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Camp Half Blood Campers' Correspondence a Year Later-

[Phil Ortega to Lisa Ortega]

Hey, little sis. Guess what? I won the chariot race. You remember when I wrote that we were getting new teachers at camp? One of them stays in my cabin. Her name's Pheobe and she's pretty nice. She brought a baby sun-horse to camp with her. You remember the story where there was that kid Phaeton and he went to his dad, Helios, because the kids didn't believe that Helios was his dad. Helios promised that he'd give Phaeton anything he wanted and Phaeton said that he wanted to drive the sun chariot across the sky. It was really dangerous and Helios tried to talk him out of it, but Phaeton really wanted to drive the chariot and he ended up losing control of the horses and falling out of the sky. There's more to it, but that's basically the story. Helios has had a bunch of kids since then so he's more careful with what he promises so the best Pheobe could get was to borrow one of the baby sun horses. Even just a baby sun horse is hard to control and it runs faster than anything so we won the first chariot race really easy and it accidentally set some other chariots on fire.

There's a funny story behind the sun-chariot. A long time ago Helios was the Greek god of the sun. Then later, as the Greeks conquered more lands, their gods changed a bit, went to different places, and stuff. Apollo's a bit of a new god that came about when there was less war. You wouldn't bother so much with a god of music and merriment if you were a warring culture. That's what Marie-Laure says, anyway. She's a teacher in the Athena cabin and she knows a lot about religion and history, not just mythology. She's saying that Helios "pulled a Pan". It doesn't really make sense because the god Pan went missing for centuries and then faded away from the world. Helios and a lot of other gods faded away because no one remembered them, but Marie-Laure says that they're coming out of hiding now. When Helios faded away he gave the sun chariot to Apollo, but he's back now. Selene is back too. She's Helios' sister and is a moon goddess, just like Artemis is Apollo's sister and she's a moon goddess. Five Selene kids came in last night. The youngest is two and the oldest is a teenager. They're all whole siblings. Selene claimed them all at once. All children of Selene have the same father because she asked Zeus to make their dad eternally young. We've met them all. The Helios, Selene, and Eos cabins get teamed up a lot. They call us the Hyperion Trio because Hyperion's their dad. He's this big Titan guy of light and stuff so it makes sense that his kids are moon and sun gods. The Selene kids are really close. They all lived together before the satyrs found them and brought them to camp. They're also really good at taking care of themselves. They ace all the survival classes. They've been teaching us about shepherding. The Eos guy keeps opening people's doors. You'd like him.

Love you, sis. Say hi to mom for me and I'll say hi to everyone for you.

Phil Ortega

Helios Cabin

Dear readers,

I had planned to save my personal comments for every 25th letter, but I should address this now-

I have been asked if the events in 'The Lost Hero' have affected my fanfic. My answer to that is: yes. Yes, it has. A lot. It screwed me over big time. I didn't think Riordan would dare have the next prophecy start up just 6 months after the last book. I think he wrote it too fast and one can tell from the degraded writing quality and wit. The screwing with my fic is probably only going to get worse since 'the Lost Hero' takes place 6 months before my fic starts and there's probably going to be more books to come. I already have Percy Jackson in my fic so at first I thought that maybe I'd just ignore the book and go on with my story as planned, but I found myself already mentally incorporating the new characters into the story. I'm going to do my best to make sure that the new campers that Riordan did mention (besides the new main characters which I have to be careful with) are cunningly slipped into my story as best I can and continue on with the storyline I had created as planned. I want to keep Percy, but I don't want to ignore Jason so for the sake of the fic, perhaps Jason is on loan to Camp Half Blood. I don't know. It's an alternate dimension now!

I will stand by the number of cabins I have added because it makes more sense. Riordan really set for himself an immense challenge that it seems he could not properly handle and he's attempting to remedy his over simplification of the Greek and Roman Pantheon at the same time, which I am thankful for, although I am not satisfied with his methods. So we shall see. Thank you for reading.