The Fate of Olympus | Reynabeth [✓]

11. Annabeth and Reyna Talk Comparative Mythologies

They crashed in the Hermes cabin for the night because Annabeth felt a little weird about her mother at the moment. Anyway, she didn't want to separate from Reyna for the night.

The Hermes cabin was less crowded now than it had been historically, so they got their own corner on the floor. They tried to go to sleep, but sleep evaded both of them.

"Hey, Annabeth?" Reyna whispered.

"I'm still awake," admitted Annabeth.

"I can't sleep. Tell me a story."

Reyna couldn't see her, but Annabeth smiled. She rolled on her side to face Reyna. "Have you ever taken a class that, like, fundamentally changed the way you thought about the world?"

"Yeah," said Reyna. "The history of military tactics class. Boy, I wish I could have been a military commander in medieval northern Europe. I would have spied on my enemies so effectively that they would have suspected me of witchcraft."

"Oh," said Annabeth. She hadn't expected that Reyna would have had a shared experience with her, much less share it. The question was intended to be rhetorical, to prime Reyna to the ideas that Annabeth was about to present. "Uh, I'm not sure that being suspected of witchcraft in medieval northern Europe would be a good thing."

"Well, just imagine how impressed contemporary historians would be at how effective I was at using spies!"

Something about that explanation fascinated Annabeth. "So do you think it's better to be admired posthumously than it is in your own time?"

Reyna thought about that. "I mean, if I had to choose whether to be admired or forgotten after my death, I'd rather be remembered for something. As for whether being admired after death is more important than being admired in my own time, well, I don't think so. Unless I did something really memorable, like become a female military commander in medieval Europe who mastered the art of espionage."

"If I were a historian, I would be bamboozled by stories a woman in Europe becoming a military commander who mastered spying."

"Yeah, I know!" Reyna grinned and bounced a little at the thought. It gave Annabeth hope, seeing Reyna genuinely happy.

"Uh-huh. Did Europeans use spies?"

"Yes, but I don't think spies were used to their full potential. It was hard to organize big groups of people and ensure their loyalty," said Reyna. "Their spying was pretty amateur if they tried. Did you know that a so-called 'spies' would meet up at the same place at the same time of the week? That's crazy! Even encryption wasn't very secure. I guess because a lot of people were illiterate. Not a lot of best practices had been established yet. People had to do it wrong before they could figure out how to do it right."

"Right, well. My Comparative Mythologies class is like that. It changed the way I thought about myths."

Reyna's walls went back up. "Oh, like wanting to...go on this quest. This 'diplomatic mission.'"

"Reyna, do you even want to be here? On this quest?"

"This quest holds the answer to saving my camp. Of course I want to be here. Plus, I need to protect you so you don't do anything stupid."

"I have never done anything stupid."

"Whatever you say."

Annabeth squinted her eyes at Reyna, but it didn't help her get a better read on the notoriously stoic Roman leader. Reyna was clearly teasing her, but was Annabeth supposed to find it funny? She did, but she also didn't really want to admit it.

"Okay, okay," said Annabeth. "Comparative Mythologies is exactly what it sounds like. We take mythologies from separate cultures and compare the similarities between them. For one of our first projects, we compared how multiple civilizations each, independently, came up with a myth describing how fire was stolen to benefit humanity. Of course, in the Greek version, Prometheus stole fire from the gods. In the Cherokee nation, Grandmother Spider stole fire. In ancient India, it was the hero Mātariśvan. In Polynesian myth, Māui showed humans how to make fire. There are a lot of other similarities, like many religions believed that humanity was sculpted out of clay, that a great flood was used to cleanse the earth, and that young gods overthrew chaotic titans."