DESTINY ↳ WILL SOLACE

7. My Dinner Goes Up In Smoke

CHAPTER SEVEN

My Dinner Goes Up In Smoke

I don't own Percy Jackson.

The rest of the tour finished awkwardly.

Percy tried to block out the other campers when they pointed at her and murmured something about toilet water wherever she went. Or maybe they were staring at Will, who was still dripping wet. Annabeth had announced that she was going to take a shower and then go train, and said that since Will had been her tour guide before, he could finish it without her help. Percy had tried to apologize, telling her that it wasn't her fault, but Annabeth's skeptical gaze made her realize that it had been her fault. She didn't understand how, but the toilets had responded to her. She had been the one with the plumbing.

"You need to speak with the Oracle," Annabeth had said.

"Who?"

"Not who. What. The Oracle. I'll ask Chiron."

Then she had left, and left Will sighing and explaining to her just exactly what Annabeth meant by that.

Percy had imagined the Oracle to be some sort of young beautiful girl who sat on a tripod and sprouted some funny words that would predict the future. At least, that was how Oracles had been described to be like in the original Greek myths. According to Will, however, the Oracle didn't look anything like that. Well, it was supposed to, but the spirit of Delphi had stopped taking hosts for some reason. The host had died, and then... well, because she wasn't alive anymore and hadn't been for decades... the Oracle had gone from being a she to an it.

It was still a bit confusing, but at least Will's answer had made far more sense than Annabeth's. She wondered how the gods hadn't figured out what had happened to the Oracle even after over half a century, but she supposed that even a god's power was limited.

Will showed her a few more places he had forgotten in his first tour: the metal shop, where kids were forging their own weapons; the arts-and-crafts room, where a bunch of satyrs were sandblasting a giant marble statue of a goat man Percy strongly suspected was Pan; and the climbing wall, which were two walls facing each other that shook violently, dropped boulders, sprayed lava, and clashed together if campers didn't get to the top fast enough.

Though Percy wasn't too excited about the first two (her arts-and-crafts skills weren't exactly anything to brag about), she actually found the climbing wall interesting for some morbid reason. Well, of course, that was only if she could actually climb it without dying.

"Um," she asked, "has anyone ever died climbing that?"

Will shook his head. "No, but we've had some pretty close calls. It's usually from new campers, though—the ones that overestimate their own skill and put it at the hardest mode because they think they can do better than the senior campers" He scoffed. "Please. They usually can barely even swing a sword correctly, and they think they can scale an erupting volcano? And then they have the audacity to complain at us medics for not working fast enough! Sometimes I just—"

He broke himself off. Percy had a feeling that he was subtly trying to warn her not to follow in those arrogant half-blood's footsteps, but it wasn't like he needed to do that anyway. If she ever climbed that thing, she was sure she would've wanted the walls to stay frozen the entire time. Call her a chicken, but she didn't exactly fancy being burned. She was sure that the medics would get to her in time to keep her from actually dying a fiery death, but she had once read that being burned was the most painful thing in the world, and she wasn't exactly anxious to try that out.