Chapter 7: The Visiting Professor from Zurich

The welcoming dinner was set in the amphitheater, which was not where welcoming dinners were usually held.

Percy noticed this first. He noticed it the way he noticed most things that were wrong — not with any particular analytical sophistication but with his stomach, which had a better track record than his brain on questions of tactical geometry. The amphitheater seated two hundred. There were forty-three campers currently in residence, plus instructors, plus Chiron, plus one recently waterlogged professor of classical mythology who had eaten three servings of roasted lamb with the focused intensity of a man reconnecting with a lost civilization. Forty-three people in an amphitheater designed for two hundred meant a lot of empty stone and a lot of echoes, and Percy kept looking at the gaps between the campers and thinking that the seating choice seemed less like hospitality and more like staging.

"You're doing the thing," Annabeth said, without looking up from the bread she was tearing into pieces she didn't eat.