Chapter Text
I shifted nervously from foot to foot, my eyes warily watching the gloomy, overcast sky. It had been a very rainy, unpleasant morning, with thick fog blanketing the coast and making it hard for normal people to see anything. It didn’t really bother me much, my clothes stayed dried unless I wanted them not to and the fog actually improved my senses rather than hindering them, but it had left the boardwalk all but deserted.
I’d half expected that the cafe would be closed when I arrived to get breakfast. I hadn’t seen a single other person walking around, but it seemed that it took more than a little bad weather to keep them from opening on time.
The weather had mostly cleared up in the hours since then, but it was still unusually foggy. Normally I wouldn’t mind, but the Mist here was so thin that the mundane mist interfered with my usual methods of sensing it. I’d never been particularly good at seeing the Mist, or even seeing through it to be perfectly honest, but with practice I’d learned to sense it the same way I could sense water around me. I’d thought it was a very clever workaround, but now it was coming back to bite me in the ass.
I squinted up as I saw two shapes moving in the sky far above, but quickly realized they were just seagulls. I sagged back against the wooden fence separating the boardwalk from the beach and tried to focus on the crashing of the waves behind me. The sea was choppy today, rough and uncertain like my racing thoughts.
Taking a deep breath, I tried to calm myself. I was making the right choice. Probably. No, not probably. I’d done my due diligence, researched the topic, and made the best choice I had available to me given my current circ*mstances. This was the right choice.
I did a lot of reading yesterday. Like, more than I had in the past four years if you didn’t include the research I’d done yesterday. Things had been a bit rough at first, especially with the lingering pains of my dream-headache, but then I found the accessibility settings on PHO and suddenly my reading got a lot easier.
It wasn’t ancient Greek, but big letters, big spacings, and no fancy italics to distract my eyes made things a lot easier! It also helped that it really was a matter of life or death––a bad choice here could cause me a lot of problems very quickly––so my demigod instincts didn’t act up quite as much as they did in school. I still had to take frequent breaks, but not nearly as many of them as I had been expecting. There were definitely still moments where I would have gladly dealt with a monster attack instead of reading one more drifting, letter-scrambled word, but unfortunately no helpful minotaur presented itself for me to vent my frustration on.
Thankfully the library wasn’t too busy and the middle-aged man behind the checkout counter showed minimal interest in verifying my story about being home schooled. After some poking around I had managed to find an out-of-the-way row of ancient-looking computers tucked away in the foreign-language and culture section, snagged a small pile of one-time login codes from an unattended desk, and gotten to work.
Even outside of the whole ‘dyslexia makes reading words hard’ thing, I wasn’t really good at this research stuff. I was born to sail and fight, not for all this nitty-gritty planning and preparing. I kept getting sidetracked, losing my train of thought, and struggled to find the information I was looking for. Still, I persevered and eventually managed to come up with my current plan.
First of all, I’d concluded early on that claiming to be a demigod was going to get me nowhere. People around here had a very firm belief that the supernatural was all just made up nonsense and tended to belittle the capes that claimed their abilities came from divine intervention or magical abilities. I would need to look into some of those just in case they were telling the truth, but that was something to worry about later.
I’d also learned that this world was already familiar with the concept of dimensional travel, though information about it was very, very limited. Only Earth Aleph as they called it (though why this was Earth Bet and that was Earth Aleph I really couldn’t say) was well known by the public. Just like this world, Earth Aleph had capes, though apparently they were much rarer and far weaker than the ones around here.
Okay, perfect. My new story seemed obvious enough and very hard to verify one way or another. It also helped that it was sort of true if you squinted. I was Percy Jackson, cape name Riptide (it was the first thing that had popped into my head when Grue asked), and I was a cape from another Earth. Earth Gimel maybe––I was pretty sure that was the next letter?
On my Earth, heroes and villains were a lot more low key than they were around here and we used different terminology. I would do my best to avoid saying anything about gods or the war or demigods, but I had a feeling something was going to slip through so it was best to be prepared. Gods could be senior heroes, demigods were like sidekicks maybe? Or Wards, that was what they called the official junior heroes around here.
Anyway, I had gotten caught in some sort of… shaker, maybe mover, effect and spit out here on Earth Bet. Simple enough. No need to mention the voice that made my brain hurt just thinking about it or that strange dream I’d had last night.
For the sake of simplicity, I was also going to pretend to be eighteen here. Sixteen-and-a-half was basically ancient by demigod standards anyway. I had no desire to go back to school or whatever and I was both tall and broad-shouldered enough to pass for an adult.
Once I’d had that figured out, it became a question of where did I go from there. Well, I was pretty sure that I could feel my preferred answer to that question walking towards me, so hopefully I’d be able to get that settled soon. Plan B was just wandering up to the oil rig superhero base thingy and hoping for the best. That wasn’t a very good plan, not even for me.
I waved to the pair of blonde girls walking towards me down the boardwalk. I’d expected them to fly in, but in hindsight this made more sense. New Wave was one of the few superhero groups in the United States that didn’t really do the whole ‘secret identity’ thing, but maybe they still shied away from obvious power usage in public? Or maybe not. I could feel that Glory Girl’s clothing was completely dry despite the morning’s foul weather..
“Hey,” I called out once they were close enough, “Glory Girl and Laserdream, right?”
“That’s us!” Glory Girl answered cheerfully. “I’m Victoria, but everyone calls me Vicky, and this is my cousin Crystal!” Her voice dropped a half-dozen volume levels. “Riptide, right? Or can I––”
“Percy is fine.”
Her grin widened and I found myself smiling back at her. Her joy was infectious. I was so happy that someone so amazing had––
A wave crashed against the beach, cold water rushing up the surf to soak into the drier sand at the edge of the water. The sound of it echoed in my mind, the roar of the ocean drowning out the faint whine of alien fingers brushing the edges of my consciousness.
It took me a moment to realize what was happening. Her wiki page on PHO said Glory Girl had some kind of emotional aura, evoking awe in her allies and fear in her enemies. It was a little annoying, but it wasn’t nearly on the level of charmspeak and I knew how to deal with mind-altering abilities.
Stuff like this was easier with actual seawater, but I could manage without it. The sea rose up within me. The golden ichor in my blood flashed with divine might and the questing touch of her aura lost all purchase on my mind.
Without skipping a beat, I extended a hand towards the pair. It hadn’t felt like an attack, no more than the way Silena sometimes accidentally let her charmspeak slip into her voice during heated arguments.
“I really appreciate you guys coming out to meet me, especially on a day like this.”
Glory Girl vigorously shook the offered hand. She had a very firm grip, particularly for someone with no noticeable calluses. She was supposedly basically invulnerable, right? Did her power protect her from that sort of thing? The curse of Achilles certainly didn’t––it had been a constant source of jokes for the Aphrodite campers. My calluses were just as indestructible as the rest of me now. “Of course! I’m always happy to help a new hero out! Brockton can use all the heroes it can get.”
Crystal’s handshake was a lot more like what I would have expected from a teenage mortal. “It’s nice to meet you, Percy. Thank you for trusting me with your secret. I promise I won’t spread it around.”
I was confused for a moment. “Huh?” It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize she meant the whole secret identity thing. “Oh, right. Yeah it's no problem. We’re all heroes here, I trust you guys.” It wasn’t like Percy Jackson was anymore a meaningful name here than Riptide was. I had no identity or family here to worry about.
We exchanged a few more brief pleasantries before I noticed how Crystal was shivering in the sea breeze. The mist and earlier drizzle had left her jeans and coat damp and she was clearly getting cold just standing out here with me and Vicky.
“It's getting a bit chilly standing out here, do you guys think we could move this inside somewhere?”
“Yeah, let's do that,” Crystal chimed in immediately. Her teeth clacked together loudly between words and Glory Girl finally seemed to notice the same thing that I had.
“Great idea. I know a nice brunch place with private booths not too far from here?” she chimed in.
“Sure.”
Fifteen minutes later the three of us were tucked away in the back corner of the restaurant in question. I was sitting on one side of the booth, with Crystal and Vicky sitting across from me. It was quite warm inside and the air was filled with the smell of frying bacon and the soft hum of classical music.
The restaurant was busier than most of the places we’d passed along the boardwalk, but that still left it half-empty just after noon on a Saturday. If that wasn’t a sign of urban decay, I didn’t know what was. Everything I knew about brunch places meant that I’d been expecting a thirty minute wait and then another twenty before we finally got a server. Instead, we’d been seated as soon as we’d come in and the waitress had come by almost immediately to get our orders.
“So,” Glory Girl began once we all had our drinks and the waitress had walked away, “you said on PHO that you had some questions about heroing?”
I shifted uncomfortably. Just talking to the two girls had been fine, they honestly reminded me of some of the newer campers after the end of the war and it had been nice to talk to people without the weight of who I was hanging over us. Now that the moment of truth had come, I was suddenly questioning my decision again.
I took a deep breath and let the waves within me settle into a smooth expanse of blue-green depths. Nothing ventured, nothing earned. I could always fall back on plan B if I had to. Or plan C and D once I figured out what those plans were.
“Yeah, something like that. Uh, you know how I said I’m new to all this, right?”
“Yup! Don’t worry, we were all there once! Everyone has to start somewhere!”
Even with her aura still futile scrambling for purchase in mind, Vicky’s positivity made me smile. She was so genuine and cheerful, and she clearly believed in being a hero.
“Thanks. Well, it's a little bit more complicated than all that. I guess like, well, I’m not really new to being a hero, but I am new to how you do it here. I’m not… from around here, I guess. Not Brockton Bay I mean, but like. Here. Earth Bet.”
Crystal, who had been taking a sip from her steaming cup of coffee, choked and spluttered and would have spilled her drink if not for the crimson force field that snapped into place over it like a lid before it could go everywhere.
Vicky wasn’t much better. She’d clearly been preparing to say something, but my words had knocked her off-kilter and left her just staring at me.
I hurriedly continued, “A few days ago, just a bit before you ran into me really, I ran into some kind of shaker or mover effect. Sorry, I’m not super familiar with the terminology you guys use here. There’s only so much research you can do at a public library in two days. It grabbed me and spit me out around here. Well, like a bit out to sea but this was the closest city to where I came out. I was a bit banged up but I’m pretty durable so it turned out okay.
“The Earth I come from, well, it's definitely not Earth Aleph and I couldn’t find any references to it online. We also have powers and heroes, but we’re a lot more low-key about it. I’ve never had to worry about my secret identity before so I was a little confused about what you were talking about.
“Anyway, I spent the last few days getting my bearings and trying to figure out what was going on. I considered just approaching the PRT, but I haven’t been able to find anything online about what they might do to accidental dimension travelers so I wanted a bit of a safety net before I did anything. I’ve seen some of the work your team does and it's pretty amazing. Plus your mom is like a big-shot lawyer and a hero. I was hoping you guys could maybe help me out?”
The two girls were silent for several long moments and I was afraid that I’d managed to screw everything up. That had all come out a bit faster than I’d meant for it too but I had never been particularly great at first impressions. Half the people I met tended to want to kill me before minute five.
Crystal cleared her throat, then turned to her cousin and poked her shoulder. Victoria, who had been silently staring at me since a few words into my explanation, jumped. “Sorry! That’s uh, not quite what I was expecting,” she said slowly. “I have… questions. I thought you just––”
Before she could continue, the waitress returned with a tray stacked high with brunch staples. Eggs, french toast, piles of bacon, hotcakes, and breakfast potatoes, and more filled the booth with a dizzying array of wonderful smells and I heard her stomach rumble hungrily. I had a feeling that her questions had suddenly become a secondary priority.
