Black Box
We’re back! I started a new job and I’m studying to take the FE exam. Between those two things, I’ve been very tired in the evenings after work. Not a lot of mental energy left to write. But here I am!
To answer a couple of the same question: yes, the Percabeth bashing is done, as is all ToA-related bashing. It has been thoroughly beaten into all of their heads that they royally and epically screwed up, but now they are going to make up for it. As for the tree scene with Luke, there’s actually some history to it.
First, that was from Abaraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Solid movie, go check it out. Second, that was not the original scene. The way I had it go in my head for so long was that instead of Luke, it was Shin’en with Percy. Additionally, the scene in the Feast Hall where Shin’en kills all the main characters was new. The way it originally went, was that Percy confronted Shin’en with Annabeth, and he refused them, and they pushed, and then he simply killed them. When they woke up, Shin’en then took Percy for the tree thing.
I actually had the dialogue written out, too.
“Tell me, Percy, what is it that you hate most?”
Percy didn’t need to think about it. “I hate you.”
Shin’en gestured to the tree. “Then strike me down—and don’t even think of actually swinging at me. I will kill you in such a way that you’ll stay dead.”
And then it went on from there until Percy chopped down the tree.
Anyway.
Blackbox mission with the Seven plus Nico, Thalia, and Reyna!
Disclaimer: I don’t own PJO or any other crossovers herein
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Annabeth, Percy, and Leo weren’t anywhere near as skilled as Piper was at essence projection, and so they couldn’t just stand there and lose themselves in a daydream. They had to get cozy and comfortable somewhere in the parking lot and go to sleep. A slightly awkward endeavor, with Percy taking his shirt off to give to Annabeth as a makeshift pillow, Frank giving his to Percy, and Nico giving Leo his aviator jacket.
Obviously, none of the girls were about to take their shirts off and go bras-out.
The trio got as comfy as they could, closed their eyes, and did their best to fall asleep.
Truth be told, the idea that demigods could control their dreams, projecting themselves into the past, present, and future anywhere in the world at will, was probably something that Rick didn’t put a lot of thought into. After all, the implications of such a power were staggering. As Piper had said just minutes ago, a demigod could very well project their essence into the locker room, bedroom, or bathroom of the opposite sex (or the same sex, in Nico’s case), and get an anonymous, risk-free, no-cost show of a person changing clothes, sleeping, using the toilet, bathing, masturbating—anything.
Obviously a huge privacy and decency risk, so Chiron didn’t teach dream control.
Another avenue was pulling a Biff Tannen from Back to the Future. Being able to see into the future, demigods could easily get rich off of betting on sports, or seeing the winning lottery numbers, or playing the stock market, or even going backwards in time in order to find lost treasures. Yet another reason Chiron didn’t teach essence projection, because a bunch of kids and teens running around, becoming multimillionaires was a recipe for disaster.
However, not all possibilities with essence projection were rooted in personal gain. Being able to send yourself into the past, a demigod would be the greatest crime solver to have ever existed. They would be able to see all the events leading to a murder, who the murderer was and where they lived by following them home, and what they did with the murder weapon, if any. A demigod would also be able to sit in on every corporate board meeting, secret politician gathering, Satanist convention, and more. A demigod would be able to investigate all the conspiracies, like who really killed JFK, was 9/11 really an inside job, and whether COVID-19 really was deliberately manufactured and purposefully released by the Chinese into the world.
A demigod would also be able see into the future what the answers to all their standardized tests would be, and go back in time to watch Einstein lecture, Mozart conduct, and the Apollo 11 launch. Lots of educational stuff.
In short, a demigod who mastered their dreams would be beholden to unrestricted information and knowledge. A blessing and a curse. A blessing because of the financial gain such a power would afford, and a curse because of the burden of insight. A demigod could see for themselves the true events of 9/11, sure, but then what? What did the demigod do about the CIA operatives or whoever, that planted the charges? What did the demigod do about the “global elite” that helped orchestrate the pandemic?
With this kind of thinking, perhaps it was best that the concept of dream control, that dreams are “like a chariot” and you have to “drive them” and not let them “drive you,” as Luguselwa put it to Apollo in the Tower of Nero, remained unexplored, at least in the lens of a book meant for middle school children.
Not so in a story like this.
Leo, Annabeth, and Percy all did manage to drift into sleep, and all three did manage to dream, and when they did, just like Apollo with no training, just like Reyna managed to do with the Garden of Bacchus, just like Piper told them to, they all three just took control of their astral forms. Instead of getting jerked around through time and space, the three of them just hovered there, seeing everything as if they were a first-person camera in a videogame.
They couldn’t see each other of course, and so none of them had any idea that the others were pulling it off.
As far as their perceptions went, time was stopped. None of their friends were moving, a fact that worked against Thalia because her face was frozen mid-sentence, causing her expression to be quite silly. Following this, since they had pulled off the first step of preventing themselves from being yanked against their will from scene to scene, they all went on their own test drive to get a feel for essence projection.
Annabeth found she was able to “rewind time,” as it were, and she watched, in a massive timelapse video-esque format, as the stadium was deconstructed all the way down to the dirt that was once here, and then watched as it was built all the way back up again. She couldn’t help but feel cheated in so many different ways. She could have aced so many job interviews, found the perfect company to apply for, or got rich off gambling and the stock market and started her own architecture firm like she wanted to do in the first place. Even more so cheated because this power was proving to be remarkably easy to control, and she theoretically could’ve been using it several years prior.
The almighty power of shoulda, woulda, coulda.
Would she be in this situation right now if she had mastered this power? This doomsday? If she had seen this day coming, what would she have done differently?
Questions with no answers, or at least, no relevant answers. What mattered was what she was doing now, and that was looking for entry points. Annabeth suspected this was an exercise in redundancy from Piper, as there were several ways they could all get in without having to scope the place out. Hazel and Nico had shadow travel and could just take turns smuggling everyone in, Piper and Frank could turn into animals, Thalia and Reyna had their Hunter training, stealth training, so they could definitely slip in, Jason could fly to the roof and break open an access hatch or something, and Annabeth herself could undeniably find a way in for her, Percy, and Leo without having to astral project herself all over the building. In truth, this was just Piper giving Annabeth a chance to learn how to use this power.
As such, Annabeth went ahead and started doing that.
Percy and Leo had a similar experience, in which they did a thing to get a feel for how essence projection worked. Leo, of course, being Leo, found the girl’s locker room, and Percy used his power to rewind time like Annabeth had, only he rewound time to watch a baseball game he had missed once upon a time. Or at least part of it, as he felt he was on the clock and didn’t quite understand how the whole essence projection thing worked.
Doing their best to figure it all out, Annabeth cased the stadium, finding all the entrances and exits she could, Leo was able to identify and distinguish between the hired private security of the targets and stadium security, and Percy was able to locate the five targets. They were sitting up in the top row, in one of the expensive suites.
It was disturbing to Percy how they all looked like regular office workers. Like people he’d see in the parking garage heading to their car after a day at the desk. So normal, so unassuming, yet so evil.
Percy returned to his body, managing to wake up at the same time Leo and Annabeth did.
“How’d it go?” Piper asked. All three of them started talking at the same time, resulting in an indecipherable cacophony that had Piper raising her hand. “Leo first, please.”
“That was weird, trippy, but awesome! I found the private security guys. Pretty stereotypical, wearing black suits with radios in their ears. They’re all around this big suite on the top row.”
Percy nodded. “That’s where the targets are.”
“That’s nice. The top row is rather expansive. Did you narrow down which suite?”
Percy nodded. “Yeah, I did. Suite 07.”
The demigods all went a little still with that one.
“Poetic,” Piper finally said. “Annabeth?”
“Plenty of ways to get in. We’ve got maintenance access areas, the rooftop, and also the front door. We can just walk in with Mist and other magic,” Annabeth finished, looking between Hazel, Thalia, and Piper.
Piper nodded. “Entry will be easy then.” She turned her attention to Nico and Hazel. “Can you two shadow travel to that suite, and then shadow travel out with the targets?”
The siblings blinked. “Well, yeah…” Nico started.
“But aren’t we going to do some epic spy infiltration thing?” Hazel picked up, voicing everyone’s confusion.
“We were never going to do some epic spy infiltration thing,” Piper said. “Why would we bother infiltrating and trying to get to the targets when we can bring the targets to us?”
“Then what was the point of us doing the astral projection dream thingy?” Leo demanded.
“For you three to get experience with it, and also give me enough to use in the event we need a backup plan.”
“Why just us three?” Annabeth asked.
“Because I only needed three things: target identification and location, guards, and access points.”
“Why us three specifically?” Percy asked.
“You’re the three that were directly in my field of vision at the time.” Piper shrugged. “Not everything has a higher or deeper meaning to it.” She looked at Percy. “What’d they look like and where is Suite 07?”
Percy gave his description of the targets and where the suite was located in the stadium, and then Piper looked at Hazel and Nico. “Get them and bring them here,” and then looking at the group, “Percy, kill Miguel, Leo, kill Thomas, Frank, kill Daniel, Annabeth, kill Christina, and Thalia, you kill Sophia. That’ll be your one of two. After that, just keep shadow-traveling back and forth and bringing guards with you each time. There’s nine of us, so we need a total of eighteen bodies. Now go.”
Hazel and Nico dropped into their own shadows.
Percy let out a shuddering breath. “This is really going to happen—wait, hang on. How am I supposed to kill him? Riptide doesn’t kill mortals.”
“Break his neck,” Piper said.
There was no further debate, however, because the Underworld kids popped back up out of the shadows cast by the demigods’ bodies, bringing with them the five targets. In a show of devotion to the cause, Percy, Leo, Frank, Annabeth, and Thalia swooped in. Percy just grabbed Miguel’s head and twisted hard as he could, and he almost ripped the man’s head off. Leo grabbed a ten-inch wrench from his toolbelt and brained Thomas with a single blow. Frank turned into a tiger and raked Daniel’s throat out. Annabeth just did what Percy did, and snapped Christina’s neck. Thalia had the easiest kill and cleanest kill, as all she did was touch Sophia, and the woman went rigid and flopped to the ground.
“What was that?” Jason balked.
“Electricity,” Thalia said, holding up her finger. “I just sent three amps through her. All it takes is one amp to stop the heart, but I wanted to make sure.”
“Since when can you do that?” Percy demanded.
“A few years ago. After Piper IM’d all of us and Reyna and I decided to give it a shot. I learned some new things I can do with lightning, which is just really high-powered electricity. So you’d better not piss me off, or I’ll kill you with a touch,” Thalia finished with a smirk.
“If you can get close to me,” Percy countered.
“Arc flash,” Thalia countered his counter.
Percy’s eyes widened slightly. Part of his construction safety training involved various workplace hazards, including arc flashes. Dangerous stuff. Percy quickly schooled himself though. “There’s a lot of water in your body, though.”
Everyone understood the implication.
“You can bloodbend?” Reyna asked.
Percy didn’t answer, but Annabeth did. “We were once jumped by a group of thugs one night.”
Nothing else needed to be said.
“Then why didn’t you just bloodbend that guy?” Frank asked Percy. “Instead of snapping his neck.”
“Because I don’t like Bloodbending, Frank.”
“Oh. That’s fair.”
Piper looked at Nico and Hazel. “Can you get us thirteen more people?”
They nodded.
Piper nodded back. “Then let’s get this over with.”
And so it was. There was no need for some great, multistep plan, or breathtakingly masterful strategy. They had magic. Why would they not just use that, especially when Shin’en gave Piper full authority to conduct this operation her way? Saved time, and was way more efficient.
Hazle and Nico brought groups of guards, and the other demigods killed them after Piper doled out assignments. Before five minutes had passed, there were eighteen bodies, two for each demigod.
There was silence after it was done.
“Are you guys okay?” Piper asked.
“It’s been a while since we’ve killed somebody,” Thalia said distantly, lightly touching Reyna’s hand.
Nico swallowed. “I think my first kill was Bryce Lawrence. I turned him straight into a chattering ghost and sent him all the way to the Underworld.”
Other opinions were kept private.
“Do you get used to it?” Leo asked Piper.
“I did,” she said stoically.
“How did you know you were killing someone that deserved to die?”
“I got good at essence projection. In a second, I could speed through a person’s life story, and I could see why they were doing what they were doing. Sometimes I just knocked them out, others I killed.”
Leo nodded.
“Other times I didn’t bother,” Piper continued. “I just made something up, like they were a child-fucker or something.”
Leo paled. “O-Oh.”
Piper turned to address her troops. “Good work, team.” She turned her head to the encroaching darkness of the sky. “Shin’en we’re done! Now-”
The world around them erupted in white, and they all bolted upright in the chairs they had sat in previously.
Virgil was there this time, not Shin’en, his hood up. “Well done,” said the Assassin.
“Where’s Shin’en?” Percy asked.
“Something came up that required his attention.”
“So he didn’t see us fulfil the mission?” Annabeth asked.
Virgil smiled slightly. “He knew you would all follow through as soon as you walked in through the door. He told me to tell you, Welcome to the army. I’ll have your assignments ready tomorrow.”
“Where’s he at now?” Percy asked.
“No idea,” Virgil answered. “He didn’t tell me where he was going and what he was doing. He just called me and told me to congratulate all of you when you woke up. He also said that you’re all free to do as you will for the rest of the day and tomorrow, and to enjoy yourselves as much as you can, because this may be the last bit of downtime any of you will get to experience for the rest of your lives.”
With that grim statement, Virgil left the room, leaving the demigods and their respective mentors together.
“…okay,” Thalia eventually started. “Now what?”
“Let’s go hang out,” Jason offered. “This place has anything you could ever ask for, and then some. Arcades, shooting ranges for bows, guns, particle disintegrators, armories, swimming pools, restaurants, skating rinks, bowling, billiards, ice skating, skiing, skateboarding-”
“Jay!” Thalia shouted with a grin. “Let’s go hang out.”
And just like that, they all went to go hang out.
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This chapter is incredibly short and almost abrupt because it’s been over a month since the last update, and I didn’t want anyone to think I was dead or had abandoned this story.
Yes, originally, this chapter was going to be the heroes exercising their espionage skills under Piper’s directions, but then I had the thought of why bother with all the spy stuff, when Piper could simply have Nico and Hazel shadow travel the targets to them? Work smarter not harder, as they say.
I’m thinking next chapter will be Piper, Percy, and others getting to know the other Percy’s.
Hopefully it won’t be a month before that happens.
Maybe I’ll get started on Dragon Princess again.
Who knows?
Please check out my novel on Amazon if you ever have the time! It’d mean a lot to me if you took a peek at my original work.
In the meantime, please Fav, Follow, and Review!