Anyone watch these past Olympics? I've never been interested in the summer ones, but the winter games...

GO TEAM CANADA! WHOO!

XXI JASON

ON NORMAL CIRCUMSTANCES, OUTRUNNING THE PYGMIES would have been easy.

But these ones had goats.

"I hate goats!" Hazel shouted as they skidded around another street corner, trying to lose them. The pygmies rode the backs of the creatures in pairs, whooping and hollering for their blood.

"Where did they even get them?" Piper screamed.

"I'm not willing to stop and ask!" Jason decided as they nearly ran into a lady holding a bag of groceries.

"We just need to get to the ship!" Hazel yelled, pointing at the Argo II, only about a kilometre away. "We can make it!"

Suddenly the road in front of them was overrun by the gnomes, some on foot, most on goat. Apparently Red-beard's group wasn't the only tribe of pygmies on Mykonos.

"Over here!" Jason ran over to a side street, pulling the girls along behind him. Piper stumbled and would have tripped if he hadn't grabbed her wrist and pulled her along.

They turned a corner and nearly ran into a wall. The half-bloods were about to turn back, but the pygmies had already blocked the exit.

"Queen Jason!" Red-beard started, the thrill of the chase making his eyes bloodshot. "We will kill you and your companions by painfully roasting your skin into blisters, then skinning you alive and sucking the flesh off your bones! Then we will throw your lifeless corpses into the sea and go after your other friends, and use the flying ship to finally escape this island!"

The pygmies cheered.

"Lovely," Hazel muttered, reaching for her spatha.

"But we're on an important mission!" Jason tried. "The world is at stake!" He turned to Piper for help.

She nodded. "Of course," she told them. "Besides, we aren't the enemies you should be fighting." She pointed up at the sky.

That worked for, like, two seconds. "I do not see anything," Red-beard announced, and began to advance. "Time to die, friends of the birds."

"We are not the ones you should be fighting," Hazel replied evenly. "You should be fighting them."

There was silence for roughly five seconds. Then, one of the pygmies shrieked, "Holy mother of beard hair!"

Jason didn't see anything—he was too busy contemplating what an odd expression 'holy mother of beard hair' was—but suddenly the pygmies were running around in circles, smashing into walls, screaming. The goats screeched and bolted, dropping their pygmy passengers into the sea of chaos. Red-beard tried to regain order.

"Pygmies!" he shouted over the chaos. "Form ranks!"

"Birds!" the pygmies replied in response, swinging their weapons at the air randomly, occasionally hitting each other. "Vermin!"

Jason grabbed Piper and Hazel, and flew them up over the wall to the other side. He turned to the girls.

"You guys would be awesome at bingo," he decided.

"We have magic to thank," Piper replied, slightly breathless. "Let's get out of here."

-o-O-o-

Once they got to Crete, Annabeth gathered them all on the deck for a short meeting.

"We'll be getting to Heraklion soon," she announced. "Our destination is just southeast of the city."

"Where exactly is our destination?" Frank asked.

"The cave of Eileithyia," Piper provided, looking around at the others. "I am right?"

"Yeah. She's the 'creator of life', as Cassandra put it," Annabeth explained. "She was born in that cave, so it would be logical for her to be hiding out there, seeing that she's the goddess of childbirth."

Leo whistled. "Childbirth? Man, there's a god for everything."

"And I'm guessing she's also 'down south and out of way'," Percy tried. "Either way, I can go."

"So can I," Jason offered. "This past incident is something I desperately need to forget."

"Man, you need to tell us what happened at some point," Leo reminded him, giving him a look.

"I'll complete the trio," Annabeth decided, probably saving Jason from death by humiliation. "We leave as soon as we get there."

-o-O-o-

For once, finding the goddess was easy.

Naturally, she was ticked off.

There weren't any tourists, mostly because the cave was just a hole in the ground. Eileithyia was sitting on a boulder near the entrance, screaming at someone over a cellphone. Her hair was on fire.

"What do you mean you don't have insurance for the end of the world? It's going to happen eventually, you might as well cover it! Ugh, you mortals are worthless! I'm never paying a dime to your company again!" The lady ripped the phone away from her ear, and it exploded. She sighed and began to pat down her smoking hair.

This made the demigods cautious to approach. "Are you Eileithyia?" Percy asked.

"Yes, I am," the goddess replied without looking at them. She wore an elegant business dress, and when not on fire her sleek brown hair reached a few inches past her shoulders. Her makeup was kept light and she was wearing high heels, although Jason didn't understand how you could wear high heels on this rocky terrain and not twist your ankle. "What do you want?"

Annabeth furrowed her eyebrows. "You were, um, supposed to be expecting us," she told the goddess.

Eileithyia looked at them for the first time and cocked her head sarcastically. "Was I?" she demanded sharply. "Well, I was never informed since the gods don't bother update their Twitter now that Gaea is rising!" She rolled her eyes and began to comb her hair with her fingers. "It is all very frustrating.

"Anyway, why are you here? If you seek my protection, don't bother, because I don't care a stinking drachma for your lives."

"And we thank you for your consideration," Percy replied. "But we're not here for protection. We were told you'd give us something."

"A fire, perhaps?" Jason prompted.

Eileithyia stared at them blankly for a moment, then flourished her hand so that her palm faced upwards. A small blue flame appeared. "I don't suppose you mean this?" she asked. It was a rhetorical question.

"Very well," she said. "I don't need it anymore anyway. But I'm not about to give it to you for free."

"We weren't expecting you to, my lady," said Annabeth politely, adding that last bit to hopefully earn some good points. Eileithyia seemed pleased.

"At least this one knows manners," she said. The goddess turned away from the boys and spoke only to Annabeth. "Anyway, I want you to go off and deal with an animal that has been terrorizing this island for far too long. Fortunately for you, it's decided to stop nearby—Heraklion."

Jason concluded the moment she said 'animal' that they would have to kill some vicious, twenty-foot-long troll-beast with horns and demon eyes. So when she told them it was just a deer, and that they had to bring it back alive, he was legitimately surprised.

"I don't want it dead, though," she made very clear. "Bring it dead and the deal is off. Lady Artemis would not be pleased with me."

Annabeth's expression stayed impassive, although her voice didn't manage. "Lady Artemis?" she asked. "Artemis's deer? But that could only mean—"

"Good luck!" Eileithyia told them. "You'll need it."

Her cellphone reappeared in her hand, and she began to play Flappy Bird.

-o-O-o-

Annabeth pulled Jason and Percy to a side.

"Please tell me Artemis's deer doesn't have horns and dragon fangs," Percy started.

"No," Annabeth replied, "but possibly just as bad. Artemis's deer is the Ceryneian Hind. To capture it was one of Heracles's twelve labours. It used to live in Keryneia, Greece, but obviously over the years it's been moving around."

"Oh, I remember this," Jason put in. "The Ceryneian Hind had super-speed powers or something, and it took Heracles a year to hunt it down. Actually, it was only a year chasing it…"

"Wonderful," Percy said. "Now I can say goodbye to my legs."

"Maybe not," said Annabeth. "Heracles wasn't that smart, just chasing it down. So, here's the plan…"

So, hey, guys!

We've just reached the mid-way point in our story!

(Yay!)

Which means there's going to be a short intermission!

(Ya- wait, what?)

You see, when I first decided to write this story, it was going to be split in half: the first set of POVs, and then the second set. So I planned out the first set to the smallest detail, then wrote out the chapters one by one. The detail part took the better part of a month.

Now I need to do this to the second set. I'm halfway done already (which is why there was a bit of a time lapse between this chapter and the preceding one), so it won't be more than a couple weeks that I'm going to be gone. But I promise, THIS STORY ISN'T OVER.

Peace out in yours and demigodishness,

Bookworm1756

-o-O-o-

PS: I'm also starting a new story, The Fanfiction Guide to Fanfiction (I might change the name later on). It's exactly as its name says it is. Go check it out! (whenever it gets up)