A/N: I do not own the Percy Jackson series Kane Chronicles or The Stand Cut or Uncut version. I have however posted 'The Tales of...' series. This story takes place after The Tales of Magicians and Demigods: The Crown of Ptolemy but before the events of Trials of Apollo. Before reading this I suggest to read if you haven't yet:

The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Early Adventures
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Lightning Thief
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Sea of Monsters
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Titan's Curse
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Magical Labyrinth
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Stolen Chariot
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Sword of Hades
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Bronze Dragon
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Last Olympian
The Tales of the Son of Poseidon: The Staff of Hermes
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Lost Hero
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Quest for Buford
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Son of Neptune
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Mark of Athena
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The House of Hades
The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus: The Blood of Olympus
The Tales of Magicians and Demigods: The Son of Sobek
The Tales of Magicians and Demigods: The Staff of Serapis
The Tales of Magicians and Demigods: The Crown of Ptolemy

Also I'm going to let this out. On rough decisions based on what I know from The Stand, any mystical creatures Monsters, and automatons that are usually associated which characters from The Tales of and/or Percy Jackson won't be in this story

Also there's no character list for the stand, but if I had too pick two from the book it be Stu Redman and Fran Goldsmith as a pairing, and if I was allowed to add a fifth character to show, it would be of course Mother Abigail.

For the list of pairings which would be spoiler alert for those showing up later:

Percy Jackson/Annabeth Chase
Leo Valdez/Calypso
Jason Grace/Piper McLean
Frank Zhang/Hazel Levesque
Stu Redman/Fran Goldsmith
Larry Underwood (no relations to Grover obviously)/Lucy Swan

Other Important Characters

Mother Abigail
Nick Andros
Tom Collins
Glen
Ralph
Trashcan Man
Susan Stern
a few more demigods as extra characters to help out.

Antagonist but still important
Randal Flagg
Harold Lauder
Nadine Cross
Lloyd

And of course the two main forces that are mention but more of Lead Supporting Roles without actually making a character appearance: God and Devil

Healthy Doesn't Always Refer to Being Helpful

In the dim light that comes over the land just after sunset but before true dark, during one of those very few minutes that moviemakers call "the magic hour," Vic Palfrey rose out of green delirium to brief lucidity.

I'm dying, he thought, and the words clanged strangely through his mind, making him believe he had spoken aloud, although he had not.

He gazed around the himself and saw a hospital bed, now cranked up to keep his lungs from drowning in themselves. He had been tightly secured with brass laundry pins, and the sides of the bed were up. Been thrashing some, I guess, he thought with faint amusement. Been kicking up dickens. And belatedly: Where am I?

There was a bib around his neck and the bib was covered with clots of phlegm. His head ached. Queer thoughts dance in and out of his mind and he knew he had been delirious…and would be again. He was sick and this was not a cure or the beginning of one, but only a brief respite.

He put the inside of his right wrist against his forehead and pulled it away with a wince, the way you pull your hand off a hot stove. Burning up, all right, and full of tubes. Two small clear plastic ones were coming out of his nose. Another one snaked out from under the hospital sheet to a bottle on the floor, he surely knew where the other end of that one was connected. Two bottles hung suspended from a rack beside the bed, a tube coming from each one and then joining to make a Y that ended by going into his arm just below the elbow. An IV feed.

You'd think that would be enough, he thought. But there were wires on him as well. Attached to his scalp. And chest. And left arm. One seemed to be plastered into his s- belly button. And to cap it all off, he was pretty sure something was jammed up his a-. What in God's name could that one be? S- radar?

"Hey!"

He had intended to resonant, indignant shout. What he produce was the humble whisper of a very sick man. It came out surrounded on all sides by the phlegm on which he seemed to be choking.

Mamma, did George put the horse in?

That was the delirium talking. An irrational thought, zooming boldly across the field of more rational cogitation like a meteor. All the same, it almost fooled him for a second. He wasn't going to be up for long. The thought filled him with panic. Looking at the scrawny sticks of his arms, he guessed he had lost so much as thirty pounds, and there hadn't been all that much of him to start with. This…this whatever-it-was…was going to kill him. The idea that he might die babbling insanities and inanities like a senile old man terrified him.

George's gone courting Norma Willis. You get that horse your ownself, Vic, and put his nosebag on like a good boy.

Ain't my job.

Victor, you love your mamma, now.

I do. But it ain't—

You got to love your mamma now. Mamma's got the flu.

No you don't, Mamma. You got TB. It's the TB that's going to kill you. In nineteen and forty-seven. And George's is going to die just about six days after he gets to Korea, time enough for just one letter and then bang bang bang. George is—

Vic you help me now and put that horse in and that is my last word ON it.

"I'm the one with the flu, not her," he whispered, surfacing again. "It's me."

He was looking at the door, and thinking it was a d- funny door even for a hospital. It was round at the corners, outlined with pop-rivets, and the lower jamb was set six inches or more up from the floor. Even a jackleg carpenter like Vic Palfrey could

(gimme the funnies Vic you had em long enough)

(Mamma he took my funnypages! Give em back! Give em baaaack!)

build better than that. It was

(steel)

Something in the thought drove a nail deep into his brain and Vic struggled to sit up so he could see the door better. Yes, it was. It was definitely was. A steel door. Why was he in a hospital behind a steel door? What had happened? Was he really dying? Had he best be thinking of just how he was going to meet his God? God, what had happened? He tried desperately to pierce the hanging gray fog, but only voices came through, far away, voices he could put no names against.

Now what I say is this…they just gotta say screw this inflation…

Germany tried that too after Word War I… All they did was make their economy worse.…

I got to go with Annabeth on this one…

(Annabeth? Annabeth Chase? Who was she? I know that name?)

Better turn off your pumps, Hap.

(Hap? Bill Hapscomb? Another name I know)

I don't think it'll explode. I believe we're safe.

Holy moly.…

They're dead, okay…

Gimme your hand and I'll pull you up outta there…

Gimme the funnies Vic you had—

At that moment the sun sank far enough below the horizon to cause a light-activated circuit (or in this case, an absence-of-light-activated circuit) to kick in. The lights went on in Vic's room. As the room lit up, he saw the row of faces observing him solemnly from behind two layers of glass and he screamed, at first thinking these were the people who had been holding conversation in his mind. One of the figures, a man in doctor's whites, was gesturing urgently to someone outside Vic's field of vision, but Vic was already over his scare. He was too weak to stay scared long. But the sudden fright that had come with the silent bloom of light and this vision of staring faces (like a jury of ghosts in the hospital whites) had cleared away some of the blockage in his mind and he knew where he was. Atlanta. Atlanta, Georgia. They had come and taken him away—him and Hap and Norm and Norm's wife and Norm's kids. They had taken Hank Carmichael. Stu Redman. Annabeth Chase. Percy Jackson. God alone knew how many others. Vic had been scared and indignant. Sure, he had the snuffles and sneezes, but he surely wasn't coming down with cholera or whatever it was that poor man Campion and his family had had. He'd been running a low grade fever, too, and he remembered that Norm Bruett had stumbled and needed help getting up the steps to the plane. His wife had been scared, crying, and little Bobby Bruett had been crying too—crying and coughing. A raspy, croupy, cough. The plane had been at the small landing strip outside of Braintree, but to get beyond Arnette town limits they had to pass a roadblock on US 93, and men had been stringing bobwire…stringing bobwire right out into the desert.

A red light flashed on over the strange door. There was a hissing sound, then a sound like a pump running. When it kicked off, the door opened. The man who came in was dressed in a huge white pressure suit with a transparent faceplate. Behind the faceplate, the man's head bobbed like a balloon enclosed in a capsule. There were pressure tanks on his back, and when he spoke, his voice coming from one of those video games, like the one that said, "Try again, Space Cadet" when you f- up your last go.

It rasped: "How are you feeling, Mr. Palfrey?"

But Vic couldn't answer. Vic had gone back into the green depths. It was his mamma he saw behind the face plate of the white-suit. Mamma had been dressed in white when Poppa took him and George to see her for the last time in then sanny atrium. She had to go to the sanny-tarium so everybody else in the family wouldn't catch what she had. TB was catching. You could die.

He talked to his mamma…said he would be good and put in the horse…told her George had taken the funnies…asked her if she felt better…asked if she thought she would be home soon…and the man in the white-suit gave him a shot and he sank deeper and his words became incoherent. The man in the white-suit glanced back at the faces behind the glass wall and shook his head.

He clicked an intercom switch inside his helmet with his chin and said, "If this one doesn't work, we'll lose him by midnight."

For Vic Palfrey, magic hour was over.

…

Percy and Annabeth finally gotten a lucky break since they arrived in this crazy place. They were allowed to share room together as an experiment to see just how unaffected the virus was spreading between them through Annabeth.

At first they were given separate rooms when they arrived, which been annoyance to the young couple. Not just because they wanted to check on each other (nurses wouldn't help as they said the doctors wouldn't allow it), but also because of Percy's ADHD made it hard for him to just sit around and do nothing all day. They had a TV, and too Annabeth's delight a education channels, but when there was nothing on for Percy, he went stir crazy.

Then came the needles for blood work and all that and that's when the doctor's discovered that Percy's skin couldn't be penetrated by needles. Maybe if they got his weak spot, but Percy wasn't about to risk that.

After days of breaking expensive needles, the doctor came in and told Percy that the higher ups decided to stop trying to poke and prod Percy with needles if he agreed too some physical test too see just how healthy he is since Percy doesn't seem sick.

Percy agreed but only if they keep him updated on those that came with him. That came to be difficult, but eventually the doctor agreed to keep him updated on at least Annabeth.

So Percy did some cardio and respitory test in return he been kept up to date with Annabeth. The doctors didn't say she was sick or not, which annoyed Percy to wits end, but he came to suspect if she isn't dead yet, she might be immune like him.

Then the doctors confirmed his suspicions when they elaborated him in a new experiment involving Annabeth too see just how healthy she is, and later on others that haven't been sick if they cooperate. With that Percy and Annabeth were transferred into a double room with two beds and a glass wall. They couldn't do anything private of course, and Annabeth was poked with needles still, but they had their time together. Unfortunately there was one draw back for Percy…

"I told you what Hap had might be connected to Campion," Annabeth said.

"You're right! I'm sorry!" Percy groaned.

A common draw back indeed that the son of Poseidon was use too at this point.

Meanwhile their observers learned that Annabeth usually the one that is right about things when she and Percy talk about something and that Percy don't normally argue against her because of it. Which is more than they can say about one other patient that happens to also not be sick.

…

"Just roll up your sleeve, Mr. Redman," the pretty nurse with the dark hair said. "This won't take a minute." She was holding the blood pressure cuff in two gloved hands. Behind the plastic mask she was smiling as if they shared an amusing secret.

"No," Stu said.

The smile faltered a little. "It's only your blood pressure. It won't take a minute."

"No."

"Doctor's orders," she said, becoming businesslike. "Please."

"If it's doctor's orders, let me talk to the doctor."

"I'm afraid he's busy right now. If you'll just—"

"I'll wait," Stu said equably, making no move to unbutton the cuff of his shirtsleeve.

"This is only my job. You don't want me to get in trouble, do you?" This time she gave him a charming-waif smile. "If you'll only let me—"

"I won't," Stu said. "Go back and tell them. They'll send somebody."

Looking troubled, the nurse went across to the steel door and turned a square key in a lockplate. The pump kicked on, the door shooshed open, and she stepped through. As it closed, she gave Stu a final reproachful look. Stu gazed back blandly.

…

"So what's the chance there are others from Arnette not sick?" Percy asked.

"I don't know. Norm didn't look to well, and it looked like his kids were catching too," Annabeth said. "Stu looked fine, but I think only Hap had the chance to talk to him since we were gathered."

Gathered was one way to put it, Percy thought.

Two days ago in the afternoon, four army men and a doctor took them from Hap's home. The soldiers were armed and didn't let any questions or declining. Annabeth and Percy were in a army station wagon with Vic Palfrey, Hap, the Bruetts, Hank Carmichael and his wife, and two army non-coms and Lila Bruett was hysterical on the way to Braintree airstrip.

Annabeth had guessed the army gathered anyone they been in contact since Campion died and went from there as there were more than one army station wagon and each were crammed with people.

At the town limits there had been two olive green trucks blocking the road, barbed wire stringed up as if to close off the town. Even Percy knew that meant one thing: Quarantine.

Of those in the army station wagon, Norm was the sickest. He was coughing, bringing up phlegm, and feverish. Everyone else but Stu seemed to be suffering a greater or lesser degree from the common cold: sneezing, coughs, and sniffles.

They were all put in an military airplane and given first class treatment of food and drinks. Lila Bruett had started calming down until Norm had some kind of fainting spell. Two stewards bundled Norm into a blanket and brought him around in fairy short order and then one of them forced Lila to drink some milk with something in it that calmed her down.

When they touched down, there had been four Cadillac limousines waiting for them. The Arnette folks along with Percy and Annabeth filled three of them and the army escort got into the fourth one.

"Stu might be immune," Percy said. "He was the only one with us not showing signs of being sick.

"Maybe, but we don't know how long this virus can stay incubated before it starts spreading," Annabeth said. "Heck we might not really be immune for all we know."

"Well, then, let's just pray to Apollo or Asclepius that we are immune and so is Stu and someone else. Because I don't think I can handle keep watching you getting poked and prodded for blood to make a vaccine out of if it turns out you're the only one they can get results from," Percy said.

Little Percy know, although Stu was immune, he was still giving the doctors and nurses trouble.

…

The red light went on over Stu's door. When the compressor or pump or whatever it was stopped, a man in one of the white space-suits stepped through. Dr. Denninger. He was young. He had black hair, olive skin, sharp features, and an mealy mouth. When Percy first saw him, he made a joke to Annabeth that Denninger looked like he can pass off as child or legacy of Hermes-Mercury and/or Hades-Pluto (not using the gods actual names but nicknames only Annabeth could identify the gods with) with those features.

"Patty Greer says you gave her some trouble," Denninger's chest speaker said as he clopped over to Stu. "She's quite upset."

"No need for her to be," Stu said easily. It was hard to sound easy, but he felt it was important to hide his fear from this man. Denninger looked and acted like the kind of man who would ride his help and bullyrag them around but lick up to his superiors like an egg-suck dog. That kind of man could be pushed away if he thought you held the whip hand. But if he smelled fear on you, he would hand you the same old cake: a thin icing of "I'm sorry I can't tell you more" and top and a lot of contempt for stupid civilians who wanted to know more than what was good for them underneath.

The problem wasn't the test though. He had no objections to them. It was the idea of him being kept in the dark and scared that he object. Like Annabeth and Percy, Stu had put together his own theory on what was going on and he been waiting patiently, buying his time for answers. But now they expect him to abide to their test with no answers.

He went through similar situation four years ago when his wife had died of cancer at the age of twenty-seven. It had started in her womb and then just raced through her like wildfire, and Stu had observed the way doctors and nurses got around her questions, either by changing the subject or giving her information in large, technical lumps. And like then, Stu had to try to force some answers after waiting long enough.

"I want some answers," Stu said.

"I'm sorry, but—"

"If you want me to cooperate, give me some answers."

"In time you will be—"

"I can make it hard for you."

"We know that," Denninger said peevishly. "I simply don't have the authority to tell you anything, Mr. Redman. I know very little myself."

"I guess you've been testing my blood. All those needles."

"That's right," Denninger said warily.

"What for?"

"Once more, Mr. Redman, I can't tell you what I don't know." The peevish tone was back again, and Stu was inclined to believe him. He was nothing but a glorified technician on this job, and he didn't like it much.

"They put my home town under quarantine."

"I know nothing about that, either." But Denninger cut his eyes away from Stu's and this time Stu thought he was lying.

"How come I haven't seen anything about it?" He pointed to the TV set bolted to the wall.

"I beg your pardon?"

"When they roadblock off a town and put bobwire around it, that's news," Stu said.

"Mr. Redman, if you'll only let Patty take your blood pressure—"

"No. If you want any more from me, you better send two big strong men to get it. And no matter how many you send, I'm gonna try to rip some holes in those germ-suits. They don't all that strong, you know it?"

He made a playful grab at Denninger's suit, and Denninger skipped backward and nearly fell over. The speaker of his intercom emitted a terrified squak and there was a stir behind the double glass.

"I guess you could feed me something in my food to knock me out, but that'd mix up your tests, wouldn't it?"

"Mr. Redman, you're not being reasonable!" Denninger was keeping prudent distance away. "Your lack of cooperation may do your country a grave disservice. Do you understand me?"

"Nope," Stu said. "Right now it looks to me like it's my country doing me a grave disservice. It's got me locked up in a hospital room in Georgia with a buttermouth little p- doctor who doesn't know s- from Shinola. Get you're a- out of here and send somebody in to talk to me or send enough boys to take what you need by force. I'll fight em, you can count on that."

He sat perfectly still in his chair after Denninger left. The nurse didn't come back. Two strong orderlies did not appear to take his blood pressure by force. Now that he thought about it, he supposed that even such a small thing as a blood pressure reading wouldn't be much good if obtained under duress. For the time being they were leaving him to simmer in his own juices.

It be forty hours before someone would talk to Stu. But until then, unknown Stu, Percy, and Annabeth, there was still one other person being tested for the same reason Stu and Annabeth were, only hers would eventually come with grave news.

A/N: Just a heads up, the next chapter won't include much of The Tales of Characters, but it's included because it shows how this virus spread across the United States and just how fast it is. The reason for chapters like this is that it includes intel on the Super Flu Virus or at least gives you more of an idea what kind of virus it is that the movie doesn't include (I should know I seen the movie and read the book) for those of you who only seen the movie.

Then comes the moment you all are probably aware of and waiting for: Hazel's and Frank's turn to appear in this story. And the person they're going to meet-you'll just have to wait, but I will tell you he's reliable and resourceful. And the fact we know Frank isn't Dyslexic is going to help this guy out later on.