~ANNABETH~
~Annabeth~As soon as the image disappeared I felt a small hand on my shoe. I looked down to see Misty trying to climb up my leg.
"Why does she like climbing people?" I questioned Percy. A smile spread across his face.
"Not from me, because I totally never tried to climb people and pretend to be Godzilla when I was little." I snorted and picked Misty up. Percy had had most of the say in choosing her name, but I was fine with that. I wanted another that I could name anyway.
Percy wandered over to the kitchen and but cheese into a hot dog bun and started eating it. I looked at him strangely.
"What?" He asked with his mouth full. I shook my head in dismissal and pulled out some baby food for Misty. I had already eaten.
Misty was a good baby; she never cried excessively or refused things we gave her. That made it easy to have her finish her lunch, even though Percy kept insisting we let her try blue pancakes. What if she choked? Not risking that yet. She gets mush until she at least has teeth.
Percy wandered over and sat on the couch as I cleaned up the goop off of Misty and washed everything we had dirtied in the sink.
I looked over at Percy sadly. He was just sitting there, staring into space. Before we moved, he wouldn't have been caught dead doing something like this. As much as I hated to say it, he had put on some weight since the baby. I mean, so did I, but that doesn't count because I was carrying her.
About half an hour later the doorbell rang. Percy jumped up to get the door and Misty scampered away towards the bedroom. I followed Percy and stood next to him as he opened it. Hazel stood smiling as big as ever at us.
Her hair was less curly and her face had narrowed. Her eyes had lost some of their gold tint, as well as narrowing. She had gotten a lot taller, considering the last time we saw her she was fifteen. We were almost immediately wrapped in hugs.
"Hi, Hazel." I said after she let us go as Percy beckoned her into the room. She grinned at us and looked around.
"Hi. I can't believe I'm actually seeing you again. I never thought..." Her voice trailed off as she wandered further into the living room.
"You live really close." Percy commented.
"Well, the address you had was actually for where I work, but I guess I do." I noticed that Hazel's cute 1920's New Orleans accent was pretty much completely gone.
"What's your job?" I ventured.
"You'd laugh." The way she bit the inside of her mouth told me we probably would.
"Tell us anyway." Percy smirked.
"I do the graphics coding for video games. Don't judge me."
Percy and I looked at each other, then back to her, "Seriously?"
"We're not laughing. I probably couldn't code a fly." I remarked.
Hazel smirked, "Actually smaller things are harder because you have- never mind..."
"What are you working on?" Percy seemed really interested in her work. I supposed it was kind of cool, considering she'd come from a time where there weren't even computers.
"Well, I'm not supposed to tell, but I guess I can spill if you swear to keep your mouth shut." Percy nodded adamantly. "It's this new game, the main one I'm working on that doesn't have a name yet, about basically a robot factory of realistic people type drones that are sort of slaves and they're just mass produced and sold off and one of them is accidentally made with emotions and they release her and anything else I say will be spoilers." She spoke really quickly so I had a hard time following.
"That sounds so awesome!" Percy grinned, his eyes flashing with excitement like he was a little kid on Christmas morning.
"If you think THAT'S awesome, wait until you see this!"
She pulled a little metal square out of her pocket no bigger than my palm and opened it up into a rectangle. She put her thumb on a black infrared scanner and held it there as the plate changed color. As she did, a faint blue light started to glow from an unseen light source somewhere in the device. It grew brighter and spread in a straight line up about a foot and stopped as if it had hit a wall when there was nothing there but thin air. The line opened up in a fan and lines of longitude and latitude appeared on it. In those boxes, strange unlabeled icons for apps I didn't recognize glowed in three dimensions. Hazel tapped one that looked like three cubes and, much to my surprise, they sunk into the background and disappeared into the air as the scene changed. The glowing holographic scream read 'Holograph Square'.
Hazel laughed, "I know. Very original name. I'm not creative, okay?"
Percy and I stared in awe, "You made this?"
Hazel nodded, "Its a little buggy, and it makes the air really cold above it, but I think it's pretty good." She said it like she was showing us a toaster.
"Hazel, this is incredible." I was completely dumbfounded as to how it worked, so I asked and got a complicated answer about making light molecules smaller than gas molecules or something. It made no sense to me, which I didn't admit very often, so I let it go.
Just as Hazel put it away, Misty waddled out, "Blue?"
I was about to go to tell her to go back to bed when Hazel squealed in my ear, "You didn't tell me you had a kid!" She rushed up to our confused looking child and knelt down in front of her, introducing herself as 'Auntie Hazel'. Percy and I snickered as Misty tried to climb up Hazel's face.
They played for a while while Percy and I watched. I wasn't sure about him, but I was curious how Hazel had gone from not knowing what a dishwasher was to making holographic metal plates. It just didn't make sense to me.
She finally stood, holding our daughter, and walked over to us.
"I wish I could go back in time..." she sighed.
"Why?" Percy and I asked at the same time. We glanced at each other, then back to Hazel.
"It was simpler. I miss it, believe it or not. As much as I love my life now, I always wonder what it would have been like if I hadn't died. Even if I wasn't a demigod." Her eyes filled with longing and I could tell this wasn't a simple daydream. If she could, she would go back and live her life there.
"Is that why you know so much about technology and stuff?" I guessed, "Because you, I don't know, want to build a time machine?"
She locked eyes with me, "Legally, I'm supposed to deny that time travel is possible." She bit her lip.
"Oh my gods! So it is real!"
"I never told you." She looked around like we were being spied on. Maybe we were. "I think I've got it." She whispered, "But I want to get everyone together to find out."
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