It was very irritating to have 'I Want It That Way' by The Backstreet Boys playing on repeat in Kia's head while they were stuck in a metal prison cell that was way too small for five people.

"What in Hades?" Annabeth grumbled, pulling uselessly at the bars as the little voice in Kia's head hit the chorus. Beyond the cell bars, a bunch of other cells were arranged in a ring around a dark courtyard—three stories of chunks of metal over chunks of metal. This was great.

"A prison," said Percy. "Maybe Tyson can break—"

"Shh," said Grover. "Listen."

At first, Kia thought Grover was about to start singing Jailhouse Rock to get them some motivation for the jailbreak, but that was before Kia heard it: deep and masculine sobbing and a raspy voice muttering angrily. The voice was like rocks being thrown at a metal container.

Kia's face twisted in confusion. "Is that some sort of language?"

Tyson's eyes—well, eye—it'd take a while for Kia to adjust properly to using the correct terms—widened. "Can't be."

"What?" Percy asked.

Tyson took hold on two of the bars in the cell and pulled them apart with his brute strength, leaving a nice cyclops-shaped opening for them all to crawl through.

"Wait!"

But Tyson wasn't about to listen to Grover, running beneath the dim fluorescent lights of the prison.

"Why didn't we do this before?" Kia muttered as they all climbed out. Annabeth, who was right behind her, hit her lightly on the back of the head. Right, focus.

They all chased Tyson, Kia looking back at the wide open cell bars. She felt bad for the poor, unassuming mortal who would look at the cell and wonder who in the damn normal-people-hell was able to pry the bars open.

"I know this place," Annabeth told the three of them. This is Alcatraz."

"You mean that island near San Francisco?" Percy said.

She nodded. "My school took a field trip here. It's like a museum."

"Just curious, are all American field trips to weird, dark jails where little boys definitely went to die?"

Neither of them answered Kia, so she blew a strand of hair out of her face, accepting she wouldn't get an answer.

Another thing to consider was that this was San Francisco. This was on, like, the whole other side of America. It seemed impossible that they'd all have gotten here in the span of only fifteen minutes. This was proof that the Labyrinth didn't obey the normal workings and laws of the real world. Whatever the real world was, anyway.

"Freeze," Grover warned.

But Tyson kept moving. Grover grabbed his arm in an attempt to stop him.

"Stop, Tyson!" he whispered in a panicked manner. "Can't you see it?"

Kia followed the direction of Grover's extended finger, and her stomach twisted into knots, organs rearranging themselves in a fright. There, about ten feet away from all of them, was, possibly, the most horrible monster Kia had ever seen.

She might have been kind of a newbie to all of this real-life Cirque du Freak stuff, but this monster was, without a doubt, absolutely terrifying. To start, her upper body was that of a venomous woman's, almost as venomous as the snakes slithering by her feet and in her hair. Medusa? No, because her lower body, just above the spaghetti nightmare of snakes, was a dragon's, with blazing red scales glinting carefully in the dim light. Where her woman's body met the dragon, an odd sort of blur cane together, bubbling and oozing, shifting rapidly from the bust of a bear, a wolf, a lion—it was like the belt of the Amazons if they could change to form the heads of animals rich folk had mounted on their walls.

The shapes weren't clear or properly formed, something that had existed long before concrete shapes had ever been formed. A monster so old, so supremely ghastly, that it transcended the limits of normal imagery.

"It's her," Tyson whimpered, voice unsteady. He sounded particularly frightened.

"Get down!" Grover whisper-yelled.

Hurriedly, they all ducked, trying their best to blend into the shadows of the hall, but the monster hadn't been paying attention to them anyway. It seemed like it was talking to some sort of person on the second floor—exactly where the sobbing was coming from. The monster, whom Kia decided would be dubbed a 'she', said something in her tumbling rocks language. What frightened Kia even more was that she could understand some of the words.

"What's she saying?" Percy muttered, eyebrows furrowing deeply. "What's that language?"

"You mean you can't understand? Even a little?"

Percy looked to her in confusion, but before he could address what she had asked, Tyson said, "The tongue of the old times. What Mother Earth spoke to Titans and... her other children. Before the gods."

His shiver was enough to tell Kia that wasn't anything good.

"Hold on," said Percy. "How come Kia understands then?"

Racking her brain, it came to her a split second after. She snapped her fingers quietly. "Morpheus is a primordial god. He existed even before the Titans. I bet that's why."

"Then can you understand it? Could you translate?" Annabeth asked hopefully.

Kia shut her eyes in concentration, but the words were too choppy. They came out in short bursts, and only the most distinct ones: torment... serve... purpose...

It was kind of like understanding Greek, but the words were more like mumbles than actual words.

Kia shook her head defeatedly. They all looked to Tyson. "Can you understand anything, Ty?"

He nodded queasily at Kia. Closing his eyes, he said in a raspy woman's aged voice, "You will work for the master or suffer."

Annabeth shuddered. "I hate it when he does that."

Here's the thing: it was super cool that Tyson could do that and stuff, but the whole sharp transition, or lack thereof, was kind of creepy. It was like believing your enemy was ten feet away and they were suddenly speaking right next to you. Not the best feeling.

"I will not serve," Tyson said in a deep, wounded voice. It was like he was playing both characters of a play. Tyson would be a very good stage actor, now that Kia thought of it.

He switched to the monster's voice: "Then I shall enjoy your pain, Briares." Tyson fumbled with his words. Briares. Kia had heard that name before, somewhere in the Titans to gods transition of the Greek world. "If you thought your first imprisonment was unbearable, you have yet to feel true torment. Think on this until I return."

Well, this woman–monster sounded like quite the pleasant life of the party.

Kia couldn't decide whether to think that the snake-woman-dragon-lion-bear-monster thing was slithering or walking across the floor, but she moved towards the stairwell. To make things abundantly better, Kia realises only now that the thing had enormous wings, like an eagle's, on her back. Instead of walking–slithering down the staircase like a normal person, because who does that, she spread her wings and flew downwards with dramatic flair. Kia was sure even those theatre friends she had for, like, two days back in grade school would agree that the dragon lady's exit was a tiny bit overkill.

Dragon lady leaped off the catwalk, flying across the courtyard, just barely scraping by the boulder they all quickly shoved each other down behind. A pungent, sulphurous wind blew across their bangs as she flew past. It made Kia's eyes burn and her nostrils cry.

"H-ho-horrible," Grover said. "I've never smelled any monster that strong."

That was simply fantastic, wasn't it? Charming and deadly. She must've been a real hit with those gentlemen monsters around the corner.

"Cyclopes' worst nightmare," Tyson murmured. "Kampê."

"Who?" Percy asked.

Tyson swallowed, an Adam's apple as large as Kia's hand bobbing downwards in motion. "Every Cyclops knows about her. Stories about her scare us when we're babies. She was our jailer in the bad years."

Annabeth nodded. "I remember now. When the Titans ruled, they imprisoned Gaea and Ouranos's earlier children—the Cyclopes and the Hekatonkheires."

"The Heka-what?" Percy asked.

"The Hundred-Handed Ones," Kia said. "Guess what they bring to the talent show?"

"A hundred simultaneous games of rock, paper, scissors?"

"Bingo."

"Very powerful," Tyson exclaimed, eyes glowing in admiration. "Wonderful! As tall as the sky. So strong they could break mountains!"

"Cool," Percy said. He nudged Kia with a grin. "Unless you're a mountain."

"Kampê was the jailer," Tyson continued. "She worked for Kronos. She kept our brothers locked up in Tartarus, tortured them always, until Zeus came. He killed Kampê and freed Cyclopes and Hundred-Handed Ones to help fight against the Titans in the big war."

"And now Kampê is back."

"Bad," Tyson summed up basically every Greek-related event in all of their lives.

"So who's in that cell?" Percy asked. "You said a name—"

"Briares!" Tyson perked up. "He is a Hundred-Handed One. They are as tall as the sky and—"

"Yeah. They break mountains."

Kia elbowed Percy. "Dude. Don't steal his mojo."

Percy pouted childishly, looking away with a huff. "Still don't get how something can be as tall as the sky but fit in a cell."

"I guess we should check it out," Annabeth said, "before Kampê comes back."

Very, very, very short chapter. At any rate, Wattpad is all caught up with all the available chapters of The Strings of Reality on Quotev. Updates from now on will be on a semi-weekly basis. Anyway, thanks for reading, and as always, good morning, good afternoon, good evening or good night!