Author's Note: I was asked why I was unhappy with Riordan's portrayal of Janus. It's a bit lengthy, so I expanded at the bottom of this chapter for anyone who cares to know. (It's long a rant-y, so feel free to ignore it, too.) Please enjoy chapter two, and as always, please review.

2. I Cover a Stranger in Peanut Butter

Dressed in leaves as she was, I might never have seen the funny girl in the tree, but when someone chucks a handful of acorns at your head, you tend to notice. Rubbing the back of my head, I looked up into the tree above me and saw a pair of angry eyes peering down at me. Her camouflage was so complete, that at first, I thought the eyes belonged to the tree, but after a moment, I saw the rest of her face. A second too late, I saw the hand, flinging more acorns, and caught most of them with my face.

I ducked and covered my head with my arms, shouting, "What are you doing?! Are you crazy?"

"Get away from my tree!" she yelled back. "I am the guardian spirit of this oak!"

More acorns bounced off my back and arms, and I was getting frustrated.

"What are you talking about? Ouch! You're not a spirit, you're just a girl! Ow! And... And that's not even an oak tree!"

I braced myself for more acorns, but there were none. Maybe she had run out. A soft thud of feet hitting grass came from nearby, and I peeked from between my arms, getting my first good look at her. She was a wispy little thing with thin, black hair halfway down her back. She was wearing what appeared to be a pile of vines and leaves sewn into a filmy material that moved like water over her skin, and she was looking at me, confused.

"What do you mean, 'it's not an oak tree'?" she asked, crossing her arms over her chest defiantly.

I lowered my arms slowly, ready to protect myself if she decided to pelt me with something else. Her ceasefire seemed genuine, though, so I pointed to the tree she had jumped down from.

"It's... It's a maple tree," I said slowly. "You can tell by the shape of the leaves."

She looked up at the leaves, but it was obvious that she didn't know the difference between oak and maple leaves. She turned back to me and her face was red and angry. She stamped her foot hard and demanded, "What do you mean it's a maple tree!"

I readied myself for another barrage of acorns, but she turned on her heel to face the tree, raising an accusing finger. "You told me you were an oak tree!" she shouted at it. "You trees think you're so funny. You think you're hilarious, but you're not."

When she started making a hissing noise that sounded quite like rustling leaves, I started to inch away, trying not to draw attention to myself. I watched as she walked up to the tree trunk and poked it hard with one finger. "You're just mean!"

Above her, a branch shook heavily and something clear and sticky, the size of a baseball, dropped out of the leaves and landed on her head. She gasped and flinched, but the raw sap was already dripping down her forehead and into her eyes. She fanned her hands frantically, surprised and horrified.

"Why?!" she shrieked at the tree. "Why would you do that?"

I froze, watching, as the leaves of the tree shook vigorously. The girl shook her head and sat down hard on the ground. "I am so," she protested as though someone had accused of not being... something. She followed it up by making more rustling noises of her own. "Why don't you believe me?" she asked, trying to scrape the sap out of her hair and eyes. After a moment of fruitless tugging, she gave up and just started crying.

I watched for just a moment before making my decision. I approached her carefully and knelt down next to her.

"Hold still, okay?" I said, tugging a maple leaf from her dress. I turned it vein-side down and very carefully scraped the sap off her forehead, and did my best to get all of it out of her eyes. This close, I could tell she was about my age, but she was too pale to have grown up in Florida. She was shaking with sobs, but didn't stop me from what I was doing.

"This isn't working very well," I said, the leaf tearing in my hands and sticking to her in bits and pieces. "This is going to be a little gross, but it should do the trick," I continued, opening my backpack and removing a plastic baggie with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in it. I took the sandwich from the bag and pulled the bread apart, scraping as much of the jelly onto the grass as possible. When I had mostly peanut butter, I started smearing it across the sap on her head.

She shrieked and sobbed harder when I spread the peanut butter over her hair and face, but the oils in it started to do the trick and I was able to wipe most of the sap off her skin. When her eyes were clear, she opened them and looked at me, eyes shining with tears. She sniffed and swiped at her nose with the back of one hand while I tried to work on her hair, but I only managed to get most of it off the surface.

She winced as I pulled on the sap and tried to comb through her hair with my fingers, and I stopped when it became clear that the peanut butter of my uneaten lunch wasn't quite enough to get everything out. Using the sleeve of my shirt, I wiped as much of the peanut butter off as I could, and sat down across from her.

"I think that's as good as it gets until you get home and take a shower," I told her. "You'll need water as hot as you can stand it and a fine-tooth comb to get it all, and you'll want to get to it soon, before it sets."

Instead of getting up to leave like I expected her to do, she just tried her best to run her fingers through the sap and stared at me. I cleared my throat and looked back at her, wondering what to do. My feet were longing to get back on the road, but something else was holding me back. I was about to cut my losses and leave, when she finally spoke.

"Why?"

The question was so broad that I wasn't sure how to answer, but I tried. "Uh, why...?"

"Why are you helping me?" she asked, looking almost cross.

I sighed and shrugged. It wasn't a question I was expecting. "I... don't know," I said. "I just... You looked like you needed help, and I was here, so... That's it."

There was more silence while she processed my answer.

"I threw acorns at you," she said, now sounding a little confused.

I laughed and rubbed the back of my head where the acorns had hit me, and she gave the barest of smiles.

"Yeah, you did," I said, grinning. "I'm... not really sure what that was about, but it seems like the tree wasn't very appreciative of your, uh, guardianship."

This seemed to set her talking. "I know, right?" she asked. "It's like, I was up sitting in the tree to protect it from poachers, or tree-cutters, or whatever, and all I get is attitu—"

She stopped abruptly in the middle of her tirade and looked at me suspiciously. "How did you...? What are you?"

"I—"

I was so startled by the question that I had no idea how to answer it. I sputtered for a moment, trying to find something intelligent to say, but she interrupted me by suddenly leaning forward until her face was inches from mine and poking at me curiously with both hands. She tugged at my cheeks painfully and then tugged my eyelids up as though looking for something specific on the tops of my eyeballs. She only had a moment's examination before I jerked back, falling onto my elbows on the ground.

"Wh-What are you doing?" I asked, alarmed.

"Are you a demigod? Can you see through the Mists?"

"I don't kn-know," I said indignantly. "What are you?" I demanded lamely, turning her question around on her.

She rolled her eyes. "I'm a dryad, obviously," she said, tugging on her clothes. "Ageless tree guardian ring a bell?" she asked, like I was stupid. It was a tone teachers and classmates alike had used on me, and it only made me angry.

"No," I said, "it doesn't, you lunatic, and this is a public park. This tree doesn't need to be protected from poachers, or whatever. It's already protected here."

"You saw the tree! You heard it!" she said, ignoring my attempt at an insult and moving closer. "You can see the truth! How do you do it?"

I opened my mouth to tell her again how crazy she was, but a blinding flash of light over her shoulder caught my eyes and I threw an arm across my face. "What the—?"

"I knew it!" the girl—dryad?—exclaimed. When I looked up, she was sitting back on her heels, pointing to a floating light over my head. When the spots had cleared from my vision, I made out the shape of a key crossed by a long stick or something glowing bright and white, rotating in midair. I gaped at what I was seeing, but the hologram slowly faded and disappeared.

"What... What was...?"

"You've been claimed," the girl said.

"Claimed? Claimed by what?"

"Your godly parent, duh," she said, still nursing her fingers through her hair, but apparently no longer interested in poking and pulling at my face.

"P-Parent?" I asked, still processing. "I don't have any parents."

She shrugged. "Well, you do now. One, at least. That was definitely the symbol of a god claiming his kid. I've seen it a hundred times before, back home."

I frowned. Her know-it-all attitude was getting on my nerves. "Well, then, smartypants, who is it?"

"How should I know?" she retorted. "There are only like a hundred of them. You're really barking up the wrong tree," she said, and then burst out laughing like it was the funniest thing anyone had every said. She doubled over, holding her stomach.

Finally, I had had enough. I stood up, zipped my backpack up in a huff and threw it over one shoulder.

"Hey," she said, her laughter stopping immediately. "Where are you going?"

"I'm going away from here," I said. I was tired of whatever games were going on here. "This is crazy. You're crazy. I don't know how you did the thing with the glowing lights, but I don't think it's fun, and I'm tired of being made fun of."

She stood up, looking like her feelings were hurt. "I wasn't making fun of you," she said. "You're just about the most exciting thing that's happened in this park since I got here."

The maple rustled its protest at the statement, but I did my best to ignore it.

"And I didn't have anything to do with the fireworks, promise. And, you can just shut it," she added to the tree.

More rustling.

"What do I look like, some sort of weird... light... producing thing?" she asked, wiggling her fingers at me to show she wasn't holding anything. "No, I'm a tree spirit."

As the rustling grew more insistent, she turned furiously to the tree and spat, "Do you mind much? I am trying to have a conversation with an actual person... here..."

I squinted at her back when her voice jumped an entire octave in pitch and came to a crashing halt. "Hey, are you okay?"

She took two steps back so she was standing next to me, her eyes transfixed on something in the tree. "I don't suppose you're the kid of some kind of fight-y god, are you?" she asked, her voice barely a whisper.

"What?" I asked at the sudden change in topic. "Why?"

She stepped behind me an instant later, ducking down. "Because now would be a really good time for some fight-y!"

She pointed over my shoulder into the trees and I glanced up. "What are you p-p-p—!"

When I saw what she was pointing at, the breath left me. Glaring down at us, the entire length of it's thirty-foot body wrapped around a heavy tree branch and part of the trunk, was an inky black snake as big around as I was.

"O-Oh."

/-

Expanded Author's Note:

The short answer is: Google Janus.

The long answer? Well, again, it's a bit... long. (And a little impassioned. Forgive me. XD)

Believe what you will, but my personal belief structure is somewhat eclectic. A Christian base, Buddhist meditation, Wiccan ritual structure, framed in Paganism and led by animal totemism. Janus, as a concept, is also a central figure in my system. He is the god of doorways and pathways. Of beginnings, transitions, and endings. He is the god of movement and journeys and choices. He sees the past and the future simultaneously. Traditionally, because he was the god of beginnings, it was necessary to invoke him before invoking any other god. He's widely believed to be one of the most important deities in Roman culture.

In Riordan's books, Janus appears briefly, and in the wrong mythos. Of course, the fact that he's strictly a Roman god in the Greek series doesn't bother me nearly as much as the fact that he appears as a sort of sideshow, with split personalities (neither of which appear to be intelligent), without any bearing on the appropriate timing of vital choices, who quakes at Hera's feet and makes a general, useless fool of himself. It's actually almost insulting.

Forgive my tirade, but in all fairness, it is why I put this after the chapter and not before. ;)

Love and candies,

/-wujy