Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27219200-20151115021519/@comment-30566621-20170603093009

Reyna and Rachel do know each other at least a little bit (from when Rachel acts as the messenger in House of Hades to transmit Annabeth's message to Reyna. Now they don't know each other well, but that's a bit different from not knowing each other at all. And yes, at this point it would feel extremely forced--most other couples' relationships have developed over more than one book, with the exception of Jason and Piper, and Frank and Hazel, though in each case Riordan wrote into the story that they already liked each other, and I think he kind of wrote them for each other so that once he paired them up in their respective introductory stories (The Lost Hero and The Son of Neptune), the pairings made sense. (Whether he did a good job on the follow-ups in later books is a different topic completely, and I'd rather not have that argued here, since I was only bringing those ships up as examples.)

And honestly, knowing the gods? I doubt Reyna x Kahale would be in the works. I feel like Aphrodite/Venus, in her obsession with love stories, would probably be more likely to push Reyna into a ship with one of Annabeth's siblings (kind of an ironic further reconciliation between Athena and Bellona, since--and this is definitely VERY tenuous theorizing--Venus could be said to be partially responsible for the disagreement, since the Romans were the ones who bastardized Athena into Minerva, and Venus was the mother of Aeneas, the demigod who founded the Romans). Though at this point I am starting to lean towards it being someone we don't know OR no one at all.