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

Also if you see '-' after a letter and there's a space before the next word, that me censoring a curse word.

Now, since at this point the Heroes of Olympus were introduced and paired up with key characters of the "Stand" when Captain Trips hit (at least those that aren't among the antagonist), I decided to include chapters more focus on chapters with the main characters of the "Stand" without the demigods. The reason being is that I would have to anyways with Lloyd and Flagg since they an important antagonist character. So if those chapters are too much like the original, apologize in advance.

Lastly (for now), I am aware of the 2020-2021 version of the mini-series of the Stand and I did try to watch the first part, but frankly I couldn't even finish watching the first part and didn't dare to watch the rest of it nor do I planned to. I don't like it. I don't like many of the changes they made since the 90s adaptation. But there are a few changes in the 2020-2021 adaptations that actually involved info from the books the Stand. May I remind you this crossover involved the UNCUT VERSION of the books, so if you see parts that seem to come from 2020-2021 adaptation, it's because those parts/info actually came from the book itself

Larry talks to his Mother at her Work

Jason worked security at the desk of Chemical Bank Building as Piper worked with Alice in cleaning. Alice Underwood had taken in Piper for training when they started. Jason wore a typical security uniform whereas Piper had to wear a shapeless gray uniform, support hose, and crepe-soled shoes. To top it off Piper had to keep her choppy hair under a black net. Piper did not complain much as it did not make her stand out. Despite being daughter of Aphrodite—goddess of beauty—Piper prefer wearing fashionable clothes or jewelry much less wear any make up. She even like cutting her own hair to purposely make it choppy for that reason.

Piper do wish the uniform involved regular pants instead of dress. She hates wearing dresses even if they are dull gray. Even when Aphrodite blessed her with a dress, she forced on Piper she tries to get them off as soon as possible (and Aphrodite had done that a couple of times).

Unfortunately, part of being daughter of goddess of beauty also refers to natural beauty even without the stuff she despises, so too many around her, she still looked beautiful. So, after learning who her mother was, Piper just tried to live with natural beauty if she can still do other things to not stand out.

Jason and Piper had talked with each other since meeting Larry. Larry did not seem too bad, but both can tell Larry was in trouble and if not, careful he can pull Alice down with him. They had no doubt Alice could take care of herself and can be stern at time, but Alice does have that motherly soft spot for her son when they noticed Larry was not home when they stop by Alice before the three of them headed to work.

Piper met Jason at the front desk. "Hey!"

"Hey! Are you done?" Jason asked.

"Yeah. Alice let me off early," Piper said. "Any trouble down here."

"Nothing I can't handle without accidentally zapping anyone," Jason said. "Homeless is no different from Fauns begging for denari. Offer them some food or money and they go on their merry way. Drunks are a bit harder to deal with, but no different than children and legacy of Bacchus during celebrations."

Larry came into the lobby. Although he looked like he been in a small fight and got out of it with a cut on his forehead he smiled when he saw the two.

"The Wayward Son is here," Piper sighed.

"Hey Jason. Hey Piper. You guys work here?" Larry asked.

"Yeah, your mom got us both jobs here after we met her," Jason said. "I take it you want to see her?"

"Yeah. You probably already heard, but I didn't come home last night and forgot to call."

Of course, you did, Piper thought before saying. "We were taking inventory when she let me off early. She might still be there. Why don't you go up and apologize to her?"

It took a lot more effort to say something unkindly, but Piper managed to put in a bit of charm speak into her words.

Larry smiled. "I will. I came here to do that. Thanks." Larry rushed off to the elevator.

"You charm speak to him, didn't you?" Jason asked.

"A little bit in case he was here for something else," Piper said. "Never hurt to be safe than sorry with someone in whatever situation he's in."

…

Larry got an elevator and went up, aware that the other people in the car were stealing cautious glances at his forehead. The wound there was no longer bleeding, but it had caked over into an unsightly mess.

The twenty-fourth floor was taken up by the executive offices of a Japanese camera company. Larry walked up and down the halls for twenty minutes, looking for his mother and feeling like a horse's a-. There were plenty of Occidental executives, but enough of them were Japanese to make him feel, at six feet-two, like a very tall horse's a-. The small men and women with the up slanted eyes looked at his caked forehead and bloody jacket sleeve with unsettling Oriental blandness.

He finally spotted a door with CUSTODIAN & HOUSEKEEPING on it behind a large fern. He tried the knob. The door was unlocked, and he peered inside. His mother was in there, dressed in the same uniform as Piper, with her hair firmly caught under a black net. Her back was to him. She had a clipboard in one hand and seemed to be counting bottles of spray cleaner on a high shelf.

Larry felt a strong and guilty impulse to just turn tail and run as though the charm of Piper's advice had washed itself away. Go back to the garage two blocks from her apartment building and get the Z. F- the two months' rent he had just laid down on the space. Just get in and boogie. Boogie where? Anywhere. Bar Harbor, Maine. Tampa, Florida. Salt Lake City, Utah. Any place would be a good place, if it were comfortably over the horizon from Dewey the Deck and from this soap-smelling little closet. He did not know if it was the fluorescent lights or the cut on his forehead, but he was getting a headache.

Oh, quit whining, you g- sissy.

"Hi, Mom," he said.

She started a little but did not turn around. "So, Larry. You found your way uptown."

"Sure." He shuffled his feet. "I wanted to apologize. I should have called you last night—"

"Yeah. Innovative idea."

"I stayed with a Buddy. We… uh… we went out steppin. Did the town."

"I figured it was that. That or something like it." She hooked a small stool over with her foot, climbed up on it, and began to count the bottles of floor wax on the top shelf, touching each one lightly with the tips of her right thumb and forefinger as she went. She had to reach, and when she did, her dress pulled up and he could see everything underneath. Larry turned away, recalling to Noah's third son when he looked at his father as the old man lay drunk and naked on his pallet. Poor guy had ended up being a hewer of wood and fetcher of water ever after him. Him and all his descendants. And that is why we have race riots today, son. Praise God.

"Is that all you came to tell me?" she asked, looking around at him for the first time.

"Well, where I was and to apologize. It was crummy of me to forget."

"Yeah," she said again. "But you got your crummy side to you, Larry. Did you think I forgot that?"

He flushed. "Mom, listen—"

"You're bleeding. Some strippers hit you with a loaded G-string?" She turned back to the shelves, and after she had counted the whole row of bottles on the top one, she made a notion on his clipboard. "Someone has had themselves two bottles of floor-wax this past week," she remarked. "Lucky them."

"I came to say I was sorry!" Larry told her loudly. She did not jump, but he did. A little.

"Yeah, so you said. Mr. Geoghan is gonna be on us like a ton of bricks if the darn floor-wax doesn't stop going out."

"I didn't get in a barroom fight and I wasn't in a strip-joint. It was not anything like that. It was just…" He trailed off.

She turned around, eyebrows arched in that old sardonic way he remembered so well. "Was what?"

"Well…" He could not think of a convincing lie quick enough. "It was. A. Uh. Spatula."

"Someone mistook you for a fried egg? Must have been quite a night you and Buddy had out on the town."

He kept forgetting that she could run rings around him, had always been able to, always would.

"It was a girl, Ma. She threw it at me."

"She must be a heck of a shot," Alice Underwood said, and turned away again. "That dratted Consuela is hiding the requisition forms again. Not that they do much good; we never get all the stuff we need, but we get plenty I wouldn't know what to do with my life depended on it."

"Ma, are you mad at me?"

Her hands suddenly dropped to her sides. Her shoulders slumped.

"Don't be mad at me," he whispered. "Don't be, okay? Huh?"

She turned around and she saw an unnatural sparkle in her eyes—well, he supposed it was natural enough, but it sure was not caused by the fluorescents in here, and he heard the oral hygienist say once more, with great finality: You ain't no nice guy. Why had he ever bothered to come home if he was going to do stuff like this to her… and never mind what she was doing to him.

"Larry," she said gently. "Larry, Larry, Larry."

For a moment he thought she was going to say no more; even allowed himself to hope this was so.

"Is that all you say? 'Don't be mad at me, please, Ma, don't be mad'? I hear you on the radio, and even though I do not like that song you sing, I am proud it is you sing it. People ask me if that is really my son and I say yes, that's Larry. I tell them you could always sing, and that's no lie, is it?"

He shook his head miserably, not trusting himself to speak.

"I tell them how you picked up Donny Robert's guitar when you were in junior high and how you were playing better than him in half an hour, even though he had lessons ever since second grade. You got talent, Larry, nobody ever had to tell me that, least of all you. You knew it, too, because it is the only thing, I never heard you whine about. Then you went away, and am I beating you about the head and shoulders with that? No. Young men and women, they go away. That is the nature of the world. I will not be surprise if one day Jason and Piper go away one day too. Sometimes it stinks, but it is natural. Then you come back. Does somebody have to tell me why that is? No. You come back because, hit record or no-hit record, you got in jam out there on the West Coast."

"I'm not in any trouble!" he said indignantly.

"Yes, you are. I know the signs. I have been your mother for a long time, and you cannot b- me, Larry. Trouble is something you have always looked around for when you could not just turn your head and see it. Sometimes I think you would cross the street to step in d-. God will forgive me for saying it because God knows it is true. Heck, Piper down in the lobby with her boyfriend sees it. She will not out and say it, but I can tell the way she acted since you came home. I think she seen the fame life herself and knows what it can do to people who cannot stay out of trouble. Am I mad? No. Am I disappointed? Yes. I had hoped you would change out there. You did not. You went away a little boy in a man's body and you came back the same way, except the man got his hair processed. You know why you came home?"

He looked at her, wanting to speak, but knowing the only thing he would be able to say if he did would make them both mad: Do not cry, Mom, huh?

"You came home because you couldn't think where else to go. You did not know who else would take you in. I never said a mean word about you to anyone else, Larry, not even to my own sister, but since you have pushed me to it, I will tell you exactly what I think of you. You are a taker. You have always been one. It is like God left some part of you out when He built you inside of me. You are not bad, that is not what I mean. Some of the places we had to live after your father died, you would have gone bad if there was bad in you, God knows. I think the worst thing I ever caught you doing was writing a nasty word in the downstairs hall of that place on Carstairs Avenue in Queens. You remember that?"

He remembered. She had chalked that same word on his forehead and then made him walk around the block with her three times. He had never written that word or any other word on a building, wall, or stoop.

"The worst part, Larry, is that you mean well. Sometimes I think it would be a mercy if you did not have money worse. As it is, you know what is wrong but not how to fix it. And I do not know how, either. I tried every way I knew when you were small. Writing that word on your forehead, that was only one of them… and by then I was getting desperate, or I never would have done such a mean thing to you. You are a taker, that is all. You came home to me because you knew that I must give. Not to everybody, but to you."

"I'll move out," he said, and every word was like spitting out a dry ball of lint. "This afternoon."

Then it came to him that he could not afford to move out, at least not until Wayne sent him his next royalty check—or whatever was left of it after he finished feeding the hungriest of the L.A. hounds—on to him. As for current out-of-pocket expenses, there was the rent on the parking slot for the Datsun Z, and a hefty payment he would have to send out by Friday, unless he wanted the friendly neighborhood repo man looking for him, and he did not. And after last night's revel, which had begun so innocently with Buddy and his fiancée and this oral hygienist the fiancée knew, a nice girl from the Bronx, Larry, you will love her, profound sense of humor, he was low on cash. No. If you wanted to be accurate, he was in trouble to his heels. The thought made him panicky. If he left his mother's now, where would he go? He doubt Jason and Piper would take him in if his mother were right about Piper can tell what she already figured out. A hotel? The doorman at any hotel better than a fleabag would laugh his a- off and tell him to get lost. He was wearing good threads, but they knew. Somehow those b- knew. They could smell an empty wallet. He wondered how Piper and Jason got that apartment above his mother's.

"Don't go," she said softly. "I wish you wouldn't Larry. I bought some food special. You saw it. And I was hoping we could play some gin rummy tonight. Piper and Jason even insisted staying to eat at their place or somewhere out, so we reconnect."

"Ma, you can't play gin," he said, smiling a little.

"For a penny a point, I can beat the tailgate off a kid like you."

"Maybe if I gave you four hundred points—"

"Listen to the kid," she jeered softly. "Maybe if I gave you four hundred. Stick around, Larry. What do you say?"

"All right," he said. For the first time that day he felt good, good. A small voice inside whispered he was taking again, same old Larry, riding for free, but he refused to listen. This was his mother and she had asked him. It was true that she had said some hard things on the way to asking, but asking was asking, true or false? "Tell you what. I will pay for our tickets to the game on July fourth. I'll just peel it off the top of whatever I skin you out of tonight."

You couldn't skin a tomato," she said amiably, then turned back to the shelves. "There's a men's down the hall. Why don't you go wash the blood off your forehead? Then take thirty dollars out of my purse and see if Jason and Piper will go with you for the movies if they have not left yet. You do not have to sit with them, but I am sure they appreciate the treat. If they are not there you can repay the twenty tonight. There's some good movie houses over on Third Avenue, still. Just stay out of those scum pits around Forty-ninth and Broadway."

What Alice did not tell her son was that Jason and Piper would pay her back later anyway. Those two were good in paying back their dues since they started working. That is why they have not been kicked out of their apartment yet. They were something Alice wish her son were, someone who finds trouble but always willing to pay back later for it. She was no fool. She can tell someone who can find trouble as easy as Larry can. But she also can tell when someone means well.

"I'll be giving money to you before long," Larry said. "Record's number eighteen on the Billboard chart this week. I checked it in Sam Goody's coming over here."

"That's wonderful. If you are so loaded, why didn't you buy a copy, instead of just looking?"

Suddenly there was blockage in his throat. He harrumphed, but it did not go away.

"Well, never mind," she said. "My tongue's like a horse with a bad temper. Once it starts running, it just must go on running until it is tired out. You know that."

"I will pay you back," Larry said. He came over to hug her and tugged at the hem of her dress like a little boy. She looked down. He stood on tiptoe and kissed her cheek. "I love you, Ma."

She looked startled, not at the kiss but either at what he had said or the tone in which he had said it. "Why, I know that, Larry," she said.

"About what you said. About being in trouble. I am, a little, but it's not—"

Her voice was cold and stern at once. So cold, in fact, that it frightened him a little. "I don't want to hear about that."

"Okay," he said. "Listen, Ma—what's the best theater around here?"

"The Lux Twin," she said, "but I don't know what's playing there."

"It doesn't matter. You know what I think? There's three things you can get everyplace in America, but you can only get them good in New York City."

"Yeah, Mr. New York Times critic? What are those?"

"Movies, baseball, and hotdogs from Nedick's."

She laughed. "You ain't stupid, Larry—you never were."

So, he went down to the men's room. And washed the blood off his forehead. And went back to kiss his mother again. He got thirty from her scuffed back purse and went down to ask Jason and Piper to the movies. Jason and Piper both were changed back to regular clothing, so Larry guessed they keep extra clothes on them for after work. They accepted the offer as Larry assure them New York City was a city where something good is always at the theater and they went to the movies at the Lux.

They watched some insane, malignant revenant name Freddy Krueger suck several teenagers into the quicksand of their dreams where all but a few of them—including the heroine—died. Freddy Krueger also appeared to die at the end, but it was hard to tell, and since this movie had a Roman numeral after its name and seemed to be well attended, Larry thought the man with the razors on the tips of his fingers would be back, without knowing that the persistent sound in the row behind him signaled the end to all that: there would be no more sequels, and in a very short time, there would be no more movies at all.

In the row behind Larry, a man was coughing.

A/N: Okay, Truth time, I did the short brief theater mention in the end of the original chapter because Larry obviously saw one of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, and I'm a Freddy Krueger and Jason Vorhees fan. I think it was either Dream Master or Dream Child but they weren't very clear which one as the only movie with only one teenager survives was the first one and that one didn't have a Roman Numeral to it. Plus it was released in the 1980s. Well I guess the sixth movie The Final Nightmare: Freddy's Dead did had technically one surviving teenager but she wasn't the main heroin of the story and it didn't match the time frame I could get together using the Stand Uncut. And again that movie didn't come with a Roman Numeral.

But another reason I included the scene was because the man coughing in the row behind Larry. If you don't remember what so significant about the coughing or just don't know, go back and re-read this story because it been implied multiple times the significance of coughing and sometimes sneezing.