"W- what?" Alyssa stared at the churning column in shock, the snow was settling and condensing to form the vaguely humanoid figure of a man with two giant wings sprouting from his back. Her mouth fell open.

"Who are you?" Kaia demanded.

"I mean you no harm." The man assures her, he had a thick accent of some sort that was muffled by the snow in the air and the fabric of my beanie. "I am Boreas, god of the North wind. And you, Alyssa, are my daughter."

Alyssa said something very intelligent like; "bwuh?"

"I am sorry your claiming couldn't have occured sooner but it had to happen now, after you had discovered your power over snow. I was under specific orders from- well nevermind about that. But I wish you luck, Alyssa. And remember that I will always be proud of you." And with that, he combusted into a thousand snowflakes that drifted away on the wind. Alyssa was still staring in shock at the place her father had been while the rest of us struggled to our feet, winded from being buried under a foot of snow.

"What was that about?" Chris asked and the space above Alyssa's head lit up, a small blue snowflake hovering above her.

Kaia smiled. "Alyssa has been claimed." She held up a pile of white tags; chairlift passes. "Who's ready to hit the slopes?"

---

Turns out that I wasn't particularly good at skiing. Scratch that; I stunk. I managed to get a few metres downhill before I hit a bump and tumbled to my butt on the snow, my legs askew beneath me but trapped firmly in the skis. Kaia zipped past me down the hill and the others followed suit - all but Jasmine who seemed to be having exactly the same issues as me.

I struggled to my feet and tried again; locking my knees in the way I had been shown, beginning to slide down the steep slope. I slowly but steadily gained momentum and soon was speeding down the hill screaming Ancient Greek profanities into the wind and scrabbling for something to slow me down. 'Pizza, pizza, pizza!' I though desperately as I tried to force my feet into a triangle shape but all I managed to do was turn drastically to my left. The chairlift queue was rushing up to meet me and devoid of any method to stop, I sat down where I was and skidded to a halt.

And so the day went.

Notes

Let me know what you think!

-Phoebe :)