How Would You Think Percy Would Figure Out His More Ocean Qualities That You Mentioned In Your Hcs? Love

how would you think percy would figure out his more ocean qualities that you mentioned in your hcs? love your ideas!

thank you!!! i have a few ideas

they figure out percy’s ludicrously high tolerance of mortal drugs because the week before he graduates high school (timing has never been percy’s friend) he’s in a nasty car accident, gets t-boned by someone going an absolutely stupid speed. nothing any of the doctors administer does anything, and percy’s got the concussion from hell and is so confused and disoriented he’s trying to fight everyone around him, which doesn’t go well for him considering he’s got no ability to balance or coordinate his movements. and he’s bleeding a not insignificant amount. they’re lucky it’s NYC and every single demigod and legacy in NYC knows percy jackson’s name and face, because whenever they meet a demigod from new jersey they just HAVE to go, “percy jackson saved the world all those times and he’s NEW YORK CITY BORN AND RAISED YOU DUMB JERSEY FUCKS, EAT SHIT” so there’s a daughter of apollo on staff. she pulls a chaotic demigod moment and sneaks percy out of the hospital with a mortal friend of hers who happens to know her lineage, and the two of them break every traffic law known to man trying to keep this teenager from bleeding out in the backseat before they can get him to Miss Conveniently Placed Daughter Of Apollo’s hidden stash of ambrosia and nectar in her apartment. percy’s taken like, tylenol, before and it hasn’t worked, but no one really thought much of it because it’s not like you’re gonna keel over if tylenol doesn’t do anything to you, but this whole fun scenario just kind of hits home that if he’s ever seriously, seriously sick, he’s just fucked, because i don’t think nectar/ambrosia goes hard enough to fix major illnesses/diseases (you’d have to take enough to burn you alive, and over a long period of time, and that’s just not working) and mortal medicine Ain’t Helpin. gotta love it when your stupid godblood says you have no rights

the smaller things sally has all figured out, in the way that moms just kind of know things, and because she’s spent more time with poseidon than percy has. she knows that when she and percy have Mom And Boy night and they go out to dinner and percy asks for sliced lemons, the way he always does, and then unscrews the cap of a salt shaker and dumps a ton of salt on a plate, and then dips his lemon in the salt and licks it off like this is normal, that’s kind of a sea boy thing. the lemon portion is all percy being weird but poseidon definitely had a notable thing for salt. there’s a ton of quirks like that, quirks that sally recognizes from poseidon, and percy doesn’t know anything about them until after his first year at CHB when he screws up the courage to ask what poseidon was like - and sally’s spent so many years thinking of poseidon solely in his connection to percy, that when she does tell percy it’s entirely framed in things that percy does. windy days make percy frazzled the way that the wind makes the ocean choppy, thunderstorms put him somewhere between nervous and pissed off at everything in existence. she can put together the basic stuff.

in canon percy hangs out with poseidon sometimes, and i think he learns a lot there, because poseidon’s got this moody sea god shit on lockdown. poseidon’s spent a stupid amount of time being a sea god, he knows the ins, the outs, the ifs, the buts - of which there are about fifty thousand, because, uh, the ocean is a complicated natural process and so are seismic processes and BEING TIED TO BOTH WOULD SUCK - but i think percy ends up stumbling into it. it’s not like he knows to ask “why do i have more energy in the winter than i do the summer” even though poseidon has the answer of “submesoscale currents are stronger in the winter because the surface of the ocean is cooler and the winds are stronger, and the transition of nutrients from the depths of the ocean to the surface flows more easily.” so poseidon’s there to be like oh yes! i sensed your first earthquake, i was very excited! and percy’s like uh..... didn’t that wake up typhon? the one earthquake i did? and poseidon’s like oh no. you were six months old, and you got very excited playing - what is it - peekaboo? with your mother. and that’s how percy learns he’s actually just been rockin earthquakes this entire time

i know this is never a thing in canon but Fuck It - san francisco is literal hell for percy and it has nothing to do with monsters or camp jupiter, it’s the migraines. the fucking migraines. the longer he stays in san francisco the worse they get, and in SoN i think he’d chalk them up to having no memories, but then whenever he returns after the war and stays more than a day it’s like his brain is trying to murder him with a pickaxe. the san francisco bay area has seven major faults, and that’s a lot of seismic pressure to have your dumb earthshaker brain contending with. i think there’s an ill-fated spring break where percy and annabeth visit everyone at camp jupiter, to organize Inter-Camp Fun Times or whatever, and percy’s okayish the first day, and the second and third day he just kind of powers through it like a champ, and then it gets to the point where he can’t even sleep and he’s just kind of a miserable lump beneath a blanket begging for the sweet release of death. it was a time of weirdly high seismic activity, compared to when he was first there, and it just kinda leveled him, the poor guy. i think annabeth puts this one together because they end up going home early and the second percy’s away from San Fran The Nightmare Land he’s just instantly better. because it’s annabeth she presents this information to percy in powerpoint format.

i think after some well-deserved time off post graduating high school, during which percy just kind of putters around working at a stable in ithaca while annabeth kicks her own ass at cornell and they share an apartment, percy does end up going back to school. after a while. academia isn’t the motivator for percy that it is for annabeth, and when percy’s grappling with and desperately trying to shove down two wars’ worth of trauma on top of an abusive childhood, it’s just hell on earth. he deserves his break first. and it’s true that percy’s not invested in academics and it’s actually really hard for him, but he is invested in the greater good, and in order for percy to defend the marine life he’s made friends with over the years the way he wants to, he has to know what he’s talking about. it’s kind of a fact that he’s resigned to, when he settles on conservation as a career choice - in his head he’s doing it for the great white he met while helping a satyr get a demigod back from florida, or the pod of orcas that regularly stops by camp half-blood to visit. and his gen ed classes do suck. but when it comes to learning Ocean Science TM, it’s weird, because those aren’t actually that hard - it’s like he knows everything they’re talking about already, he just needed to be reminded of it. he knows about submesoscale currents because it’s as much a part of him as his own physical body. so i think oceanography and marine biology become the main way percy figures out all those weird percy quirks, and it’s possibly one of the weirdest journeys of self-discovery a demigod has ever had, because it’s [ocean does something weird] “OH I DO VIBE” and it’s a fun time. imagine getting answers about yourself and how you work when you didn’t even know what questions to ask. it might have taken percy 20 minutes to decipher this paragraph in his oceanography textbook through his dyslexia but he does it and the second he does he’s so emotionally validated

percy’s powers relating to seismic activity, though, just kind of continue to be an incredible, impenetrable nuisance. you’d think being on a fault line would make him feel powerful, considering the fault line is his bitch and all. instead he feels like he is dying, because seismic activity is about stress, the buildup of stress, and the release of it. it’s like great news! every fault line everywhere is your bitch, you own those! but they’re going to scream in your ear for all of existence about it!

percy visits poseidon once and mentions going to san fran and poseidon looks so aghast

poseidon doesn’t go to san fran because if he did he would end up just going “fuck this stupid place” and would proceed to induce an earthquake that would reduce san fran to a weepy plot of rubble. all of the olympians think poseidon is ~so moody~ and it’s like YOU TRY having YOUR ENTIRE BEING MADE UP OF THE MOST TEMPERAMENTAL NATURAL PROCESSES. YOU TRY IT, YOU FUCKS. YOU TRY!!!!