Splitting a Soul~Chapter 2

After practice, I headed over to the showers to wash up. I smelled like dirt, sea water, and sweat; a strange combination that I had gotten strangely used to after the past few months. However, that didn’t mean I enjoyed it and was always in a rush to wash it off. Even if the sun was completely up by now and the camp was getting into their daily schedule, the camp was still freezing cold even with the magical barrier. The showers also seemed to be the only part of the camp that hadn’t been updated over the hundreds of years the camp was in existence. That meant that as soon as I was finished, I made a mad dash for my clothes to get dressed, then headed into my cabin and wrapped myself in a blanket.

I sat there for awhile as I dried off, but finally managed to pull myself out of bed and finished packing to go home. While most campers were staying at the camp, there were others that did like to visit their families for certain holidays. Sure it was dangerous for so many demigods to leave camp on the same day, but at the same time with so many demigods in one place, smaller monsters tended to stay away. Just then all the lanterns in my room flickered and seemed to be pulled toward the door just as a knock came.

“Come in,” I called and the door opened slowly. Kimi entered the room with a small blue suitcase. She was also in her regular Camp Half-Blood shirt and a medium length black skirt. The colors reminded me of last Halloween, where she visited all the cabins dressed as a witch and me as a zombie. It was fun, but our simple costumes were nothing compared to the Hephaestus cabin, which made entire robot suits as their costumes. At one point, a werewolf had gotten into the camp somehow and everyone was complimenting it on how real it looked…until it tried to eat a few people.

“I’m all packed up,” Kimi said, raising her bag in front of her as proof to me that she was telling the truth. It was kind of cute as she held it with a big smile on her face. “So what time are we leaving for the train station?”

“By any chance are you excited?” I asked her raising an eyebrow. A small blush appeared on her face and she put the bag back on the floor. She then turned her head away really fast.

“It’s just that I’ve never really been to a family dinner before and I’ve never met your family before. I don’t know what to expect,” Kimi said with a smile. “Is the rest of your family anything like you? I mean you are normally pretty calm and level headed.”

“Well, you’ll see when we get there I guess. But we won’t leave for the city for another few hours so you’ll have to wait,” I told her, and she seemed a bit disappointed. But she gave me a small smile and a nod in understanding.

“Alright, I guess I’ll see you later,” she told me before grabbing her bag and leaving out the front door. I wondered how she wasn’t cold, as she only had on a t-shirt, but I figured it had something to do with her fiery nature.

The rest of the day seemed to go by pretty smoothly. Thresh from the Ares cabin was teaching sword fighting that day, which he defined as beating up everyone scheduled for sword fighting. Luckily thanks to all the extra training I’d been given, he very rarely picked me to spar with. The only times he did was when there were traps set up to through me off. One time I went up against him and found out that he had planted land under the field that would shock those that stepped on them. I didn’t like fighting him regardless, as he reminded me too much of Blackbeard; a bloodthirsty pirate I was forced to fight last summer. I wasn’t even the one to ultimately beat him; the Sirens were the ones that eventually finished the fight.

After practice, I moved on to lunch. It was pretty crowded, especially considering it was the time of year when most kids went home. A lot had stayed because of the weird weather patterns growing all over the country, as the Elementals seemed to become more violent. I finished my grilled cheese sandwich and walked over to the fire and scrapped the crust into it.

“I offer these to you father. I just hope you’ll be watching over me during my vacation,” I thought and the smell of burning crust filled the air. All of a sudden the voice of the wine god echoed around the camp. Being a god, he never used the loud speaker. I think it was just his way of showing off or maybe he liked the sound of his voice.

“Attention campers, attention campers; all those leaving the camp today should report to the Delphi Strawberry Company vans. Everyone else…do whatever it is your doing, just as long as it doesn’t bother me. Don’t think I don’t know who it was that replaced my mattress with a jell-o mold,” Dionysus said angrily. Meanwhile, two kids over at the Hermes table gave each other a high five. I then watched as two vines sprung from the wooden benches and wrapped the campers together.

“Anyway, that is all. Don’t be late or Argus will leave without you and I wouldn’t want any extra campers left behind. That is all.”

A few campers got up from their tables and quickly tossed their food scraps into the fire. They then headed out and I followed as well, making a quick stop at my cabin to pick up my bag. There was a large group of demigods waiting by the vans and I wondered if Argus would be the only one driving or if everyone would fit.

“Name please,” came a voice from next to me. I turned my head to find Steven Scale looking at me with a check list in hand. He gave me an irritated look before asking again. Most of the camp found him annoying because of his constant need for balance, but I guess that can happen when you’re a child of Nemesis. “Name?”

“Dude, I’ve been here for almost half a year. You know my name,” I told him, and it was true. Being the only member of my cabin, he would walk up to me and almost force me to sit at one end of the table so everything was symmetrical. Sometimes I would sit on the side of the table just to mess with him. Steven on the other hand just shot me a look.

“Name please!” he asked me again, so I finally gave up.

“Ashton Faith!” I told him and he marked it on his check board. “Why do you have to make everything so complicated?”

“Just doing my job, balance is important after all so I need to know who is leaving and who isn’t. No if you’ll excuse me,” he said without finishing his sentence and moved on to the next person who just so happened to be Kimi.

“Name please,” he repeated.

“Kimi,” she replied.

“Last name?” he asked her, but that only seemed to make Kimi feel uncomfortable. Considering she didn’t have a last name to speak of, it was understandable. She turned her head away from the kid slowly.

“I don’t have one,” she said quietly.

“Oh, right here,” he said, making a mark on his paper and moving on. I walked over and placed my arm around her.

“Hey, don’t let that guy get you down. This is going to be a fun vacation that you’ll remember for a long time,” I told her and that at least seemed to cheer her up. We climbed into one of the vans and before long we were headed into the city to grab a train. As soon as we left the borders of the camp, I hoped that it would really be as fun as I hoped. These days, fun was something that was becoming hard to come by.