PERCY JACKSON ONE-SHOTS!!!

Saving Grace stood on the roof of a nearby skyscraper, keeping a careful watch on the horizon. Her Lady Artemis had warned her that a leader from the SPQR Heroes may soon be afoot, and had sent her alone to stand guard. 

Normally the Huntresses of Artemis didn’t help with the Half-Blood Camp, a camp of super powered mutants that worked to keep evil monsters at bay, and instead did it themselves, or instead they simply stopped crime around the city, or other things, but with the Amazons siding with the SPQR Heroes, they had no choice.

The Amazons (who weren’t really superpowered, but rather incredibly strong and trained warrior girls,) and the Huntresses didn’t really see a point of all the fighting between the two mutant camps, especially seeing the things that had gone down last year with the Seven Supers, where three of the SPQR Heroes and four of the Half-Blood Camp had come together to take down a slew of giants and Mother Earth herself. It was believed that Shadow Slicer, Praetor, and Demolisher had even been the people responsible for the return of the Half-Blood Talisman.

Silently, not as Saving Grace, but rather as Thalia Grace, (mostly) normal teenage girl, wondered to herself why so many of the camps continued to fight. Nico (who had at a young age been thrown into a coma during a bad accident, and woke up eighty years later alongside his sister with the ability to raise the dead and travel among the Shadows,) and Coach Hedge (called one of the many satyrs, after a fatal accident at a research facility caused all the men inside to become half goat and half human, and all the women to become like the garden, rivers, and sky. The new species always were intermingling, and raising new satyrs and nymphs or whatnot together,)...well Nico and Coach Hedge had helped whoever Praetor was to return the Talisman to the Half-Bloods. So why were so many of the SPQR attacking Half-Blood and Huntresses…?

“I feel the same way,” a commanding voice said behind her, and Saving Grace spun around, sword and shield raised, only to realize it was Praetor, with her arms raised in truce. She had a golden, almost winged mask on her face with one long braid down her back. Her armor was a mixture of silver and gold, with a long silky-looking purple cape. Praetor sighed at Saving Grace’s actions. “I apologize. I can feel others emotions when I’m near them, and from farther away if the emotion is powerful enough. And I must tell you, I feel the same frustration and hurt that you do.” As Saving Grace raised the sword higher, Praetor only sighed again. “I come in peace, Saving Grace.”

“And how do I know that?” Saving Grace did not let go of her sword or shield.

“You don’t. But you can still trust me, Saving Grace. I know your brother Lighting McKing.” Praetor looked like she was trying to stop a smile from coming onto her face. “In fact, I helped Seaweed Brain come up with the name.”

“If you know Lightning McKing, then what’s his real name?” Thalia was shining through her facade of Saving Grace.

“Jason Grace. And Seaweed Brain is Percy Jackson. I also know you’re Thalia Grace, one of the women of the Huntresses of Artemis. And I am here to let you know that the attacks on Half-Bloods will be stopping,” Praetor looked like she was angry. “For it has come to my attention that my second-in-command, The Stuffed Prophet, was giving commands to legions behind my back. He has already been properly disposed of. SPQR will remain on standby in case Half-Blood Camp needs assistance with anything, including the aftermath of these attacks, or anything else.” Praetor turned to leave, but Thalia cried out.

“Wait!” Praetor turned, and Thalia felt her stomach drop. “Will...um. Will I ever see you again?”

Praetor paused for a second before slowly removing her helmet-mask. Some of the most beautiful eyes Thalia had ever seen bore into her.

“I should hope so, Thalia Grace. I should very much hope so.” And with a swish of that beautiful cape, Praetor was gone.

After Thalia Grace had dutifully reported the information back to Lady Artemis, she practically ran home to put away her costume and talk to Jason. 

Jason had barely entered the door when Thalia tackled him, screaming. 

“Jeez, Thals, get off-! What the…?” Thalia finally stood, and helped Jason up, but not before stabbing her finger in his face.

“What do you know about Praetor? What’s her name? Why does she know mine?” Jason just gave her an odd look, blinking rapidly before her words sank in.

“Oh? Reyna? Yeah, sorry, Thalia...I kind of talk about you a lot to friends…” Jason looked sheepish, but Thalia’s brain was practically buzzing.

“No, no...it’s fine! I just, uh…” Jason looked at her expectantly and Thalia simply groaned, sat down, and buried her face in her hands. “Well you know how you had that crush on one of my friends-”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jason looked incredibly embarrassed. “Go on?”

“Well, it’s my turn, I guess.” is all Thalia said, and Jason immediately understood, his eyes bulging and a little scream escaping from his mouth.

“Oh my god, you like Reyna!” He hopped down onto the couch, his face filled with unabashed glee. “Oh my god, I can’t believe it-”

“Alright, alright, alright! We get it, Thalia has a crush, blah blah blah. You know Artemis wouldn’t like it if I dated-”

“Actually,” Jason said, looking downright malicious in his glee, “You could pose it as an alliance sealer if you ever asked her out. She is the leader of SPQR, and the sister of the leader of the Amazons. All you’d have to do is say that, and bam! The Lady Artemis is going to allow it, trust me.”

“Yeah, if I could even ask Reyna out,” Thalia snorted. “I bet she wouldn’t even know who I was, other than my name. And besides,” Thalia stared straight at her hands in her lap. “We only met one time. Sure, that’s enough for me to get a crush, but she could be, like, demisexual or something.”

Jason just nodded silently, doing that face one does when they’re comforting a friend that is due to soon get their world torn open. “Yeah, yeah. Uh, do you mind if I go patrol tonight? I just-”

Thalia looked up at Jason and smiled. “Of course, Jace. Go and flirt with-”

“Shut! The up!”

“If we have to talk about my love life, we have to discuss yours as well~”

“I’d rather not! Good bye!”

Thalia, when she was bored, tended to read any of the comic books surrounding her and her friends, or Jason’s friends.

She knew all of their backstories by heart. Percy’s father had been unknowingly infected with a cursed/blessed rune in the sea that killed him, but passed the blessings of the sea onto Percy. Piper’s mother had been a beautiful and powerful sorceress, and had passed her beauty and ability to “Charm Speak” people into doing anything she wanted down to Piper. Hazel had suffered a similar fate as Nico when she worked in a mine a long time ago, and the mine had collapsed upon her. A strange and powerful entity had taken pity on her and raised her to the ground, granting her life back, along with the powerful gift of being able to raise jewels from the ground. These were only some examples, and Thalia had examined and talked about each of them with all of them.

Of course, in each of the published comics, they never gave their real names, only their superhero alias. Thalia stood and went to her rather large pile, sifting through to find Reyna’s.

Eventually, she came to it: The Origins of Praetor the Powerful, written by “Uncle Rick”. 

Thalia flipped through it, soaking in every panel. Reyna had been gifted by her ancestors once her father turned into a raging alcoholic monster with abilities to always help others. Reyna and her sister had run away together, both taken in by SPQR and the Amazons respectively. Both sisters worked their way up, eventually coming to be the leaders they were today.

Thalia closed the comic and found herself picking up her own.

She’d practically raised herself and Jason, after their mother started to become an alcoholic and neglectful. Jason, along with a stapler, tried to eat an amulet that once belonged to their father. 

Thalia had tried to stop him, but it was too late, and with a blast of lightning, it had bonded to Jason’s nerves and skin cells. And with a crackle of static as Thalia picked Jason up, it spread to her as well. 

The siblings had been separated shortly afterwards as the (now illegal and locked up) Mutant Police had taken Jason away from her. Little did Thalia know, however, as she ran away from home, was Lupa, an intelligent she-wolf who was poisoned with a strange mixture the Mutant Police had tried years ago on a pack of wolves. Lupa would help break the mutant children out, train them in the ways of their mutation, and send them to SPQR.

Meanwhile, Thalia discovered that at Half-Blood Camp, she was welcome and accepted. She’d also discovered she could fly, thanks to an almost horrific accident that would have killed her otherwise. Yet like Icarus and the sun, she flew too close to the sky and was struck by the lightning she attracted.

Thrown to the earth, dryads had desperately used a bit of the experiment that had turned them to tree-like creatures to turn Thalia into a tree temporarily, making her fall into a deep slumber, preserved in her youth, until a cure could be found.

Years later, Annabeth and Percy themselves found the cure and spread it around the tree, awaking her and causing her to revert back to her human form. Yet effects of the experiment still remained, and thus, Saving Grace was known for also being able to use tree-like abilities: suddenly growing hundreds of feet tall, poisoning her enemies, and shooting her arms like branches out to whip her opponents in the face, or even to trip them up. And still, years later, Thalia was incredibly afraid of heights. (Saving Grace wasn’t, of course. Saving Grace couldn’t be. But yet Thalia feared it even after all these years.) A month after her happy reunion to life, she’d joined the Huntresses of Artemis, a band of permanent virgins who drank the waters of the immortal creek for the ability to go out and hunt, all while still being young. In addition, they received better eyesight, tracking, and strength. 

Yet all Thalia could think about as she read it again was of Reyna. She’d had a commanding aura to her, and Thalia could easily see her as a leader of an army of thousands. 

Thalia turned these thoughts over in her head one last time as she let herself fall into a dreamless sleep.

“Wake up, wake up, wake up!” Jason was about three inches from Thalia’s face the next morning, so she did what came naturally to her and punched him. However, being used to this, Jason dodged it. “Our friends invited us to go to lunch today.”

“Go away, I don’t wanna.” Thalia groaned as she turned in her bed. It was Phoebe’s shift today.

“Reyna’s gonna be there,” Jason said, and wouldn’t you know it, Thalia could get dressed and ready in thirty minutes.

At the cafe, their friends were already sitting at the booths. Being their friends, they were all loudly talking, laughing, and shouting. Jason slid in next to Percy, leaving Thalia to sit next to Reyna. She sat cautiously, and Jason started to talk to Percy to allow Thalia and Reyna to talk amongst themselves. 

Reyna fixed a dazzling smile at Thalia. “Hello, Thalia.”

The way she said her name made Thalia’s gut twist. It was like she was one of the most important things in the world, and Reyna was looking at it with quiet admiration.

“Uh, hey, Reyna.” Reyna just smiled at her before speaking again.

“So you do know my name.”

“Well, uh, Jason told me, and I’m sorry if that’s being-”

“No, no. It’s perfectly fine.” Reyna took a sip of her drink. “Your espresso is on the way, by the way. Just thought I’d let you know.”

“Oh, uh, thanks.” Thalia gave her an awkward smile before finding a subject to talk about. “So, uh...How’d that thing with the...weird guy in your second-in-command go?”

“Oh, Octavian?” Reyna groaned and looked up at the ceiling. “Don’t even get me started. I only made him my second in command because of some prophetic thing, and he was a little-” and thus it went, the two falling into easy conversation.

Thalia didn’t want it to end, but yet, it had to. She still walked Reyna to her car, laughing and talking all the while.

“Well, this is me,” Reyna said with some uncertainty. “I...um.” She took in a deep breath and looked Thalia in the eyes. If someone had punched her in the chest, it would’ve taken away less breath than Reyna’s eyes. “I really liked hanging out with you, and I was wondering if we could hang out again.”

“Like as a date?” Thalia kicked herself internally for asking oh gods-

“Yeah, if you'd want it to be,” Reyna said, smiling. If Thalia had to rank Reyna’s attractive features, her smile would only come second to her eyes. 

“Yeah. I think I would.” Thalia said slowly. Reyna kissed her cheek, and Thalia’s brain went wild.

“Get my number from Jason. Text me later?” 

“Of course.” And thus, Reyna climbed into her car and drove away. Thalia touched her cheek with a smile before pumping her fist. “YES!”