A Snow Day

The winter after the war, during the second week in January, a blizzard hit the east coast, coating towns in two feet of snow and causing schools and jobs to be let out for two days and parks to get very crowded. Somehow, as if by Fate, all Seven of the prophecy were in New York so they decided to have a "We're the Seven and We're Awesome" day.

(Camp Half-Blood and Camp Jupiter took turns visiting every other month, so it just so happened that CJ was visiting CHB for the week of the snow day, and it would be CHB's turn to visit in March. They took a plane that the gods collectively paid for, and Percy only went on the plane once during the year to be safe. During the summers, Percy, Annabeth, Piper, Leo, Rachel, and Nico would pack into a car and have a road trip all the way to California.)

They all met in Central Park at ten, one of the less crowded areas far away from the skating rink. It was just an empty clearing with no trees and certainly no people. The girls showed up in their Uggs that they didn't really care if they would get ruined and their matching animal hats and mittens. (Annabeth had owls, Piper had kittens, and Hazel had pandas.) And the boys were wearing the snow boots that elementary school kids wore that they probably wouldn't be caught dead wearing at their age but who really cares?

First it started when Annabeth pushed Percy into the snow and he made a snow angel. Five minutes later, seven snow angels were scattered around, and most of them had the shoe prints that ruined everything when you try to stand up.

Then someone, probably Leo, suggested a snowman building competition. Hazel was instantly decreed the judge, considering she would be the most fair. So the three teams were: Percy and Annabeth, Leo and Piper, and Jason and Frank. (Which evens out to one super smart person and/or engineer and/or good leader on each team, Annabeth, Leo, and Jason, and arguably Percy could be considered one of those too.)

The team picking was actually a really easy process. Percy and Annabeth were already standing next to each other and they didn't even look at the other, they just stood there and knew they were on the same team. Piper decided not to pair up with her boyfriend and chose Leo instead, knowing she would had a better chance of winning with Leo because he would go all out and maybe try just a little too hard.

Jason and Frank then realized they were the only two left and high-fived, with the exchanges of "We can do this, absolutely!" and "Can I just turn into an animal and you just copy me into a snow sculpture?" It's obvious who said what.

Then Leo took out his prototype monster-proof iPhone the Hephaestus cabin had been working on for months and set a timer for an hour. (Keyword: prototype. Monster-proof-ness was not completely guaranteed.)

Hazel got a pad of paper and a pen from Leo, out of his tool belt of course, and wrote down what kind of hot chocolate everyone wanted (it was never a good idea to give a demigod caffeine), since she didn't actually have to help but being a judge could be fun anyway. She set out for the Starbucks on Columbus and West 86th.

It wasn't very crowded, but if you consider that most schools were closed, in turn causing parents to take the day off work, in turn causing them not to get their daily coffee, it makes sense. Hazel really didn't feel like making the barista suffer so she just handed her the list of different kinds of hot chocolate, but she didn't write her own order down so she just said it. Then the seven hot paper cups were handed back to her and Hazel nearly burned her tongue on hers ("Um, no whipped cream, but can you put some caramel and cinnamon?").

Meanwhile, the snowmen were all in very different stages.

Percy and Annabeth couldn't even get the bottom done because they couldn't even agree on what the name would be ("Can't we name it Percy Jr.?" "Let's just stick with Frosty...") and then they all of a sudden stopped arguing, flopping into the snow and laughing hysterically. That earned some strange looks from the other two teams and the poor innocent bystanders that happened to be on the path nearby.

Jason and Frank, but really only Frank, were building a normal snowman, but Jason felt the need to run to the costume store (if those were even open) to buy a top hat to make it look really awesome. Jason promised to sprint and use the wind to make the sprinting even faster.

Leo and Piper were fairly certain they were going to win, even if their's was three feet tall. They made a whole miniature snow family plus a dog and a really awkward looking cat, and they actually somewhat looked like people, or at least gingerbread men, instead of three balls stacked on top of each other. Then Leo found food coloring in his tool belt, which left him wondering how it got in there, but they used that make different colored clothes. Leo even managed to not melt Mr. and Mrs. Iceberg.

Hazel and Jason came back at the same time after they ran into each other on the street, but they didn't just come back, they literally dropped out of the sky.

Soon the hour was up and Leo and Piper won, as expected, since Percy and Annabeth didn't even build anything, because they were too busy hysterically laughing and then stopping and then finding something else funny five seconds later, and Frank and Jason made three huge snowballs that didn't even get stacked up yet, so it was just a sleepy snowman.

Percy said and wondered, for the first time ever, "Maybe I can control snow too since it's just water?" It was followed by a round of "No, duh!" and "Why didn't you think of that five years ago?" So he started flinging snowballs at people with his mind, after he realized he could have made the coolest snowman ever.

A full-blown snowball fight broke out and lasted for just over three hours, the final winner obviously being Annabeth. It every-man-for-themselves-but-no-lethal-weapons-please and everyone made little snow forts. But by the end, the only two people actually participating were Percy and Annabeth, since he literally didn't have to do any work and she's super competitive.

Everyone else subconsciously joined an unspoken game of "Who's snow fort is coolest?" (It wasn't Leo, let's just say that. His melted repeated after he set himself on fire in frustration.) Then the daughter of Athena and son of Poseidon realized everyone was making cool forts, so they joined in.

It was a tie between Piper, Percy, and Annabeth. Annabeth would have won, but then Leo tried to look inside and he melted it because his clothes were still smoldering. Percy really didn't know what to make his look like, so it was a classic igloo but it wasn't too perfect, in case mortal wondered how it was super perfect. Piper was a daughter of Aphrodite, so obviously hers was pretty.

And soon it was nightfall and time for everyone to go home, after they had a weird but comforting dog pile in the middle of a public field where people were watching. Everyone got a nice feeling of what it was like to be a normal person that didn't have to go on quests on a giant flying warship or travel across the country in a certain number of days.

They didn't care if people thought they were crazy; they were best friends and that all that mattered.

(Plus, demigod crazy is different from normal people crazy. Normal demigods would be sent to a mental asylum in the mortal world, so imagine what would happen to mentally insane demigods.)

I know, I know, I probably shouldn't have started a new story but I just want a story dedicated to fluffy one-shots. Not romantic, but friendships and friends and family and that kind of love. So I know that this was pretty horrible, but anyway, I really loved the idea and I had to wrote it down and I actually might be a little proud of it and it's just so cute seeing the Seven being all best friends. So yeah. There will probably be more chapters to this, but one shots and they might not all focus on just the Seven. Oh my gods, what if I did the road trip to Camp Jupiter that I mentioned? And I really would like to post C is for Cameras on my Alphabet Drabbles, but I don't know HOW I'm going to pull it off without making it either way too fluffy and romantic or way too fluffy and friendship-y. If you read this AN to the bottom, tell me what kind of friendship you would like to see in the next chapter and put the phrase, "blue plastic hairbrushes" in the bottom of your review!

~Sofia