𝐀𝐠𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐭 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐄𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐡 (𝐇𝐞𝐫𝐨'𝐬 𝐨𝐟 𝐎𝐥𝐲𝐦𝐩𝐮𝐬)

ELEVEN ; an unsupportive parent and whole lot of headaches

     If Jason was planning on spending much more time knocked out like this, then he was going to have to lose some weight.

     Leo set out finishing the final repairs on Festus, leaving Piper and Eileen to the job of loading Jason onto the dragon. Piper took his front, and Eileen wrapped her hands around his ankles. Together, the two girls carried (mostly dragged) his limp body through the snow; a trail scoring the surface beside their footprints. Eileen had a feeling her face was as red from the effort as Piper's. Curse Jason for being so fit - all that muscle was acting like a dead weight on their tired limbs. A sharp pain pestered Eileen from her shoulder, and her back was starting to hurt. Not to mention the fact that every now and then, the world would spin out of focus as a wave of nausea rose with the bile in her throat.

     They dropped him beside Festus (who looked like he hadn't crash-landed at all; if you ignored the suspicious brown stain on his underbelly), where a ring of melted snow circled around his seemingly slumbering form. Leo tinkered around at a panel around his head, legs hooked around where the dragon's ears would have been had he had any.

     "Am I just really unfit," Piper puffed, "or was that a lot harder than it should have been?"

     Eileen held her finger up to signal that she needed a moment. Piper seemed to take that as a form of agreement.

     "I don't know how we're meant to get this oaf onto Festus' back." Eileen said, stretching her back painfully.

     Piper wiped a loose hair from her face (she still somehow managed to look perfect, even in her dishevelled state), and called for Leo, who didn't seem to hear her. "Leo?" She tried again.

     Still, Leo remained engrossed in his work.

     Thump!

     With a startled yell, he made a flailing grab at his dragon's head before hitting the snow. It dusted his curls as he sat up, flicking the slush off his face and leaving a streak of machine oil in its place. "Who threw that?" He demanded.

     Eileen held up her hands as a display of her innocence. Not so subtly, Piper held her face in one of her hands while she pointed off into the distance with the other. "Oh, look," she said, "is that the Cyclops?"

     Leo, unsurprisingly, was not convinced. The snowball that Piper had thrown at his face had collected in his lap, soaking into his pants. Eileen pinched her forearm to stop herself from laughing at him, something she was sure would result in having a snowball being thrown at her own face.

     "Yeah, I think so, actually," Leo said. He got to his feet, brushing down his clothing at the same time. "It's right, there!"

     A snowball sailed right over Piper and Eileen's heads.

     Piper followed its path with her eyes, an amused smile playing on her lips. She turned back around and opened her mouth to say, "You missed," but only got halfway through her sentence before a second snowball hit her straight between the eyes.

     "Bullseye!" Leo cackled.

     Eileen could barely hold back her own bubble of laughter as she helped pick the snow from the hair of a very shell-shocked Piper. "Alright, guys," she said. "As much as this would be fun, we can't leave poor Jason on the floor like this, and if we hang around for much longer, we may actually run back into those very real Cyclops."

     Three pairs of eyes turned to stare at Jason's body, and immediately guilt flashed across Piper's face. She hurried to his side and tucked her arms back under Jason's armpits.