Whoo! It's 3am, I have work tomorrow and guess what? I'm feeling all kinds of productive/industrious (in the writing sense, not in the going to bed sense). Once again, I don't know what this is. Enjoy. Or do not and just flee in terror from my admission that I'm nuts. Your choice.

I got a lot of reviews about this saying that I needed to split up the paragraphs, which confused me because I thought the paragraphs were split up, but it turns out there has been some kind of glitch in the document which prevented paragraphs from being registered properly. So... sorry about that. And sorry it's been a long time for me to fix them. Hopefully, things should be better now.

Marzipan.

So this shadow travelling thing? Not an exact science.

Maybe one day it would be if he kept working at it, but for now it wasn't so accurate. Travelling to Camp was easiest because it was surrounded by so much magical protection; the wards, charms and giant forcefield around it screamed at him whenever he tried to shadow travel, even if he didn't want to end up there. After all, it was the nearest place to him that was so inherently… magical? No, that probably wasn't the right word, even if the Camp did contain a bunch of teenaged heroes with superpowers who bore the brunt of the world-saving grunt work whenever an apocalypse decided to tear its ugly head.

Chiron (and probably Annabeth) would take issue with him calling the camp magic, but it was the closest word he could think of to describe it. Then again, Nico was the first to admit that his vocabulary wasn't huge, what with the total lack of schooling he'd had over the years. Sure, there had been a library at the Lotus Casino that Bianca had occasionally frequented, discovering some books about a boy wizard she had pestered him to read, but what sane kid (who also suffered ADHD and dyslexia) wanted to read when they were in a luxury hotel full of video games that kept getting bigger and better and on a limitless budget? So magic would do as an adjective for now. It wasn't like he had a handy thesaurus in his pocket.

What Nico di Angelo did have in his pockets was a handful of drachma, not particularly useful in the mortal world unless you found a pawnbroker that bought gold and was not scrupulous enough to care about the coins' apparent antiquity. In the inner pocket of his jacket, where it jabbed him in the ribs whenever he tried to zip it up (no mean feat now he was out of the Casino and so was aging and growing; he had reached fifteen and with it pretty much the limits of his jacket), was a Mythomagic statuette of Hades. A particularly unflattering representation, actually, but it wasn't as if he went around waving it under his father's nose; he was too attached to being un-vaporised to do that.

Apart from the sword in its sheath and the clothes on his back, Nico didn't have much else in the entire world. A few more garments spewing out of the chest of drawers in his cabin, a few books and some other mementos from here and there pretty much summed up the majority of his possessions, but what else was there for a demigod to own, anyway?

Clothes were the main thing. Nudity had gone out of fashion since Ancient Greece and wandering around in the buff was something they frowned upon in America. Nico frowned upon the practice too, actually. Big time. Yet even with the bulk of his clothes, it didn't change the fact that his life could pretty much be squeezed into a box right now. And not a very large one at that.

Some people might see it as a lonely life being the only (known) child of Hades. There was no one to share a cabin with, something the Hermes kids particularly couldn't get their heads around. No one to talk who shared the ability to hear the incessant whisperings of the dead and death, no one who could experience the pulse of the earth beneath their feet and bend that to their will. Despite this, Nico rarely felt lonely. Perhaps he was just as much of a loner as he'd heard Annabeth say he was, once, when she thought he wasn't listening, but he didn't care. He actually quite liked it this way.

Percy and Thalia probably felt similar, although Thalia less so now she was a Huntress. Nico idly wondered whether, one day, a half-sibling would pop up to share his cabin with and if they did, would they get on? Percy had demanded that all demigods must be claimed (perhaps because he too felt lonely sometimes and was hoping for a sibling…?) but neither Zeus, Poseidon nor Hades had claimed anyone new. It would anger each of them to find that the other had further disregarded the pact, so maybe they were holding out, waiting for the other to act first.
The Underworld was another place that was easy to find, but then that was because it was home (or rather 'home') despite how gloomy and depressing it was. Other places, however, were distinctly harder to find and travel to. Like Percy's Upper East Side apartment for instance. Nico had appeared on top of a Dumpster in an alleyway, promptly overbalancing and falling onto some bags of garbage someone had been too lazy to toss into the bin. Given the smell, he would rather have landed on the floor, despite how cold and wet it was.

It was drizzling drearily in New York, although it hadn't been in Long Island when he left Camp. Light rain was slowly forming oily puddles on the sidewalk, miniature lakes not yet full enough to burst their banks and flee for the storm drains. The drizzle looked like it was swarming above the streetlamps, which were uncomfortably few and far between, he noted, like a cloud of irritated gnats that gave the lights a halo.

Nico was cold, even with his jacket.

Where in Hades was Percy's freaking apartment? He had been many times before, albeit usually in a more conventional manner than shadow travelling, but he had never paused to really fix the place in his mind so he could find its exact location again. He had been too busy being made to feel insanely welcome by Sally and Paul and fed to bursting point for that. It was a stupid oversight on his part, really. He should have known better, but being made to feel like part of a family, even if it was just temporarily, had been too pleasant a distraction.

Okay, this was getting ridiculous. He was cold and wet and plagued by another feeling that might have been hunger (Nico was not the biggest fan of food, and being around the dead all the time wasn't the biggest reminder to eat, so he found it hard to tell when he needed feeding). Looking around, Nico wasn't even sure if this was the Upper East Side. He remembered Percy's neighbourhood being infinitely classier than this. Nico shoved his hands deeper into the pockets of his jeans and hurried forwards. He had visited Percy once using the subway. Maybe he could find a subway station and… And what? He didn't have any mortal money. At least the subway would tell him where in Hades he had landed, he supposed.

A footstep that wasn't his splashing into a shallow puddle made him stop dead. Hello, ADHD reflexes. That's where you've been hiding. He glanced over his shoulder. Four men were following him. Smart move, wandering around in a big city at night, by himself, looking lost and like he didn't belong. Of course that was going to attract attention. Bad attention. Hey, at least they looked mortal enough. Then again, with monsters you could never tell. When he stopped, they stopped. They were muttering amongst themselves. One laughed.

It was too dark to see properly, but Nico was fairly sure he could take them. Monsters were much scarier, after all, but he didn't want to get in a fight with them. With a monster, it was fine for a fight to end in death, hopefully the monster's. With mortals, though, well he couldn't just go around offing them. Even the ones that were about to jump you in the street in the middle of the night and basically acted like total scum. He walked faster than before, bowing his head against the rain, which was getting heavier. He could feel individual drops now instead of just a dampness.

He was just about to turn the corner, hoping that if he could get out of their sight and into the shadows he could get away, when the footsteps behind him broke into a run. He was grabbed by the collar of his jacket and lifted clean off his feet, then swung hard into the side of a building, driving the air out of his lungs as his back collided with the wall. The short, desperate gasps he was using to try to re-inflate his lungs were made all the harder when he was pinned there with a muscular forearm on his chest, his feet dangling off the floor.

On closer inspection, it looked like they weren't men at all, rather boys. The oldest, holding Nico, couldn't be more than eighteen. He had tried to mask his youth (and the acne that screamed for some Accutane) with a smattering of downy, sandy hairs on his chin and upper lip, along with some more hair that you would have to be ridiculously generous to call a beard covering his cheeks. Nico relaxed. They weren't much older than him

"Well, hi. I'm Nico. Who are you?" he tried as an opener. Over the years, Percy's sarcasm and false bravado seemed to have rubbed off on him more than he had realised. Besides, having seen their ages, he felt a million times more confident.

"Shut up and give us all your money, kid."

Nico stared long and hard at him pityingly. "I'm wandering around the city at night. In the rain. By myself. What about my current circumstances screams filthy rich to you? I don't have any money. Now get off me."

He had been inching his feet up the wall as he'd been talking, pressing the soles of his sneakers flat against the brickwork and bending his knees. Now he used that leverage to push off the wall, leaping forward and headbutting the guy holding him in the nose. Under his forehead, he felt the nose break and the cartilage spread to one side that announced the start of what would be a copious nose bleed.

His captor yelped at least three octaves higher then he would ever admit and staggered backwards, blinded by pain and tears. Nico dropped to the ground catlike, blinking away pain of his own. Well, that hurt like a son of a bitch when you didn't have a helmet on.

Mid-blink, he missed the first high-top sneaker whistling towards him, but felt the pain explode in his kneecap. His headache was forgotten as he fell back against the wall, twisting awkwardly sideways to avoid another blow and get to his feet, limping slightly. The guy with the broken nose had his hands cupped over his face as blood oozed sluggishly from between his fingers. He was standing to one side. The small part of his face that Nico could see beneath those fingers was not very happy.

Nico parried an uppercut to his gut with his elbow and lashed out with a roundhouse kick, but his damaged knee buckled underneath him and the kick didn't land as well as he'd hoped. It pushed one of the guys back out of the semi-circle around him, though, so he ran for it, squeezing past them and almost making it into a full sprint when he was tackled from behind, bringing him hard to the sidewalk.

Again, he felt the breath leave him and he couldn't call out, then he was spun onto his back and punched hard in the face. His head snapped to the left and he was suddenly being kicked in the ribs from both sides. He felt a hand plunge into the pocket of his jeans, almost tearing them down, and a fist closed around the drachma and dragged them out. Next they tore open the aviation jacket and discovered his sheathed sword. There was laughter and Nico wondered what it was they were seeing his sword as through the Mist. Probably something pathetic, like a catapult or something. The kicking stopped and Nico moaned, painfully rolling onto his side and then clambering up onto all fours, wheezing and coughing.

"What's this?" Bloody Nose demanded, shoving the gold coins under Nico's nose. He was talking thickly, his voice nasally and distorted by his warped nose. "You Canadian or something?"

"Nah, I'm from Greece," Nico gasped out, the only one present to appreciate the joke, of course.

Bloody Nose kicked him in the stomach and he crashed to the ground again. "That's for my nose, asshole. And you don't sound Greek," he said, spitting red-tinged spit onto Nico's neck. Nico felt it run viscously onto the sidewalk next to his face. Wow. If his dad ever found out about this, these guys were not in for a happy afterlife.

"You're welcome," Nico returned, groaning.

"What's this?" one of them asked. "Aren't you a little old to be playing with dolls?"

Nico suddenly realised that he couldn't feel the Hades figurine in his pocket anymore and his head snapped up. "Give that back," he spat, hauling himself to his knees with shaking arms. He was glaring at the douche with the statuette, but they just laughed at him. No one at Camp would ever laugh at Nico if he looked at them like that. He hadn't even felt them take it, but they had Bianca's last gift to him. He carried it everywhere as a kind of talisman and was not about to lose it now. He dragged himself back to his feet and balled his fists at his side, anger pulsing through his head.

"Or what?" Bloody Nose taunted, shoving Nico in the chest then grabbing a fistful of his shirt. "What are you going to do if we don't give back your dolly?"

Nico lashed out, breaking the grasp on his shirt with one hand and using the other to punch his opponent in his already-broken nose. Bloody Nose staggered backwards, cursing, but the other three advanced. Nico curled his lip and flicked his wrist. The paving stone right in front of Bloody Nose erupted from the ground, split in two. Each piece flew in a different direction, one smashing into a Dumpster and denting it so badly that trash spilled out the top.

Bloody Nose had fallen onto his butt, his feet on the gap where the paving stone had been. He dropped the drachma in shock, and they skittered, bouncing and jingling, down the sidewalk. The hardcore began to churn in the hole and the three advancing behind Nico started to back off. The cement turned to powder, revealing bare soil beneath which rose up like an angry mouth, clamping Bloody Nose mid-calf and sucking him towards the hole. Terrified he tried to scramble out, but the hold of the earth was too great. He was knee-deep and sinking fast. Nico's face was tight with fury, his nails digging so hard into his palms that his knuckles had gone white.

"Help!" Bloody Nose shrieked at his cronies as the dirt reached his waist. His companion dropped Hades and ran towards him just as other paving slabs began to rise from their foundations just moments before, flying through the air like deadly, square Frisbees. "Help me, please help me, I don't want to die, help me please, please…"

Nico sneered in disgust at the pathetic display of fear in front of him. Two of the gang shoved past him as they fled. The third, the one that had been taunting him with Hades, was trying to drag Bloody Nose out of the middle of the sidewalk, who had sunk up to his armpits and was clawing the slick paving slabs with one hand, splintering his fingernails. The other was entangled in his friend's coat. The Hades statuette had been dropped near Nico's feet. Bloody Nose was alternating between screaming and sobbing, his face was shining with blood, tears and catarrh as he begged his friend to save him.

Nico sighed disgustedly and unballed his fists. The shifting earth stopped as he bent to retrieve Hades, rolling his eyes as he dried the statuette on his shirt and returned it to his pocket. He took a step forwards to retrieve the fallen drachma and the friend yelped, immediately disentangled himself from Bloody Nose and took off at a sprint. As Nico collected the last of his money, Bloody Nose had managed to claw himself back out so that he was only waist deep. He was still sobbing, gasping and choking.

"Help me, please…" he said, his upper body lying flat on the sidewalk.

Nico cocked his head at him. "Seriously?"

"Who are you?" Bloody Nose asked, a slight sense of awe breaking into his fearful tone.

"I'm Nico di Angelo. And I was the wrong guy to try and mug," he said, turning on his heel and vanishing into the shadows.

Ten minutes later, he was sitting in the Jackson-Blofis living room with one icepack on his face and another on his knee. Sally had a washcloth and a bowl of warm water with antiseptic and was dabbing at the graze on his chin from when he had hit the sidewalk when Percy came in, perfectly dry despite the weather, and narrowly prevented himself from tossing his bag onto the chair Nico was in. He realised just in time that the chair was occupied and threw his bag onto the couch instead.

"What did you do now?" Percy asked dryly, flinging himself down onto the couch opposite Nico.

"Nico got mugged," Sally told him concernedly. "Four boys jumped him a couple of blocks over."

"Did they take anything?" Percy asked.

Nico only cocked the eyebrow not obscured by the icepack at his cousin accusatorily, and Percy laughed.

"Yeah. Stupid question, huh?"