hey everyone! sorry i haven't updated in a long time! i have no excuse for this one (except that i found a few good fanfics and i might have gotten carried away . . .), so again, i'm really sorry i haven't updated this. here you go!

I rubbed my eyes and blinked them open, yawning. Where am I? Above me, there was a huge tree with small blueish, purplish, and pinkish flowers. Next to me, Annabeth softly snored, petals from the tree scattered all over her. A couple feet away, our new friends Sophie and Keefe were sleeping in a makeshift bed of pillows and blankets, like us. When I sat up, I could see the huge house where Sophie lived. Suddenly, the events of yesterday came crashing down on me.

There was this weird . . . force that was pulling at my body from every angle. It felt good, like sunlight pouring through my veins. I wanted to let this force tear me apart and take me wherever it went, but then I thought about my mom. My camp. My friends. Especially my Annabeth. How would they react? They would be devastated if I let this force carry me away from life. So I held on to reality as best as I could. Then just as my grip was slipping, the world turned dark.

"Hey, Seaweed Brain. You ok?" Annabeth's voice yanked me back to the present. I was pale and drenched in a cold sweat, shivering uncontrollable despite the warm temperature outside.

"Yeah," I lied, even though Annabeth probably saw through it.

"Really?" she asked, raising an eyebrow. "Because your current state says otherwise."

I sighed. I knew this would affect Annabeth, but there's no avoiding her. "Just what happened yesterday," I confessed. "You know, after . . ."

It was Annie's turn to turn pale. She started shivering as if she had just been placed in Antarctica with no clothing. Buckets of sweat poured down her forehead like a rainstorm. All symptoms of a very bad flashback.

"Hey, Annie. Look at me," I ordered, slowly turning her head to face me. "We're fine. I'm fine. You're fine. That was yesterday. We're better now." Annabeth nodded along, although her face was still paper white. I rested her head against my shoulder, and we just sat like that for a while, relieving ourselves from the flashback. Every time one of the flower petals fell on us, I felt a little better, almost as if the flowers were healing us.

A while later, our friends stirred. Sophie got up first, and Keefe followed. (But only because Sophie shook him until he woke up.) They scooted their little bed closer to ours, asking, "How're you guys feeling?"

"Better," I replied, weakly smiling. Then I had a genius idea. (Yes, I know, I know. I'm so amazing.) "Hey, what if I borrowed your crystal–portal thingy to go back—"

Keefe interrupted. "You can't go back with that crystal. That's Sophie's home crystal. It only leads to Havenfield." Looking at the confusion on our faces, he explained, "That's the name of Sophie's house."

I whistled. "You guys name your houses?"

"Yeah," he responded. "But like I was saying, you can't go back with Sophie's home crystal."

Oh. My spirits had been effectively dampened. But they picked back up when Keefe said, "But, I can try to sneak a pathfinder to the Forbidden Cities."

Annabeth frowned. "What's a pathfinder, and what are the Forbidden Cities?"

Sophie laughed. "A pathfinder is like a wand with a crystal on the end. The color of the crystal shows what locations the crystal takes you to. For example, a blue pathfinder would take you to the Forbidden Cities. That's what we call the place where humans live."

Annabeth eyed her suspiciously. "Wait . . . so you're not humans?" Sophie and Keefe look alarmed. They stared at each other for so long I wondered if they were mind-talking, since their faces held no emotions, and they hadn't said a word. *iT's CaLlEd "TeLePaThY" sEaWeEd BrAiN! "tElEpAtHy"!

Finally, after they seemed to have reached an agreement, Sophie turned to face us, sighing. "The thing is, we're not. We're . . . elves." She waited for our reactions.

These were my thoughts: "Wait, so you guys are from Lord of the Rings? Or are you guys Santa's helpers? And where are the points on your ears?"

Sophie and Keefe laughed hysterically, falling over in the process. "No . . . not like that," Keefe said in between breaths. "We're . . . none . . . of that. We're . . . just elves. And we . . . get pointy ears . . . when we're . . . thousands . . . of years . . . old."

Annabeth's eyes widened. "Wait, you can be thousands of years old?" ("Wait" tally: 3 and counting.)

Sophie nodded, composing herself. "Hundreds, maybe thousands, maybe millions. No one's ever found an elf who died of old age, so as of now, yes. The oldest elf know is Fallon Vacker, who is my parents' friends' son's great–great–great–great–great–great–great–great–great–great–great–great–great–great–great–great–great–great–great-grandfather." Whoa . . . that's a lot of great's. Thought the first thing I noticed about how she phrased that was how she went out of her way to call him a friend, and instead called him . . . whatever she said. I wonder if she had some bad history him him. Being wise, I didn't ask about it.

"Wait, that's possible?" I asked, awestruck.

"Yep," Keefe replied.

Annabeth and I shared our own glances. We decided to let them know.

"Well," she began. "Since you told us that you're elves, it just feels right to tell you guys that we're . . ." Annabeth hesitated, clearly still not trusting them, even though they'd saved our lives.

"Demigods," I finished for her. Sophie looked at us with a mix of awe and confusion.

"Wait, so you're saying that people like Hercules from that Disney movie are real?" she asked, surprised.

"Yeah," I responded, then held out my hand in a joking manner, as if I were meeting them for the first time. "I'm Percy Jackson, son of Poseidon. Pleased to meet you." Sophie and Keefe cracked a smile.

"And I'm Annabeth Chase, daughter of Athena," Annie added. She also held out her hand. She and Sophie shook, and Keefe and I did as well. Then we burst out in a tiny fit of laughter.

Once we had calmed down, I asked Keefe to elaborate on that "pathfinder" topic. "So . . . about that blue crystal thingy."

He sighed. "Yeah, I can go steal one from my dad." He said the word dad  like an insult.

"Keefe," Sophie said, reaching for her boyfriend's hand. "You know I can use one of Grady's, right?"

"Yeah, but my father's has more locations."

"I know, but what if Grady's has what we're looking for? I heard him mention something about 'a magical place called New York City' a couple nights ago to Edaline. C'mon, I'm sure he'll let us borrow it." Sophie stood up and pulled Keefe up with her, then said to us, "We'll be right back." She ran over to her mansion of a house and disappeared through the door, Keefe at her heels.

"So," Annabeth said as she leaned against my chest. "We'll be going back for a couple hours at most, then coming right back, right? I'm going to assume that's exactly  what happens. Otherwise, the Fates aren't doing a good job twisting the future."

I grinned. "Come on, Wise Girl. Use some optimism. For example,"—I picked up a plate of pastries at the edge of the makeshift bed that I hadn't noticed before—"these taste amazing," I remarked, taking a bite. "I'm definitely coming back at least once to get another handful of these." Slowly, Annabeth smiled.

"You're right," she whispered. "Just use optimism."

"I'm sorry, what was that?" I smirked, cupping my hand around my ear.

"I said, you're right," she said, a little louder.

"Oh, really?" I feigned a look of surprise.

"Oh, shut up, Seaweed Brain," Annabeth said, playfully pushing me down, then collapsing on top of me in a fit of giggles. I laughed along with her. It felt so nice to be so carefree, as if the world wouldn't end at any moment. I hoped we'd get more moments like this in the future. But the Fates must've sent us here for some reason. Which probably meant another prophecy and a quest as a bonus. I internally groaned.

The front door of Havenfield opened, and Sophie and Keefe emerged from inside. Sophie seemed to be carrying a shiny blue stick. When she got closer, I could tell that there was a crystal on the tip, which probably meant that this was the pathfinder.

"Whoa, you're right," I remarked in wonder. "It does look like a wand. Wait, can you abracadabra something with it?" ("Wait" tally: 6 and still counting.)

Sophie laughed. "No, although that would've been nice. That was my first thought when I saw a pathfinder, too." Sophie spun the crystal around, then held the crystal up to the light. Immediately, a beam of light refracted towards the ground, elicited a "whoa" from Annabeth and I.

"Wait," Annabeth said. "The laws of relativity show that you have infinite mass when you're traveling with light, so won't you need infinite energy to be doing that?"

Sophie smiled. "Another first thought I had when light-leaping. I don't know, it just works like that, I guess. Well, you should probably get going now." Annabeth wasted no time in reaching the beam of light, but I grabbed her hand. "Wait." I then looked at Sophie and Keefe. "You two should come too."

Annabeth exclaimed, "But the campers are going to kill them as soon as they set foot there!"

I shook my head. "They won't." Then, after a moment of reconsideration, I added, "At least, as long as we're with them." I turned around to glare at the two. "And you two won't lay a finger on them, right?" Sophie and Keefe vigorously nodded. "Good." I sighed. "Let's get going, shall we?"

Annabeth stepped through the beam of light, followed by me, then Keefe, then Sophie. We let the light whisk us away until we landed near Half-Blood Hill. The four of us walked towards camp. Then, right as we stepped through the barrier, we ended up in the middle of a battle zone.

hey again! i hope you all enjoyed this chapter. I tried to make up for the lost days/weeks, and this was what I could come up with. fyi, total "Wait" tally: 7. hope yall liked it! please don't forget to vote, comment, and follow!

–╰•🌟🌟𝕒𝕟𝕠𝕟𝕪𝕞𝕠𝕦𝕤𝕕𝕠𝕝𝕡𝕙𝕚𝕟🌟🌟•╯