The price of the Stars

chapter 12

Percy pov.

Jason, Piper, Annabeth, and I were on our way back to the McLean/Chase residence and this time I was driving. "So who is this Taylor?" I asked. I saw Piper shrug, "Taylor Swift of course. Have you ever met her?" I laughed softly. "Of course not!" Piper nodded, "Have you ever met anyone famous?" I glanced at her, "You mean apart from Annabeth and you?" "Yes." I considered the question forward second. "I of course met the president once, do famous terrorist leaders count?" Piper giggled and even Annabeth cracked a smile. "Not really?" Piper snorted. "Piper meant celebrities. Any Hollywood stars or other people like that?"

I scratched the back of my head. "I was unfortunate enough too meet Emma Watson once when she first became Good will ambassador for the UN." I said hoping it would stay at that. To my displeasure I found that not only Jason and Piper were looking at me expectantly but even Annabeth seemed to be following the conversation. "When a VIP like a UN ambassador enters the contry measures are taken. Of course they have their usual bodyguards but a fast response team with a lot more firepower is put on hot standby. Now, her chief of security used to be my Sargent when I was a marine. Before he left the service to work for the UN, a friend of mine and I pranked him and he decided to get back at me by wasting my time and requesting me in person to lead that response team."

Piper gave me a challenging look. "I never met her but I heard she is supposed to be a very cool person." I nodded in agreement, "Yeah, she wasn't as useless as civilians usually are. She didn't even whine around when we told her to wear a bullet proof vest from JFK to the hotel." For the rest of the ride they tried to pester me for information but I kept silent for the rest of the ride. I really didn't want to break it to them how bad the reputation of most celebrities were among people in my line of work. I mean we usually looked down on them as saw them far below us, not that that stopped us from listing to their music or watching their movies, or making very unapropied jokes about them in our free time. In fact Piper would probably be sick if she heard some of the extremely sexist comments that I heard about her, even within my own team. But that kind of behavior could be forgiven if you worked in that kind of highstress environment. Okay, okay I admit it. I also made some very unapropied jokes about Piper.

We also didn't look down on all of them the same way, some where even respected. Piper's father for instance was very active in fighting human trafficking and slavery in North America, not that he got any official credit for it. If he did he would he dead by now. In fact that only reason why I new about it was because I had also been a rather big reason why pigs like that have sleepless nights. Of course not everyone had a reputation as good as Tristan McLean. There was of course the other side of the spectrum where people like Justin Beiber resided, people that were seen as naive weaklings who were wasting the air they where breathing.

Finally we reached the house and parked in the drive way. Hazel and Thalia both pulled in next to us. When Hazel got out she called over, "Hey, Frank will be here in half an hour. He just called

"Annabeth! Try on this one?" I glanced up. Annabeth was going through hell and I had been threatened under pain of death not to interfere with Annabeth's dressups no matter how much Annabeth begged for me to save her. In other words she was forced to change into new outfits for the party. On the upside if I had been paying attention I would have gotten to see Annabeth in bra and panties quite a lot which would have made my day brighter. On the down side I wasn't paying attention. I was writing with my best friend Val. She also seemed very interested in the magazine picture and seemed to be rather disappointed that it was only a rumor even though it was hard to tell over what's app.