𝕋𝕠

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Chapter 2

(Wrote this last week but couldn't be bothered posting it)

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(Wrote this last week but couldn't be bothered posting it)

☆✩★✩☆✩★✩☆

Ever since her time in Tartarus, Thea's appetite hadn't been the best. Perhaps it was the days of little to no eating, but she could not seem to enjoy food as she had before. It had been months now, and yet she still struggled with eating the recommended three meals a day.

Now she wished she had no such struggle, because the Romans knew how to eat.

Sets of couches and low tables were carted into the forum until it resembled a furniture showroom. Romans lounged in groups of ten or twenty, talking and laughing while wind spirits - aura - swirled overhead, bringing an endless assortment of pizzas, sandwiches, chips, cold drinks and fresh-baked cookies. Drifting through the crowd were purple ghosts - Lares - in togas and legionnaire armour.
Around the edges of the feast, satyrs (wait, no - fauns. Roman) trotted from table to table, panhandling for food and spare change.

In the nearby fields, the war elephant frolicked with Mrs O'Leary (Thea tried to avoid looking that way), and children played tag around the statues of Terminus that lined the city limits.

The whole scene was so familiar yet so completely stranger to her mind. At camp there was so much like this but at the same time everything was different. She wanted to sit with Hazel, and maybe get to know her younger - wait, older?
Actually, Thea went with younger, just as she did Nico even though he was also from the earlier stages of the 1900s.
Hazel was her younger half-sister, Roman or not.

No more comments on Jason's hopelessness were thrown around either. If their quest was going to succeed, they needed these Romans, which meant getting to know them and building some goodwill. Insulting their former Praetor would apparently be doing the complete opposite.

Reyna and a few of her officers (including the blond kid Octavian, freshly back from burning a teddy bear for the gods) sat with the Greeks. Percy joined them with Frank and Hazel. But all in all, Thea ended up sitting between Piper and Leo (she just barely avoided Jason there).

A tornado of food platters settled onto the table. Thea's appetite was far from present, but she put some on her plate anyway, conversations with Piper and Mrielle echoing in her thoughts. She didn't need help, so she couldn't act as if she did.
"You alright?" Piper grabbed her hand. She must have zoned out or something. But Thea only nodded. She would be fine.

The daughter of Aphrodite didn't look too convinced, but she let the matter go.
She fell back into the real world when Reyna called a toast to friendship.
After introductions all around, the Romans and Greeks (and Jason) began exchanging stories.

Jason explained how he'd arrived at Camp Half-Blood without his memory, and how he'd gone on a quest with Piper, Leo, and Thea to rescue the goddess Hera (or Juno, take your pick - she was equally annoying in Greek or Roman) from imprisonment at the Wolf House in northern California.

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