"𝚟𝚒𝚡𝚎𝚗" | 𝚙. 𝚓𝚊𝚌𝚔𝚜𝚘𝚗

𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚝 𝚜𝚎𝚟𝚎𝚗, 𝚊𝚌𝚝 𝚘𝚗𝚎

"You'll get it, chouchou." She told him, after dodging an arrow (how did it go backwards?).

At least Chiron didn't complain, not even after he got a stray arrow stuck in his tail. It was a pain to desnag it, but with Stelle's help, they managed fairly quickly.

"He's got a very silky tail." She told him.

"O...kay, then..."

Foot racing? No good either. The wood-nymph instructors left Percy in the dust. Stelle was the fastest runner at Yancy and still couldn't outrun the dryads. They told them not to worry about it. They had centuries of practice from lovesick gods. 

Stelle glanced at a laurel tree, decorated with bouquets and flowers and paintings,

"Hey, whatcha lookin' at?" One of the instructors looked around, before her eyes fell on the laurel tree. "Oh."

"What's wrong?" Stelle asked.

The instructor looked around worriedly, as if afraid one of the others might overhear. She had pretty hazel skin (she was a hazel tree...so... obviously), and green hair that looked suspiciously of leaves and branches.

"Er... that laurel tree, she hasn't been seen around since I was here anyways. The tree is still alive and all, so the nymph inside must be... but she's just not here."

"Why, is it like Daphne or something?"

The instructor did a double take and a tint of green entered her face. "Don't say that name..!"

'Huh. Was Daphne some sort of ghost story to them?'

But the nymph looked wistful and envious. "You know what I heard about her? I hear that she had rivers underneath her skin and the moon in her eyes. I heard her steps were dances and her laughs were just... beautiful."

"Wow." Stelle said flatly, unimpressed. "But she's a tree."

"Uhm, I'm a tree."

"Oh, right. Whoops."

Moving on to wrestling, forget it. Every time Percy stepped onto the mat, Clarisse pulverized him. While Clarisse did go easier on Stelle, she still got roughed up pretty bad.

"There's more where that came from, punk." Clarisse would mumble in Percy's ear.

The only thing Percy excelled at was canoeing, which wasn't exactly the heroic skill people had expected to see from a kid who beat the Minotaur. Stelle sucked at canoeing, which was expected, but it still irked her to be worse than Percy at something.

"It's embarrassing, honestly."

"Hey!"

Percy knew the senior campers and counselors were watching them, trying to decide who their godly parent was, but they weren't having an easy time of it. Percy wasn't as strong as the Ares kids, or as good at archery as the Apollo kids.

He didn't have Hephaestus's skill with metalwork or- gods forbid- Dionysus's way with vine plants. Luke told him he might be a child of Hermes, a kind of jack-of-all-trades, master of none. But Percy got the feeling he was just trying to make me feel better. He really didn't know what to make of him either. 

With Stelle's bet, most people had narrowed it down to two Olympians. Athena or Aphrodite. Ethan himself was more partial to Nike, having jokingly said that she was a winner. When asked to bet, Percy had chosen Aphrodite.

He had no answer other than that she wasn't ugly, which caused a little bit of teasing.

Despite all that, Percy liked camp. He got used to the morning fog over the beach, the smell of hot strawberry fields in the afternoon, even the weird noises of monsters in the woods at night. He would eat dinner with cabin eleven, scrape part of my meal into the fire, and try to feel some connection to his real dad.