Chapter Text
Okay. Alright.
Take a deep breath: 1,2,3,4
Hold your breath for 5 and 6
Breathe out for 7, 8, 9,10
Repeat a few more times.
Everything was excellent.
Nothing is on fire.
I am having a perfectly normal day.
I am not standing in an old museum bathroom with rusted pipes everywhere. That looks like one minor prick injury away from causing me tetanus or any other disease.
I stare at my reflection. Or what I can only assume my reflection was.
Because staring back at me is a twelve-year-old girl.
She’s tiny. Too small. Black wavy hair around shoulder length, tan skin due to days of being out in the sun, soaking up the warm rays. Sea-green, bluish eyes that don’t seem to decide what color they want to be, and a school uniform that I absolutely do not own.
That is not my face.
But it is my reflection. When I squint, the girl in the mirror squints. When I raised my hand, she raised her hand.
I slowly touched my face, the warmth of Percy’s— no, my hand just felt…wrong.
An irritation fear entered my mind the longer I stared at the girl in the reflection, that if I were to step away, she wouldn’t follow.
I let out a groan, slightly flinching at how high my voice sounds.
I think back on how the hell I got myself into this situation in the first place.
Now, you may be asking yourself: How did I get here?
Great question, the simple answer?
I don’t fucking know.
One moment, I'm in an indoor mall after I finished getting my eye exam.
Looking at my phone, I saw that it was only 3:33 p.m.
Great, I had thought to myself. I had roughly an hour and a half to kill before Mom would pick me up.
She said that she had to drive to her dad’s workplace really quickly to drop off his blood pressure meds that had run out.
In this scenario, I decided to do the most obvious thing a teenage girl could do: start randomly walking from shop to shop, trying to kill time, by window-shopping and looking at items way too expensive for my yearly allowance.
Then I got hungry. So I decided that finding the food court to grab a good burger was a good idea, maybe some fries, and soda while I’m at it.
It wasn’t like I hadn't been to this mall before. But it was still difficult for me to navigate it easily due to its size. You could walk in a straight line for thirty minutes and still not reach the other end. That’s how big it was.
So I looked around for a hanging sign with directions before heading to the food court.
If I had any change left over from the 35 dollars in my pocket, there was a nice ice cream shop right before the food court. I could stop by and splurge on myself on a sweet treat.
I made my way through a hallway, passing a few people, as I made my way through an intersection.
And you know how some malls display cars inside, parked to look aesthetically pleasing and serve as advertisements?
Yeah, the mall had a few Ram trucks parked in the intersection right before the food court.
Well…Tell me why one of the pickup trucks, with absolutely no one in the driver's seat, decided to roar to life the moment I walked past it and ram straight into me.
I felt myself getting thrown backwards as I hit the floor. I could hear a few people screaming about something, and I felt myself slowly getting drenched in warm liquid.
I had the oddest thought, that for a second I could have sworn that the headlights had flickered on before the engine had actually started.
The thought left my mind as I started feeling really tired. My eyelids drooped, and before I knew it, I lost consciousness.
And instead of waking up in a hospital like a normal person, I woke up on a parked school bus in front of a museum in New York.
Before I could process what was happening, a woman I immediately recognized as Mrs. Dodds leaned into my personal space, practically drilling holes into my skull with her stare, and hissed, “Perseus Jackson.”
I took that as my cue to panic.
I practically shot up like a lightning bolt, making Mrs.Dodds take a step back. I rapidly threw out an excuse of needing to use the bathroom, which sounded more like gibberish than actual English, before getting off the bus, nearly running like the devil himself was after me.
I sprinted into the museum bathroom, locked the door behind me, and now here I am, trapped in a small stall, staring at a mirror that insists I am Percy Jackson.
Except I wasn’t, because last I checked, Percy wasn’t female. Nor did he…or she, were twelve years old, as the girl in the mirror was.
As I dragged my hand through my hair, grabbing it with a death grip as I sighed miserably…which of the gods did I piss off this badly to become the pre-teen with an arguable death-wish?