The Plea of Apollo || COMPLETED

MODERN EDUCATION

Many would say graduating high school was not a very hard task to complete. As long as a student tried, he or she would most likely walk out with a diploma. Sure some classes were bound to be challenging, and everyone had their own strengths and weaknesses, but overall getting good enough grades to graduate was not impossible.

Fighting monsters while doing this made things a bit harder, but to demigods this was just a fact of life. However, Leo changed that.

"No one has any questions for me?" Malcolm, head of the Athena cabin now that Annabeth was studying in New Rome, asked politely. When none of those in the room answered, he shrugged before settling on one of the couches in the Big House.

Ever since Leo, along with the help of Calypso and his siblings, designed a device that could block monsters from sensing demigods who used technology, a new program being offered at the camp was online schooling. Using the funds gathered from the Strawberry Fields, Chiron purchased a dozen or so laptops for those willing to take classes online. Of course they had to be fixed with the aforementioned signal-blocking devices Leo patented, but for the first week of use they were working very well.

From where Nico sat next to Will, who of which was not actually enrolled in the small group of online demigod students, the son of Hades glared at the screen as if he wanted to make it burst into hellfire.

"Nico," Will said gently as he saw a red box appear on the screen next to the answer Nico had typed in. "Maybe you should go ask Malcolm to explain to you what you're doing wrong. He'd be able to tell you right away."

Nico turned to his boyfriend with a grunt of frustration. "Can't you explain it to me? Gods I had no idea how much things have changed since the 1930's."

"I thought you went to school before you came to camp?"

"I did, but Bianca and I didn't do well in subjects like math and the sciences for the short time we were there. You should have seen us when they gave us calculators. I was sitting there for a good five minutes before I asked for an abacus, to which everyone gave me weird looks and I was told I was hopeless if I couldn't even work a simple calculator."

Will frowned. "I'm sorry, Death Boy." He gave the younger demigod a small hug. "I understand how this must be hard for you, but I'm proud you're trying to get an education."

"Well I know I'm definitely not going to college like you," he said sourly as he typed in another answer. "I just don't think it's for me. The only reason I really want a GED is so I can say I'm not a complete idiot. And in the name of my father what the actual Hades is wrong with my answer?" He burst as the screen read "incorrect" once more.

The son of Apollo read the question on the screen before turning to Nico with a small smile. "Nico, what concepts did you learn in math up until now?"

"Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. I know about fractions, percent, time, and money math too. When I went to that academy for half a year they tried to teach me basic algebra, but I wasn't very good at it. The whole concept of mixing letters with numbers made no sense to me. It does now," he added quickly. "Jason, Piper, and Annabeth were nice enough to write me a list of the most important things I missed out on since I didn't go to middle or high school."

"Did they teach you about square roots?"

Nico blinked at him. "I take it you don't mean roots of a tree in the shape of a square?"

Will had to hold back his laughter as he pointed at the screen of the computer. "They teach you how to do basic algebra and geometry but fail to tell you what a square root is? That, Nico, is a square root sign. Whatever number is underneath it taken to the one-half power. Here." He wrote down the basic square roots in the notebook Nico was using to show his work and explained what they meant. "So the square root of nine is three since three times three equals nine. Now if you multiply that times three like in the question you get nine as the answer."