Child of lightning-Percy Jackson X reader-Book two

What just happened?

The way Tantalus saw it, the monster birds had simply been minding their own business in the woods and would not have attacked at all if Annabeth, Tyson, Percy and I hadn't disturbed them with our 'bad' chariot driving.

This was all just utterly unfair. Percy even told Tantalus to go... chase a doughnut. Which, as you would expect didn't help Tantalus's mood.

He sentenced us to kitchen patrol—scrubbing all the pots and platters all afternoon in the underground kitchen with the cleaning harpies. Usually campers never had to do this chore because well, in the simplest words it's crazy dangerous. The harpies washed with lava instead of water, just so they could get that extra-clean sparkle and kill ninety-nine point nine percent of all germs. To avoid any catastrophes, Annabeth, Percy and I had to wear asbestos gloves and aprons.

Tyson didn't seem to mind the heat though. He plunged his bare hands right in and started scrubbing away. We had to suffer through hours and hours of hot, dangerous work, especially since there were loads of extra plates. Tantalus had ordered a special lunch banquet to celebrate Clarisse's chariot victory—a full-course meal featuring country-fried Stymphalian death-bird.

The only good thing about our punishment was that it gave Percy, Annabeth and I all a common enemy and lots of time to scheme. After listening to me and Percy's dream about Grover again, Annabeth looked like she might be starting to believe us...maybe.

"If he's really found it," she murmured, "and if we could retrieve it—"

"Hold on," Percy stopped her. "You act like this...whatever-it-is Grover found is the only thing in the world that could save the camp. What is it?"

"I'll give you a hint." She said. "What do you get when you skin a ram?"

A mental image formed in my head.

I raised my eyebrow, "do you really want me to answer that?"

She sighed and rolled her eyes. "A fleece. The coat of a ram is called a fleece. And if that ram happens to have golden wool—"

A memory popped into my head from my old mythology class at Yancy academy. "Wait, you don't mean..."

Percy looked her in the eyes. "The Golden Fleece, are you serious?"

Annabeth scrapped a plateful of death-bird bones into the lava. "Remember the Gray Sisters? They said they knew the location of the thing you seek. And they mentioned Jason. Three thousand years ago, they told him how to find the Golden Fleece. You guys do know the story of Jason and the Argonauts?"

"Yeah." I shrugged, looking to Percy. "We watched that movie right?"

"Oh yeah, that old one with the clay skeletons." Percy smiled

Annabeth rolled her eyes. "Oh my gods! You are both so hopeless."

"What?" I demanded.

"Just listen. The real story of the Fleece: there were these two children of Zeus, Cadmus and Europa, okay? They were about to get offered up as human sacrifices, when they prayed to Zeus to save them. So Zeus sent this magical flying ram with golden wool, which picked them up in Greece and carried them all the way to Colchis in Asia Minor. Well, actually it carried Cadmus. Europa fell off and died along the way but that's not important."

"It was probably important to her." Percy remarked.

"The point is, when Cadmus got to Colchis, he sacrificed the golden ram to the gods and hung the Fleece in a tree in the middle of the kingdom. The Fleece brought prosperity to the land. Animals stopped getting sick. Plants grew better. Farmers had better crops. Plagues never visited. That's why Jason wanted the Fleece. It can revitalize any land where it's placed. It cures sickness, strengthens nature, cleans up pollution—"