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A scream echos against the walls. Annabeth’s scream. For him.

Caligula’s fist is pressed tight to his abdomen and the spear enclosed within it is even tighter as it shimmies around; the emperor’s grasp is shaky, too much adrenaline.

He’s been speared. Just like Iapetus had tried to do to him so many years ago. There’s a joke about destiny somewhere in there.

It’s painful, like really painful, like someone actually got to stab his Achilles’ Heel painful—but he’s still standing.

And that’s when he sees it. A thrumming sea-green glow encasing his body, from foot to fingertip. He’s seen it once before, in a different color, on Clarisse.

A blessing from Poseidon. 

Caligula sees it too and makes quick work of putting distance between them, ripping the spear out in the process. He hurts but doesn’t bleed. He wants to hurl but swallows it down. A swallow that goes right to a gut that tugs.

And the feeling is so similar to his confrontation with Akhlys, so disturbingly strong, he barely has time to register the thought—that maybe these Olympians should stop injecting him with the godly equivalent of steroids—before he gives in and welcomes it back, vision swimming in red.

“Was that supposed to hurt?” he asks a man (not a god, a man) who has lost near all his nerve. When an answer doesn’t come, he forces one out.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.