WARNING: badly written but a rewrite is up on my page
REDAMANCY | Lorna and her friends are the demigods of the great prophecy. Together, they will sail to Rome, with a camp of demigods trying to kill them, to save a son of Hades, and follow the Mar...
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3. The Great Prophecy
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The Romans sure knew how to eat.
Sets of couches and low tables were carted into the forum until it resembled a furniture showroom. Romans lounged in groups of ten or twenty, talking and laughing while wind spirits—aurae—swirled overhead, bringing an endless assortment of pizzas, sandwiches, chips, cold drinks, and fresh-baked cookies. Drifting through the crowd were purple ghosts—Lares—in togas and legionnaire armor. Around the edges of the feast, satyrs (no, fauns, Lorna thought) trotted from table to table, panhandling for food and spare change.
In the nearby fields, the war elephant frolicked with Mrs. O'Leary, and children played tag around the statues of Terminus that lined the city limits. The whole scene was so familiar yet so completely alien that it gave Lorna vertigo.
Reyna and a few of her officers (including the blond kid Octavian, freshly back from burning a teddy bear for the gods) sat with Lorna and her crew. Percy joined them with his two new friends, Frank and Hazel.
As a tornado of food platters settled onto the table, Jason leaned over and whispered, "I want to show you around New Rome. Just you and me. The place is incredible."
Lorna nodded. She looked over at Percy and tried not to stare at the new marks on Percy's forearm—an SPQR tattoo like Jason's. At Camp Half-Blood, demigods got bead necklaces to commemorate years of training. Here, the Romans burned a tattoo into your flesh, as if to say: You belong to us. Permanently. Lorna swallowed back some biting comments.
Reyna called a toast to friendship. After introductions all around, the Romans and Lorna's crew began exchanging stories. Jason explained how he'd arrived at Camp Half-Blood without his memory, and how he'd gone on a quest with Piper, Leo and Lorna to rescue the goddess Hera (or Juno, take your pick—she was equally annoying in Greek or Roman) from imprisonment at the Wolf House in northern California.
"Impossible!" Octavian broke in. "That's our most sacred place. If the giants had imprisoned a goddess there—"
"They would've destroyed her," Piper said. "And blamed it on the Greeks, and started a war between the camps. Now, be quiet and let Jason finish."
Octavian opened his mouth, but no sound came out. Lorna really loved Piper's charmspeak.
"So," Jason continued, "that's how we found out about the earth goddess Gaea. She's still half asleep, but she's the one freeing the monsters from Tartarus and raising the giants. Porphyrion, the big leader dude we fought at the Wolf House: he said he was retreating to the ancient lands—Greece itself. He plans on awakening Gaea and destroying the gods by...what did he call it? Pulling up their roots."
