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I was sitting by myself near the strawberry fields, waiting for Connor to bring back some a couple of cans of Coke from our stash, to cope with the summer heat. However, I chose this particular spot to sit at because, well, I could see Katie from here.
Katie’s the head of the Demeter cabin, and, in my humble opinion, an absolute knockout. Seriously, the way she gets all mad when I swap out all their seeds for boiled ones, it’s so cute! But of course, she hates me, or atleast I think she does. Of late, she’s been looking at me with a fond sort of exasperation, instead of her usual anger, and I’m not sure what to make of it.
Anyway, while I was lost in my daydreams, I didn’t notice her come up and sit beside me until she spoke, “So, when are you planning on pranking us next? Because I’d really appreciate the heads-up.”
A little surprised at her calm tone, I stuttered, “Well, I wasn’t actually planning on it, but now that you’ve asked, I-“ she cut me off with a laugh, which surprised me even more. Katie never laughed at anything I said, ever.
“C’mon, Stoll. I saw the way you were staring at the fields. What’ve you done?” she asked, letting a little bit of annoyance creep into her voice, although it didn’t quite reach her eyes, which still sparkled.
Thankfully, I was interrupted at that moment by a somewhat familiar voice behind me, saying, “A good prankster never tells, girl. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to borrow my boy here for a little while.” Hermes put a firm hand on my shoulder, and dragged me off with him, much to my annoyance, as I’d wanted to continue the conversation with her.
I wasn’t quite sure how to greet Hermes. On one hand, he was a god, so it’d probably be in my best interest to bow and be all respectful. On the other hand, he was my father. I figured he’d let a little bit of insolence slide, so I asked him, “C’mon dad, you couldn’t have waited five minutes?”
Hermes raised an eyebrow at that, looking over my shoulder back at Katie, who had gotten up to go back to the strawberry fields, probably to search for my (non-existent) trap. “Unfortunately, my boy, I don’t. It’s a rather important matter, you see. My staff’s been stolen.”
I was silent for a whole minute. Everyone at camp knew about Hermes’ staff, he never went anywhere without it. And besides, the twin snakes, George and Martha, that wrapped around the staff, were rather fond of us Hermes kids. I didn’t quite know how to respond to his statement, so I kept it simple, “How?”
“I made a stupid mistake,” he muttered. “I was late with a delivery of doormats to Janus, so I left the caduceus on the dashboard of my truck and ran inside with the box. Then I realized he needed to sign for the delivery, so I ran back to the truck-“
“And the caduceus was gone,” I finished.
Hermes nodded. “If that ugly brute has harmed my snakes, I swear by the Styx-“
“Hold on, hold on, you know who took the staff?”
“Of course I do, boy. I am the god of thieves, and the only thief dumb enough, or brave enough, depending on how you look at it, to steal something belonging to an Olympian would be Cacus.”
“Am I supposed to know who that is?” I asked, wracking my brain for any memories of the name.
“He’s a small giant, about ye high,” Hermes changed himself to be 10 feet tall, making me duck out of the way in surprise. “He’s always been stealing stuff from us, back since the Roman days. Nowadays he hides out in the tunnels under Manhattan. Oh, also, he breathes fire.”
“Right. So, you need us to fight a 10-foot-tall fire-breathing giant, to retrieve your staff. And you can’t do this yourself because?” I asked, not really wanted to risk my life to fix my godly dad’s mistake.
“The other gods would take notice, son. And can you imagine how embarrassing it is be for me, the god of thieves, to have his own symbol of power stolen from under his nose? No, they would never let me live this down. Also, can you get it back by 5 in the evening? Any later and they’d surely notice the late deliveries.” Hermes frowned, before asking, “Who’s this ‘us’ you refer to? I’d rather have you do it alone, get into less trouble that way.”
That caught me off guard. Surely Hermes wanted me to go with Connor? After all, we did pretty much everything together, and with me going off to college soon, I wanted to spend as much time with him as I could. However, as I looked back over my shoulder, to see that Connor hadn’t returned from the cabin yet. I also saw Katie, still in the field with a few of her cabinmates. A quick idea popped into my head, and I decided to use Hermes forgetting my brother to my advantage.
I pointed over to Katie, and told Hermes, “If I’m doing this, I need something in return. Nothing too fancy, just a little favour.” I whispered what I had in mind, and he nodded thoughtfully. “Get the staff back by 5, and you can have your trip.” With that, he flashed himself away, leaving me standing there, hoping I could convince Katie to help me with retrieving the staff.
I jogged over to Katie, who was staring intently at a watering can, as if it would magically irrigate all the plants. With her powers, who knows, maybe it would. I didn’t want to her ask her to help me with a quest, so I dragged her off to the side, causing a few indignant heys from the rest of her cabinmates, but I ignored them.
When we were out of earshot, I told her about Hermes visit, and why he needed our help. She nodded thoughtfully, her eyebrows scrunching up a little, making her look even cuter. I pushed that thought aside. Later, Travis, later, I told myself. Finally, she asked me, “Why do you need me, though? Surely you could ask Connor, or Percy, or someone else that’s powerful enough to fight a giant.”
“Connor’s busy with counsellor stuff, Percy’s in his cabin with Annabeth, and I don’t want to know what those two are doing in there, and honestly, you seemed rather bored, so unless you’re really intent on watering those plants, come along?” It wasn’t a complete lie, Connor was no where to be found, and Percy was with ‘Beth, just not in their cabin.
“Screw it, why not?” she asked, tying her hair up into a ponytail, making her look even hotter. “When do we leave?” she asked, followed by, “Where are we going?”
I, admittedly, had not thought that far ahead, but not wanting to look like a fool in front of her, I came up with what I felt was a reasonable plan on the spot. “Well, I was thinking I’d ask Annabeth for her magic shield, you know, the one that shows the location of anyone under the sun?”
“Sounds good, except you just told me those two were fooling around in Cabin 3,” she said, “and I don’t want to, ah, interrupt them.”
Thankfully, Percy and Grover chose that exact moment to walk past us, which meant that Annabeth would most likely be alone. Katie saw Percy too, and came to the same conclusion as me, so we both jogged over to Cabin 6, where Annabeth was looking over some plans with her brother, Malcolm.
We gave Annabeth the 5 second version of our quest, and explained that we needed to borrow her shield. She gave it to us, wished us luck on our quest, winked at Katie (though I wasn’t quite sure why) and went back to poring over her blueprints.
We stared at the shield, looking back at our reflections, until Katie asked, “Shield, show me where Cacus is.” Immediately, light rippled across the bronze surface, becoming a familiar part of Manhattan, showing renovated warehouses surrounding an elevated train track that had been turned into a park with trees. I remembered going there a few years back, with my mom and Connor.
“That’s the Highline park, in the Meatpacking district,” I said.
The shield zoomed in further on an intersection that had been blocked off with barricades and detour signs, in the middle of which was a large hole, smoke coming out of it.
“Smoke, hmm. The kind of smoke that might come out of a fire-breathing giant’s mouth, perhaps?” asked Katie. “Well, I think we’ve got our location. Let’s grab our stuff and meet at the stables in 10?”
We jogged back to our respective cabins. I packed light, grabbing my sword, and a couple of grenades I had lying around (don’t ask), just in case. I met back up with Katie, who had brought her dagger and a few packets of seeds, although what good they would do us underground without any light, I didn’t know.
We got onto Katie’s pegasus, Deere, and set off towards Manhattan, hoping Chiron didn’t notice our absence. After a short flight, that I totally didn’t spend distracted by Katie’s hair in the wind, we landed on West 15th. As we made our way towards the intersection, where two police officers stood guard, but weirdly, they paid us no mind as we ducked under the barricades and walked towards the hole, which was around the size of a garage door, with metal climbing rungs going down one side of it.
“You got any ideas?” I asked Katie, as she was the sensible type, and though she wasn’t a daughter of Athena, she did always seem to have some clue about what she was doing.
“We climb down, find the giant, and get the caduceus,” she said, which made me reconsider my previous statement. With that wonderful plan, we climbed down the pit, until my feet hit the ground with a small splash. Katie dropped down beside me, and turned on a torchlight that she seemed to have conjured from nowhere.
The pit emptied into a factory sized cavern, that was surrounded by old pipes, probably sewer lines. Scattered around the cavern were crates, toolboxes, pallets of timber, and stacks of steel pipe, along with, weirdly, a bulldozer and an assortment of cars.
The worst thing of all, though, was the meat hanging off large hooks that dangled from the ceiling. It wasn’t very fresh, judging by the smell and the flies. However, there was no sign of a giant, so we decided to head towards the bulldozer, hoping to find some clues to the giant’s location.
When we reached the bulldozer, which, upon further inspection, looked like it had been through combat, with a variety of scratches and dents covering its body panels, and what looked suspiciously like a fist denting the bucket, a loud voice rumbled, “Breakfast.”
I peeked up, over the bulldozer’s tire, and immediately wished I hadn’t. I could see the giant clearly, and to put it simply, the hanging meat looked fresher than him. As Hermes had said, he was about 10 feet tall, and had curly orange hair. His face wore a permanently pout, with an upturned nose, wide eyes and arched eyebrows, so he looked both startled and unhappy.
“Oh, he’s ginger,” said Katie, rather unhelpfully.
Unfortunately for us, the giant had very good hearing, as he immediately perked up, looking around the room until he spotted us, and beckoned for us to come forward. For lack of a better option, we did.
“I call for breakfast, and two demigods arrive? That’s rather nice! It’s been a while since I’ve eaten a demigod. I imagine you’d taste wonderful with tortillas, salsa, and eggs. He looked at us some more, before saying, “Oh, a Demeter girl. I bet you taste like veggies. And ah, Hermes boy. Here to retrieve Daddy’s staff?” he taunted, before pulling the staff out of thin air. It was 3 feet of smooth, white wood, topped with a silver sphere and dove’s wings that fluttered nervously. Entwined around the staff were two very alive, very agitated serpents.
“Travis!” a voice spoke inside my mind, “Thank Hermes you’re here! I was starting to get worried that he’d sold us to this ginger jerk and finally upgraded to a newer model.”
“Come on, George, you know he loves us too much to do that,” another voice said, that I assumed to be Martha.
“I’ll give it to you, of course,” said the giant, apparently unaware of the conversation between the snakes. “Anything for the right price."
“Sorry, big guy, but I haven’t got much to offer you,” I said. “Tell you what, you give me the staff, and we’ll let you live. Hell, I’ll steal you a real Rolex,” I offered, rather desperately.
“That’s the wrong price, pal,” the giant replied. “And you know the punishment for offering the wrong price? Death.”
He pointed the staff at us, and shouted kill them, but George and Martha didn’t seem to be in the mood for that, instead just spewing paper all over us. Katie picked one up and read it, looking rather unimpressed. “Death by Groupons?” she asked, “Because I now have 85% off on piano lessons.”
“Gah!” Cacus glared at the snakes, before breathing a fiery warning shot of fire over their heads, causing them to squirm in alarm.
“We’re cold-blooded! Fire is not good!” George shouted, which didn’t do anything to deter Cacus, since, well, he couldn’t hear them. “Hey, Cacus!” I shouted, trying to regain his attention, “Why did you steal the staff?”
The giant sneered. “Foolish demigod. When you lot defeated Kronos, did you think you eliminated all the enemies of the gods? You only delayed the fall of Olympus for a little while longer. Without the staff, Hermes will be unable to carry messages. Olympian communication lines will be disrupted, and that’s only the first bit of chaos my friends have planned.”
“Your friends?” Katie asked.
Cacus waved off the question. “Doesn’t matter. You won’t live that long, and I’m only in it for the money. With this staff, I’ll make millions! Maybe even thousands! Now hold still so I can grill you.”
I looked at Katie, and smiled. “Time to fight?”
“Smartest thing you’ve said all year,” she said, and together, we charged.
Katie veered to the giant’s left, as I charged him head-on. I was still out of sword’s reach, when suddenly, Cacus unhinged his jaw, and blew fire.
Shocking discovery; fire, hot.
I managed to leap to one side, but I could feel my arms starting to warm up and my clothes igniting. I rolled through the mud to douse the flames and knocked over a few toolboxes. The giant roared, “Look what you’ve done! I told you to hold still!”
Katie used the distraction to strike. She lunged at Cacus from behind and stabbed him in the back of the knee—according to Chiron, a nice soft spot on monsters. She leaped away as Cacus swung the caduceus, barely missing her. The silver tip slammed into the bulldozer and the entire machine turned to stone. “Huh, that’s new,” she said.
“I’ll kill you!” Cacus stumbled, golden ichor pouring from his wounded leg. He blew fire at Katie, but she dodged the blast. I lunged with my sword and slashed my blade across the giant’s other leg.
I’d hoped it would be enough to bring him to his knees, but no. Cacus bellowed in pain, and turned with surprising speed, smacking me with the back of his hand. I went flying and crashed into a pile of broken pallets. My vision blurred. Katie yelled, “Travis!” but her voice sounded as though it were underwater. She whirled on the giant, pulling out a packet of seeds and hurling them at the giant, who looked rather amused, until the seeds started to grow at an alarming rate, digging their roots into his shirt.
The giant staggered, whirling back towards Katie before she could throw any more seeds at him, and pointed the staff at her, determined to turn her to stone. However, before he could, the staff turned into a cell-phone, and rang to the tune of “Macarena.” George and Martha, now the size of earthworms, curled around the screen.
We danced to this at our wedding, Martha said. "Remember, dear?" George didn't respond.
“Stupid snakes!” Cacus shook the cell phone violently.
Eek! George said, as the phone grew back into a staff.
Katie ran to my side. Together we backed up until we were next to the ladder. “Our tag game strategy isn’t working so well,” she noticed. She was breathing heavily. The left sleeve of her T-shirt was smouldering, but otherwise she looked okay. “Any suggestions?
I looked up, at the little square of sunlight. Suddenly, I remembered where we were. Above us we a bunch of massive trees, and judging by the height of this cavern’s ceiling, their roots wouldn’t have had much space to grow. I conveyed as much to Katie, who’s eyes widened at what I was implying.
“I’ve never tried moving something that big before,” she started, “but it’s our only chance,” I finished. “You’ve got to give it a shot,” I said, trying to come off as encouraging, but most likely sounding rather desperate.
She gulped. “Listen Travis, if we don’t get out of here… I just wanted to tell you-“ I shushed her. “Me too, Kat, me too, but let’s save it for when we get out of here, shall we?” She nodded, and looked up, thrusting her hands to the sky as if expecting to be invited to Mount Olympus by the gods.
Suddenly, the roof of the cavern rumbled, and the stone gave way to a mass of dirt, being pushed downwards by the tree’s roots, which had been contained for too long. They didn’t stop, though, and as Cacus looked up in surprise, the roots broke the water pipes above us, dousing him in some very unclean water.
He sputtered and fell to the ground under the weight of the water, giving us time to hightail it out of there, putting our climbing lessons at the lava wall to good use, as we were back on the surface in no time, with one minor problem; we still didn’t have the caduceus.
Then a distant snaky voice spoke in my mind. “Gag me,” said George. “Even for me that was disgusting, and I eat rats.”
“Incoming!” Martha warned. “Oh, no! I think the giant has figured out—"
An explosion shook the street. A beam of blue light shot out of the tunnel, carving a trench up the side of a glass office building, melting windows and vaporizing concrete. The giant climbed from the pit, his shirt steaming, and his face spattered with slime.
“What is that?!” shouted Katie.
“That would be laser mode,” I replied, not too happy about this new development. Katie and I fled as another laser bolt gouged a ditch through the street to our left. Chunks of asphalt rained down like confetti. Behind us, Cacus yelled, “You ruined my house! For that, you die!”
We kept running. My hope was to get this monster away from the mortals, but that’s kind of hard to do in the middle of New York. Traffic clogged the streets. Pedestrians screamed and ran in every direction. The two police officers we'd seen earlier were nowhere in sight, maybe swept away by the mob.
I pointed. “There!” A hundred feet away, the old railroad tracks split and the elevated platform formed a Y. The shorter piece of the Y was a dead end—part of the park that was still under construction. Stacks of potting soil bags and plant flats sat on the gravel. Jutting over the edge of the railing was the arm of a crane. Far above us, a big metal claw hung from the crane’s arm—probably what they’d been using to hoist garden supplies.
Katie understood what I was planning, and she looked like she was trying to swallow a quarter. “No,” she said. “Too dangerous.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Katie, I’m a son of Hermes. You know I rock at grabber-arm games.”
“But can you operate it?” she asked. I wasn’t sure, but it was our best shot, so I gave a (hopefully) confident nod. “Cakewalk. Just lure him over there. Keep him occupied while I grab him.”
“And then what?” she asked. I smiled, “You’ll see. If you can snag the caduceus while he’s distracted, that would be great,” and with that, I ran for the crane, leaving her to fight the massive, fire breathing giant by herself. “She’ll be fine,” I told myself. “She’s Demeter’s daughter, and she’s surrounded by plants,” I reasoned, but it didn’t do much to assuage my worries.
“George! Martha! Please change out of laser mode, and don’t kill my girlfriend-to-be,” I called, hoping they could hear me. I didn’t get a response, so I just ran faster, leaping over the railing that surrounded the crane and jumping into the cabin.
My hands flew to the right buttons, despite me having no idea what any of them did. I assumed it was Hermes helping me, so I muttered a silent “Thanks.” Behind me, I could hear Katie shout, and suddenly the ground rumbled. I didn’t have time to focus on that, so I focused on getting the crane to move instead.
“Really?” came Katie’s voice, “A credit-card reader?”
I laughed, knowing that George and Martha had heard my little plea, and had managed to get out of laser mode, so Katie wasn’t a spot of grease on the floor yet. It gave me enough time to figure out the controls of the crane, and now I just had to hope Katie could grab the caduceus and get out of the way in time. When I looked up, he’d thrown down the staff, and shouted, “Stupid snakes! I’ll incinerate you myself!”
Unfortunately, he never got the opportunity to, as Katie used the grass to grab the caduceus, and move it over to her. That had the unintended (but probably expected) effect of making him very mad. “You put out my fire with sewage. Now you steal my staff,” he growled.
“Which you wrongfully stole,” Katie pointed out, slowly creeping to her right, keeping her sword level with the giant. He moved with her, staying directly opposite to her, until they’d turned a full 180 degrees, and now Cacus had his back to the crane. He cracked his knuckles, “It doesn’t matter. I’ll kill you with my bare hands.”
Unfortunately, he didn’t get an opportunity to do that either, as I dropped the crane’s arm on his head, knocking him out. When he came to, I’d grabbed him around the waist using the claws of the crane, and had bought him up 50 feet in the air, when he tried to blow fire. Luckily for me, all that came out was some mud.
I swung the crane arm back and forth, building up momentum, praying to my dad that the crane wouldn’t tip over with his weight. I swung the arm back one more time, and opened the claw at the top of the arc, sending the giant sailing over the rooftops, and towards the Hudson.
“George, Martha,” I said out loud, “back to laser mode for a minute, please?” I asked, hoping Katie would catch on to what I wanted to do. She did, and pointed the staff’s tip at the falling giant, blasting a beam of blue light, which disintegrated the giant into a beautiful starburst. I looked down at Katie, and she had never looked more beautiful, her shirt ripped, her hair a mess, but I didn’t care.
We met outside the crane's railing, and screw what Percy says, this was the best kiss of all time.
When I finally came up for air and pulled out my phone to check the time, it read 4:32. “Oh gods, we have to get the caduceus back to Hermes!”
“And get us some rats,” said George, who’d thankfully returned to being part of a staff, instead of a laser.
Thankfully, we didn’t have to go too far, as I’d agreed to meet with Hermes at the Rockefeller centre, which wasn’t that hard to reach via the subway. Besides, the subway system had rats, and I say had, because there weren’t any left when we reached Rockefeller centre, where we met him by the Atlas statue.
“Oh, thank you!” he exclaimed when he saw us, “I’d just about given up hope! You’re the best, Travis. Don’t tell Connor I said that, though. Speaking of, where is he?” asked Hermes, a question I wanted an answer to as well. He had been sneaking off a lot recently, particularly to the Apollo cabin. I wasn’t about to tell Hermes all that, though, because although he was our father, he wasn’t really around enough for us to be telling him about our love lives. I just told him he was busy with counsellor stuff, the same lie I’d told Katie.
Hermes seemed to buy it, asking about the fight with Cacus instead. We told him the story. When I relayed what Cacus had said about someone else giving him the idea to steal the caduceus, and about the gods having other enemies, Hermes’s face darkened.
“Cacus wanted to cut the gods’ communication lines, did he?” Hermes mused. “That’s ironic, considering Zeus has been threatening…” His voice trailed off.
“What?” Katie asked. “Zeus has been threatening what?”
“Nothing,” Hermes said.
It was obviously a lie, but I figured there was no point in pressing the issue. That would be a problem for another day, and I had better things I wanted to do today. The god managed a smile. “At any rate, well done, both of you! Now I must be going. So many stops—”
“There’s the small matter of my reward,” I reminded him, which made Katie frown. “What reward?” she asked, visibly confused, as I hadn’t mentioned anything to her earlier.
“Come on, now, you can’t seriously be considering going back to camp like this, you’re all dirty, and smelly, and you’re probably hungry as well. Not how I want to show that we’re dating to the rest of the camp, my love. So, I figured, a little date at this nice pizza place I know wouldn’t go amiss, unless you have other plans?” I said, tongue in cheek.
“You jerk, you had this all planned out, didn’t you? Lie to me to get me to help you with the quest, and if we win, you get this nice dinner date?” Katie said, a hand on her hip, the familiar exasperated look back on her face. “You could’ve gotten us killed, you know,” she said, but I didn’t care. I met her lips, and the world faded away, even as Hermes stood to the side, looking on with an amused expression.
When we pulled away, he said, “well, I think you lovebirds should get changed.” He snapped his fingers, and just like that, we were clean again, and I was dressed in a formal button-down shirt and trousers, and Katie, oh. Katie was dressed in a beautiful green dress that accentuated every part of her. I would’ve kissed her again, but before I could, Hermes snapped his fingers again, and suddenly, we were standing in New York Avenue, in front of one of the best pizza places in the city.
For a second, I wondered about how I was going to pay, but when I checked my pocket, I found a silver metal credit card with ‘Temporary Access to the Bank of Olympus’ written on it. I smiled, saying a silent thank you to Hermes, before holding Katie’s hand and waltzing into the restaurant.
Life couldn’t have been better.