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🍦— 004. dreamless city.
VIVI DIDN'T REALLY EXPECT to have that heartwarming moment with her father, but it felt kind of nice. It looked like Hermes really cared for his children, no matter how many of them he had. Sure, she hated him at first ( well, no hate really, just disliked him ), but the more she thought about it, the more questions rise in her head.
How did monsters not smell her before she arrived at the Camp. To add to that, two demigods were in the same house. That surely couldn't went unnoticed. That's when she thought that maybe her dad had something to do with it. Maybe he, I don't know, put some kind of a spell on her house or on Vivi herself so she wouldn't attract them? Who knows.
"Yo, Vivi!" Connor yelled as he entered the throne room, "You all need to see this. Now."
The other campers had gathered in a small park at the edge of the mountain. They were clustered at the guardrail, looking down at Manhattan. The railing was lined with those tourist binoculars, where you could deposit one golden drachma and see the city. Campers were using every single one.
Vivi looked down at the city. She could see almost everything from here ─ the East River and the Hudson River carving the shape of Manhattan, the grid of streets, the lights of skyscrapers, the dark stretch of Central Park in the north. Everything looked normal, but something was wrong.
"I don't. . . hear anything," Annabeth said.
That was the problem. Even from this height, Vivi should've heard the noise of the city ─ millions of people bustling around, thousands of cars and machines ─ the hum of a huge metropolis. You don't think about it when you live in New York, but it's always there. Even in the dead of night, New York is never silent. But it was now.
"What did they do?" Percy's voice sounded tight and angry. "What did they do to my city?"
"Our city, boy." Vivi said and pushed Michael Yew away from the binoculars and took a look.
In the streets below, traffic had stopped. Pedestrians were lying on the sidewalks, or curled up indoor ways. There was no sign of violence, no wrecks, nothing like that. It was as if all the people in New York had simply decided to stop whatever they were doing and pass out.
"Are they dead?" Silena asked in astonishment.
"Not dead," Percy said. "Morpheus has put the entire island of Manhattan to sleep. The invasion has started."
