User blog comment:Hyperborean/"The House of Hades" – official expectations blog/@comment-122.167.38.137-20130627134534/@comment-4531192-20130628135902

Well, I can make a long post about why I think Leo and Reyna are intelligent, if that's really necessary.

In the beginning of The Lost Hero, Leo finds Festus and is able to find the control panel inside of its head and fix the wiring inside. He is then taken to the Bunker 9 where he finds the bronze wings for the dragon, which he manages to fix and attach to the dragon in just one night. In Quebec, Leo saves Piper and Jason from the car factory by using some of the heavy-lifting machinery that is there and creating a remote for using them. After his dream with Hephaestus, Leo wakes up while Festus is crashing to the ground. He tells Jason to save Piper while he tries to reboot Festus. He is able to restart Festus, but it's already too late and they crash. Later, when Lycaon attacks the group, Leo is able to use gasoline to fight off some of the wolves. It didn't work, but it probably gave them enough time until the Hunters of Artemis arrived to save them. On Mount Diablo, Leo kills most of the Earthborn with construction vehicles and the toy he had created beforehand. He even aids in killing the last Earthborn by setting himself on fire. Granted, he did not fight off the Giant, but that's not his job anyway – it's Jason's. The group then takes a chopper to the Wolf House, and reach it in time thanks to Leo, because nobody else in the crew knows how to operate machinery. At the end, Leo and Piper free Hera from her cage, but it is mostly thanks to Leo that Hera is freed (as Piper merely charmspeaks Gaea).

Throughout the first book, Leo is able to use his mechanical skills almost in every situation regardless of the hardware that he is given, which shows his ability to use his knowledge in almost any circumstances. Granted, he is not emotionally intelligent or even book smart, but he is very intelligent in a mechanic/engineer type of way.

This is also shown in The Mark of Athena, where Leo is able to get the celestial bronze that is needed to repair the Argo II from Narcissus. He isn't able to talk the latter into giving it to him – probably because he isn't good with people and Narcissus is so obsessed with himself, anyway – so he creates a plan with which he is able to trick Narcissus into giving the bronze to him. When they escape, Leo is able to fix the engine very quickly while Percy fights off the nymphs and Narcissus, again showing his ability to work under difficult conditions and repair almost any hardware. I could go on and and on about Leo, but I think I've made my point about him clear.

Reyna is someone we haven't seen much of in the series, having only made a few appearances, but in The Son of Neptune we learn that she has been able to run Camp Jupiter for months on her own, while also preventing Octavian from becoming a praetor. Not only that, she is also able to fend off the giant attack on Camp Jupiter long enough for Percy et al. to arrive. This shows that Reyna is probably just as good of a tactician as Annabeth, if not better. In The Mark of Athena she also shows off her leadership skills while being under tremendous pressure due to the Greek attack on Camp Jupiter. She also promises Annabeth to try to hold Octavian back when she clearly has lost control over him and the camp as a whole. Reyna is perhaps the best leader we've seen in the series – yes, better than Annabeth – because her leadership skills and ability to control people like Octavian is something that has not been matched by any other character so far.

As to your comment about Annabeth and the myths, my point is that she does not come up with anything herself, and often just remembers something that someone else can use to defeat the enemy. (This happened a lot with Percy and Annabeth in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.) Also, don't take my words out of their context –I'm not saying she never uses the information she has, I'm just saying that she does not do it as often as someone else, and that the child of Athena thing is something that is overplayed in both series. She is smart, yes. But there are other people that are just as smart as her. Granted, she may be the most book smart and remember the most stuff, but she is not the Stephen Hawking some people make her seem like.