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“That is not gonna be edible.”
Jason Grace scratched the back of his head as he watched his friends bunched around a table in the dining room of the Argo II, a variety of ingredients – flour, milk, eggs, baking powder, blue food dye and blueberries, to name a few – and all the world’s best intentions before them as they stared at the empty bowl placed at the middle of the table.
Annabeth cleared her throat. “Again, Seaweed Brain – this ratio of ingredients won’t yield anything edible; if you add a little more baking powder and up the oven temperature by twenty seven degrees, I’m pretty sure that it could actually be used as an explosive.”
Leo picked up the pen stuck behind his ear and pulled out a stack of yellow post-its from his utility belt, scribbling it down as Percy groaned. “But baking should be about measuring with your heart! At least that’s what Julia Child says.”
Annabeth narrowed her eyes. “Julia would never .”
She was a child of Athena, I’m sure of it , Annabeth said when they had the opportunity to catch a rerun of the movie “Julie and Julia” while undercover. Jason, to his credit, was too mesmerized by all the food they cooked in the movie to speculate who could’ve been who’s child; Percy lost a bet to him not long after and now officially owed him a plate of beef bourguignon a la Julia Child.
Jason recalled the chain of events that lead them to their current predicament: they were shot out of the sky by a simultaneous attack of griffins and venti, in which Jason once again sustained a concussion just before the moment everything went downhill. Upon waking up, he discovered that the Argo II was somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, that Hedge was severely seasick, and that they were out of food because the ship’s food supply system got damaged in the fight.
One might wonder how on Earth they could be out of food in the middle of the ocean with a son of Poseidon on their side; here’s how that conversation went:
“Percy, my man,” Leo said, “you speak fish. Can you please ask some heroic salmon to pull a Katniss and volunteer before the Argo II turns into a Hunger Games arena?”
Percy’s response was a pout and the saddest puppy-like eyes mankind has ever seen; he shrugged and looked down at the waves splashing against their boat as if you’d asked him which of his children you could sacrifice. None of them were in the mood for fish anyway, Jason supposed. He thought about shooting seagulls out of the sky with lightning bolts, but he wasn’t sure he could manage it without burning them to a crisp, and the alternative was plucking them with their bare hands – if that didn’t turn all of them vegan, he didn’t know what would do the trick.
They couldn’t move until Leo and Annabeth fixed the ship; while the two of them assessed the damage today, Piper used charmspeak to alleviate Coach Hedge’s nausea and the rest of the group scoured the ship for emergency stashes of food or even ingredients, regardless of the fact that while they could all individually take on monsters, baking was another level of daunting.
Anyway, back to the problem at hand: Annabeth and Percy were bickering about Julia Child, and Piper knew better than to get herself involved between the two; she picked up a handful of chocolate chips and ate them one at a time, watching the conversation between Camp Half-Blood’s finest; next to her, Frank and Hazel sat next to one another, observing as well.
“Why do you need blue food coloring?” Jason asked, interrupting whatever freaky showdown-turned-flirting-session was going on before their dinner ingredients. He picked up the small vial of the indigo colored liquid, swirling it in between his fingers as he adde:
“I may have been raised by wolves but even I know that pancakes aren’t blue.”
“ They are,” the two replied in unison.
Jason noticed Annabeth’s smile widened and Percy smirked, turning to him with an explanation. “It’s a thing that my mom and I started doing when I was younger.”
Percy straightened his back as if to prepare to step into the role of the storyteller, but as soon as he squared his shoulders, his stomach growled – it sounded like a full on chimera. “We’ll talk about it after dinner, if we ever make it.” He looked around the room, sweeping his sea green eyes over his friends and frowned. “Guys, can any of us actually cook?”
Frank and Hazel chuckled, exchanging glances as Jason looked to the floor while Leo searched for something in his utility belt – Jason was hoping that it was a meal – and Annabeth shrugged as if to say yes, how hard can it be, it’s just science . Piper, to her credit, picked up the whisker from the bowl and said, “I’m twenty percent sure that I can charmspeak this thing into stirring on its own, but other than that, no, I’m out.”
“We’re gonna starve, aren’t we?” Percy said.
Frank stood up, exchanging glances with Leo. The son of Hephaestus wriggled his eyebrows and asked, “Code Cordon Bleu?”, to which Frank replied with a nod; the tinkerer produced an apron and a chef’s hat out of his belt, as well as a tub of maple syrup, and handed them to Frank.
“Unlike most of you,” Frank said, tying the apron behind his back, “I came to camp when I was fifteen, which means that I’m the only one who had time to properly watch and enjoy the Great British Bake-Off. Well, we really only watched it because Grandma thought that Paul Hollywood has nice blue eyes, but that’s besides the point right now.”
“We’re not gonna starve?” Percy asked, looking hopeful with his raised eyebrows. His growling stomach only echoed the sentiment, if a bit more primevally.
“We’re not gonna starve,” Hazel assured him, giving their chef a kiss on the cheek. “I have faith in our star baker here. I also have a beignets recipe memorized, in case he fails.”
Frank gasped, offended, but Hazel patted him on the back reassuringly.
“You’re gonna do amazing, praetor Zhang. Don’t worry about it.”
Her stomach also growled, as if to add onto the don’t worry: and don’t take too long .
The increasing amount of gastrointestinal growling made Jason wonder if they had perhaps been under the attack of eidolons of the kitchen variety. Speaking of ghosts, Nico di Angelo wandered out of the shadows and reached for the chocolate chips as well; Leo and Frank yelped as he appeared out of nowhere and stuck his bejeweled hand into the bowl before them.
The son of Hades once told Jason that modern pagans offer his father bitter chocolate as an offering, and that he had an appreciation for their train of thought; Hades himself was really more of a milk chocolate guy, or if he was really feeling it, cherry-liquor filled chocolate bonbons, so all the bitter chocolate offerings went straight to Nico instead, as neither Hazel nor Persephone loved them either.
“I’ll bet you ten drachmas,” he said to Leo, speaking across the table while sitting down next to Jason, “that the Gods are going to get a good dinner tonight.” Jason, Percy, Piper and Annabeth chuckled; at both camps, it was a custom, if not a rule, that parts of your dinner were to be tossed into the flames and burnt as an offering to the gods.
Leo grinned, rubbing his palms together and posing as if to say DEAL, I CAN’T WAIT TO CASH IT IN , but at a very stern-sounding clearing of the throat from Frank Zhang, he dropped his hands back into his pockets and began whistling as he spun on his heel and headed towards the other, out-of-reach side of the table. Hazel stuck the chef’s cap onto her boyfriend and clapped him on the back, her and Percy’s stomachs humming in support.
Annabeth took Percy’s hand into her own, but before they left the chef to work his miracles, she stuck her head into the dining room once again and said, “Again, are you sure that you don’t want me to engineer a recipe for you? Really, it’s all about math – the ratios should go like this…”
Hazel lovingly shooed her away, assuring her that they had it covered and to go have some fun until it was done. She gave Percy a wink as he put his arm around Annabeth’s back; the daughter of Athena chuckled as she let him lead the way.
Jason picked up on the clue; he nodded to Pipes and Leo to follow him onto the galley as well, to give the two some privacy. Nico di Angelo stayed last, teasing the two once more and then running out of the room chuckling as Hazel threw what sounded like chocolate chips at him.
*
An hour later, the crew of the Argo II was gathered around the dining table in the common room, none of them able to speak as they stuffed themselves with pancakes:
Piper ate hers with chocolate and whipped cream, doing so quite elegantly; in contrast to her, Jason, having joined the eidolons-of-the-kitchen-variety sentiment and become ravenous, reverted to his lupine beginnings, stuffing his mouth with the pancakes and almost growling, which made Leo snort so hard that a blueberry shot out of his nostril and back onto his plate.
The blueberries were the courtesy of Annabeth doing shopping and buying the odd fruits and vegetables for a balanced diet. Her and Percy were now devouring the dozen blue-colored pancakes baked with chocolate chips and blueberries into them, chuckling to some inside jokes of their own.
Hazel and the newly-crowned star-baker, Frank, ate with smiles on their faces as they watched their friends eat. They received enough praise to make Gordon Ramsey green with envy; speaking of folks turning green, Coach Hedge also reluctantly joined the group, stabbing at a pancake with the most miserable look on his face: if satyrs were made to be on water, we’d have gills instead of hooves seemed to be his general sentiment for the time being.
Nico di Angelo felt at home in all the chaos.
Hazel took the time to prepare some pancakes with bitter chocolate sprinkled with sea salt for him, and he gave her a hug as a show of his gratitude; he’d make sure to mention how good they tasted in his next letter to Will, who’ll join them on their next stop in two days, unless they get thrown into a volcano or the bottom of the Mariana trench next – the chances of which were never low – that is.
As he ate away at his new favorite food, he looked around the table and took in the chaos once more: Percy and Annabeth bickering, Jason, Piper and Leo making each other laugh, as well as Frank and Hazel, whose laughter was so contagious that even Nico himself was catching on to it.