The next day, the kids arrive in Denver and decide to contact Chiron back at camp.  Annabeth and Grover teach him how to make a rainbow from a spray hose, because the goddess of rainbows will carry messages for them.

So.  Wait.  Monsters, mythological creatures made of magic, are able to track cell phones as an automatic thing, to the point where they don’t even need to know which phone Percy is using before they’re on him.  However, monsters – mythological creatures made of magic – can’t track a mythological, magic form of communication?

So they make a video call to the camp and get Luke instead of Chiron.  Luke says there’s “an issue” with the campers, but then a truck playing really loud hip-hop parks nearby and they can’t talk over the noise. 

“I’ll take care of it!” Annabeth yelled back, looking very relieved to have an excuse to get out of sight. “Grover, come on!”

 “What?” Grover said. “But—”

 “Give Percy the nozzle and come on!” she ordered.

Grover muttered something about girls being harder to understand than the Oracle at Delphi,

Really, book?  You really want to go there?  You want to use a loud-ass truck interrupting conversations, and turn it into a tired old comment about girls being confusing?  Annabeth wasn’t exactly speaking in tongues or saying one thing and then meaning another.  Would you have said the same thing if Percy was yelling at you over the music?

Luke manages to tell Percy that back at camp, the kids heard about the bolt theft and now the cabins are all fighting according to who they side with, Poseidon or Zeus.  And…so?  It’s kids at camp fighting.  Sure, they’re demigods, but they’re stuck at camp.  It’s not like the gods, who bring down storms and cataclysms when they argue.

While Annabeth is still out of the picture, Luke ‘accidently’ plants the idea that she stole the bolt, and also reinforces the idea that Hades is ultimately behind it.  Then the water shuts off, so they lose the rainbow and can’t talk any more.

The kids go to a diner and try and think of a sob story good enough to get a free meal.  Before they can try, Ares shows up, and he’s every cartoon you’ve ever seen of a biker dude.  Other than that, though, he’s pretty cool.  Very trite, but it’s a trope I actually enjoy, so I don’t mind seeing it repeatedly. 

“That’s right, punk. I heard you broke Clarisse’s spear.”

 “She was asking for it.”

 “Probably. That’s cool. I don’t fight my kids’ fights, you know?

😀

I don’t get the sense that he’s needlessly evil or anything, he’s just a tough, crude, rough kind of fellow.  And since he’s supposed to be the ‘aggression’ side of war, not just war in general, it pretty much fits.

Ares buys them food, then proposes that they should go get his shield for him, since he left it in a water park.  If they get the shield, Ares will get them the rest of the way to California.  To sweeten the pot, he even offers to tell Percy something about his mom.

Since the kids can’t turn down a request from a god (or a free ride), they head out to the park.  They break in and take some park-themed clothes, since all theirs are days old and nasty.  Along the way, the other two fill Percy in on Ares’s “girlfriend,” Aphrodite, and the whole love-triangle going on there.  What was the point of Chiron hijacking the Latin class if Percy couldn’t even learn which god is fucking which other gods?  I mean, the Ares/Aphrodite scandal isn’t exactly a small one; it was in a lot of myths.

He was crippled when he was a baby, thrown off Mount Olympus by Zeus. So he isn’t exactly handsome.

Did…did you just…really?

It would be one thing to say that he’s ugly in addition to being handicapped.  It would be one thing to say that he landed on his face when he got thrown off the mount, and so that sucks.  But to say that he’s ugly because he’s handicapped?  This especially since many myths don’t actually agree on what his deformity is.  In some, he’s got a shriveled foot.  In others, a lame leg.  In still others, it’s a hunchback.  In a few, it’s a marred face.  But, really, in the majority, it has something to do with the lower extremities.

They keep walking and find the Tunnel of Love, an empty bowl-shaped pool with a paddle boat at the bottom.  The shield is in the boat.  Percy wants Annabeth to go with him, and she freaks out because going into the ‘Thrill Ride of Love’ with a boy is embarrassing.  Uh, really?  It’s not like they’re even going on the ride, they’re just crawling into the empty shell of the ride while on a mission.  Priorities, Annabeth.  You’re supposed to be the smart one.

When they touch the shield, it sets off a trap which covers the pool so they can’t get out, somehow broadcasts the whole incident live to Olympus (wtf, no cell phones, but they have magical cable television?), and then releases a bunch of mechanical spiders.  I’m confused; if the point of the trap is to embarrass Aphrodite and Ares, then what are the spiders for?

Percy figures the spiders might have just annoyed gods, but they are very mortal.  He gets Grover, outside the trap, to turn on the water to the pool so that he can direct their boat down the ‘tunnel’ part of the Tunnel of Love, and thus they escape. 

The whole scene is really decent.  It shows Percy and Annabeth working together under stress, and both of them perform admirably.  It’s just that it’s so…I don’t know, unexceptional?  It’s good, but it’s just good, and what else can I say about it?

I’m still confused about the cameras part of the trap, though.  Do the gods have television?  What do they watch all day?  Are there Truman Show-esque channels where they can just watch people?  It’s an interesting concept, gods watching television, but it’s so undeveloped.  With Medusa’s statue business, that seemed pretty organic.  It grew out of something she already did (make statues) mixed with something modern (souvenir shop) and that was great.  And we actually got to see it.  But the television?  It just doesn’t feel as natural to me.  It feels like something we should actually get to see and have expanded on.