It was morning by the time I finally made it back to the city, the sun just barely peeking over the distant horizon. It was cold and windy, but the sky was clear and the sunrise painted the sea with streaks of glorious gold.
Before making landfall I spent a half-hour exploring the bay, crisscrossing the sandy depths and watching the coast from beneath the waves. I’d found over the past few months that there was a lot you could learn about a city from exploring its coastline, and Brockton Bay was no exception.
I noticed a few things of interest during my exploration. First of all, there were a lot more fish than I was expecting, particularly just outside the bay and in the surrounding waters. A few of my distant relatives in my dad’s court had told me about how badly mortals had damaged the ocean’s biosphere, but I hadn’t really paid them much attention. Now, I think I understood where they were coming from. There were a lot more fish than there should have been. Like, considerably more.
Putting that aside––I had no idea if that piece of information was at all significant, but it didn’t really seem very applicable right now––I continued my exploration. The next thing I noticed was the ridiculous number of sunken ships filling the waters. A harbor full of colossal, rusting wrecks was blocked off by a titanic cargo ship embedded in the sand just beneath the surface.
Even without really knowing what had happened, I could feel the tragedy of it written in the waves. One sunken ship had spelled the doom of dozens more. Forty-seven ships large enough to carry tens of thousands of tons of cargo reduced to nothing but rotting, rusting scrap. Even if that wasn’t connected to what was going on, it certainly bore investigating.
Finally, I concluded that the bay contained what my ninth-grade math teacher would have called a ‘statistically significant’ number of corpses. The ocean had a lot of corpses in it, but the majority of those were found far out to sea. The majority of them also tended to die of drowning, not bullets or, in a few cases, genuine concrete shoes. It seemed the mortals of this city were rather violent, or at least had a very violent past.
By the time I was done, the sun had mostly risen and I spent a few minutes finding a good place to emerge from the sea. I hadn’t noticed it at first, but now that nearly a full day had passed, I was starting to realize that the Mist here felt astonishingly thin. Thinner than I had ever felt it. It was still there, a barely perceptible film of static that buzzed against my tongue, but that was all. It was nothing like the dense fog that lived up to its name surrounding Camp Half-Blood and Olympus, nor even the permanent background haze that I had grown so used to that I hadn’t even been able to notice it until Triton purged it from the water around him and showed me the difference. I was glad now that he had; I couldn’t trust that it would stop people from noticing me doing something strange and being forewarned was a lot like being forearmed. Briares would probably disagree, but I personally thought that four arms was plenty for most things.
Thus, instead of walking out onto a beach fully clothed and completely dry, I found an empty, out-of-the-way pier a few minutes walk away from a rather nice looking stretch of boardwalk and used it as cover to get back onto dry land. A short walk later, I emerged from a side alley and joined seamlessly with the other early-morning pedestrians.
In the early morning chill, my sweatshirt and jeans fit in perfectly. My plan was to walk around, find a map, hopefully find a library, and then go from there. I didn’t really like libraries; my head was wired for ancient Greek, and English books tended to make my eyes hurt and my brain spin. The letters had a bad tendency to just float right off the page while I was trying to look at them.
Still, I knew that it was probably my best bet for finding a usable computer with a serviceable internet connection, and it wasn’t like I’d be able to stay there for long anyway. Demigods and technology didn’t mix very well. Computers weren’t as bad as cell phones, but anything more than half an hour on the internet would attract every monster in the city straight to me.
That wasn’t as much of a problem for me as it was for most demigods––there were very few monsters that could pose a genuine threat to me. Hades, I’d taunted monsters on purpose a few times over the past few months as a public service. It was all too easy to attract a big crowd with a long call to my Mom and then take care of them all at once. However, between the especially thin Mist and the number of innocent mortals that would be stuck in the library with me I didn’t want to risk it.
Step one was easy enough, there was a map posted barely a minute’s walk away from where I entered the boardwalk. Step two was going to have to wait a little bit longer. The map happened to be posted right outside a coffee shop, and the dazzling spread of pastries behind the glass combined with the smell of freshly baked bread wafting through the half-open door made my stomach growl and quickly reminded me that I hadn’t eaten anything in more than twenty-four hours.
Step two rapidly became step three. Thankfully, it seemed like American dollars still looked the same despite the MIA gods. Ten minutes later I was digging into a slice of warm blueberry pie, the table around me heavily laden with plates. Four thick slices of bacon, three eggs, two blueberry nutella crepes, a slice of blueberry pie, and a large cherry coke. The latter was tragically not blue, but I refused to drink blue gatorade on principle and that was the only properly-colored beverage they had available.
It had eaten through a large chunk of my cash, but I didn’t want to risk paying with my Poseidoncard or the Lotus Cash Card before I could test if they still worked and I was absolutely ravenous. I reasoned that I wasn’t going to get anything productive done on an empty stomach, so it was a worthy expense. Worst comes to worst, I’d figure something out. I always had.
As I was eating, I still kept my eyes and ears peeled for anything interesting I might overhear. The majority of it was just random gossip––which coworkers were sleeping together, who they thought was the hottest Protectorate hero, plans for the weekend––but I did learn that it was March seventeenth, which meant that I had either spent much longer than I thought swimming around down in Florida or that I’d been unconscious for the better part of three entire days. I had left my hotel in Tampa on the morning of the thirteenth, and I was pretty sure that I had run into that Glory Girl person yesterday afternoon. That was certainly something to keep in mind.
I was trying to decide if the Protectorate was some sort of celebrity group or if it had something to do with Glory Girl and her rambling when I noticed a young woman with dark blonde hair and green eyes stumble blearily into the cafe, her eyes glued to her phone screen and a laptop bag tucked under her arm.
She looked for all the world like any other tired teenager, but there was something about her that instantly highlighted her to my senses. It was the Mist, I realized after a moment. The Mist around her seemed to recoil from her presence, the barely-there haze pushed back as though she was walking around in her own personal giant hamster ball.
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My spoon froze for a fraction of a second and then I went back to eating my crepes. They were absolutely delicious, the combination of the sweet blueberry preserves, light whipped cream, gooey hazelnut spread, and perfectly cooked crepe able to match my mom’s cooking despite its lack of proper coloration.
The girl didn’t seem to notice anything, silently joining the short queue at the counter and occasionally reaching up to rub her eyes or massage her forehead. I kept a wary eye on her as she moved up the line, ordered a very large hot coffee and a blueberry scone, and then shuffled over to a table next to the window that was conveniently well within my line of sight.
Riptide’s pen form was a comforting weight in my hand as I slowly spun it between my fingers, making sure to keep my hand under the table and out of sight as I did so. It was a good trick, something one of the younger Apollo campers had come up with. It was so much easier to focus on something when your hands were kept busy. The girl in question typically fiddled with her hair bands. Riptide was an even more convenient alternative, keeping the blade in my hand and ready at a moment’s notice. Like this, I could be across the room with my sword buried in a monster’s chest in a fraction of second.
Despite my caution, nothing did end up happening while I was eating. The girl drank about half of her oversized cup, nibbled on the scone, and then pulled a sleek-looking laptop out of her bag and began fiddling with spreadsheets. I was almost tempted to go up and ask her if she knew what PHO was, but decided not to risk it.
She was certainly rather cute and might know something, but I was in no position to take risks right now. If need be, I could probably hunt her down sooner or later. A bubble in the Mist like that would probably be pretty noticeable even from a distance. If all it took to make me drop my guard was a pretty face then I never would have survived as long as I had. Maybe if she was wearing something a bit more form fitting… No. Stupid Percy.
It was only as I was leaving that she finally seemed to notice my presence. Her eyes initially passed over me as I walked towards the door, carefully making sure to never show her my back, but then she stiffened and her head snapped back around to stare at me. I paused momentarily, turned to look at her, and then walked out of the restaurant. If she was a well-hidden monster, that would have been more than enough for her to know what I was. If she was something else then, well, I honestly didn’t know.
I waited for several minutes on a nearby bench, but she did not come out to follow me. Eventually I decided to just head towards the library. There was only one visible on the map I’d seen, and it was on the complete opposite side of the boardwalk from where I was and several blocks deeper inland beside.
I considered taking a shortcut through the water, but ultimately decided against it. There was still plenty of daylight left and it was entirely possible the place wasn’t even open yet. Yes, I could take my time and maybe poke around a bit before I had to go in there. So many books, ugh. I really wasn’t looking forward to it. The too-short amount of time I’d spent in the Athena cabin library with––I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and bit my tongue––had fully spoiled other libraries for me. I somehow doubted the local library would have their collection translated into ancient greek.
I was about half way to my destination, ambling along the wooden walkway and chewing slowly on a piece of blue raspberry salt water taffy, when I noticed them. I hadn’t been paying very much attention to the people around me, my attention primarily focused on the bizarre fortress standing at the center of the bay. That was another clue that definitely bore looking into, I’d never seen or heard of anything like it existing in the mortal world before, but that was another thing to return to once I had a bit more of a general understanding of what was going on. For that reason, I had avoided getting too close to the thing’s legs while I was exploring the bay.
Two brightly-clothed figures, a man and a woman, were walking down the boardwalk towards me, the Mist rippling around them as it fled their presence and rippled in their wake. The man was dressed in bright red body armor, the top of his face covered by a matching visor that left his eyes and mouth exposed. The woman was wearing a skin-tight gray and white body suit covered in shimmery lines of cobalt-blue.
They looked like superheroes. Even more so than Glory Girl, their costumes instantly brought the idea to mind. Now that alone didn’t mean anything––people dressed up as superheroes all the time––but more importantly, the people around them treated them as though they were superheroes.
The pair stopped every few steps to take pictures with passersby and give autographs. People greeted them respectfully, didn’t get in their way, and generally responded much more favorably than I would have expected for a pair of out-of-place cosplayers on a chilly spring morning. They smiled and talked with people and radiated an aura of confidence and security.
I momentarily weighed my options, then decided to follow my gut and turned to walk towards the duo. I wanted a chance to scope them out. My initial suspicion would have been that they were disguised monsters, but that wasn’t possible given the way that the Mist was actively avoiding them and I’d never seen or heard of a monster that could really mimic a normal human without its help.
I’d also only ever seen one other person who elicited that sort of response from it––that sleepy girl from before. Did that mean she was a hero too? I tried to remember if Glory Girl had had the same effect as these three, but I just hadn’t been paying enough attention to say one way or the other. Maybe that was just normal here, some variation of a clear-sighted mortal that couldn’t exist back home?
I pushed those thoughts aside––I wasn’t much of a thinker, and coming up with pointless theories with so little information to go off of was pointless. Furthermore, it was almost my turn.
“Thank you for all the work you do for our city,” I told the red-armored man, reaching out to shake his hand. It felt like an easy guess, something you could tell a firefighter, a policeman, and maybe even a superhero without it sounding strange.
He took it after a moment, his grip firm and confident. “Of course! It’s my duty and pleasure to help out you fine folks!” He smiled at me broadly. “Just remember: stay in school, don’t do drugs, and always be the best person you can be!” Then he winked and his smile turned cheeky. “But don’t forget to have some fun either. You’re only young once.”
The woman beside him finished with the mom and daughter duo that she was talking to and turned towards us, playfully smacking his shoulder. “I saw that Assault, don’t you go filling the boy’s head with bad ideas.” Then she winked at me again.
It was clearly a well-practiced bit––I wasn’t the most observant camper, but even I could tell that––but it was still fun and clearly had a lot of heart in it. I spent another thirty seconds with the pair, getting a signed picture showing the two of them standing back to back with the giant oil rig fortress thing behind them for my trouble. Apparently the woman was Battery and the man was Assault. I’d never heard of either of them, but they seemed to be pretty popular.
The two spent another few minutes talking to the growing crowd before moving on further down the boardwalk. I watched them go, then turned and hurried off towards the library. I was starting to feel much more confident that the internet would have some answers for me. Back home that would have been a futile endeavor, but here it seemed like these superheroes, if they were indeed superheroes, were popular, public figures among the mortals. I probably wouldn’t be able to find anything about where the hell the gods were, but some basic knowledge should be pretty easy to find.
Usually, something like that would have been Ann––Annabeth’s job. She was the smart one, the one who knew everything, had all the answers, and told me who I needed to stab and where. Without her, I had to step up and do it myself. I wiped a tear from the corner of my eye without breaking stride. I really wished she was here with me. Hopefully my research skills weren’t too shabby and I could make her proud.