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[bornofwisdom]

CHARACTER NAME: Annabeth Chase
SERIES: Percy Jackson and the Olympians
CANON POINT: Post the The Last Olympian
LOSS: Her ability to build things properly as any good architect can. No matter how hard she tries, everything she puts together will have some sort of error in it so that it won’t function properly.


ABOUT THE CHARACTER:

Coming off as a bit cool and distant at first, Annabeth has come a rather long way from being the girl that Percy Jackson met his first year at Camp Half-Blood. At least, when it comes to him anyway! She remains, however, a rather passionate girl who pours most of herself into everything she does. Her favorite hobby, apart from making fun of Seaweed Brain himself, has always been architecture — she can always be found taking apart or building things. It manifests in part from being the Goddess Athena’s daughter but her father’s occupation also plays a part in her desired career choice to build and create things. In fact, her talent with doing just that is what lands her with the job offering of a lifetime once the epic battle with Kronos and the Titans has miraculously come to a victorious end for the side of the Gods — rebuilding Olympus.

Still, she has a tendency to be somewhat harsh and fairly judgmental when it comes to meeting new people, especially if they happen to be of the female persuasion, and they happen to be friends with her companion, Percy. Her caring for him digs deep in her personality which leads the green-eyed monster to rear its ugly head from time to time. However, if said girls can deal with her fierce jealousness and push her to becoming friends, she would be just as loyal to them as she is any other of her friends to date. For example, when she first meets Rachel Elizabeth Dare, she’s bitter and irritated at how close she appears to be with Percy, but the moment the girl becomes the new Oracle, Annabeth gives her more of a chance (which completely has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the Oracle must remain pure and thus cannot have a boyfriend. Not at all!) And they do make friends with one another.

Annabeth is a very strong individual, having been trained for a rather long time at Camp Half-Blood. She arrived at the sanctuary for Demigods with two friends, Luke Castellan and Thalia Grace when she was seven years old and now at the age of sixteen, she has been training over the years in a variety of different combat skills. Her range of weaponry is wide enough to contain sword usage, knife skills and that of a bow and arrow as well, but she’s also fairly good at hand-to-hand sparring.

Her stubborn streak rivals her strength and her vast intellect. While she is a well-trained Demigod, a smart Demigod — Annabeth is also an extremely stubborn Demigod, as well as possessive. Both can be some rather large flaws in the girl. As aforementioned with Percy and females, her possessiveness should be somewhat of a given at this point, although it shows her ridiculous stubbornness as well. Given that she would rather stalk off and be irritated at another girl even glancing in his direction, rather than listen to him explain that it may not be what she thinks.

If we’re going to delve into flaws, though, everyone including Demigods, immortals and even humans, have something called a ‘Fatal Flaw’ — a dangerous type of weakness that manifests itself either mentally or physically upon a person. It’s most often their ‘downfall’, so to speak. Annabeth’s double-F is called ‘hubris’ — or deadly pride. She reveals her Fatal Flaw to Percy when they are near approaching the Sirens, as that can sometimes cause a Fatal Flaw to reveal itself. She believes that she can fix anything at all, more than simply a building or a bridge; she believes she can fix the whole of the world. Rebuild it better than even the gods themselves had created it in the first place. She thinks that she can resolve things between her mother and father and get them to properly be together with each other. Annabeth even thinks, or rather thought, that she could fix everything with Luke. It had been a ‘dream’ of sorts to rebuild the world under the influence of the Siren’s call and her prideful flaw, so having the opportunity to do rebuild the fallen kingdom of Olympus is as close as she can achieve despite her flaw.

Like any other being, Annabeth suffers from certain fears that could cripple her should she have to deal with them in some manner or another. Thalia has a ridiculous fear of heights, which is funny as she is the daughter of Zeus, God of the sky. Luke has a few fears of his own and Grover, well, he’s rather riddled with some irrational fears — Annabeth’s own fears stem, mostly, from mythology to do with her mother. Like most of the children of Athena, Annabeth has a severe fear of spiders, or things that look spider-like, be they machines or any other form of a ‘spideresque’ creature. This is from mythology surrounding Athena and a mortal girl named Arachne which resulted with the latter of the females being turned into a spider. In the modern days, most children of Athena now believe that spiders are generally out to get them — which is awkwardly rather true as spiders are quite aggressive toward the Goddess’ children in particular.

The only other particularly large fear of hers, apart from that of being afraid of her own double-F, is a fear of the one eyed creatures known as cyclopes. Thalia, Luke and Annabeth were trapped by a cyclops when trying to make it to camp for protection. The creep factor is enhanced by the cyclopes ability to mimic voices of others perfectly, it tends to give her the willies and for a long time, it causes a wedge between her and Percy’s half-brother, Tyson, despite how much he seems to like her (because of a crush, as it were) and how much he does for her all throughout their first time meeting. In the end, she manages to get over her fear enough to be friendly with Tyson, growing to love him like a brother and close friend.

Boys tend to find Annabeth to be a pretty blond, although it’s never really clear how she feels about her own looks. She never has mentioned whether she finds herself pretty or even beautiful, although that just makes her seem all the more modest a girl — or perhaps she simply doesn’t have time to care about such things. Percy has called her beautiful, although not often to her face and has described her eyes as an intense shade of grey, although they always appear to have a distracted look. Also she apparently somewhat tall and athletic; which is likely true from all the training she’s been put through over the years via Chiron, the teacher at Camp Half-Blood.

ABILITIES:

As a Demigod, Annabeth has a few powers that mostly come from being associated with her mother, the Goddess Athena, as well as her training at Camp Half-Blood. However, there are some ‘abilities’ that come naturally to all the Demigods of earth and those come in the form of what mortals might see as ‘disabilities.’ Annabeth, like other Demigods, ‘suffers’ from both ADHD and dyslexia, both of which she explained to Percy in the simplest terms she could think of to do so. The ADHD is present within Demigods as a form of battlefield reflexes. She claims that the attention problems are not from seeing too little, but too much which makes them all much more aware of their surroundings. Dyslexia is explained much more simply, even. The minds of Demigods are ‘hard-wired’ to interpret Ancient Greek, not English.

Like her mother, she is naturally gifted with divine wisdom, a master sense in strategy, high intelligence and an uncanny talent for cleverness; all of which has more often than not been of extreme use to her and her friends on a variety of their quests together. She has a passion for architecture and is rather knowledgeable about the Gods and creatures from mythology, which is also something that has proven to be useful to Percy and others during their times together. Many times, her ability to rattle off information about specific monsters is what led Percy, or others, to know how to properly take care of the battles they’d find themselves in.

That isn’t to say that she’s lacking in her own abilities to fight. Knowledge and smarts is one thing, but Annabeth comes with both brains and brawn. While she may not be the strongest of the fighters at Camp Half-Blood, she is one of the most skilled with a bow (apart from the Apollo and Artemis cabins) and has a very good level of ability with bow a sword and a knife, although she prefers the latter of all three weapon choices. The girl is also rather adept with hand-to-hand combat, although would prefer to make use of some weapon rather than her bare hands, however should she have no choice, she wouldn’t be completely vulnerable. Also, it helps to have a trick or two up one’s sleeve during battles. Annabeth has an interesting magically enhanced baseball cap given to her by her mother as a gift for her twelfth birthday that makes anyone wearing it turn completely invisible. She’s been known to make use of the gift rather often, as it were.

Lastly, although certainly not least in any form of the word, she has an exceptional photographic memory and has managed to remember most everything she’s ever seen and heard. One could almost say she has an eidetic memory. Almost, but not quite! She does forget things from time to time, although most often they come back to her in moments in which she needs them the most.

THIRD-PERSON WRITING SAMPLE:

Slender fingers pushed through strands of blond curls, grasping at clumps of hair, tugging back to maneuver the hair into a messily made ponytail. The pads of her fingers then brushed the loose strands behind her ears and palms pressing flatly to her face, she rubbed her skin in mild irritation. After a short moment having groaned to herself, she drops her arms and open her stormy grey eyes, turning her head in every which way to take in all the sights and structure of the area she’s found herself in. With her eyes walking over the make of the castle she’s found herself in, unable to place the century and make of the model, she gives a soft shake of her head.

The word ‘right’ passed her lips, affirming in her tone that she was going to figure out just what was taking place with her and her sudden appearance in some new spot — one that she was assuming might be something to do with the Gods, as they most often did. Sighing softly, Annabeth raised her head and peering up to the ceiling, pushed her tongue against the inside of her cheek in thought. Nothing looked familiar to the up and rising architect. In exasperation, she set her hands to her hips and shifting weight from one foot to the other, rolls her eyes.

“Nothing Greek here, not even Roman.” At this point though, she would have taken medieval England structure so long as it was something that she could at least recognize.

Again, she spoke the single word ‘right’ in a mutter to herself as it seemed to be the only comfort she could find while being so completely and totally lost as to where she was. Trailing her gaze to the floor, in which the tiles also remained a mystery to her as for their origin in make. Giving up on her attempts at recognizing the area, the demigoddess mentally went through a checklist to note what she had and what she might need. Back pocket, Yankee’s baseball cap — check. No need to lean over to her ankle, she could feel her bronze dagger strapped at her shin and so — check. Pushing a hand into her jeans’ pocket, she riffled around a few drachmas, the currency of the Gods. Good. Should she need to pay off some monsters for whatever reason, or even send an iris message, she would be all set.

Check, check, check. Everything seemed to be relatively in order. In spite of not knowing where the hell she was, she could at the very least say she felt mildly prepared for the strange transition from Olympus to — well, wherever this place might be.

In her experience however, suddenly finding oneself somewhere that they do not belong hadn’t been a good thing for her or any other demigods and heroes that she had come to know throughout her life. In fact, which how extravagantly beautiful this castle appeared to be, Annabeth could almost swear it had to be some other branch of the Lotus Hotel and Casino. Hearing voices approaching, the trained camper moved swiftly toward the nearest pillar and pressing her back to it, turned her head in order to overhear the upcoming conversation better without having to give her position away. It would have been so much easier if Grover had been there, he could hear so much better than she ever could.

Brows knitting to a frown, the demigoddess overheard the two chattering about something called ‘paradisa’ before the words turned to echoes and vanished as the two citizens had wandered far enough away that she could no longer hear anything being said. It almost sounded Latin, but wasn’t quite it — either way, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that the word was a meaning for paradise. Now, she really was worried that it was another branch of the Lotus Hotel and Casino. She frowned though. There were no games to tempt her into staying this time and she didn’t really have the overwhelming desire to be there, either. Logically, then, it could not have been a cursed casino luring children into its walls to stay and play forever.

Annabeth shook her head again, muttering to herself about how it didn’t matter if it was a casino or not, she wasn’t meant to be there. Her place now was back in New York atop the Empire State Building, rebuilding Olympus and meeting Percy that evening for their movie date—

—this was turning into a bad summer vacation.

Frowning, she shifted her position and peering out from behind the pillar, glad that no one was around for the moment, she jogged toward the nearest door to hopefully locate something in the form of, preferably, a map to lead her out of this mess she’d found herself in.

“Gods, grant me the wisdom to figure this out.”

FIRST-PERSON JOURNAL SAMPLE:

Great. Where is this?

I don’t recognize any of the structures around here from any books I’ve read or Daedalus’ research, even…
( soft sigh ) Okay, talk it out, Annabeth…

Not Greek in make, so definitely not randomly somewhere in Olympus. And, it’s not Western American make either, or Eastern American for that matter… It’s just not American whatsoever. I didn’t… Fall through a crack into the Underworld, or…?

Dangit. Mom—!? Is this some sort of sudden quest—!?

Ugh,Gods! How do you go from showing plans to Zeus for a new throne room and end up — wherever the heck this is!? All I wanted to do today was get my plans together for the council room and…

Son of a gun… Actually!
Maybe I have some drachmas… If I can find some water to contact the Gods, or Percy, or…