We Get Advice from a Poodle

**We Get Advice from a Poodle** is the sixtieth chapter of The Gift of a Best Friend. It was first published on May 29th, 2018.

## Chapter

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**Jasmine's POV**
We were pretty miserable that night.
We camped out in the woods a hundred yards from the main road, in a marshy clearing that local kids had obviously been using for parties.
The ground was littered with flattened soda cans and fast-food wrappers.
We’d taken some food and blankets from Aunty Em’s, but we didn’t dare light a fire to dry our damp clothes.
The Furies and Medusa had provided enough excitement for a day. We didn’t want to attract anything else.
Actually, I could do a twirl and I would be instantly dry, and do the same for Annabeth, Percy, and Grover, but since it’s summer, it’s pretty hot and at least we’d stay cool for a while.
We decided to sleep in shifts.
Percy volunteered to take first watch.
I turned Toothless back to normal size. I also summoned us some nice fluffy pillows.
Annabeth and I leaned ours against Toothless and curled up in the blankets.
Annabeth was snoring as soon as her head hit the pillow. It was cute. I wonder if I snore when I sleep. I hoped not.
I leaned my head against my pillow, but I didn’t go to sleep. I didn’t want to.
So I just pretended that I was asleep while watching Annabeth snored and listened to Percy and Grover.
Grover fluttered with his flying shoes to the lowest bough of a tree, put his back to the trunk, and stared at the night sky.
“Go ahead and sleep,” Percy told him. “I’ll wake you if there’s trouble.”
Grover nodded, but still didn’t close his eyes. “It makes me sad, Percy.”
“What does? The fact that you signed up for this stupid quest?”
“No. *This* makes me sad.” He pointed at all the garbage on the ground. “And the sky. I can’t even see the stars. They’re polluted the sky. This is a terrible time to be a satyr.”
“Oh, yeah. I guess you’d be an environmentalist.”
He glared at Percy. “Only a human wouldn’t be. Your species is clogging up the world so fast . . . ah, never mind. It’s useless to lecture a human. At the rate things are going, I’ll never find Pan.”
“Pam? Like the cooking spray?”
“Pan!” Grover cried indignantly. “P-A-N. The great god Pan! What do you think I want a searcher’s license for?”
A strange breeze rustled through the clearing, temporarily overpowering the stink of trash and muck. It brought the smell of berries and wildflowers and clean rainwater, things that might’ve once been in these woods.
“Tell me about the search,” Percy said.
Grover looked at him cautiously, as if he were afraid Percy was just making fun.
I haven’t known Percy that long, but I do know that he wouldn’t make fun of such a thing. Especially if it meant a lot to someone. In this case, Grover.
“The God of Wild Places disappeared two thousand years ago,” he told Percy. “A sailor off the coast of Ephesos heard a mysterious voice crying out from the shore, ‘Tell them that the great god Pan has died!’ When humans heard the news, they believed it. They’ve been pillaging Pan’s kingdom ever since. But for the satyrs, Pan was our lord and master. He protected us and the wild places of the earth. We refuse to believe that he died. In every generation, the bravest satyrs pledge their lives to finding Pan. They search the earth, exploring all the wildest places, hoping to find where he is hidden, and wake him from his sleep.”
“And you want to be a searcher,” Percy said.
“It’s my life’s dream,” Grover said. “My father was a searcher. And my Uncle Ferdinand . . . the statue you saw back there—”
“Oh, right, sorry.”
Grover shook his head. “Uncle Ferdinand knew the risks. So did my dad. But I’ll succeed. I’ll be the first searcher to return alive.”
“Hang on—*the first?*”
Grover took his reed pipes out of his pocket. “No searcher has ever come back. Once they set out, they disappear. They’re never seen alive again.”
“Not once in two thousand years?”
“No.”
“And your dad? You have no idea what happened to him?”
“None.”
“But you still want to go,” Percy said, sounding amazed. “I mean, you really think you’ll be the one to find Pan?”
“I have to believe that, Percy,” Grover said. “Every searcher does. It’s the only thing that keeps us from despair when we look at what humans have done to the world. I have to believe Pan can still be awakened.”
Percy stared at the orange haze of the sky.
“How are we going to get into the Underworld?” he asked Grover. “I mean, what chance do we have against a god?”
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But back at Medusa’s, when you were searching her office? Annabeth was telling me and Jasmine—”
“Oh, I forgot. Annabeth will have a plan all figured out.”
Ok, usually, I would kick someone’s ass when they attack my best friend, but in this case, Percy was kind of right with the sarcasm. Annabeth was annoying the hell out of me with that and him.
“Don’t be so hard on her, Percy,” Grover said. “She’s had a tough life, but she’s a good person. After all, she forgave me. . . .” He faltered.
“What do you mean?” Percy asked. “Forgave you for what?”
Grover seemed very interested in playing notes on his pipes, and I understood why.
But Percy figured it out.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Your first keeper job was five years ago. Annabeth and Jasmine have been at camp five years. They weren’t . . . I mean, your first assignment that went wrong—”
“I can’t talk about it,” Grover said, and his quivering lower lip suggested he’d start crying if Percy pressed him, like I would if I was in the same position. “But as I was saying, back at Medusa’s, Annabeth, Jasmine, and I agreed there’s something strange going on with this quest. Something isn’t what it seems.”
“Well, duh,” Percy said. “I’m getting blamed for stealing a lightning bolt that Hades took.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Grover said. “The Fur—The Kindly Ones were sort of holding back. Like Mrs. Dodds at Yancy Academy . . . why did she wait so long to try and kill you? Then on the bus, they just weren’t as aggressive as they could’ve been.”
“Them seemed plenty of aggressive to me.”
Grover shook his head. “They were screeching at us: ‘Where is it? Where?’”
“Asking about me,” Percy said.
“Maybe . . . but Annabeth, Jasmine, and I, we both got the feeling they weren’t asking about a person. They said ‘Where is *it?*’ They seemed to be asking about an object.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“I know. But if we’ve misunderstood something about this quest, and we only have nine days to find the master bolt. . . .” He looked at Percy like he was hoping for answers, but I could tell that he didn’t have any.
“I haven’t been straight with you,” Percy told Grover. “I don’t care about the master bolt. I agreed to go to the Underworld so I could bring my mother back.”
Grover blew a soft note on his pipes. “I know that, Percy. But are you sure that’s the only reason?”
“I’m not doing it to help my father. He doesn’t care about me. I don’t care about him.”
Grover gazed down at him from his tree branch. “Look, Percy. I’m not as smart as Annabeth or Jasmine. I’m not as brave as you. But I’m pretty good at reading emotions. You’re glad your dad is alive. You feel good that he’s claimed you, and part of you wants to make him proud. That’s why you mailed Medusa’s head to Olympus. You wanted him to notice what you’d done.”
“Yeah? Well maybe satyr emotions work differently than human emotions. Because you’re wrong. I don’t care what he thinks.”
Grover pulled his feet up onto the branch. “Okay, Percy. Whatever.”
“Besides, I haven’t done anything worth bragging about. We barely got out of New York and we’re stuck here with no money and no way west.”
Grover looked at the night sky, like he was thinking about that problem. “How about *I* take first watch, huh? You get some sleep.”
I could tell Percy wanted to protest, but Grover started to play Mozart, soft and sweet, and Percy turned away. After a few bars of Piano Concerto no. 12, he was asleep.
My powers kept me protected from that kind of stuff, but I wanted to sleep now and had my powers let go.
Then I, too, fell asleep.

I woke up a little after dawn and Annabeth was awake.
I noticed that Grover was gone, and she told me that he went off exploring and Percy was still asleep. But Toothless was awake.
Annabeth I agreed that we should make breakfast, but the only food was nacho-flavored corn chips from Aunty Em’s snack bar, but I wanted a real breakfast. So I summoned us a small flat grill with the ingredients from my house to make batter for pancakes. I love pancakes.
Annabeth and I mixed the ingredients together in a big bowl, my powers sending them back home after we were done with them, and finished making the batter.
I scooped some of it onto the grill with a spoon and Annabeth flipped them with a spatula.
Grover came back a little while later with a dirty pink poodle.
It, of course, being an animal felt my aura and ran up to me to say hello, barking excitedly.
“Hi there, cutie,” I told him. “What’s your name?”
*Gladiola*, he replied, then licked my face.
His tongue tickled and I pushed him back and he sat down in front of me.
“That’s a nice name,” I said. “My name is Jasmine. That’s my best friend, Annabeth, and my dragon, Toothless. Guys, this is Gladiola.”
*Hi*, Toothless said.
“Hello, Gladiola,” Annabeth said.
She usually isn’t this friendly toward animals, but she knows how mad I get when she doesn’t treat an animal like she would a person, not that she treats them any better, though.
Most people don’t actually like it when I make them do that to animals, but I don’t like how they sometimes treat them, so too bad.
“He wants to helps us to get our way west,” Grover said.
“Aww, that’s so sweet of you,” I said to Gladiola.
He barked happily. *Anything for you and Grover.*
“How can he help us?” Annabeth asked.
“He has a plan,” Grover said.
“Then I guess I better wake up Percy so he can hear the plan.”
She went over to his sleeping body and shook him awake.
“Well,” Annabeth said, “the zombie lives.”
Percy seemed to tremble a little bit.
“How long was I asleep?” he asked.
“Long enough for us to make breakfast.” Annabeth put a plate of pancakes in front of him. “And Grover went exploring. Look, he found a friend.”
Gladiola went over to Grover and sat in his lap while Grover sat cross-legged.
*Is he a hostage?* Gladiola asked, yapping suspiciously at him.
“No, he’s not,” Grover said.
Percy blinked, clearly not sure of what to make of the situation. “Are you . . . talking to that thing?”
*Don’t call me a thing*, Gladiola growled.
I also glared at Percy for calling him a thing, too.
“This *thing*,” Grover warned, “is our ticket west. Be nice to him.”
“You can talk to animals?”
Grover ignored the question.
I can talk to animals, and since satyrs can, too, I’m sometimes told that I’m like a satyr. Except that I’m not a vegetarian, like all satyrs are.
A lot of people are surprised by that, but as long as meat doesn’t look like the animal it came from, I’m good. It still doesn’t mean that it didn’t come from that animal, I know, but I’m a hypocrite when it comes to meat. I can’t help it. I love bacon and cheeseburgers and bacon cheeseburgers and most other kinds of meat. Plus, I have seven carnivores at home, what can I do? Even though watching them hunt is too disturbing for me, but not the actual hunt. That’s just nature.
Anyway, yeah, I’m a bit like a satyr.
“Percy, meet Gladiola,” Grover introduced. “Gladiola, meet Percy.”
Percy stared at Annabeth and me, trying to make sense of all of this. Seriously, had he not seen me talk to Toothless?
“I’m not saying hello to a pink poodle,” Percy said. “Forget it.”
“It’s not his fault he’s a pink poodle,” I scorned.
“Percy,” Annabeth said. “I said hello to the poodle. You say hello to the poodle.”
Gladiola growled. *Well?*
“Hello,” Percy muttered.
Grover explained that he’d come across Gladiola in the woods and they’d struck up a conversation. Gladiola had run away from a rich local family, who’d posted a $200 reward for his return. Gladiola doesn’t really want to go back to his family, but he was willing to if it meant helping Grover and me.
“Aww,” I said.
“How does Gladiola know about the reward?” Percy asked.
“He read the signs,” Grover said. “Duh.”
“Believe it or not, Percy,” I said. “Dogs can read, too.”
“Of course,” he said. “Silly me.”
I rolled my eyes. Now he’s being a total ass.
“So we turn in Gladiola,” Annabeth explained in her best strategy voice, “we get money, and we buy tickets to Los Angeles. Simple.”
“Not another bus,” Percy said warily.
“No,” Annabeth agreed.
“And no turning in Gladiola,” I said.
“Jasmine—”
“No. We don’t need to. My family’s the richest family on the planet, remember? They’ll gladly give us money if we need it. Like right now. My grandparents would even gladly take us to L.A.in their airship. But since Percy’s a son of Poseidon, that’s clearly out of the question. Gladiola, I’m very grateful that you’re offering yourself to help us, but you don’t need to. I’ve got it handled. I especially don’t want to send you back to a family you don’t want to go back to. But I’ll gladly make you apart of my family if you’d like.”
*Thank you*, he said. *But I would like to be on my own right now.*
“Ok. I hope you have fun.”
*Thank you. And good luck on your quest. Let me know if you need my help any time.*
“Of course. Thank you, Gladiola.”
We all said goodbye to him. Well, all except Percy, and he went back into the woods.
“Alright,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Annabeth pointed downhill, toward train tracks we hadn’t been able to see last night in the dark. “There’s an Amtrak station half a mile that way. According to Gladiola, the west-bound train leaves at noon.”

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## Character Appearances

### Main Characters

* Annabeth Chase
* Jasmine Saturday
* Percy Jackson

### Pets

* Toothless
* Gladiola