Champion of Love

Four Dirty Children and a Goat Man

When you grew up in the early 2000s and knew the pop culture from that time period to put in here LMAO.

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They walked for several days, sleeping for a few hours during the day and traveling through the night. Monsters were always more active in the dark, especially out in the wilderness like the questers were traveling through.

If people saw five dirty children hitchhiking on the side of the road, they'd probably call the police to pick them up, or try to take the kids somewhere safe themselves. Since they had no transportation, they had to travel on foot and couldn't afford the setback.

Percy had been sent on a few missions in the wilderness that took a few days. Aphrodite wanted him to be able to survive on his own if she was ever called away and couldn't help him or just wasn't allowed to.

So, he and Grover ended up giving the rest of the group a crash course in surviving out in the wild. Annabeth had stayed in the streets where she could hide in buildings if she was being chased, so she'd never learned these skills.

Bianca and Nico tried to remember if they'd ever learned how to survive, but weirdly enough, their memories were both very blank. They had some memories of when they were very little and their mother was still alive, then there was nothing and they were told their parents were both dead by a mysterious lawyer, who'd taken them to a hotel to stay until a good boarding school could be found. They didn't remember anything from their time in the hotel, including any birthdays, yet they knew had to have stayed there for years because they'd only been attending boarding school for the last two years of their lives. Their boarding school tuition was funded by a secret bank trust their parents had apparently left them. So, Hades had a minion watch over his kids.

But one thing that confused Percy was how they marveled so much at how far technology has come in the last few years. They said they remembered their mother having "compact fluorescent lamps" installed in their home, replacing all their old lighting when they were very little and that it had just been introduced to America shortly after they'd moved there. Then, suddenly, they saw all kinds of other technologies popping up everywhere after that strange blank period in their memories.

Yeah, it was really confusing and Nico complained that it was hurting his head trying to think about it, so they ignored that.

They spent the next three day traveling in foot, making good time. They reached Vegas by early morning on the 18th. Still three days left to complete the quest. Honestly, Percy thought they were doing pretty good for how often their resources were taken away or just sucked (Looking at you, Ares).

They stumbled out into the desert afternoon of Las Vegas on the 18th. It was a hundred and ten degrees, easy, and they must've
looked like deep-fried vagrants, but nobody paid them any mind. Vegas was a whole different kind of crazy from New York

They passed the Monte Carlo and the MGM, pyramids, a pirate ship, and the Statue of Liberty,
which was a pretty small replica, but still made Percy homesick.

He wasn't sure what they were looking for. Maybe just a place to get out of the heat for a few minutes, find some sandwiched and lemonade, make a plan for actually getting into the Underworld.

They must have taken a wrong turn, because they found themselves at a dead end, standing in front of the Lotus Hotel and Casino. The entrance was a huge neon flower, the petals lighting up and blinking. No one was going in or out, but the glittering chrome doors were wide open, spilling out air-conditioning that
smelled like flowers–Lotus blossom. Aphrodite loved Lotuses and had them floating in all her ponds in her temple on Olympus.