Leo could, with only the faint audio of the room available to him, pinpoint the exact moment things had went wrong. There had been a shout, the noise muffled through the walls of ice to the point of incoherency, but, even if he did not know of the words that had been spoken, he was much convinced they were words to be feared.

The shout had been followed by a bang, a rash, various other noises Leo wasn't the keenest to hear because, with each one, his friends' states could be worsening. They could have been losing and he'd be none the wiser, standing there, beginning to smoulder, under the watch of Calais who, despite his very apparent dimness, Leo could not hope to bet in a battle with any physicality involved.

But Leo could not bear it when he heard the noise of a gun, likely Lance's, firing off as his friend shouted indignantly before being met with words, again so muffled Leo had very little chance of finding out their meaning.

He felt his heart drop in his chest when the words were met with only silence, beginning to worry he may have missed the chance to help. What if he was too late?

But he couldn't give up; he just had to find a way past Calais.

Intelligent eyes searched the room for a solution until the settled upon a rather obvious one they could simply not think of failing. Cursing himself for not thinking of it sooner, Leo took a step back, glanced over at Calais who appeared to be none the wiser, then another, glance, step, glance, step, glance, step.

Then he was there, standing with a hand, surely rather hot as there were trails of steam curling up from the outstretched, nimble fingers, hovering as inconspicuously as he could manage over the case of bronze that could, with a simple command in a series of whirs and clicks, unfurl back out into the dragon he was sure could help him, could help all of them.

Calais turned round to be met with the image of a large bronze dragon, its expressionless face seemingly angry as its unliving eyes tared at him, the mouth opening wide with a few creaks from the mechanisms that allowed such a thing to happen, instead of the image of the scrawny son of Hephaestus he was meant to be keeping a watch over.

He barely had time to yell to the son of Hephaestus before the dragon let loose a spiral of frame from is throat that Calais had no chance of escaping from.

He screeched as he crumbled, falling into particles of dust the wind was none too kind to, allowing Leo a quick path to his friends, followed by the giant dragon he only hoped could save them.

He knew Calais would reform, he just hoped it wouldn't be too soon - they needed absolutely no more additional problems.

Leo noticed a pair of eyes latch onto him even before Festus had crashed through the wall, much too big to make use of the doorway Lo had passed through. Lance was looking at him thankfully as he stood in front of Piper and Jason protectively with the rifle in his arms aimed decisively but not being used to shoot of at all. Leo noticed a small hole in the wall over where Boreas sat, only just missing the god. He supposed it was intentional that the shot missed.

"Run!" Leo yelled as loudly as he could manage, not noticing the tuft of hair that promptly burst into flame at the top of his head.

His comrades were quick to comply to his wishes, running as fast as their legs could possibly carry them towards him. Though Khione ad Zethes were unwilling to let up for a second.

They remained in hot pursuit, approaching Leo just a quickly as his friends.

He grit his teeth as he watched the pursuers get nearer and nearer their targets, reluctant to release any fire from his palms after what he had done in the past but willing if it meant he could save his friends. But he found he didn't need to.

Without warning, both children of Boreas went to take another step but found themselves meeting with the floor rather than their targets.

"What?" Kione sounded nothing if not outraged as she tried to wrestle herself back to her feet but found she could only move one leg from its place.

Both she and Zethes looked back to find themselves shackled to the floor by restraints of water that were much stronger than they had any right to be. At about the same instant in that short span of time each of them felt was much longer than it possibly could have been, the eyes of all the fleeing demigods caught the same image.

Lance just stared slightly blankly as Leo's hand lathed onto his am and pulled him decisively backwards, away from the scene as Festus charged forwards, unleashing more burning flames upon the room as Boreas made to flee as the battle finally caught up to him and Khione and Zethes finally managed to break free. They didn't get far.

At last, lane felt the overwhelming roar of the wave in his ears lessen before dissipating entirely, fading away into nothingness and allowing the sounds of the world around him to come flooding back.

He felt himself running properly then, breaking away from leo's grip and rushing on ahead of him, knowing the infrastructure of the penthouse had been challenged by their actions. Leo ran a bit faster when he wasn't trying to keep Lance moving so he wasn't left behind or long and Lance soon took to grabbing his arm as Festus followed behind them.

Even Piper was thankful when they got back onto festus, as much as she didn't like the dragon.

After the heavy breathing had passed and the penthouse, of which there was surely not much left as it had been melting bit by bit even as they fled, had long since gone out of sight Jason decided he had something to say to Lance.

"You did that?" He confirmed, referencing the shackles on the floor that just might have saved hem from a fate much worse than that with which they had been met.

"I think so…"

"Why didn't you do it earlier then?" he sounded a little bit angry.

Lance threw his hands up into the air, somewhere between a mock surrender and a movement to convey his exasperation "I didn't know how and I don't know how I did it even now. Okay?"

"Huh," the anger had quickly been replaced with a contemplative air "You really haven't had a chance to practice with anything aside from that weapon have you?"

"No." Lance tugged at the straps of the bag slung across his back that contained his rifle.

"It would be a good idea to get some practice," Jason informed "I don't know what the mist will do to a rifle but I do know it's not the best of ideas to take it out in public - if we have to fight in a populated place it'll be the best idea to do it as inconspicuously as possible. Who would suspect us of all the weird things happening with the weather?"

"I suppose," Lance conceded "But we're a bit busy - we might need to put a hold on that."

"We could all do with some practice," Piper agreed as she looked at the reflective blade of Katoptris as it sat in her hands.

The ground below them was changing the further along they flew, trying not to soar above the most populated of places if they could help it due to their doubt in the mist's ability to normalise something as abnormal as a gleaming bronze dragon.

The surrounding air changed too, travelling through varying degrees of warmth, of cold, of humidity, of frostiness. Every now and then they would hear the rain falling around them, feel it patter across their skin as the gripped just a little bit tighter onto the one thing keeping them in the air as it became more slippery.

Lance couldn't help but stare up at the crying sky the first time the rain had fallen around them.

He muttered to himself in his mother tongue "Me perdí este,"

Leo looked back at him.

"What? The rain?"

"Yeah,"

"Why?"

Lance shook his head "I don't remember," Leo snickered and Lance smiled at him lopsidedly in response "I just feel as though it's been a while. I think someone mentioned something about 'rain' that would kill you last time I talked about this?"

"What?"

"I really don't know."

"Lance," Piper said from behind him "You should stop treating your memories as though they are even remotely normal."

"Clearly," he chuckled as the sky around them grew darker.

Piper yawned, looking at both Jason and Lance, both in front of and behind herself, with a warning.

"I'm tired," She declared "You'd better not let me fall."

"I wouldn't purposefully!" Lance told her indignantly.

Piper didn't take long to fall asleep, even if she was cold and the rain had rendered her damp her choppy hair sticking to both her forehead and neck.

But her rest was riddled with nightmares that made her feel as though she would be more relaxed had she forced her eyes to stay open: it was the same dream as she had been having for a while, the dream in which she saw both her father and a giant. But, this time around, it was different.

There wasn't a glimpse of her father to be seen and she found something out about that great, fiery giant she wished never to see again, either in her sleeping or waking moments.

The giant's name was Enceladus and he was trying to bribe her into betrayal.

He told her in that booming voice of his that hurt her ears to listen to that she should come to him on the afternoon of their solstice deadline, that she should betray her friends and Hera and go to him. If she did she could live in peace with her father.

She didn't care if it was just a dream: it was a demigod dream and demigod dreams had a tendency to be upsettingly prophetic.

Not for the first time, in the midst of that fitful sleep she was both desperate and reluctant to break free from, she just wished for the normalcy she had never once experienced.

After all, how could the kleptomaniac, delinquent daughter of a millionaire actor who had never known her mother (and had recently found out she was a goddess from the pantheon of ancient Greece of all things) and didn't know how much she really knew her father, the same girl who swore her actions weren't really as bad as people liked to declare them, ever be normal?

A/N
So, my computer's working again!

I'm sorry about the length of this chapter by the way, it' not that bad but it's a tad shorter than usual. You'll forgive me because it's an early update, right?

I'd like to mention that the little bit of Spanish I used I got from the internet because I don't speak Spanish, so if you speak Spanish and it's wrong please correct me and I'll fix it.

I can actually 'celebrate' Lance's birthday on time!

I'm really sorry if I accidentally put Lane instead of lance at some point by the way, my computer is lagging a bit because my correcting software uses the internet to run and I write in google docs because I don't have word on here and it is very confusing (the wifi at my house is honestly terrible).

This is irrelevant at this point so you don't have to read it if you don't want, but why does this site have to use the US date system? It's so confusing!

Why would you put the month before the date? It just makes everything difficult! The date at the corner of my computer screen is 28/07/2017 but this is going to upload and say that it was updated on 07/28/2017 and I'm going to forget at some point and just be incredibly lost:

"What the bloody hell is this? There aren't twenty eight months!"

Anyway, enough of that.

All the best,

~We'reAllABitOdd