A/N:

Remember in The Lightning Thief, when Percy and Annabeth and Grover were lured into Medusa's gnome emporium?

Remember the little girl and Uncle Ferdinand?

I was reading TLF one day and I'd gotten to that part, when I thought-THIS WOULD BE A GREAT FANFIC.

So I gave the kid a back story, and ended up with a one-shot. It's basically about how the kid, otherwise known as Elizabeth Diana Hermione de Monfrey, got turned into stone. Maybe in the late 1800s.

Disclaimers-Nope, not me. Mr. Rick Riordan, you are so lucky to live in the same state as me.

Warnings-sadness and some heartrending pitifulness.

The girl was tired.

Elizabeth Diana Hermione de Monfrey II was bone tired. She had left her unwelcoming mansion, home to too many bitter and horrible memories. She would never return to that forbidding and sinister place, or at least that was what she told herself. She knew that her otherwise neglecting parents wouldn't hesitate to send the police after her. They needed someone to do the work after all, and couldn't be bothered to hire servants.

She would be caught within forty-eight hours. It would be the same as the last three times.

Elizabeth collapsed finally. Her no-longer-starched white dress was smeared with mud and dirt, stained green in the places she had fallen on her knees. The eight-year-old bowed her head and a tear sliced another damp path of clean white skin through the thick black mud coating her cheeks.

Elizabeth fiddled despondently with the torn hem of her lacy dress. This was the farthest she had ever made it.

Maybe they really had forgotten her.

The smell of roasting beef, something she'd cooked and smelled and served, but never eaten, came to her nostrils. Elizabeth glanced up through hooded blue eyes. She had crumpled to her knees before a statue garden. The marble sign that sat upon the tops of two pillars read simply, "Madame M's Statuary."

Elizabeth mumbled dryly, "So this is where Mother and Father purchased their hideous lion?" The young girl shivered, as if from the cold, and quietly got to her bare feet.

"Dearie," a kind voice called sweetly through the pillows, "do come in."

Elizabeth plucked up her not inconsiderable courage and stepped inside. Her knees bent alarmingly, but her hand caught on a stone fang and she hailed herself back up.

"Are you, by any chance, Madame M?"

A laugh bubbled out of the shadows. "I am."

Rather unnerved by the wicked giggles of glee, Elizabeth picked up a basket that had been lying besides her feet. "What do you want with me, Madame?"

"Why, nothing much, dearie," the voice said again, and then a hideous being leaped from the shadows.

Elizabeth Diana Hermione de Monfrey II froze. Her hands were clasped tightly around the basket handle, and her face went into a pose of fear.

She could not move. The fiend circled her, hissing angrily through her teeth.

"Always the face," she muttered. "Always the face. And such a look of pitiful innocence ruined."

The monster raised a clawed hand as if to smite the girl's face off, and with a surprised feeling, Elizabeth felt herself not being able to move. Her eyes, the only part of her motion-capable, flicked downward.

Her skin had turned stony and gray.

Madame M snarled in aggravation and dragged the statue to the side. "Another day, perhaps, my sisters," she called.

Hours passed.

The police came to the statuary to inquire on Elizabeth's whereabouts. Nobody answered, but as they left they were ambushed. Elizabeth would have blanched, had she been able to move, at the gore dripping from their decapitated heads.

Days passed.

Two more policemen entered and were destroyed. Inside her rocky shell, Elizabeth was curled up in disgust.

Weeks passed.

A monster every bit as hideous as Medusa was flattened by a statue of a giant. She burst into sand. Elizabeth cheered inwardly at this small victory. Only two creatures were left.

Months passed.

Medusa's other sister left one night and never returned. Later, much later, a delivery came with a mirror and a note from her to Medusa. The last remaining monster shrieked with anger. Several small statues shattered.

Years passed. The garden became filled with statues. A satyr appeared. A deer leaping into the statuary was turned to stone in midair, shattered into granite chips when it hid the ground. An innocent catbird turned to stone was snapped up by a customer.

Centuries passed.

Three figures passed Elizabeth in her stony body. A boy with an odd way of trotting-walking, a girl with curly blonde hair…and another boy with thick black locks of hair and deep sea-green eyes.

And she knew this because, before he was lured away to a doom she was sure would befall him, he looked at her like he knew.

Like he knew she, once, had fallen into Medusa's trap.

Okay, that was actually pretty bad.

But for a one-shot, it was okay. I lost inspiration in the part where she got turned to stone.

Stupid me. I should be working on my other fanfic!!

R&R, please! I can't survive without reviews!!