Chapter Text
It starts like any other day in the Hephaestus cabin, pretty fricken awesome. In Leo’s opinion of course, but he doesn’t see who would disagree. Most of the cabin is gathered in the forges, one week into the summer and the part-time campers are eager to test out the ideas they’ve cultivated over the years.
Leo, however, was working on one of his trickiest projects yet, and it just so happened to be the size of a finger nail. Not yet of course, that was the goal. So far the smallest he can make the device is the size of a head. Which isn’t helpful.
What is he trying to make? A chip that blocks the part of the cellular signal that sifts the mist. His hope is that if it works how it’s meant to then campers can bring him technology to modify it with, and boom! No more monster-alerting phones!
At the moment in the forge all that can be heard is the grinding and sparking of campers at work. It’s a rare occurrence and even rarer to last this long, but Leo is too focused to break the silence himself.
It just so happens that Harley, from his spot making a new trap for Capture the Flag, breaks the silence for him, “If you could meet anyone from history for a day, who would it be?”
Hypotheticals were common in the forge, and could very quickly get out of hand. Sometimes the hypotheticals even wound up becoming reality, but that almost never ended well.
Nyssa answers first, “Talos, not only is he a wicked inventor but he was an automaton himself. It would be interesting to pick him apart.” Leo nods along, thinking of all of the new ideas he could get from that experience.
“Benjamin Franklin! What– for a child of Athena he was pretty cool!” One camper that Leo doesn’t remember the name of shouts from their spot across the forge.
Christopher is next from his spot beside Leo, “Archimedes, whatcha thinking Leo?”
Leo shrugs for a moment before throwing out his personal hero, “Probably Daedalus.”
Almost immediately the forge quiets, not completely–it wouldn’t be the forge if it was ever quiet. But the noise went down enough that Leo looked up to find most of the inhabitants looking at him.
Shane shakes his head before getting back to work, “Jeez Leo, I always forget you weren’t around for that.” His words get everyone back to work, but it’s not as productive as before, everyone seems to have an ear on the new turn of conversation.
“Around for what?” Leo’s own hands slow on disassembling his project so he can make it smaller.
“The summer with Quintus.”
“Quintus? Was he another camper?”
Nyssa snorts, “No he was a camp director, Mrs O’Leary was a gift to Percy and Annabeth’s old laptop was her gift. The rest of us just got the trauma dump afterwards.”
“After what?” Now Leo’s hands have stilled on his project and his full attention was on Nyssa, Annabeth’s laptop, while it worked, was a thing from his dreams. He wishes she still had it, if only so he could take it apart and figure out what made it monster-proof.
“After the Labyrinth," Christopher supplies, “Percy and Annabeth went through it in there, ‘specially with Nico and Minos at their throats for most of it.”
“Nico hated Percy—wait scratch that, the Labyrinth?” Sure the idea of Nico, who has done a lot for Percy, ever hating the guy was an insane thought, but the Labyrinth? That was epic.
“Yeah, turns out there’s an entrance inside camp. Luke's army tried to use it, but we had Quintus so it was pretty much useless.”
“Dude, why have I never heard about this? How can I get to the entrance?”
Harley shakes his head incessantly, “No–nope, we aren’t really supposed to go. People who have either gone crazy or are missing.”
“Or Percy and Annabeth”
“Or Nico”
“Isn’t he pretty insane though?”
“Nico’s perfectly fine, but army? Luke? Who the heck is Quintus? You guys are giving me nothing?” Leo takes some scrap metal and absentmindedly fiddles with it while looking expectantly at his cabinmates for the details of one of the coolest stories he’s ever heard.
Nyssa winces, “Yeah it was during the titan war so… yeah, but quintus kinda was Daedalus.”
Harley jumps up excitedly, “Yeah it was his fifth body!”
Leo blinks at the kid for a second, “Fifth body? Daedalus?”
“Daedalus discovered that he could technically avoid death by transferring his consciousness to automatons he made.”
“Dude really? So where’s he now then?”
“Uh, Leo he died in the battle. Hence why Annabeth had his laptop?”
Leo pauses, “You’re telling me that not only did I miss meeting Daedalus but I also had his laptop on my ship and didn’t take advantage of it? Or even know it?”
“Sorry?” Shane says and just like that everyone switches their switch and gets back to work, leaving Leo standing, dumbstruck in the middle of the forge. He shakes his head,unbelieving and gets back to his project.