Annabeth

I was sitting on a train driving home. Could I call San Francisco home? During the time I had been looking for Percy, I had been there quite a few times and I had always felt welcome. Yeah, I could call this place home. I felt Percy's body next to mine but when I turned to the side he wasn't there. Weird. It reminded me of that one song lyric. 'I still feel your touch in my dreams' Jason really liked that song, especially the part where it said 'I feel the static' because, according to him, it justified giving Piper an electrical shock everything he touched her. Needless to say Piper didn't like it. Now the song was playing on loop in my head. Or was it the entire train? '…Sleep next to me. I still feel your touch in my dreams. Forgive me my…' dreams. That sounded important. I looked down at my hands. Eleven fingers. That sounded very much like a dream. Or some god had thought that giving me an extra finger would be sooo funny. When I pinched my nose closed, could still breathe fine. Definitely a dream. As the dreamer, I guessed I was now the supreme empress of this world. And my first action as such was to stop the train by just pushing against the seat really hard. This of course violated the third Newtonian law, but who cares? This was a dream after all. I had only reached this state of being aware I was dreaming a few times, but since mid-June, when I had tried to contact Percy in his dreams, it had been getting more common. I had some fun doing some epic stuff like walking out of the train through the closed door. After a few minutes I remember something Bobby had said a few weeks ago. "How cool would it be if dreams had multiplayer" Now I knew that they did if you just knew what to do.

I focused on leaving my dream and ended up in the dreamscape, the place where all dreams can be accessed. It's like, let me think, like the corridor with all the magic doors from monsters inc. At least regarding how it approximately worked, but the visual appearance was different. Anyways, I tried to find Percy's dream. If their location corresponded to real world locations, finding it should not be hard since in the real world, Percy was like ten centimeters away from me. Looking around, I saw a dream-bubble that felt Percy-ish. Once I touched it, I was pulled into the dream.

Blue light flooded my surroundings. Upon turning around I saw the source of the light: a massive blue Jell-O. Percy was standing next to it, ripping out pieces with his bare hands and eating them. He noticed me. "Look Annabeth what just appeared. Looks like the gods want to thank me." He didn't know this was a dream. To be fair, the brain section for questioning whether something is realistic turns off during sleep. I decided to leave him in his oblivion. Why ruin it? "Can I have a piece?" "No, it's mine. Just kidding, I'd finish like one percent of this before it goes bad. Take as much as you want." I grabbed the comically large spoon that happened to be lying around and tried the Jell-O. It tasted really good, but not like Jell-O. It tasted more like pizza. "It works like nectar" Percy explained. "For me it tastes like my mom's cookies." Unlike nectar, this stuff did not set you on fire if you ate too much of it.

After something like two days (it was probably like 2 minutes in the real world, time is weird in dreams) I decided to do something other than eat Jell-O. "Hey Percy, why don't we do something else? We could do literally anything here, just eating seems like a stupid choice." "Do everything? Why?" Had he still not noticed? "This is a dream, seaweed brain" "A dream? Are you sure?" "If this weren't a dream, could I do this?" I tried to think of something I could do or summon. I went for a small red rock and imagined it appearing in my pocket. Once I felt it was there, I pulled it out and showed it to Percy "okay, convinced. So, how did you know? Also, you stole that idea from Harry Potter" "Easy. I just looked at my hands and saw eleven fingers. I then assumed that the gods had not decided to alter my anatomy for fun and that I was dreaming. I could also breathe through a pinched nose." "Cool, let's just put this away safely before doing anything else." I willed a Tupper box into existence and put the Jell-O into it. The whole structure was about a million times larger than the box, but it still somehow fit. Dream logic, am I right? Then I showed Percy some of the things I liked to do in my dreams.

"It's simple. If you believe something will work, it will. Just like this:" I jumped up, but instead of coming back down I floated a few centimeters above the ground. "Just try it. Don't worry, Zeus probably can't kill you in here." It took Percy a couple of attempts, but eventually he was flying as well. I took his hand and we shot up into the sky. We landed on a cloud. "So, everything I imagine comes true?" Percy asked. I confirmed that. "So if I were to imagine a giant flying spi-" "Nope, not happening. How about a giant flying ant." The next moment, I felt something brushing against my back. When I turned around, I saw just what I had said, though even bigger than expected. The biggest ant I had ever seen had been about three meters long. This one was closer to ten and its wings created a wind as strong as that of a helicopter. "Hey Percy, did you know that helicopter is made up of two words?" "Let me guess, heli and copter?" "Wrong. It's helico meaning 'spin' and pter, meaning 'fly'" "pter… like in pterodactyl?" "Yes. Except it's pronounced 'terodactyl', the P is silent"

With that out of the way we attempted to mount the massive ant queen (or maybe it was a male allate). Once we were on the ant's back, it started flying.

Soaring through the air like that was a lot of fun, though Percy was panicking a tiny bit. We eventually landed by a large city. It looked a bit like New York, but with some Greek accents added to it. "I've seen this city before, but where?" "Oh, I modeled it after what the sirens showed you." "My ideal world."

"Let me try something" Percy said. I prepared for the worst. He focused on whatever it was he was creating for about 5 minutes, he told me to turn around. Behind us was a simple wooden box, a bit larger than a telephone box with a metal door. "Percy, what is that?" "Just trust me. When has that ever not been a good idea?" Now, even in my memory, there was a long list of times when that had been the case, but I decided to ignore that fact for once. It was a dream, what could possibly happen?

Percy and I went into the box and for a few seconds nothing happened. Then I felt like my consciousness was pulled from my body. Then it returned, but something felt different. Percy opened the door. Wait, hadn't I been standing at the door? Light shone through the door, illuminating long blond hair. "In case you haven't guessed, I've built a body swapper." "Why thought?" "Why did you summon a giant ant? Why did we fly around? Because we could. And that's why I built a body swapper." "First, I'd like to clarify that summoning a large flying arthropod was your idea. I merely changed it from spider to ant. But other than that, fair point. Do you think this is permanent?" "I'd say we'll stay like this until we wake up. Then we'll be back to normal. Hopefully. But seriously, I highly doubt that a machine within our dream can influence the real world like that." "So, What are you going to do in my body?" I asked "Well, what would you do if you were suddenly in the body of a girl? Well, you always are, but you know what I mean." That was an assumption Percy made way too often. Of course, he was almost always right. "Let me guess, the assumption that I know what you want to do is filled with allonormativity" "And what is that again?" "Well, usually it refers to the assumption that everyone experiences regular sexual attraction, just like how heteronormativity means the assumption that everyone is attracted to the opposite gender, but in this case allonormativity means the assumption that sexual stuff is the first thing everyone thinks of when asked a question like 'what would you do in a boy's body?' " "Well, if I assume an answer, it's not really a question. Wait, I know what you're gonna say. You're gonna tell me that it was a rhetorical question asked for the purpose of answering the question you had previously asked me." Was I really that predictable? "Actually, whatever you wanted to do with my body, it's not what I want to do with yours. I was actually considering the social implications of being Male." "Aren't you the one that always says that that doesn't matter? If I remember correctly, like the third sentence you ever said in my presence was accusing me of sexism. And now you're saying that being a boy makes a difference" "Well, by saying that, I am not implying an inherent difference in abilities or whatever. I am just acknowledging that others assume such differences and treat people accordingly, resulting in induced gender differences. I guess it's similar to the Pygmalion effect where the expectations you have of people change the way you act, which changes the way they act, which causes the expectations to come true. And no, I don't know why the effect is named after some ancient Greek guy whose ideal woman was one who didn't do stuff like talk. Or have sex. Well, I understand the second one" "Alright I got it. Acknowledging sexism is not the same as doing it, there are induced differences and Pygmalion had a weird taste in women." "Pretty much. I guess this counts as science hour with Annabeth, what are you going to do next?" "Uh, allonormative stuff" Like I said, allos are weird.

What I ended up doing was to try out Percy's water powers. As a demigod who has never had powers (at least none in the realm of kinesis or control) it was an amazing experience. Of course, I could have done this in any dream, without Percy's body, but I preferred it this way. I also tried out some more complex things like moving clouds to create electric charge. I had often wondered what Percy should be able to do, but had been hesitant to tell him since his last 'I theoretically should be able to do that' moment had resulted in something traumatic. I didn't know what it was, but I had a vague idea that it had not been something I wanted to experience again. Just as I was trying to control metal using a magnetic field created via the movement of the electric charge in the clouds, my brain decided that I had had enough good experiences for one night. The scene around me changed to a massive cave. This also seemed to reverse the body swap. About 50 meters away I could see the Athena Parthenos wrapped in spider webs. Now the thing with flashbacks is that you cannot tell the difference between memory and actual sensation, so they feel just as real as anything you're experiencing at the moment. But this was a dream, so I knew whatever I was realistically experiencing was not real. I just needed to carry that knowledge over to the flashback. So I repeated to myself 'This is a dream. This is a dream. This is a dream' until I felt like I had fully crossed over. I tried to focus on the outside world. Me in Percy's bed, him right next to me. That gave me a feeling of safety. I remembered that my dagger, whose absence had been the reason everything had gone wrong here, was on the ground next to the bed, and it appeared in my dream-hand. Now the flashback would be at least bearable.

I watched myself go through the entire process of trapping Arachne in a Chinese finger trap; the Argo II crew rescuing the statue and me standing around on the fractured ground. I could hear myself thinking 'Oh, it's just a bit of spider silk, there's no need to bother Percy with cutting it away. I wanted to scream at myself that it was very much necessary to cut the silk, but of course to no avail. I could not change what had happened. I was pulled towards a crack. I watched until Percy let go of the edge, at which point the flashback ended and I woke up.

"You okay?" Percy asked. It was clear he had only just woken up. "You were shouting something about cutting it" "Arachne's web. The one that pulled me in. I thought there was no point in telling you to cut it. How could I have been so stupid?" "Hey, don't blame yourself. No one could have known it was dangerous." Percy leaned down and picked something up. "Hey, you want this?" It was my dagger. I took it from his hand. Turns out having the one thing that I had not had back then was exactly what I needed. "Thank you. Sometimes you know what I need better than I know it myself." "Well, that's what partners are for, right?" In our case, that was definitely true, though I didn't think Aphrodite or whoever else we have to thank for our relationship had traumatic healing in mind. "So, what do you want to do next?" I asked. "How about sleeping? It's 3am." He yawned and I followed a fraction of a second later. "Good idea. Let's hope this time neither of us has a flashback." I spent about twenty minutes contemplating whether sleeping with a dagger in my hand would be dangerous and whether it was worth the feeling of safety it was giving me right now, but fell asleep before I could come to a decision. The next time I woke up was from the sun shining through the curtains. Normally, waking up with the sun in April at our latitude would be way too early, but due to how the surrounding buildings were arranged, Percy's window remained in the shadows until about 8:30. Before that, I had dreamed about some really weird schist, something about skeletons (raised by Nico) fighting against immortal lizards.

So, this was the actual final birthday chapter. This one is again a bit late because I spent so long contemplating whether or not I should cut the entire body swap machine scene, but decided against it because 1) It's a dream and dreams are always a bit weird 2) I would have had to cut about 800 words and 3) Unlike Annabeth, you're not at any danger of dying from an overload of weirdness, so deal with it.