Gimme your wallet, hands up in the air where I can see them!" he gasped out, "Your phone too! And, and, and that jacket you got there looks mighty nice, off, off, off!"

I stared at him quizzically. Was he… mugging me? It was hard to take him seriously; he looked like he belonged in a hospital, not out on the street. I had lived in the seedier parts of the Big Apple for most of my life, but no one had ever tried to mug me before.

"You deaf or something, stupid fucker? I said hands in the air and gimme your wallet! Now! I have a gun!" He waved his pistol violently and I was worried for a moment that he was going to shoot himself. "I'ma shoot you, man! Don't test me!"

He was almost on top of me now and I could smell him, the stench of unwashed clothing, moldy food, and cigarette smoke reminding me unpleasantly of my old stepdad Smelly Gabe. I waved my hand through the air, trying to remember Chiron's lessons on how to hide myself from mortals with the Mist, but nothing happened. My head was pounding, the dull thump of my heartbeat making me grit my teeth in discomfort.

The man looked desperate, hungry, and the gleam in his bloodshot eyes told me that he wasn't really all there right now. I raised my hands slowly towards him, palms out. "Calm down," I began, but my voice caught in my too-dry throat and I coughed loudly.

The sudden motion sent a renewed wave of pain arcing down my spine and shaking my limbs and I slumped forward, caught in a very unpleasant coughing fit. Unfortunately, that seemed to be the last straw for the man's already fraying nerves.

There was a loud, sharp bang and I felt something slap against my shoulder. A small piece of flattened metal tinkled to the ground, bouncing several times on the cracked pavement before coming to a rest by my foot.

I straightened just in time to see the man scrambling away from me, eyes wide with fear. "Cape!" he called out loudly, his voice shaking with fear, "Cape! I diden realize you was a freaking cape! Don't hurt me, I'm sorry man, I'm sorry!"

He stumbled, fell, crawled for several steps, then lurched to his feet and bolted away down the road, disappearing a moment later around a corner.

I stared after him, bemused by his reaction but unwilling to chase him down. I had much bigger things to worry about, like Mrs. O'Leary's continued absence. I was mildly curious what exactly the Mist had shown him to make him react like that, but it didn't really matter. He'd probably just remember this as a bad drug trip or something like that. It was probably whatever, even if he made a big deal of it I doubted anyone would ever believe him, nor would anything come of it.

Wiping my fingers on my sweatshirt, I stuck them back in my mouth and whistled a third time. I would give her another ten minutes and then I was jumping back in the water and taking the long way back to camp. It was less than two-hundred miles back to Long Island. Even in my current state I could make the trip in under an hour.

This time however, there was a response, just not the one I expected. A figure blasted down out of the sky like a comet and came to a sudden stop just a few feet away from me, floating motionlessly an inch above the ground. She was tall and curvy, her figure highlighted by the sleek white dress she was wearing.

Despite the weather, she was wearing a skirt that ended at her mid-thigh, though her high boots and shoulder-cape did look rather warm. Her platinum-blonde hair was held back by a gleaming golden tiara and she radiated a palpable aura of menace that seemed to fill the air around me and made my skin prickle uncomfortably.

I had no idea what goddess she might be, but knowing my luck she had probably been one of the minor ones that sided with the Titans. She didn't feel particularly powerful––I'd met a lot of gods since the war ended and had learned a bit about how to distinguish someone who could turn me into a smoking husk in the blink of an eye from just a very immortal waste of time––but it was honestly hard to tell.

She didn't really feel like any goddess I'd ever met, but I had no idea what else she might be. Flying plus weird spiky crown plus weather-inappropriate outfit sounded pretty goddess-like to me. I wanted to sigh. At least she probably wasn't a monster, not that my track record with non-monsters wasn't that much better.

Chapter 2: Glorious Confusion

Chapter Text

In my experience, the best way to deal with gods is to not deal with them at all. Take it from someone who's met way too many of them. Most gods are assholes. Even my dad, one of the nicest and most personable gods I'd met, had a rather hefty reputation for being a dick when offended or minorly inconvenienced.

Unfortunately, gods tend to be a bit pushy and don't really like taking no for an answer. When you do have to deal with a god, it is important to be wary but respectful. Gods don't take insults lightly, and it's very hard to know what will and won't insult a god. Sure, some things are obvious; don't call them mean names, don't murder people in their temples, don't slaughter their worshipers, don't rape their priestesses, don't break oaths sworn in their name, don't feed them dead babies, don't say you're better than them at something they do, and so on.

Others are less straightforward. Especially if you don't know anything about the god or goddess in question, just try to keep your mouth shut and get through things. That isn't always foolproof––some gods are offended when mortals don't beg and grovel on sight, but if you run into one of those you're probably fucked anyway.

Fortunately I had a bit more leeway than most mortals or even demigods. Being the Hero of Olympus had its perks. Even outside of that, unless I was dealing with a major god or goddess, between the Curse of Achilles, my demigod powers, and the slowly blooming blessing I received at the end of the war, I could probably take them if I really had to. Since I didn't recognize this floaty, princess-looking goddess, she probably wasn't anyone super powerful.

Still, that was no reason to get cocky. I carefully shifted my weight slightly, my left hand drifting towards where I could feel Riptide's pen form in my back pocket. I was only a few steps away from the sea. If a fight broke out, I would leap back off the pier into the surf. I wasn't in great shape right now, but the saltwater should give me enough of a boost that I could at least make a hasty retreat.

In any case, I hoped that wasn't going to be necessary. I had enough enemies as it was. "Hello," I greeted, bowing my head slightly without breaking my line of sight. "Way to make an entrance, solid ten out of ten."

She narrowed her eyes and I had to hold back a sigh. Someday I would remember not to joke around with goddesses. None of them ever had a sense of humor.

Expecting some sort of rebuke, I was surprised when she looked around, scanning our dilapidated surroundings with practiced ease, then turned back towards me. My skin prickled and I could see suspicion in her eyes. "I thought I heard a gunshot," she called out loudly, "Did you see anything? Is anyone hurt?"

That was not what I had been expecting at all. She sounded genuinely worried. I'd never heard a god worried about the affairs of mortals before.

"Yeah, there was a bum with a handgun. Tried to mug me." I poked the flattened bullet with the tip of my sneaker, sending it clattering loudly across the concrete. "I don't think it really worked out for him."

It took a moment for her to take in what I'd said, and when she did she shot up and away from me, stopping only once she was well out of arm's reach even if I lunged. Her hands were balled up into fists and the faint smile on her face was replaced by a look of wary caution and barely-restrained violence.

"Are you a hero?" she asked sharply.

Huh? "Well, I'd like to think so, yes. That's certainly what people keep telling me, at the very least."

She instantly relaxed somewhat but did not fly back down towards me. "Good, that's… that's good. Are you new? What's your name?"

This conversation was not going at all the way I had expected it to. I was starting to reassess my initial conclusion that this girl was a goddess, though I still wasn't sure what else she could be. She actually looked more like one of those superheroes I sometimes saw on movie posters. What was that lady's name, the one with a metal red white and blue bikini? Wondrous Woman? Superb Woman maybe? Something like that.

The Stoll brothers loved those things and would talk your ears off about them if you gave them a chance, but I never really had time for that. I had always been too busy trying not to die, and after the war I spent as little time at camp as I could manage.

I bit my tongue before I could blurt out something stupid and refocused on her question. It had been a while since I'd introduced myself to anyone. After the fifteenth 'Oh yes I know who you are, Perseus Jackson' I had mostly stopped bothering except to correct it to Percy, not Perseus.

This was somewhat refreshing. Savior of Olympus was a heavy title that could get tiresome at times. I was a little tempted to lie and give her a fake name, but that seemed needlessly complicated and likely to backfire.

"Oh right, sorry, I should have introduced myself." I extended a hand up towards her. "Hi, I'm Percy, Percy Jackson. It's a pleasure to meet you."

The girl's eyes widened slightly and she drifted several inches down towards me. "No, no, I mean––not your name name, your cape name! We just met and I promise I won't tell anyone, but you should never, ever tell anyone––Look, New Wave is different, but your identity is a big deal! So, I'm Glory Girl. What's your name?"

I blinked rapidly. I was somewhat confused. And worried. It had been less than a minute since this girl descended from the sky and she suddenly looked about halfway to a panic attack.

"Uh, like a… nickname you mean? I guess Ann––Annabeth used to call me seaweed brain, but that's kinda a her thing. I'd prefer if you didn't call me that, actually. Usually I'm just Percy, that's already a nickname sort of. Technically I'm Perseus Jackson, but my mom only calls me that when I do something really dumb."

I was rambling, I realized, and there was an ache in my chest from when I'd stumbled over Annabeth's name. Pausing, I looked up towards Glory Girl (and what sort of a name was that? It really did sort of sound like something a superhero would call themselves). If anything, the floating girl looked even more freaked out than she had a moment ago.

"Um, are you… okay?" I asked slowly.

Floaty-girl took several deep breaths. "You're new to all this, aren't you," she said flatly. Then, without giving me a moment to respond, continued. "I know it doesn't feel super important right now, but your secret identity is a big deal when you're a cape. The unwritten rules mean most people won't use your identity against you, but a lot of villains only pretend to care about the rules. Especially with villains like Hookwolf and Lung around here, you don't want people coming after your family."

I was… honestly even more confused now. I spent a lot of time being very confused, but usually I had Ann––someone around to help me figure things out, plus a bunch of Greek history to fall back on in a pinch. Lung, Hookwolf, secret identities, villains… this really did sound a lot like a superhero comic.

"Look at what happened to my aunt Jess. My parents really thought we were doing something when they all unmasked, but then an Empire wannabe went and shot her out of costume. If they're willing to do something like that to an entire family of capes, you don't want to know what they'd do to your family if they knew who you were."

That did sound slightly concerning. I certainly didn't want anyone coming after mom or my stepdad, though it would be funny to see anyone trying to go after my dad to get to me. That was like stealing the Mona Lisa to prepare for baby's first burglary.

She paused, mumbling something under her breath that I couldn't really make out. I heard 'what else… mum… new cape…' but that didn't mean much to me. Suddenly she snapped her fingers and pointed at me. "Right, the rules. This is your first time out, right? Not much of a costume, but that's not unusual. No one has explained the rules to you yet, right?"

"I… rules?"

"The unwritten rules are sort of a framework, a code of honor, for heroes and villains, though not everyone follows them very closely. No killing, no going after secret identities, respect the truce, no attacking civilians, that sort of thing. It's all pretty much common sense and if anyone breaks it, everyone else is supposed to team up and go after them. Usually." She mumbled something very rude under her breath, then sighed. "But some villains are strong enough that they can get away with breaking them, so you have to be careful."

Okay. I was feeling thoroughly out of the loop. There was clearly some kind of misunderstanding going on here and I was really, really sick of it. By now, I was pretty sure this girl wasn't a goddess. That didn't leave me any closer to figuring out what she actually was, but she neither felt, talked, nor acted like any goddess I'd ever met.

I had heard rumors that there were other things out there, more than just the Greek gods and myths. Monsters that didn't fear celestial bronze and didn't disappear into dust when killed. Strange people that couldn't see through the Mist but clearly weren't just regular mortals. When I'd asked my dad about it he had very quickly changed the subject. Chiron had simply refused to talk about it when Lacy, one of the Aphrodite girls, came to camp talking about some weird siblings that 'smelled a bit too much like gods'. Maybe this was one of those things?

"I'm sorry, I don't think I––" I began, only to be cut off by the loud sound of a cell phone ringing. Glory Girl reached into a pocket hidden under her skirt and dug out an expensive-looking phone.

"Hey Amy, sorry I… No, no, I heard a gunshot and… No one's hurt, it's alright. I ran into a new hero and… Oh shit, that's tonight? I'll be there in five!"

She hurriedly shoved the phone back into its pocket and looked back down towards me. "Sorry, I have to run. I need to pick up my sister from the hospital and I'm running really late. Here," she dug into another pocket––I would have to ask her where she got a skirt like that, the Aphrodite campers would kill to get that many pockets––and pulled out a business card and a pen. She rapidly scrawled something on the back and handed it to me.

"That's my private PHO, send me a message if you have any more questions. Say something about like, um, that nickname you gave me, or something like that so I know it's you. Us heroes have to stick together, alright? Got to go!"

And then she was gone, shooting into the sky like a comet, her short cape snapping in the wind behind her from the speed of her liftoff. I watched her go for several seconds until she vanished behind a row of warehouses, then looked down at the card she had shoved into my hand.

'Point_Me_ _The_Sky' it read. I had no idea what PHO was, it sounded like a website maybe, but she seemed to think I would know what it was. She seemed to think I would know a lot of things, actually. I shoved the card into my pocket. Maybe I could give it a look after I checked in with Chiron.

For the moment, I put the bizarre encounter behind me. Mrs. O'Leary was still missing and I was starting to get worried about her. She'd never taken nearly this long to find me. I knew that she was a big girl and could take care of herself––very few things were willing to mess with a hellhound the size of a bus––but that didn't stop me from worrying. It was possible she was too injured to get to me, or perhaps she couldn't hear me because of some sort of magic, but I didn't like any of the possibilities that were coming to mind.

If she was injured, hopefully she knew to run back to camp. The defenses around Camp Half Blood were stronger than they'd ever been and nothing short of a full-on assault could hurt her there. With any luck, I'd find her in an hour and we could laugh this off with a game of Get the Greek.

Moving slowly to avoid inflaming my remaining injuries, I clambered down the side of the pier and then dropped heavily onto the dirty beach below. Two painful steps later, my feet were in the water and vitality rushed into my aching body. Of all the days to not be carrying any Ambrosia…

Chapter 3: Lost

Chapter Text

It was gone. All of it. Just… gone. Missing. Absent. Camp, Olympus, Atlantis, my mom's apartment, all of it. Just… just gone. I didn't understand. What the hell had happened? Where was I? When was I? What was I going to do?

The sea beneath me felt strange, though that might just have been the panic clawing at my throat. It had taken less than an hour to get from Brockton Bay to the north shore of Long Island, except instead of Camp Half Blood's familiar beachfront I found a big hotel and a few restaurants.

In hindsight, that was when the denial started to kick in. I decided I must have somehow forgotten the location of one of the most important places in my life and spent the next hour zooming up and down along the shoreline trying to find it.

I found nothing. Not a single sign that the camp had ever existed. I even stopped at a small local library that I had no memory of and checked the phonebooks. There was no entry for Delphi Strawberry Service. The old, tired-looking librarian told me there had never been a local strawberry grower here as far back as she could remember.

My next attempt took considerably less time. Finding an isolated bit of shoreline, I used my powers to create a misty rainbow and tossed a gold drachma through it. "Oh Iris, goddess of the Rainbow, please accept my offering."

I didn't even bother trying to give a location. The coin fell straight through the mist and plopped onto the wet sand. It seemed like Iris wasn't taking calls today. I picked up the coin, rinsed it off, and dove back into the sea.

From there I headed inland, moving deep underwater following the east river until I was nearly at the Empire State Building. Or well, the place where the Empire State Building should have been. Instead, there was a new-looking skyscraper that very much wasn't it. There were similarities, but it was shorter and squatter, and the spire above it was considerably less impressive looking. More than that, even focusing as hard as I could to push the Mist away from my eyes, I couldn't see a single sign that Olympus was hanging high overhead.

As a matter of fact, everything around me looked unfamiliar. I'd been on this street a hundred times by now, fought and killed right here, but I could not recognize so much as a single building. Only the street signs were the same, their presence a glaring hole in many of the theories swirling through my head.

Furthermore, while the Empire State Building was missing, I could recognize another rather conspicuous building, or rather pair of buildings, towering high above me. I was too young to remember seeing them in real life, but high school had certainly taught me what the World Trade Center had once looked like. I could see both towers, neither looking singed, much less destroyed.

My head spun, but I wasn't done yet. It took another hour to get from 34th Street to the apartment that Paul and my mom lived in. Along the way I checked a few other local spots. Some were there. An old bakery Mom had sometimes got discount bread from was open, but it had a new storefront and I didn't recognize the girl behind the counter. Others had been replaced by completely unfamiliar storefronts at addresses where I knew they did not belong.

By the time I arrived, I already knew deep down what I was going to find. The entire neighborhood looked completely different, newer and with a lot more construction going on than I remembered. The apartment building wasn't there, replaced by a much shorter building with a restaurant on the ground floor and three stories of offices above it.

I barely remembered stumbling my way back to the sea, carried along more by the promise of saltwater and healing than anything else. The trip down to Atlantis was a blur of gentle, soothing water and hot tears burning my eyes. As I expected, there was nothing there but sand and fish. No palace beneath the waves, no forges filled with my cyclopean brothers, no Triton with his wry humor and warm smile, no Poseidon waiting to greet me with a smile and a pat on the shoulder, no nothing. I would have even welcomed Amphitrite––as much as my father's divine wife didn't like me, at least she would have been a sign that I wasn't going insane.

I broke down then, kneeling in the murky depths with a school of fish swimming around me as tears leaked from my eyes only to be immediately washed away by the current. I was so confused, so lost, so hopeless.

What was going on? Where was I? What happened? I could only make half-hearted guesses and baseless assumptions.

I'm not quite sure how long I spent down there. It must have been at least a few hours, maybe longer. Slowly but surely, the panic receded as years of experience reasserted themselves. I had been in more hopeless situations before. Had I panicked when I faced Kronos face-to-face in the throne room of Olympus? No. I had kept my wits about me and through my choice I had banished the titan back into the depths of Tarturus. Had I panicked when I met Hyperion in Central Park, his armies arrayed around him and his body burning with divine power? No. I had fought and raged, dousing his fires and suppressing his martial skill until my allies could deal with him permanently.

I had not folded then, and I was not going to fold now. I took several long, slow breaths and stood up, my power anchoring me to the seafloor. Looking around, I finally allowed myself to acknowledge something that I had noticed hours before. The ocean here felt different. Colder. Not so much in temperature, but in the way it welcomed me.

I focused inward, feeling the thrum of divine ichor rushing in my veins and echoing through the waters around me. There was no answering thrum, no sign of my father's might suffused throughout his domain. It was something Poseidon had shown me before he allowed me to go off on my own to explore the depths of the sea. If ever I could not feel his presence, it likely meant I had stumbled onto something dangerous. Certain monsters, lesser sea-gods, and even places of power could suppress Dad's reach.

Here though, it felt different from how he'd shown me. There was nothing in the water at all, or perhaps it was simply too faint to feel. When Triton asserted his own dominance over the waves around him, I could feel his divine power in every drop of water. Amphitrite's touch was lighter, gentler and more refined, but even still I could sense it with time and effort. No matter how hard I focused, no matter how much I strained my senses, I could find nothing but the faint traces of my own power echoing back at me.

I shivered. For a moment, the icy depths around me felt like Stygian iron pressed against my throat. The ocean, no matter how cold and dark, had never felt so suffocating before. It still welcomed me as its prince, my eyes cutting through the murk even as I stayed warm and dry, but it didn't feel the same. I could almost imagine a shadowed shape flitting in the distance, just out of sight. A dark, malevolent creature watching me, hunting me, looking for an opening.

Moving purely on instinct, I slammed my hands into the ground and the earth and sea answered me. Knife-like currents tore through the waters around me for a hundred feet in every direction. Seaweed, too-slow fish, bits of human garbage, and an unfortunate crab were torn to shreds in seconds. Massive clouds of sand erupted from the ocean floor, rendering the already dark waters completely opaque.

I knelt there for a long moment, waiting for something, anything, to happen. A threat to appear, a monster to make itself known, even just a dolphin to swim by and apologize for spooking me. I would have welcomed a good fight, or even just a swarm of lesser monsters to exterminate. After Kronos's defeat, there had been a lot of those that needed disposing of before they could hurt someone, but that had mostly been taken care of months ago. I wanted a distraction, something to take my mind off the growing worry building in the back of my mind.

Nothing happened. Then I just felt rather silly. What an overreaction to an imagined threat. I thought back to the curious haddock that had greeted me when I first came down here and felt slightly bad. Most fish were kind of stupid, but I hadn't meant to kill them. I hadn't even left them in an edible state, what a waste.

I stood up and shook myself, gentle currents brushing away what few grains of sand had landed on me and clearing the waters in a small bubble around me. Taking another deep breath, I refocused on the situation at hand.

The evidence was undeniable. Wherever I was, there was no Poseidon here. No sea god at all. I could imagine a few ways such a thing could have happened, but I didn't like any of those possibilities.

Olympus was missing. Camp was gone like it had never existed in the first place. By Hades, the Empire State Building just wasn't there! What the fuck?! I needed answers, and I needed them yesterday.

I tried to think back, tried to remember the voice I'd heard. It had been talking, saying… something. The attempt left me doubled over and gasping for breath as a renewed spike of agony cut through my brain like Riptide through an Empousa. Even completely submerged in healing seawater, it felt like a bad idea to keep trying. I wasn't sure how much more of that my brain could handle.

If that was a dead end, where did that leave me? I fell back on Chiron's lessons. 'If you don't know what to do, start by taking stock of what resources you have and what you know about your situation. That will at least tell you what your options are.'

Fair enough. First of all, what did I have on me? I sat down on the seafloor and began to take stock. Pockets first. Gum, wallet, keys, a few gold drachma, the card the weird flying girl had given me, Riptide, two chocolate wafer bars in blue plastic wrappers, a broken pencil, the pen I accidentally stole from the old librarian, a bit of lint, and a nice carbon-steel knife that Rachel gave me for my birthday.

What else? I had my armor––though I was only wearing the chest plate right now, I could easily summon the rest of it by tapping my chest. I rarely did so––with the curse of Achilles, my skin was harder than even god-forged celestial bronze, but it was handy to help hide where exactly my Achilles heel was. The armor had been a gift from Hephaestus himself, a reward for the hero of Olympus. It fit me perfectly, was temperature controlled, and could shrink down until all that remained was a nearly-invisible harness that conveniently covered the small of my back. I had only taken it off a few times since I had received it, and only reluctantly at that. Never again would someone die trying to cover for my weakness.

I was also wearing my favorite blue sneakers, navy blue sweatshirt, blue jeans, and orange camp T-shirt. With that all accounted for, I grudgingly unbuckled the Mist-covered fanny pack that I always kept hidden under my sweatshirt. Inside was my camp necklace, a small baggie of ambrosia squares that I was suddenly happy I'd forgotten about (who knew when I'd be able to restock), more drachma, Tyson's latest transforming watch-shield, and a plastic bag that I reached into without looking and then tucked away. Annabeth's cap, knife, and camp necklace with its nine painted beads were all there, but those were memories I did not need to deal with right now.

With everything laid out on the sand in front of me, it was easy to see the one option that might tell me something about where I was and what the Hades was going on. I picked up the paper card and stared at the words written on it. 'Point_Me_ _The_Sky'. The strange flying girl had told me to send her a message on PHO, whatever that was. It wasn't much, but it was the only clue I had to go off.

It took only a few moments to tuck everything away. I stood up, made sure I hadn't forgotten anything, and then shot off like a bullet towards shore. Hopefully Glory Girl and Brockton Bay would hold the answers I needed. Otherwise… well, I would cross that bridge when I got to it.

Chapter 4: Low Humidity

Chapter Text

It was morning by the time I finally made it back to the city, the sun just barely peeking over the distant horizon. It was cold and windy, but the sky was clear and the sunrise painted the sea with streaks of glorious gold.

Before making landfall I spent a half-hour exploring the bay, crisscrossing the sandy depths and watching the coast from beneath the waves. I'd found over the past few months that there was a lot you could learn about a city from exploring its coastline, and Brockton Bay was no exception.

I noticed a few things of interest during my exploration. First of all, there were a lot more fish than I was expecting, particularly just outside the bay and in the surrounding waters. A few of my distant relatives in my dad's court had told me about how badly mortals had damaged the ocean's biosphere, but I hadn't really paid them much attention. Now, I think I understood where they were coming from. There were a lot more fish than there should have been. Like, considerably more.

Putting that aside––I had no idea if that piece of information was at all significant, but it didn't really seem very applicable right now––I continued my exploration. The next thing I noticed was the ridiculous number of sunken ships filling the waters. A harbor full of colossal, rusting wrecks was blocked off by a titanic cargo ship embedded in the sand just beneath the surface.

Even without really knowing what had happened, I could feel the tragedy of it written in the waves. One sunken ship had spelled the doom of dozens more. Forty-seven ships large enough to carry tens of thousands of tons of cargo reduced to nothing but rotting, rusting scrap. Even if that wasn't connected to what was going on, it certainly bore investigating.

Finally, I concluded that the bay contained what my ninth-grade math teacher would have called a 'statistically significant' number of corpses. The ocean had a lot of corpses in it, but the majority of those were found far out to sea. The majority of them also tended to die of drowning, not bullets or, in a few cases, genuine concrete shoes. It seemed the mortals of this city were rather violent, or at least had a very violent past.

By the time I was done, the sun had mostly risen and I spent a few minutes finding a good place to emerge from the sea. I hadn't noticed it at first, but now that nearly a full day had passed, I was starting to realize that the Mist here felt astonishingly thin. Thinner than I had ever felt it. It was still there, a barely perceptible film of static that buzzed against my tongue, but that was all. It was nothing like the dense fog that lived up to its name surrounding Camp Half-Blood and Olympus, nor even the permanent background haze that I had grown so used to that I hadn't even been able to notice it until Triton purged it from the water around him and showed me the difference. I was glad now that he had; I couldn't trust that it would stop people from noticing me doing something strange and being forewarned was a lot like being forearmed. Briares would probably disagree, but I personally thought that four arms was plenty for most things.

Thus, instead of walking out onto a beach fully clothed and completely dry, I found an empty, out-of-the-way pier a few minutes walk away from a rather nice looking stretch of boardwalk and used it as cover to get back onto dry land. A short walk later, I emerged from a side alley and joined seamlessly with the other early-morning pedestrians.

In the early morning chill, my sweatshirt and jeans fit in perfectly. My plan was to walk around, find a map, hopefully find a library, and then go from there. I didn't really like libraries; my head was wired for ancient Greek, and English books tended to make my eyes hurt and my brain spin. The letters had a bad tendency to just float right off the page while I was trying to look at them.

Still, I knew that it was probably my best bet for finding a usable computer with a serviceable internet connection, and it wasn't like I'd be able to stay there for long anyway. Demigods and technology didn't mix very well. Computers weren't as bad as cell phones, but anything more than half an hour on the internet would attract every monster in the city straight to me.

That wasn't as much of a problem for me as it was for most demigods––there were very few monsters that could pose a genuine threat to me. Hades, I'd taunted monsters on purpose a few times over the past few months as a public service. It was all too easy to attract a big crowd with a long call to my Mom and then take care of them all at once. However, between the especially thin Mist and the number of innocent mortals that would be stuck in the library with me I didn't want to risk it.

Step one was easy enough, there was a map posted barely a minute's walk away from where I entered the boardwalk. Step two was going to have to wait a little bit longer. The map happened to be posted right outside a coffee shop, and the dazzling spread of pastries behind the glass combined with the smell of freshly baked bread wafting through the half-open door made my stomach growl and quickly reminded me that I hadn't eaten anything in more than twenty-four hours.

Step two rapidly became step three. Thankfully, it seemed like American dollars still looked the same despite the MIA gods. Ten minutes later I was digging into a slice of warm blueberry pie, the table around me heavily laden with plates. Four thick slices of bacon, three eggs, two blueberry nutella crepes, a slice of blueberry pie, and a large cherry coke. The latter was tragically not blue, but I refused to drink blue gatorade on principle and that was the only properly-colored beverage they had available.

It had eaten through a large chunk of my cash, but I didn't want to risk paying with my Poseidoncard or the Lotus Cash Card before I could test if they still worked and I was absolutely ravenous. I reasoned that I wasn't going to get anything productive done on an empty stomach, so it was a worthy expense. Worst comes to worst, I'd figure something out. I always had.

As I was eating, I still kept my eyes and ears peeled for anything interesting I might overhear. The majority of it was just random gossip––which coworkers were sleeping together, who they thought was the hottest Protectorate hero, plans for the weekend––but I did learn that it was March seventeenth, which meant that I had either spent much longer than I thought swimming around down in Florida or that I'd been unconscious for the better part of three entire days. I had left my hotel in Tampa on the morning of the thirteenth, and I was pretty sure that I had run into that Glory Girl person yesterday afternoon. That was certainly something to keep in mind.

I was trying to decide if the Protectorate was some sort of celebrity group or if it had something to do with Glory Girl and her rambling when I noticed a young woman with dark blonde hair and green eyes stumble blearily into the cafe, her eyes glued to her phone screen and a laptop bag tucked under her arm.

She looked for all the world like any other tired teenager, but there was something about her that instantly highlighted her to my senses. It was the Mist, I realized after a moment. The Mist around her seemed to recoil from her presence, the barely-there haze pushed back as though she was walking around in her own personal giant hamster ball.

My spoon froze for a fraction of a second and then I went back to eating my crepes. They were absolutely delicious, the combination of the sweet blueberry preserves, light whipped cream, gooey hazelnut spread, and perfectly cooked crepe able to match my mom's cooking despite its lack of proper coloration.

The girl didn't seem to notice anything, silently joining the short queue at the counter and occasionally reaching up to rub her eyes or massage her forehead. I kept a wary eye on her as she moved up the line, ordered a very large hot coffee and a blueberry scone, and then shuffled over to a table next to the window that was conveniently well within my line of sight.

Riptide's pen form was a comforting weight in my hand as I slowly spun it between my fingers, making sure to keep my hand under the table and out of sight as I did so. It was a good trick, something one of the younger Apollo campers had come up with. It was so much easier to focus on something when your hands were kept busy. The girl in question typically fiddled with her hair bands. Riptide was an even more convenient alternative, keeping the blade in my hand and ready at a moment's notice. Like this, I could be across the room with my sword buried in a monster's chest in a fraction of second.

Despite my caution, nothing did end up happening while I was eating. The girl drank about half of her oversized cup, nibbled on the scone, and then pulled a sleek-looking laptop out of her bag and began fiddling with spreadsheets. I was almost tempted to go up and ask her if she knew what PHO was, but decided not to risk it.

She was certainly rather cute and might know something, but I was in no position to take risks right now. If need be, I could probably hunt her down sooner or later. A bubble in the Mist like that would probably be pretty noticeable even from a distance. If all it took to make me drop my guard was a pretty face then I never would have survived as long as I had. Maybe if she was wearing something a bit more form fitting… No. Stupid Percy.

It was only as I was leaving that she finally seemed to notice my presence. Her eyes initially passed over me as I walked towards the door, carefully making sure to never show her my back, but then she stiffened and her head snapped back around to stare at me. I paused momentarily, turned to look at her, and then walked out of the restaurant. If she was a well-hidden monster, that would have been more than enough for her to know what I was. If she was something else then, well, I honestly didn't know.

I waited for several minutes on a nearby bench, but she did not come out to follow me. Eventually I decided to just head towards the library. There was only one visible on the map I'd seen, and it was on the complete opposite side of the boardwalk from where I was and several blocks deeper inland beside.

I considered taking a shortcut through the water, but ultimately decided against it. There was still plenty of daylight left and it was entirely possible the place wasn't even open yet. Yes, I could take my time and maybe poke around a bit before I had to go in there. So many books, ugh. I really wasn't looking forward to it. The too-short amount of time I'd spent in the Athena cabin library with––I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and bit my tongue––had fully spoiled other libraries for me. I somehow doubted the local library would have their collection translated into ancient greek.

I was about half way to my destination, ambling along the wooden walkway and chewing slowly on a piece of blue raspberry salt water taffy, when I noticed them. I hadn't been paying very much attention to the people around me, my attention primarily focused on the bizarre fortress standing at the center of the bay. That was another clue that definitely bore looking into, I'd never seen or heard of anything like it existing in the mortal world before, but that was another thing to return to once I had a bit more of a general understanding of what was going on. For that reason, I had avoided getting too close to the thing's legs while I was exploring the bay.

Two brightly-clothed figures, a man and a woman, were walking down the boardwalk towards me, the Mist rippling around them as it fled their presence and rippled in their wake. The man was dressed in bright red body armor, the top of his face covered by a matching visor that left his eyes and mouth exposed. The woman was wearing a skin-tight gray and white body suit covered in shimmery lines of cobalt-blue.

They looked like superheroes. Even more so than Glory Girl, their costumes instantly brought the idea to mind. Now that alone didn't mean anything––people dressed up as superheroes all the time––but more importantly, the people around them treated them as though they were superheroes.

The pair stopped every few steps to take pictures with passersby and give autographs. People greeted them respectfully, didn't get in their way, and generally responded much more favorably than I would have expected for a pair of out-of-place cosplayers on a chilly spring morning. They smiled and talked with people and radiated an aura of confidence and security.

I momentarily weighed my options, then decided to follow my gut and turned to walk towards the duo. I wanted a chance to scope them out. My initial suspicion would have been that they were disguised monsters, but that wasn't possible given the way that the Mist was actively avoiding them and I'd never seen or heard of a monster that could really mimic a normal human without its help.

I'd also only ever seen one other person who elicited that sort of response from it––that sleepy girl from before. Did that mean she was a hero too? I tried to remember if Glory Girl had had the same effect as these three, but I just hadn't been paying enough attention to say one way or the other. Maybe that was just normal here, some variation of a clear-sighted mortal that couldn't exist back home?

I pushed those thoughts aside––I wasn't much of a thinker, and coming up with pointless theories with so little information to go off of was pointless. Furthermore, it was almost my turn.

"Thank you for all the work you do for our city," I told the red-armored man, reaching out to shake his hand. It felt like an easy guess, something you could tell a firefighter, a policeman, and maybe even a superhero without it sounding strange.

He took it after a moment, his grip firm and confident. "Of course! It's my duty and pleasure to help out you fine folks!" He smiled at me broadly. "Just remember: stay in school, don't do drugs, and always be the best person you can be!" Then he winked and his smile turned cheeky. "But don't forget to have some fun either. You're only young once."

The woman beside him finished with the mom and daughter duo that she was talking to and turned towards us, playfully smacking his shoulder. "I saw that Assault, don't you go filling the boy's head with bad ideas." Then she winked at me again.

It was clearly a well-practiced bit––I wasn't the most observant camper, but even I could tell that––but it was still fun and clearly had a lot of heart in it. I spent another thirty seconds with the pair, getting a signed picture showing the two of them standing back to back with the giant oil rig fortress thing behind them for my trouble. Apparently the woman was Battery and the man was Assault. I'd never heard of either of them, but they seemed to be pretty popular.

The two spent another few minutes talking to the growing crowd before moving on further down the boardwalk. I watched them go, then turned and hurried off towards the library. I was starting to feel much more confident that the internet would have some answers for me. Back home that would have been a futile endeavor, but here it seemed like these superheroes, if they were indeed superheroes, were popular, public figures among the mortals. I probably wouldn't be able to find anything about where the hell the gods were, but some basic knowledge should be pretty easy to find.

Usually, something like that would have been Ann––Annabeth's job. She was the smart one, the one who knew everything, had all the answers, and told me who I needed to stab and where. Without her, I had to step up and do it myself. I wiped a tear from the corner of my eye without breaking stride. I really wished she was here with me. Hopefully my research skills weren't too shabby and I could make her proud.

Chapter 5: Rising Tide

Summary:

Had some trouble posting this one. Is anyone familiar with an issue where, instead of actually posting the chapter, it just tells you it can't load the page after you click post? I've never seen that before and it happened like a dozen times before I gave up and only got it to work a few hours later.

Chapter Text

Hours later, I found myself sitting on an old bench staring out at a nearly empty stretch of beach. Low tide was just a few minutes out here, the ocean having retreated to reveal a long stretch of smooth, wet sand. Despite the cold, two barefoot teens were running along the waterline, leaving shallow footprints in their wake.

Without really meaning to I watched their path, my eyes instinctively drawn to the only movement in my field of vision. I could feel the water welling up from the sand to fill their heel-prints, the way spray from occasional shallow puddles beaded on their water-resistant jeans, and even the bouncing and shaking of their water bottles.

Did that count as a thinker power, I wondered idly. Or perhaps it was all part of one big shaker power? I didn't really know, nor did I particularly care. The way the locals classified their abilities was… strange, if potentially rather useful, but I had only briefly glanced over them before I decided it was high time to leave the library. For now, I had bigger things to worry about.

I leaned back, folded my hands behind my head, and crossed my legs. The cool sea breeze wasn't the same as a dunk in the ocean, but it was still rather pleasant and I really just needed some time to think.

My current situation honestly reminded me a little of those first few days at camp. It felt like it had been a lifetime, but in reality only six short years ago I hadn't known the first thing about gods, demigods, monsters, and all the baggage that came with my family history.

It had taken days for me to even begin acclimating to everything, but once I had, everything had felt so natural. I'd known the truth deep down in my blood even when it had been hidden from me for my safety. I doubted that was going to happen this time.

Everything here felt so… alien. Wrong. Just, fundamentally not how it was supposed to work. I had spent nearly four hours at a computer, browsing the internet and looking at forums and wikis, and not a single monster had been attracted to the library. I'd even taken periodic breaks to scout around outside at first, once I realized there was too much to learn in just half an hour, but before I discovered that there was no horde ready to break down the doors to feast on demigod flesh.

Was it strange that I missed getting attacked by hordes of monsters? So many demigods would have given an arm and a leg to never have to worry about monsters again, but here I was freaking out because of the opposite situation. There were no monsters here, at least not in the way that I understood them. I'd found references online to monster capes and the Endbringers, but those weren't monster monsters. With the Mist this thin, it should have been impossible for people not to notice Empousai and cyclopes, gorgons and satyrs hidden among the mundane population.

More than that, these 'monsters' could be hurt by mortal weapons and didn't explode into dust when they died. Morbid or not, I'd found plenty of pictures of dead 'monster' capes. They just looked… dead. Like people. Not monsters.

And then there were the Endbringers. I'd only found a scant few pictures of them online, but everything I'd read painted them as impossible, unstoppable horrors. Still, they were modern horrors. Not ancient calamities, but something that, like 'superpowers', had only appeared in the past decades.

I… I didn't know what to think. Heroes, villains, capes, parahumans, and so many more words spun through my head like sand sucked into a hurricane. They weren't demigods. I was absolutely confident that they weren't demigods. The internet was rather cagey about how exactly people became capes, but I'd met several of them now, and they didn't feel like demigods.

Glory Girl, Assault, Battery, that girl… No. No, they weren't demigods. Or gods. Or monsters. They were… something else. They were an impossibility. I knew what all those felt like, the way my blood rushed and sang in the presence of danger and divinity. The way Mist swirled around monsters and demigods alike.

I'd seen videos online of what some capes could do, and it was intimidating, but also… strange. They were powerful, but oh so limited in so many ways. Their abilities almost seemed like specialized Magic, but that was impossible given how they repelled the Mist like a Mets fan at a Yankees game.

I clenched my teeth as my thoughts drifted back towards the Endbringers, and the one they called 'Leviathan' in particular. I didn't know what I could do about the other two, but that beast's days were numbered. Now that I knew what I was looking for, I could feel the barest echoes of its power rippling through the ocean depths.

Just thinking about it made my blood boil. It dared to infringe on my father's domain, to bring to bear the rage of the seas without his say. Entire cities, regions, millions of innocent mortal lives, gone. The nearly imperceptible traces of golden ichor in my veins burned at the thought of it. Thief, intruder, blasphemer! I had a sudden urge to dive down into the lightless depths and hunt this beast that dared to style itself as master of the waters.

The barely screwed-on cap of the water bottle clutched in one of my hands burst off, dousing my hair and neck in sea water and pulling me out of my daze. I took several long, slow breaths and dropped the crumpled plastic bottle on the bench beside me.

As much as I wanted to go hunt down that monstrous creature, now was not the time. I couldn't get distracted. Certainly the next time it dared to emerge from the sea to menace mankind I would be there to face it. I could wait that long. Figuring out more about this strange world in which I'd found myself and how I'd gotten here took priority.

I stood up and jogged down towards the ocean to refill my bottle. Along the way I also scooped up a handful of seashells and tucked them away in my pockets. It was always a good idea to have a little bit of the ocean with me wherever I went.

I was tired of sitting around. Of reading and thinking. I needed to move, to run, to do something. I didn't typically go out looking for trouble, usually trouble found me, but I could make an exception. According to what I'd read, the docks here were filled with villainous capes and evil gangs. With the curse of Achilles I wasn't scared of a few mortals with guns, and a good fight would help me gather the measure of these local villains.

Apparently one of them could turn into a dragon! I'd never had a chance to fight one for real––a few had appeared during the battle for Olympus, but I had always been in other parts of the battlefield at the time. The idea was exciting, intoxicating even. Ever since my dip in the Styx, I'd found myself eternally hungry for a good fight, and heroes fighting dragons was a story as old as time.

First though, I needed to make sure I could blend in with the locals if it came down to it. When in Rome, do as the Romans, right? I wasn't a parahuman, no more than these capes were demigods, but I was pretty sure I could do a rather convincing approximation.

The easiest option would probably be to deploy my armor fully. I'd only ever used it a few times to acclimate myself to fighting in full armor, but in its third mode it fully covered my body and the helmet left my face completely unrecognizable.

However, that came with its own downsides. The armor was… a bit much, to say the least. That was one of the reasons I tended to wear a hoodie over it even when I just had the chestplate deployed. Gleaming celestial bronze scale armor embossed with my father's trident symbol and polished to a mirror shine tended to be noticeable even through the Mist. If I also decided to use the helmet to hide my 'secret identity', the bright blue horse-hair plume, taken from one of Poseidon's prized hippocampi, and featureless faceplate would stand out like a beacon in any crowd.

That was something I could bring out quickly enough if a fight did break out, I decided as I knelt down on the edge of the water. Angling the crumpled bottle towards the incoming waves, I directed a powerful stream of water into the warped plastic, carefully ballooning it back out to its original size.

For now, I could probably just settle for the classic disguise of comic book heroes everywhere. I had seen a shop selling domino masks as I scouted around checking for monsters after I'd left the library. Seeing a good opportunity to test out my credit cards, I hid my face under my hoodie and bought a half-dozen.

The Poseidoncard turned out to be a dud, but thankfully my Lotus Cash Card still seemed fully functional. I noticed a barely-perceptible drop in Mist density around it when the wary-looking cashier swiped it through his machine, so that probably meant that the bank accounts Dad gave me access to were invalid, but the magic on the cash card still worked fine. It was probably best not to use it for any large purchases, there wasn't really very much Mist for it to work with, but for groceries and basic necessities it was probably good enough.

Well, there was no time like the present. I stood up, brushed the sand from my knees, and headed purposefully towards these so-called 'docks'. I really didn't like that name. Judging from the maps I'd seen, the majority of the docks weren't even near the water! It was a stupid name.

Four entire hours later, my not-so-charitable opinions about the docks hadn't gotten any brighter. The only good thing I could say about the past few hours was that the chicken lo mein I got from a tiny hole-in-the-wall place was good enough. Though I probably should have taken off my domino mask and hood before ducking into the restaurant; the lady behind the counter had clearly been put off by my attire and spent the entire time I was waiting for my food throwing me fearful glances.

In hindsight, it was probably my own fault. I'd gone out looking for criminals during a weekday afternoon. Even with my very fringe understanding of how this superhero thing worked, I should have known better.

Of course as soon as I decided to take a bit of a break, that was when something finally happened. I had just sat down and torn open the plastic wrapping of a half-crushed fortune cookie when I suddenly felt several gaps in the Mist, something I had been focusing on intently in the past hours, rushing in my direction.

I roughly shoved the cookie in my pocket and hurriedly scanned the surroundings. I saw them nearly immediately. Three massive tiger-lizard-dog monster things were bounding down the road towards me, each just a bit smaller than Mrs. O'Leary.

I was on my feet with Riptide in hand a moment later, though I didn't take the cap off the blade yet. Standing up gave me the angle to see the costumed figures riding in pairs on two of the monstrosities.

I… didn't recognize them. There were four of them: a guy, two girls, and a fourth who's gender I wasn't quite sure of from this distance. None of them resembled any of the heroes or villains I had read about in this city, though honestly that didn't really mean much. Apparently this city had a huge number of capes, and I had only looked up the rosters of several of the more important teams.

From a glance, I assumed that these were supervillains. The monster mounts and skull helmet certainly made me think they were villains. Everything I'd seen mentioned how important public relations was to the local heroes and I doubted they would let their members get away with black motorcycle leathers and a skull motif.

I uncapped Riptide and stepped into the middle of the road. "Hello there!" I called out loudly, "You lot wouldn't happen to be supervillains by any chance, would you?"

Two of the figures, the one in a skull mask and a blonde girl wearing very flattering skin-tight lavender spandex, exchanged looks, and I realized that they weren't going to stop. In fact, the other girl shouted something to the dogs and they began to turn towards the nearby intersection.

Very rude. I was really getting sick of the recent tendency for monsters and other enemies to try and run away when they saw me. These people didn't even know who I was! Sure none of the demigods that had sided with the Titans wanted to face Percy Jackson, the Hero of Olympus. Unlike some of the other campers, I didn't take prisoners. Here though, I was a nobody and they were still trying to run away!

Well, I couldn't have that. Fortunately, I had a lot of practice stopping people from running away. Sometimes, water was not readily accessible or simply not the most optimal tool for the job. For years I had stayed away from certain abilities for fear of the damage they could cause. After what had happened to Michael Yew, I had honed my skills with other parts of my dad's divine portfolio until I was certain such a tragedy would never be repeated.

I raised one foot and then slammed it back down into the already cracked and weathered pavement. As the dogs readied for another long bound, the earth beneath their feet rippled and rolled, sending all three of the beasts sprawling as they tried to push off from the suddenly moving street.

Casually spinning Riptide at my side, I walked towards the downed group. None of them were injured; they hadn't even fallen from their makeshift saddles and my stomp had barely even damaged the road beneath them. I just wanted to slow them down, not hurt them.

"Hello there," I called out again. "Running away when I'm trying to talk to you is very rude. So, I take it you guys are supervillains then?"

The muscular girl wearing a plastic dog mask glared at me and the dubiously gendered renaissance reenactor sitting behind her reached down to grab what looked like a gaudy gold scepter strapped to the saddle beside him. The other two exchanged hushed words before the skull-masked guy turned towards me.

"We are, and if you don't get out of our way we'll show you exactly what that means." Dark smoke poured out from beneath his helmet and his voice was deep, echoing, and vaguely hollow. He sounded confident and intimidating. Perfect.

"Sounds good to me!" I said cheekily, "I'm new around here and I'm curious to see what you can do!"

That turned out to be a poor turn of phrase a moment later when billowing clouds of black smoke erupted from the supervillain, hiding him and the others and plunging the world into total darkness.

Huh, that was pretty neat. Darkness generation was a damn cool superpower for a villain, very spooky. It wasn't super effective against me, I could still feel seven distinct blobs of water moving around and sense the disturbance the four capes made in the Mist, but I imagined it was probably pretty useful against most people.

Even more interestingly, I felt a sort of… quiver in the Mist around him when the smoke first emerged. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before and I didn't know what it meant, but it felt significant.

I waited patiently to see if they would try to use the cover to attack me. Judging from their movements, only the big guy could see through the smoke he made and the others were just following his directions. I was pretty sure they were talking, but I couldn't hear a word. In fact, I couldn't hear anything but my own heartbeat and slow breathing. A few experimental swishes with Riptide told me that the smoke pushed against me when I tried to move. It felt a bit like when Kronos tried to freeze time around me, but much less effective. Apparently the darkness muffled more than sight.

I was rather disappointed when the group decided to flee. I waited for the three monsters to bound up onto a nearby rooftop, then followed after them. Focusing on the nearby ocean, I leapt up and out of the darkness onto the nearest roof, the ground beneath me rippling to give me a bit of extra height .

"That was pretty cool!" I called out after them. The blonde girl spun around in the saddle, staring at me with wide eyes beneath her domino mask.

"Bitch, get us out of here," she called out to the other girl. "Grue, I don't think your darkness is going to stop him, but it might slow him down!"

Grue and Bitch, huh, Well, the first one was probably a cape name and the second one made it sound like those two didn't have a great relationship, but it was something to go off of the next time I was at the library.

The so-called 'Bitch' let out a piercing whistle and the three monsters accelerated. I shrugged, recapped Riptide, and set after them. I might not be a son of Hermes, but I was still considerably faster than any mortal.

After less than a minute, it was clear that I was catching up to them. Grue summoned walls of smoke in my way, but I simply ran through them and used my water sense to avoid losing the group when they tried to descend back down to street level. Several times I felt something trying to grab at my limbs and muscles, but grabbing a seashell from my pocket and calling a slow trickle of salt water from it to run down my hand quickly put a stop to that as well.

They seemed to realize that as well. "Judas, Angelica, stop! Brutus, hurt!" The dog-masked girl called out suddenly. The dogs stopped and the riderless one turned and lunged towards me, crossing the street in a single leap, its tooth-filled jaws open wide.

I danced nimbly out of the way and drew Riptide. As the monster came in for another bite, I experimentally slapped it on the nose with the flat of the blade and was surprised when I felt a solid impact and the monster reeled back in pain. I had been half expecting the celestial bronze to pass clean through the thing's head. It seemed this creature really was a monster. Curious.

I dodged around two more lunges, then slammed my elbow into the side of its bony jaw, sending the monster crashing to the ground. If this was a tame monster like Mrs. O'Leary I didn't want to hurt it too badly. As much as I wanted a good fight, a conversation was probably going to be much more productive. Hopefully this show of force was enough to stop them from running off again. Like my stepdad Paul always said, primary sources are the best when you're trying to figure something out.

I spun Riptide around and turned to face the watching group of supervillains. "So, do you guys think you could answer a few questions for me?"

Chapter 6: Telling Tales

Chapter Text

Tattletale was concerned. Worried, even. Stressed too. As much as she would like to deny it, she was scared. Her eyes flickered between Brian's broad back, the laid-out form of Brutus, and the nonchalant looking cape that seemed to be the source of all her headaches today.

Brian turned to look at her and, even without using power, she could hear the unasked question. What do we do? He may officially be their leader, but only a fool discounted the voice of the team's Thinker.

She bit her lip and glanced back towards the unknown cape. He was just standing there, casually spinning his glowing sword as though he hadn't just knocked one of Rachel's dogs out with a single blow.

He was dressed like a total newbie––jeans, a hoodie, and a dollar-store domino mask that did almost nothing to disguise his features. It was almost insulting, but something told her he wasn't nearly as green as he appeared. There was an easy confidence in his stance and cool certainty in his sea-green eyes that spoke of experience.

Despite already knowing what she'd find, Tattletale dropped the walls around her power and focused on the cape in front of them. She was going to pay for it later––was already paying for overusing her power today––but she had to know. She had to make sure.

Instead of the usual flood of information, the roar of a raging sea filled her ears. Waves crashed inside her mind, pounding against her skull like it was a breakwater, and the unmistakable briny smell of fish and saltwater filled her nose. Behind it all was an almost panicked, confused buzzing that set her teeth on edge and made her left eye throb.

She slammed the floodgates shut before she could be overwhelmed. Well, not really overwhelmed per se, but hopefully this way the headache would only last for two days and not three or four.

She didn't like this. She didn't like it one bit. This was unmistakably that same boy from this morning. Her power had never reacted to anyone else the way it was acting now and she refused to believe that there were multiple capes in the Bay who could completely no-sell her powers.

Who was he? Was he following her? Did he know who she was? Did he work for Coil? She had no idea, and that terrified her. She'd gotten so used to seeing all the cards that not knowing was driving her insane. Worse, he was not only completely opaque to her power, but he was also an A-list Brute and more on top of that. Someone had certainly won the power-lottery here, and it certainly wasn't her.

"I guess we talk," she quietly told Brian. "I don't think we're going to get away the old fashioned way and I'd really rather not wake up in a PRT holding cell. We can always make a break for it later."

Brian considered her words, then nodded minutely. He turned back towards the strange cape, new trails of black smoke leaking out from behind his motorcycle helmet as he used his power to disguise his voice.

"Perhaps we can," he called out, "but I'd like some assurances first. If we answer your questions, will you let us be on our way?"

Tattletale felt an itch to interject, but for once managed to avoid living up to her cape name and stayed silent. Normally she'd be able to answer a question like that for Brian without him having to ask it, but today was proving to be anything but normal.

The cape spun his sword around one more time then stabbed it into the ground, concrete parting around the blade like butter. Tilting his head to the side, he seemed to consider Brian's words for several seconds. Then he shrugged. "Maybe. I'll think about it." He smiled broadly at them, showing two rows of pearly-white teeth. "That's the best you're going to get from me, I'm afraid."

Brian's shoulders were tense, but she trusted that he wasn't going to do anything stupid. She glanced down at her phone where she was holding it out of sight between her and Brian's bodies. There was no response from Coil. She'd messaged him that they were fleeing from an unknown cape, but he hadn't gotten back to her yet. As much as she didn't like her boss, sometimes the devil you knew was the safer bet. You could never know what a new cape might do.

"I guess that's true enough," Brian called out grudgingly, "but don't be surprised when we don't go spilling all our secrets.

"That's fine, I wouldn't expect you to anyway."

Tattletale wasn't really sure what she was expecting next. This certainly wasn't it.

"So you guys are supervillains, right? We already covered that. But like, what do you actually do? I don't think I've heard of the four teenage musketeers and their giant monsters, so what? Planning to steal the moon? Kidnap the mayor maybe? World domination?"

Brian seemed just as lost as she felt and Alec laughed, though it sounded slightly forced. Anxious. Worried. Afraid of capture. Power isn't working right. Afraid of––She cut her power off before she could waste any more of her already very limited remaining usage. Damn it, that complicated things even more.

She squeezed her eyes shut, the glare from her still silent phone stabbing into her brain like shards of broken glass. Keeping a tight hold on her power, she refocused on Brian's words.

"Uh, no, no, nothing like that. We're the Undersiders, not Lab Rat or the Elite. We just do heists, quick in and out. No muss, no fuss, no injuries if we can avoid it. We keep a low profile because it's safer that way. When you live in the same city as Lung and the Empire, it's best to stay out of the way."

"Huh. Fair enough, I guess. Then why all… this?" he waved in their general direction, "Why be villains at all?"

"It's personal," Brian said gruffly. "It pays the bills and that's all I'll say."

The cape's eyes turned to her and Tattletale shrugged. Without her powers, she didn't have any particular advantages in reading people, but hopefully she was interpreting the cues she was picking up correctly. "About the same. I don't want to hurt anyone, but a girl's gotta eat!"

He turned towards Rachel and Alec, but Rachel was too busy staring at the down form of Brutus. "Bitch!" she called out loudly and Alec poked Rachel from behind.

It took her a moment to understand the cue, but when she did she turned briefly towards the still-smiling cape. "Need to take care of my dogs. Money for food, kennels, shelter. I'm going to check on Brutus."

Without another word, she slid out of the saddle and marched across the street towards both Brutus and the unknown cape. Tattletale frowned, but the boy didn't look particularly worried or like he was going to attack her. Hopefully this wasn't going to screw things up for them.

He watched Rachel for a few seconds as she began to fuss over Brutus, then turned towards Alec, the last member of their team who hadn't answered yet. He raised his arms at his sides and shrugged casually. "What they said basically. It pays the bills and means I can order all the pizza and Chinese food I want while I'm gaming."

Tattletale waited with bated breath as the other cape studied them intently for several long seconds. He had one hand still firmly around the handle of his sword, but the other bounced erratically up and down on the pommel, something small clenched tightly in his fist.

"I… guess that makes sense," he said finally. "So what are you guys out doing tonight?"

"We were robbing a casino," Brian answered frankly. "Ruby Dreams, I don't know if you've heard of it. They have decent cash reserves and good insurance. We went in, got the money, and got out. No one got hurt, not even the security guards. Like the others said, we have to make a living somehow, and this is as close as we can get to a victimless crime. The cash we got will keep us taken care of for a few weeks, maybe longer if we're careful. It's not a huge haul, but it's something. Now we're just trying to get away without attracting too much attention. We can fight if we have to, but we would rather just go about our business in peace."

Tattletale approved. If this guy really was a hero, focusing on the lack of victims might help their case. If he was another villain scoping out the competition, focusing on the low-profile nature of their operation and the small scale of their gathered loot could only be a good thing as well. Usually she would have preferred to do the bulk of the talking, but she really wasn't feeling very up to it right now.

"Wow, that is much tamer than what I was expecting. The darkness must be great for crowd control and covering your escape and those monsters of yours are pretty fast."

"Something like that."

He clicked his tongue loudly. "Okay. Tell me a bit about yourselves. What you can do, your cape names, how long you've been around, that sort of thing. I promise I won't spread it around, I'm just curious. Do that, and maybe answer some questions about a few of the capes around here, and I think I'll get out of your hair for tonight. Sounds like a deal?"

Brian glanced over at Alec, who waggled his hand, then nodded. "I think we have to," Tattletale whispered, "but keep it short."

"I don't like it, but we have a deal. You can probably find most of this online anyway."

"I like this way more," he interjected, then waved for Brian to continue.

Brian soldiered on. "I'm Grue, this is Tattletale, Regent, and the girl over there is Bitch, though in the interests of being PG, the good guys and media decided to call her Hellhound instead. Together we're the Undersiders and we've been doing this for almost a year now.

"Like you've probably already noticed, I can generate this darkness. It blocks sound, sight, and a bunch of other things. Bitch has her dogs," he patted Angelica's back, "Regent can make people trip up and drop things, and Tattletale is our brains. I'd rather not say anything else."

He nodded."That's fine, I've heard enough." Tattletale relaxed slightly. As much as she loved showing off, one powerful cape knowing too much about what she could do was more than enough.

He was silent for nearly a minute then, his hand continuing to bounce up and down and his foot tapping rhythmically against the street. Then he sighed. "Well, I guess there's no real harm in letting you guys go. You're not really the sort of supervillains I was looking for anyway. First though, I'm pretty new around here and I'd like to hear your thoughts about the… cape scene around here. I imagine people like you keep a close eye on the competition."

Okay, that was a much better direction for this conversation to take. Maybe if she played her cards right she could even point this powerful newcomer's interests towards Coil. Something told her they hadn't seen the limits of his abilities yet.

"I think I can help with that," she called out before Brian could answer. "What would you like to know?"

Chapter 7: Marooned

Chapter Text

Hours later, curled up on a makeshift bed of soft sand and wrapped in a blanket of warm currents, my eyes finally closed as sleep took me into its comforting embrace. It had been a very long two days and I was utterly exhausted.

Despite my weariness, sleep did not come easily to me tonight. My conversation with the Undersiders had left me with far too many questions and far too few answers. They were just… people. Ordinary mortals with mortal problems and mortal ideas. Well, maybe they weren't quite ordinary mortals, ordinary mortals didn't have super powers after all, but they weren't gods, monsters, demigods, or anything else I had ever seen in my life.

They were just so very human. These weren't cartoon supervillains like I remembered seeing in movies, with their grand plans and impractical ambitions. Grue, Bitch, Tattletale, and Regent were all doing this for such… common reasons. Simple mortal greed and necessity combined with supernatural abilities. I didn't know how I felt about it. How I was supposed to feel about it.

In the end, I'd spent about ten minutes interrogating the group before I finally let them go. Tattletale had proven to be a fountain of information, happily answering each and every question I bothered to ask about the other local villains. I hadn't learned all that much more than what I'd already seen online, but I found hearing it again from someone to be much more informative than reading it all myself.

Somehow, the biggest shock tonight had been seeing a perfectly ordinary dog climb out of the fleshy remains of the monster I'd knocked aside. Bitch had cleaned the dog off somewhat with a towel and then done something that made a new meat suit to grow around it until there were once more three giant monsters. Well, not monsters. Just ordinary dogs in monster costumes apparently. That had been very, very weird.

Despite my curiosity, I had held back in checking if Riptide could hurt the dog itself. The information would probably have been rather valuable, but it would have also needlessly antagonized the dog-loving girl. It was something I would have to do sooner or later––it would be really, really bad if my sword suddenly passed through someone while I was fighting them instead of, well, stabbing them––but that could wait for now.

After I'd let the Undersiders leave, the villains bounding off into the distance on the backs of their dog-monster-thingies, I'd spent another few hours wandering futilely around the docks before finding an abandoned pier and diving back into the sea for the night. I needed time to process and decompress, and a full night's rest in the depths of my dad's domain sounded like just what the doctor ordered.

Of course it was never going to be that simple. It never was for a demigod. My eyes closed at the bottom of the sea and opened within the crumbling ruin of an ancient temple.

"Oh for fuck's sake," I mumbled, my voice echoing within the confines of my mind. "Of all the nights…"

The temple sat at the peak of a mountain, surrounded on all sides by little more than barren rock and scraggly bushes. A winding road led past the ruins and down towards a distant town. Far below I could feel the sea, gentle waves lapping the hulls of small fishing boats and crashing against high cliffs.

I felt at home. At peace. This was where I belonged. For a moment I could almost imagine that I was standing in the halls of Atlantis, surrounded by pillars of shining coral and warm water.

This place was mine, something familiar in an alien world. For the first time in days I could feel the comforting echo of my Father's power, a boundless storm of the ocean's fury lurking just out of sight, but tinged with warmth and love.

I took a step forward and ran my hand along sun-kissed marble. I could feel the sea in it, in every inch of once-pristine marble now worn and weathered by the passage of time and the hands of man. This place had been loved and cherished once. The target of countless pilgrimages and hopeful petitioners.

In my mind's eye, I could almost see the temple's former glory. Echoes of prayer and sacrifice rang in my ears like forgotten song lyrics, ancient Greek words hanging at the tip of my tongue before fading into darkness. Burnt offerings filled my nose and I smiled as I remembered joyful meals at Camp.

The place was beautiful. Perhaps it was not the match of the temples I'd seen on Mount Olympus or within Atlantis, but so much more because this place had been made by mortal hands. Craftsmen had poured their lives and souls into this place, seeing the beauty within the marble and freeing it to see the light of day.

A statue of Poseidon dominated the temple, bronze polished to a mirror-gleam and easily thrice the height of a mortal man. His face was twisted into a dark scowl, but I could see humor glinting in his bronze eyes and the barest hint of a smile in his teeth. This too was mortal work and made so much more because of it.

Beneath it stood the altar, heaped with gifts and sacrifices. Bronze brazier burned with green and orange fires, casting dancing shadows on the walls and filling the room with warmth and light. A child sat against the back wall, staring up at the statue as she carefully whittled a stick with a bronze knife. She raised her makeshift trident into the air, comparing it against the statue's bronze weapon, and smiled. The statue smiled back and she vanished into memory.

Faint shapes moved around me––priests, sailors, and countless others; shadows of shadows without mass or substance brushed against my skin and moved through me as though I wasn't there. Some few were darker, richer than others. I could see faint impressions of familiar green eyes and black hair. They came and went bearing sacrifices and singing prayers for safety and fair weather.

I was in Greece––the Ancient Land. Maybe I wasn't standing in the sea itself, but this place remembered that it had once been just as much within my Father's domain as any ocean current. Cape Sounion. I mouthed the name, rolling it on my tongue and searching my memories.

I had never heard of it before, but the name was written in the waters around me. The Aegean Sea sang like no waters I had ever ventured within, danger and riches both hiding just beneath the surface. My silent question was answered by the sea-breeze and the crashing of the waves far below.

The Mist was thicker here. Just a little, but after hours of focusing the difference was instantly apparent. It lurked within the stone and billowed in the wake of nameless shadows. My voice joined in alongside a severe-faced priest's prayer, my words inaudible even to me, and the Mist swirled and sang with every word.

I blinked and suddenly I was in another time. Looking to the horizon, I could almost see a fleet of black-sailed ships. Upon the cliffs stood a sobbing man in the garb of a king. He raised his hands to the sky and cast himself down the mountainside, plunging into the merciless depths below with nary a splash.

Moments later, he was replaced by a man that could have been my twin. Jet black hair and sea-green eyes stared back at me from an older, nobler face. This time I needed no aid to know before whom I stood. I soundlessly mouthed the name of one of my most famed half-brothers. Theseus, founder of Athens. Son of Poseidon.

He turned towards me and smiled ruefully. I smiled back. It felt almost like looking in a mirror. Here we were, two brothers separated by nearly three millennia, yet united by divine blood and the death of one uppity cow. Then he took one look down towards the sea, wiped tears from his eyes, and vanished beyond the horizon.

Countless more images flashed past me and the world changed with every moment. Priests came and went, the land shifted with the seasons, roads were built and washed away by rain, and wooden vessels grew more and more complex and sophisticated.

Finally, another black-haired, sea-green eyed man stood before me. He looked old. Tired. Barely more than the idea of a man. There was no priest in the temple. No sacrifice on the altar. No prayers echoing in my ears. He leaned heavily on a golden trident covered in barnacles.

I recognized him. How could I not? His smile had warmed my dreams as a child and in the past six months I'd spent more time with him than almost any demigod child could dream of. "Poseidon?" I called out. "Dad?"

He did not respond. A single tear ran slowly down his nose and then fell down, down, down to splash silently into the emerald waves. Waters raged and storm winds blew. When they passed, nothing but the faint smell of the sea and an invisible glimmer of gold remained.

Then even that was gone. "Dad?" I asked softly. There was no answer.

A profound, overwhelming sense of loss filled me, grief crashing against the hole in my heart where Annabeth had once been and knocking my legs out from under me. I knelt alone surrounded by sixteen weathered columns and bare fragments of once well-polished marble. I could still smell the sea, still feel the salty breeze ruffling my hair, but there was something missing.

I was there for what felt like an eternity, tears leaking down my cheeks like rain water pouring down a storm drain. I didn't understand. Couldn't understand. What? Why? How? The world felt cold and empty. Something crucial was gone and the world knew it, even if people could not see the hole.

Eventually the tears ran dry. I rose to my feet and walked forward, stopping at the edge of the cliff where once King Aegeus had stood and looked out for the sails of his son's returning ships. There was a storm on the horizon, dark and terrible, but painfully mundane. There was no eagle fighting a horse, no flying chariot or Master Bolt. Only water vapor, strong winds, and the faint smell of salt and ozone.

Something glimmered in the depths. Something gold. It called to me. The sight of it made the ichor in my veins twist and writhe in agitation. It was something familiar, but unknown. Mine but forbidden to me.

'This is not the time,' a voice whispered suddenly in my ear. Sand and rock shifted beneath my feet until I stood facing the temple ruins with my back to the sea.

There was something here. Something massive. Just out of sight. Just out of reach. The weight of countless millennia pressed down on my shoulders. The voice was weak and tired. It sounded small and scared, a child asking their mother to check for a monster under their bed, and yet it dwarfed me like a mountain dwarfs an ant. The voice was familiar, but not. A different note played on the same instrument

I looked up at the sky and found that it had been replaced by a sea of stars. Something lurked up there, two coiling shapes that blocked out the sun and dwarfed the moon. It hurt to look, hurt to see. There was something in the way, not the Mist, not anything I'd ever seen before, but a massive hand peeled back the curtain for a single fraction of a moment. 'Know. Awaken, but do not forget.'

My eyes shot open, my brain feeling like it was about to burst out of my skull and burning knives stabbing my eyes. Well, that was certainly one way to spend the night. Not nearly as restful as I would have liked, but… informative. I had so many questions and no one to ask them. Just the way I liked it… Not. Sometimes it really did feel like the Fates hated me. Stupid old ladies with their stupid giant socks.

Chapter 8: Preparations

Notes:

Sorry about the formatting :sob:

Chapter Text

It took more than two hours of tossing and turning, but eventually I did manage to fall back asleep despite my racing thoughts and the stabbing pain behind my eyes. Several times I was tempted to reach for my meager reserves of ambrosia, but I was disciplined enough to push through the pain while I let the soothing waters around me do their work.

As tempting as it was, I could work through this pain, and ambrosia was simply too valuable to waste like that. If something managed to hurt me despite the curse of Achilles, it might be my only chance at recovery. And in a world filled with mortals with strange and powerful… powers––well, I certainly had some ideas. Sometimes even Chiron's warnings were filled with tactical advice.

This time, thankfully, I slept like a log. No demigod dreams disturbed my rest. No horrible memories or haunting nightmares plagued me. I wasn't even bumped awake early by a worried dolphin or turtle tangled in a six-pack ring, an unfortunately common occurrence when I was resting in shallow waters like these.

I woke up with the sun, feeling much less rested than I would have liked despite having spent hours literally in my element while I slept. It was still mostly dark down here, only a smidgeon of sunlight reaching down this far this early in the day, but rising early had become a habit over the years.

It was around seven, seven-thirtyish, maybe. I was feeling rather hungry––the curse of Achilles meant I needed more food and sleep than an ordinary demigod. Unfortunately, today was Friday which meant that the little cafe I'd gone to yesterday didn't open until nine, and I wasn't really feeling fast food right now. That blueberry pie had been absolutely delicious and I'd been craving another slice since lunch.

I also kind of wanted to see if that girl would be there again. I was almost certain she was a parahuman and maybe I could try to talk to her. I knew capes were pretty protective about the entire secret-identity thing––outside of a few exceptions I'd read about––but maybe she'd be willing to talk? She'd definitely noticed something about me, so perhaps capes had some way of recognizing each other?

Wait no, that didn't make sense because I wasn't one of them. I was a demigod, not a parahuman. Weird. Well, it didn't really matter now. I'd cross that bridge when I got to it.

The promise of blueberry pie kept me going through my usual morning training. I opened up a big bubble of air around me, leaving only a few inches on the ground to keep the sand wet and so I could still move around like I was in the open while benefiting from the rejuvenating touch of the sea. Sometimes I did just train underwater, but for my sword fighting and general fitness it was better to train in an environment that didn't actively help me through every motion.

I spent a few minutes warming up, then spent another hour and a bit doing sword drills with Riptide, unarmed fighting drills Chiron had taught me, calisthenics, and some basic practice using my demigod abilities to finish things off. By the end of it, I was feeling a lot more awake and energized.

I also spent some time trying to see if I could still use any of the techniques I'd learned to manipulate the Mist. What I'd found was that controlling the Mist around here was tricky. You had to be a lot firmer with it than I was used to. Thalia had always said the trick was just making a suggestion and letting the Mist do the rest. Here, that just simply didn't seem to work. It was going to take a lot more practice to get anywhere with it, but at least I now knew not to try anything like that until I had a better grip on things.

I made it to the cafe, Buns 'n' Roses according to the sign, just a few minutes after it opened. The place was almost empty. There was a red-headed young woman sipping a large coffee with her eyes closed in the corner and a mom with a stroller looking at the different breads on display, but other than that it was just me and the impressively built man behind the counter who was busily filling the baskets behind the glass with freshly baked pastries and breads from a large rolling rack.

I ordered a slightly smaller spread than I'd eaten the day before and this time paid for it all with my Lotus Cash Card. The cashier gave me a strange look when I asked for three slices of pie for here, then shrugged and waved it off. I also got a free loaf of whole wheat garlic chive bread because I was one of the first five customers today. I didn't really need it, but it was apparently a new recipe (as the man told me three different times in the space of thirty seconds) and smelled absolutely delicious, so I wasn't going to say no.

I finished most of my food in about twenty minutes, then spent another fifteen savoring my last slice of pie while I watched the morning news on the TV in the corner. The villains I'd talked to were on the news, though I only recognized them because one of the newscasters mentioned the casino they robbed by name. They just called them 'local villains' and the only pictures they had showed clouds of darkness billowing out through the front doors of the casino. I was happy to see that I hadn't been lied to yesterday. No one had been hurt during the attack, just like Grue had told me.

To my disappointment, the girl did not come back while I was eating and I wasn't willing to wait for her any longer than I already had. I had a lot of things to do and figure out today and I could always try to find her another time or just talk to some other cape. I still had Glory Girl's card safely tucked away, and if the need arose I could try to reach out to the Protectorate. I glanced out the window towards where I could see the repurposed oil rig standing out in the bay, its force field shimmering in the morning sunlight. Their base wasn't exactly hard to find.

I brought my plates over to the bin in the corner, waved to the man behind the counter, and left the cafe swinging the brown paper bag with my bread in it. Today I was heading back to the library with a new goal. Yesterday, I had gotten acquainted with this strange new world I found myself in. Today, I needed to figure out what I was going to be doing next.

If I was going to get anywhere with all this, I needed a plan, a base, and allies. Only then could I safely focus on that bizarre dream and the horrifying voice that still made my head hurt just thinking about it. Even without really digging deeply into it, the implications were… disturbing. That bit at the end especially. That had been my dad, I was sure of it. I… I didn't like the thought of what I'd seen.

I shook my head to clear it and focused on the boardwalk beneath my feet. Library first, freak out later. Focus, Percy.

Welcome to the Parahumans Online message boards.
You are currently logged in, Riptide
You are viewing:
• Threads you have replied to
• AND Threads that have new replies
• OR private message conversations with new replies
• Thread OP is displayed.
• Fifteen posts per page
• Last ten messages in private message history.
• Threads and private messages are ordered chronologically.

Topic: Kyushu, Newfoundland, Who's Next?
In: Boards ► News ► Events ► World
SurpriseFornax (Original Poster) (Kyushu Survivor) (Newfoundland Survivor)
Posted On Jul 9th 2009:
I think you've all seen the pictures by now. It's been two years since Newfoundland and all I can think of is who's next? I haven't been able to look at the ocean without having a panic attack in years and I moved what's left of my family to Montana and I still don't feel safe.
(Showing page 9 of 111)
►BigDEnergy (Verified Cape) (RIP)
Replied On Jul 9th 2009:
Oh shit man, I heard their were people like you, but I'd never met any before. Glad you and your folks made it out. I was on one of the teams doing evacuations, I'm sorry we couldn't do more. It was horrible, really just awful stuff. Seeing all the bodies in the water, all the rubble... That shit hunts my nightmares to this day. We have got to do something about Leviathan and the other endbringers. We can't keep doing what we're doing. On a good day sometimes we drive them off, but sometimes we don't and either way a lot of innocent people die. I don't know what, but something needs to change. For now, I'm going to keep fighting and keep trying. Its the least I can do.
End of Page. 1, 2, 3 ... 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 ... 109, 110, 111

Topic: The Dangers of Tinker/Mover Dimensional Travel
In: Boards ► Discussion ► Capes ► Theoretical
Mr. Dr. Buzzkill (Original Poster) (Cape Husband) (Actually a Doctor)
Posted On Mar 5th 2009:
So I know that by now, Earth Aleph is old news. We've been trading for their movies for more than a decade now (my wife exclusively watches Aleph productions these days. She hates what capes have done to Hollywood) and everything is alright, but that's not what I want to talk about here. That portal is tightly controlled and regulated by the government to make sure that nothing dangerous can come through in either direction.

No, I'm thinking about potential new capes. New capes who are young and careless and might bring about the end of the world while they're just trying to play around with their powers. We know that Aleph diverged back when Scion appeared, but imagine something else. Lets call it Earth Gimel. An earth that diverged a thousand years ago because they had the white death instead of the black death.

Now imagine that Mr. Portal Boy opens a portal to Earth Gimel and just prances on through to talk to the locals. Well, maybe Mr. Portal Boy catches a simple case of the White Death, something the locals have become all but immune to over the centuries. Then, Mr. Portal Boy goes to school! Suddenly we're dealing with an epidemic the likes of which we can barely imagine. It gets even worse when we try to quarantine the issue and Mr. Portal Boy opens up a portal to France because he wants a baguette for lunch and suddenly they've got White Death in France too!

Edit: Don't tell me the PRT has it all under control! It doesn't even have to be a cape here on Bet, what if a Mr. Portal Boy triggers on Gimel!? Huh? What then? Or Earth Dalet, Earth He, whatever! You get the point! Shit like this keeps me up at night!
(Showing page 113 of 159)
►Procto the Unfortunate Tinker (Not a tinker) (Banned)
Replied On Mar 6th 2009:
You're right man, that does sound freaky. Imagine if they have like, fish tails or something. That would be so fucking cool! Do you think fish ladies are hot and do they have, you know, the right equipment down there? I think I would bang a fish lady if she was hot, I've always thought mermaids were pretty dope.

►RegularPosterPoster
Replied On Mar 6th 2009:
BoberTheHober dude wtf

End of Page. 1, 2, 3 ... 111, 112, 113, 114, 115 ... 157, 158, 159

Topic: Simurgh Attacks Madison, Copies Haywire Tech
In: Boards ► News ► Events ► America
Nokra (Original Poster) (Veteran Member) (The Guy in the Know) (Unverified Cape)
Posted On Dec 23rd 2009:

Topic: New Wave: A History and Maybe a Future
In: Boards ► Boards ► Places ► America ►Brockton Bay
Bagofmarbles (Original Poster) (Cape Groupie)
Posted On Jan 2nd 2009:

Topic: Brandish Wins Case, Fights Hookwolf!?
In: Boards ► Boards ► Places ► America ►Brockton Bay
Bagofmarbles (Original Poster) (Cape Groupie)
Posted On Sep 1st 2010:

Private messages from Point_Me_ _The_Sky:
Riptide: Hey Glory Girl, it's me the cape from Wednesday who introduced themselves wrong?
Riptide: You said I could message you if I have any questions and I sort of do.
Riptide: You were completely right, I'm really new to this cape thing and I could really use some advice and support, but I'm not really comfortable messaging you about it on here. Is there any chance we could meet up in person to talk about it?
Point_Me_ _The_Sky: Oh, hi! Sorry i hd to rush off on you like that, I lost track of time! Yeah I think we could probably do something like that. PHO is pretty secure but I absolutely get it. I see you made a new account, is Riptide your cape name?
Riptide: Yes, I guess it is. It felt like a good fit.
Point_Me_ _The_Sky: Totally! I like it! Catchy, rolls off the tongue, and I don't think it's taken?
Point_Me_ _The_Sky: Its not! Just checked!
Riptide: That's good.
Riptide: So, would you be willing to meet with me sometime? Maybe tomorrow since it's the weekend?
Point_Me_ _The_Sky: Yeah that should work! How about the boardwalk?
Point_Me_ _The_Sky: I normally wouldn't ask this sort of thing, but do you want to do it in or out of costume? I mean since I already know your name and face and I don't know if you have a costume or not or whatever?
Riptide: I'm fine with out. I have a costume but it's pretty eye-catching. That's one of the things I want to talk to you about actually.
Point_Me_ _The_Sky: K, 1 work?
Riptide: Yeah that sounds good. I'll wait for you outside of the Buns 'n' roses cafe in the same sweater as last time if that's alright with you?
Point_Me_ _The_Sky: kk. Do you mind if I bring my cousin? My mom's insisting on it.
Riptide: Sure that's fine with me. I'll see you then. Thank you.
Point_Me_ _The_Sky: C u then!

Chapter 9: Meeting Young Waves

Chapter Text

I shifted nervously from foot to foot, my eyes warily watching the gloomy, overcast sky. It had been a very rainy, unpleasant morning, with thick fog blanketing the coast and making it hard for normal people to see anything. It didn't really bother me much, my clothes stayed dried unless I wanted them not to and the fog actually improved my senses rather than hindering them, but it had left the boardwalk all but deserted.

I'd half expected that the cafe would be closed when I arrived to get breakfast. I hadn't seen a single other person walking around, but it seemed that it took more than a little bad weather to keep them from opening on time.

The weather had mostly cleared up in the hours since then, but it was still unusually foggy. Normally I wouldn't mind, but the Mist here was so thin that the mundane mist interfered with my usual methods of sensing it. I'd never been particularly good at seeing the Mist, or even seeing through it to be perfectly honest, but with practice I'd learned to sense it the same way I could sense water around me. I'd thought it was a very clever workaround, but now it was coming back to bite me in the ass.

I squinted up as I saw two shapes moving in the sky far above, but quickly realized they were just seagulls. I sagged back against the wooden fence separating the boardwalk from the beach and tried to focus on the crashing of the waves behind me. The sea was choppy today, rough and uncertain like my racing thoughts.

Taking a deep breath, I tried to calm myself. I was making the right choice. Probably. No, not probably. I'd done my due diligence, researched the topic, and made the best choice I had available to me given my current circumstances. This was the right choice.

I did a lot of reading yesterday. Like, more than I had in the past four years if you didn't include the research I'd done yesterday. Things had been a bit rough at first, especially with the lingering pains of my dream-headache, but then I found the accessibility settings on PHO and suddenly my reading got a lot easier.

It wasn't ancient Greek, but big letters, big spacings, and no fancy italics to distract my eyes made things a lot easier! It also helped that it really was a matter of life or death––a bad choice here could cause me a lot of problems very quickly––so my demigod instincts didn't act up quite as much as they did in school. I still had to take frequent breaks, but not nearly as many of them as I had been expecting. There were definitely still moments where I would have gladly dealt with a monster attack instead of reading one more drifting, letter-scrambled word, but unfortunately no helpful minotaur presented itself for me to vent my frustration on.

Thankfully the library wasn't too busy and the middle-aged man behind the checkout counter showed minimal interest in verifying my story about being home schooled. After some poking around I had managed to find an out-of-the-way row of ancient-looking computers tucked away in the foreign-language and culture section, snagged a small pile of one-time login codes from an unattended desk, and gotten to work.

Even outside of the whole 'dyslexia makes reading words hard' thing, I wasn't really good at this research stuff. I was born to sail and fight, not for all this nitty-gritty planning and preparing. I kept getting sidetracked, losing my train of thought, and struggled to find the information I was looking for. Still, I persevered and eventually managed to come up with my current plan.

First of all, I'd concluded early on that claiming to be a demigod was going to get me nowhere. People around here had a very firm belief that the supernatural was all just made up nonsense and tended to belittle the capes that claimed their abilities came from divine intervention or magical abilities. I would need to look into some of those just in case they were telling the truth, but that was something to worry about later.

I'd also learned that this world was already familiar with the concept of dimensional travel, though information about it was very, very limited. Only Earth Aleph as they called it (though why this was Earth Bet and that was Earth Aleph I really couldn't say) was well known by the public. Just like this world, Earth Aleph had capes, though apparently they were much rarer and far weaker than the ones around here.

Okay, perfect. My new story seemed obvious enough and very hard to verify one way or another. It also helped that it was sort of true if you squinted. I was Percy Jackson, cape name Riptide (it was the first thing that had popped into my head when Grue asked), and I was a cape from another Earth. Earth Gimel maybe––I was pretty sure that was the next letter?

On my Earth, heroes and villains were a lot more low key than they were around here and we used different terminology. I would do my best to avoid saying anything about gods or the war or demigods, but I had a feeling something was going to slip through so it was best to be prepared. Gods could be senior heroes, demigods were like sidekicks maybe? Or Wards, that was what they called the official junior heroes around here.

Anyway, I had gotten caught in some sort of… shaker, maybe mover, effect and spit out here on Earth Bet. Simple enough. No need to mention the voice that made my brain hurt just thinking about it or that strange dream I'd had last night.

For the sake of simplicity, I was also going to pretend to be eighteen here. Sixteen-and-a-half was basically ancient by demigod standards anyway. I had no desire to go back to school or whatever and I was both tall and broad-shouldered enough to pass for an adult.

Once I'd had that figured out, it became a question of where did I go from there. Well, I was pretty sure that I could feel my preferred answer to that question walking towards me, so hopefully I'd be able to get that settled soon. Plan B was just wandering up to the oil rig superhero base thingy and hoping for the best. That wasn't a very good plan, not even for me.

I waved to the pair of blonde girls walking towards me down the boardwalk. I'd expected them to fly in, but in hindsight this made more sense. New Wave was one of the few superhero groups in the United States that didn't really do the whole 'secret identity' thing, but maybe they still shied away from obvious power usage in public? Or maybe not. I could feel that Glory Girl's clothing was completely dry despite the morning's foul weather..

"Hey," I called out once they were close enough, "Glory Girl and Laserdream, right?"

"That's us!" Glory Girl answered cheerfully. "I'm Victoria, but everyone calls me Vicky, and this is my cousin Crystal!" Her voice dropped a half-dozen volume levels. "Riptide, right? Or can I––"

"Percy is fine."

Her grin widened and I found myself smiling back at her. Her joy was infectious. I was so happy that someone so amazing had––

A wave crashed against the beach, cold water rushing up the surf to soak into the drier sand at the edge of the water. The sound of it echoed in my mind, the roar of the ocean drowning out the faint whine of alien fingers brushing the edges of my consciousness.

It took me a moment to realize what was happening. Her wiki page on PHO said Glory Girl had some kind of emotional aura, evoking awe in her allies and fear in her enemies. It was a little annoying, but it wasn't nearly on the level of charmspeak and I knew how to deal with mind-altering abilities.

Stuff like this was easier with actual seawater, but I could manage without it. The sea rose up within me. The golden ichor in my blood flashed with divine might and the questing touch of her aura lost all purchase on my mind.

Without skipping a beat, I extended a hand towards the pair. It hadn't felt like an attack, no more than the way Silena sometimes accidentally let her charmspeak slip into her voice during heated arguments.

"I really appreciate you guys coming out to meet me, especially on a day like this."

Glory Girl vigorously shook the offered hand. She had a very firm grip, particularly for someone with no noticeable calluses. She was supposedly basically invulnerable, right? Did her power protect her from that sort of thing? The curse of Achilles certainly didn't––it had been a constant source of jokes for the Aphrodite campers. My calluses were just as indestructible as the rest of me now. "Of course! I'm always happy to help a new hero out! Brockton can use all the heroes it can get."

Crystal's handshake was a lot more like what I would have expected from a teenage mortal. "It's nice to meet you, Percy. Thank you for trusting me with your secret. I promise I won't spread it around."

I was confused for a moment. "Huh?" It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize she meant the whole secret identity thing. "Oh, right. Yeah it's no problem. We're all heroes here, I trust you guys." It wasn't like Percy Jackson was anymore a meaningful name here than Riptide was. I had no identity or family here to worry about.

We exchanged a few more brief pleasantries before I noticed how Crystal was shivering in the sea breeze. The mist and earlier drizzle had left her jeans and coat damp and she was clearly getting cold just standing out here with me and Vicky.

"It's getting a bit chilly standing out here, do you guys think we could move this inside somewhere?"

"Yeah, let's do that," Crystal chimed in immediately. Her teeth clacked together loudly between words and Glory Girl finally seemed to notice the same thing that I had.

"Great idea. I know a nice brunch place with private booths not too far from here?" she chimed in.

"Sure."

Fifteen minutes later the three of us were tucked away in the back corner of the restaurant in question. I was sitting on one side of the booth, with Crystal and Vicky sitting across from me. It was quite warm inside and the air was filled with the smell of frying bacon and the soft hum of classical music.

The restaurant was busier than most of the places we'd passed along the boardwalk, but that still left it half-empty just after noon on a Saturday. If that wasn't a sign of urban decay, I didn't know what was. Everything I knew about brunch places meant that I'd been expecting a thirty minute wait and then another twenty before we finally got a server. Instead, we'd been seated as soon as we'd come in and the waitress had come by almost immediately to get our orders.

"So," Glory Girl began once we all had our drinks and the waitress had walked away, "you said on PHO that you had some questions about heroing?"

I shifted uncomfortably. Just talking to the two girls had been fine, they honestly reminded me of some of the newer campers after the end of the war and it had been nice to talk to people without the weight of who I was hanging over us. Now that the moment of truth had come, I was suddenly questioning my decision again.

I took a deep breath and let the waves within me settle into a smooth expanse of blue-green depths. Nothing ventured, nothing earned. I could always fall back on plan B if I had to. Or plan C and D once I figured out what those plans were.

"Yeah, something like that. Uh, you know how I said I'm new to all this, right?"

"Yup! Don't worry, we were all there once! Everyone has to start somewhere!"

Even with her aura still futile scrambling for purchase in mind, Vicky's positivity made me smile. She was so genuine and cheerful, and she clearly believed in being a hero.

"Thanks. Well, it's a little bit more complicated than all that. I guess like, well, I'm not really new to being a hero, but I am new to how you do it here. I'm not… from around here, I guess. Not Brockton Bay I mean, but like. Here. Earth Bet."

Crystal, who had been taking a sip from her steaming cup of coffee, choked and spluttered and would have spilled her drink if not for the crimson force field that snapped into place over it like a lid before it could go everywhere.

Vicky wasn't much better. She'd clearly been preparing to say something, but my words had knocked her off-kilter and left her just staring at me.

I hurriedly continued, "A few days ago, just a bit before you ran into me really, I ran into some kind of shaker or mover effect. Sorry, I'm not super familiar with the terminology you guys use here. There's only so much research you can do at a public library in two days. It grabbed me and spit me out around here. Well, like a bit out to sea but this was the closest city to where I came out. I was a bit banged up but I'm pretty durable so it turned out okay.

"The Earth I come from, well, it's definitely not Earth Aleph and I couldn't find any references to it online. We also have powers and heroes, but we're a lot more low-key about it. I've never had to worry about my secret identity before so I was a little confused about what you were talking about.

"Anyway, I spent the last few days getting my bearings and trying to figure out what was going on. I considered just approaching the PRT, but I haven't been able to find anything online about what they might do to accidental dimension travelers so I wanted a bit of a safety net before I did anything. I've seen some of the work your team does and it's pretty amazing. Plus your mom is like a big-shot lawyer and a hero. I was hoping you guys could maybe help me out?"

The two girls were silent for several long moments and I was afraid that I'd managed to screw everything up. That had all come out a bit faster than I'd meant for it too but I had never been particularly great at first impressions. Half the people I met tended to want to kill me before minute five.

Crystal cleared her throat, then turned to her cousin and poked her shoulder. Victoria, who had been silently staring at me since a few words into my explanation, jumped. "Sorry! That's uh, not quite what I was expecting," she said slowly. "I have… questions. I thought you just––"

Before she could continue, the waitress returned with a tray stacked high with brunch staples. Eggs, french toast, piles of bacon, hotcakes, and breakfast potatoes, and more filled the booth with a dizzying array of wonderful smells and I heard her stomach rumble hungrily. I had a feeling that her questions had suddenly become a secondary priority.

Chapter 10: Like Diamonds in the Sky

Chapter Text

I'm not really sure if they believed me. They certainly didn't at first. My trainwreck of an introduction to Glory Girl certainly helped my case––basically everyone around here understood the whole cape secret identity thing and even a brand new hero should have had at least that much figured out––but it wasn't enough to reassure them that I wasn't crazy.

Still, I'm glad I chose to start talking only after we'd ordered, because I have a feeling they might have just up and left otherwise. As it was, both girls looked… let's say very skeptical as I continued my story.

In all honesty, I didn't have that much proof to go off of. I just hoped it would be enough to get a foot in the door. Presumably the PRT would have some way of checking my story, but I'd been in enough trouble throughout my life (and heard enough stories from my former classmates) that approaching the local authorities without someone like a lawyer behind me seemed foolish.

As we ate I laid out what I did have. First of all, a handful of crumpled one-dollar bills and pennies minted in the last decade. Apparently they didn't have either of those around here. They only used dollar coins and pennies had been phased out years ago. I'd managed to dodge a bullet by paying for my food that first day with just twenties and a five. Getting the police called on me for counterfeiting would have been really, really embarrassing without the Mist to get me out of trouble.

Unfortunately, that was really the end of my tangible proof. Everything else was just me rattling off other differences I'd noticed. We had a different president, and not the guy they had in Aleph either; I'd double checked just to be sure. There had been an attack on nine-eleven, just like in Aleph.

Most of that was easily accepted. The one that really raised some eyebrows was when I mentioned that Brockton Bay didn't exist back home. Not that it had been totally destroyed, but rather that it had just never been founded in the first place as far as I could remember.

Vicky frowned at me and told me that was nonsense because Aleph and Bet only started diverging when Scion showed up. I had no real answer to that. I'd already decided to keep the entire god/monster/demigod business on the down-low for now so I couldn't really go out and say that I knew that the divergence point was not that. Instead I just shrugged and moved on.

By the time I was finished, the food was mostly gone and Vicky and Crystal were staring silently at one another. Eventually Crystal turned to me and flashed me a small smile. "Do you think you could give us a few minutes?"

"Yeah, sure. Not a problem." I stood up and headed to the bathroom.

Once they were sure I was gone, the two girls broke into hushed whispers. If I had been a normal mortal, there was no way I could hear them through the bathroom door and across half the restaurant. I wasn't a mortal. I wasn't even your run-of-the-mill demigod, as much as any demigod can be run-of-the-mill.

I felt a bit bad intruding on their private conversation, but not as bad as I would feel if I walked into a trap and had to hurt someone to get out. I strained my ears, focusing intently on the both where we'd been sitting. A gentle sea breeze blowing in through the crack in the door caught their words and carried them to my ears. It wasn't a perfect solution and I lost a lot of words, but it was enough.

"...sounds completely crazy, but he seems…"

"...give him a chance…"

"...could be a Master…"

"...my aura...flattened a bullet against his shoulder…"

"...Haywire's been dead for…"

"...said it was someone on his side…"

"...he could be making things up…Madison…"

"...call Mom...Amy could check if he's telling the…"

"...don't know if it's safe to…"

"...we're heroes. Helping people…He gave me his secret identity like it was…"

"...fine, Aunt Carol can…"

I washed my hands, cleaned a bit of maple syrup off my cheek, and headed back. It didn't seem like they were plotting anything nefarious and I counted that as a win in my books. Just in case, I grabbed a plastic water bottle filled with seawater from my hoody, soaked a paper towel, and then wrapped it around my bare bicep before covering it back up with my sleeve. This way I could finally stop focusing on blocking out Vicky's aura.

I got back to the table just in time to get my glass of soda refilled. Vicky waited until the waitress was gone, then took a deep breath. "Okay so I don't know if I totally believe your story, but I think that even if you're just crazy you deserve our help."

Crystal elbowed her cousin. It had exactly as much impact as it would have if she'd tried to elbow me––Vicky didn't even move––but it did make her shoot Crystal a sharp glare.

"I'm just paraphrasing what you said," Vicky hissed.

"But you didn't have to just go out and say it like that!"

I laughed. "It's fine, don't worry about it. It's a pretty crazy story."

"Right. Anyway, as I was saying before someone elbowed me, we think that what you're saying makes sense. I sent mom a text. She went into the office this morning, but she should be home in a few hours. I think if you talked to her she'd be willing to give you a hand, or at least point you at someone who can."

"If you really want to go through with this, she's going to need to hear your story as well. I know it's one thing to unmask to Vicky and me, and a whole other deal to do it in front of an adult like my aunt." She paused for a moment, "On that note, how old are you? I know you said you've had your powers for a few years now and you probably didn't bring a legal guardian with you from your Earth, but that sort of thing could be important."

"Honestly I thought Vicky would have told everyone who I was already. I don't really care much one way or another. As I said, I don't really have a secret identity, nor any friends and family to protect. I doubt Percy Jackson exists here, and if he does he's a completely different person than I am."

I paused for a moment, suddenly curious if there was a Sally Jackson in this world. If so, what did her life look like? In this world she never would have met my dad, never had me, never married Smelly Gabe, and so much more. Maybe her parents had never even died, maybe her uncle had been saved by a parahuman healer, maybe, maybe, maybe. It was impossible to say now, but perhaps I'd look into it someday.

"Oh, and I'm an adult, you don't need to worry about that," I lied quickly, "I turned eighteen in August."

Crystal seemed to relax slightly at my words. "Oh that's good. Vicky told me she knew your name, but she didn't tell any of us who you are. I know it doesn't feel important to you right now, but maybe it will someday in the future if you're stuck here. At the very least, other people will think it's a big deal. You sh––"

Vicky cut in before Crystal could finish. "Yeah, yeah, I think he gets it, right?" Without waiting for an answer she continued. "I've been dying to ask, so what's your power? I saw that bullet on Wednesday so I know you're a Brute, but like, are you a full Alexandria package? How strong are you? How durable? I'd love a new sparring partner––Uncle Neil, uh Manpower I mean, and Aegis are the only ones around who I can really practice with and I sometimes have to be a bit careful with them. Do you think––"

This time it was Crystal's turn to stop her exuberant cousin. "Breathe, Vicky. He can't answer your questions if you're just going to talk over him."

Vicky deflated instantly, "Sorry, I got a little too excited."

"Don't worry, I completely understand. I've had trouble finding practice partners before too. I'm not super familiar with all the categories, but I think I'm a Brute/Shaker? I'm pretty strong, invulnerable, and I can control water. Oh, and I can sort of sometimes cause earthquakes, but only little ones. I collapsed a bridge once. Long story. No flying for me unfortunately, but I can swim pretty quickly in a pinch. I really don't know enough about all the numbers to say where I fall. PHO seems pretty hazy on what they all mean and I had other things to focus on."

Our conversation was once more disrupted by the arrival of the waitress, this time with a small woven basket with our check. She collected our plates and hurried away, leaving me with a sudden quandary: Here I was sitting in a restaurant with two sort-of-law-enforcement-people. The only money I had on me was either functionally counterfeit or a magic credit card that was… probably also not great.

"So, uh, I––" I began awkwardly.

Crystal seemed to realize the problem about five seconds after I did. "I'm not going to ask how you paid for things, though Aunt Carol definitely will. Don't worry, I've got it." She slid several bills into the basket, then stood up and turned to look back at us. "I'll go pay up front."

We watched her go for a second, then Vicky turned to me curiously. "So how have you––"

I looked around in an exaggeratedly furtive way, then leaned forward and whispered, "I have a tinkertech credit card. My normal card is a dud, but this one still seems to work."

She blinked several times, then tilted her head to the side. "Huh. I guess that's not too weird. The PRT headquarters have a tinkertech elevator. A credit card seems a lot more useful than that. How does it work?"

I shrugged. "No idea. I know the money on it is real and it only works for small purchases, but it comes in handy." I probably shouldn't, but I couldn't resist. "May as well be magic for all I know."

Glory Girl thankfully seemed to appreciate the 'joke'. "Tinkers are kind of bullshit, huh?" she asked rhetorically.

"They sure are. Back home we have this giant bronze dragon automaton thingy named Festus. It's as big as a house and weighs a bajillion pounds, but I know for a fact they have some wings somewhere that they can stick on him in a pinch."

I paused for a moment, considering if this was something I wanted to reveal now or hold off on for later. Well, it was whatever. Trust had to start somewhere and Glory Girl seemed nice. "I also have a tinkertech sword that turns into a pen for storage. It's actually where I got my cape name, the sword's called Anaklusmos, that's Greek for riptide."

"That sounds sweet! You'll have to show me later!" Her expression suddenly turned serious. "Though I'm not sure how long you'll be able to use it for. Unmaintained tinkertech can be dangerous."

"It should be fine, I think? I guess if something is damaged it's going to be hard to fix, but the sword is pretty durable, as is my armor. I've never had to go back and get them maintained before, hopefully that won't change anytime soon."

She looked unconvinced. "If you say so…"

We sat in awkward silence for a few seconds until Crystal finally came back. Glory Girl instantly perked up. "Let's go! Mom shouldn't be home for a few hours yet. We can go practice!"

"Vicky––" Crystal began reproachfully, but I was honestly just as eager as Glory Girl seemed to be.

"Sure! That sounds like a great idea." According to PHO Glory Girl was one of the strongest up-and-coming heroes in the city and I was very curious to know what exactly that meant. My excursion two nights ago had been informative, but not very satisfying. The curse of Achilles meant I was always ready and itching for a fight, and it had been days since I'd faced a meaningful opponent.

Crystal sighed. "Fine. But you two need to promise you'll be careful and we should get Amy before we go."

"Yup! Promise! I'll go get her. See you guys at the place, okay? Bye!" Glory Girl blurted out. A moment later she was gone, rushing out of the restaurant and launching herself up into the air.

Crystal watched her go for several seconds, then sighed again. "Sometimes it's exhausting just looking at her," she mumbled. "I feel so old."

"She's certainly something," I agreed. She reminded me a little of Annabeth. Not the way the other Athena girls did––I could never stand to talk to any of Annabeth's sisters for more than a few minutes, the resemblance was just too painful––but they had the same sort of build and the obvious passion and intensity in Vicky's eyes and words reminded me of her.

Honestly it was a good thing that both Crystal and Vicky's hair was more platinum-blonde than Annabeth's honey-colored hair and that they had bright blue eyes instead of Annabeth's stormy gray ones (really the two of them could have easily passed for sisters, not cousins like I knew they were). Annabeth's face haunted my dreams as it was and I always did my best to avoid things that reminded me too much of her.

I squashed that thought. Not the time, not the place."So, uh, I guess Amy is Panacea, right? That one makes sense just in case someone gets hurt, but what is 'the place'?"

Crystal laughed. "Oh, it's just a bare stretch of beach a little past the boat graveyard that we sometimes use for our practice sessions. Mom found it ages ago and we've been using it on and off ever since. It's isolated and basically impossible to get to by car so it's a pretty convenient spot for us. Ever since Eric and I triggered we've had enough fliers that we can just carry dad and my aunt and uncle over without having to bother with driving. Saves us a lot of time and trouble."

"That does sound pretty convenient."

Crystal suddenly looked a little bit unsure of herself. "Are you fine with me carrying you?" she asked quietly. "My force fields aren't really strong enough to carry a person on their own so I'm going to have to hold you."

A twinge of worry flickered through my mind at the mention of flying. Zeus was a huge jerk and me and flying rarely got along. Still, getting carried sounded a lot more like flying on a pegasus than in an airplane, and anyway I was pretty sure Zeus… wasn't around here. Not anymore at least.

"Yeah, that… should be fine. Can we stick to flying over the water? I'm pretty durable but I'd feel more comfortable with the ocean under me than concrete."

"Yeah, yeah, definitely! I promise I've never dropped anyone by accident before, but if it makes you feel more comfortable I'd be happy too."

"I appreciate it," I told her with a smile.

"Great!" She looked away quickly, "We should get going. I'm faster than Vicky when I'm on my own, but carrying someone slows me down a lot more than it does her."

We headed out of the restaurant and down towards the beach, talking about mostly inconsequential things as we went. Crystal wanted to know more about my life and world and I was happy to oblige her. I told her about camp––though I did my best to avoid saying anything about gods and demigods so I had to tweak some details––some stories about my past quests, and a little bit about my life before I found out I was a demigod.

In exchange, she was equally happy to answer my own questions. Research was all well and good, but there was no substitute for a first hand account. She told me a little bit about what it meant to be a hero in Brockton Bay, gave me some funny anecdotes about her family and the protectorate, and even a little bit about herself as well.

She was eighteen, just like I was pretending to be, and was going to be starting at Brockton Bay University in the fall. She didn't really know what she wanted to do with her life, unsure if she wanted to become a full time hero in the future or go for a law degree like her aunt.

Once we had walked out of sight of the boardwalk, Crystal stopped and a bubble of nearly-opaque crimson-red light snapped into place around. "So uh, I can either like, hold you in my arms, or I can hook my elbows under your armpits and carry you like that?"

Neither sounded particularly dignified, but I was much more concerned with not getting dropped and/or struck by lightning so I didn't particularly mind. "Whatever you're more comfortable with."

"Okay," she said with more hesitance in her voice than I was fully comfortable with. "Brace yourself."

She leaned down and scooped me up in her arms, a few small crimson force fields appearing beneath me to take some weight off her arms. I found myself cradled against her chest like an oversized dog, with one arm under my knees and the other supporting my head. In hindsight, perhaps the other option might have been better. Crystal was wearing a coat and blouse, but my side was still basically pressed directly under her chest.

Once she had a firm grip, we lurched up into the sky and I felt my stomach drop momentarily as we rapidly gained altitude. For all that Crystal had said that flying with someone really slowed her down, she was still very fast.

Even as the earth fell away beneath us, Crystal continued to keep a bright red force field around us, blocking out both the wind and any unwanted observers. I did my best to focus on the sea far below and not on the minimal support beneath me and Crystal's presence beside me.

After about a minute, Crystal seemed to notice my discomfort. "Are you doing okay? I know flying can be a little rough. It makes me nauseous sometimes even when I'm the one doing the flying."

"Yeah. Yeah. I'm fine. I just… I don't like flying very much."

"Oh, I'm sorry. I should have––"

"No, it's all fine. I appreciate you offering. I'm not like, scared of heights or something. It's just my world has a really powerful cape with uh, weather powers, and he has a bit of a grudge against me. I try to avoid airplanes because of it."

"That sucks. What did you do to him?"

"Me? Nothing, but my dad's a cape too, though I didn't know about that until a few years ago, and the two of them have some beef that goes way back."

"Oh, I see. I didn't realize you were a second generation cape like me. Do you guys have similar powers?"

"Something like that. His water powers are stronger than mine, but I'm a bit more of a Brute than he is. I think your family is pretty similar, right?"

Crystal nodded, "Yeah. Second generation capes are pretty rare, especially since secret identities make it really hard to identify people like that, but powers do run in families sometimes. Me and my brother have basically the same powers as my mom, though my lasers and flight are better than hers and Eric––Shielder I mean, has stronger shields than both of us."

Did that mean that powers were genetic like demigod abilities? But no, I knew what Glory Girl's mom and dad could do, they were both capes with public identities, and neither did anything close to what powers Vicky ended up with. What did laser weapons, turning into a ball, and light grenades have to do with flight and super strength? That wasn't even mentioning Panacea, their other daughter, whose powers were even more different than what the rest of New Wave could do.

"We have a lot more capes like that back home than you guys have here. I think it's probably because we don't worry about secret identities and there are a lot fewer capes in general. Most of the people at camp have a cape parent and powers similar to theirs."

"That sounds pretty cool! I sometimes wish I had more people outside my family I could talk to about both normal life and being a cape. My friends try, but sometimes they really just don't understand, you know?"

I considered her words. I'd never really had any friends that weren't involved with the supernatural, I realized. Well, not close friends at least. Still, I'd spent enough years at school to know a little bit about what she was saying. "Yeah, I get that."

She grinned down at me, her cheeks red from the cold. I suddenly realized that her coat was still somewhat wet from before and it was pretty cold this high up.

"Here," I willed the water out of her clothing, leaving her dry and hopefully much warmer, "you looked cold."

"Oh! Ah, thank you. Yeah, that's much more comfortable."

A few more minutes passed in silence. I kept my eyes closed and my hands clutched over my chest. Not thinking about flying didn't seem to help, but flying over the water really did make the experience much more pleasant than it could have been. Worst comes to worst, I could have a column of seawater catch both of us as we fell and protect me from any further wrath from above.

"Okay, we're basically here. Hold on tight!"

I wanted to ask what exactly I was supposed to hold onto, but my words vanished as we suddenly dropped from the sky. Wind howled outside our shield and my stomach leapt into my throat. A handful of seconds later it was over and Crystal decelerated, coming in for a gentle landing on a stretch of rocky beach.

"Hades," I swore softly, my heart hammering in my chest. Crystal made to set me down, but I just sort of rolled out of her arms and hit the ground face down with a thump and a clatter of loose stones.

"Percy!" Crystal exclaimed, "Are you okay?"

I rolled onto my back and looked up at her. There wasn't a single bruise anywhere on me and I had barely felt the impact.

"Oh right, Brute. Sorry. I forgot."

Chapter 11: Fly Like a Brick

Chapter Text

We hadn't managed to beat Glory Girl here. She was standing off to the side next to a folding chair where Panacea sat bundled up in two coats and with a thermos filled with hot coffee cradled in her arms. She shot Crystal and I a glare, then turned back to her sister. They were arguing, or maybe just talking passionately, about something, but I had neither the desire nor energy to listen in.

"Give me a second," I mumbled to Crystal. I felt… strange. Weirdly tired. Flying had never taken so much out of me before, at least not when I'd done it on pegasus-back, and airplanes were always super stressful but not like this.

"Take your time."

By the time I was good to go, Glory Girl had finished arguing with her sister and flounced over to join Crystal and I. She'd taken the time to change out of her mundane clothing into the same outfit I'd seen on Wednesday. As I'd noticed then, like this she really did look the part of a superheroine.

Between the short skirt, cape, golden tiara holding back her long hair, and white heeled boots, she wouldn't have looked out of place on the cover of a comic book or on a movie poster. Before she looked like any other pretty teenage girl. Now she looked every inch the young heroine I knew her to be.

"So how are we doing this?" I asked.

Glory Girl grinned, showing off a row of pearly-white teeth. "Full contact. Powers, costumes, the works. Obviously nothing like, super lethal? But Amy can patch us up if anything goes wrong as long as we're careful." She paused for a second. "You do have a costume, right? You said on PHO that you did. Is it like your sword?"

"That works for me!" It was exactly what I'd been hoping for in fact. I didn't bother answering the rest of her question, she'd see it soon enough.

Without further ado, I peeled off my sweater and tossed it aside. Crystal looked like she wanted to say something, but thought better of it and bit her lip as she stepped away.

Stretching my arms out above my head, I cracked my knuckles, then cracked my neck one way and then the other. It was mostly for show––I could actually crack basically any part of my body on demand with a bit of effort. Turns out synovial fluid, the stuff that lubricates your joints, is basically just water and making some tiny little nitrogen bubbles was a piece of cake compared to some of the training dad put me through.

Then I grinned at Glory Girl and slapped my chest, where the harness-form of my armor lay waiting, twice in rapid succession. Shimmering waves of bronze rippled out from the center of my chest, spreading out along my torso and then down my limbs. In their wake, layers of armor appeared.

The first wave covered me in a skin-tight layer of liquid bronze, the metal shining like well-polished gold despite the gloom. The second wave refined the liquid metal into proper armor. Layers of gleaming fish-like scales emerged from the undefined mass, each one no larger than a fingernail.

My usual chestplate and greaves flowed into existence, sweeping lines molded perfectly around my body to provide maximum protection with no impact on my speed and flexibility. My helmet came next, growing out of the metal around my neck to fully cover every inch of exposed skin until only two narrow slits remained for my eyes. Despite the obstruction, I could still see perfectly. The metal was completely opaque when looking in, but for me it was as clear as water.

Finally the third wave passed, leaving behind the intricate ornamentation that Hephaestus had painstakingly designed into the armor. Each and every scale was inscribed with my father's trident, the metal work so fine that it was nearly impossible to see with the naked eye. Two more tridents adorned my back and chest, surrounded by an intricate design of hippocampi swimming through a coral reef. Lastly, a plume of blue and red hair grew from the top of my helmet like a mohawk, completing the image of a classical Greek warrior.

"Holy shit that's so cool," Crystal whispered under her breath.

I raised my arms on either side of me, barely feeling the weight of the armor on my shoulders. The movement was completely silent, scales rolling against one another without so much as a clink.

Brushing my hand across my hip, Riptide's pen form appeared in my hand and I flicked the cap off with my thumb. "A bit like my sword, yeah," I told Glory Girl, who was staring at me with wide, delighted eyes like a kid in a candy store for the first time.

She shook her head and floated up a few inches off the ground. "Showy, but let's see if you have what it takes to back it up! You said your stuff's pretty durable, yeah? Don't want to wreck anything.

I twirled Riptide. "It can take a beating and the armor can repair itself as long as the mechanisms aren't damaged. I'll tell you to stop if I'm worried."

"Sounds good! Ready?"

Crystal hurriedly shot away, landing on the ground beside Panacea and surrounding the two of them in a transparent forcefield tinged with crimson like the rest of her abilities. Panacea looked less annoyed than she had before, though she had eyes only for her sister and her coffee. I imagined one of the greatest healers in the world had seen some pretty impressive stuff over the years.

"Ready!" I confirmed, and it was on.

Vicky took the initiative immediately, shooting towards me like a bullet with her fist extended. My first instinct was to meet her blow for blow––I'd faced down Kronos, or at least a limited version of him, what was one teenage superhero compared to that––but that was the curse talking. Even if I could do so, that wasn't the point of this the same way I wasn't just going to drown her under a million gallons of seawater. This was not a battle to be won, but rather a learning opportunity.

Riptide came up and I sidestepped just far enough that an uncontrolled projectile would have missed entirely. Glory Girl, for all the demeaning nicknames I'd seen on PHO, was very much not a wild wrecking ball. She stopped on a dime and threw a sharp, well practiced straight punch at my chest.

I swung Riptide up to knock her arm aside but underestimated the needed force. Her arm shifted to the side a fraction of an inch as Riptide's edge slipped frictionlessly along her bare forearm and then a battering ram slammed into my shoulder and sent me skidding backwards leaving two long trenches through the sand in my wake.

Huh, interesting. I straightened and found her floating several feet away from me where we'd exchanged hits.

"You're pretty fast," she told me simply.

"That was a good punch."

A second later she was on me again. I dodged the initial charge, then ducked under the follow up punch and caught her leg between my armored elbow and side.

That barely seemed to slow her down though. Like some of the more annoying monsters and gods I'd fought over the years, her strength completely ignored any sort of principles of physics.

That was probably because of her flight––she didn't seem to have any issues leveraging her strength despite not having touched the ground a single time in our first exchange. Sort of like the opposite of that annoyingly durable monster I'd killed in the labyrinth, except without the healing.

She spun like a windmill blade, folding her arms over her chest as her long hair dragged through the sand. I let go of her leg before she could do a full three-sixty and slam me into the ground, but I was still sent flying on a narrow arc up and over her.

I twisted in mid air to get my feet under me, but decided against using my powers to catch myself. That proved to be a mistake. She took absolutely no time to recover, not even bothering to finish her spin as she rocketed towards me with her hands still folded over her chest and her legs extended together towards me.

The literal flying kick caught me under my ribs and launched me nearly fifty feet through the air. This time, I was much less reluctant to use the rest of my abilities. She was strong, stronger than almost any demigod I'd ever faced. I'd met Laistrygonian giants who didn't hit like she could.

A column of seawater rose from the surf and caught me before I could hit the ground. "Being able to fly is such bullshit!" I called out loudly. Even if she wasn't as strong as Ares or Kronos or even my brother Triton, the way she used her strength was completely different. Fighting two people like her would be a total nightmare; they could just bounce me back and forth through the air at their leisure without giving me a chance to fight back.

Glory Girl very maturely stuck her tongue out at me. "Giving up so soon?" she asked teasingly.

"Not in the least. My turn, I think."

I waved Riptide dramatically through the air like a conductor's baton. There was a wrenching in my gut and a half-dozen geysers blasted out of the waves beneath me, each one curving unnaturally through the air to home in unerringly on my sparring partner.

The look of surprise on her face was both comical and endearing. Had she somehow missed that I'd told her I was a hydrokinetic or was she so distracted by our first few exchanges that she'd forgotten?

Whatever the case, she didn't let it distract her for long. She wove expertly between foamy columns of seawater, moving in three dimensions in a way that spoke of either natural aptitude or long hours of practice. Fighting underwater, or evidently in the sky, was very different from doing so on land. You had to really think about your positioning in a way that just didn't happen on land outside of some particularly showy dodges.

Even for me it had taken some time to wrap my head around it. Being able to dodge up and down was just the start of it, particularly if you were nimble enough to rotate your body every which way fast enough. She was no master, but her level of skill was impressive for a mortal as young as her.

Eventually, the sheer number of attacks filling the sky overwhelmed her. She dodged one column, spun like a top to avoid a second, and folded nearly in half at the waist to evade a third. The fourth, coming up through her blind spot, smacked straight into her butt and sent her flying.

These were not the narrow, blade-like jets of water moving fast enough to cut clean through steel beams I'd gotten used to using in recent months, but rather much more gentle pillars of foam-filled cold water. Still, the simple mass and volume of water hit like a battering ram and knocked her out of the sky.

She recovered right before she hit the ground, but by then it was too late. A dome of water nearly two yards thick surrounded her like the cupped palm of a very wet giant. She experimentally punched the barrier and the blow sent water spraying out from the outer edge of the barrier, but more water quickly flowed into place, trapping her fist in the process.

She tilted her head to the side and said something I couldn't hear. I shrugged and tapped the side of my head meaningfully with my finger. She shrugged back, then shoulder checked the barrier hard enough to turn a tree into pulp. More water sprayed, but that was about it.

She shrugged again, then tapped the ground several times with her free hand, prompting me to drop the barrier.

I let the column of water still holding me up drain back into the sea and walked over to where my temporary opponent was studying the circle of dry sand and rocks she was standing on surrounded by a thick band of waterlogged earth.

Despite the loss, there was a huge smile on her face and she laughed loudly as I approached. "That was awesome!" she exclaimed. "Do you want to go again?"

"Do we still have time?"

"Plenty! It's like… not even three yet, right? Mom won't be home till five at the earliest, maybe even six or seven."

"Great!"

Crystal, who had hurried over when she saw us stop fighting, sighed loudly. "You're welcome to join us!" Glory Girl quickly glanced over towards me, "right Percy?"

"Yeah, of course."

That only made her sigh again. "Maybe later."

The next hour was honestly pretty great. We had two more no-holds-barred fights, both of which I ended up winning. After that however we had a few much more interesting fights. Some were physical only, others restricted only certain parts of our powers, like no barriers for me or flying for her.

About half-an-hour in I retracted most of my armor, mostly to prove that I was just as indestructible without it as I'd claimed, and we had a lovely boxing match that quickly devolved into wild, super-powered wrestling that left craters in the sand and kicked up great sprays of seawater. By the end of it she was breathing heavily and I had to quickly dry her costume off with my powers while Panacea ranted about hypothermia and reckless idiots. She seemed… prickly.

It didn't take me long to notice a few peculiarities about Glory Girl's strength, though I didn't mention any of my suspicions just yet. She always made sure to back up for a moment after any particularly hard exchanges and the first time I'd left any actual mark on her actual body was when I double-tapped her with a column of water and a nearly-dodged blow from Riptide. She'd waved things off, the tiny cut quickly healed by her sister, but once I had that single data point, it didn't take long to confirm things.

Crystal joined us for exactly one fight, right after the wrestling match that had pissed off Panacea. That time we all limited ourselves to ranged abilities and she proved herself to be a real menace with her speed, lasers, and barriers that could momentarily block the waves and geysers I was limiting myself too.

Funnily enough it was Glory Girl who got her in the end, before herself falling before my barrage. Turns out super strength plus an easy supply of very throwable rocks was a rather dangerous combination.

Having to heal her cousin also didn't seem to endear me anymore to Panacea, even though it was her sister who had injured Crystal and not me. It was just a slightly broken arm, barely even a scratch, and she dealt with it in literal seconds anyway.

Eventually however, both of us were starting to get tired and it looked like it was about to rain, so we decided to move things to the Dallon family home. Once again Crystal carried me in her arms while Vicky, who had changed out of her Glory Girl costume into skinny jeans and a cute red sweater, carried her sister.

As the rain began to fall, we flew together inside one of Crystal's red domes and chatted about the fights and their lives as outed superheroes. Eventually this transitioned into Vicky complaining about her on- and off-again boyfriend Dean, with whom she'd broken up for (at least) the fifth time a few days earlier. Apparently he'd said something 'just horrible' during their double date with Amy and some other boy that Vicky knew and that had been enough to make her break it off again.

I didn't pay very much attention towards the end––flying felt really, really not great, though being carried by a pretty girl like Crystal certainly made it better. From what I gathered, Vicky was considering breaking things off all together if she could find 'someone new, someone who really gets me, you know?' Amy seemed to be all for it at first, then changed her mind, while Crystal thought she should give this guy Dean another chance and stick with guys in her own year.

I had no real opinion one way or the other. I just wanted to get back to the ground, or even better, into the sea. Fish weren't meant to fly and clearly neither was I. Give me a nice, rocking boat or even a horse any day of the week. Or honestly I'd take a flying boat or a flying horse. Damn, a flying boat would be so cool. Maybe we could stick like a dragon head on the front or something? I'm sure we had some dragon heads gathering dust up in the big house at camp…

Chapter 12: Dealing With the Worst Kind of Monster

Chapter Text

Carol Dallon was…quite the person. She had an air about her sort of like one of those super strict teachers, the ones who don't really like kids very much and you can never quite understand why they decided elementary school was for them. Just looking at her I never would have guessed she was actually a superhero with more than a decade of experience, even if from the sound of things she'd been focusing more heavily on her civilian career in the past few years.

She was in the dining room waiting for us when we arrived, sitting at the head of the table in a well-fitted charcoal suit. Her short, golden-blonde hair was perfectly styled without a single strand out of place and she had a very stereotypical-looking briefcase open on the table beside her. If not for the family photos and other minor signs of habitation, I would have thought I'd walked into the boardroom at some hoity-toity company and not a house.

She made us wait for nearly a minute as she finished filling out a document, signing it with a flourish before tucking it away into her briefcase and snapping it closed. Victoria introduced me, and I couldn't help but notice how her body language shifted in her mother's presence. She instantly went from friendly teenager to stern and closed off. At the same time, her sister almost seemed to hunch in on herself further and quickly vacated the room, scurrying up the stairs and out of sight without so much as greeting her mother.

I did my best to make a good first impression––Crystal had quietly given me a heads-up about how seriously her aunt took everything while I'd dried us off with my powers––but I'm really not sure how well I succeeded. She had a great poker face. It probably came with the whole 'being a lawyer' thing.

We shook hands, exchanged what I was pretty sure could be classified as polite greetings even if hers sounded rather more passive-aggressive than what I would have hoped for, and then she got right down to business.

"So my daughter tells me you claim to be a Case-22, is that correct?"

A what? "Umm…"

"A dimension traveler, I mean. The PRT classifies such people as Case-22s, though I believe the term has not disseminated into the public consciousness the same way it has for Case-53s."

"Oh. Then yes. I am. Or at least that's the best explanation I've been able to come up with."

She nodded slowly, "Reasonable. Victoria mentioned some of the evidence that you presented. I can't say for certain that it is necessarily compelling, but I believe the PRT likely has further tests they could use to confirm such things."

Pausing, Carol picked up a thin stack of documents lying on the table beside her, tapped them on the table to straighten them, then set them down on top of the stack in front of her. "I took the liberty of referencing the PRT's public documents concerning such cases. Policy is to immediately present any potential Case-22s to the nearest office, but I can not fault you for seeking out a legal professional beforehand."

"It seemed like a good idea."

She actually smiled at that, though it was a very narrow, joyless smile. I wasn't sure her face even could make a proper smile. She looked way too adult-y for that. "Good. I just wish more capes had that much sense. How you present yourself to both the public and before government entities has an oversized impact on future outcomes for new heroes."

She paused again, then continued. "Now then, before I can tentatively agree to assist you, I do have a number of concerns. Firstly, the PRT documents stress the dangers of interdimensional diseases and potential long-term connections. Would you consent to an examination from my daughter Panacea and do you have any more information about how you arrived here?"

"Uh, yeah sure, that first thing sounds fine. My power makes me really resistant to diseases so I don't think it will be a problem anyway. For the second bit, I'm really not sure. It was a pretty rough trip though, so I doubt anyone less durable than me could have survived it. I can probably find the spot I came through, but that's probably more something for the PRT to worry about."

"That seems reasonable to me. As long as you agree to cooperate with the PRT's investigation into such things, I am willing to work with you." She turned to Vicky, who was standing off to the side watching the two of us talk. "Victoria, could you please fetch your sister for me? Crystal, I'm afraid I will have to ask you to leave for the time being, or at least step out of the room so I can speak privately with Mr. Jackson as his attorney."

"Yeah, sure Aunt Carol. Percy, if you need somewhere to stay tonight, there is an open guest room at my house and I'm sure mom wouldn't mind. We live just down the street."

"That would be great, thanks Crystal!"

She smiled at me, then left the room just as Vicky came back with a frumpled looking Panacea wearing half of her distinctive costume.

"I see you're getting ready to head to the hospital. Good timing then, Victoria can take you in her car once you're done here."

I turned to Panacea and offered my hand. "Thanks for coming out earlier, I realize we were never really introduced. I'm Percy."

"Panacea. Do I have your permission to heal you?" Well that was kind of abrupt. "Just yes or no, I need your verbal consent."

"Yeah, sure. Go for it."

She grabbed my bare hand, her face an image of boredom that quickly transformed into an interested frown, then confusion.

We stood in silence for several seconds and I could see Carol starting to stand up out of the corner of my eyes, a frown on her face.

"There's something wrong with your DNA," Panacea said suddenly, "I…I can't see all of it? Like, half of it. It's weird. And I can't affect you, like at all. I can look, but I can't touch. If you get hurt, I don't think I could fix you. It's…"

"Does he have any unfamiliar diseases we should be worried about?" Carol asked sharply.

Panacea shook her head quickly. "No, no, I don't think so? Nothing he could spread anyway. I can see the remnants of some stuff, but nothing contagious or recent."

"Good. Then you and Victoria can go. I may need you again tomorrow when we go to speak with the PRT, be sure to be free."

"Yes Carol." Her voice sounded almost mechanical as she said it, and it seemed to take her a great deal of effort to let go of my hand. Vicky smiled, waved goodbye, and then the two of them were gone, leaving me alone with the scary lawyer lady. Lovely, just my favorite.

The next forty-five minutes faded into a blur. Carol said a lot of words, asked a lot of questions, and none of it really seemed to amount to much. I did remember telling her that if she was worried about compensation, I could probably go find some sunken treasure for her. That devolved into a whole thing about NEPA-5, legal claims, and responsible uses of parahuman powers that I did my best to listen to but still barely understood.

She did eventually ask for more details about my powers. As I'd decided before, I told her about most things, but not quite everything. I told her about all the stuff I mentioned to Vicky and Crystal––durability, water control, and mini earthquakes––then also added a few of the other minor powers that being a son of Poseidon gave me like talking to fish and horses, controlling boats, and always knowing where I was on the sea.

I deliberately didn't say anything about the curse of Achilles, just saying that I was invulnerable, nor did I mention being able to summon water and the way seawater made me stronger, faster, and let me regenerate. Those were cards that I wanted to keep to my chest, at least for now. I wasn't sure how much I trusted the heroes around here yet.

I also said nothing about the Mist. I was not sure how I felt about parahumans repelling the Mist. That seemed…bad. The Mist also sounded a lot like a master or stranger power, and people around here had a big bias against those.

She seemed both impressed and a little confused, calling me the strongest grab-bag cape she'd ever heard of. I mentioned that having a mix of different abilities wasn't uncommon back home and she metaphorically threw her hands up in the air and moved on.

Eventually we hammered out all the technicalities, I signed a paper saying that Carol was representing me in this one specific case and related issues, and then we started to figure out our plans going forward. The agreement did include some language about how Carol was going to get paid in the end, but I both didn't mind that and ultimately I didn't really expect a lawyer, even a superhero lawyer, to work for free. If someone was paying me, it could come out of that. Otherwise, I'd go like, find some gold or rare fish or something. I'd make it work.

Sometime in the middle of everything, Carol had ordered us both takeout from a nearby restaurant. It was pretty good and Carol finally seemed to relax a tiny bit after we ate, so maybe part of her grouchy exterior had just been hunger. Probably not, but I could hope. She seemed like a good woman, very principled, though I'd seen too many times how such things could go very wrong very quickly.

She really hadn't liked it when I mentioned letting the Undersiders go after I fought them the other night, but she also approved of my decision to not escalate and risk property damage since I hadn't been willing to contact the PRT at the time anyway. She really didn't like villains, even when I mentioned some of their motivations for why they did what they did. Actually, that might have made things worse.

What we eventually decided on was pretty simple. We'd go meet with the PRT tomorrow––Carol had a good enough relationship with them that we could figure something out even with it being the weekend––and then we'd go from there. She mentioned a bunch of maybes and contingencies, but it really did mostly just depend on what the PRT came up with.

She told me I would probably have to subject myself to power testing, that was fine. I'd also need to answer a bunch of questions about my world and stuff, figure out my new identity, and take care of a bunch of stupid bureaucracy (my words, not hers).

Apparently it really helped that I 'was' eighteen. I also didn't have any government documents on me that listed my actual birthday, so they didn't really have any way to prove otherwise. People had been telling me all year that I looked older than I was and Carol hadn't questioned it when I'd told her I turned eighteen in August, so hopefully it wouldn't even come up.

Worst case scenario, I would do my best to bust out of whatever cage they tried to put me in. If it really came down to it, they had a giant, very expensive looking base out in the middle of the bay. I could smack it around a bit as a distraction and then flee into the ocean. That would kind of suck, but I could do it.

Hopefully it didn't come down to that. Vicky and Crystal both seemed nice and they'd probably get caught up in things. That would be sad.

Eventually everything that needed my input out was taken care of and Carol shooed me out of the house with directions to the Pelhams, instructions to get some sleep, and a firm demand not to get into any trouble before tomorrow. I was honestly impressed that she had to add that last bit––most people had to know me for at least a week before they figured out I could cause three major disasters in two blocks.

Chapter 13: Meeting Heroes

Chapter Text

I made it to the Pelhams a little after ten. Crystal met me at the door, a finger on her lips as she told me that her parents were already asleep. She led me up the stairs to a sparsely-furnished bedroom at the end of the hall, showing me the bathroom, her room, her parent's room, and the room where Eric was still awake doing his homework along the way.

She let me get settled in, which mostly consisted of putting the sheets she'd brought me on the bed and taking off my hoodie. I was very thankful that my powers made cleaning myself and my clothing rather easy––sweat was basically just salt water and I could dry things on command––because otherwise I imagined I would have looked and smelled considerably worse after several days with no changes of clothes.

About ten minutes later, Crystal came back wearing sweatpants and a long white t-shirt and carrying two mugs of hot tea. I wasn't really much of a tea person––unless of course it was of the twisted variety––but it was a nice gesture. I thanked her and she handed me a brown mug decorated with a stylized bear wearing jeans and a bright yellow hat.

I was expecting her to leave after that, but instead she curled up in the papasan chair in the corner of the room, watching me silently as I sipped at my tea. It was slightly sweet and a little grassy, with notes of some sort of fruit or berry. I couldn't say whether it was good tea, but it was hot and didn't taste bad so it was kind of nice after walking through the chilly March evening.

"Could you tell me a bit more about your world?" Crystal asked suddenly. "Only if you want to, I mean. I know it's getting late and you're going to talk to the PRT tomorrow, but I've never met someone from another earth and it sounds so fascinating! They say Aleph only diverged from us a few decades ago but it's already so different, and it seems like your world is also pretty different from Bet."

"Uh, yeah, sure. I don't mind. I don't think I could fall asleep right now anyway." I was tired, but the anxiety about my meeting tomorrow was still getting to me. I'd gotten pretty used to meeting gods, but somehow mortal bureaucrats sounded even scarier. Getting my learner's permit with my stepdad had been an experience, and I'd had the Mist on my side at the time. Dealing with a super-powered DMV sounded like a literal nightmare. "What do you want to know?"

We ended up staying up a teensy bit longer than I think Crystal fully intended. I spent about an hour telling her slightly altered stories about some of the monsters I'd fought and quests I'd gone on. Then the topic had shifted to more personal anecdotes. I told her about my mom's affinity for blue food. She told me about some of her and her brother's hijinks after they'd first gotten their powers.

Around two a.m I suddenly remembered Carol's instructions to get some sleep. Whoops. Crystal was really fun to talk with. She was smart, had a good sense of humor, and seemed like a genuinely good person with a passion for helping others. For a moment I'd almost managed to forget that I was impossibly far from home and possibly permanently cut off from everyone I'd ever known.

I hoped my mom was doing okay. I was really glad she had Paul now to support her. I had a feeling she wasn't going to take my disappearance well.

"Are you alright, Percy?" Crystal asked quietly. I opened my eyes and realized that she was still standing in the doorway, loosely holding our two empty mugs at her side.

"I…I think so," I answered quietly, but the lump in my throat probably made my words sound unconvincing. "I hope everyone's doing alright. My mom…"

Crystal set the mugs down on the bedside table, then sat down beside me on the edge of my borrowed bed and wrapped me in a tight hug. She didn't say anything, but it was probably better that way. Any reassurances she could have tried to give me would have been completely empty and we both knew it.

After a moment, I hugged her back, savoring the warmth of another person pressed up against me. Her hair was very soft and smelled of lavender. "Thanks," I whispered into her shoulder, my voice muffled.

"Any time," she whispered back. "You should get some sleep. Aunt Carol told me your meeting is at nine, so you need to be up pretty early."

"Late and sleep deprived probably wouldn't make a good first impression," I joked weakly.

"Probably not." She stood up, smiled, and left the room, turning off the lights on her way out.

It still took me more than an hour to fall asleep, my eyes staring blankly up at the dark ceiling as I listened to the inaudible crash of distant waves, but the hug helped. Oh Annabeth. How I missed her. How I wished that she was here with me. She'd know exactly what we needed to do. There was no way she couldn't figure out a way to get back home.

Not for the first time I cursed that traitorous scum Ethan Nakamura. A quick death had been far too good for him. I hoped Hades had found a suitably horrible fate for him. May his soul suffer for eternity in the fields of punishment.

A single tear leaked down my cheek and vanished into nothingness. Oh Annabeth…

"So what do you make of him?" Armsmaster muttered, his words audible only to the sensitive microphones inside his armor.

"I'm not seeing anything," Dragon answered promptly. "Facial recognition found nothing and there is no record of a Perseus or Sally Jackson living in New York pre Behemoth. I also can't find any cape that matches his powers or shares his tinkertech. There aren't very many high end brutes who also have hydrokinetic powers."

Well, not outside the obvious example, Armsmaster thought grimly.

"Per PRT protocol, I've taken the initiative to forward his information to Watchdog. Hopefully they'll be able to tell us for certain in the next few hours."

"Thank you."

Armsmaster shifted his gaze back to the large display covering one wall of the conference room. The potential Case-22 was sitting beside his lawyer, Brandish, slowly working through a tall stack of forms and tests with her help. He'd mentioned dyslexia during the initial interview and his behavior matched with what Armsmaster knew of the learning disorder.

Perseus Jackson. The display in his helmet zoomed in on the young man's face. Once again, the facial recognition program connected to his armor found no precise matches, not that he had expected it to do so.

He was tall and well built, with what Armsmaster's software told him were very handsome features. His immediate disregard for masks contributed to his story––cape culture had become deeply embedded in the public consciousness over the past few decades. His accent matched what he would have expected from someone growing up in New York, but anyone like that should have had an instinctive understanding of maintaining a secret identity.

The door to the conference room opened and Director Piggot strode into the room, followed closely by Miss Militia and the Deputy Director. "Armsmaster, good. What do you have for me?" she asked briskly, taking a seat at the head of the long table facing the display.

Armsmaster waited for everyone to sit down, then began. "I was contacted last night by Carol Dallon of New Wave just after nine p.m. The potential Case-22 contacted her for legal representation and presented sufficient preliminary evidence for her to believe his story. He also consented to examination by Panacea, who found that the subject did not appear to be carrying any dangerous diseases from his home dimension, though his power apparently makes him impossible for her to affect directly."

"At least that's something," the Director muttered loudly.

Armsmaster continued. "Wanting to get this issue settled as soon as possible, I set up a meeting for nine this morning, to which Mrs. Dallon agreed. The subject, whom I will henceforth address as Riptide, the cape name that he has chosen for himself, and Mrs. Dallon arrived promptly at the specified time. Since then he has fully cooperated with questioning and testing, though no final conclusion has been determined as of yet. He does not exist on any database that I or Dragon have access to, and the issue has been forwarded to WEDGDG."

"You were present for the initial evaluation. What is your impression so far?"

"According to my software, Riptide does truly believe that he is a Case-22, though it is possible that his memory may have been tampered with by a master or stranger cape. Based on his account, he arrived in Earth Bet on Wednesday of this week and spent several days gathering information before approaching us and Mrs. Dallon via her daughter. Glory Girl was the first cape who he encountered and she left him her contact information after mistaking him for a regular new hero.

"According to him, he stumbled across some form of dimensional passage while exploring the ocean in his home reality. The passage was incredibly hazardous and he claims that only his Brute power allowed him to survive the experience and he was badly injured regardless. He does not know the precise location where he emerged, but is willing to assist us in locating the point.

"After some initial questioning, Riptide consented to basic power testing. He is a highly-durable Brute and a hydrokinetic Shaker. None of the equipment present in the PRT headquarters was able to injure him and he had no difficulty standing beneath the hydraulic press, though he mentioned that he is not necessarily able to lift the same sort of weight that he can endure. I was unable to independently verify this fact.

"His hydrokinesis is similarly impressive. He has fine control of water in a large area around him, though he was unable to pin down a specific range limit. We were also unable to find a mass limit for water he could control as of yet, but he has agreed to further testing near the shoreline at a later date."

"Leviathan. You're describing Leviathan. You're telling me we have a mini-leviathan Case-22 on our hands?" Piggot asked, her voice hard.

"Essentially, yes."

"Wonderful. What else have you got?"

Notes appeared on the display within his helmet. "The Earth that Riptide comes from, tentatively labeled Earth Gimel, appears to have diverged from our world at some point in the recent past, though the exact date is currently impossible to pin down. The world appears to have a smaller cape population than we do and have established a very different cape culture. The existence of capes is mostly kept secret from the general population and the majority of their efforts are focused on combating some form of monster-capes or potentially bio-tinker creations.

"Furthermore, the world has a much higher concentration of second-generation capes such as Riptide himself. According to Riptide, his father is a much stronger hydrokinetic than he himself is, but does not have the same level of Brute abilities as Riptide. Most second-generation capes in his world tend to be weaker than their parents. This is generally consistent with trends observed in Earth Bet, though proper studies are difficult to conduct due to secret identities."

"And what about Riptide himself?" Miss Militia asked. "I assume we will be attempting to recruit him into the Protectorate?"

"Riptide considers himself a hero, though the term seems to mean something slightly different in his own world. I have not seen enough to make a firm determination one way or the other, but I do not believe he would have approached us if he intended to become a villain."

The director clicked her tongue loudly. "We'll try for a soft sell. From the sound of it, he's certainly not someone we want as a villain. If he does turn out to be a Case-22, we'll need to help him figure out a new identity. Hopefully that will help ingratiate him to the PRT. If he isn't, well. We'll take that on a case-by-case basis."

"Understood, Director."

"Good. Keep me informed. I'll be in my office. I may as well get something productive done if I'm coming in to work on my day off."

Chapter 14: Blah Blah Blah Please Join the Heroes

Chapter Text

Sometimes I'm not the sharpest sword in the armory. I've made some pretty dumb decisions over the years and even taking into account my dyslexia and ADHD my grades pretty clearly reflect my academic talents. I've had like, a B-. Once. Out of sheer dumb luck. Hades, I'm a sixteen year old highschool dropout. Like I said, academics were never really my thing

On the other hand, I've also had some pretty great ideas over the years. Like dropping out of school (though my step dad probably thought that was one of my dumber choices, sorry Paul!) to do demigod stuff full time, giving Luke Annabeth's dagger, and shipping mom Medusa's head that one time. Now I had another thing to add to my list of really fucking great plans. 'Hiring', for all that I hadn't really paid her anything yet, Carol Dallon to represent me to the PRT was an absolutely ten out of ten banger of an idea.

I honestly don't know how I would have managed without her. Not only had she somehow gotten us a meeting with the PRT on less than a day's notice, and on a weekend to boot, but she also cut through mountains of papers and questions like Riptide sliced through empousa.

Without her, I'd probably still be working on that first evaluation test they'd given me, a thick ream of papers that reminded me of those horrible standardized tests I had to take every year. That was if I even managed to get that far without doing something stupid––having someone else to do most of the talking and keep me from putting my foot in my mouth was really, really handy. Carol's presence had probably saved the annoying, well-dressed PRT agent they'd sent to talk to us from a fist to the face

Instead, we'd spent less than an hour dealing with random bullshit and then I got to talk to Armsmaster, a Protectorate hero wearing some super cool looking power armor, and show off a little. The dude was a little abrupt, but Carol told me that was just how we was, and I didn't begrudge him being a little grumpy about getting pulled away from what he actually wanted to be doing on a lovely Sunday morning to help me out.

I answered a few questions for him, doing my best to stick to the story I'd established ahead of time. It was even mostly true since I just sort of avoided talking about all the blatantly supernatural stuff. Dad and the other gods were just powerful parahumans and anything silly I said was just a difference in terminology, nothing more.

Then we went down to this cool little testing room they had set up. It really did look like something out of a movie, complete with two scientists with clipboards in white lab coats and a big glass window on one side of the room to let people look in.

I lifted some weights, moved some water around, and let the scientists futilely poke and smack my hand with an entire cabinet of high-tech mallets, needles, and even this crazy blowtorch looking thing that kinda reminded me of when I fought Hyperion. None of it did anything––it took more than brute force to bypass the Curse of Achilles––but it made them happy and staying on the good side of an international superhero organization seemed like a good call if I was going to be stuck here for the foreseeable future.

After that, I had a bit of a break while Carol reviewed some preliminary documents and a nice PRT trooper brought us a cart of food from the cafeteria. It was honestly kind of good, much better than what I expected when I heard it came from a cafeteria. I still had nightmares about some of the disgusting goop American schools tried to pass off as real food. They even had some kind of sour blue soda that I'd never heard of! Not my favorite, but very blue and pretty tasty to boot.

And now I was sitting in a different meeting room with Carol, this one two floors higher in the building with a larger table and a few more chairs. I was sitting on one side of the table, Carol beside me with her briefcase in front of her and a severe look on her face. She was very, very good at severe looks.

Across from us sat Armsmaster––whose armor was honestly starting to make me feel a little self conscious (maybe I should be wearing my armor too?)––along with another hero by the name of Miss Militia and two PRT people, a man and a woman, in matching suits.

"We were told you would have confirmation for us more than an hour ago, but all I'm seeing are delays and more tests for my client. I would like an explanation." Carol fixed the PRT man with a firm stare, "My client wishes to resolve the situation he finds himself in as soon as possible, but it seems to me that the PRT is dragging its feet on anything but preliminary documents and examinations."

"Mrs. Dallon, please, we are working on––"

A raised palm from Armsmaster cut the man off before he could keep going. "We have encountered some moderate issues in terms of confirming Riptide's story. Certain elements that we typically utilize have proven to be unreliable when it comes to your client. We have found no evidence of Riptide's civilian identity existing on Earth Bet, but have not been able to rule out all other potential cases." He turned his head to address me directly, "It appears that a number of associated Thinkers have experienced complications when attempting to ascertain the validity of your claims. Are you aware of the effects your power has on such individuals?"

I played back Armsmaster's words in my head and still wasn't quite sure what exactly he was saying, so I turned to Carol. "Uh, what?"

"He's saying that Watchdog is having trouble verifying that you're really a Case-22 and they think it might be because of something your powers are doing."

"Oh, that makes more sense." I paused for a moment. "Wait, why are they having trouble? Or I guess what kind of trouble?"

"Armsmaster?" Carol prompted.

He remained silent for several seconds, his lips moving soundlessly, then set his armored arm back down onto the table with a heavy clunk. "We believe that Riptide may possess some form of secondary power that causes Thinker effects directed at him to fail. We would ask that Riptide consents to further power testing to confirm the validity of this claim while we continue to ascertain the truth of his story."

"Riptide?" Carol asked.

My immediate thought was that this was something the Mist was doing passively, since unlike all of these parahumans I actually attracted the Mist towards me instead of pushing it away. In fact I'd noticed that the Mist around me and in places I went was considerably thicker than it was on average. When I woke up this morning, it was noticeably denser in my room than it had been when I'd gone to bed. That wasn't necessarily a great theory, but I had no idea what else they might be talking about.

"Um, I guess that's––" Carol shot me a sharp look, "Uh. That's maybe okay, but I'd like to hear more before I agree to anything," I hurriedly corrected. "I don't think my powers do anything like that though?"

"There is precedent for certain Brute powers to provide resistance to other types of powers," Miss Militia chimed in. "For example it is well known that Alexandria is immune to Master powers. It might be something like that."

"Maybe?" I shrugged. "I don't think anyone back home ever had any problems, but maybe they just never told me." I'd been part of too many prophecies to think I was immune to the sort of stuff they classified as Thinker abilities around here, but perhaps it was a matter of different power sources? I had no idea how the powers around here worked, but they were clearly not the same as what gods, monsters, and demigods could do.

From there, the conversation once again turned to specific details, most of which were hashed out between Carol and the PRT guy with little input from me. Basically it was going to take a while because they didn't have any real Thinkers on their team and they needed to bring someone in, but that was complicated and annoying to set up or something.

On the bright side, once I'd agreed to that they finally started moving forward with the actually important stuff that I wanted; namely getting me set up in this new world. Apparently what they had found so far was convincing enough that they were going to give me a chance even if their fancy acronym superhero organization hadn't been able to confirm things one-hundred percent.

Apparently the PRT had a small fund set up for dimensionally displaced individuals like me to help us get back on our feet, which was a pretty cool thing for them to do. Also they wanted me to join the Protectorate. They also offered me some free housing while I got acclimated to Earth Bet, and maybe I could do that by joining the Protectorate.

Did you know that the Protectorate pays its heroes a competitive salary? Wow, what a fun fact. Oh, you mentioned that you have some fancy tinkertech armor? Well, Brockton Bay's Protectorate had two Tinkers who might be willing to maintain it for you, but only if you joined up! There were also three different pamphlets about joining the Protectorate shoved in with the other papers they gave me about places I could choose to live and basic information I needed to know.

I had a feeling that they kind of wanted me to join the Protectorate. Me getting papers and having a new identity drawn up wasn't conditional on joining, but they certainly did seem to just keep slamming the sales pitch down my throat. It eventually got to the point that Carol would loudly clear her throat every time someone mentioned the idea, which mostly got them to shut up. Mostly.

"So Riptide," Miss Militia asked, "have you considered what you'd like to do going forward? There's a spot for you in the Protectorate if you're interested. We could really use another experienced hero like you. Triumph only just graduated from the wards you know, he's about your age."

"I'm really not sure, to be honest," I told her truthfully. "Ideally, I think I'd want to go home. I miss my friends and family a lot." I sighed heavily, "But from everything I've read that's not very likely now, is it?"

Miss Militia said nothing. The only permanent connection Earth Bet had to another Earth was with Aleph, and even then it was data-only. Furthermore, Professor Haywire, who might have been able to actually help me, had been dead for several years and there was no Tinker or Mover with comparable capabilities. I'd tentatively floated the idea earlier and Armsmaster had told me flatly that the Protectorate was likely unable to help me, or any other Case-22, get home.

"I'm probably going to keep being a hero," I eventually said. "It's the only thing I really know well. I guess I could be like, a fisherman or something, but that's mostly a spare time thing, you know? Heroing… Well, it's in my blood. Literally."

Miss Militia nodded, "Of course. As a Protectorate hero you would not be expected to work at all hours of the day, with some exceptions for emergencies and the like. Heroing is my calling, but it's important to work in moderation to avoid burning out. If fishing is how you relax after a long day, well, the Rig is certainly in a good spot for you to do so." Then she did this thing with her eyes that told me she was smiling even though her mouth was covered. It was…weird.

"True enough, I'm just not sure I want to get tied down like that. Joining the Protectorate feels like a big commitment, and I'm still trying to figure everything out."

Miss Militia jumped on that immediately. "If you're worried about that, how about we start with something less formal? I'm certain the director would not mind you accompanying some of us on our daily patrols––it's not that uncommon for prospective members to do so. I believe Triumph and Velocity are on duty today, they should be heading out in a little over an hour. Perhaps you'd like to join them? I can't imagine you're enjoying sitting around here all day."

"That does sound pretty good. Carol–"

Carol looked up from the papers she was reviewing. "I think we're probably wrapping up for today anyway, especially if you aren't planning to join the Protectorate right this minute. We should be able to finish filling out the paperwork for your new civilian identity in about half an hour and I know the PRT affiliate documents forwards and backwards by now so those shouldn't take long either if they haven't changed anything. After that it will take a few days for them to process everything so we'll need to come back later in the week."

"And there's no problem with me going on a patrol?"

"It shouldn't complicate anything. Just keep your mask on, remember that your name is Riptide, and don't do anything reckless."

Great, I could do two of those things! "Then that sounds like a great idea," I told Miss Militia."

"Wonderful, I will go get everything set up for you then." She shook my hand, nodded to Carol, and left the room.

Carol promptly shoved a pen into my hand. "Now, we're going to need your signature here, here, here, and here. This one is…"

Nearly two hours later, Triumph, Velocity, and I were walking together through central Brockton Bay. It had taken us slightly longer than anticipated to get going, mostly because of my armor. Apparently I hadn't done a very good job of describing it and they'd expected something a little less…eye-catching. On the bright side, according to Triumph my armor would make the apparently nightmarish image team leave me mostly alone if I did join up.

So far the patrol had been pretty boring. We hadn't run into any trouble and while my armor did stand out, the two well-known heroes with me attracted the majority of people's attention. I briefly introduced myself to a few of the people that had come up to talk to us, but that was about it.

It was honestly really, really weird to walk around in public in my armor and have people actually see exactly what was in front of them. Normally if I did something like this, people would see me as wearing something like SWAT gear, not shiny plate armor. It certainly led to a lot more people taking pictures, and Velocity said I was probably going to be all over PHO by the end of the day.

On the bright side, Triumph did seem like a pretty cool guy. He was really into baseball and had a lot of interesting stories from his time in the Wards. It was also a good opportunity for me to get some first hand information about what it was like to be in the Protectorate, which was probably a good thing because what I'd heard so far hadn't really impressed me very much.

He didn't go out and say it outright, but the Protectorate seemed horribly passive, only ever reacting to what the villains were doing and mostly working to keep the status quo. Maybe things were different here, but I'd found in the past few months that it was much better to be active than reactive. In the wake of the war, I'd gone out with some of the other campers and massacred every monster we could find in the vicinity of New York, working out from Camp in a growing spiral.

It was not a permanent solution of course, monsters would always keep coming, but the new Athena head counselor had told me that they expected upwards of a twenty percent drop in demigod casualties in the next year. The right way to deal with monsters was overwhelming force applied with brutal efficiency.

Perhaps I was being a little over dramatic––the villains here and monsters back home were two very different types of fish––but the war against Kronos had left me very short on mercy when it came to those who endangered the people I cared about.

And then something finally happened. There was a crackle in my ear and a voice came out of the little earbud communicator they'd given me before I'd gone out with the other heroes. It was connected to my new phone, apparently something they gave to all PRT affiliated heroes, and was how the people back at the Protectorate base could communicate with the three of us.

"This is console, we have reports of independent hero Browbeat engaging with Victor and Othala near your location."

Velocity, who'd been scouting around us using his power, suddenly blurred out of an alleyway and stopped beside Triumph and I. He tapped his ear, "Velocity responding, here with Triumph and Riptide. Where are we headed?"

Console gave us a location, the street names meaning absolutely nothing to me but Velocity nodded sharply. "I'm on it. ETA two minutes. Triumph, Riptide, follow along when you can." And then he was gone again, disappearing into a red blur that rushed away down the sidewalk.

Triumph clicked his tongue. "I know where that is, we can be there in a few minutes if we hurry. Do you want to come along? I know this was supposed to be just a 'learning the ropes' kind of thing but––"

"Of course I'm coming! Don't worry about me Triumph, I can handle myself."

"Fair enough. Looks like we've got some excitement for your first patrol, then. Let's go!"

Chapter 15: The Easy Part of Heroing

Chapter Text

"So, Victor and Othala?" I asked. "I know that Othala is the healer, but what's Victor's thing?"

Triumph, who was staring out the window of the PRT van that had picked us up barely thirty seconds after console had contacted us, turned to look at me. "Oh, right, I forgot for a moment that you're new to Brockton. Um, Othala isn't just a healer, she can give anyone she touches one of several powers. Invulnerability, fire control, and regeneration are the big ones, but she can also do flight and super strength. Maybe some others, but we're not entirely sure."

I nodded, filing that factoid away for later. That sounded like a pretty handy ability. "And Victor?" I prompted.

"He's a skill thief. If you're close to him, he can slowly take your skill at certain things, faster if you make eye contact. He keeps the skills permanently so he's pretty dangerous, but unless he drains a skill completely you'll get it back pretty quickly."

Now that was a dangerous power. "Got it."

"Good, because we're here."

The van pulled over and Triumph threw open the doors at the back, barely waiting for the van to screech to a stop before jumping out onto the pavement. I followed after him, rapidly scanning the street around us to assess the situation.

Two rows of dilapidated apartment buildings stood on either side of a poorly maintained street. There were a half-dozen cars parked along the sides of the road, with large stretches of garbage-strewn asphalt littered with potholes between them.

It was strange to see such a rundown part of the city so close to the considerably nicer street that I'd been patrolling down with Triumph. The difference was night and day, and there wasn't a single person out and about, though I could see a number of people watching furtively from upper-story windows up and down the street.

Our target was pretty obvious. It was the one with a broken-down door surrounded by three zip-tied skinheads. The gunfire I could hear ringing inside was also a bit of a clue.

Velocity was nowhere in sight, and Triumph was clearly waiting for the half-dozen troopers accompanying us to pile out of the van, but I didn't feel like waiting. Riptide appeared in my hand and I charged up the half-dozen steps leading to the apartment building's entrance, ignoring Triumph's shout of surprise as I blitz past him.

I could feel the fighting up on the second floor. Velocity––a weirdly blurry mass of water to my senses––was running down a hallway while two more figures seemed to be fighting in close quarters. The gunshots had fallen silent by now, but I could still feel half-a-dozen men standing clustered around a much smaller shape that I assumed must be Othala.

The apartment's lobby was empty except for another skinhead, this one with a very prominent eagle tattoo on his neck, lying bent-over on the ground near the door. I barely spared him a moment of attention, instead slamming the door to the stairs open and taking them two at a time.

Beneath my armor, I carefully unscrewed a water bottle from the inside, allowing the seawater within to pour out and flow up to fill the space around my shoulders. I was instantly energized, my movements coming faster and my senses going into overdrive as I rushed into the hallway.

My assessment had been completely correct. A man I assumed had to be Browbeat––massive muscles, mask, clearly fighting the dude who was probably Victor––was getting slowly taken apart and pushed back down the hallway. His opponent, a masked man wearing a black breastplate over a bright-red shirt and black pants, was clearly far more skilled than he was, and looked completely unaffected by Browbeat's occasional grazing hits.

On the other side of the hallway, Othala stood surrounded by six more skinheads. Two of them were using rough walls of fire to keep Velocity from getting close, while another was floating in the air behind her. The other three seemed content to simply shield her with their bodies, making me think that they must have been granted invulnerability just like Victor probably had been.

I made a snap judgment call. Browbeat was getting pushed back, but he seemed to be keeping Victor reasonably occupied and was mostly uninjured. Velocity also looked fine, but was making no headway against the two fire controllers. They would be okay for a few more seconds while I dealt with the biggest threat.

The pipe I could feel almost directly above Othala's head burst open, and a powerful torrent of water punched clean through the flimsy ceiling panel and flowed down towards the neo-natzi supervillain. Fortunately at the last moment I remembered that this was a person I was trying to capture, and not a monster that needed killing. Instead of cutting straight through her skull like I'd originally planned to, the torrent of water simply knocked her off her feet.

A moment later, the water split into seven streams. Six knocked the gangsters off their feet and away from Othala, while the last streamed down to join the original burst in enveloping my primary target.

The two fire controllers yelped and cried out in pain as they were sent sprawling on the floor. The flier managed to get out of the way at the last second, but the stream turned one-hundred-and-eighty degrees directly behind him and hammered him into the wall. The invulnerable trio barely seemed to feel it, but they were no stronger than ordinary men and it was easy enough to pin them each to the ground with strands of water as hard as steel beams.

"Victor!" Othala just managed to cry out before suddenly Velocity was there. He stopped directly above her and dropped a containment foam grenade directly on top of her, enveloping her body in rapidly-expanding yellowish foam.

The moment she was taken care of, I was already turning to deal with Victor. I'd emerged from the stairs just a scant few feet behind him, and dealing with Othala and her escorts hadn't taken long at all.

Hearing Othala's scream, he sharply kicked Browbeat in the knee with his boot, then spun around to see what was going on as the independent hero dropped to the ground. The point of my blade was there to meet him as I cooly leveled Anaklusmos towards him, the blade hovering a scant few millimeters from his exposed neck.

I felt something touch my mind, worming, questing tendrils brushing against the edges of my thoughts, but the crashing of waves shoved them away in an instant and Victor flinched. "Surrender," I ordered firmly. Then I remembered that I was trying to do the superhero thing. What did superheroes say again? "You're under arrest," I added after a moment's thought.

Victor's eyes flicked between me, Velocity, who was still standing over Othala's rapidly expanding prison of containment foam, and then the window a few feet to his left. His hand came up, swatting my sword away with his palm, and he lunged towards the window. We were on the second floor, but if he was invulnerable like I thought he was that wasn't really a problem.

Unfortunately for him, I hadn't let my guard down. Victor lunged at the window and he was several steps closer to it than I was, but ultimately he was a skilled mortal and I was a demigod.

I lunged after him and caught him by the scruff of the neck like a disobedient kitten trying to run away from its mother. "I guess we can add resisting arrest to your charges," I quipped, remembering a similar line from a TV show Paul sometimes liked to watch.

I turned towards Velocity. "Do you have another one of those grenades, or should I just hold onto him for now?" I shook Victor slightly for emphasis.

Velocity blurred over to stand beside me, looking almost like he'd just walked over except with the motions played in fast-forward, and looked down at Victor's limp body. "Could you get him down to the troopers? They should have proper restraints in the truck and whatever power Othala gave him is probably going to run out any second."

"Yeah sure." I gestured to where I was still holding the six Empire gang members down with watery nets. "Watch out for the guy with the black shirt, he's trying to grab his gun."

"Thanks! Send the solvent team up here when you get down, we should try and secure both Victor and Othala as soon as we can before any other Empire members arrive. We––"

And that was when an air conditioner crashed through the wall and nearly turned Victor into paste. His eyes bulged as I pulled him out of the way in the nick of time.

"Rune! Watch where you––"

This time it was a chunk of pavement, and I roughly tossed Victor aside before I smashed the hunk of masonry into the floor with my armored elbow. Victor tried to scramble to his feet, but water was still flowing out of the pipe I'd burst open––I felt a little bad about the property damage, but the two big holes in the side of the building were considerably more damagey than what I'd done so maybe it wasn't so bad––and I used a few gallons of water to pin him in place.

Looking out through the new gaps in the wall, I saw a girl with blonde hair in a black and red robe standing on a floating manhole cover, three more chunks of pavement floating around her. Triumph was shouting up at her from the street, standing protectively in front of several PRT troopers. The van we'd arrived in was a total loss from the look of it––the girl, Rune probably, had half-crushed it with a makeshift boulder.

"Give me Victor and Othala and no one has to get hurt," she told me authoritatively, but I could hear a faint tremor in her voice. "I don't know who you are, but you don't want to cross the Empire!"

Yeah, no. She didn't sound nearly as scary as she clearly thought she did. "How about instead you drop those rocks and go to jail, go directly to jail, do not pass go, do not collect your buddies?" Okay that sounded a lot better in my head.

Rune's answer was to launch another one of her floating projectiles at me. I waited for it to widen the hole in the wall, then dodged easily out of the way and rushed forward. Two steps took me across the hallway and then I leapt, twisting my body to fit fully through the awkwardly-shaped gap in the wall.

Rune clearly wasn't expecting that and reacted far too slowly. Her platform flew back several feet and then I crashed into her anyway, pinning her arms against her sides and sending both of us careening clean off her platform.

Rune shrieked like a little girl on her very first roller coaster, or maybe an Aphrodite camper that had just found a rat in her makeup kit. I tucked her thrashing body against my chest and then turned my body just before we hit the ground, absorbing most of the impact on my indestructible back. Rune still certainly felt the impact, my armor didn't make for a particularly soft landing, but I was pretty sure that even a squishy mortal like her could survive such a tiny fall. She kept screaming even after we hit the ground so that was probably a good sign.

I stood up and pinned her to the ground with my armored foot. "Are you guys alright?" I called out to Triumph and the troopers. "Was anyone in the car?"

"Everyone got out in time!" Triumph called back. "How did everything go up there? Is Rune okay?"

"Velocity foamed Othala and I think probably Victor too by now," I rattled off quickly. "Browbeat looked hurt, and Rune's still moving so she's probably fine."

"Good. Console says there's another van on the way. Good work, Riptide."

"I was happy to help!"

And that was about the end of my first ever fight as Riptide, superhero extraordinaire. Easy enough. Unfortunately as I would soon learn, fighting bad guys really was the easy part.