A/N (I recommend reading this): I'm going to MAKE THIS CLEAR. Just like I mention on my bio page about every other fanfiction I done: I DON'T OWN THE PERCY JACKSON AND THE OLYMPIAN SERIES or AND THE KANE CHRONICLES OR IT'S CHARACTERS as the rights goes to Rick Rioran. Also I suggest you guys start paying attention to the Author notes and my warnings that I left on EVERY chapter of EVERY story.

Sorry if this chapter is too much like the book.

This is a The Tales of version of the Percy Jackson and Kane Chronicles crossover and takes place after 'The Tales of the Heroes of Olympus part of the series. So if you haven't read them yet read before reading this story as stuff that happened in them will be mentioned:

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 if you haven't got the chance feel free to read:

The Tales of Classical Mythology

A crossover with The Tales of series with my dictionary on Greek/Roman Mythology where The Tales of Percy Jackson tells his version of stories behind famous names in Greek and Roman Mythology.

And if you are a fan of Stephen King:

The Tales of the Heroes of the Stand

Which is basically a crossover of The Tales of series with one of Stephen King's best novels The Stand.

Lastly, any one who wants to do a Demigods and Olympian reads story using 'The Tales of the Son of Poseidon' is allowed as long as you inform me about it.

Oh, How I Miss Being a God

As we trudged up Madison Avenue my mind swirled with questions: Why hadn't Zeus given me a winter coat? Why did Percy Jackson live so far uptown? Why did pedestrians keep staring at me?

I wondered if my divine radiance was starting to return. Perhaps the New Yorkers were awed by my obvious power and unearthly good looks.

Then Meg McCaffrey set me straight.

"You smell," she said. "You look like you've just been mugged."

"I have just been mugged. Also enslaved by a small child."

"It's not slavery." She chewed off a piece of her thumb cuticle and spit it out. "It's more like mutual cooperation."

"Mutual in the sense that you give me orders and I am forced to cooperate"

"Yep." She stopped in front of a storefront window. "See? You look gross."

My reflection stared back at me, except it was not my reflection. It could not be. The face was the same as on Lester Papadopoulos's ID.

I looked about sixteen. My medium-length hair was dark and curly—a style I had rocked in Athenian times, and again in the 1970s. My eyes were blue. My face was pleasing enough in a darkish way, but it was marred by a swollen eggplant-colored nose, which had dripped a gruesome mustache of blood down my upper lip. Even worse, my cheeks were covered with some sort of rash that looked suspiciously like… My heart climbed into my throat.

"Horrors!" I cried. "Is that—Is that acne?"

Immortal gods do not get acne. It is one of our inalienable rights. Yet I leaned closer to the glass and saw that my skin was indeed a scarred landscape of whiteheads and pustules.

I balled my fist and wailed to the cruel sky, "Zeus, what have I done to deserve this?"

Meg tugged at my sleeve. "You're going to get yourself arrested."

"What does it matter? I have been made a teenager, and not even one with perfect skin! I bet I don't even have…" With a cold sense of dread, lifted my shirt. My midriff was covered with a floral pattern of bruises from my fall into the Dumpster and my subsequent kicking. But even worse, I had flab.

"Oh, no, no, no." I staggered around the sidewalk, hoping the flab would not follow me. "Where are my eight-pack abs? I always have eight-pack abs. I never have love handles. Never in four thousand years!"

Meg made another snorting laugh. "Sheesh, crybaby, you're fine."

"I'm fat!"

"You're average. Average people don't have eight-pack abs. C'mon."

I wanted to protest that I was not average nor a person, but with growing despair, I realized the term now fit me perfectly.

On the other side of the storefront window, a security guard's face loomed, scowling at me. I allowed Meg to pull me farther down the street.

She skipped along, occasionally stopping to pick up a coin or swing herself around a streetlamp. The child seemed unfazed by the cold weather, the dangerous journey ahead, and the fact that I was suffering from acne.

"How are you so calm?" I demanded. "You're a demigod, walking with a god, on your way to a camp to meet others of your kind. Doesn't any of that surprise you?"

"Eh." She folded one of my twenty-dollar bills into a paper airplane. "I've seen a bunch of weird stuff."

I was tempted to ask what could be weirder than the morning we had just had. I decided I might not be able to stand the stress of knowing. "Where are you from?"

"I told you. The alley."

"No, but… your parents? Family? Friends?"

A ripple of discomfort passed over her face. She returned her attention to her twenty-dollar airplane. "Not important."

"My highly advanced people-reading skills told me she was hiding something, but that was not unusual for demigods. For children blessed with an important parent, they were strangely sensitive about their backgrounds. "And you've never heard of Camp Half-Blood? Or Camp Jupiter?"

"Nuh-uh." She tested the airplane's point on her fingertip. "How much farther to Perry's house."

"Percy's. I am not sure. A few more blocks… I think."

That seemed to satisfy Meg. She hopscotched ahead, throwing the cash airplane, and retrieving it. She cartwheeled through the intersection at East Seventy-Second Street—her clothes a flurry of traffic-light colors so bright I was worried the drivers might get confused and run her down. Fortunately, New York drivers were used to swerving around oblivious pedestrians.

I decided Meg must be a feral demigod. They were rare but not unheard of. Without any support network, without being discovered by other demigods or taken in for proper training, she had still managed to survive. But her luck would not last. Monsters usually began hunting down and killing young heroes around the time they turned thirteen, when their true powers began to manifest. Meg did not have long. She needed to be brought to Camp Half-Blood as much as I did. She was fortunate to have met me—something I am not use to as everyone needs me, different meaning.

Had I been my usual omniscient self, I could have gleaned Meg's destiny. I could have investigated her soul and seen all I needed to know about her godly parentage, her powers, her motives, and secrets.

Now I was blind to such things. I could only be sure she was a demigod because she had successfully claimed my service. Zeus had affirmed her with a clap of thunder. I felt the binding upon me like a shroud of tightly wrapped banana peels. Whoever Meg McCaffrey was, however, she had happened to find me, our fates were now intertwined.

It was almost as embarrassing as the acne.

We turned east on Eighty-Second Street.

By the time we reached Second Avenue, the neighborhood started to look familiar—rows of apartment buildings, hardware shops, convenience stores, and Indian restaurants. I knew that Percy Jackson lived around here somewhere, but my trips across the sky in the sun chariot had given me something of a Google Earth Orientation. I was not used to traveling at street level.

Also, in this mortal form, my flawless memory had become… flawed. Mortal fears and needs clouded my thoughts. I wanted to eat. I wanted to use the restroom. My body hurt. My clothes stank. I felt as if my brain had been stuffed with wet cotton. Honestly, how do you humans stand it?

After a few more blocks, a mixture of sleet and rain began to fall. Meg tried to catch the precipitation on her tongue, which I thought a very ineffective way to get a drink—and of dirty water, no less. I shivered and concentrated on happy thoughts: the Bahamas, the Nine Muses in perfect harmony, the many horrible punishments I would visit on Cade and Mikey when I become a god again.

I still wondered about their boss, and how he had known where I would fall to the earth. No mortal could have had that knowledge. In fact, the more I thought about it, I did not see how even a god other than myself could have foreseen the future so accurately. Even demigods born with future sight—other than my children that are blessed with it—cannot be accurate all the time. After all, I had been the god of prophecy, master of the Oracle of Delphi, distributor of the highest quality sneak previews of destiny for millennia, and sometimes I will admit I pass that power to my children, although that rarely happens. After all, no demigod should have that much knowledge of their future.

Of course, I had no shortage of enemies. One of the natural consequences of being so awesome is that I attracted envy from all quarters. But I could only think of one adversary who might be able to tell the future. And if he came looking for me in my weakened state…

I tamped down that thought. I had enough to worry about. No point scaring myself to death with what-ifs.

We began searching side streets, checking names on apartment mailboxes and intercom panels. The Upper East Side had a surprising number of Jacksons, I found that annoying.

After several failed attempts, we turned a corner and there—parked under a crape myrtle—sat an older model blue Prius. Its hood bore what look like horse hooves prints. But I knew horses do not gallop over Toyotas, but pegasus—winged horses—often do.

"Aha," I told Meg. "We're getting close."

Half a block down, I recognized the building: a five-story brick row house with rusty air conditioner units from the windows. "Voilà!" I cried.

At the front steps, Meg stopped as if she had run into an invisible barrier. She stared back toward Second Avenue; her dark eyes turbulent.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"Thought I saw them again."

"Them?" I followed her gaze but saw nothing unusual. "The thugs from the alley?"

"No. Couple of…" She waggled her fingers. "Shiny blobs. Saw them back on Park Avenue."

My pulse increased from an andante tempo to a lively allegretto. "Shiny blobs? Why didn't you say anything?"

She tapped the temples of her glasses. "I've seen a lot of weird stuff. Told you that. Mostly, things do not bother me, but…"

"But if they are following us," I said, "that would be bad."

I scanned the street again. I saw nothing amiss, but I did not doubt meg had seen shiny blobs. Many spirits could appear that way. My own father, Zeus, once took form of a shiny blob to woo a mortal woman. I have no idea why any mortal women found that attractive, but it worked.

"We should get inside," I said. "Percy Jackson will help us."

Still, Meg held back. She had shown no fear while pelting muggers with garbage in a blind alley, but now she seemed to be having second thoughts about ringing a doorbell. It occurred to me she might have met demigods before. Perhaps those meetings had not gone well.

"Meg," I said, "I realize some demigods are not good. I could tell you stories of all the ones I've had to kill or transformed into herbs—"

"Herbs?"

"But Percy Jackson is a genuine hero type of demigod. In fact, he is one of the seven greatest demigods ever known. Besides we knew each other for ten years now, and I taught him everything I know."

Okay so the last part was a stretch of a lie, but I did know Percy for ten years now, ever since he was seven and Chiron brought him to his first field trip to Olympus so the Olympians (mostly Zeus) can decide whether he was a threat as son of Poseidon or if he truly is the hero he was predicted to be by my son Halcyon (also gone by Hal by the way). And every year since I seen him grown from that adorable seven-year-old child into that hero.

Well, except for that one year he decided to stay home with his mother instead of coming to Olympus. But all be fair, most of us did not have a problem with it. He was spending the first holidays in years with his mother for peep sake. Even Hera approved him being gone. That was until Zeus noticed his master bolt was missing, but fortunately it was cleared up by time summer solstice meeting.

Meg frowned. "You did?"

I found her innocence somewhat charming. So many obvious things she did not know. "Of course. Now let us go up."

I rang the buzzer. A few moments later, the garbled voice of a woman answered, "Yes?"

"Hello," I said. "This is Apollo."

Static.

"The god Apollo," I said, thinking perhaps I should be more specific. "Is Percy home?"

More static, followed by the front door buzzed. I guess they were debating whether it really was me. After all, Percy should know better than to keep a god waiting instead of welcoming him in. I pushed it open. Just before I stepped inside, I caught a flash of movement in the corner of my eye. I peered down the sidewalk but again saw nothing.

Perhaps it had been a reflection. Or a whirl of sleet. Or perhaps it had been a shiny blob. My scalp tingled with apprehension.

"What?" Meg asked.

"Probably nothing." I forced a cheerful tone. I did not want Meg bolting off when we were so close to reaching safety. We were bound together now. I would have to follow her if she ordered me to, and I did not fancy living in the alley with her forever. "Let us go up. We cannot keep our hosts waiting.

After all I had done for Percy Jackson, I expected delight upon my arrival. A tearful welcome, a few burnt offerings, and a small festival in my honor would not have been inappropriate.

Instead, the young man swung open the apartment door and said. "So, it's really you?"

As usual, I was struck by his resemblance to his father, Poseidon. He had the same sea-green eyes, the same dark tousled hair, the same handsome features that could shift from humor to anger so easily. However, Percy Jackson did not favor his father's chosen garb of beach shorts and Hawaiian shirts. He was dressed in ragged jeans and a purple and white hoodie with the words GOODE SWIM TEAM stitched across the front.

That is right, I remember, when Percy was not being a hero or good son, he competes in mortal swimming competition for a sense of being normal—or as close to being normal a demigod can. It is uncommon for demigods still in school to do that. To remind themselves they still can have a life outside fighting monsters and assisting gods.

Meg inched back into the hallway, hiding behind me.

I tried for a smile. "Percy Jackson, my blessings upon you! I need assistance."

Percy sighed. "Of course, you do." Then his eyes moved down to Meg. "Who's your friend?"

"This is Meg McCaffrey," I said, "a demigod who must be taken to Camp Half-Blood. She rescued me from the streets."

Percy's expression softens when I mention her being a demigod. I guess she reminded him of when he was a twelve year old demigod, or perhaps his girlfriend Annabeth, who he grew up with and originally friends with since they were seven until after the Second Titan War from what I understand (Aphrodite normally keeps up with couples stuff going on between demigods as its outside my domain).

Percy then scanned me over and smirked. "So, Zeus finally made you mortal for the third time? What took so long?"

That is right. I completely forgot that along with a prediction that Percy be amongst the seven greatest demigods known, Hal also gave Percy a big book on everything involving ancient Greek and Roman stories to help guide him on his path. Most children of Poseidon do not take on reading books, but Percy took Hal's warnings and advice to heart and studied everything he can from the book. Because of it, Percy knows about my history of being mortal twice before. But what did he mean 'what took so long?' perplex me.

"Look, I can fill you in what I can, but right now I'm surely we're being followed by malicious spirits."

Percy did not look so alarm as if that was the one thing, he feared might be the case of why we are here.

"Right. Come on in. I'll see what I can do to help," Percy said. "And maybe in return you can do me a slight favor."

A/N: In case any of you forgotten The Tales of Percy Jackson is smarter than the original Percy Jackson. Also I did prevent Percy getting expelled from Goode High School. You'll also be reminded of some other changes I made for The Tales of series in the next chapter.