Lee's bunk

There was something to be said for causing a great deal of trouble with the knowledge that the Mist would obscure tracking. Which was why Galena was walking into Cabin 11, her laptop under her arm. She had gotten if from Father George for her 16th birthday, maybe a make up present for actually being her father instead of just her padre.

"Hey Lee, I was working on a brute force app. I'm thinking we might want to try it. It starts with the long randomized passwords and routes back to the more commonly used. Since the Feds like to make generated instead of hard ones."

It had long ago been established that MyDogFrankLikesBunnies or f1n1t3m4thm4t1c5 was harder to crack and easier to remember than a mishmash of letters and numbers. Still, most government agencies liked to be complicated.

Galena grinned as she climbed over next to Lee, pulling a flash drive from her pocket. "Something easy for a trial run? EPA's twitter account, maybe?" She suggested with a grin, booting up her laptop. She selected a windows load, skipping the Gentuu and Ubuntu options on her boot loader. "We can post things like 'New study reveals politicians hot air responsible for global warming.'"

Galena plugged the flash drive into Lee's computer and moved it over to her lap. She pulled up the app and it started running. A run of passwords appearing in quick succession with error messages. "So, anything new in the world of Hermes? Because Cabin 6 is still boring."

Galena chuckled, shaking her head. She wished her siblings had a sense of humor like that, but most of them were too stuck on being high level geniuses and doing "important" things or making important things. Or planning war games. None of them acted like normal kids, and Hermes cabin, well, they did. Or the type of kids that Galena was used to. Petty delinquents and harmless theives. As opposed to some of the other cabins, which held the type of more violent criminals she had seen in her jaunt at a secure facility. Maybe she was just weird. Okay, well, no, she was definitely weird.

"That sounds like fun. My siblings are all just into reading and scheming. Nothing exciting goes down there. I'm half tempted to hide someone's computer and watch the cabin explode."

Galena laughed loudly at the idea of her siblings all hitting the wall as a spider man walked in. It was great. Then the beep, they were in. New Study Reveals: Politicians cause global warming with hot air from speeches. It took Galena a few tries to make it right, but her dyslexia wasn't as bad as other demigods. She could read with ease and write most of the time fairly well.

"I think a senator might lose his hair piece over this."

Galena chuckled, shaking her head. The poor EPA would have no idea what hit them. After all, the EPA was rarely punked, it was usually the other departments. "Government employee head explodes after hack, right?"

Galena laughed, "Well, we could go for NASA and see what's cooking with the plans for the Orion program." She said, her hands flying over her computer to bring up NASA's databanks.

Aah, finally. Familiar territory for him.

Normally, Hermes couldn't just teleport into a cabin and deliver gifts that way -- for some reason some of the other gods had made a huge fuss about that years ago, calling it invasion of privacy for their kids or blatant disrespect of their property or symbols. It wasn't like he was coming in there solely to spray-paint everything neon orange and pink, even though that sounded like a swell idea, but he'd agreed to try delivering things the old-fashioned way: sneaking around like a criminal, shoving himself down chimneys or sneaking in through windows and then teleporting out to prevent suspicion. (Closing the opened windows and doors? Bah. Let them wake up before anyone steals their gifts.)

Of course, teleporting into his own cabin wasn't out of the question.

So after delivering the hammer to the boy in the Hephaestus cabin, the god had immediately disappeared -- only to reappear in the middle of his own cabin, funky Santa hat almost falling off mid-transit. All asleep? All good. He knew most of his kids' faces at least, so he easily located Lee's bunk and pulled her gift out of his bag: a pogo stick, something that he had thought of after watching a few too many mortal toy commercials once. He'd had Hephaestus spruce it up a bit, but the idea was very much his.

Leaning the pogo stick by her bunk, with a pretty little penguin label sticker with her name on it, he disappeared.

Morgan Landry wrote:Child's name: Lee Sherwood
God parent: Hermes
Type of gift and powers of the gift: An Xpogo stick.

Powers:
• It can go up to 20ft height (Double the height of a normal xpogo stick)
• It can bounce on surfaces like grass, sand, gravel and forest ground.
• It includes a 50 cm celestial bronze blade that snaps out when you press a red button on the handle. (The blade is located inside the piston and snaps out of the tip. It's only one blade, yes.)

CHRISTMAS WOOHOOO

Lee kicked her blanket off and jumped out of her bunk bed. Only two other siblings were awake, opening their packages as quietly as they could in the blinking light of the Christmas tree. Lee looked at hers: a small pile of wrapped presents sat on top of her trunk, a large cylinder leaning against it. She frowned, was this really meant for her? She checked the tag -- well whoever it was must know her because the penguin was her favorite animal. She'd definitely keep the name tag.
Deciding to keep the big present for last, she opened the other gifts. A sweater from her aunt, a box of cookies from her roommate Xana, a new snapback and hairdye from her mom, an iTunes gift card from her cousin... Christmas was better than last year!

Now, to the mystery gift.

Lee took it, turned it upside-down, shook it a little to get hints of what was inside. Finally she slipped a finger into the fold of the glossy blue wrapping paper and tore it open.

"Holy goatee of Hades!" she exclaimed, waking one of her brothers who grumbled and turned around in a noisy mattress creak. But Lee barely played him any attention. It was an xpogo stick. Her dream!
A paper fluttered to the ground and Lee picked it up, reading quickly. Twenty feet height, Jesus! Super bounce on a range of surfaces including sand and gravel, sweet. A last note was written in Ancient Greek: when in danger, press the big red button. Dad.

So it was from Hermes. Lee felt her heart start to race. That meant something. He knew how much she loved pogo and how much she dreamed of it. Hell, the penguin sticker could be a coincidence but she felt sure he knew of her obsession with the arctic birds. She felt like she was gonna cry. Thank you so much Dad. It felt like he actually cared about her and checked up on her. In its own way, that feeling was an even better Christmas present than any pogo stick.

Sticking an apple and caramel cookie between her teeth, she stored all her gifts safely away into various hiding places and gratefully bowed her head in front of the Hermes statue of the cabin. The Stoll brothers had put reindeer antlers and a red nose on it but it still looked pretty regal. Her gaze then fell on the stick and a smirk curled across her face.

Now -- pogo time!