Botanophobia: Fear of Plants
Aurelia hated keeping people's secrets.
Because when Hazel didn't wake up the first time Frank tried to wake her, he gave her an accusing look, demanding what was happening. Aurelia had chosen not to answer, merely telling Percy to find some land.
Percy agreed, thinking that maybe if she was off the water, the seasickness would be better. The entire time, Aurelia tried to calm Frank's panic and placate Percy's worry.
Did Aurelia know exactly what happened with Hazel? Well, she knew they were blackouts. Hazel had the misfortune of blacking out once when the two of them had been in the barracks. But Hazel didn't elaborate much on what caused the blackout, and Aurelia was respectful enough not to pressure her into telling.
"Hazel!" Frank was shaking the girl's arms, panicked. "Come on, please!"
Aurelia sat on the ground, her legs crossed as she watched, patiently waiting. They were on a cliff overlooking a beach. About a hundred feet away, the ocean glinted in the moonlight. The surf washed gently against the stern of their beached boat. To the right, hugging the edge of the cliff was a lighthouse. Behind them, fields of tall grass rustled in the wind. The night sky was blazed with stars.
After a few minutes of Frank trying to wake her, her eyes opened.
"Where are we?" she asked.
Frank exhaled and Aurelia felt his relief. "Thank the gods you're awake. We're in Mendocino, about a hundred and fifty miles north of the Golden Gate."
"A hundred and fifty miles?" Hazel groaned. "I've been out that long?"
Percy knelt beside her, the sea wind sweeping his hair. He put his hand on her forehead as if checking for a fever. "El told us you were asleep at first. But then we couldn't wake you. Finally we decided to bring you ashore. If it's the seasickness—"
"It wasn't seasickness," Hazel murmured, taking a deep breath.
Aurelia felt Hazel's guilt "Hazel, you do not have to—"
"It's okay, Ari," Hazel assured her friend, before looking at the boys. "I haven't been honest with you guys. What happened was a blackout. I have them once in a while."
"A blackout?" Frank took Hazel's hand, and Aurelia felt a sense of pleasure go through Hazel. "Is it medical? Why haven't I noticed before?"
"I try to hide it," Hazel admitted. "I've been lucky so far, but it's getting worse. It's not medical ... not really. Nico says it's a side effect from my past, from where he found me."
Aurelia could feel a mixture of concern and curiosity from Percy. "Where exactly did Nico find you?"
Hazel shot a glance at Aurelia but the daughter of Pavor just waved at her. A simple gesture that said It's up to you.
"I'll explain," Hazel promised. She clawed through her pack, which they had placed beside her along with her bundled sword. "Is ... is there anything to drink?"
"Yeah." Percy muttered a curse in Greek. "That was dumb. I left my supplies down at the boat."
Hazel was definitely feeling guilty now. "Never mind. I can walk ..."
"Don't even think about it," Frank said. "Not until you've had some food and water. I'll get the supplies."
"No, I'll go," Percy offered, shooting a glance at Frank's hand on Hazel's. Then he scanned the horizon as if he sensed trouble, but there was nothing to see—just the lighthouse and the field of grass stretching inland. "You guys stay here. I'll be right back.
"You sure?" Hazel asked. "I don't want you to—"
"I can go with him," Aurelia offered. "Buddy system. Just to be safe." And also she didn't really want to be left with just Frank and Hazel while acting awkwardly around each other.
Percy nodded. "Okay. We'll be quick. Frank, just keep your eyes open. Something about this place ... I don't know."
"I'll keep her safe," Frank promised.
Aurelia stood and she followed Percy back down towards the boat to get their supplies.
"You see it too right?" Percy asked. "Do they like each other?"
"I am an empath, Percy," Aurelia muttered. "I literally feel it. I want to say something, but I think that they need to be able to get there without any interference. Wherever 'there' may be."
Percy nodded in agreement. They reached the Pax and he passed her her bag before grabbing his own.
Percy studied Aurelia. "You do that a lot don't you? Keep people's secrets?"
"Fear is the mindkiller, Perseus. Seeing people's fears allows me to make certain judgments. I can tell a lot from a person's fears, like their motives, their intentions. Their secrets. It is a part of my job. Secrets are killers. My job was to determine if they would kill the beholder of the secret, or if there was a possibility it would take down others in the process."
"So you knew about Hazel's blackouts?" Percy asked.
Aurelia nodded.
"Do you know where she comes from?"
Aurelia made a so-so gesture.
"How come you never tell?"
Aurelia blinked thoughtfully. "Because it is disrespectful to share private information without permission. Like say ... if someone burned down a spa when they were younger and caused several people to get kidnapped? Just to give an example."
Percy pursed his lips. "I know I apologized already, but I really am sorry."
Aurelia shrugged. "Reyna used to always say that maybe it was Fate. It was a hard time, I will admit, but she is right. If it did not happen, we would never have gotten to Camp Jupiter."
Percy was hesitant, and Aurelia could feel it.
"Ask me whatever it is you want to ask me."
"Do you know why we did it?"
Aurelia shouldered her bag with a sigh. "I had a few theories, but I think the most likely one was to escape."
"Escape?"
"Escape. For Annabeth, or women in general, Circe's island could have been an oasis. It was a place where we sharpen our minds, our skills and our eyeliner. I remember your girlfriend. I did her hair and helped her dress. But she cared about you too much, and after she saw what we did ..."
"What did you do?"
"Men on Circe's Island were much less fortunate," Aurelia murmured. "Women ruled the island, men were merely pigs in comparison. So we turned you into a guinea pig."
"A guinea pig!"
"A guinea pig," she nodded, going into her bag to grab a water bottle for Hazel. "Annabeth refused Circe's invite to stay. Outsmarted her. But the only way to beat Circe was to let out the other captives on the island."
"I thought we set it on fire," Percy muttered.
"If we are being technical, the pirates that you and Annabeth freed looted, destroyed and set fire to the Island, but since you freed them, inadvertently you set burned down the island."
"Hmm."
The two of them walked back up the cliff to where Hazel and Frank were waiting.
"I wonder ..." Percy mused. "If you were on the island with Reyna and her sister, you and Reyna must've known each other for a very long time. Were you two friends then as well?"
"Reyna was my first friend," Aurelia admitted.
"Is that one of the other reasons she made you her Truthsayer?"
"Yep," Aurelia agreed. "I mean, my skill set was one that she liked to utilize. But she needed someone she could trust. Especially with people like Octavian who aim for power. It is hard to find someone you can trust indefinitely. She is my person." Aurelia pursed her lips. "Do you think you had a person?"
Percy nodded. "I think he may have been a faun."
"A faun?
"I think his name is Grover," Percy added. "I saw him in my dreams last night. He mentioned something about an empathy link." Percy froze slightly. Why did he say that? He hadn't been planning on telling anyone about Grover.
Aurelia felt the shift in his emotions. "I will not tell you if you do not want me to."
Percy gave her a grateful smile. He still didn't know what to make of his dreams. He didn't know what to make of his feelings of deja vu. All he knew was that he had to find a way to succeed on this quest, or else he had no chance of getting his memory or his old life back.
Aurelia paused in her step for a quick second. She felt terror. Not hers, or Percy's. Frank's.
"Hazel," she murmured before she took off running up the cliff. Percy, who was slightly confused, quickly followed suit.
The two of them had been gone barely five minutes and when they reached the top of the cliff, Frank was staring at the field in shock.
"Hazel," he whispered. Hazel was nowhere to be seen.
"Frank, what happened?" Percy demanded.
"I ... I don't know," Frank stammered. "Something grabbed her."
Aurelia sent a strong wave of calm to Frank. "Relax. We will find her." She pointed towards the fields. "Did she get pulled that way?"
Frank nodded.
"Then let's go."
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Hazel is smart at least.
The daughter of Pluto had yelled at the top of her lungs to whatever monsters had taken her, while standing atop of a very large looking rock. The yelling had led them to where she was, and relief was felt through all of them to see that she was unharmed.
At least until the strange chubby, cupid, piranhas started climbing up the rock she was standing atop. Karpoi. Disgusting grain spirits.
Frank shot a golden arrow at one, piercing its chest. The monster dissolved into pieces of Chex Mix. Aurelia burst out with Percy, each holding their respective swords. Frank shot another karpoi, while Percy slashed his sword through another. Aurelia charged the last two, stabbing them both with Ferrum Temoris.
Within minutes, the karpoi had been reduced to piles of seeds and various breakfast cereals. One started to reform but Percy pulled a lighter from his pack and sparked a flame.
"Try it," he warned, "and I'll set this whole field on fire. Stay dead. Stay away from us, or the grass gets it."
Frank winced and Aurelia put her hand on his shoulder, sending another wave of relaxation to calm him down.
"He'll do it!" Hazel shouted at the grain piles. "He's crazy!"
The remnants of the karpoi scattered in the wind. Frank helped Aurelia climb the rock so she could watch them go. Her sword had shrunk back to her necklace and she began to look around.
Percy extinguished his lighter and grinned at Hazel. "Thanks for yelling. We wouldn't have found you otherwise. How'd you hold them off so long?"
She pointed at the rock. "A big pile of schist."
"Excuse me?"
"Guys," Aurelia called from the top of the rock. Her voice was hoarse, like she was scared to be too loud. "You need to see this."
Frank, Hazel, and Percy climbed up to join her. As soon as Hazel saw what Aurelia was looking at, she inhaled sharply. "Percy, no light! Put your sword away!"
"Schist!" He touched the sword top and Riptide shrank back into a pen.
Down below them, an army was on the move.
The field dropped into a shallow ravine, where a country road wound north and south. On the opposite side of the road, grassy hills stretched to the horizon, empty of civilization except for one darkened convenience store at the top of the nearest rise.
The whole ravine was filled with monsters—column after column marching south, so many and so close, Aurelia was shocked they hadn't smelled them yet, or heard Hazel yelling.
Crouched against the rock, Aurelia watched beside her friends in disbelief as several dozen large hairy humanoids passed by, dressed in tattered bits of armor and animal fur. The creature had six arms each, three spouting on either side, so they looked like a cavern evolved from insects.
"Gegenes," Hazel whispered. "The Earthborn."
"You fought them before?" Percy asked.
She shook her head. "Just heard about them in monster class at camp. The Earthborn fought the Argonauts. And those things behind them—"
"Centaurs," Percy said. "But ... that's not right. Centaurs are good guys."
Frank made a choking sound. "That's not what we were taught at camp. Centaurs are crazy, always getting drunk and killing heroes."
Aurelia watched as the horse-men cantered past. They were human from the waist up, palomino from the waist down. They were dressed in barbarian armor of hide and bronze, armed with spears and slings. It looked like they were wearing vikings helmets ... no, actual horns are jutting from their shaggy hair.
"Are they supposed to have bull's horns?" Hazel asked.
"Maybe they're a special breed," Frank suggested.
"Let us not ask, though," Aurelia added.
Percy gazed farther down the road and his face went slack. "My gods ... Cyclopes."
Sure enough, lumbering after the centaurs was a battalion of one-eyed ogres, both male and female, each about ten feet tall, wearing armor cobbled out of junkyard metal. Six of the monsters were yoked like oxen, pulling a two story siege tower fitted with a giant scorpion ballista.
Percy pressed the sides of his head. "Cyclopes. Centaurs. This is wrong. All wrong."
Despair. That's all Aurelia could feel from Percy and she grabbed his hand, trying to absorb his fear and replace it with a calm feeling. He looked sickly pale in the moonlight, as if his memories were trying to come back, scrambling his mind in the process.
Shadows began dancing around Aurelia's neck, like they were whispering Percy's fears in her ear. A cold feeling was draped at the back of Aurelia's neck.
"We need to get him back to the boat," Hazel decided. "The sea will make him feel better."
"No argument," Frank said. "There are too many of them. The camp ... we have to warn the camp."
"They know," Aurelia murmured, pushing back the lump in her throat. "Reyna knows." There was no way the legion could fight so many. If they were only a few hundred miles north of Camp Jupiter, their quest was already doomed. They could never make it to Alaska and back in time.
"Come on," Hazel urged. "Let's ..." Her voice died when she saw the giant.
When he appeared over the edge, Aurelia couldn't quite believe her eyes. He was taller than the siege tower—thirty feet, at least—with scaly reptilian legs like a komodo dragon from the waist down and blue-green armor from the waist up. His breastplate was shaped like rows of hungry monstrous faces, their mouths open as if demanding food. His face was human, but his hair was wild and green, like a mop of seaweed. As he turned his head from side to side, snakes dropped from his dreadlocks.
He was armed with a massive giant and a weighted net. Just the sight of those weapons made Aurelia's stomach clench. She has never felt such a paralyzing fear.
And the worst part isn't that it wasn't fear for herself. It was fear for her camp, fear for her friends. Her friends—who were also paralyzed like she was and she was too scared to control her own emotions to help them. It felt like standing near a powerful magnet, and all the iron in their blood was being drawn toward it. The giant radiated his own gravitational field.
"Who is he?" Frank's voice quivered. "That's not—"
"Not Alcyoneus," Hazel said weakly. "One of his brothers, I think. The one Terminus mentioned. The grain spirits mentioned him too. That's Polybotes."
No one asked Hazel how she knew. Their hiding spot atop of the rock would be in plain sight to a creature that tall if he chose to look in their direction. Yet, they made no move to leave, instead creeping closer to get a better look.
As the giant got closer, a Cyclops woman broke ranks and ran back to speak to him. She was enormous, fat, and horribly ugly, wearing a chain-mail dress like a muumuu—but next to the giant she looked like a child.
She pointed to the closed-up convenience store on top of the nearest hill and muttered something about food. The giant snapped back an answer, as if he was annoyed. The female Cyclops barked and ordered her kindred and some of them followed her up the hill.
When they were halfway to the store, a searing light turned night into day. Aurelia was blinded. Below them, the army dissolved. Aurelia squinted like she had just stepped out of a dark theater into a sunny afternoon.
"Too pretty!" The Cyclopes shrieked. "Burns our eyes!"
The store on the hill was encased in a rainbow, closer and brighter than Aurelia had even seen. The light was anchored at the store, shooting up into the heavens, bathing the countryside in a weird kaleidoscope glow.
The lady Cyclops hefted her club and charged at the store. As she hit the rainbow, her whole body began to steam. She wailed in agony and dropped her club, retreating with multicolored blisters all over her arms and face.
"Horrible goddess!" she bellowed at the store. "Give us snacks!"
The other monsters went crazy, charging the convenience store, then running away as the rainbow light burned them. Some threw rocks, spears and swords, and even pieces of their armor, all of which burned up in flames in the pretty colors. Finally the giant leader seemed to realize that his troops were throwing perfectly good equipment.
"Stop!" he roared.
With some difficulty, he managed to shout and push and pummel his troops into submission. When they'd quieted down, he approached the rainbow-shielded store himself and stalked around the borders of the light. "Goddess! Come out and surrender!"
No answer from the store. The rainbow continued to shimmer.
The giant raised his trident and net. "I am Polybotes! Kneel before me so I may destroy you quickly."
Apparently no one in the store was impressed. A tiny dark object came sailing out the window and landed at the giant's feet. Polybotes yelled, "Grenade!"
He covered his face. His troops hit the ground.
When the thing did not explode, Polybotes bent down cautiously and picked it up. He roared in outrage. "A Ding Dong? You dare insult me with a Ding Dong?" He threw the cake back at the shop, and it vaporized in the light.
The monsters got to their feet. Some muttered hungrily, "Ding Dongs? Where Ding Dongs?"
"Let's attack," said the lady Cyclops. "I am hungry. My boys want snacks!"
"No!" Polybotes said. "We're already late. Alcyoneus wants us at the camp in four days time. You Cyclopes move inexcusably slowly. We have no time for minor goddesses!" He aimed the last comment at the store, but got no response.
The lady Cyclops growled. "The camp, yes. Vengeance! The orange and purple ones destroyed my home. Now Ma Gasket will destroy theirs! Do you hear me, Leo? Jason? Piper? I come to annihilate you."
The other Cyclopes bellowed in approval. The rest of the monsters joined in.
Aurelia covered her mouth to keep herself from crying. The entire eight months Jason had been missing, the only sign Aurelia hadn't gotten to him being alive was her dreams, and a part of her was very skeptical of trusting dreams. But this ... a monster naming him aloud.
"Jason," Hazel whispered, her eyes looking specifically to Aurelia. "She fought Jason. He might still be alive."
Aurelia's body gave a small shake, like she was trying to restrain from crying or laughing. It could have been either.
"Do those other names mean anything to you?" Frank asked.
Both Aurelia and Hazel shook their heads. Aurelia had never heard of any Leo or Piper, but she didn't care. Jason was alive.
Although, if you die on this quest then it won't really matter because you still won't be able to see him again, Aurelia chided herself.
She pondered what the Cyclops had said: Orange and purple ones. Purple—obviously the color of Camp Jupiter. But orange ... Percy had shown up in a tattered orange shirt. That couldn't be a coincidence.
Below them, the army began to march south again, but the giant Polybotes stood to one side, frowning and sniffing the air.
"Sea god," he muttered. To Aurelia's horror, he turned in their direction. "I smell sea god."
Percy shaking. He looked sickly and dazed and both Hazel and Aurelia placed their hands on his shoulder, pressing him as flat against the rock as they could.
The lady Cyclops Ma Gasket snarled. "Of course you smell sea god! The sea is right over there!"
"More than that," Polybotes insisted. "I was born to destroy Neptune. I can sense ..." He frowned, turning his head and shaking out a few more snakes.
"Do we march or sniff the air?" Ma Gasket scolded. "I don't get Ding Dongs, you don't get sea god!"
Polybotes growled. "Very well. March! March!" He took one last look at the rainbow encased store, then he raked his finger through his hair. He brought out three snakes that seemed larger than the rest, with white markings around their necks. "A gift, goddess. My name, Polybotes, means 'Many to Feed!' Here are some hungry mouths for you. See if your store gets many customers with these sentries outside." He laughed wickedly and threw the snakes into the tall grass on the hillside.
Then he marched south, his massive komodo dragon legs shaking the earth. Gradually, the last column of monsters passed over the hills and disappeared into the night.
Once they were gone, the blinding rainbow shut off like a spotlight. They were left alone in the dark, staring across the road at the closed up convenience store.
"That was different," Frank muttered.
Percy shuddered violently and Aurelia recognized the shellshock. Her uncle and her mother would often exhibit similar behavior whenever they got flashbacks of the wars they fought in Iraq.
"Let's go to the store," Hazel suggested. "If there's a goddess inside, maybe she can help us."
"Except a bunch of snake things are guarding the hill now," Frank commented. "And that burning rainbow might come back."
"We have to try," Aurelia murmured, staring at Percy. Her hand ruffled his hair, a gesture meant to comfort him, and she sent heavy waves of calm into him—an attempt to get him to stop shaking. And for a second, Aurelia was that nine year old girl who was stuck inside that god-awful house in Puerto Rico, brushing her mother's hair and wearing gold dresses just so she could keep Martina from killing herself.
Aurelia tried to find Percy's fear, to remove it from his current state of mind and into her necklace, but there was no specific memory causing his shellshock. It was just an overwhelming feeling of despair, horror, shock, and fear. And it was so overwhelming Aurelia had to stop herself from shuddering.
"Well ..." Frank managed, "any goddess who throws a Ding Dong at a giant can't be all bad. Let's go."
A/N: Don't you just love it when the MC has so much trauma, that almost everything she does can be related back to it?
On a more serious note: Aurelia has always felt the responsibility of being the emotional caretaker for her family, so it's a part of her self-worth. So when she's helpless to help Percy ... her self worth totally diminishes.
My poor baby :(