Work Text:
Percy glared as the numbers on the laptop screen swirled in front of him. The ship rocked below him, somewhere else in the lab someone stumbled into a table with a startled yelp, and two of the technicians were loudly debating something in Portuguese. Percy thinks its about soccer, futebol had been thrown around a couple of times. There was a strong smell of antiseptic, vomit and fish guts, and a plank of wood that had for some reason been left between one of the freezers and the server tower was rattling incessantly. None of which was helping him parse the spreadsheet he was trying to read. He needed Gwladys to come back through with their tea mugs yesterday so she could continue reading numbers at him. Data entry was a slog.
Percy must admit that he hadn't been expecting it to be like this when he'd managed to get a place on this survey. The spaces were limited, the ship only had 10 beds for the scientists and there was more than 10 scientists in the consultancy he worked at. He thought one of the more senior taxonomists would get to go, not 24 year old fresh graduate, new employee, chaotic and scatterbrained Percy Jackson. But the surveyors needed someone to identify fish and critters, and apparently Percy was one of the someones for the job. And well, he always had loved being at sea. So when he got the role, 2 weeks at sea identifying whatever got pulled up from the sea floor, he was thrilled. He had packed his stuff, including the new demigod-proof laptop from Leo, the second hand steel-toe capped wellies and waders from old man Jacob who had retired a month after Percy had started, and his own pair of gloves (he didn't mind touching the critters, bit something most people didn't realise is that fish can be sharp, and Percy didn't plan on revealing his healing factor to his co-workers. And he had been warned about the gloves that were provided on these kinds of trips, he wasn't particularly enthused by gloves that had been damp for a decade), ready to face whatever the trip threw at him.
And it had started off alright, as the younger of the taxonomists that had been brought on, he was given the day shift role. 12 hour shifts seemed bad at first, but it turned out a lot of it was just standing around waiting for the boat to get to location, for gear to finish deploying, and for the others to sort what was brought up into various buckets. Percy's job was to say what was in those buckets. Not like the others didn't have an idea, but they had other jobs to do like weighing things and in this case specifically, counting and measuring the scallops. But Percy got final say on if bob the fish was a windowpane or summer flounder, or what exactly the hydrozoan or bryozoan he was looking at was. The biggest downside had been that not everyone who came up in the gear survived, but it seemed all the crew, technicians and scientists, were compassionate towards the fish, with order of priority given based on how long the little guys could survive in the air and how injured they were. And if Percy discreetly healed the fish as he tipped them over the side? Then no one had to know. But all in all, the weather had been descent, only a couple people had been seasick, the food was fantastic (and Percy hadn't had to sacrifice any of it. He's known in advance it couldn't be a possibility, so he had given an extra big sacrifice before leaving, but that did mean more food for Percy. None of it was blue, but he could survive).
But then, a week in, the weather had turned for the worst, and they were stuck over Georges bank with Canada as the nearest port. The waves were too big and the wind too strong to deploy anything, and they had to travel in for shelter and they couldn't survey in Canadian waters, they only had permission to survey in US waters anyway. And more people had gotten seasick in the strong rocking and rolling of the boat, and Percy couldn't do much to help without it being suspicious. And as the only two on day shift not affected by the seasickness, Percy and his colleague and new friend Gwladys were doing data entry as a way to fill time. Its not like they could watch TV here, and Percy could only play Pokemon sapphire on an old game-boy advance (no internet connection or signals on that thing meant no look-at-me-monsters-im-a-demi-god-come-find-me action, something that Percy had been thrilled to discover) before he was itching in his skin with a need to do anything other than train up his swampert to be able to challenge the next gym. And the only other thing to do was apparently data entry.
Percy couldn't read the data sheets, they weren't exactly in Greek or Latin, and numbers weren't exactly his favourite thing either even if they were easier than English. (And it didn't exactly get any easier when Carlotta wrote her ones the German way and Jay wrote their sevens the same way that Carlotta wrote her ones. Percy was certain he had heard Jay complaining about how numbers were the devils work. They also seemed to be the slowest with reading measurements and there was a lot of rubber smudges on their sheets from numbers written down incorrectly and corrected. Their twos and threes also looked remarkably similar, as did their zeroes and sixes.) So Percy was typing them instead as Gwladys read them out. At the very least, animal names were in Latin and Percy could do Latin - mostly, he struggled with the made up Latin words that sometimes got used, but he could tolerate them, they were mostly people's names after all - especially after his years at New Rome University.
He missed Annabeth, he missed his mum and Paul and Estelle, he missed camp. He hadn't had time to miss them so much earlier, as he was occupied with all the samples being processed and arguing with Carlotta about Takeshi's music taste (Takeshi had positioned himself in charge of the lab's music on day one, after all, he was the one that brought along the waterproof speaker and had almost nothing saved on his phone save for hundreds of hours of downloaded songs), and just generally chatting about what brought all of them here and whatever gossip was going down in the marine biologist community (its smaller than one might think, it seems at the very least everyone knows of someone who knows someone, especially when it came to more obscure fields like benthic taxonomy it seemed. Percy apparently had a lot more to learn on the people side of things, he was realising). But now, sitting here staring at his laptop waiting for Gwladys to return with hot drinks, he missed them more than anything.
And now Jay was cussing about accidentally whacking their elbow on the doorframe after a particularly sharp jolt of the boat. Percy needed them to please stay seated. They were gonna get a concussion or something next time.
But most importantly, he needed Gwladys back with the tea now please.