GG, Kronos, But I Have Foresight

Chapter 2 - Nancy Bobofit is Not the Best Roommate

Okay, okay, okay, step one - don't panic. Step one failed. Step two... what was step two? I didn't have a step two. I didn't have a step two. Step three - panic some more. At least I was able to pull that one off. Step four - Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out.

"YAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!" I howled, punching the makeup desk's oaken surface. My knuckles throbbed, and I rubbed them gingerly in response. In hindsight, perhaps slamming a twelve-year-old, feminine fist into a hard surface wasn't the best of ideas. Then again, I wasn't exactly well-known for my good ideas, and that was before I was turned into a tween girl.

Tween... Oh, shit. I'm gonna have to go through puberty again, aren't I?

I'm gonna have to go through puberty again.

I'M GONNA HAVE TO GO THROUGH PERIODS.

"YAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!"

"You done now?" Nancy asked dryly, blowing a pink Double Bubble bubble.

Panting, I clutched my still-aching chest and plopped myself down on the floor. "Yeah, I'm done now. Oh, wait. YAAAAAAAARGH! Okay, now I'm done."

"So what was that about, weirdo?" the redhead asked casually. She pulled out her cell phone, her thumbs flying over the keys. I blinked at that. Were kids at Yancy Academy allowed to have cell phones? I had no idea. I also had to blink at just how ridiculously crappy the cell phones looked. These were not your 2017 smartphones, people. "I am definitely texting all my friends about this, and I'd like some reasons as to why my annoying dormie suddenly freaked."

"You're too young to understand," I quipped, groaning as I picked myself off the floor. Now that I was over freaking out, there was only one thing left to do: head to the bathroom.

"Bitch, your birthday's in November. Mine's in June. I'm way older than you."

I paused with my hand halfway to the door. I was younger than Nancy Bobofit in this universe!? I threw my hands up to the sky and glared. "Aw, what? Come on, seriously?"

"Yes," Nancy drawled. "And, where are you going?"

"Bathroom." I marched out the door. Moments passed, and I poked my head back into the room. "Um, where exactly are the bathrooms again?"

Apparently the bathrooms were not that far from our dorm room, which was pretty lucky. I hurried across the marble floor of Yancy Academy's hallways and came to a stop at the bathrooms after making one right turn and jogging down the stairs. I definitely didn't trip a couple times due to my misplaced center of gravity. I also definitely didn't use the wall to keep my balance the rest of the way. I did, however, pause and stare at the entrance to the girl's bathroom for about five minutes when I finally arrived.

My skin crawled. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. Dare I step foot in the one place forbidden to all men for centuries? The garden of femininity, the sacred trust of solitude and peace from perverts?

I took a nervous step forward. Every atom in my body screamed, and I stopped.

Come on, dude, I told myself in a pathetically whiny voice. If you don't take this chance now, you'll never be able to do it again!

My fists shaking by my side, I lifted a trembling foot high into the air. I brought it down hard across the threshold of the entrance, my black school shoes thudding against white-and-blue tiles. Gulping, I lifted my other foot and set it down ahead of the first. Lift, fall, lift, fall. My fists were clenched so tightly that my knuckles were turning white, but at last, a giddy feeling swept over me. I'd done it! I'd entered the girls' bathroom!

I rushed around the corner, skidded to a stop in front of the mirror, shrugged off the straps keeping up the black tank top-ish part of the uniform, and whipped off my baggy, white hand-me-down shirt.

Hazel eyes blinked.

"...This is not as fulfilling as I imagined it would be," I thought aloud, "but I am strangely okay with this."

I wasn't exactly what one would consider pretty. My new feminine body had a pretty average build for being in the tween years. Despite the boring white bra which covered my chest (did my girl side not understand what water and Murphy's Law did to white clothing?), I could tell that her - no, my breasts were on the smaller side. My hourglass figure wasn't quite defined yet, but it was getting there.

Man. It felt really weird to be thinking those thoughts. Like, really weird. But, like I'd said, now that my initial freak out was over? Yeah. I was... kind of alright with this. I wouldn't say comfortable - not by leagues. Just, alright. Adjusted. Honestly, I was just super thankful I hadn't turned out to be Mary Sue-beautiful. That would've made things a little awkward. Somehow being so average, just like in my past body, made things a little easier to cope with. It was true that I might have to deal with annoying looks from men for the foreseeable future, but that wasn't - oh, no, wait, I was not tempting fate. No, siree.

Thunder rumbled high above the rooftops of Yancy Academy.

Fuck.

I shrugged my clothes on, my curiosity about my own body satiated. I was just about to step out of the bathroom when I felt a clenching below my stomach that was both familiar and unfamiliar. I froze in horror and sloooowly turned to look at the bathroom stalls.
Di immortales. How was I supposed to do this?

~o~

Nancy Bobofit looked up from her phone, a curious frown on her face as she regarded my disheveled form stumbling into our dorm room. My face was pale, I was clutching my stomach, and my entire body was trembling.

"So, care if I ask what took you an hour in the bathroom?" she asked, line of sight returning to the soft glow of her phone screen.

I shuddered in horror. "A Thing Man Was Not Meant to Know. In every sense of the phrase."

"By the way, I thought you might care to know," Nancy added as I climbed the ladder to the top bunk - which was apparently mine - with a nasty shudder, "but I stuffed a lot of your clothes with ketchup sandwiches."

Anger washed over me and caused me to momentarily forget about my horrific attempt at utilizing different plumbing. I lowered my head over the edge of the top bunk to glare down at Nancy, who seemed altogether too pleased with herself. "WHY!?" I demanded, my voice cracking. "Just... why!?"

"Because I was bored."

"Aw, shit, I don't even have a good response to that." I pulled myself up and collapsed in exhaustion on my hard bed, which just an hour before had broken my fall into this messed-up alternate world. "I'm too tired for this bullcrap."

I closed my eyes, thinking about things. If I was forced to be in Yancy Academy with a twelve-year-old Nancy, that meant I was likely supposed to live through the events of at least the first PJO book. But what was I supposed to do? I growled angrily. Everyone knew that messing with prophecies could land you in some serious trouble, and wouldn't avert them anyway. Was I meant to eventually join forces with Percy and the gang? Could I even do anything if I did? Was I human, or was I demigod? Or was I something even stranger?

After some time, I finally rolled over and sighed. First things first - I was going to have to get those clothes washed now, wasn't I? Yeah, I was. I didn't want to have to spend the entire rest of my school year in white shirts stained with red ketchup. Hopefully Nancy had done it recently enough that I could still bleach out most of the stains. Growling about school bullies and unfair situations, I heaved myself over the edge of the bed, landed badly on my foot again, and limped over to my closet.

Well, I assumed it was my closet, at least. As I'd described earlier, there were only two in the room, and one of them had all sorts of mismatched belongings in it. I was fairly positive the female version of me wasn't a kleptomaniac, which meant I had the cleaner closet.

At least one version of me had some sense of order about their sleeping quarters.

Sighing, I opened my closet and winced at the amount of ketchup stains that were covering the shirts. Yeah, that was a lot of sandwiches. Nancy must've raided the kitchen for all of this. I grabbed all of the shirts that were stained, shook out the sandwiches that were somehow lodged into them, and strode out of the room after gaining directions to the school laundry. I hummed something inspiring to myself, one of my favorite tracks from My Hero Academia. Music always helped keep my mind off things when they went badly, and it was no different here. The music helped calm my nerves, though my anger and annoyance at Nancy and at being in this whole situation in general weren't quelled very much.

Actually, the closer I walked to the laundry room, the angrier I found myself getting, despite the music.

I'd been taken unwillingly from my home. I'd lost the ability to see my family again, unless they were somehow still existing in this alternate world. And I hadn't even met the person or thing that had done it all. Hell, I hadn't even been told what it was that I was supposed to do here! Was there some divine task assigned to me? Or were the gods just bored and decided to pull me here for fun, like Nancy with her sandwiches? Was it even the gods who had brought me here?

I had millions of questions and not a single answer, and I was pissed. Off.

Upon finally reaching the laundry room, I noticed that there was a group of four girls, all wearing the same uniform as me, waiting inside, around the lines of washers and dryers. I spared them a frown as I walked by and shrugged my gaggle of stained shirts into a more comfortable spot over my arm. I opened up an empty washer, dumped my load inside it, added some bleach, and set it to wash them. I waited impatiently, all the while feeling the girls' eyes on me.

"So, Eve has finally snapped, has she?" one of them (I had no idea who) snickered behind my back.

Nancy Bobofit's statement came back to mind: I'm definitely texting all my friends about this.
I was gonna kill her.

There was a chuckle from a different girl - a higher-pitched voice, a crueller voice. "Yeah, but I mean, it's not like we all didn't see it coming. She got in here because she kept claiming that she saw monsters everywhere, after all. It was only a matter of time."

"Yelling her head off like a lunatic," giggled someone else. My shoulders shook. "Must have been so scary, seeing ghosts and goblins in her dorm room."

I unclenched my fist long enough to grab some of my shirt and scrunch it up inside my hand. What had Eve gone through in her past life? I had no idea, but hearing these girls make fun of her like this - make fun of me - was setting my blood to boil. And furthermore, was Eve an actual person or were these all just memories created by the Mist?

I calmed down somewhat. Yeah, that was probably it. It was like that thing with everyone forgetting about Mrs. Dodds when Percy decapitated her in canon - I'd bet that these memories everyone has of Eve are just false ones conceived from a prehistorical magic.
Beyond the laundry room, I heard footsteps and two boys talking. Some of the footsteps were off-beat, like the person making them was limp or something.

"If I were her," someone said, "instead of being insane all my life, I'd have just jumped off the nearest rooftop."

I gritted my teeth. That was it.

"You know, telling someone to commit suicide is a federal offense," I growled, turning around and glaring at the four girls who had been laughing behind my back. They smirked at themselves and rolled their eyes, and my eyes narrowed. "I'd suggest that next time, you think before you speak. If I actually were to jump off a rooftop, you'd be thrown in jail."

One of them, a brunette with a freckly face and a mean smile, shook her head. "I'm afraid not, Monster Whisperer. See, I didn't actually tell you to do anything."

My fists shook. "You were clearly insinuating it," I hissed. I was so fed up with everything that I couldn't stand it.

"What are you gonna do about it, freak?" one of the brunette's friends, a tall blonde, asked cheekily.

I glowered at them, and started to raise my fist, but I hesitated. Was I really about to punch these people? They were just bullies. They didn't deserve my time of day. They were just human, and humans are mean to each other. It's just a natural law of the universe. Besides, most of my rage wasn't even directed at them.

I lowered my fist, disgusted with myself as much as them, and turned to glare daggers at my washing machine. "Just leave me alone."

The footsteps from earlier drew close and louder. "Is everything alright here, girls?"

Blinking, I raised my head to look at the entrance to the laundry room, where two kids who were about my new age stood with passive expressions. One of them, the boy with the crutches, had acne and just a few whisps of hair on his chin. He looked nervous, and his lower lip was trembling, but he was resolute as he frowned at the girls who'd been trying to egg me on. He had a baseball cap on his head. Beside him was a boy with a Mediterranean complexion, who would've looked pretty plain had it not been for his unkempt hair, which looked rather strikingly like a surfer's, and his sea green eyes.

My eyes widened.

Beside me, the girls hesitated and looked at each other. Even though Percy and Grover, because that's who these boys had to be, looked pretty weak at the moment, it was clear my bullies liked doing their thing more when other people weren't around. They paused, exchanged looks, and all herded out the door past Percy and Grover.

"We're fine, punks."

"Beat it, Enchilada Boy," the brunette snarked, shoving Grover into the side of the entrance.
He bleated in surprise, and my back stiffened. Dear Lord, that sounded exactly like a goat. I stared as a furious Percy turned swiftly to her.

"Hey, watch where you're going!" the son of Poseidon growled.

"Sorry." She didn't sound sorry.

"It's alright, Perce," Grover reassured his friend as he stood up straight. "She didn't hurt my leg."

Percy's fists lowered. I hadn't even realized he'd raised them. "Oh. Alright, then." The duo turned to me as the quartet of bullies at last vanished from sight. "Hey, there, Eve. You alright?"

I blinked. "You know me?"

"Um..." Percy's brow furrowed. "Kind of? I mean... I think I've seen you in class before, but... I don't know?"

"Wow, great answer," I said flatly. Grover studied me carefully.

"I've never seen you around," he said slowly. "Who are you?"

"Evan -" My voice caught, and I paused, leaving only the slight whirring of the washing machine in the background. That wasn't quite right anymore, was it? The undercover satyr raised his eyebrow as he caught my slip-up. "Er, Eve Gamble." I stuck out a hand. "Nice to meet you."

Grover studied my hand and looked from it, to my face. His nose twitched, and I realized he must have been sniffing to gather my scent. Oh, yeah, that's right! If this was before the museum field trip, then he would've known there was a monster in the school, but had no idea who it was. My face paled for a moment. Oh, crap. It was obvious now that the Mist was messing with people's memories of me, but as a satyr who knew about all of this, he wouldn't have been affected by it like Percy was. I was sure that he was thinking I'm the monster.

"Grover Underwood," Grover said, very uncertainly, as he slowly accepted my handshake. "Nice to meet you, too."

Percy grinned and shot me a winning smile as he firmly shook my hand after Grover. It was a much more confident and friendly shake than Grover's had been. "Percy Jackson. Give us a shout if those girls bother you again."

"Uh, thanks," I said intelligently as my childhood hero grinned, waved, and pulled his best friend back out into the hall.

I swallowed nervously as Grover's studious gaze didn't leave me until they were around the wall.

Oh, yeah, that satyr didn't trust me. He didn't trust me in the slightest.

Greaaaaat.

Notes