We should start with a tune, what's it, a tune wheel, a tune whistle?

Yeah, uh, pitch pipe.

A pitch pipe.

Yeah.

I feel like we should start this.

We'll be podcasting in the key of cheese. What's good. Thanks so much for tuning into another episode of The Newst Olympian. My name is Mike Schuber. I'm the titular Newst Olympian. I'm a grown man who never read the Percy Jackson books as a kid, but I'm reading them now as an adult. I'm on a quest to determine if this is a book series that we've all been sleeping on, and I'm not on this quest alone. I'm joined this time in person by repeat guest, one of my best friends in the whole wide world, one of the few people who I'm not related to that I say I love you on the phone to when I say goodbye.

It's Stephen Barra in the studio. Stephen, how's it going? I love you, too, man. Love you, bud. This is fun because you were here just doing New York things because you're going to be moving back here soon. Yes. And then we had an unfortunate mishap with who was supposed to be the guest remotely. And I turned to you at the kitchen

table this morning and said, hey, Stephen, you want to be a guest on the newest Olympian today?

And I said, great. I closed my copy of the Titans curse and had to find my copy of Sea of Monsters

to figure out what we're doing. Thankfully, I had them in the room. But yes, what's also fortuitous

about this is that you had said that if you didn't pick the chapters that you had already picked for your earlier appearance on the C of Monsters episodes of TNO, you would have picked these.

So look, it's all worked out in a very strange incidental way.

Exactly. And we're here. Let's do it.

Let's do it. So we are here to first continue

chapter 13 and see how much of chapter 14 we can get into. Chapter 13, as you may recall,

is Annabeth tries to swim home. And we haven't seen exactly what that means yet, but we will

soon because where we last left our heroes, they were approaching the island of

the Sirens.

So a mythology thing that I knew a little bit about, I've seen, oh, brother rare art thou,

so I kind of know what's going on there.

I will say that first, our past guest, Alyssa Asabon, was very excited to share some stuff

about the rest of this chapter, but we didn't get to it because we had too much fun talking about it. But she did schedule, send me an email that arrived a couple of hours before recording to make sure that I was done reading the chapters. So she had some notes that she wanted to share that I will share on her behalf as we get to the relevant parts of this chapter. But let's continue. So they are approaching

...