Riordanverse Feats/Discussion/Analysis Thread

[Cryso Agori]

Because Percy Jackson is better than Harry Potter and rereading the series anyway.

Percy Jackson And The Olympians: The Lightning Thief

Chapter 1.

The book series can cause Demigods to 'awaken' (IIRC the books canonically exist in the Riordanverse.)

Look, I didn’t want to be a half-blood. If you’re reading this because you think you might be one, my advice is: close this book right now. Believe whatever lie your mom or dad told you about your birth, and try to lead a normal life. Being a half-blood is dangerous. It’s scary. Most of the time, it gets you killed in painful, nasty ways. If you’re a normal kid, reading this because you think it’s fiction, great. Read on. I envy you for being able to believe that none of this ever happened. But if you recognize yourself in these pages – if you feel something stirring inside – stop reading immediately. You might be one of us. And once you know that, it’s only a matter of time before they sense it too, and they’ll come for you. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Percy has bad luck on field trips.

I hoped the trip would be okay. At least, I hoped that for once I wouldn’t get in trouble. Boy, was I wrong. See, bad things happen to me on field trips. Like at my fifth-grade school, when we went to the Saratoga battlefield, I had this accident with a Revolutionary War cannon. I wasn’t aiming for the school bus, but of course I got expelled anyway. And before that, at my fourth-grade school, when we took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Marine World shark pool, I sort of hit the wrong lever on the catwalk and our class took an unplanned swim. And the time before that… Well, you get the idea.

Poseidon's and Zeus's feud affecting the weather.

Overhead, a huge storm was brewing, with clouds blacker than I’d ever seen over the city. I figured maybe it was global warming or something, because the weather all across New York state had been weird since Christmas. We’d had massive snow storms, flooding, wildfires from lightning strikes. I wouldn’t have been surprised if this was a hurricane blowing in.

Percy causes the water to grab Nancy and pull her into the fountain with anger.

I tried to stay cool. The school counsellor had told me a million times, ‘Count to ten, get control of your temper.’ But I was so mad my mind went blank. A wave roared in my ears. I don’t remember touching her, but the next thing I knew, Nancy was sitting on her butt in the fountain, screaming, ‘Percy pushed me!’ Mrs Dodds materialized next to us. Some of the kids were whispering: ‘Did you see –’ ‘– the water –’ ‘– like it grabbed her –’ I didn’t know what they were talking about. All I knew was that I was in trouble again.

Ms. Dodds moves fast.

I gave her my deluxe I’ll-kill-you-later stare. I then turned to face Mrs Dodds, but she wasn’t there. She was standing at the museum entrance, way at the top of the steps, gesturing impatiently at me to come on. How’d she get there so fast? I have moments like that a lot, when my brain falls asleep or something, and the next thing I know I’ve missed something, as if a puzzle piece fell out of the universe and left me staring at the blank place behind it. The school counsellor told me this was part of the ADHD, my brain misinterpreting things. I wasn’t so sure.

I wasn’t so sure. I went after Mrs Dodds. Halfway up the steps, I glanced back at Grover. He was looking pale, cutting his eyes between me and Mr Brunner, like he wanted Mr Brunner to notice what was going on, but Mr Brunner was absorbed in his novel. I looked back up. Mrs Dodds had disappeared again. She was now inside the building, at the end of the entrance hall.

Ms. Dodds turns into a Fury.

‘Your time is up,’ she hissed. Then the weirdest thing happened. Her eyes began to glow like barbecue coals. Her fingers stretched, turning into talons. Her jacket melted into large, leathery wings. She wasn’t human. She was a shrivelled hag with bat wings and claws and a mouth full of yellow fangs, and she was about to slice me to ribbons.

Mr. Brunner throws Percy a sword, Percy follows his instincts and cuts her down.

Mr Brunner, who’d been out in front of the museum a minute before, wheeled his chair into the doorway of the gallery, holding a pen in his hand. ‘What ho, Percy!’ he shouted, and tossed the pen through the air. Mrs Dodds lunged at me. With a yelp, I dodged and felt talons slash the air next to my ear. I snatched the ballpoint pen out of the air, but when it hit my hand, it wasn’t a pen any more. It was a sword – Mr Brunner’s bronze sword, which he always used on tournament day. Mrs Dodds spun towards me with a murderous look in her eyes. My knees were jelly. My hands were shaking so bad I almost dropped the sword. She snarled, ‘Die, honey!’ And she flew straight at me. Absolute terror ran through my body. I did the only thing that came naturally: I swung the sword. The metal blade hit her shoulder and passed clean through her body as if she were made of water. Hisss! Mrs Dodds was a sand castle in a power fan. She exploded into yellow powder, vaporized on the spot, leaving nothing but the smell of sulphur and a dying screech and a chill of evil in the air, as if those two glowing red eyes were still watching me.

Mist hides the death of Ms. Dodds and wipes memory of her.

Grover was sitting by the fountain, a museum map tented over his head. Nancy Bobofit was still standing there, soaked from her swim in the fountain, grumbling to her ugly friends. When she saw me, she said, ‘I hope Mrs Kerr whipped your butt.’ I said, ‘Who?’ ‘Our teacher. Duh!’ I blinked. We had no teacher named Mrs Kerr. I asked Nancy what she was talking about.

‘Sir,’ I said, ‘where’s Mrs Dodds?’ He stared at me blankly. ‘Who?’ ‘The other chaperone. Mrs Dodds. The maths teacher.’ He frowned and sat forward, looking mildly concerned. ‘Percy, there is no Mrs Dodds on this trip. As far as I know, there has never been a Mrs Dodds at Yancy Academy. Are you feeling all right?’

 

[Cryso Agori]

The mist seemingly creates a new teacher, Mrs. Kerr, to replace Mrs. Dodds and everyone remembers her as the teacher. Everyone except Percy.

I was used to the occasional weird experience, but usually they were over quickly. This twenty-four/seven hallucination was more than I could handle. For the rest of the school year, the entire campus seemed to be playing some kind of trick on me. The students acted as if they were completely and totally convinced that Mrs Kerr – a perky blonde woman whom I’d never seen in my life until she got on our bus at the end of the field trip – had been our maths teacher since Christmas. Every so often I would spring a Mrs Dodds reference on somebody, just to see if I could trip them up, but they would stare at me like I was psycho. It got so I almost believed them – Mrs Dodds had never existed.

And Grover.

Almost. But Grover couldn’t fool me. When I mentioned the name Dodds to him, he would hesitate, then claim she didn’t exist. But I knew he was lying. Something was going on. Something had happened at the museum.

Percy has nightmares about Mrs. Dodds.

I didn’t have much time to think about it during the days, but at night, visions of Mrs Dodds with talons and leathery wings would wake me up in a cold sweat.

The freak weather.

The freak weather continued, which didn’t help my mood. One night, a thunderstorm blew out the windows in my dorm room. A few days later, the biggest tornado ever spotted in the Hudson Valley touched down only fifty miles from Yancy Academy. One of the current events we studied in social studies class was the unusual number of small planes that had gone down in sudden squalls in the Atlantic that year.

Percy starts to believe what Mr. Brunner says about Latin to be true.

As exam week got closer, Latin was the only test I studied for. I hadn’t forgotten what Mr Brunner had told me about this subject being life-and-death for me. I wasn’t sure why, but I’d started to believe him.

Percy's dyslexia.

The evening before my final, I got so frustrated I threw the Cambridge Guide to Greek Mythology across my dorm room. Words had started swimming off the page, circling my head, the letters doing one-eighties as if they were riding skateboards. There was no way I was going to remember the difference between Chiron and Charon, or Polydictes and Polydeuces. And conjugating those Latin verbs? Forget it.

Percy eavesdrops on Chiron's and Grover's convo.

I was three steps from the door handle when I heard voices inside the office. Mr Brunner asked a question. A voice that was definitely Grover’s said, ‘… worried about Percy, sir.’ I froze. I’m not usually an eavesdropper, but I dare you to try not listening if you hear your best friend talking about you to an adult. I inched closer. ‘… alone this summer,’ Grover was saying. ‘I mean, a Kindly One in the school! Now that we know for sure, and they know too –’ ‘We would only make matters worse by rushing him,’ Mr Brunner said. ‘We need the boy to mature more.’ ‘But he may not have time. The summer solstice deadline –’ ‘Will have to be resolved without him, Grover. Let him enjoy his ignorance while he still can.’ ‘Sir, he saw her…’ ‘His imagination,’ Mr Brunner insisted. ‘The Mist over the students and staff will be enough to convince him of that.’ ‘Sir, I… I can’t fail in my duties again.’ Grover’s voice was choked with emotion. ‘You know what that would mean.’ ‘You haven’t failed, Grover,’ Mr Brunner said kindly. ‘I should have seen her for what she was. Now let’s just worry about keeping Percy alive until next autumn –’ The mythology book dropped out of my hand and hit the floor with a thud. Mr Brunner went silent.

Percy gets a glimpse of Mr. Brunner's true form.

My heart hammering, I picked up the book and backed down the hall. A shadow slid across the lighted glass of Brunner’s office door, the shadow of something much taller than my wheelchair-bound teacher, holding something that looked suspiciously like an archer’s bow. I opened the nearest door and slipped inside. A few seconds later I heard a slow clop-clop-clop, like muffled wood blocks, then a sound like an animal snuffling right outside my door. A large dark shape paused in front of the glass, then moved on. A bead of sweat trickled down my neck. Somewhere in the hallway, Mr Brunner spoke. ‘Nothing,’ he murmured. ‘My nerves haven’t been right since the winter solstice.’

Percy realizes that Grover and Mr. Brunner thinks he's in danger.

But one thing was clear: Grover and Mr Brunner were talking about me behind my back. They thought I was in some kind of danger

Percy finally confronts Grover about what happened in the museum.

Finally I couldn’t stand it any more. I said, ‘Looking for Kindly Ones?’ Grover nearly jumped out of his seat. ‘Wha – what do you mean?’ I confessed about eavesdropping on him and Mr Brunner the night before the exam. Grover’s eye twitched. ‘How much did you hear?’ ‘Oh… not much. What’s the summer-solstice deadline?’ He winced. ‘Look, Percy… I was just worried for you, see? I mean, hallucinating about demon maths teachers…’ ‘Grover –’ ‘And I was telling Mr Brunner that maybe you were overstressed or something, because there was no such person as Mrs Dodds, and…’ ‘Grover, you’re a really, really bad liar.’

Grover gives Percy the Camp Half-Blood address and tells him he's trying to protect him.

His ears turned pink. From his shirt pocket, he fished out a grubby business card. ‘Just take this, okay? In case you need me this summer.’ The card was in fancy script, which was murder on my dyslexic eyes, but I finally made out something like: Grover Underwood, Keeper Half-Blood Hill Long Island, New York (800)009-0009 ‘What’s Half –’ ‘Don’t say it aloud!’ he yelped. ‘That’s my, um… summer address.’ My heart sank. Grover had a summer home. I’d never considered that his family might be as rich as the others at Yancy. ‘Okay,’ I said glumly. ‘So, like, if I want to come visit your mansion.’ He nodded. ‘Or… or if you need me.’ ‘Why would I need you?’ It came out harsher than I meant it too. Grover blushed right down to his Adam’s apple. ‘Look, Percy, the truth is, I – I kind of have to protect you.’

The bus Grover and Percy are on breaks down, and Percy sees the fates knitting giant socks and hears them cut it.

We were on a stretch of country road – no place you’d notice if you didn’t break down there. On our side of the highway was nothing but maple trees and litter from passing cars. On the other side, across four lanes of asphalt shimmering with afternoon heat, was an old-fashioned fruit stand. The stuff on sale looked really good: heaping boxes of blood-red cherries and apples, walnuts and apricots, jugs of cider in a claw-foot tub full of ice. There were no customers, just three old ladies sitting in rocking chairs in the shade of a maple tree, knitting the biggest pair of socks I’d ever seen. I mean these socks were the size of sweaters, but they were clearly socks. The lady on the right knitted one of them. The lady on the left knitted the other. The lady in the middle held an enormous basket of electric-blue yarn. All three women looked ancient, with pale faces wrinkled like fruit leather, silver hair tied back in white bandannas, bony arms sticking out of bleached cotton dresses. The weirdest thing was, they seemed to be looking right at me. I looked over at Grover to say something about this and saw that the blood had drained from his face. His nose was twitching. ‘Grover?’ I said. ‘Hey, man –’ ‘Tell me they’re not looking at you. They are. Aren’t they?’ ‘Yeah. Weird, huh? You think those socks would fit me?’ ‘Not funny, Percy. Not funny at all.’ The old lady in the middle took out a huge pair of scissors – gold and silver, long-bladed, like shears. I heard Grover catch his breath. ‘We’re getting on the bus,’ he told me. ‘Come on.’ ‘What?’ I said. ‘It’s a thousand degrees in there.’ ‘Come on!’ He prised open the door and climbed inside, but I stayed back. Across the road, the old ladies were still watching me. The middle one cut the yarn, and I swear I could hear that snip across four lanes of traffic. Her two friends balled up the electric-blue socks, leaving me wondering who they could possibly be for – Sasquatch or Godzilla.

Grover believes Percy is gonna die.

‘Grover?’ ‘Yeah?’ ‘What are you not telling me?’ He dabbed his forehead with his shirt sleeve. ‘Percy, what did you see back at the fruit stand?’ ‘You mean the old ladies? What is it about them, man? They’re not like… Mrs Dodds, are they?’ His expression was hard to read, but I got the feeling that the fruit-stand ladies were something much, much worse than Mrs Dodds. He said, ‘Just tell me what you saw.’ ‘The middle one took out her scissors, and she cut the yarn.’ He closed his eyes and made a gesture with his fingers that might’ve been crossing himself, but it wasn’t. It was something else, something almost – older. He said, ‘You saw her snip the cord.’ ‘Yeah. So?’ But even as I said it, I knew it was a big deal. ‘This is not happening,’ Grover mumbled. He started chewing at his thumb. ‘I don’t want this to be like the last time.’ ‘What last time?’ ‘Always sixth grade. They never get past sixth.’ ‘Grover,’ I said, because he was really starting to scare me. ‘What are you talking about?’ ‘Let me walk you home from the bus station. Promise me.’ This seemed like a strange request to me, but I promised he could. ‘Is this like a superstition or something?’ I asked. No answer. ‘Grover – that snipping of the yarn. Does that mean somebody is going to die?’ He looked at me mournfully, like he was already picking the kind of flowers I’d like best on my coffin.

 

[Cryso Agori]

Percy ditches Grover.

Confession time: I ditched Grover as soon as we got to the bus terminal. I know, I know. It was rude. But Grover was freaking me out, looking at me like I was a dead man, muttering, ‘Why does this always happen?’ and, ‘Why does it always have to be sixth grade?’ Whenever he got upset, Grover’s bladder acted up, so I wasn’t surprised when, as soon as we got off the bus, he made me promise to wait for him, then made a beeline for the restroom. Instead of waiting, I got my suitcase, slipped outside, and caught the first taxi uptown.

Percy describing his mom.

‘East One Hundred and Fourth and First Avenue,’ I told the driver. A word about my mother, before you meet her. Her name is Sally Jackson and she’s the best person in the world, which just proves my theory that the best people have the rottenest luck. Her own parents died in a plane crash when she was five, and she was raised by an uncle who didn’t care much about her. She wanted to be a novelist, so she spent high school working to save enough money for a college with a good creative-writing programme. Then her uncle got cancer, and she had to quit school in her senior year to take care of him. After he died, she was left with no money, no family and no diploma.

Percy feels a warm glow and a trace of a smile when he thinks of his father.

The only good break she ever got was meeting my dad. I don’t have any memories of him, just this sort of warm glow, maybe the barest trace of his smile. My mom doesn’t like to talk about him because it makes her sad. She has no pictures. See, they weren’t married. She told me he was rich and important, and their relationship was a secret. Then one day, he set sail across the Atlantic on some important journey, and he never came back. Lost at sea, my mom told me. Not dead. Lost at sea.

Percy gets anxious and feels like something is gonna come and attack him when he thinks about the Fates and Mrs. Dodds.

Gabe’s smell was almost worse than the nightmares about Mrs Dodds, or the sound of that old fruit lady’s shears snipping the yarn. But as soon as I thought that, my legs felt weak. I remembered Grover’s look of panic – how he’d made me promise I wouldn’t go home without him. A sudden chill rolled through me. I felt like someone – something – was looking for me right now, maybe pounding its way up the stairs, growing long, horrible talons.

Percy's mom's appearance and voice calms him down.

Then I heard my mom’s voice. ‘Percy?’ She opened the bedroom door, and my fears melted. My mother can make me feel good just by walking into the room. Her eyes sparkle and change colour in the light. Her smile is as warm as a quilt. She’s got a few grey streaks mixed in with her long brown hair, but I never think of her as old. When she looks at me, it’s like she’s seeing all the good things about me, none of the bad. I’ve never heard her raise her voice or say an unkind word to anyone, not even me or Gabe.

Percy uses the warding off evil gesture which causes the door to slam into Gabe.

Watching him lumber back towards the apartment building, I got so mad I did something I can’t explain. As Gabe reached the doorway, I made the hand gesture I’d seen Grover make on the bus, a sort of warding-off-evil gesture, a clawed hand over my heart, then a shoving movement towards Gabe. The screen door slammed shut so hard it whacked him in the butt and sent him flying up the staircase as if he’d been shot from a cannon. Maybe it was just the wind, or some freak accident with the hinges, but I didn’t stay long enough to find out.

Percy likes Montauk.

Our rental cabin was on the south shore, way out at the tip of Long Island. It was a little pastel box with faded curtains, half sunken into the dunes. There was always sand in the sheets and spiders in the cabinets, and most of the time the sea was too cold to swim in. I loved the place.

Percy's been there since he was a baby, his mom met his dad there.

We’d been going there since I was a baby. My mom had been going even longer. She never exactly said, but I knew why the beach was special to her. It was the place where she’d met my dad.

Blue food explanation.

I guess I should explain the blue food. See, Gabe had once told my mom there was no such thing. They had this fight, which seemed like a really small thing at the time. But ever since, my mom went out of her way to eat blue. She baked blue birthday cakes. She mixed blueberry smoothies. She bought blue-corn tortilla chips and brought home blue candy from the shop. This – along with keeping her maiden name, Jackson, rather than calling herself Mrs Ugliano – was proof that she wasn’t totally suckered by Gabe. She did have a rebellious streak, like me.

Sally's description of Percy's father.

Eventually, I got up the nerve to ask about what was always on my mind whenever we came to Montauk – my father. Mom’s eyes went all misty. I figured she would tell me the same things she always did, but I never got tired of hearing them. ‘He was kind, Percy,’ she said. ‘Tall, handsome and powerful. But gentle, too. You have his black hair, you know, and his green eyes.’

Percy's father never actually met Percy.

‘How old was I?’ I asked. ‘I mean… when he left?’ She watched the flames. ‘He was only with me for one summer, Percy. Right here at this beach. This cabin.’ ‘But… he knew me as a baby.’ ‘No, honey. He knew I was expecting a baby, but he never saw you. He had to leave before you were born.’ I tried to square that with the fact that I seemed to remember… something about my father. A warm glow. A smile. I had always assumed he knew me as a baby. My mom had never said it outright, but still, I’d felt it must be true. Now, to be told that he’d never even seen me…

Sally says she sent Percy to Yancy to be safe.

now we were stuck with Smelly Gabe. ‘Are you going to send me away again?’ I asked her. ‘To another boarding school?’ She pulled a marshmallow from the fire. ‘I don’t know, honey.’ Her voice was heavy. ‘I think… I think we’ll have to do something.’ ‘Because you don’t want me around?’ I regretted the words as soon as they were out. My mom’s eyes welled with tears. She took my hand, squeezed it tight. ‘Oh, Percy, no. I – I have to, honey. For your own good. I have to send you away.’ Her words reminded me of what Mr Brunner had said – that it was best for me to leave Yancy. ‘Because I’m not normal,’ I said. ‘You say that as if it’s a bad thing, Percy. But you don’t realize how important you are. I thought Yancy Academy would be far enough away. I thought you’d finally be safe.’ ‘Safe from what?’

Percy's experiences from other schools. Also, see's through the mist at a young age.

She met my eyes, and a flood of memories came back to me – all the weird, scary things that had ever happened to me, some of which I’d tried to forget. During third grade, a man in a black trench coat had stalked me on the playground. When the teachers threatened to call the police, he went away growling, but no one believed me when I told them that under his broadbrimmed hat, the man only had one eye, right in the middle of his head. Before that – a really early memory. I was in pre school, and a teacher accidentally put me down for a nap in a cot that a snake had slithered into. My mom screamed when she came to pick me up and found me playing with a limp, scaly rope I’d somehow managed to strangle to death with my meaty toddler hands. In every single school, something creepy had happened, something unsafe, and I was forced to move.

Sally talks about a certain summer camp.

‘I’ve tried to keep you as close to me as I could,’ my mom said. ‘They told me that was a mistake. But there’s only one other option, Percy – the place your father wanted to send you. And I just… I just can’t stand to do it.’ ‘My father wanted me to go to a special school?’ ‘Not a school,’she said softly. ‘A summer camp.’ My head was spinning. Why would my dad – who hadn’t even stayed around long enough to see me born – talk to my mom about a summer camp? And if it was so important, why hadn’t she ever mentioned it before? ‘I’m sorry, Percy,’ she said, seeing the look in my eyes. ‘But I can’t talk about it. I – I couldn’t send you to that place. It might mean saying goodbye to you for good.’ ‘For good? But if it’s only a summer camp…’ She turned towards the fire, and I knew from her expression that if I asked her any more questions she would start to cry.

Percy has a prophetic dream about Zeus's and Poseidon's cold war and Kronos.

That night I had a vivid dream. It was storming on the beach, and two beautiful animals, a white horse and a golden eagle, were trying to kill each other at the edge of the surf. The eagle swooped down and slashed the horse’s muzzle with its huge talons. The horse reared up and kicked at the eagle’s wings. As they fought, the ground rumbled, and a monstrous voice chuckled somewhere beneath the earth, goading the animals to fight harder. I ran towards them, knowing I had to stop them from killing each other, but I was running in slow motion. I knew I would be too late. I saw the eagle dive down, its beak aimed at the horse’s wide eyes, and I screamed, No! I woke with a start.

A hurricane hits Montauk.

Outside, it really was storming, the kind of storm that cracks trees and blows down houses. There was no horse or eagle on the beach, just lightning making false daylight, and five-metre-high waves pounding the dunes like artillery. With the next thunderclap, my mom woke. She sat up, eyes wide, and said, ‘Hurricane.’ I knew that was crazy. Long Island never saw hurricanes this early in the summer. But the ocean seemed to have forgotten. Over the roar of the wind, I heard a distant bellow, an angry, tortured sound that made my hair stand on end.

Grover appears but is somehow different.

Then a much closer noise, like mallets in the sand. A desperate voice – someone yelling, pounding on our cabin door. My mother sprang out of bed in her nightgown and threw open the lock. Grover stood framed in the doorway against a backdrop of pouring rain. But he wasn’t… he wasn’t exactly Grover.

Grover was searching for Percy all night.

‘Searching all night,’ he gasped. ‘What were you thinking?’ My mother looked at me in terror – not scared of Grover, but of why he’d come. ‘Percy,’ she said, shouting to be heard over the rain. ‘What happened at school? What didn’t you tell me?’

Percy understands Grover cursing in ancient greek.

I was frozen, looking at Grover. I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. ‘O Zeu kai alloi theoi!’ he yelled. ‘It’s right behind me! Didn’t you tell her?’ I was too shocked to register that he’d just cursed in Ancient Greek, and I’d understood him perfectly. I was too shocked to wonder how Grover had got here by himself in the middle of the night.

Grover has hooves and goat legs instead of human feet and legs.

Grover ran for the Camaro – but he wasn’t running, exactly. He was trotting, shaking his shaggy hindquarters, and suddenly his story about a muscular disorder in his legs made sense to me. I understood how he could run so fast and still limp when he walked. Because where his feet should be, there were no feet. There were cloven hooves.