ATLOP: Trial by Fire

The Prophecy Comes True

What was in the bottle held my attention though.

I'd read about them before and seen pictures but seeing one in person was very different.

A Storm Bottle.

Why was there a Storm Bottle on my dresser?

"Hey, uh, Percy," Carl said. "What is that thing? It appeared in the middle of the night and woke me up."

I studied the bottle, being careful not to touch it or bump the table. Inside the bottle whirled a compacted storm.

Storm bottles could be immensely dangerous if one wasn't careful. In the sea they usually held waterspouts or whirlpools, strong ones holding sea storms. This one held a genuine storm, and a fairly strong one.

Opening it without knowing how to guide and control it would result in a lot of destruction.

That was definitely going in the 'never open unless I'm gonna die anyways' pile, at least for now.

OO OO OO OO OO OO OO OO OO OO

There were three weeks left of the summer camp when I received my mom's letter.

I was happy to hear from her, it was good to hear she was doing well.

The police were apparently baffled by Gabe's disappearance but he'd signed the divorce papers before leaving so mom didn't have anything to worry about. She had a strange feeling the police wouldn't find him.

She got a stipend in the place of Gabe for him posing for Madeline (a new up and coming sculptor whose specialty was super ugly neorealism) who made a sculpture of him. She'd sold it, entitled The Poker Player to a collector, through an art gallery in Soho.

The money was more than enough to cover the deposit on the new apartment that she told me she'd officially moved into the new apartment last week, and had already decorated it some. It was furnished and everything, though she was holding off on my room beyond the basics until I decided what I wanted to do.

She also managed to get the stuff from Montauk, which was still there somehow. She told me she'd drop it off if I wanted to stay at camp for the school year.

On that note she was also planning to go to school and had already paid for her first semester's tuition at NYU.

She'd left a P.S.: Percy, I've found a good private school here in the city. I know the camp has a school program, but if you decide you want to live at home I've put down a deposit to hold you a spot. I'll understand your decision either way.

I folded the note up and decided to wait before making my decision.

OO OO OO OO OO OO OO OO OO OO OO

Annabeth had dug out a new book from the Athena library for us to look over. I suspected that it was actually from the Apollo one based on the explosions from that cabin yesterday, though maybe the Apollo cabin took it from the Athena cabin seeing how one of them was seen fleeing the cabin with an armful of books last week.

We were going over the stories in it that were written by a demigod thousands of years ago. It was amazing that the book had lasted so long. So far, we'd read about four quests, each with their own prophecy, a dozen interactions with the Gods, and two interactions with Titans.

Annabeth stretched, "You know, all these prophecies have at least three lines."

I nodded, "Yeah, seems to be a minimum requirement."