The Sea of Monsters (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #2)

by Rick Riordan

“I…I am a freak?” he asked me. “No,” I promised, gritting my teeth. “Matt Sloan is the freak.” Tyson sniffled. “You are a good friend.

I love Tyson

“Laistrygonians. The monsters in the gym. They’re a race of giant cannibals who live in the far north. Odysseus ran into them once, but I’ve never seen them as far south as New York before.” “Laistry—I can’t even say that. What would you call them in English?” She thought about it for a moment. “Canadians,”

The bull must’ve been as surprised as I was, because before it could unleash a second blast, Tyson balled his fists and slammed them into the bull’s face. “BAD COW!”

Ever come home and found your room messed up? Like some helpful person (hi, Mom) has tried to “clean” it, and suddenly you can’t find anything?

Somebody had messed with my favorite place in the world, and I was not…well, a happy camper.

As soon as we saw him, Tyson froze. “Pony!” he cried in total rapture. Chiron turned, looking offended. “I beg your pardon?”

“I’ll be right over here, big guy,” I promised. “Don’t worry. We’ll find you a good place to sleep tonight.” Tyson nodded. “I believe you. You are my friend.”

“I am a monster.” “Don’t say that.” “It is okay. I will be a good monster. Then you will not have to be mad.”

Tyson 😭

Tantalus made a wild grab, but the marshmallow committed suicide, diving into the flames.

“Daddy always cared for m-me,” he sniffled. “Now…I think he was mean to have a Cyclops boy. I should not have been born.”

screaming, crying, throwing up 😭

But whenever Annabeth talked about the time she’d spent with them, I kind of felt…I don’t know. Uncomfortable? No. That’s not the word. The word was jealous.

“Powdered donuts,” Tyson said earnestly. “I will look for powdered donuts in the wilderness.” He headed outside and started calling, “Here, donuts!”

“Percy, you know who you remind me of most? Thalia. You guys are so much alike it’s scary. I mean, either you would’ve been best friends or you would’ve strangled each other.”

“My fatal flaw. That’s what the Sirens showed me. My fatal flaw is hubris.”

“Hubris means deadly pride, Percy. Thinking you can do things better than anyone else…even the gods.” “You feel that way?” She looked down. “Don’t you ever feel like, what if the world really is messed up? What if we could do it all over again from scratch? No more war. Nobody homeless. No more summer reading homework.” “I’m listening.” “I mean, the West represents a lot of the best things mankind ever did—that’s why the fire is still burning. That’s why Olympus is still around. But sometimes you just see the bad stuff, you know? And you start thinking the way Luke does: ‘If I could tear this all down, I would do it better.’ Don’t you ever feel that way? Like you could do a better job if you ran the world?”

We only came close to dying six or seven times, which I thought was pretty good. Once, I lost my grip and I found myself dangling by one hand from a ledge fifty feet above the rocky surf. But I found another handhold and kept climbing. A minute later Annabeth hit a slippery patch of moss and her foot slipped. Fortunately, she found something else to put it against. Unfortunately, that something was my face.

“Just don’t let go!” Annabeth said, standing invisibly somewhere off to my right. That was easy for her to say. She wasn’t hanging upside down from the belly of a sheep.

Now, the “Nobody” thing wouldn’t have made sense to anybody, but Annabeth had explained to me that it was the name Odysseus had used to trick Polyphemus centuries ago, right before he poked the Cyclops’s eye out with a large hot stick.

Apparently, he didn’t even stop to consider that Annabeth’s voice was female, whereas the first Nobody had been male. On the other hand, he’d wanted to marry Grover, so he couldn’t have been all that bright about the whole male/female thing.

The Cyclops sounded so heartbroken, just like…like Tyson.

But Polyphemus sobbed…and for the first time it sank in that he was a son of Poseidon, too. Like Tyson. Like me. How could I just kill him in cold blood?

“Tyson, thank the gods. Annabeth is hurt!” “You thank the gods she is hurt?” he asked, puzzled.

“Dude!” the centaur groaned, almost buckling under Tyson’s weight. “Do the words ‘low-carb diet’ mean anything to you?”

“Humans don’t exist on the same level as the immortals. They can’t even be hurt by our weapons. But you, Percy—you are part god, part human. You live in both worlds. You can be harmed by both, and you can affect both. That’s what makes heroes so special. You carry the hopes of humanity into the realm of the eternal. Monsters never die. They are reborn from the chaos and barbarism that is always bubbling underneath civilization, the very stuff that makes Kronos stronger. They must be defeated again and again, kept at bay. Heroes embody that struggle. You fight the battles humanity must win, every generation, in order to stay human. Do you understand?”

“Percy,” Chiron said, his voice impossibly soft. “The titan Kronos is my father.”

“Do you ever feel your father abandoned you, Percy?” Oh, man.

“He sent you to help me. Just what I asked for.” I blinked. “You asked Poseidon for…me?” “For a friend,” Tyson said, twisting his shirt in his hands. “Young Cyclopes grow up alone on the streets, learn to make things out of scraps. Learn to survive.”

“Brother!” I said, loud enough for everybody to hear. “Tyson, my baby brother.”