Flash Freeze (On Hold)

Playing With...Ice

It's been a year since Percy up and left Camp Half-Blood. In that time he'd officially settled down in Canada as a citizen, thanks to Khione. They lived in a modern looking cabin. It was well furnished with four main rooms as well as a kitchen area. It even had an upstairs loft for storage.

They'd set up near Hudson Bay in the Quebec region and he'd taken a job as a simple Aquatic Researcher. Simple would be an understatement. With Khione's help, and vast amounts of money from being a goddess for millennia, they'd started their own company for protecting and researching sea life. They'd made such a large name for themselves in that year's time frame, that they had quite the large backing by the government and some large corporations.

Not only that, they had six other researchers working with them. While the other people were scientists with actual college degrees and most of them at least a decade older than Percy, they deferred to him a lot when it came to decision making. At first it unnerved him because he had two trains of thought. That they were acting as if his backing by Khione's money was the reason, and that he didn't want to be a leader to people so much older than him. But he learned a couple months in that it was his profound knowledge on sea life that had them acting as so, which entirely came from his dad.

Still, Percy was quite happy with his new life. They were few if any monsters in the area, and those that were left him and Khione well enough alone. No demigods or random gods came to find him or visit him yet which was another good thing. He'd almost entirely left that part of his life behind, other than Khione and his heritage.

-/-

The gods sat and deliberated. "We need to find out what has our kids falling ill. It started appearing after YOUR son left," Athena said accusingly, throwing a dirty look at Poseidon.

Poseidon rolled his eyes, over her antics from the past year. "And as I said before, your daughter is the reason he left, but I sincerely doubt he's the cause of it all. It's affecting demigods regardless of whether he was close to them or not. Percy wouldn't target innocents even if he was to be vengeful, unlike some goddesses..."

Zeus spoke up, "At the moment it doesn't matter how it started. Just how do we fix it? Apollo has had no progress in treatments and his kids aren't making any headway either. We need to issue a quest. I fear if we don't act now, they will all get sick and even die."

-/-

Percy stood in front of Boreas, the father of Khione. "So, you asked for my presence?" He and Boreas had, had many conversations, so they were past him getting annoyed with Percy's lack of respect at him being a god.

"Well...no actually I was told you wanted to see me."

They both looked at each other in confusion. "I told you both the other wanted you here. Look, Percy, I don't want you to leave either, but without a doubt there is a quest on its way to most likely see me. I don't want you to get caught or have to do deal with anything you don't want to. So I figured it'd be best to tell you now and see what my father could do to help," Khione said.

Percy froze. "A quest? What for?"

"I don't know the details of the prophecy, but I know it's about some disease sweeping through the demigods at camp and making them sick. Since demigods can't catch normal diseases, it's very concerning to the gods. They are seeking out someone who can make ice as the concoction needs to be kept at a low temperature by a magical means hence the quest to find me seeing as I am the goddess of snow. I can't really understand everything, but that is what the Olympians said."

Now was the time for Percy to truly panic. He highly doubted it was Khione they needed. He'd developed an affinity as of late. One that a normal child of Poseidon could not.

When he was a few years younger he'd asked his father why he could not seem to control ice. His father's reply was that there were two factors. He was the god of the oceans, not ice. As well as that as the god of oceans, that meant salt water not freshwater. It was far more difficult to control fresh versus salt water as Percy already understood.

So the fact that ice had no salt and was a different god's domain than his father, meant Percy was unlikely to be able to control it without a godly level of power, something he was just short of, according to Poseidon. 'Look son. It's like Montauk. You have a connection to that beach for two reasons. One being it is the place you were conceived. The other being it is on my domain. You would be unkillable by anyone short of a Titan in that place. But ice is not part of our domain. And if it becomes one, then you have faced trials harder than any other of my children.'

That was how Poseidon put it. Percy now guessed the trials that led him to develop such powers had to do with the betrayal at camp, but he had no solid evidence or reasoning behind it. He just knew that he now had the ability to manipulate ice as if he were a child of Khione herself, something that he shuddered to consider. He had his reasons for thinking ill of being considered a child of Khione. Not that he'd tell anyone.