Percy Jackson Short Stories

This narrow world

We all know what the other campers think of us. They think we're a lot of narcissistic butterflies, good only for staring at ourselves in the water and giggling to each other.

Now, admittedly we don't see half-blood life as the grim, unremitting struggle that it seems to be for certain other residents of this camp – and certainly they're not the first people to accuse us of being insufficiently sensitive to the general tough-all-over-ness of things. Kiss the boys and leave 'em crying, that's our motto. But, still, it has to be some kind of amazing that they never even suspect there might be more to us than meets the eye.

Take the copper thing, for instance. Even the Athena kids don't seem to have wondered why our cabin wins all the important coin tosses – or, for that matter, who it was who cut off the phone lines to the Cyclops's cottage that one time about five summers ago.

More to the point, they never seem to realize just how much time they spend under our mother's power. Nearly every camper on this hill has had a crush on one of the others at some point; do they seriously believe that all we did was sit back and cheer them on?

Oh, no. Our lineage can be as formidable, our divine forebear as terrible, as any on search Olympus – and we could prove the point in an instant, if we ever needed to.

But we don't need to, not really. That's the other thing our cousins don't think of – they spend so much time talking about Theseus and Hercules and all the other children of the Elder Gods, they never stop to remember who our mother's most famous mortal child was. And for all the time they spend talking about the virtues of Western civilization, they always seem to forget who they owe the West's greatest civilization to.

They'd remember pretty quickly, of course, if they ever poked their heads into our cabin. Right between the two rows of bunks, in a place where you can't possibly miss it, there's a copper bust of our most illustrious half-brother – a man who did his share of hay-tumbling in his time, yes, but who did a few other things as well.

Aeneas Pius. Father of Rome.

So let the others think what they want to about us. Let them say that the kids in Cabin Ten are a bunch of cream puffs who only care about gossip and hairstyles.

We're the children of Aphrodite.

We're the great-aunts and great-uncles of Caesar.

When you've got that, who needs respect?