Percy Jackson (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
againstallodds) wrote2016-05-02 11:15 pm
againstallodds) wrote2016-05-02 11:15 pm
Entry tags:
Altered States Application
Player Information
Name/Alias: Tai
Personal Journal:tairako
Email: lai_nyan-at-yahoo.com
Please put *I am 18+ years old* to confirm you are of minimum game age. I AM A PINK ELEPHANT
Do you have other characters in game? Clint. I'm going from one guy who's badass but powerless to a kid who's... yeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaah.
May we post and/or link your application for others to see as an example in the future? Sure, why not.
Character Information
Character Name: Percy (Never Call Him Perseus) Jackson
Canon: ...Percy Jackson
Canon Point: Post-Sword of Summer, the first in the Magnus Chase series which follows the original Percy Jackson and the Olympians quintet and Heroes of Olympus quintet
Character Journal:againstallodds
Appearance: Ask Percy to describe himself and he'd give you the basics: he's six feet tall, decently athletic, with black hair, sea-green eyes, and a more-or-less Mediterranean complexion. And while all that's true, it leaves out the way other people see him, because Percy has a consistent problem of undervaluing himself. If you study him for any length of time it's pretty easy to tell that he's been through life's wringer and has been through way too much shit for an almost-seventeen-year-old, and he's perfected the art of turning on a threatening aura at the drop of a hat in the form of his "wolf glare" that he learned from the mother wolf herself, Lupa. He's obviously heavily involved in physical activity, but also looks like he could at any minute decide to point a cannon at a bus and shoot it... which he has in the past. It got him expelled. Notably, he's implied to look the most like his divine parent of any of the main demigods in the series (except maybe Thalia), as everyone else has different eye or hair colors or entirely different races from the Greco-Roman gods. He also has a brand/tattoo on his arm: the letters SPQR above a trident, with one stripe under it, his mark of being a full member of the Twelfth Legion of Rome. He normally wears jeans or shorts with t-shirts and sneakers - normal everyday clothes - but also always wears his leather necklace with his Camp Half-Blood beads on it as well. And his clothes always have pockets. (He's got the wrong eye color and a slightly paler complexion than I'd like, but finding a Greek teen is apparently beyond the power of the internet, so I'll be using Nicholas D'Agosto as a PB because he's kind of ridiculously perfect otherwise and I don't like Logan Lerman all that much.)
Age: Seventeen
History: Have a wiki link
Personality: If you saw Percy walking down the street, you probably wouldn't think much of him. An average teenager, a little tall for his age, with messy black hair and green eyes, nondescript clothes, on his own he isn't much you'd take notice of - unless you're someone in a position of authority, and then you might notice the little spark in his eyes that usually means that this one doesn't like rules and boundaries, and you'd keep an eye on him in case he started trying to short-circuit all the streetlights in your area or something else equally weird and troublesome and dangerous and annoying.
If you were lucky, you'd get out of there before the big scary wolves attacked and he started fighting them off with a baseball bat.
Percy Jackson is a lot more than he seems on the surface, and his life is more or less a big seething mess of contradictions. He had it rough when he was young, having to deal with his odious stepfather and all of his crap, and that toughened him up quite a bit. He inherited his father's nature, the sea's nature - Percy doesn't like to be confined, doesn't like pointless rules, doesn't like people telling him what he can and can't do just because they think they can. His dislike of authority has gotten him in plenty of trouble, being one of the reasons he kept getting kicked out of school throughout all of his life. One of the others of course being that he just can't stop doing stupid stuff, but we'll get to that. Percy always sort of felt that something was off with his life, that there was something he wasn't aware of but really needed to be, and growing up with Gabe and having to constantly be the new kid in a succession of schools toughened him up and made him angrier than he would have been otherwise. Once Gabe is gone and he has a more stable life with his mom and his friends at Camp Half-Blood, the anger gradually tempers down and becomes more focus, more directed, but he still remembers those days and how much he resented being trapped in the situation. More than anything, Percy refuses to be trapped against his will.
Percy is one of those guys that is and isn't smart at the same time - even Annabeth says so. It's not that he's unintelligent, but he's not what you'd call book-smart. His ADHD/dyslexia is one of the really strong cases, so most of the time he pulls C's and D's out in classes, but if he focused (or... could focus) he could probably be a B- student. His grades have improved a little since discovering all the demigod stuff and having a better outlet for all his energy, but they're still mostly hovering in the C range. But Percy's greatest mental strength is his ability to think quickly in bad situations, sometimes even more quickly than Annabeth. This is most obvious during the final battle in New York, where even though Annabeth and the Athena campers took over managing the details, Percy was still the one who devised their strategy on the fly and knew how to keep shifting people around to keep the largest amount of ground covered. He has brilliant (and often very stupid) ideas occur to him in the middle of all the dangerous situations he gets into, and he doesn't think before acting on them - because if he thought about them, he'd likely be dead. He remembers how there's a soft spot on the bottom of crabs and decides to try the Daedalus 23 command on the New York Public Library stone lions thanks to those flashes of ideas; both times the idea worked perhaps even a little too well. This is linked in with his ADHD making these kinds of mental jumps much more common for him than normal mortals, but also means that he can't concentrate sitting still in a desk, which is why (besides the dyslexia) he's not so great with mortal schoolwork.
Emotionally, Percy is very intelligent. With the huge exception of romance. But he's actually more stereotypically "sensitive" than he would give himself credit for, since he's able to detect mood changes in his friends pretty well and, if they've provided him some of the pieces, accidentally or not, he can often realize what made them upset and either apologizes for acting like an idiot, sympathizes with them, or tries to cheer them up. He never once made fun of Annabeth after rescuing her from the Sirens in the Sea of Monsters, tries (often fails, but does try) to keep Grover's spirits up during his search for Pan, and even though he stumbled a lot after the revelation that Tyson was his brother, come to really appreciate the big guy and lets him know it frequently. Even with Clarisse, his biggest "enemy" at Camp Half-Blood, he doesn't ever tease her or let anyone else know about seeing Ares more or less emotionally abuse her, or mention he saw Phobos pulling the same trick during the stolen chariot caper. After Silena dies, he knows what she did, knows how it hurt them, but he refuses to think of her as anything but a hero at the end - she made a mistake, a big one, but she set things right. He tries to comfort Nico di Angelo over Bianca's death, and keeps trying to help him even when Nico tries to overrun him with skeletons and yell at him repeatedly. Percy is a very compassionate person - he remembers how hard he had it when he was little, with only his mother really there for him, and he's determined to not inflict that on anyone else and protect the people he cares about, even if he hasn't known them for that long. His bond with Hazel and Frank becomes just as big as his bond with Grover in a lot of ways in much less time (though admittedly more trying circumstances).
Of course, that leads into his big one - his fatal flaw. Every hero has one, and Percy's is personal loyalty. Now, that sounds like it would be a good thing, and in many ways it is, but the worst flaws are often the ones that are good in moderation, which is pointed out to him by none other than Athena herself. Percy would do anything to protect a friend, or sometimes even an enemy. Anything. He would choose to save a friend even if the world was ending, basically. It means he always has this terrifying sense that he's the only one that can save everyone, that he has to keep on guard to protect people. He has a hard time admitting anyone else is better than him at it, even if that person is better because of circumstances. It means he won't stop and rest when he has to, because he won't stop until he knows everyone is safe. It means he ends up making more mistakes in battle, which could be fatal for him or anyone else. It means he could potentially choose to let the world end by trying to save the people he cared about most, especially Annabeth. So far he's gotten off lucky, but at some point, the luck has to run out. Oddly enough, even with that flaw, Percy isn't haunted by any ghosts - deaths he regrets. He's seen people die, certainly, many of them friends; Beckendorf and Silena were the worst for him. But he seems to not carry guilt about them once an appropriate time of mourning has passed, so his fatal flaw more or less extends only as far as the danger itself, and once it's over, he can process things more realistically. When he, Thalia, and Nico were chasing the Sword of Hades through the Underworld, he was the only one Melinoe couldn't control, even with him being slowly poisoned. That's not to say he doesn't still carry regret and sadness over losing friends, but he comes to peace with it instead of holding on to it. Unlike plenty of other heroes, he's not prideful basically at all - he doesn't want to be in charge of things, doesn't want the glory, doesn't really think of himself as anything special. It's not exactly modesty, but it's pretty close. Reyna specifically comments on it when he says he doesn't want to be a Roman praetor and when he apologizes to her for messing up her life, even though at the time he had absolutely no freaking clue what he'd done to screw her over. He just felt bad about doing it, whatever it was. (When he's finally made praetor, his entire speech is about how he doesn't deserve the position, and he has absolutely no problems giving it up first when Jason returns and then when Jason gives Frank an emergency promotion in the middle of battle.)
But really obviously, Percy can be as thick as two short planks. He's a genuinely good guy, but he's still human, and still flawed. (Hey, when even the gods are flawed, how can their children be otherwise?) He can see connections in the world around him, but he can often miss the forest for the trees. Oftentimes he needs the obvious pointed out to him. Also even after years of knowing he was a demigod, Percy still hasn't gone and done a lot of homework on the history of the gods, Greek or otherwise, so the things he knows about their stories are mostly just things he's heard walking around or that his family and friends have told him. Annabeth is genuinely surprised when he's able to identify an old sea god and describe him a little during the journey in the Argo II. The kid needs to go buy a copy of Bullfinch's and just read it already. He's also impulsive, and the ADHD only makes it worse - he frequently says stupid things, even to the gods sometimes. He's been threatened with incineration and life as a dolphin or mental patient more than once because of that. If he sees something interesting, he can't resist poking at it - which is how that cannon went off on a school trip (whoops). Annabeth and others have frequently had to pull him back from doing something really stupid, or get him away after he's already done it. He has an unmistakable temper and can relatively easily be goaded into letting it explode, especially if the one pushing his buttons is a bully like Clarisse or her father because bullies are his primo number one hot button. He's also a complete nincompoop at recognizing romantic feelings in himself or about himself, which has lead to complications with not only Annabeth and Rachel, but also Calypso and even Nico, though to be fair no one realized that about him. His lack of pride means he can't really see why anyone would be interested in him like that, so those revelations often completely blindside him. He also doesn't seem to realize he's pretty darn good-looking, which is obviously subjective but overall seems to be fairly universal. Percy has recently started dating Annabeth - something that everyone else expected years ago - and though they're very different, that seems to be what makes them good for each other. She could use some excitement in her life, he could use some steadying influence, they're already good friends and a more than competent team to the point where they can instinctively fight back-to-back in the depths of Tartarus itself. He can still be an idiot, but Annabeth helps keep him on an even keel.
His other biggest failing is thoughtlessness. Or, not exactly thoughtlessness, but he has an unfortunate habit of "out of sight, out of mind." He's very concerned with people, cares a lot about them, and certainly for the ones he's close to he never forgets them, but if someone's not around he just ...doesn't think about them a lot. When Nico's around Percy talks to him, tries to help, but Nico never stays at camp for long and Percy just assumes that he's doing okay, at least after the Midas/Labyrinth incident. (Granted, Nico chose to sequester himself a lot and never acted like he was having trouble, so this one's not entirely Percy's fault.) He remembers Calypso but after he specifically tells the gods to free her from her island after the Battle of Manhattan, he doesn't check to make sure they did (and yes he got Hera-napped but that happened several months later so he did have time). Probably the worst example was during the Caper of Hades' Stolen Sword, when he wiped Iapetus' mind clean with Lethe water, then managed to convince him he was a friend of his named Bob. After leaving the Underworld that day he barely remembered the amnesiac Titan, but when Annabeth asked him about the Titan at the beginning of their journey through Tartarus just the sound of Percy saying "Bob" was enough to draw Bob's attention to them and have him come and help Percy. All because Nico visited him and told him Percy was a good guy - but not Percy himself, which he feels hugely guilty for. He's very recently had this flaw pointed out to him in just about the most horrifying way possible, when Bob - Iapetus, who'd chosen to be his own Titan - sacrificed himself to let Annabeth and Percy escape Tartarus with their lives to stop Gaea. Both of them fought against him and Damasen choosing to die like that, both of them screamed and cried and tried to throw themselves back into the fight, especially Percy, but in the end nothing they did could change the mind of the giant and the Titan and they had to tell the stars that Bob said hello. After that trauma and heartache he seems to be working overtime to make up for it, apologizing to Nico, vowing to reunite Leo with Calypso, and letting himself be poisoned underwater for a myriad of other things that happened in Tartarus but that one's included in there.
The one thing Percy seems to hate more than anything is being yanked around, whether for good or for bad. He utterly loathes bullies, especially ones like Octavian who insinuate that he or his friends are traitors. He will willingly help just about anyone and trusts people - hell, he chose to give Luke the cursed dagger - but that trust runs out very quickly when people try to manipulate others for their own benefit, no matter what it does to the people around them. And if they're doing it just for the fun of it, Percy will want to kill them. No exceptions. He's very protective of his friends, running away from camp twice without official sanction (once to save Grover, once to save Annabeth), and through everything he's seen, all the people he's lost, all the danger he's been in, he's gotten really damn terrifying when those friends are threatened. Rachel once painted a picture of a combat he'd been in, and the expression on his face scared even him, though she assured him that she'd painted from real life. When he and Annabeth come across the goddess of poisons and misery, Akhlys, in Tartarus, and she tries to kill them, Percy goes batshit terrifying grabbing control of Akhlys' own poisons from her and using them to basically torture her into helping them. It was so bad that even Annabeth was afraid of him at that point. Once he realizes what he did, he feels so horrible about it and sick to his stomach at what he did that he deliberately lets Kymopoleia poison him to make up for it, but that doesn't change the fact that that's still something he did.
Accordingly, his godly relatives have a habit of hijacking his life and doing whatever the hell they want, whether he wanted to do it in the first place or not. He doesn't need praise or anything, but he hates how they just jerk mortals around and don't care about the consequences. He chooses not to be made a god for a lot of reasons, but that's kind of one of them, though a small part. He doesn't really like the gods as a whole - he mostly fights for them because they're better than the opposition and he doesn't want the world to end. Some of them he likes, and for most of them Percy is about as high on the respect ladder as a mortal can get, to the point where sometimes Percy can trade favor for favor for helping them out (such as with Hermes). But they do like to do a lot of the same things that Gabe did, only through negligence and not caring about mortals rather than being a sleeze. It's why the war started, in a way - and Percy uses the one wish they grant him to make sure it won't happen again. The one thing he wants more than anything is to know his father's proud of him, and Poseidon eventually tells him that yes, he is - but the gods don't like having mortals tell them what to do. It's entirely possible that his making the gods swear to claim their children and take a slightly more active part in their lives will backfire on him one day. But he can't bring himself to care - it needed to be done, badly, so he did it. Aside from his father, the only god that Percy really, genuinely likes is Hestia, goddess of the hearth, though he respects the others for their power if nothing else (though barely). Following those two, he does best with Artemis (since he earned her respect by rescuing her, not being an arrogant jackass, and mourning Zoe Nightshade) and Hermes (who honestly acts the most human out of all the gods, and doesn't zap Percy into a pile of ashes even when he brings him bad news). He can mouth off to a lot of them (though definitely not all) and they'll let him go at this point, because they know he's more use to them alive than dead, but he knows a lot of them aren't above punishing him in some way for his insolence, though some of them seem to find it amusing.
Powers/Special Abilities: ...Oh boy. LIST FORM IS GO. Because I'm not killing myself for this.
River Power: The Power to Change All Food and Drink Around Him to Blue. It's a thing with him and his mom, and he doesn't need any more powers, good gods.
Reason for Character Choice: I love 'im.
Additional Information: I mentioned it up there in the powers section, but for the time being I'm declaring Percy's “demigod dreams” as null and void since he won't be in the realm of the gods (aka home) anymore. If you guys think it'd be a good plot convenience thing for future use, I'm happy to start feeding him snippets of things and building dreams about whatever.
Also, saying this here. As soon as Percy learns that the river is the source of people coming in, and that there's probably some kind of rift down there, he's going to want to inspect it. I don't know what/how that'll affect your plot, but he's fucking infamous for jumping the gun and racing off on his own to check things out or go on quests, to the tune of two entire books with it as a major plot device, so fair warning.
Writing Samples
First-Person Transmission Sample: Hey guys, uh- guess we should finally get used to cell phones, huh? Since we've never been able to use them before and all.
I just- Look, I just went uptown. [For anyone who knows him very well, it'd be obvious that Percy's a lot more upset than he's letting on. He looks troubled, sure, like pretty much any Drifter does after showing up in either a completely new world or a parallel dimension, but there's something about his eyes that just speaks of despair to his friends.] It's not there - our apartment building. There's something else there instead, some other apartment. Same kind of building but totally different layout. Mom and Paul... they're not there, either.
...I don't know what to do about this, guys. Annabeth, do you have any ideas?
Third-Person Log Sample: It wasn't like waking up underwater was a new experience for Percy. It was actually pretty normal for him now - or at least it had been - considering he was used to being called out to the ocean at all times of day and night to help out endangered sea life or mythological creatures, and it was actually pretty comfortable to sleep just drifting in water, weightless and buoyed up by his natural element. All he had to be sure and do was sleep far enough down that no one saw him and decided he was drowning (the last time that had happened had been fun).
But even with him being used to it, it wasn't like he was expecting it. He'd lain down in his bunk in Cabin Three, head on his pillow after almost a year away from it, the familiar sounds of the camp around him, Tyson snoring nearby, waves lapping at the shore, monsters howling in the woods, all the comforting sounds of home he'd been away from for far too long thanks to pushy divine kidnappers, and was looking forward to waking up to more of the same. Not water. Water was great, water was in a lot of ways his very blood, but he'd had plenty of being shoved somewhere new without giving his permission lately. Hera wasn't going to pay him back for those eight months he'd lost while she had him "asleep," after all.
At least he knew exactly where he was - the Hudson River, his Poseidon Junior Sea Scout senses were telling him, not even a couple of miles from his home. Shifting upright, he didn't even try to hold back a frown at being tossed somewhere else yet again, but at least the trip hadn't been more than a few miles this time, and he still had all of his memories. He could get out of the river and make an Iris Message, tell Chiron something had happened and then swim (or get towed) back to camp - and that was when his brain finally caught up to him.
He couldn't sense the river god. Okay, he didn't have some kind of god-sensing powers, but he'd been in the river before and he knew really well just how much the Hudson didn't like having him around. The fact that he hadn't shown his big, trash-filled face by his point was a pretty horrible sign. Not only that, but the river was a lot more polluted than it should be - sure, it'd been a year since he traded the sand dollar with Poseison's powers in it to the Hudson and the East for their help in defending Manhattan, but even a year wouldn't have restored so much of the trash and chemicals he could see (and taste) in the water.
Mouth pressed into a grim line, Percy grabbed a current and shot himself up to the surface as quickly as possible. As long as he was in Manhattan he'd swing by his apartment in the Upper East Side, see his mother and stepfather and talk to them before heading back to camp. Even if they didn't have any advice for him, he'd feel better just seeing them.
Name/Alias: Tai
Personal Journal:
tairakoEmail: lai_nyan-at-yahoo.com
Please put *I am 18+ years old* to confirm you are of minimum game age. I AM A PINK ELEPHANT
Do you have other characters in game? Clint. I'm going from one guy who's badass but powerless to a kid who's... yeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaah.
May we post and/or link your application for others to see as an example in the future? Sure, why not.
Character Information
Character Name: Percy (Never Call Him Perseus) Jackson
Canon: ...Percy Jackson
Canon Point: Post-Sword of Summer, the first in the Magnus Chase series which follows the original Percy Jackson and the Olympians quintet and Heroes of Olympus quintet
Character Journal:
againstalloddsAppearance: Ask Percy to describe himself and he'd give you the basics: he's six feet tall, decently athletic, with black hair, sea-green eyes, and a more-or-less Mediterranean complexion. And while all that's true, it leaves out the way other people see him, because Percy has a consistent problem of undervaluing himself. If you study him for any length of time it's pretty easy to tell that he's been through life's wringer and has been through way too much shit for an almost-seventeen-year-old, and he's perfected the art of turning on a threatening aura at the drop of a hat in the form of his "wolf glare" that he learned from the mother wolf herself, Lupa. He's obviously heavily involved in physical activity, but also looks like he could at any minute decide to point a cannon at a bus and shoot it... which he has in the past. It got him expelled. Notably, he's implied to look the most like his divine parent of any of the main demigods in the series (except maybe Thalia), as everyone else has different eye or hair colors or entirely different races from the Greco-Roman gods. He also has a brand/tattoo on his arm: the letters SPQR above a trident, with one stripe under it, his mark of being a full member of the Twelfth Legion of Rome. He normally wears jeans or shorts with t-shirts and sneakers - normal everyday clothes - but also always wears his leather necklace with his Camp Half-Blood beads on it as well. And his clothes always have pockets. (He's got the wrong eye color and a slightly paler complexion than I'd like, but finding a Greek teen is apparently beyond the power of the internet, so I'll be using Nicholas D'Agosto as a PB because he's kind of ridiculously perfect otherwise and I don't like Logan Lerman all that much.)
Age: Seventeen
History: Have a wiki link
Personality: If you saw Percy walking down the street, you probably wouldn't think much of him. An average teenager, a little tall for his age, with messy black hair and green eyes, nondescript clothes, on his own he isn't much you'd take notice of - unless you're someone in a position of authority, and then you might notice the little spark in his eyes that usually means that this one doesn't like rules and boundaries, and you'd keep an eye on him in case he started trying to short-circuit all the streetlights in your area or something else equally weird and troublesome and dangerous and annoying.
If you were lucky, you'd get out of there before the big scary wolves attacked and he started fighting them off with a baseball bat.
Percy Jackson is a lot more than he seems on the surface, and his life is more or less a big seething mess of contradictions. He had it rough when he was young, having to deal with his odious stepfather and all of his crap, and that toughened him up quite a bit. He inherited his father's nature, the sea's nature - Percy doesn't like to be confined, doesn't like pointless rules, doesn't like people telling him what he can and can't do just because they think they can. His dislike of authority has gotten him in plenty of trouble, being one of the reasons he kept getting kicked out of school throughout all of his life. One of the others of course being that he just can't stop doing stupid stuff, but we'll get to that. Percy always sort of felt that something was off with his life, that there was something he wasn't aware of but really needed to be, and growing up with Gabe and having to constantly be the new kid in a succession of schools toughened him up and made him angrier than he would have been otherwise. Once Gabe is gone and he has a more stable life with his mom and his friends at Camp Half-Blood, the anger gradually tempers down and becomes more focus, more directed, but he still remembers those days and how much he resented being trapped in the situation. More than anything, Percy refuses to be trapped against his will.
Percy is one of those guys that is and isn't smart at the same time - even Annabeth says so. It's not that he's unintelligent, but he's not what you'd call book-smart. His ADHD/dyslexia is one of the really strong cases, so most of the time he pulls C's and D's out in classes, but if he focused (or... could focus) he could probably be a B- student. His grades have improved a little since discovering all the demigod stuff and having a better outlet for all his energy, but they're still mostly hovering in the C range. But Percy's greatest mental strength is his ability to think quickly in bad situations, sometimes even more quickly than Annabeth. This is most obvious during the final battle in New York, where even though Annabeth and the Athena campers took over managing the details, Percy was still the one who devised their strategy on the fly and knew how to keep shifting people around to keep the largest amount of ground covered. He has brilliant (and often very stupid) ideas occur to him in the middle of all the dangerous situations he gets into, and he doesn't think before acting on them - because if he thought about them, he'd likely be dead. He remembers how there's a soft spot on the bottom of crabs and decides to try the Daedalus 23 command on the New York Public Library stone lions thanks to those flashes of ideas; both times the idea worked perhaps even a little too well. This is linked in with his ADHD making these kinds of mental jumps much more common for him than normal mortals, but also means that he can't concentrate sitting still in a desk, which is why (besides the dyslexia) he's not so great with mortal schoolwork.
Emotionally, Percy is very intelligent. With the huge exception of romance. But he's actually more stereotypically "sensitive" than he would give himself credit for, since he's able to detect mood changes in his friends pretty well and, if they've provided him some of the pieces, accidentally or not, he can often realize what made them upset and either apologizes for acting like an idiot, sympathizes with them, or tries to cheer them up. He never once made fun of Annabeth after rescuing her from the Sirens in the Sea of Monsters, tries (often fails, but does try) to keep Grover's spirits up during his search for Pan, and even though he stumbled a lot after the revelation that Tyson was his brother, come to really appreciate the big guy and lets him know it frequently. Even with Clarisse, his biggest "enemy" at Camp Half-Blood, he doesn't ever tease her or let anyone else know about seeing Ares more or less emotionally abuse her, or mention he saw Phobos pulling the same trick during the stolen chariot caper. After Silena dies, he knows what she did, knows how it hurt them, but he refuses to think of her as anything but a hero at the end - she made a mistake, a big one, but she set things right. He tries to comfort Nico di Angelo over Bianca's death, and keeps trying to help him even when Nico tries to overrun him with skeletons and yell at him repeatedly. Percy is a very compassionate person - he remembers how hard he had it when he was little, with only his mother really there for him, and he's determined to not inflict that on anyone else and protect the people he cares about, even if he hasn't known them for that long. His bond with Hazel and Frank becomes just as big as his bond with Grover in a lot of ways in much less time (though admittedly more trying circumstances).
Of course, that leads into his big one - his fatal flaw. Every hero has one, and Percy's is personal loyalty. Now, that sounds like it would be a good thing, and in many ways it is, but the worst flaws are often the ones that are good in moderation, which is pointed out to him by none other than Athena herself. Percy would do anything to protect a friend, or sometimes even an enemy. Anything. He would choose to save a friend even if the world was ending, basically. It means he always has this terrifying sense that he's the only one that can save everyone, that he has to keep on guard to protect people. He has a hard time admitting anyone else is better than him at it, even if that person is better because of circumstances. It means he won't stop and rest when he has to, because he won't stop until he knows everyone is safe. It means he ends up making more mistakes in battle, which could be fatal for him or anyone else. It means he could potentially choose to let the world end by trying to save the people he cared about most, especially Annabeth. So far he's gotten off lucky, but at some point, the luck has to run out. Oddly enough, even with that flaw, Percy isn't haunted by any ghosts - deaths he regrets. He's seen people die, certainly, many of them friends; Beckendorf and Silena were the worst for him. But he seems to not carry guilt about them once an appropriate time of mourning has passed, so his fatal flaw more or less extends only as far as the danger itself, and once it's over, he can process things more realistically. When he, Thalia, and Nico were chasing the Sword of Hades through the Underworld, he was the only one Melinoe couldn't control, even with him being slowly poisoned. That's not to say he doesn't still carry regret and sadness over losing friends, but he comes to peace with it instead of holding on to it. Unlike plenty of other heroes, he's not prideful basically at all - he doesn't want to be in charge of things, doesn't want the glory, doesn't really think of himself as anything special. It's not exactly modesty, but it's pretty close. Reyna specifically comments on it when he says he doesn't want to be a Roman praetor and when he apologizes to her for messing up her life, even though at the time he had absolutely no freaking clue what he'd done to screw her over. He just felt bad about doing it, whatever it was. (When he's finally made praetor, his entire speech is about how he doesn't deserve the position, and he has absolutely no problems giving it up first when Jason returns and then when Jason gives Frank an emergency promotion in the middle of battle.)
But really obviously, Percy can be as thick as two short planks. He's a genuinely good guy, but he's still human, and still flawed. (Hey, when even the gods are flawed, how can their children be otherwise?) He can see connections in the world around him, but he can often miss the forest for the trees. Oftentimes he needs the obvious pointed out to him. Also even after years of knowing he was a demigod, Percy still hasn't gone and done a lot of homework on the history of the gods, Greek or otherwise, so the things he knows about their stories are mostly just things he's heard walking around or that his family and friends have told him. Annabeth is genuinely surprised when he's able to identify an old sea god and describe him a little during the journey in the Argo II. The kid needs to go buy a copy of Bullfinch's and just read it already. He's also impulsive, and the ADHD only makes it worse - he frequently says stupid things, even to the gods sometimes. He's been threatened with incineration and life as a dolphin or mental patient more than once because of that. If he sees something interesting, he can't resist poking at it - which is how that cannon went off on a school trip (whoops). Annabeth and others have frequently had to pull him back from doing something really stupid, or get him away after he's already done it. He has an unmistakable temper and can relatively easily be goaded into letting it explode, especially if the one pushing his buttons is a bully like Clarisse or her father because bullies are his primo number one hot button. He's also a complete nincompoop at recognizing romantic feelings in himself or about himself, which has lead to complications with not only Annabeth and Rachel, but also Calypso and even Nico, though to be fair no one realized that about him. His lack of pride means he can't really see why anyone would be interested in him like that, so those revelations often completely blindside him. He also doesn't seem to realize he's pretty darn good-looking, which is obviously subjective but overall seems to be fairly universal. Percy has recently started dating Annabeth - something that everyone else expected years ago - and though they're very different, that seems to be what makes them good for each other. She could use some excitement in her life, he could use some steadying influence, they're already good friends and a more than competent team to the point where they can instinctively fight back-to-back in the depths of Tartarus itself. He can still be an idiot, but Annabeth helps keep him on an even keel.
His other biggest failing is thoughtlessness. Or, not exactly thoughtlessness, but he has an unfortunate habit of "out of sight, out of mind." He's very concerned with people, cares a lot about them, and certainly for the ones he's close to he never forgets them, but if someone's not around he just ...doesn't think about them a lot. When Nico's around Percy talks to him, tries to help, but Nico never stays at camp for long and Percy just assumes that he's doing okay, at least after the Midas/Labyrinth incident. (Granted, Nico chose to sequester himself a lot and never acted like he was having trouble, so this one's not entirely Percy's fault.) He remembers Calypso but after he specifically tells the gods to free her from her island after the Battle of Manhattan, he doesn't check to make sure they did (and yes he got Hera-napped but that happened several months later so he did have time). Probably the worst example was during the Caper of Hades' Stolen Sword, when he wiped Iapetus' mind clean with Lethe water, then managed to convince him he was a friend of his named Bob. After leaving the Underworld that day he barely remembered the amnesiac Titan, but when Annabeth asked him about the Titan at the beginning of their journey through Tartarus just the sound of Percy saying "Bob" was enough to draw Bob's attention to them and have him come and help Percy. All because Nico visited him and told him Percy was a good guy - but not Percy himself, which he feels hugely guilty for. He's very recently had this flaw pointed out to him in just about the most horrifying way possible, when Bob - Iapetus, who'd chosen to be his own Titan - sacrificed himself to let Annabeth and Percy escape Tartarus with their lives to stop Gaea. Both of them fought against him and Damasen choosing to die like that, both of them screamed and cried and tried to throw themselves back into the fight, especially Percy, but in the end nothing they did could change the mind of the giant and the Titan and they had to tell the stars that Bob said hello. After that trauma and heartache he seems to be working overtime to make up for it, apologizing to Nico, vowing to reunite Leo with Calypso, and letting himself be poisoned underwater for a myriad of other things that happened in Tartarus but that one's included in there.
The one thing Percy seems to hate more than anything is being yanked around, whether for good or for bad. He utterly loathes bullies, especially ones like Octavian who insinuate that he or his friends are traitors. He will willingly help just about anyone and trusts people - hell, he chose to give Luke the cursed dagger - but that trust runs out very quickly when people try to manipulate others for their own benefit, no matter what it does to the people around them. And if they're doing it just for the fun of it, Percy will want to kill them. No exceptions. He's very protective of his friends, running away from camp twice without official sanction (once to save Grover, once to save Annabeth), and through everything he's seen, all the people he's lost, all the danger he's been in, he's gotten really damn terrifying when those friends are threatened. Rachel once painted a picture of a combat he'd been in, and the expression on his face scared even him, though she assured him that she'd painted from real life. When he and Annabeth come across the goddess of poisons and misery, Akhlys, in Tartarus, and she tries to kill them, Percy goes batshit terrifying grabbing control of Akhlys' own poisons from her and using them to basically torture her into helping them. It was so bad that even Annabeth was afraid of him at that point. Once he realizes what he did, he feels so horrible about it and sick to his stomach at what he did that he deliberately lets Kymopoleia poison him to make up for it, but that doesn't change the fact that that's still something he did.
Accordingly, his godly relatives have a habit of hijacking his life and doing whatever the hell they want, whether he wanted to do it in the first place or not. He doesn't need praise or anything, but he hates how they just jerk mortals around and don't care about the consequences. He chooses not to be made a god for a lot of reasons, but that's kind of one of them, though a small part. He doesn't really like the gods as a whole - he mostly fights for them because they're better than the opposition and he doesn't want the world to end. Some of them he likes, and for most of them Percy is about as high on the respect ladder as a mortal can get, to the point where sometimes Percy can trade favor for favor for helping them out (such as with Hermes). But they do like to do a lot of the same things that Gabe did, only through negligence and not caring about mortals rather than being a sleeze. It's why the war started, in a way - and Percy uses the one wish they grant him to make sure it won't happen again. The one thing he wants more than anything is to know his father's proud of him, and Poseidon eventually tells him that yes, he is - but the gods don't like having mortals tell them what to do. It's entirely possible that his making the gods swear to claim their children and take a slightly more active part in their lives will backfire on him one day. But he can't bring himself to care - it needed to be done, badly, so he did it. Aside from his father, the only god that Percy really, genuinely likes is Hestia, goddess of the hearth, though he respects the others for their power if nothing else (though barely). Following those two, he does best with Artemis (since he earned her respect by rescuing her, not being an arrogant jackass, and mourning Zoe Nightshade) and Hermes (who honestly acts the most human out of all the gods, and doesn't zap Percy into a pile of ashes even when he brings him bad news). He can mouth off to a lot of them (though definitely not all) and they'll let him go at this point, because they know he's more use to them alive than dead, but he knows a lot of them aren't above punishing him in some way for his insolence, though some of them seem to find it amusing.
Powers/Special Abilities: ...Oh boy. LIST FORM IS GO. Because I'm not killing myself for this.
- ADHD/Battlefield Comprehension: All demigods have battlefield reflexes bred into them that manifests as ADHD in normal life, Percy just has it worse than most. He can sit down and concentrate on things like meals and whatnot, he doesn't have to be doing things all the time, but he can't sit still for very long unless he's exhausted. Which happens a lot unfortunately. But it means he has the ability to take in a lot at once and not get confused by it, which helps immensely in battle and other chaotic situations. It's like he works faster than the world and occasionally the world catches up. By the time of the Battle of New York he's been through enough shit and Indy Ploy'd his way through too many deathtraps to name so has experience to draw on and becomes an excellent strategic thinker, on a level with Annabeth but in a different manner (she plans thoroughly ahead, he's able to adapt on the fly. They're strategy and tactics working hand in hand).
- Dyslexia/Ancient Greek: Demigods are hard-wired for their godly parent's language, whether Greek or Latin, and almost all of them have trouble with English. They seem to be able to relatively quickly be able to grasp the other language as well (Greek or Latin, whichever side their parent is not), since Percy is seen actually passing Latin and picking up other words, likely due to the gods' shared natures. Percy's dyslexia is worse than most, especially when weird fonts and colors come into play. Don't ever ask him to spell anything.
- Limited Clairvoyance: Demigods get a lot of dreams, and a lot of them turn out to be prophetic in one way or another. Percy seems to get more than most, probably due to his father's influence allowing him to get into "hidden" places, and occasionally he takes the place of someone in the dream. Since I'm not writing a book, I'm going to say this particular trait is shut down because he's no longer in his own gods' realm, but if it helps the plot I may try to find some way to work it back in later. If I do bring it back I would need player approval and/or mod approval to have any dreams about others.
- Swordfighting: He's a naturally talented, incredibly gifted swordfighter. Even as a mortal demigod, Percy has fought gods, Titans, and giants to defeat at his hands. He has Riptide to help with this - Anaklusmos, a sword made by a daughter of a sea goddess and imbued with her power. It's a magic weapon in that it normally looks like a ballpoint pen, but when he uncaps it, it grows to three feet of Celestial bronze, a metal that's virtually unbreakable (only another divine/immortal weapon has ever been shown to be able to break a weapon of Celestial bronze or Imperial gold). It's enchanted to always return to his pocket, so he's more comfortable with losing his weapon in combat than many others would be and has used that as a genuine tactic in the past. However, Celestial bronze only works on beings from the gods' world, not mortals, so he'll have to find another weapon.
- Strength: It's not superhuman, quite, but it is above average and helps in his fighting. He was also able to hold up the sky on his shoulders, though he only lasted for about ten minutes. He got a streak of gray hair for his troubles though that faded over his time in a Hera-coma.
- Immunity: Percy went and did something stupid and bathed in the River Styx, all so he could make himself stronger to face Luke/Kronos. It nearly killed him - the only way he survived was by picturing Annabeth pulling him onto the shore. But what happened is that he gained what's called the Curse of Achilles, where every inch of his body except for one small area is incapable of being harmed.
Blows to that one small area (for him, the small of his back) have a much higher chance of being fatal. But he can be hit, bitten, swung at, maybe even shot although he hasn't tested that yet and if it doesn't hit that one spot, he'll survive it without a scratch. In the past he's defeated an entire army of undead soldiers under the command of his uncle, Hades, in what was completely seriously referred to as a "whirlwind of death." The downside to this is that he expends energy at a much faster rate, tires much more quickly, sleeps more often, and has to eat more as well. He can go much stronger, much faster, but not as long. In a solo fight it won't make much or possibly even any difference, but against a force he will eventually fall.The Curse of Achilles was washed away as he crossed the Little Tiber into New Rome, but I'm leaving this here for cataloging purposes. Percy does seem to have kept a little of the power-up that came with diving in deathwater, though, as even the same day he lost the curse he was still half responsible for the defeat of Camp Jupiter's two best legions who always won war games. The other half of the defeat was a war elephant. Even compared to other demigods he still seems faster and stronger. - Hydrokinesis: He has some degree of divine authority over his father's element and it seems to be getting bigger as he gets older. Salt water is easiest for him but fresh water is still entirely doable. He can move it, create shapes out of it, use it to grab things, make it explode (yes, water), increase its pressure, breathe it, hose people down with it, see through it, use currents to shoot himself through it like a missile, create bubbles of air to let other people breathe, and generally use it as an all-purpose battering ram. Dousing himself in water wakes up his powers further; even at twelve, after he got in contact with the ocean, he was on the same fighting level as Ares, the god of war. He also doesn't suffer any effects from water pressure, and can fall into it from great heights (the Gateway Arch) and survive perfectly fine.
Percy has recently figured out that this extends to some control over pretty much any liquid, since all liquids are at least partially made of water and he can control the water within the other stuff in the liquid. It's much, much harder for him to do this, since there's not as much water for him to work with and he's also fighting the other components, but he managed to discover this just in time to take over control of a bunch of poisons from the goddess of poisons herself when she was about to kill him and Annabeth, so it's possible - even likely - this could get stronger with use. - Healing: If he submerges himself in water while still alive, it will heal him of any wound and almost any poison, though the more serious the wound the longer it takes. Once again, salt water is best, but fresh water is still good. On land he needs medical care like anyone else since he doesn't have any nectar or ambrosia with him, though he's gotten used to having other forms of magical healing around.
- Equine/Sealife Communication: He can talk to horses and horse-like animals (like zebras) since his father created the horse in the shape of a cresting wave. He can also communicate with whales, fish, and other undersea life, who refer to him as "lord," which he tries to get them to stop. Mostly it doesn't work because most of them don't have a whole lot of brain.
- Hydrogenesis: Percy can create water out of nothing, by summoning it from petrified seashells, calling it from places on the earth that used to be underwater, and his own divine source of water inside him. However, this drains him considerably and is a tool he's only used a couple of times in the past, both times when lives were at stake. The first time nearly flattened him; the second would have killed him if not for (possibly) some divine intervention.
- Geokinesis: Given that Poseidon is known as the "earthshaker" and is the one who makes earthquakes, it's no surprise that Percy got a little of that too. But only a little; mostly he has the water stuff. Geokinesis for him seems tied into his hydrogenesis; the first time he used it, the ground rumbled and shook. The second time he caused Mount St. Helens to erupt.
- Heat Resistance: His father's nature gives him a resistance, though not an immunity to, strong heat, such as fire and lava. Yes, he's had lava thrown at him before. He does not want to repeat the experience, even if it didn't kill him right away.
- Hurricanes: When he's really pissed, he can create a miniature hurricane around himself and use it as an attack of its own. And "miniature" still means between ten to twenty feet in diameter. The water has to already exist for him to be able to do it, he can't summon it, but the hurricanes are still strong, solid shields, able to keep a Titan away with the force he can bring to bear and make it stronger.
- Cryokinesis: Since it's frozen water, he has a degree of control over snow and ice, though less than he does when its in its liquid form. He was able to create a hurricane in Alaska out of snow and small drops of ice mixed with near-freezing water.
- Sailing: Percy has a magical control over boats, especially old-time actual sailing boats with no motor, being able to control them with his will and the wave of his hand. He has perfect bearings at sea, a perfect sense of direction, and a perfect sense of how fast he's traveling.
River Power: The Power to Change All Food and Drink Around Him to Blue. It's a thing with him and his mom, and he doesn't need any more powers, good gods.
Reason for Character Choice: I love 'im.
Additional Information: I mentioned it up there in the powers section, but for the time being I'm declaring Percy's “demigod dreams” as null and void since he won't be in the realm of the gods (aka home) anymore. If you guys think it'd be a good plot convenience thing for future use, I'm happy to start feeding him snippets of things and building dreams about whatever.
Also, saying this here. As soon as Percy learns that the river is the source of people coming in, and that there's probably some kind of rift down there, he's going to want to inspect it. I don't know what/how that'll affect your plot, but he's fucking infamous for jumping the gun and racing off on his own to check things out or go on quests, to the tune of two entire books with it as a major plot device, so fair warning.
Writing Samples
First-Person Transmission Sample: Hey guys, uh- guess we should finally get used to cell phones, huh? Since we've never been able to use them before and all.
I just- Look, I just went uptown. [For anyone who knows him very well, it'd be obvious that Percy's a lot more upset than he's letting on. He looks troubled, sure, like pretty much any Drifter does after showing up in either a completely new world or a parallel dimension, but there's something about his eyes that just speaks of despair to his friends.] It's not there - our apartment building. There's something else there instead, some other apartment. Same kind of building but totally different layout. Mom and Paul... they're not there, either.
...I don't know what to do about this, guys. Annabeth, do you have any ideas?
Third-Person Log Sample: It wasn't like waking up underwater was a new experience for Percy. It was actually pretty normal for him now - or at least it had been - considering he was used to being called out to the ocean at all times of day and night to help out endangered sea life or mythological creatures, and it was actually pretty comfortable to sleep just drifting in water, weightless and buoyed up by his natural element. All he had to be sure and do was sleep far enough down that no one saw him and decided he was drowning (the last time that had happened had been fun).
But even with him being used to it, it wasn't like he was expecting it. He'd lain down in his bunk in Cabin Three, head on his pillow after almost a year away from it, the familiar sounds of the camp around him, Tyson snoring nearby, waves lapping at the shore, monsters howling in the woods, all the comforting sounds of home he'd been away from for far too long thanks to pushy divine kidnappers, and was looking forward to waking up to more of the same. Not water. Water was great, water was in a lot of ways his very blood, but he'd had plenty of being shoved somewhere new without giving his permission lately. Hera wasn't going to pay him back for those eight months he'd lost while she had him "asleep," after all.
At least he knew exactly where he was - the Hudson River, his Poseidon Junior Sea Scout senses were telling him, not even a couple of miles from his home. Shifting upright, he didn't even try to hold back a frown at being tossed somewhere else yet again, but at least the trip hadn't been more than a few miles this time, and he still had all of his memories. He could get out of the river and make an Iris Message, tell Chiron something had happened and then swim (or get towed) back to camp - and that was when his brain finally caught up to him.
He couldn't sense the river god. Okay, he didn't have some kind of god-sensing powers, but he'd been in the river before and he knew really well just how much the Hudson didn't like having him around. The fact that he hadn't shown his big, trash-filled face by his point was a pretty horrible sign. Not only that, but the river was a lot more polluted than it should be - sure, it'd been a year since he traded the sand dollar with Poseison's powers in it to the Hudson and the East for their help in defending Manhattan, but even a year wouldn't have restored so much of the trash and chemicals he could see (and taste) in the water.
Mouth pressed into a grim line, Percy grabbed a current and shot himself up to the surface as quickly as possible. As long as he was in Manhattan he'd swing by his apartment in the Upper East Side, see his mother and stepfather and talk to them before heading back to camp. Even if they didn't have any advice for him, he'd feel better just seeing them.