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CHAPTER ELEVEN the living tale of courtland von tucker
———CONNOR! ( NEW ORLEANS )
CONNOR'S MOTHER'S NAME is Aurora. She's petite and maybe three quarters of both Connor's height (and Travis is taller than Connor!) with bright, thick and extremely curly blonde hair and fascinating cerulean blue eyes. In high school, ironically enough, she had been a cheerleader, but her real passion had lay for art. However, most importantly and above all, Aurora Stoll is a pacifist. To an absolute fault, she wears peace on her like a ticking clock — all throughout Connor's childhood, she had always been calm and extremely collected, even the day she had dropped Travis off at camp, and the day she had to let Connor go as well. Travis and Connor had both been mischievous as kids, the class jokers, and Aurora had been called down to the principal's office multiple times what with their mix of love for destruction and the inability to sit still for long periods of time due to the ADHD or read properly when the teacher kept telling them to die to their dyslexia. She had always been so patient with them, sitting down and explaining each concept over and over in the same tone, never changing, until they understood. And whilst Travis had quickly quit trying to read after he got to camp and realized he didn't need to be able to properly read English all the time when he knew Ancient Greek off the top of his head, Connor did not share the same sentiment: the boy would spend nights tucked in his bed as Aurora sat beside him, reading book after book until he was lulled to sleep.
So, yes, Aurora Stoll was absolutely a pacifist.
And if she had seen how Connor had reacted to seeing Hermes for the first time at that very moment, and the way he had snapped — well, Connor supposed that his mother would be very, very disappointed in him (and that made him extremely upset). She had been upset when he first wrote to her about how he had tossed a spider in Annabeth's bed before she went to sleep, how he and Travis had left chocolate easter bunnies on Katie Gardner's cabin's roof, how he had replaced each of Verona's eyeshadow pallets with prices of egg shells, and glued pieces of a pool noodle over her sword as a barrier when she wasn't paying attention, and stole every alarm clock out of the Aphrodite cabin just to spite her the morning she had a meeting, and changed every single directional sign in the forest before a capture the flag game to deliberately make her go the opposite way of the direction she wanted...Connor had written to his mother a lot about the things he'd done to Verona, he realized.
Perhaps he just wanted his mother to know exactly what he was up to, since she couldn't be around to see it.
Either way, he knew full and well that she could not be proud of what took down at the train station. Knowing full well Zeus could well and good blast him out of the sky even now, Connor hung on tightly to the stupid, stupid magic carpet as it flew over Texas from far; far above. He knew that technically Zeus shouldn't blast either of them out of the sky, considering they were not children of the Big Three and Aphrodite and Hermes had really done no harm to him, but it made him uneasy after he had insulted the Gods at the train station to fly in Zeus's domain, even if it was on his father's carpet. And his father — Connor still felt so much rage towards him. Sure, he was angry that Luke had left him and Travis alone at camp, when they had grown up together. Luke was his brother after al, but could he blame him? Yes, he had caused major chaos in the process, but he wasn't wrong — the Gods didn't care at all. His ride on the magic carpet towards New Orleans in itself proved that. Meeting her daughter for the first time and what had Aphrodite done?
