They're What?!

The Race is On

Piper POV

We sat down at our table in the Great Hall. Some of the students shot us subtle and nervous looks, but no one said anything to us as we began to eat our food.

"Where's Nico?" Hazel suddenly asked halfway through the meal.

"Oh!" Percy got up quickly. "I'll go get him." He jogged out of the hall, hundreds of pairs of eyes following him.

"If they've got something to say to us, they should just say it." Luna muttered, nibbling at the spoonful of pudding she had. Her hair had blue streaked through it today to match her robes and the blue t-shirt she was wearing underneath.

"They're not going to. They're terrified of us." Jason pointed out.

"Good." I muttered.

Ginny stabbed a piece of broccoli with her fork. "You guys have forgiven Ron, right?"

I shrugged. "For the most part. Thalia's not happy with him, and we're being kind of tentative right now."

"Understandable." Hermione put in. "Ronald is an idiot, but with some time and pushing he can usually find reason."

Clarisse didn't seem ready to forgive the Gryffindor boy either, even though she hadn't been around for a lot of the stuff that had happened. She was just on Percy's side. No one could see it at first, but the two seemed to have developed a mutual respect of each other.

"There's Nico and Percy." Annabeth commented. The cousins had walked through the doors. Percy was looking rather worried while Nico talked quickly, waving his hands around wildly to illustrate his point. I'd never seen him talk like that.

"Well you'll have to tell the others." Percy said as they got close enough.

"What is he telling us?" Frank asked.

"It's about my headaches." Nico explained, sitting down. "Like the one that made me pass out in Lily's class and the one that knocked me out a few hours ago. I've figured out why they keep happening."

"Is it something bad?" Annabeth asked.

"Can it be anything else for a demigod?" Nico countered. Annabeth gave him a stern look and he rolled his eyes. "Right, the reason. So I've been having these dreams lately-"

"What kind of dreams?" Jason asked, cutting the son of Hades off.

"I was about to tell you, Grace." He snapped back. "As I was saying, I've been having these dreams lately where I'm stuck in Tartarus-"

"Why didn't you tell us sooner?" Annabeth asked, looking worried.

"I didn't think it was important." Nico gritted his teeth. "Can I continue?"

Percy nodded.

"Okay, I can't get out of it unless someone wakes me or Morpheus decides to let me wake up. So I'm just stuck down in Tartarus doing nothing for several hours."

"Is that why it's been so hard to wake you up in the morning?" Leo asked.

"No, that's just because I don't want to be here." Nico rolled his eyes.

"So you just...sit...down in Tartarus for a few hours?" Luna asked. "That must be horrible."

"You have no idea."Nico muttered. "Back to the important part. I was asleep earlier, courtesy of one of these lovely migranes and I saw a group of monsters staring at the sky."

"There's a sky in Tartarus?" Thalia raised an eyebrow. "It's underground."

"Are we really going to debate this right now?" Nico asked in annoyance. "It's a huge cavern, tends to get cloudy, looks like a sky. Anyway, all of a sudden there was this weird blue light trying to push through the clouds. But not like sunlight trying to get through, I'm talking about it looking like it was from somewhere else, trying to break through the fabric of reality or something."

"Okay...." Annabeth frowned. "What does this have to do with your headaches?"

"As soon as the light showed up, my head started pounding." Nico said. "It wasn't a coincidence, it happened again later during my dream."

"So what does that mean?" I asked.

"It means someone is trying to break into Tartarus." Hazel said, cutting her brother off before he could answer. "I can feel it too, but not nearly as strongly as I'm more connected to the riches aspect of my father."

Annabeth and Percy looked at each other. "Someone trying to bring things out of Tartarus can't be good."

"I think it's Voldemort." Nico admitted. "They're down in that forest, just waiting for a chance to attack, but they need the numbers."

"They're going to pull every monster they can from the underworld as soon as they can figure out how." Annabeth was pale. "This is really bad."

"But we'll figure out how to combat it." Percy assured her. "We've been here far too long to let these scumbags win. We will find a way to beat them."

We looked at each other.

"Percy's right. We're demigods, we aren't going to just lie down and take this." Jason finally said. "We'll stand together."

I nodded, along with the others in the group."

"We stand together."

[A/N so a lot of crap is going on.... I don't support the LGBTQ+ community, I've said that before, but I pray for all those who lost family members in Orlando yesterday....

Also, BROCK TURNER IS A RAPIST. If you support Brock, get off my account right now and don't come back.]