BANG!
Percy rolled as a tail the size of a boat crashed where he was a second ago. He quickly jumped on the tail in an attempt to run at the monster's head but was instead flung so high that he was practically courting a painful smite by lightning.
Then, he started free-falling, and all the son of the sea said was, "CHIRONNNNNNNNNNN."
A mutated-looking dragon looked directly at him with sea-blue-glowing eyes and roared with the ferocity of 100 hellhounds.
Percy aimed his sword to land at the beast's eyes, and at the perfect time, not a second later, there was a stream of blinding blue light. Riptide cut straight through the laser into streams that avoided the demigod.
"WHO IN THIS GODS-FILLED WORLD UPGRADED THE DAMN DRAGONS?" the hero screamed as Riptide pierced the dragon's eyes.
The Dragon thrashed in pain. Percy was thrown across the used-to-be-green plain, now a disaster zone, straight into the mountainside.
Percy blinked the blinding light away just in time to see a giant one-eyed dragon run at him.
Percy then got a trademark idea and started running towards the Dragon.
As they were in the perfect distance for crashing (the Dragon doing most of the crushing), water shot below Percy, and he was lifted into the sky. He grabbed his sword, still stuck in the beast's eyes, and pulled. Riptide made a quenching sound as it exited the eye socket, and Percy slid below the dragon and stabbed.
The Dragon roared again before collapsing.
On our favorite hero...
Fates were just doing this for their amusement at this point, the still-alive Percy thought, and why in the name of Zeus was it shooting LASERS; it's supposed to be breathing fire!
The dead dragon didn't turn into golden monster dust but instead glowed bright blue before shedding its dragon skin and turning into a ghostly blue whale.
Perfect. Percy thought, this is exactly what I wanted to do this weekend.
"Thank you, Prince," The blue whale started.
Percy was sure he had a concussion, tons of scrapes, scratches, and far too much blood loss for this early in the weekend.
"I was cursed because-"
"It's okay, you're uncursed now. Please get on with whatever ghostly blue whales do." Percy knew he was being rude, but he was too injured to care. All he cared about was why Chiron thought he had to send Percy to kill a dragon and not Clarisse or someone who would actually be excited about killing a dragon.
If blue whales could frown, it would.
"I have to admit I thought after suffering so much in your short miserable life, you would actually find a day of killing dragons somewhat relaxing."
Percy wondered if it would be okay to stab the blue whale.
"Your entire family is suffering quite a lot, but at least your godly family is now at rest."
Percy should have ignored the ramblings of the overgrown fish, but his stupidly ADHD mind did not.
"My entire family is at rest, godly is peaceful for now. Mortal is dead."
The blue whale tilted, not just its face but its entire body tilted to look at Percy more closely. Seeing a giant blue whale doing a 90-degree turn made him pretty queasy, something as giant as that should not be able to do that so easily.
"My prince, your grandparents are very much alive right now. I am a spirit of suffering, and your mortal grandparents and uncle are suffering right now; they are at a crossroads in life."
Percy stared at the blue whale of suffering; he wondered if it gave sap stories to every tired demigod that beat it.
No, it was probably only his bad luck.
The words finally fully registered in Percy's sleep-deprived, post-adrenaline mind.
"My mom said that her parents died in a plane crash," he said simply.
"Thank you, hero; I will not forget you," the annoying supermassive whale of suffering said instead of answering him, and then there was a bright flash, and it was gone.
. . .
"Is it against the ancient laws to give an answer to us mere mortals some straight answers?"
x-x-x
A box was opened, and Percy frowned.
It was another box of memories, just not the memories he was looking for.
Percy had been on a sort of self-imposed quest to find more about his mom's side of the family. He knew well enough to take the words of the divine seriously. The blue whale dragon's words had caused him to open up boxes of old stuff and memories that his mom kept in the house. It used to be quite a problem back in the cramped old apartment with smelly Gabe; it was better in the new one, and his mom used to cheer him up sometimes and show him some of his old stuff.
He glanced to his side to see a sand globe, his personal arts and crafts project that had a small collection of sea shells, some water, and lots of sand, the opposite of a snow globe.
There was also a collection of sea shells that the son of the sea had carefully maintained as long as his memory let him. He could now feel them brimming with the power of the sea and the sounds of waves and floods. They were quite comforting to keep around his house.
There was a hand-stitched blue sweater that his mom had given him after a very nasty cold, which was the only one the demigod had. Being a demigod and having half your genes made it hard to get affected by the common cold.
There were other things in these boxes: a paper stick that he used to pretend was a sword, his 4th-grade English notebook with doodles of superheroes and villains that captured his hyperactive imagination, and of course, the green cardboard box itself, which had the words "HERE LAY DRAGONS" in bold blue marker. He had spent what felt like his entire childhood in that box, well until he was 9 and had to start going to boarding schools. He wished he could tell his younger self that dragons hurt.
Percy really hoped that the whale dragon was just pranking him; he really did not want his mom to be a liar, and his childhood to be tainted more than it already was by prophecies and quests.
He moved his eyes from picture to picture from the campfire to the St. Louis Arch to the world map with a red dot on places he had been. It was a reminder that his mom put up; she seemed hell-bent on not letting him forget his quests, something about remembering how he was a hero. Personally, Percy wanted to know where he could mark Tartarus on that map.
He looked down at the last box, which had a few storybooks that his mom liked to read and a photo of her as a teenager. Percy sighed, ready to give up and be content with his theory of pranking Blue whale dragons when the photo had another man laughing with his mom. He seemed a bit older than his mom.
Percy paused; it definitely didn't look like his dad, but he looked familiar with blue eyes and soft features. Then, an older man entered the frame, but he looked quite serious and had the hard features and eyes of a soldier in war, a look he had unfortunately seen on many children. There was also a woman with soft features and flowing brown hair that was signature to his mom, with a jolt; he realized that this was his mom's family, a family that should have died when Mom was much younger. Percy felt numb; his mother had lied to him.
He blinked, and it was just his mother again; he could see a clock tower in the background, the infamous Big Ben.
Percy decided he was going crazy from sleep deprivation; hallucinating was not good for demigods. He was about to keep the photo of his mom back in her box of things that she had made long before her death when the man was back laughing with his mom, and so were the older man and woman.
Percy had his second jolt of realization; this picture was moving.
Why was the picture moving? Why hadn't his mom told him about her family? Why did she lie?
It was all too much; he wanted to rage; he wanted to punch something and scream. This wasn't fair; his mom was a good person; she trusted him. Why would she hide her family? Why—
He saw dust land on his mom's portrait.
He looked around and saw the shaking of his building; he saw glass on the floor and the unusually rageful movement of water; he heard thunder and the crying of kids who lived next to him.
He took a deep breath. He looked at the photo and then at the roof where Olympus was high above him. This wasn't a quest; he did not have a time limit; he simply kept the photo on the table and walked to his bed.
He knew he would have to know more to keep his sanity, but that was going to wait. For now, he went to his water bed and went into the realm of Morpheus.