The first in a series of four or five related drabbles concerning Percy's mommy-kins and that water-logged god-dude in beach shorts, and the Events Leading Up to Percy-poo's Conception.

I can't promise you that Phoebus Apollo won't eventually worm his way into the fic and attempt some form or other of poetry, and I also can't guarantee that I won't shamelessly plagiarize Zork: The Grand Inquisitor (the most batshit ridiculous, fantastically marvelous game ever made), but I hope you'll enjoy this UNADULTERATED MADNESS nevertheless.

[all i own is my own fanatical love of greco-roman lore. apart from that...? nada.]

::Sally Jackson meets a god, and his ravening Giant Squid::

The first time he meets her, she's busy drowning herself in his ocean. Not intentionally, he later learns, though why else she'd have been out past the shoals with such exceptionally horrendous swimming aptitude unless she'd been meaning to kill herself, he has no idea.

(A good while after the fact, she will defend, huffing sulkily all the while, that her swimming aptitude is 'just fine, thanks, when huge, fuck-off Cthulhus aren't trying to eat me for lunch.')

Belatedly, it occurs to him that Davy the Kraken flopping about on the water like a horrifying, eight-tentacled, colossus-puppy in such alarming proximity probably isn't doing much in the way of improving her technique.

Arching a brow and settling his chin against the heel of his palm, he leans into the salty spray, closing his eyes and releasing a careful, shuddering breath, melting into the briny deep between one heartbeat and the next, a coalescence of divine quiddity and natatory spirit, cool and wild and powerful, fathomless and eternal.

He slips into his primordial skin, becoming effortlessly the element for which he was named; Davy startles, subsiding with an anxious, bellowing croon that quivers through the water with an agonizing, slogging rhythm -and then he feels her.

Curiously, every desperate lance of her lithe arms through the claustrophobic vacuum of his aqueous flesh sinks her deeper, and swathed around her as he is, Poseidon feels the hot terror of her lungs filling with water. Little more than the blink of an eye is all he requires to enfold her securely in his current, baby eddies wrapped like jewelry at her wrists and ankles, speeding her to the surface before she has the chance to actualize what he can only assume is an unimaginative attempt to loose her mortal coil. (Hades gets this one over his Tartarus-entombed body.)

She breaks the surface seconds later with a huge, gulping gasp of a breath, shaking with adrenaline and muscle strain and, very probably, the chilly Almost-Encounter with his oily, brooding bastard of a brother.

He deposits her carefully at the feet of his human-shaped husk, washing back into solid form just as she crawls onto her arms and knees and begins choking and dry heaving in frightful proximity to his Holy Pearls.

It's not nearly as appealing as it sounds.

When at last she's breathing somewhat normally, he aims a furrowed brow into the clear sky, and the wind whispers her name as it whistles past.

"Oh." Sally Jackson says to Poseidon's crotch.

Startled, she snaps her gaze up to his, and he finds her wonderfully stunning in that mesmerizing, ephemeral way of mortals. "You're blowing glue." She whispers, and the Earthshaker appraises her worriedly, wondering if this means she's concussed. Or possibly deranged.

"Pardon?" She gives an embarrassed little twitch, and all the blood in her body boils up attractively into her cheeks, an endearing, bashful flush that pulls him inextricably closer.

"You're glowing blue." She amends, and then blinks bewilderedly up at him, like she maybe understands this announcement sounds slightly less-than-sane.

Before he has time to wonder what this means, exactly, she jerks back with a flustered, "Oh!", fumbling over her own knees and feet and fingers, and he chuckles gaily when she hops to her feet and points over her shoulder at the emerging Kraken, flailing a gesture of frantic alarm and shrieking –mostly incoherently—about the enormous cruise ship-sized sea monster popping out of the water, coming to devour them whole, and yes, she knows she probably sounds certifiable, but he's just got to trust her for a moment or three and 'run like Hades' (which is an expression he's not sure he's heard in at least half-a-century, so it's a bit jarring) before they're flattened and then eaten like the tiny, delicious little people snacks they are.

In response to her histrionics, he slides her a slow, contemplative grin. She shifts nervously under his scrutiny and then threatens to bludgeon him into unconsciousness with a rock and drag him to safety if she has to, and when her eyes flick cursorily over the vast array of Bludgeoning Instruments immediately available to her, he decides she's just about the most captivating creature he's met in a couple hundred years, at least.

Poseidon's been around long enough to know an Extraordinary Mortal when he sees one. Sally Jackson's clearly impervious to the obfuscations of the Mist; he can't remember the last time a human had perceived the azure aspect of his divinity –auras are pesky, impossible things to conceal on the best of days, and mostly he refuses to bother trying. Most mortals can't see them, anyway, so it usually isn't worth the effort.

Also, the young Miss Jackson appears to be quite aware of the fact that his Rather Substantial Pet Squid is a Rather Substantial Squid (even if she can't discern that said Squid is –mostly—harmless), as opposed to a school of bloodthirsty sharks or a massive tidal wave or whatever it is these naive, primitve beasts fool themselves into seeing when Davy surfaces to play fetch with her master.

Speaking of which—

He clears his throat softly, and Davy the Kraken slips silently back into the murky depths.

Meanwhile, Sally's trying to pull him from his craggy seat on the rock outcropping, using the whole of her –fairly unimpressive—weight to attempt to haul him bodily away from the perceived nautical terror, and he's using the opportunity to inappropriately admire the toned length of her legs.

At length, it dawns on lovely Sally that she's being (not-so-subtly) ogled, and it's somewhere around this point that she manages to conveniently set aside her Dread-Panic long enough to smash him roundly in the face with her knee.

Poseidon thinks he's probably in love.

Yeah, you read that right.

Davy the Kraken is a LADY Kraken.

Bow-chick-a-bow-woooooow.

...um.