Side by Side: A Percabeth story [ON HOLD]

4 - An Intruder?

   "Chiron!" Percy shouted as we raced through the doors of the Big House. "I want your pizza!"

   We knocked on his living room door, and were admitted by a very amused-looking Chiron.

   As we entered Chiron's spacious living room, I smelled the distinct scent of pizza. Percy raced over to an open box on the centaur's kitchen counter and, when Chiron nodded, laughing, grabbed a slice and stuffed half of it in his mouth before you could say "Stop, Percy."

   "So I assume you came here for a reason, correct? Not just so that Percy could fill his entire mouth with my pizza?" Chiron asked, getting down to business.

   "Yes," I replied, grateful for the distraction, as Percy had already finished two slices of the pizza and was working on a third. "Percy's canoe coach, Mr. . . . uh, Percy?"

   "Mr. E.," he replied, swallowing his third slice. "He said to me, 'How dare you be late? No lunch for you. And this time, son of Poseidon, I command you to get wet.' He was really un-sophisticated about his wording, I gotta say, but he sure got his point across." The dark haired boy shuddered. "He whapped me with a paddle every time I forgot to turn off my power to stay dry. And when he whapped me I fell off the boat, and usually forgot to turn off that power, so he whapped me again and again... It was really annoying. He kept repeating, 'I went through it too. I went through it too.' Which was super weird, since nobody whapped him off the canoe!"

   Chiron scratched his beard, looking confused. "I never hired a Mr. E," he replied. "I never hired any coach for the canoe lake, in fact. You just go down when it's your time and paddle along."

   I was starting to worry. "So you're saying that the guy who was apparently posing as Percy's canoe coach wasn't really a canoe coach at all?"

   Chiron nodded, and I mentally face palmed. How could I not have seen that? There was always another option, and I'd missed this one.

   "So what do you suggest we should do?" I questioned, looking Chiron in the eye.

   He shrugged, and his horse tail swished back and forth anxiously. "You can monitor him as best as possible for a little while, and then after you think you've gathered sufficient information, report back to me." The camp director glanced at Percy, who was finishing up his fourth slice and eyeing the last one hungrily. "Make sure you try to decipher what his real name is. A lot of the villains we have here come from ancient times, as I'm sure you've figured out already, and they come back for vengeance. Instead of taking it out on the actual god or goddess that offended them, they punish the demigod children of that deity instead."

   I nodded. It was kind of hard to miss that. "So we have to look for ancient male villains whose names start with E."

   "Hungry ones, too," Percy added, taking a break from the now-cold pizza. "Mr. E kept asking campers for their snacks. I had a whole box of chocolate in my backpack for later, but he snatched them right up like he owned them and stuffed them in his mouth. It really got on everyone's nerves – people were dumping their bags in the lake so Mr. E couldn't get to them."

   Chiron nodded thoughtfully. "I have a hunch. But I'll need more information before I can prove it. Thank you both for alerting me to this, and good luck scouting!"

   We waved and set off, Percy's fingers greasy from the pizza.