#this is when Jak goes back to Haven

[radioactivepeasant]

Snippets Thursday: Meddling Mar (part 1 of 2)

A two-part piece to avoid a super long post, jumping ahead to how Damas and Phobos got their suspicions about the boys confirmed (part two is Damas confronting Jak over it)

The net thumped against the supports of the dock as Phobos hauled it upward. The catch was small for the evening; normally she wouldn't have even considered bringing it in so early. But the scanners had picked up a storm blowing in, and the last thing she wanted was for her net to get dragged out over the reef -- or for the Scylla to get any ideas about free snacks if she decided to shelter in the lagoon. Small though the catch may have been, it would just have to suffice until the weather was more favorable. Phobos supposed she could always take another overnight trip for larger fish later in the week. Maybe Jak would agree to let Mar tag along.

Phobos's hands stilled over the net of wriggling greenbellies. She stared out at the water without really seeing it as her thoughts drifted to the two boys who had drifted into their lives. Or, drifted back into their lives.

She knew her son when she saw him. He could have been five or eight or twenty-five and she would have known him. Denial at this point was foolish. But what she couldn't understand was Jak.

Phobos knew the child she'd borne. Knew every curl on his head, every dimple and birthmark. But to her knowledge, she'd only given birth once. And Jak...

Jak looked at her with Mar's eyes. He smiled with Mar's left-cheek dimple. And according to Damas, beneath the scarf he never took off, Jak had Mar's portwine stain on the back of his neck.

Phobos didn't need the blood results from the monks to know who Jak was. What she didn't understand was why.

Why had the Precursors given their lost son back, in two different bodies? Why did the older Mar call himself Jak? How had he come to be? And did he even know the impossibility of his own existence?

The wind began to pick up, sending a spray of salt into Phobos's face. She sputtered and spat. Served her right for getting distracted. Grumbling to herself, the angler slung the net over a pole and balanced it across her shoulders. It was getting to be time to take shelter, and her dawdling meant she might not make it to the tower before the sands picked up.

As she trudged through the West Market, shops closed their shutters and people nailed down tarps over stands. The walls and cliffs would protect most of Spargus from the winds, but the West Quarter was open to the sea. Things sometimes got a little dicey on the coast.

"Captain!" Someone called across the street, and Phobos spotted one of the summer semester teachers for the little ones.

"Oye, Captain Phobos!"

"Wind's picking up, Korah," Phobos warned her, "Is everyone home?"

The younger Spargan shook her head with a worried frown. "Not yet! I've got Seek with me -- the new boy? Seek? -- he refuses to go home! Says he needs you."

Phobos dropped the net immediately.

"Clean the net and those are yours," she said hastily to the startled shopkeeper beside her. Then she raced across the street.

Sand was beginning to carry along the wind, stinging her face as she caught up to Korah.

"Where is-" She caught herself quickly before saying Mar. "Where is he?"

The teacher gestured with the stump of her right arm. "I convinced him to wait in the Chime Sisters' place so I could look for you. I'm sorry, Captain. I know you're busy. The little guy's really taken a shine to you, though."

She ducked into a half alley between shops, looking for some relief from the wind.

"Don't know if he's showed you any of his classwork or not, but he picked you for his presentation on important roles in the community."

Despite her worry, a warmth filled Phobos's chest. "I uh. I know," she answered, just a little bashful. "It's taped up in my boat cabin."

So much had changed. Mar didn't suck his thumb anymore. He didn't respond to old nicknames. He didn't snuggle anymore, or want to be carried. He didn't call her Mommy -- that one hurt most -- but something, something was still there. Perhaps it was instinct. Or perhaps she'd rebuilt it with her own two hands by simply being present.

Phobos followed Korah to the two story building that held the Chime sisters' shop and apartment. Just as the teacher had said, Mar sat just inside, huddled next to the door with his knees drawn to his chest. He looked sullen. Like he couldn't decide between anger and sadness. Immediately, Phobos knelt in front of him with a worried frown.

"It's about to storm, minnow," she said, "Why aren't you home? Where's Jak, he usually picks you up by now, doesn't he?"

Apparently this was the wrong thing to say. Mar's brows fell into a fierce scowl.

"Jak left me!" he answered in short, terse signs.

That didn't make any sense. Jak was devoted to his little brother! Phobos glanced at the women sheltering around her and then back at Mar.

"I'll take him up to Damas’s," she said. "We'll get this straightened out after the storm blows over."

Nadia Chime clucked her tongue and nodded. "You get that little sprout out of this weather, cap'n!'

Phobos held her hands out to Mar. "Come on, you. Let's go see Damas, eh? Bet you he kept Jak late for training again."

Mar shook his head angrily. This time, tears beaded up in his eyes. But he reached out and grabbed Phobos's hands anyway, using them as leverage to propel himself into her arms.

Something was very wrong.

"Hey, hey," Phobos murmured, returning the embrace, "It's okay, baby, I've got you."

She shoved down the beginnings of anxiety fluttering in her stomach. The sooner she got to the tower, the sooner she could regroup with Damas.

"We need to move fast if we don't want to get sandburn. Can I carry you, minnow?"

Silently, Mar nodded into her chest. Phobos took a breath, scooped up her little boy, and made a dash for the residential sector.

Something's wrong with Jak. He's hurt, or he's sick, he must be. He wouldn't leave Mar. He wouldn't!

By the time she'd made it to the bridge tunnel that led to the tower door, the storm was beginning to sweep across the eastern part of the city. Wind howled down streets an alleys like a dune-wolf looking for prey, and kangarats scurried for cover while Leapers bedded down and covered their heads with their vestigial wings, as they did in the wild. Phobos hefted Mar higher in her arms and made for the door marked with the great spiral wyrm.

"Almost inside, Mar," she said, trying to comfort him.

Just as he had every time she'd slipped his name into conversation before, the child failed to correct her.

The walls of the tower were thick, almost erasing the wind entirely. Phobos stepped into the elevator and sat down as it rose. She set Mar down on her lap and took advantage of the silence to ask, "What did you mean "Jak left"? Is he on a mission?"

Mar still looked angry, but tears stained his dusty cheeks. "He left!" Stupid Haven's stupid governor whined about all the trouble happening -- but it's only happening because they tried to kill us, so stupid Jak left to keep them away from Spargus because they're all so STUPID!"

Phobos felt a knot forming in her stomach.

"Haven?! Why the- why in the world would Jak listen to them? And why would he try to keep them away from the city by himself?"

And with that, the dam burst. The silent trickles of tears turned into sobs that shook Mar's little body as he signed, "Because of me. I'm a bad brother."

"What?! No, nonono you are not a bad brother!" Phobos wiped tears from round cheeks and rocked her son back and forth. "Why would you think that?!"

"Cause it's my fault he left!" Mar hiccuped, and his signs shook. "The Council guys in Haven are looking for me, cos I go where Jak goes. And he- he- he-"

"He left so the council would look for you somewhere else," Phobos guessed grimly.

A fresh flood of tears soaked the front of her tunic as Mar cried. He clung to her the way he used to as a toddler, wailing into her chest. The elevator locked into place and Damas was already running towards them, having heard the cries, before Phobos even had a chance to stand up.

"Pho! What's wrong? What's happening?"

Phobos's face was pale as she looked up at him.

"Daym," she asked, "When did you last see Jak?"

Damas’s blood ran cold.

Part Two

#fic prompts #writing prompts #jak and daxter #dadmas #king damas #jak and daxter au #free day thursday #meddling mar #meddling mar au #jak and daxter mar #captain phobos #this is when Jak goes back to Haven #he's going to be extremely grounded when he gets back #especially because the monks finally get results on the dna test while he's in haven

[tumb1rprincess]

Been thinking lately about how Jak 3 just randomly makes a 180 when it comes to shipping and suddenly slaps Jak and Ashelin together. I didn't like it when I was young and I still don't like it a whole lot now. And I feel like a major reason for that is that Jak/Keira and Torn/Ashelin have a long history when it comes to their relationships, whether it's outright stated or up to fan speculation.

Like, even before Jak and Keira kind of get together at the end of the first game, you can tell they've known each other for a while. And it makes me wonder how they met, how they became friends, when did they first start falling for each other. Like, I'm guessing they were childhood friends, and the two of them and Daxter were almost like a Ed/Winry/Alphonse from FMAB type of situation. And then Jak II happens and suddenly, Jak is not the silly, happy kid Keira used to know, and you can see she kind of doesn't know how to feel about that, let alone process that. I wish Jak II could have delved more in to that, but I guess that leaves us fans to fill in the blanks. Did Keira learn the details of what Jak had to go through? Did she find out Errol was behind half of it? But with them together in Jak X, I feel like it kind of shows that they worked past that, and while Jak will never be the same as he was, they flirt and play around with each other almost like they did when they were younger.

Torn/Ashelin are kind of the same in a way. They've known each other for a while before the start of Jak II and it makes me wonder how they met. Was it when Torn was a Krimzon guard? Did Ashelin have any role to play in him quitting? She did say she's always wished Haven City was better ever since she was a kid. Did she encourage him to join the Underground, or did he find it first and she decided to use her position as Praxis's daughter to help? And while Torn refers to her as a friend in Jak II, he's probably already fallen for her at that point. He gets so touchy when Jak goes "Did you say 'she'?" and even more defensive when he asks later on about Torn's connection with her after finding out she was Praxis's daughter. Hell, he pretty much betrays the Underground in order to keep her safe when Praxis threatens to kill her. And if that doesn't scream love, I don't know what does. And does Ashelin ever find out what he did for her sake? Also, I'm just a sucker for the "knight/ruler" kind of ship dynamic. Like, Torn serves under Ashelin not just because it's his job, but because he loves her, and she's the only one to get past his "tough guy" exterior.

I just have a lot of feeling about these couples and I'm glad Jak X finally made things right and got them back together.

#jak and daxter #jak #keira #ashelin #torn #baron praxis #errol #daxter #jak II #jak X #jak 3

[sarandipitywrites]

Find the word tag

@ahordeofwasps tagged me for this one - thank you! Go read her snippets here (seriously. read them. They are ajdshfkjlash). my words to find are nerve, name, new, and nail. i'll be searching the latest draft of Dead Roots, Dark Water for this one

i'll tag (no pressure!) @moonandris, @just-a-local-dreamer, @adhdavinci, @breath-of-eternity, @aalinaaaaaa, @eccaiia, and you (open tag!) to find scratch, change, story, and shoe.

CW for nerve, as it contains magical healing depicted as mild body horror. that entry has been moved to the bottom of the post. now, without further ado...

name

"Code names are standard for Underground communication. Our comm cracking procedure's prevented breaches so far, but it pays to be paranoid." "Hey, lemme make somethin' clear, Gravel-Breath: this job interview goes two ways. I have not expressed, nor accepted—" The gears clicked into place. Daxter's jaw dropped. "Wait. I'm Zeek?" "Short. Common. Inconspicuous." "Lotta words for boring. We got code names, man, let's make 'em somethin' spicy, somethin' like… Orange Lightning, or, or The Daxterminator—" "Zeek." He pointed at Jak. "Cylen. Don't try to change them."

new

Lines littered the length of Jak's exposed arm. Raised, dark gray ridges; thin, silvery lines; patches of dark, taut skin. What little he could see of Jak's chest told the same story. A thin breath hissed out from Daxter's tightened throat. "Who?" Jak snatched his hand away, yanked on his new blue coat. "It's fine. I'm fine. Don't worry about it." Silver. In the shadow of his jaw. Daxter pressed his fingertips under Jak's chin, angled it up. A thin silver scar. Vertical. Surgical. Skirting his larynx. Fire burned white-hot in his chest, choking, smothering. Tremors quaked down his arms. "Who?" Gol? Praxis? Some freak scientist, some vainglorious bastard who thought themself a god, wanted to fix what wasn't broken— "Dax, stop." Jak looked away, ears angled back. "Just…" Daxter let out a breath, long and stuttering. "Yeah. Right. Sorry, bud." It could wait. They could wait.

nail

Daxter turned around, took one look at him, and groaned. "Dude. The shoes weren't a friendly suggestion. Put 'em on." "Never needed them before." "You never been in Haven before. And the first rule of Haven is: shoes are not optional. Place's nastier than a hiphog's wallow. With at least…" he counted off on his fingers, "three times the horrible diseases." Jak crossed his arms. Whatever pathogens Daxter was worried about, Jak had encountered worse and survived. Without shoes. Daxter mirrored his stance and narrowed his eyes. "Jak Sabo, you are wearin' those boots if I gotta pin you down and duct tape 'em on. I ain't carryin' you around when you step on a nail and get gout." Jak rolled his eyes, but opened the bag and retrieved the boots. "Tetanus." "Yeah, that too."

nerve

He filled the gaps with green, wove the sheared bones together with spiderwebs of collagen and calcium. The new material scratched at his insides like raw sandstone on an exposed nerve. Eco jabbed through veins and nerves, stitching the frayed ends back together. Flesh, tendon, skin. Even when the last gash closed, golden brown eclipsing red, the inside of his skin itched like sand under his fingernails. Iron and lilies lingered, sweet and metallic and nauseating.

#cw: body horror #writeblr tag games #find the word tag #my writing #dead roots dark water

[sparguscityangel]

and i’m used to that (but i can get used to this)

I got hit with some Jak/Keira feels recently and I had to write something short and fluffy about my kids ;u; I might upload this to AO3 too, I haven’t decided yet so I’ll post it here. Rated G for because they’re kids and I wanted to write some wholesome teen friendly romance.

Warning: Mentions of physical abuse from Jak’s time in prison.

Title is from Monster by Olivia Olson from Adventure Time: Distant Lands - Obsidian. This whole fic is inspired by that song, it was hard picking which lyric to put aurhgaliurhgaerg

Enjoy!

Rain in Sandover was always cause for melancholy for Keira. It meant staring out her window with her chin in hand and watching the water pour over the village in fat drops. It meant the stench of wet yakkow wafting from the east and soggy straw threatening to collapse above their heads. It meant being unable to meet up with Jak and Daxter as they were forced by their guardians to hunker down indoors. Rain brought depression and loneliness to the village, groans and moans as the denizens scrambled to figure out how to avoid the water from flooding their homes despite the barrier of sand bags plopped at every entrance. Keira always felt the loneliest during those days. It helped having books and inventions to tinker with on rainy days, but it was nothing compared to running barefoot on the beach as the sun bestowed more freckles on her shoulders. 

In the last two years, Keira has grown used to the ache in her chest when she thought of all the times she didn’t appreciate Sandover to the fullest capacity, but sitting in her apartment with a hot mug in hand and looking out at the neon lights of Haven reflecting off the rain, she supposes nothing really changes. Not completely anyway. Not without retaining at least something of what once was, a ghost of the past that never really goes away nor would she want it to. 

She has a hard time with that, doesn’t she? Change. Everything changed so quickly, she’d barely allowed time to get her bearings before the next shift began and she’s planted again at square one. It happens so suddenly, too. Abruptly and violently, like a balloon popping if left out in the sun for far too long. There’s no warning that it’s about to happen, and you are barely able to move out of the way before … POP. She thinks of all the people she never got to say goodbye to, all the artifacts and technology that were lost once more to the passage of time, to Chompers the plant that withered away to nothingness in her father’s hut as it awaited a caregiver who never returned. She tries not to think about it.

Keira took a sip of her tea. It was lukewarm now, but she couldn’t find it in herself to care. The warmth of the mug brought the feeling back into her fingers, so it served its purpose in the end. Despite the warmth combating the chill in her bones, Keira couldn’t find it in herself to go to bed just yet. She knew it was late, and she’d have to get up early in the morning to head back to the garage, but she felt unusually alert. The city, thought active and bright, felt sleepy all around her. She leaned her head against the frame of her window, debating on whether to close the open orifice, when something down below in the street caught her eye. 

It moved slowly toward the entrance of the building, casting glances over his shoulder whenever the clanking of armor against armor drew too loud. His head was wrapped with a scarlet scarf, only his darting eyes visible, and his hands were tucked into the pockets of a racing jacket, but Keira would recognize him anywhere. She’d probably recognize him by touch alone if she had too, and then she chastised herself for lying so blatantly even to herself. Precursors, she didn’t even recognize him when he was a shadowed silhouette on her curtain, how could she recognize him by touch alone? 

Her intercom buzzed loudly in the quiet apartment, and Keira startled. It was rare that she had a visitor, the sound of her own intercom foreign despite living here for a year and a half. Perhaps, it was also in part that she hadn’t spoken to Jak in over a month, not since he stormed out of her garage after the Class 2 race. She stood up on the second buzz, padding from the window seat straight to her intercom and pressing the button to answer. She held her finger there for a full minute, listening intently to Jak’s breathing on the other end as she willed herself to swallow her pride and speak first. 

“Hello?”

“Hi,”

“Hi,” A beat. “Want to come up?”

“Yeah,” 

Less than ten words exchanged between them before Jak was inside Keira’s apartment, dripping rainwater onto her rug and staring at the pattern under his boots like it was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen. Keira didn’t say anything. Her heart pounded in her throat, anxiety making her mouth feel like cotton. All she could really do was stand opposite of Jak, both avoiding looking at the other. A game of chicken where the first one to speak would lose, only this time it was more serious than trying to shove the other off shoulders and laughing as they splashed wildly in the water. 

The drops rolling off Jak were soaking her rug, though, and Keira really liked that rug. Damn it. “You’re soaked,” she sighed, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t flood my apartment,” 

Jak raised an eyebrow at her, confusion twisting his face in the darkness before a soft, “Oh,” rolled out of him and he snapped to action to remove his jacket. He toed off the boots as he did so, dropping an inch or two in height. The apartment was dark — the only source of light coming from the neon from the window and the passing of headlights that swept across her furniture like searchlights, but even with limited visibility, she could see the way his tunic stuck to his skin. There was little doubt that the garment was thoroughly soaked. Why wasn’t he taking it off? He was going to catch his death if he kept it on. It wasn’t like her apartment was awfully warm, and even through her thick cardigan, she could feel the late autumn night. 

She raised an eyebrow at him, then subsequently blushed when he cleared his throat. Oh, right. Keira cleared her throat. “I’ll, uh … I’ll go see if there’s … um, sorry, the bathroom is right there, help yourself, I’ll just … yeah,” she stammered off, caught between running to her room to bury her face into a pillow with the loudest scream she could muster or jumping out the window with a running start. Thankfully, Jak nearly bolted for the bathroom with a curt nod and she didn’t have to marinate in the awkwardness for long. Once the door closed with a click, she dropped her head in her hands harder than necessary. 

It used to be so easy to talk to her best friend. The conversations always flowed so naturally, an endless stream of consciousness about her latest idea and Jak’s newest addition to his bug collection. Somewhere around the time she turned eleven, it was enough just to lay next to him on the dock near the Fisherman’s house and watch the clouds morph over them until the sky grew orange and the dying sun would turn the blue of Jak’s eyes into something akin to honey toned. The first time she noticed it, her breath caught in her throat and her fingers itched to etch the image on paper. It was then she realized that Jak wasn’t just her friend, not like he was an hour prior, but someone else. Her childish brain conflated him alongside the awe of stepping into the Precursor Temple in the Jungle, and she has had trouble separating him from the grandiose mosaics of the Precursors ever since. 

It broke her heart when she saw him under the fluorescent lights of the garage and the only word that came to mind was sick. He looked sick. From the pale pallor of his skin to dull irises that seemed to avoid soaking in the light. Everything about him was just … wrong. It was meeting a stranger, another Havenite who walked the streets of the city like reanimated corpses that would continue to wander until they succumbed to their own decay. She wondered if this is how it felt to renounce one’s faith, then she laughed at herself because she would know the feeling well. No Precursor who was benevolent would ever sentence two close friends to this. 

She snapped back to the present when the bright high beams of a patrol zoomer blinded her, casting shadows and the monsters that lurked within them over the walls of her apartment. She shoved the past down, and tuned into the present where she was standing in her home, holding dry clothes in her arms. The bathroom door opened a crack and darted toward it quickly, holding the bundle of clothing out in front of her for the other teen to take. “Here. Put these on,” she immediately noticed his eyes widen slightly at the pants, and before he could draw any conclusions, she blurted out, “They’re some generic racing uniform the stadium gives every team that competes. I always tell myself I’m going to donate them, but I keep forgetting. The sweater is mine,”

“Thanks,” he replied, taking the sweater and pants slowly. It was as if he was afraid that the wrong movement would shatter the clothes like glass, that Keira herself would snatch them away from him. When his hand felt the soft fuzz of her favorite sweater, however, she watched as his hand lingered for a moment. Still as the dead, Jak’s fingers twitched and smoothed over the sage tendrils of fluff. He opened his mouth like he wanted to say something, but instead of words, he nodded and shut the door. She tried not to take it personally and retreated to her window seat, leaning back against the wall. 

Jak clambered around in the bathroom, no doubt knocking over a few toiletries into the sink. She could hear what sounded like her bar of soap slide in the porcelain basin. How can someone so skilled in fighting discipline be so horrible at moving around an enclosed space, she’ll never know. Jak emerged a few moments later, and lingered around the doorway. He looked ridiculous, and she wanted to tell him so, but the sweater hung off his frame more than she thought it would and the pants were meant for an adult man at least a foot taller than him and all she could think about was how small he looked. She swallowed thickly, clearing her throat to get his attention. 

He just stared. 

“You know I don’t bite, right?” Keira patted the cushion next to her. He still didn’t move, and she was close to tears then. How did it get so messed up between them? What happened to them where just the idea of being near the other was enough of an issue to cause pause and reflection?

In the neon light, Jak’s face was visible for the first time since he stepped foot in the apartment. His cheek was bruised with nauseating yellow and sharp purple, and his lip was scabbed from a cut. The injured looked a few days old, and it didn’t take a genius to notice how the map of destruction was about the same length as the butt of a Krimzon Guard stun baton. His hair was still wet from his trek in the rain, but the ends started to curl in loose ringlets and waves around his shoulders as it dried. Eventually, the golden boy of Sandover sighed heavily and sank down next to her, keeping his eyes trained on the ground between his bare feet. 

Though his back was to the open window, Keira could still make out the set of his jaw, frown lines permanently etched into his face. Despite it all, he was still a sight for sore eyes, and one she missed more than she realized until now. 

“No Daxter?” she asked, testing the waters between them. Jak shrugged a shoulder, his elbows no doubt digging painfully into his thighs as he leaned forward. 

“He’s with Tess,” he said flatly, “Something about date night. I don’t know, I didn’t really ask,”

Keira nodded and hummed in understanding, though she knew she was stalling on what she really wanted to ask. She bit her lip, worrying it between her teeth before the curiosity overwhelmed her. “So I’m what? Your last resort?” 

Another shrug. “I didn’t really have anywhere else to go. I was going for a walk and then I ended up here, so I figured …” he tensed, wound up like a spring loaded toy that was ready to pop at any given moment. He sighed, but his shoulders remained hunched. “Forget it. Thanks for the dry clothes. I’ll just get out of your hair,” Jak moved to get up, but Keira has known him longer than anyone, and her hand darted out to tug at his sleeve. He paused halfway, turning his attention to her hand. 

“Don’t go,” she swallowed, “It’s pouring outside. Just stay here,” 

“Keira …” 

“Please? I missed you,”That seemed to have struck a chord with him. His body deflated, letting her guide him back to the cushion they were sharing only moments before. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it … like that. I just thought you didn’t want to see me after … you know,”

Jak was always a terrible liar. He couldn’t keep a secret to save his life, and although he could get away with batting his eyes and smiling slyly at the adults, there was only so much he could feign. It was evident when he cleared his throat, obviously trying to hide the way he had a visible reaction to her bringing up their argument in the garage. 

It was nasty. That’s the only word she can think of to encapsulate the entire interaction. It was nasty, and she felt grimy every time she found herself replaying the conversation in her mind like an echo chamber of her Top Five Most Embarrassing Moments. Jak must’ve felt the same, because he leaned back until the back of his head to meet the vertical metal slats of her window. 

“It’s fine,” he muttered, but he wouldn’t look at her. He hasn’t looked at her since he arrived, and it shattered her heart. Never in a million years did she ever think there would be a time where they were sitting so close to each other, yet still miles apart. 

“No, it’s not,” She shook her head, moving to place a hand on his shoulder, but he dodged the touch like it was a branding. She deserved that. She folded her hands back into her lap, picking at her cuticles as she searched for the right words. It was nearly impossible to figure out how to start, but she owed it to Jak to at least explain her actions. He was entitled to that. “I hurt you. I wish I could say that I didn’t mean to, but I don’t want to lie to you. In the moment, yeah, I wanted to hurt you for … I don’t know. I was hurting, and I guess I didn’t want to be the only one,” she heard Jak scoff under his breath, and at any other time, it would’ve made her fly off the handle, but this time she scoffed alongside him. “Point is, I shouldn’t have treated you like you were some kind of thug. We all have to do some pretty crappy things to survive, and if working for Krew helps you and Daxter stay afloat, it’s really not my place to belittle you for that,” 

Jak ran his hand through his hair, bushing back the long strands that fell over his face. It was then she realized that he was completely dressed down. His goggles were gone, and his faithful right pauldron was nowhere to be found. There was nothing hard about him, nothing to shield him. Jak was completely vulnerable in front of her. She dug her thumb into her palm, pressing her nail deep to avoid reaching out to see if the invisible barrier between them was still in place. 

“It wasn’t really the Krew stuff that upset me,” Jak started, hesitant and shaky, “I’ve made my peace with being a hired gun. It’s not like I have much of a choice, but I do wish you let me explain,” he swallowed, “It … Keira, Erol is bad news. I should’ve explained myself, but whenever he’s around, I can’t … think straight. Everything gets hazy and my chest feels tight. I was terrified when I saw him in your garage. You have no idea what he’s capable of,” 

Keira took a deep breath. She figured it would come back to Erol one way or another. It was strange having two men she was attracted to pointing fingers at the other, spewing slander of the other and then asking her to make a decision on their character from hearsay alone. What she knew for certain was that one was lying and one was telling the truth. “I know he’s the Commander of the Krimzon Guard. I know he helped me a lot those few months I was in Haven. I had nowhere to go, I don’t know what had happened to you and Daxter and daddy. All I knew was that I was alone and scared and cold and hungry and Erol was there for me,” Jak nodded, but Keira could tell he was elsewhere right now. She pressed on, “I also know he hurt you,” He snapped to look at her, and if it wasn’t for the circumstance, she thinks her heart might’ve melted. He was woefully beautiful, like a doomed prince in a tragedy. All pain and sorrow intersected with the holy burden of being so appealing that makes onlookers refuse to look away. Her mouth dried up and she had to swallow. “Daxter mentioned the Baron and eco … at first I didn’t really register it until Erol came by the garage after you left and told me about you,”

“What did he say?” “That you were dangerous. I don’t think he knows we grew up together because he just went on and on about how you were arrested for kicking crocapuppies or something equally as stupid. He said he tried to … rehabilitate you, but you were too evil to change. I thought, ‘He can’t be talking about the same Jak. Whoever he was describing sounded like a villain in a fairytale.’” She chuckled humorlessly. “I’m not going to apologize for trusting him. But I am sorry for trusting him more than I trusted you,” 

Jak pursed his lips. He was concentrating hard at the spot near Keira’s ear, on the wall behind her. She almost turned to look, but his eyes slid back into focus and they darted to look into hers. Chills ran down her spine. “Rehabilitate. Fucking bullshit,” he smirked, but Keira noticed it was off. His canines were too sharp, his smile didn’t reach his eyes, and it looked more like he was baring his teeth. Her heart seized a bit, but not in a bad way. Her cheeks grew warm and her palms sweaty, and she had to look away from him. “He made my life a living hell for two years. Still is. I can’t go a single day without seeing his ugly mug plastered somewhere and reliving the shit he put me thought,” 

Keira opened her mouth, but the tremors in his hands told her that this needed to happen. He needed to get this off his chest, and if he needed her to be the one he offloaded this too, she’ll gladly accept it. It felt good being near him again. If he wanted her to sit while he screamed at the stars and waged holy war with the Precursors, then she'd sprout roots and dig far deep into the earth. She folded her legs in front of her and laid her chin in her palm, keeping her face neutral as Jak grit his teeth. “It wasn’t enough that they’d pump me full of dark eco for him. He wanted to watch them do it. He’d stand there and watch them strap me down and he’d flip the damn switch to the Halo. And when that novelty wore off, that’s when he’d drag me into The Room,” he paused, Adam’s apple bobbing as he chewed on his words carefully. When he started again, it was slower, more calculated. “He beat me. Every single day for two years, he’d use me as his own sadistic plaything. I knew he wanted me to beg him to stop, but I wasn’t going to give him that satisfaction. I’d rather he kill me than to ever give him what he wanted. I told myself that I wasn’t going to let him change me, that he couldn’t take who I was away from me, but every time that door closed I lost parts of me that I’ll never get back,” he blinked, “Seeing him in your garage … I thought he did something to you. I thought he found out about you somehow and hurt you. Then you said he was the best racer you’ve ever seen and something in me just … broke. He broke me, but you, Keira? You made me unfixable,” 

Keira couldn’t argue with that. What can she say? She couldn’t deny Jak that feeling of betrayal. He’s been denied so much as it was already, she wasn’t going to be the one to invalidate those feelings. She couldn’t scream and cry like a victim, twist the situation so that Jak was in the wrong because he wasn’t. She should’ve trusted him from the beginning, and cut ties with Erol the moment he even mentioned that he was someone who couldn’t be trusted. A part of her wanted to pipe up that she didn’t know about Erol’s cruelty, but the other part of her knew that was a lie. She hadn’t seen it first hand, but she heard the way he spoke to his racing rivals. The way he’d seethe and demand rematches whenever someone beat his score, the amount of times something heavy got flung in the general direction of a cocky racer that rubbed Erol the wrong way. She saw the bloody knuckles and wild look in his eyes, and because she was too scared to lose her only friend and reliable client, she looked the other way. She was no better than Erol, who stood by and watched as her best friend was tortured within an inch of his life. 

No words came to mind. There was no way she could remedy this quickly enough, but Jak’s hand was shaking violently and curled up so tight that she could see the veins and tendons jump out. It looked painful. She didn’t want him to hurt anymore. 

She laid her hand over his, telegraphing the movement slowly. When Jak didn’t flinch away again, she took the fist in both hands. He was cold to the touch. She wondered if her hands felt like a branding against his own, a mark of the Baron’s crest on the inside of his wrist telling her that he must know the feeling all too well. She dug her fingers into where his own met his palm, releasing his grip. Crescent moon indents formed a line in the middle, and she rubbed her thumbs in unison against them until they faded away to nothing. He was real in her hands. There was flesh, and blood, and bone, and a heartbeat, and life. He was right here, right next to her in her apartment, and he was real. Her ghost had returned to her alive. 

She held his hand in hers. She was in her apartment in Main Town, she was sitting on a cliff on her fourteenth birthday, she was standing on the top of a Citadel — she was participating that was happening at different points of her life in the past and each time she held Jak’s hand, it felt like the very first time. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, “I’m sorry. I’ll never stop apologizing, not even if you decide to forgive me. And I’m sorry, but that’s so not true,” Jak stilled, his hand twitched in hers and she knew he was going to try and pull away, but she squeezed his even tighter to keep him put. “You’re not broken. You’re here, completely intact, with me. There’s nothing to fix,” 

“You don’t know that,” he said, “I’m not that kid you grew up with anymore. He died in prison, Keira. I’m just what’s left of him,” 

Keira looked down at their hands. “I don’t believe that. I think you’re still you, just … different. Even if we didn’t go through the Rift, you weren’t going to stay fifteen forever. That’s just not practical. Scientifically speaking, we’re constantly evolving. We mature, we regress, we grow up. It’s not fair to yourself to expect to stay the same when it’s natural to not even be the same person we were a month ago. And yet …” she traced his nail beds with her other hand, and smiled when she made out the scar on his middle finger from when Jak tried to pet a wild Lurkerpuppy. “See this?” she held their hands up, “This is still you. This is the same hand you used to bring the Sculptor’s muse back to him. Your bones, your eyes, your feet, your heart — they’re still all here. Despite everything, you’re still you,” 

“I can’t be what you want me to be,” 

“I won’t want you to be anything,” Keira spat, twisting her face in mock disgust. “Did I like you when you were fifteen and non-verbal? Yeah. Do I like you now that you’re seventeen and a bad boy? Hell yeah,” 

Jak chuckled, and when Keira looked up, she found him smiling at her. A genuine one. Not the strained one he gives out at racing matches or the baring of teeth he does when Krew calls him. This was the smile that made her first realize that she would do unspeakably embarrassing things to see more of. It was all teeth and sunshine. “You like me, huh?” 

“If you’re just figuring that out now, then you’re either the most oblivious guy on the planet or you’re tied with Daxter for the most gullible,” 

“I can’t give you what you want, you know,” he muttered, “I’m not ready for that,” 

Keira nodded. There was still so much to work on between them. Tonight they were able to pluck off enough bricks from the wall that separated them to see the other, but there were still many more to go. It’ll be exhausting, and they’ll be covered in dust and sweat, but at least they would be dismantling it rather than building onto it. Sometimes, that’s all one can really hope for. And that was enough for her. “You know what I want right now?” she asked, and when Jak shook his head, she answered it for him, “I want to be a kid,” 

“You just had a whole speech about not being kids anymore,”

“No, no. I just had a whole speech about not staying kids anymore. I want us to be kids. Precursors, Jak, we’re teenagers,”

“I’d make the argument that I’m mentally at least thirty years old at this point,”

“That’s the first joke I’ve ever heard you make and it’s not even funny,” she groaned, hearing her friend laugh, “I’m serious! We went from being barefoot kids and straight to adulthood. We didn’t even get the chance to be our own age,” 

“Okay, how do you suggest we do that? What do teenagers even do?” Jak frowned as he thought of his own question. It was a good question. Keira didn’t even know what she meant by ‘being a teenager’ but she knew it meant being carefree. She knew it was a pinnacle age where the fancies of childhood and the pains of adulthood intersected. She knew that she, Jak, Tess, and Daxter all apparently skipped that transition altogether and headed straight for becoming a young adult. Teenagers weren’t supposed to have their own apartments yet, nor were they supposed to be running around the city doing errands for a known crime boss. They were supposed to be doing something stupid. Looking out the window, Keira was instantly struck with the perfect idea. 

“Come on,” she smiled, leaping off the bench and pulling the hero toward the front door. Jak followed suit, his eyebrow raised in quiet suspicion. He didn’t say anything until they were running down the stairs of the complex, barefeet echoing loudly in the corridors as Keira practically sprinted for the entrance. 

“Where are we going?” he asked quietly, the question dissipating the moment Keira pushed the heavy door open. The rain hadn’t let up at all since Jak first arrived, pouring various waterfalls from atop the awning above the door. The two teens stood under it, holding hands and gazing up at the dark rain clouds overhead. The neon lights of the city were fuzzy and bright in contract, reflecting off the puddles on the street by their feet. Keira smiled up at Jak, a mischievous glint in her eyes. She didn’t have to say it. They’ve known each other since they were old enough to remember, they could read the other like a book. Everything and anything the other wanted to know was there for the taking. 

Keira didn’t give a warning other than a hand squeeze before she was yanking the blond teen toward the open road. The city had officially gone to sleep, and they were claiming it for themselves as the inhabitants dreamed. The rain pelted down on her head, soaking her hair and sticking her cardigan to her skin. She let go of Jak’s hand, throwing her hands to the rain and basked in the storm. She goes back to egg Jak to dance with her, not caring that her movements aren’t the most fluid and there was no music to get the rhythm of. She jumped and waved her arms and swayed her hips and laughed when her best friend joined her, pulling her close. 

In a couple hours, the Krimzon Guard would be back on patrol and Jak would leave her apartment before daybreak to avoid being recognized. In a week from now, Keira would be standing on a zeppelin next to the Rift Rider she’s been working on for years as she watched her best friend shrink in the distance, praying to Gods she no longer believed in that this won’t be the final time she sees him. A year and a half from now, they’ll meet again with a magnetic barrier between them, realizing that they had officially crossed the threshold into adulthood without the other and be torn apart again in a bittersweet reunion where Keira will realize that Jak belonged out in the Wasteland with his new family. She won’t be there when Jak discovers he’s the lost heir to the city, nor will she be there as he breaks apart holding his father’s dead body in his arms. He won’t be there when Keira is put on trial for her involvement in aiding a banished man reenter the city nor will he be there when she finally severs all ties to her father after his transgressions come to light. They’ll be torn apart and reunited over and over again until the sun explodes in the sky and engulfs the planet into flames. They’ll still fight, and they’ll still hold grudges, and they’ll go to bed angry at the other. 

When it would rain, from now on, Keira would think of this moment, and of them, and feel nothing but love and happiness. This precious moment that will remain perfect and untouched in time forever. A moment where Jak and Keira dance without abandon in the rain, pretending they are the only two people left with a whole city at their fingertips. Keira will throw her head back to laugh, and Jak’s hand will be pressed against her back. He’ll hold her hand high above his head and she’ll twirl, wet hair sticking to her face and neck as she almost slips on the wet concrete. Jak’s eyes will glow an electrifying blue in the neon lights and lightning, and Keira will realize that she liked it almost more than she liked the golden blue. 

For now, they were young and in love, and that was enough for them.

#jak and daxter #jak/keira #jakxkeira #keira hagai #fanfic #snippet #angel's fic #<- my fic tag ig ailurghaliurgh #jnd

[spuddy-buddy]

scattered notes from a hypothetical Jak and Daxter series re-write of sorts because i have fucking brainworms now i guess

THE GIST

The story kicks off two years after TPL; Jak has been training his channeling to become a proper sage as implied by the sages at the end of TPL, Kiera has still been inventing things, and Daxter still has no pants. Sometime near the beginning of the story stuff goes down which causes Jak to need to take a hit for someone and gets hit with some manner of dark eco. It doesn't kill him or turn him into a furry, because thanks to his being more experienced with channeling he actually manages to channel it. However, dark eco is still dark eco and therefore still wrecks your shit no matter what, so Dark Jak happens. It's taken a lot more seriously than it was in Jak II so instead of having like no story relevance it's actually the main catalyst for the story since everyone is very rightfully horrified and worried about Jak's well being, Gol and Maia still fresh in everyone's minds. Since the only people on the continent stupid enough willing to study dark eco are kinda floating at the bottom of a vat of the stuff the Sandover crew gotta look abroad for help. Samos recalls rumors of another continent on the other side of the world, so the Sandover crew sets off and, after spending time at sea, end up in Haven City. One thing leads to another and they all get mixed up with the Metal Head war and the Underground, all the while having to appease the various Havenite factions to try and get Jak the help he needs.

WORLDBUILDING/MISC STORY BEATS

I've only thought as far as Jak II story-wise.

The 100 power cell ending is ignored for now bc I can't think of anything for it.

Not sure if Gol and Maia come back(yet?).

For now I've decided that maybe it's a dark eco bomb from the Metal Head war that's washed up on the shore that kickstarts the story(from who's side? wouldn't you like to know weather boy).

Jak's worsening condition plays more of a part in the story, serving as the Sandover crew's main motivation.

All our faves are still there, albeit altered to better fit the re-write.

Since this re-write nixes time travel Haven's just a new city; the culture's way different, with a society that's less attuned to the world and more dependent on technology because of the Metal Head War(though not as technologically advanced as Haven in Jak II).

Haven’s development convergently led to something close to Kiera’s a-grav zoomer.

It appears at first that there are no channelers or sages, but in actuality it turns out there's coincidentally and conveniently three sages secretly operating in and around Haven: one red, one blue, and one yellow.

Mar is still a revered hero and founder of Haven City, but because there's no time travel there's no confusion later on if Jak is Mar or not.

The Precursor Stone and Mar’s big-ass gun are still plot macguffins.

There aren't guns yet; the closest things are the Guards' shock staves. Tess is working on it though.

The Krimzon Guard have some sort of artificial channeling suit technology and are split into the Krimzon Guard(red eco) and the Ambyr Guard(yellow eco). Their "tattoos" are actually scars resulting from from using the suits.

Barron Praxis’ mechs are cobbled-together Precursor bots.

After Gol and Maia bit it(?) the Lurkers make a sort of peace w the Still Unnamed Main Race. Because the latter would-be conquerors never made their way over to Haven some have even integrated into society there.

By extension, Barron Praxis' enslavement of them is less so systemic and moreso a very recent development and/or dirty secret to be used against the Barron except the sharks the sharks are true neutral bastards who heed no master(inspired by astrathechinchilla's good takes).

At some point in the story when everything starts getting out of control the Sandover gang almost decide to pack it in and head home until it's revealed that the Metal Heads plan to invade the rest of the world after conquering Haven. Around the same time it's also revealed that Baron Praxis wants to capture Jak for himself to use him in experiments(basically to start the Dark Warrior Project instead of effectively ending it).

Jak and Samos(and maybe Kiera idk) are all from Haven originally. Samos was part of Damas' court and was charged with hiding Jak to ensure his survival; this is why Samos knows about Haven. Domino-ing off of this Barron Praxis has been in power for far longer than he was in Jak II. When this is discovered Jak decides it's better to leave Ashelin in charge after the Barron is deposed since he's not the leader type and she knows better what her people need than he does.

Also at the end Jak comes to the conclusion that he probably can’t be cured, but that he’ll be fine as long as he’s got support from his friends and loved ones.

Spargus and Kras City still exist, albeit slightly altered to better match the rest of the rewrite. Lurkers are even more present in those cities because A: there isn't an active war going on, and B: they aren't being secretly used as slaves. Instead of cars Spargans utilize less intelligent beast-type Lurkers as mounts for traversing the wasteland and adjacent areas. Kras has more of a remote floating city vibe and is still known for its lawlessness and night life, though has more of a pirate spin to it instead of an avid racing scene.

GAMEPLAY

Gameplay is once again more exploration-focused than combat-focused, with players being rewarded with orbs and parts for exploring and returning to areas with new abilities.

Haven itself isn't as fuckoff huge for no reason as it is in Jak II, but still bigger and more developed than anything in TPL. It’s still the central hub of the game.

Places like Haven Forest, the Precursor temples, and the mines still exist, though some are altered to better fit the re-write.

There are subquests equivalent to TPL's power cell missions for things to do outside the main story.

No guns. The gunplay in the Jak games is not very good y'all we're getting rid of the guns.

Combat adds a sort of lock-on that can switch targets for better utilization of ranged eco abilities, as well as a dodge.

Kiera gets to be important again and is the reason Jak gets to use whatever eco whenever he wants instead of having to collect and use it right away; she invents something he can use to store it until he needs it because fuck love triangles and shelving. She can upgrade this device as Jak and Daxter collect parts for her.

Skull gems are still the main collectible, orbs are still the super secret hidden items that unlock goodies, and parts are rewards for side quests.

The d-pad is used to cycle through eco types like it was used for gun mods in Jak II/3; this is referred to as the "eco wheel" for now. All ecos have three abilities tied to them with the first level for each being the basic functionality from TPL with some added functionality: blue eco now also affects all momentum when active for higher/longer jumps, red eco gets knocks enemies down further and for longer, and yellow eco gets a minor moveset tweak(square's punch is still the projectile, circle's kick has an AoE affect).

Green lvl 2 can heal on demand, and lvl 3 can heal the environment.

Blue lvl 2 can be used to parry if dodging is timed right, and lvl 3 can power machines for a time.

Red lvl is a passive buff that adds concussive AoE effects to hits, and lvl 3 adds a charge attack that can break through damaged structures.

Yellow lvl 2 is a passive buff that increases projectile speed and tracking, and lvl 3 adds a charge shot that can break through damaged structures.

Jak learns the lvl 2 and lvl 3 abilities from the Havenite sages and Samos through story progression.

All eco regenerates passively up to a point, but can be replenished faster and further by eco pickups. Kiera's upgrades can affect these aspects as well as max capacity.

DARK JAK

Aspects such as passive buffs to speed and power and the arcing dark eco are maintained.

To emphasize that Jak's exposure is very much so Not Good, instead of being a panic/win button Dark Jak is more of a high-risk-high-reward kinda deal: Dark Jak takes more damage, can't dodge, can't use normal eco abilities(most notable being green's self heal), and drains eco and health. These negative affects can be mitigated as the story progresses, but not outright removed. As a compromise the game wouldn't be as ball-bustingly unforgiving as Jak II is.

The eco wheel changes while playing as Dark Jak; the typical colors and abilities are replaced with abilities exclusive to Dark Jak. These abilities are analogous to their colored eco counterparts.

Green is replaced with a life sap that kills and corrupts wildlife.

Blue is replaced with a sort of bullet time kinda thing.

Red is replaced with something analogous to the Dark Bomb and Dark Blast, but less extreme.

Yellow is replaced with piercing bolts with minor DoT.

that's it that's all i got

#Jak and Daxter #Rewrite #Fix It fic #sort of #not really though #Spudd's JaD AU

[xadoheandterra]

Series: Semblance Title: Patriciate Fandom: Jak and Daxter Chapters: I | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII | VIII | IX | X | XI | XII | XIII | XIV | XV | XVI Characters: Jak, Daxter, Samos, Keira, Kid!Jak, Ashelin, Torn, Tess Tags: Worldbuilding, Accidentally King of Haven!Jak, hurt/comfort, things go wrong, things get better, things get worse again, slow build, slow burn, slow to update, cross posted, fantasy racism, canon divergence, been meaning to share this here Summary: “It’s yours,” Jak said softly. “Keep it…remember where you come from. At least one of us should remember….”

If Jak knew the consequences of that one, selfish choice…well, he’d probably have made the same decision either way.

Master Seem has found herself in the midst of a crisis. Not a day goes by that something seems to happen in the Wastes, after all.

 Seem lit each of the candles around her room carefully before she settled upon the mat in the center. With a soft breath she relaxed herself and slipped her eyes shut. Seem focused on her breath, focused on the sounds of flickering flame. With each exhale she extended her senses outward. She touched upon the monks in the halls one by one; took in the small, barely there beacons of light that signaled the eco they touched. Her senses shifted to the eco stores at the bottom of the temple, checked the quantities and basked in the glow before she shifted upward toward the surface; toward the Spargans that crawled like ants so focused on survival and freedom they often missed the bigger picture. Then, at the center, a beacon—bright, charismatic, enthralling in its presence. Awareness stoked her, amusement, contentment.

Hello.

                        Seem.

Seem drew back and began to compress herself down into her room, her breaths, her candles. She then pushed back out and began the process again. When she reached that beacon once more, that level of awareness—a fond chuckle—

                       Again?

Practice.

                      Ah.

—she pulled back once more and started to repeat the motions again. A second later, mid-draw back into herself, the ground shook and dust dropped from the ceiling. Seem’s concentration snapped, her eyes slipped open, and she frowned. Carefully Seem uncrossed her legs and blew out her candles. One of the acolytes would stop by no doubt with further information about the quake. The ground rumbled a second time, rolled and shifted like the tides of the sea while Seem worked. Then a third, fainter. Aftershocks.

The acolyte who stepped into the room in a rush caught Seem’s attention as she blew out the last candle. The aftershocks now were almost negligible, although the rush outside her room let Seem know that each of the monks worked hard to find the damage, make a note of what they needed to repair—and check upon the eco stores. If any dark eco slipped into their sanctuary they’d need to relocate—and probably relocate all of Spargus too, although Seems’ mental map indicated that there shouldn’t be any liquid dark eco for at least a fair eight kilometers or so.

With the shifting of the earth, however…Seem looked over to the acolyte. “Yes, Kyla?” she rasped.

“I’m sorry Master Seem, but Lord Damas has put out an urgent call. Part of the sands shifted and collapsed. Wastelanders’ beacons are shining.”

Seem closed her eyes. “Creators preserve us,” she murmured. Seem shifted her fingers into a prayer and bowed her head over her hand. A second later she raised it, red eyes sharp. “Go. Tell Damas I will meet him at Spargus’ entrance.” She paused. “We will no doubt need an update on our eco stores,” she added. “Make sure the guardians know to prepare our stores of green, just in case.”

Kyla ducked her head in acknowledgement and fled from the room. Seem took another second to gather herself and her thoughts. Collapsed and shifted sands in the wastes meant uncovered caverns and possible ruins. Uncovered caverns or ruins meant the risk of dark eco. The green would help mitigate the dark eco’s effects for a time and help heal any injured Wastelander. That Wastelanders were caught in the shift also meant these caverns were vast. Seem pursed her lips. This could be provident with the coming of the Daystar—but ultimately lives trumped discovery. With a deep breath Seem swept from the room and out into the hall.

Monks, acolytes, trainees, and guardians swarmed through the halls. They moved swiftly, silently, and many carried broken pieces of pottery damaged in the initial quake. A few siphoned eco; they carefully manipulated liquid globules into new containers that had spilled into the halls. The sheer number of people in the sanctuary halls would boggle the mind of most outsiders. No one ever realized the true numbers of the Precursor Monks, barring Damas—but then there were reasons for Damas’ unique knowledge of their Order.

Seem reached out and grabbed a free acolyte. She didn’t even look in their direction as she grasped their arm; instead Seem focused on the organized chaos around her.

“Master Seem?”

“Gather all of our healers,” Seem said. “We have a collapse in the wastes and active beacons.”

“Right away,” the acolyte murmured, bowed, and then dashed off.

With that out of the way—green eco stores, and now healers—Seem moved into the throng of people. She weaved through toward the armory to dress for a visit to the Wastelanders. While none of the monks truly needed the face paint or armor it did serve to define themselves to those out of the Order. In some respect the paint and armor provided a sense of divine purpose—it inspired those around them. Once it inspired Havenites, now it inspired Wastelanders. It further ensured that they received privilege out of their enclaves, and even now it held some manner of importance among the Marauder Clans.

Everyone knew of the Order of the Precursor Monks, even if they didn’t believe in Mar and some sort of divine lineage gifted by the Precursors themselves. Official dress was important, and the additional measure of protection certainly didn’t hurt matters either.

Inside the enclaves, and even sometimes outside the enclaves, most monks honestly preferred to just wear their robes. Even Seem gave in to the temptation to leave the temple in just her robes and a clean face. It felt in some ways freeing. People didn’t recognize her without the distinctive armor and paint—aside from Damas, but then Seem suspected Damas knew quite a bit more than he tended to let on. That, and he’d often babysat her as a small child. Damas, for that reason alone, automatically got a free pass in recognizing her—and in making demands, although no one would say that to Seem’s face.

Seem made certain her armor tightened down enough to allow for breathability, but also would keep her safe. She tugged the unnecessary folds out of her robes from beneath the leather and precurian metal just to make things comfortable, and the grabbed a brush and the cans of paints. Carefully she applied the colors of the Creators across her skin, and once that too finished Seem headed over to the transport. She glanced to the guardians who gathered around barrels of green eco, nodded toward the pilot of the transport, and grabbed a rail inside the bay as it rose into the air.

For five minutes they followed ancient precurian tunnels before the transport moved out from beneath the desert. Another five minutes back in the general direction they came from and they were at Spargus. The only other exit from the tunnels the Monks occupied—aside from the teleporter that lead to a temple most thought they resided in; they trained there, not lived there—was in the Palace of Spargus. For public inquiries or summons of the Monks they often came from this exit. Elsewise if Damas called upon them in privacy—a rare action all things considered—they traveled through the Palace. It was a bit of a convoluted route, but it eased the Spargans’ minds and left them unaware of the tunnels and undercity beneath their sands that the Monks truly occupied.

The transport settled down within the gates of Spargas and Seem carefully debarked. She motioned for the guardian-healers to stay with the barrels of eco for the time being. Seem didn’t know where the collapse resided in the sands. Damas would inform her of what he required of the Monks, and Seem would distribute orders as necessary from there.

“Seem,” Damas nodded as he stepped up toward the young Monk. Seem dipped her head in respect and signed a brief prayer that Damas slightly grimaced toward. Around them Spargans hurried about. They loaded crates and barrels of medical supplies into spare vehicles—bandages, emergency tourniquets, intravenous solutions—and double-checked weapons and vital machinery. Seem noted everything around her silently. “What do you know?” Damas questioned. He turned towards his own vehicle and returned to his preparations.

Calmly Seem moved up beside Damas. “The quake pushed me from my meditation,” Seem said dryly. “The number of aftershocks is what concerns me the most, especially since there is also the volcano to consider.” Seem glanced off in the direction of the volcano itself with a faint frown. “Though to be fair it hasn’t been terribly active, there is still enough of a chance…and then there is the amount of beacons you indicated—”

“I never said how many,” Damas interrupted as he pulled a tarp over his own supplies in the back of his vehicle.

Seem hummed. “The manner in which I received your message was telling enough.”

Damas didn’t laugh, but he did smile. “Very well. You are correct; there are too many beacons.”

Seem nodded. “The number of active beacons suggests a large, buried, cavernous structure,” Seem moved toward Damas’ side instead of just behind him, lips pressed thin. “We have no knowledge of its state and should proceed with caution, Lord Damas.”

Damas grunted. He climbed into his vehicle and raised an eyebrow in Seem’s direction as she stood there. “And?”

Seem huffed, climbed in after Damas—she had to crawl along the back edge of the seat to get to the passenger side, determined not to go around the vehicle with Damas at the wheel—and tugged her own scarf and goggles she’d brought especially for this occasion up around her face. “And there is a chance of something to help with the coming Daystar,” Seem said, voice only slightly muffled. “However, research is for the moment secondary. My Monks’ primary concern is the lives of the Wastelanders. To that end we have brought our guardians and green eco stores.”

“You expect dark eco?” Damas questioned. Around him Wastelanders piled into their own vehicles and the pilot for the Monks’ transport lit up the A-Grav engine.

“I expect there is more to this quake than we have yet to understand,” Seem replied dryly.

“We’ll proceed with as much caution as we can afford, then!” Damas hollered as he kicked his own engine into gear. There was a brief moment of respite—of the seat humming beneath her; leather and precurian metal humming straight into her bones in that relaxing manner that Seem hadn’t felt in years—and then they tore out of the gate and off into the Wastes.

The site of the shift in the sands was not too far out from Spargus, or even that far from the volcano. It left Seem a little uneasy—this close to the underground lava flows could easily mean the volcano might be preparing to erupt. While precurian metal had so far proven to withstand the intense heat of volcanic lava—not without harming those who touched it, unfortunately—Spargus was in no way prepared to survive an eruption. Neither were the Monks.

Damas slid his dune buggy to a stop near the edge of the gaping chasm. Seem carefully lifted her own goggles to peer off into the distance; she tried to judge the gap, noted how even now sand still slid down like little granules of rain. Eight kilometers? Sixteen? Seem couldn’t be sure. They’d need to measure the gap, and the length of the chasm to properly gauge what they are looking at.

“Mar,” Damas breathed out, eyes wide. He quickly turned to several Wastelanders. “Perimeter check! Keep an eye out for Marauder bands! Get me distance on this thing!” He turned toward another set of Wastelanders. “You! Grab a guardian, pair up, and begin to repel down! Keep your jeeps and buggy’s away from the edge. The sands unstable.” Damas turned back toward Seem. “This is worse than I anticipated.”

Seem nodded grimly as Damas kicked his car into gear and reversed away from the ledge. “How many beacons have gone off exactly?”

“About twenty from the last count,” Damas ground out. “Fifteen were excavating artifacts, the other five checking on the Marauder’s most recent conquests.”

“And how many more are out here?” Seem questioned.

Damas grimaced. “I have no Mar-damned idea, Seem,” he said gravely. “The ledger was destroyed in the quake.”

Seem hissed, “Creators,” under her breath as the vehicle came to a stop. “This could go on for several kilometers into the Wastes,” Seem said cautiously. “Probably even into Marauder territory.”

“We’ll be careful then, won’t we?” Damas glanced her way as he killed the engine. Seem nodded sharply; she left him to prepare the repelling equipment to get them down into the chasm and headed over toward the guardian’s and barrels of eco. Guardian-healers began to pair off while the barrels were offloaded—Seem watched for a moment as one was cracked open and glittering green globules were carefully siphoned away into special containment units that the guardians wore. She glanced over toward the pilot.

“Go back to the temple once everything is offloaded,” Seem ordered. “Get more healers. And a few warriors. This is going to take a while.”

The pilot nodded, and Seem moved over toward the cracked open barrel of eco. Carefully she siphoned away the green into her own containment units, and once full she turned around and headed back toward Damas. Out of either of them he’d be the better at channeling green eco, given his lineage, but Seem could, if she focused hard enough, move the eco she’d siphoned off as well.

“Are we ready?” Seem questioned when she returned to Damas’ side. Damas’ gaze swept across the group of Wastelanders. He grimaced.

“We’ll need more Wastelanders,” he noted.

“I’ve already sent for more guardians,” Seem said. “Let the rest of my guardians sit in for Wastelanders. You need to make sure Spargus is defended.” Damas hummed. “My guardians will search another section of the perimeter. We can focus here. If we portion places off and place our people strategically—”

“Yes, yes,” Damas chuckled. “Who has the most experience leading in cases like this, Seem?”

Seem flushed. “I apologize, Lord Damas.” Damas waved a hand.

“My men know what to do,” Damas said eventually. “Are you ready?”

Seem nodded, and when Damas held out a hand she grasped it tight and then, combined with his strength and the momentum of the sudden pull against her body weight, swung herself up and onto Damas’ back.

“You’ll be leading the way?” Seem questioned.

“Not the rescue mission, obviously,” Damas replied. Several Wastelanders and guardian Monk pairs were already off into the chasm below. “But between the two of us I think I have the better chance of dealing with any metal head threats, don’t you agree?”

“You do have more experience fighting the Hora-Quan,” Seem agreed. “But do not rule me out. I am the leader of the Order of Precursor Monks, after all.”

Damas laughed, headed toward the edge, and began to repel down. Seem made sure to keep her legs wrapped tightly against Damas’ sides as she twisted to peer down into the depths of the cavernous creation in the sands. After a second she reached into the pack against Damas’ back and, while Damas carefully dropped them further and further down, lit the flare for light as they moved further and further from the noonday sun.

The wall they repelled down was volcanic rock, like much of the earth far beneath the sand. It was porous material that granules buried itself into, crafted from volcanic eruptions hundreds of years ago. Interspaced here and there, surrounded by the rock, were the occasional hardened lava flows—and precursor metal. Seem noted all of this with a critical eye and tried to extrapolate just what they began to repel down into.

Damas pulled them to a stop upon a ledge and Seem hopped off his back. She knelt to peer further into the gaping maw of the newly revealed probable ruins, but they still traveled even further beneath the sands. After a second Seem tilted her head up toward the daylight. They repelled down seventy meters, and the bottom still appeared far away. Whatever this was it had to be old enough that the earth and the volcano had swallowed it whole. It was buried far deeper than the precursor ruins that the Monks occupied beneath Spargus.

The ledge Damas landed them on followed the edge of the cavern walls easily enough, jagged and twisted—but a good point to start their search for beacons. Damas reached out a hand to pull Seem to her feet and absentmindedly Seem clutched the fingers she saw in her peripheral as she dropped the flare next to the wall that they just repelled down.

“Whatever this is,” Seem rasped, “it is old.”

Damas hummed in agreement and fished out a small, square receiver that he handed over to Seem. Seem glanced it over—it seemed to function almost like a radio or sonar. She could see a small dot in the distance.

“For the beacons?” Seem questioned as she tilted her head toward Damas. He’d never once shared this with her, or with the other Monks that she knew of.

“Yes,” Damas replied. “You direct me. I’ll test the ground as we move. I do not trust this porous rock.”

“And if we come upon a beacon’s location and there is nothing?” Seem questioned.

“We go down,” Damas told her, and she nodded once, brows furrowed in thought and lips pursed beneath her scarf.

Seem eyed the ledge, and then eyed the way down again. “How many flares do you have?” she asked.

“About twenty before we’ll need to regroup and gather more,” Damas said.

“How many meters apart do you wish to drop a flare?” Seem asked. Damas started along the edge and she followed behind.

“Roughly fifty meters or so,” Damas said.

Seem nodded thoughtfully. They could travel about a kilometer’s distance before they’d have to regroup; decent of a distance that, if they moved cautiously, they could cover in a short amount of time—but that meant they’d be at this for longer, and the Wastelanders didn’t have that much time available.

“Drop a flare every hundred fifty meters,” Seem offered. “We can go three kilometers a distance that way before we need to turn back.”

Damas glanced back to eye her. “Further the distance; yes, I like that thought.” He grabbed his radio from his hip and quickly relayed the change to his men. “We’ll need more provisions with that plan,” he murmured. “Water will run out fairly quick.”

Seem shrugged her shoulders. They could do that easily enough—the Monks could ferry water out to them, just as they could ferry the injured in to Spargus. Hopefully the Marauder clans would be feeling generous as Seem thought this new addition to the Wastes ran right into a few of their camps. She’d have to make sure to send a few of her guardian-warriors off to assess the damage and mitigate any skirmishes for the time being.

The sun settled beneath the sands as Seem sipped at her stew among her guardians. Her gaze remained steady upon the tent that housed her guardian-healers and the injured they’d recovered from the crevasse. So far, thankfully, they’d found only one loss of life after a dozen or so rescued—although given the cold of the night and the dangers of travel now they might just lose a few more before the sun rose with the dawn.

“Do you think this has something to do with the Hora-Quan, Master Seem?” one of the younger guardians asked. Seem glanced over at them, watched as they stared at their own bowl of stew.

“The ruins are precurian,” Seem said. “Perhaps we could find a weapon against the Precursors ancient enemy.”

“But the earthquake?” asked another. “The volcano isn’t active, is it? Could the Hora-Quan have manipulated the earth?”

“Could dark eco?” murmured another.

Seem breathed slowly and set her stew down. “Listen to me, my guardians,” Seem said and immediately all her guardians looked toward her. “The world is constantly changing, even in its unfinished state. The volcano is active as its always been. The Hora-Quan move as they always have. The Daystar comes as it always will.” She eyed each of them as they stared at her with rapt attention. “Right now we have injured, wounded, Wasterlanders to worry about and they take precedence, but do not forget the dangers of the world around us either.”

“There’s been rumors of a rather large and strange Hora-Quan out in the Wastes, though,” muttered another of Seems guardians.

“The Hora-Quan change with time as all things do,” Seem sighed heavily and worked to ease the fears of the guardians before her, even if she worried that something was amiss herself. “Rest assured nothing about this quake is anything except natural. There has been no eco cause that I can sense, and do you really believe Lord Damas of Mar would not sense such a change himself?”

The Monks around her quieted at the idea that Damas couldn’t sense it.

“Of course we don’t think that,” one of the older guardians uttered with a sigh. “Most of these children have never felt a real quake before, Master Seem. They are scared.”

“It is a frightening event,” Seem agreed, “but we must be strong.” Seem breathed deeply. “All of you, while you search for the beacons, record what you find. Once we have cleared the crevasse we will begin the hunt for any help against the Daystar.”

“Yes Master Seem,” murmured the Monks together.

Seem picked her stew back up and took a sip. She glanced over toward Damas and raised her brows when she saw that he looked back at her with a small smile on his lips. Seem ducked her head and flushed in surprise. An uncomfortable feeling rose up in her chest, a tightness that reminded her of days before she came to live in the Wastes, live as the head of the Monks. While Seem might not ever wish to change her circumstances, she could wish that perhaps things didn’t work out the exact way they had.

Seem sipped her stew, closed her eyes, and thought of home.

#fic: patriciate #fic: semblance #jak and daxter #accidentally king of haven #fanfic #wip #crossposted #canon divergence

[my-personal-domain]

A few years after arriving in Sandover, 7 year old Jak saw something of interest on Sentinal Beach. Kaj, Daxter and Keira right behind him, Jak plucked up the odd object.

The next thing the kids knew, they were clambering up a metal structure to avoid getting bitten by these odd critters.

Basically the four kids get stuck in Hertown, clinging on a power structure, avoiding a pack of Coyotes. Jen saves them and takes them in. She wonders who Kaj really is before just guessing he is a difference in a timeline. Can't expect them to stay the same. Kaj is younger than Jak by a few months.

A quick DNA test reveals that Jak and Kaj are half siblings. And Kaj is Jen's son. Jen goes, 'Okay, whatever. I was going to adopt them all anyway.'

Two years later, they find the Artifact that can bring them back to Sandover. Jen uses the Artifact to travel back and forth, taking care of business on Earth and keeping the kids safe every single day.

A few weeks later, Jen received a report from AI Tony of a surge of energy similar to her Artifact, but larger. It was rather close to Hertown. Rushing out there, she placed herself in between the unkown and her biggest project. Lo and behold, more long ears coming out of a large ring hidden in a large crevice.

They are Spargans and monks. After a tense standoff, Jen managed to learn that their world is fated to potentially die. After finding the ring, the Spargans were trying to find alternatives for their people to survive.

The seal of mar is the key that triggers the rift ring transportation. Jen has a seal of Mar and it ends up being real, not fake. A deal is worked out. Hertown has levels of tunnels beneath, having more than enough room for all Spargans and monks. She will begin to have things be set up in order to house them all if the fate comes true.

Things get tricky when the children come over to visit when the King is already there. Jen has already explained the video games, but meeting your kids before they were born was something else. However, after a quick test with the Seal of Mar, Damas was all for it.

Jen does end up flirting with the King and they end up going for it. When Jen is 6 months along, Damas comes in holding an infant Mar. Mar was from when Damas got very drunk over in Spargus and the mother didn't want to raise a baby. Jen immediately pitches in. Soon, she names her newly born son Ram.

When the little ones are 2 years old, the Precursor Legacy begins. The monks' history notes reveal that Jen was alongside the children for the whole journey.

Daxter ended up not get fuzzified. He works extra hard to be on the same level as Jak. Upon the Dark Sages' defeat, Mar and Ram get kidnapped.

Upon using the rift ring and landing, Jak and Daxter move immediately and find Spargans on the lookout for them. Unfortunately, Kaj goes missing.

2 years later, while in Haven helping Sig, J&D find Kaj being held in prison and break him out. Turns out Veger had him the whole time, committing light eco experimentations.

Jak 2 starts. Kaj has some issues with his light eco. Jak does his best to help his little brother. Mar and Ram get shipped back to Spargus. What was that Underground? You need the heirs? Figure something else out!

The Precursor egg gets retrieved and put on Earth, Kor is dead. Time to get ready for the final test.

Vegar bombs the Palace. The kids do not get banished, rather they leave immediately after the Palace falls to help move supplies over to Earth where everything is set for a new settlement.

Jak 3 goes on. When the planetary defense system is up and going, Vegar comes in and starts shooting, shutting the machinery down. Jen requested for the allies from Haven to be transported over just as the ship in space fired down. There are now only a handful of survivors from Haven.

Terraformers start coming down and evacuations begin. The handful of Havens, Spargans and Monks must now begin a new life on Earth.

Jen saved ottselfied Vegar's life. There has been enough death. He will live in isolation with maybe a hamster or a ferret for company.

Jen's AI Tony will 'dig up' records of people being born in secrecy all around the world and just having some differences due to illegal experimentations. Different hair or eye colors, and they all have long ears for some reason. Jen's first and immediate thought is to just blame it on Lord.

Lord was responsible for a LOT of things. The corrupted rich simply complied with his planning. Where Hertown was going to be the 'headquarters', it made sense that there would be some extra info over there not to be found anywhere else. Jen finds or do something questionable, blame Lord for it. She has abused that tactic on occasion.

Due to a lot of preparations and arguments, Hertown becomes its own little country, allied with the USA. Everyone now needs to be taught the ways of Earth and get vaccinations.

Thanks to the help of the three ottsels, Hertown holds giant eco crystals all around. With proper care, it can grow, just very slowly. Everyone gets a chunk of crystal to insure they still have eco for their health.

Jen takes on the position of a ruler next to Damas. She will take care of the Earth part and Damas will continue to watch over his people. It will be a long and difficult time, but they will prevail.

#oc #jak and daxter #jen #earthbound au

[moomingitz]

It’s... interesting looking back at the Jak and Daxter series, because when the second and third games first came out during my edgy teen years my mindset for them was mostly, “OMG Jak is now a buff and rugged edgy boi, he’s saying curse words, and has a literal edgy dark side to him. And Daxter is a big playboi who doesn’t hide his love for bewbs. Jak and Daxter is no longer for babies but for mature big kids like me!”

But looking at the series now; Holy shit, Jak has had it rough. Where do I even begin? This is going to be long, so get comfortable:

First, Jak was ripped away from his father at a very young age due to an insurrection. Then he was kidnapped by one of the people who was responsible for it, with the intention of being used to awaken some ancient Precursor technology, but luckily he somehow escaped and then was taken in by a rebellion group.

Then he was sent back into the past to be raised by Samos, the Sage of Green Eco. While that was a good thing for Jak, since he was able to grow up in a loving and supportive environment, what happened to him before that is something that would still be traumatic to a little kid especially in the form of something like Separation Anxiety. While this goes into headcanon territory, I can’t help but wonder if that had a lot to do with why Jak was the mostly silent type before the events of the second game. But thankfully he was lucky to grow up with two best friends like Daxter and Keira.

Surely you think that would be the end of misfortune Jak would have to go through. Wrong!

Fast forward to where he’s now 15 years old and everything seems all good and exciting after he and Daxter saved the world from Dee Snider and his twisted sister. Sure they didn’t accomplish what they set out for by turning Daxter back into his old humanoid self, by Daxter is content staying as a furry anyway. At least they saved the world and found some ancient Precursor technology. But hold up! Turns out it was some kind of rift gate and the moment they activated it some giant bug monster pops out and they’re all separated and thrown into some new place they’ve never seen.

Literal seconds later, before Jak or Daxter have any time to react or process what exactly just happened and where they ended up, Jak is immediately arrested and knocked unconscious, despite doing nothing wrong. He’s then tortured and experimented on for the next two years, in hopes of turning him into a living weapon by pumping Dark Eco into him. Keep in mind Jak was only 15-16 years old during those nightmarish two years of his life. But his BFF Daxter never gave up looking for him and eventually rescued Jak.

Upon busting out Jak has no damn idea where exactly he is, and when he does it turns out him and Daxter are now in a totalitarian, police state of a hellhole where never ending propaganda is blared everywhere you go, and where Jak’s only crime is just existing. Oh, and there’s currently an ongoing war between this police state regime ruling the city and some species called Metal Heads, so the territory outside the city is near inhospitable. So just simply leaving Haven City isn’t really an option. It’s either deal with the Krimson Gaurd who will get on you for just sneezing in the wrong direction, or claw your way for survival outside the city walls.

Until finding Samos and Kiera much later, Daxter is the only familiar and welcoming face Jak still had until then(the only exception being Sig in the “welcoming face” department).

Oh, and it turns out those Dark Eco experiments gave JAk some dark Hulk like form that he has trouble controlling(at least that’s what the game tells us). Oh, and they eventually learn that this shithole place they found themselves in is actually their home 500 years into the future. Oh, and it turns that this little kid they’ve been having to protect from both the Krimson Guard and the Metal Head army is actually Jak’s younger self.

Despite all that, the rebellion group and many of the criminals they had to work with eventually warm up and even become their friends, the authoritarian regime eventually crumbles, and they kill the Metal Head leader. Even though Jak doesn’t go back to his childhood home in the past, Keira, Samos, and Daxter choose to stay with him in the future, so he’s definitely not alone in the end. Happy ending earned, and that should be the end of all the bad stuff to happen in Jak’s life, right?...

Of course that wouldn’t be the end of bad traumatic shit to happen to Jak!

Right after the events of the second game, Jak is not only blamed for the fallout of the Praxis regime falling and the Metal Head army’s demise, but he’s outright banished to the Wasteland, no thanks to some weasely council member, Veger.

But ya boi Daxter snuck out to join Jak in his exile, so at least Jak still has his best friend with him. Jak now has to survive in a Mad Max esque land after proving himself worthy to Damas, the leader of some refuge village. But it’s kind of good because he slowly gets on this guy’s good graces.

Oh, but later on it turns out this Damas guy is actually the very father Jak was forcibly separated from during his very early childhood. But, Jak only figured that out just as Damas was dying, and he didn’t have a chance to tell Damas that he was his son that’s he’s been wanting to find for years.

It also turns out this Veger douchebag was one of the people aside from Baron Praxis who was responsible for Jak being separated from Dadmas, and was the guy who kidnapped him in an attempt use him to obtain that ancient Precursor technology.

Of course everything works out in the end. But yeah... You see what I mean? Jak was put through the wringer during the events of this whole trilogy! He's done nothing wrong! Yet starting from a very young age he’s either been targeted or dragged into other’s messes for just existing, or for something he had no choice to do in order to survive. The only real thing he did wrong was dragging Daxter over to Misty Island, which led to him being accidentally transformed into an ottsel in the first place. But the events of the first games was all a lighthearted adventure anyway. Aside from that it’s been one unfortunate or traumatic event after another for Jak.

When letting everything Jak went through really sink in, there’s guaranteed trauma and the resulting PTSD this poor guy is going to have to address or else it will inevitably manifest itself in some way later on. Acting gruff and blase' will only work for so long. I know some people get tired with pieces of fiction being compared to Steven Universe, but Steven’s eventual mental breakdown seriously came to mind. And some people will say, “It’s just a vidya game, stop thinking too much into it.”, but there was a conscious decision to take this series into a more dark and mature direction after the first game. So, it’s a bit hard not to think about more possible unpleasant implications based on what happened in the sequels, especially when looking at the events of the games through the lenses of today.

Taking all of this into consideration is also why I think Daxter is seriously the “MVP” of the series.

Daxter grew up being Jak’s best friend, which I’m sure helped Jak a lot after being separated from his father and taken to a literal place in time completely different and unfamiliar to him. I’m very sure his time growing up in Sandover Village and hanging out with Daxter was the best period of Jak’s life. Even after Jak dragged him to Misty Island, accidentally causing him to be transformed into an ottsel, and sacrificing his chance to be turned back to normal in order to save the world, Daxter showed no hard feelings towards Jak and he even learns to like being an ottsel.

He spent two years trying to find out where Jak was being held prisoner in Haven City, and infiltrated the place once he did and helped Jak escape.

And despite not having any fingers pointed towards him for the fallout after the events of the second game, Daxter still chooses to join Jak in exile in the Wasteland.

Daxter has never shown any ill will towards Jak despite him being the one responsible for being turned into an ottsel, and he’s never really abandoned him even when he is given many chances to or a way to get himself out of really bad situations. Despite everything, Daxter is still the same quippy, upbeat dork of a friend Jak has grown up with.

I really believe Daxter helped a lot with keeping Jak’s sanity intact during all of the hell he was put through and beyond. If there was a guaranteed way for someone to sign their own death warrant with Jak, I think harming or outright killing Daxter would be it.

#Jak and Daxter #Jak II #Jak 3 #Daxter #Damas

[talesofsonicasura]

Random Scenarios

May include pairings from this, self inserts or random, parental/sibling relationships between characters(not the sexual kind, bloody sickos), fluff, angst or shenanigans. Anyone can write these in any type of form or with any character.

Tony altering doorways, furniture, and etc to suit Corazon's ridiculous height. (The dude is 9' 7 1/2 in height.)

Eddie, and Venom being introduced to their s/o's Rapidash, Venom's amazed about touching fire that doesn't hurt.

Katakuri comforting a kid!Giorno after a horrible nightmare related to his parents.

Daxter ends up getting third wheel when Jak and Jolyne start talking about their awful prison experiences.

Kid!Josuke follows Macaque around asking to be taught how to fight.

Balan is concerned about Ichigo's questionable relationship between his friends, family and Soul Society's nature.

Luffy and MK go on a pranking spree much to everyone's distaste/misfortune

Kid! Ben realizes how much Haven City and some of Jak's associates suck. Plans to overthrow everyone else's plans for Jak and Daxter's sake.

Venom and Eddie end up crashing (literally) the Phantom Thieves road trip. Somehow ends up adopting a gaggle of super powered teens and hits on the cop following said group. Local cop questions his preferences in partners.

Sanji and Pigsy team up for a cooking contest. Zoro becomes a reluctant judge for said contest.

Terrorist group realizes their folly for kidnapping Tony Stark, Macaque wants his smartass 'Merchant of Death' back.

Sojiro somehow ends up adopting a gaggle of kids/teenagers with superpowers or aren't human. Ren ends up with Spyro, Sora, Yuuji, Giorno, Jak, Daxter, and Danny as siblings.

Balan teaches Ulquiorra about kindness. Goes better than expected.

Yusei wonders how he end up having a 10 ft eldritch entity of negativity attached to him. Lance is a possessive tsundere that refuses to leave local duelist alone.

Kid!Sanji befriends a Elecmon as a kid. Said Elecmon returns years later as a BanchoLeomon which proceeds to curbstomp Judge and the rest of Sanji's shitty family members.

Bayonetta encounters Kid! Rin. Son of Satan gets badass witch mother and tons of unconditional love.

Post-JTTW! Sun Wukong indulges in an urge to kidnap a lost stranger from nearby modern city. Said stranger being a Digimon Tamer who thinks kidnapper is a Digimon and not a godly entity.

Skylander Wallop adopts a Kid!MK. Everyone wonders why local delivery boy carries a crystal hammer on his back at all times.

Teen!Mei finds herself a sibling in the form of a confused Kid! Yuya.

Ichigo accidentally becomes a Portal Master instead of a Soul Reaper. His room ends up being filled with talking figurines that can come to life.

Phantom Thieves and their Personas explore Wonderworld. Balan happily watches as Costume, Tim, Persona and Human have fun positive interactions with each other.

Crazy Diamond restores Macaque's blind eye and vision. Shadow monkey cries while hugging his human son and Stand responsible.

Enjoy.

#one piece #balan wonderworld #lego monkie kid #jojo's bizarre adventure #yugioh #jujutsu kaisen #marvel #iron man #persona 5 #venom #venom movies #skylanders #bleach #yu gi oh arc v #yugioh 5ds #blue exorcist #bayonetta #tales of sonicasura #sonicasura #digimon #danny phantom #jttw #ben 10 original series #ben 10 #fuck square enix #kingdom hearts #persona series #pokemon #spyro #jak and daxter

[sonicringnoise]

Have a Jak 3 rant

Okay, I need to talk about Jak 3 and just...how absolutely janky the plot is. 

This rant is extremely long, so I put it under the cut.

First of all, I just want to point out, I love this game. I love it so much, and it’s my favorite out of the trilogy. But it just...it could have been so much better, guh.

And I know that development of this game was rushed (hell, it only came out a year after Jak 2), but I’m still going to rant about it!

It starts out just fine, with the Wasteland and Spargus and the arena, but it gets so weird as it goes on. Just...really disjointed.

We never really find out why Jak keeps going after eco crystals. Seriously, he gets a dark eco crystal from the Dark Maker at the beginning of the game, a light eco crystal from Seem, and just...starts collecting them, for some reason? Like, was he going to make a necklace? Start a rock collection? It’s never explained.

But whatever, it turns out those are needed later in the game to save the world. Fine.

After some Spargus-y missions, we then go...to the Monk Temple. You know, the temple. That’s never been mentioned before, and we didn’t even know existed, but we just went up there to explore and stuff and...

Like, how hard would it have been to have a line where Seem says, “We monks live far to the north, in a temple in the mountains.”

Then we’d at least have a reason to go there. But no, instead we just show up there and start poking around. 

This is one of my biggest issues with the game. In Jak 2, there are cutscenes that set up these missions, or even communications in gameplay that tell us where to go. In Jak 3, there’s just...a lot of that missing.

But, fine. Whatever, Jak has, like, ESPN or something.

At the volcano, Jak gets a dark power of invisibility, I guess. But only when he touches certain statues, and it’s only ever really used to get past a few traps and then never again.

Oddly enough, this was something that...made sense? I mean, invisibility is actually a power that dark eco has. Remember in Jak 2, there were metal heads who could turn invisible. 

But it’s never used! And that complaint holds true for almost every power Jak gets. You basically use the powers when a prompt comes on screen to get through a one-time obstacle, and then never again. 

Then we find out Veger is talking to the monks, but no one ever really expands on why? Or how? Like, for a city hidden in the Wasteland and forgotten, a lot of fucking people know it exists! 

Speaking of which...

We meet Ashelin in the desert and she begs us to come back to Haven City. Jak asks her how she knows Damas and she answers, “It doesn’t matter now.”

Excuse me??

It totally does matter! If Ashelin knows Damas, it begs the question: does she know that Jak is his son? Does she know the Kid is his son? Does she even know about the Kid? 

I mean, Ashelin would almost have to know that Jak is Damas’ son: during this scene, she gives him his seal back and says, “Don’t you remember who you are?”

Whatever. Add that to the list of things that are never mentioned again.

Jak says he’s not coming back to the city, because he’s an angry teenager and he likes hanging around with his Sand Dad. 

This is immediately followed by Jak returning to Haven City.

We head to the Monk Temple, again for no reason. This time, we open up some doors and Pecker leads us back to the city. 

There is no explanation as to why Jak has a change of heart. I actually think that the scene where Damas and Jak had a heart-to-heart and he mentions his lost son should be here: it leads perfectly into Jak deciding that the Greater Good is more important than his feelings.

Instead, we get nothing. Nada. Zilch. Just Jak heading back to Haven City because it’s The Thing To Do.

We reach Haven City after a boss battle and meet with Samos and Keira. Samos sucks, but that’s in character. Keira has no lines in this scene, and only makes goofy faces. Seriously, look: 

That’s it, that’s the character. 

Like, what’s happening in this scene? What’s going on with you, Keira? Are you okay? Are you making bedroom eyes at Jak? Are you confused? Did you smoke some of your father’s funny herbs again?

(Again, I know Keira’s role got cut down a lot because they changed voice actors, but it’s...so...jarring for a normally prominent character to suddenly get shoved into the background.)

We do some missions for Torn and eventually find out that Erol is the bad guy. Never explained how Erol survived slamming his Zoomer into dark eco and exploding in front of a huge crowd, but at this point, it’s whatever. 

We continue on our journey: Tess is a furry, Samos is useless, Torn is...Torn. 

We get a scene with Sig where Jak and Daxter ask him about Damas and his job as a spy and all that stuff. Fine, well and good, except the following exchange happens:

Jak: You’re playing with people’s lives!

Sig: Why not? They played with mine.

I’m sorry??

There’s a story there, and I’d like to know! What the hell happened to Sig? Why is nothing ever explained??!!

We get some Dadmas feelings, then we head over to have a chat with Kleiver. And this happens:

Jak: Kleiver, I need to find some very special Precursor artifacts, but I’m running out of time.

...Are you?? Has that been established?

So, in one of the previous missions, Samos mentions over the communicator (during gameplay, not in a cutscene) that to activate some ruins in Haven Forest, you’ll need some artifacts. But all he says is this:

Samos: Mar wrote that there was some ancient ruins to the west that were activated by five special artifacts and revealed wondrous truths. I'll see what I can find out.

That’s it! There’s never a cutscene where Samos says you need to find the Holo Cube, the Quantum Reflector, the Beam Generator, the Prism, and...by the way, there is no 5th artifact. Samos, you’re full of shit.

(Unless the Eco Sphere you get from Seem towards the end counts, but it’s very unclear.)

And, by the way, I had to Google those artifact names. The artifacts are never actually named until you acquired them in-game. Jak just finds random artifacts and is like, “Welp, this’ll do it! How convenient!”

Sigh.

Once we get all these artifacts no one told us about, we’re told to go take a cab down to the center of the earth. We don’t do that, and instead blow some shit up to visit our friends in person again. 

(Quarantine mood, really.)

And, again, I can’t get over how much of a non-character Keira is. Seriously, she just stands there and claps like a 3-year-old.

And we also come to my own personal pet peeve: the scene where Ashelin strips Veger of his title.

I can’t with this shit.

The biggest issue I have with this game, from a story standpoint, is how quickly the inciting incident is resolved. Like, Jak being banished is the whole reason we have a Jak 3. The city turned against him; his anti-hero choices in Jak 2 led to him being blamed for the war in Jak 3. It made sense.

But Ashelin decides, 75% through the game, to just be like, “Naw, Veger, fuck you. Get out of my face, buh bye.”

It just pisses me off, because if Ashelin had that power, why didn’t she use it before Jak was banished??

And why is Jak okay with this? Why is Moody McAngerface not even a little annoyed that she didn’t care enough to do this when he was dying of heatstroke in the desert?

Uuuuuuggggghhhhh guys I don’t understand.

So we see Vin again, blow some more stuff up, fight Erol, and get some tentacle wings. Seem acts all nice to us and gives us a present we didn’t know we needed. More Dadmas ensues, we see the Dark Maker ship for some reason, blow even more stuff up.

Finally, it’s time to head to the catacombs. We get into some trouble with Dark Makers (even though there’s only, like, three of them), and Damas busts through the goddamn wall in a car.

No idea how he got here, considering the Wasteland appears to be an island, but whatever, it’s a badass scene.

Then, because Jak can’t have anything nice, they get hit and crash the car all over Damas’ legs.

Seriously, dude, I get that you might be dying from blood loss, but why are you coughing, your lungs are fine.

So Damas dies, Jak is his long-lost son, it’s very sad, and Veger you piece of shit.

I will forever be salty that Veger, who was an overall excellent villain, was sidelined for Erol of all people. Admittedly, Jak 2 did the same thing with Praxis, but Kor was a much better Big Bad than Erol.

Regardless, we then get the Worst Plot Twist Ever, when we find out the Precursors are ottsels.

k.

Moving on from that tragedy, we then get to fight Erol. The fight sucks, it’s boring and I hate driving the stupid Wasteland buggies.

And then the end comes, and my blood pressure skyrockets. Somewhere, my PCP senses a disturbance.

The Precursors being ottsels is stupid, but Jak telling them to call him “Mar” is even stupider. First of all, Jak does not seem like the kind of person to get sentimental over his birth name. It’s weird, and I don’t like it.

Second of all, the ottsel leader calls him Mar once, directly after that. And then never again. 

Seriously, 90 seconds after Jak says he wants to be known as Mar, this happens:

I’m sorry, what’s that?

Why would you add that line in about Jak wanting to be called by his birth name, and then ignore it a minute and half later??!!

It just infuriates me. There’s a lot of stuff in Jak 3 that does this: it’s touched on once, then it’s gone forever.

And let’s talk about Daxter’s wish. I actually find this particular decision - where Daxter chooses to wish for pants instead of being human again - totally believable. 

Despite how much Daxter is regarded as the comic relief idiot of the duo, he’s actually shown to be pretty sharp. He’s definitely observant. And at this point, remember that he’s already seen the Precursors at work: he saw them turn Veger into an ottsel.

So Daxter probably realized that these guys were on some monkey paw, be-careful-what-you-wish-for bullshit and decided to wish for the most innocuous thing he could. Who knows what would happen if he actually asked to become human again? Might come out lookin’ like Samos.

And he’s right, by the way! Look at what those assholes did to my baby Tess. They could’ve just got her a size 6 pair of Levi’s and been like, “Here, boom, pants.” 

But nooo, they turned her into an ottsel, too, because why not why the fuck not nothing matters ahhhhHHHHHHHHH

...

...

Anyway, like I said, Jak 3 is my favorite in the series. It had such potential. It’s like a puzzle that’s missing pieces. I like it more for what it could have been, rather than the absolute mess it actually is.

#jak and daxter #rant #jak 3 #i shouldn't be allowed to talk about video games #but it's just such bullshit

[radioactivepeasant]

Snippet Friday Week Two: Blackmail au

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The cheers were deafening. Overwhelming. Too much noise and too many people and-

Jak clamped his hands over his ears and shrank behind Sig.

Ahead of them, Damas carefully navigated a throng of warriors, all of whom seemed to want to slap his back or tousle Mar's hair. Jak didn't like them touching his brother. He wasn't their kid. He wasn't theirs!

"Easy, kiddo," Sig murmured, and wrapped one thick arm around his shoulders. "There's not too many kids in Spargus. Losing Mar hit everybody hard."

There hadn't been too many kids in Sandover, either. But Jak could say with reasonable certainty that no one would've kicked up this much of a fuss if he or Daxter had gone missing.

Well, maybe they would have if it had been Keira. She had a parent to miss her, after all.

Jak swallowed down a prickle of envy. It tasted like anger, and stale bitterness. In Haven, it was easy to look at people there and think of his childhood as ideal in comparison. But Spargus made it clear that Sandover had provided the bare minimum of what a child needed to survive. Necessities, but no true emotional investment. No genuine love.

Mar seemed to be getting as overstimulated as Jak. He grew quiet and subdued, huddled against his father's chest. There was just too much happening.

Damas smiled softly at him and hefted him a little higher in his arms. "I know. You're doing so good, baby. We're almost home."

"Want Dax an' Jakky," Mar signed, beginning to look zoned out.

Damas turned to face Sig and the older boys.

"Jak," he called gently, "Could you come take your brother for a moment? He's asking for you."

It was as much strategic as it was simply responding to Mar's needs.

Jak needed something to ground him, and by the looks of it Daxter was too overwhelmed to help.

Mar needed his older brother to feel a sense of normalcy.

And Damas wanted- needed- to make it known that this older boy was his.

Jak stepped up beside him and held out his arms for Mar. Honestly, Damas had no idea how he could carry his little brother and an ottsel the same approximate weight without a hint of difficulty. Had he always been so strong? Damas pushed away the questions for later and put an arm around Jak’s shoulders -- shielding him from the crowd and silently declaring to the onlookers that the boy was his at the same time.

A buck-toothed child sitting on her parent's shoulders called out in a voice just high-pitched enough to be heard over the crowd, “Who's that guy?” as she pointed at Jak.

Damas smiled in the girl's direction. “This is Jak, my firstborn!” he declared proudly. “We were separated when I was first exiled. My enemies could not find him and so they told me instead that he was dead. Yet here he is, the thorn in Praxis's side he cannot remove!”

The praise set Jak’s teeth on edge. It reminded him too much of hero talk. But at the same time it was an uncomfortably unfamiliar experience. Someone was talking about him to others as if he was proud not of Jak's accomplishments so much as his mere existence.

Jak pulled his eyes away from the crowd to focus on Mar. He could put aside the discomfort of crowds for his brother.

“Hang in there, kid,” he murmured.

Daxter patted Mar's head, almost falling off Jak’s shoulder to do so. “Just try to think of whatcha wanna show us first when we get to your room, okay?”

Mar brightened a little at the suggestion. “Show you my toys!” he decided. “You can play with me?”

Jak hefted him a little higher. “Uh…sure kid.”

As long as his idea of play wasn't “hold on to Jak’s back while he goes Dark and play Flut-Flut Ride" like they did in Haven sometimes. Jak really didn't feel like explaining that to Damas and Sig.

________________________________________

Mar had...a lot.

Just. A lot.

Jak counted six picture books sticking out of a bright red crate in a corner that had been furnished with a stack of pillows and a bucket of blocks. There was a drawer of clothes, long outgrown, with a scant two shirts that still fit. He had toys-!

So many toys!

Jak sat on the floor in something akin to shock as his brother ran back and forth from his cot to deposit things into his arms.

A soft Lurker made of cloth and feathers.

A little leather thing that looked like a bald Flut-Flut.

An old, worn-out teddy-bear with a crude "P" stitched onto its chest.

A rubber ball.

A wooden top with a string on it.

Jak frowned and held up the top, keeping it out of reach of Chopper's curious jaws. "I've never seen one of these with string on it before. What's it for?"

Damas looked up from sorting out the clothes that no longer fit Mar. "Oh. That's a trompo. Loop the end of the string around your finger, then throw the top. If it lands on its point, it spins."

"Huh."

Jak set the other toys to one side. This did not deter Mar, who proceeded to hand them all to Daxter.

"So you...just pull it and throw? Like a grenade?"

Jak took the toy and wrapped one end of the string twice around his middle finger. With a shrug, he flicked his wrist and let go of the trompo. It bounced, only barely glancing the tip to the floor, and rolled away. Jak's eyes narrowed. There had to be a trick to it. He picked it up and began winding the string around it again. Maybe he'd thrown too hard? Maybe it was more like casting a fishing line than a grenade.

The second time, the trompo landed on its point and spun around once or twice, but soon wobbled and fell. The third time, it spun for nearly four seconds before clattering to the floor. The fourth attempt was too fast and sent it rolling across the room again.

Sig sat down beside Damas to watch the boys. Daxter and Chopper had both been completely buried under Mar's four beloved stuffed animals -- none of which had been forgotten in the last two years.

Mar had grabbed his weighted Star Blankie from his cot and was menacing Daxter with it, intent on tucking him into "bed".

And Jak crouched barefoot in the center of the nursery, watching the spinning top with wide, fascinated eyes. It was as if he'd forgotten the rest of them existed, hyperfocused on unraveling the secrets of a little wooden trompo.

"Well, at least two shirts still fit. Pants will be an adventure, but-" Damas looked up and his words trailed away.

Beside him, Sig was watching Jak with such a sadness in his eye that it drove thoughts of clothing from Damas's mind entirely.

"...Sig?"

The breath Sig took was shaky. He swallowed hard.

"I've never seen him play," he whispered.

"I didn't think he even knew how after what they did to him. I-"

He stopped and covered his mouth with one hand. He didn't want Mar to see him looking so distraught. But he couldn't help wondering how many years it had been since Jak had played. Since he'd even been allowed to act his age. Had the "training" started early? Did he ever know what it was to be coddled? To be tucked into bed, or held close during thunderstorms?

Would he allow them to fill in the holes Haven had left behind?

Sig's throat ached when he looked at the innocent smile on the teenage mercenary's face. There was still a sweet little kid in there, there had to be. But they had to make him feel safe enough to come out.

"Daym, we have to get him some toys," he whispered. "I...I don't think he's ever had any."

The same realization Sig had made dawned slowly on Damas’s face. His brows knit together and the lines etched around his mouth deepened. Perhaps he needed to take his resolution to treat both boys equally a little more literally than he'd first planned.

"Oooo!"

Mar had finally noticed the trompo.

He stopped trying to bury Daxter and Chopper in toys and scampered over to lean on Jak’s back.

"Oowow, Za!"

That innocent look turned bashful as Jak twisted to look at his little half-brother. "Pretty cool, huh?" he asked.

"Do it again!" Mar signed enthusiastically, "Make it go all the way to the door!"

Jak shrugged. "Why not. We'll give it a go."

"Heads-up, in five minutes I think Mar needs to get ready for bed," Sig warned suddenly.

"I'm not tired!" Mar protested.

"Mar-mar you've been rubbing your eyes for fifteen minutes," Daxter tattled from under the stuffed animals.

Jak bounced his shoulder, causing the toddler to slide off. "And you turn into a Lurker when you're overtired. We'll do one more spin, and then I'll-"

He frowned. No, they weren't in Haven anymore. Things were different now. He didn't know the rules here.

"Uh. I guess they'll get you ready for bed?"

Damas actually looked embarrassed, and even a little sad. He blew a breath out through his teeth.

"Jak," he began, "It's been…It's been two years since Mar was home. As much as I want to fall back on the routine we kept…before…I- I don't think that's what Mar is used to."

Sig nudged Damas’s elbow in an attempt at comfort and nodded. "He's right, cherry. Do you…want to show us what you usually do?"

Jak exchanged a look with Daxter. Daxter shrugged and extricated himself from the pile of toys. He brushed himself off and eyed the room critically.

"Yeeeeahh….I don't think he's gonna sleep. Not without the lights on. Those barbarians in the Underground never turn the lights out. And lemme warn you now: this kid? He's a climber. That dresser better be anchored to the wall, or he will try to monkey his way up it in the middle of the night."

“Ah. So he still does that.” Damas chuckled ruefully. “I can't say I'm surprised.”

He raised his brows at Mar.

“And for the record, little one, Daddy, Ba, and Jak and Daxter are all on the same page here. You're not staying up to break of dawn just to play with your toys. They'll still be here tomorrow, I promise.”

"Well, then can Dax and Jakky sleep over?"

Mar ran to climb up into Damas’s lap, beaming winningly at him and Sig. "So they can play with me tomorrow?"

"Of course, Marmo," Sig answered warmly. "They can stay as long as they want."

Mar's eyes lit up and he threw his arms up with a jubilant hiss. Then a puzzled look came over him.

"Does he have to ask his grown-ups? With the scribbly face and Mr. Green Man?"

Jak's face hardened. "I don't have to tell them anything," he scoffed.

Sig nodded with a hard set to his jaw. "They aren't his grown-ups, baby. Me and your daddy are, or close enough to it."

If anything, this only seemed to confuse the little boy more. He wrinkled his button nose at Sig, then looked to Damas. "But I thought Jakky lived in the stinky city!"

"Not if I can help it," Jak grumbled. He let out a gusty sigh and shifted his eyes away. "Look, um. Your dad is...we...we kinda...share the same dad. It's weird, I know."

He missed the gentle expression that passed over Damas’s face. It was the first time he'd acknowledged their connection at all, let alone out loud. That was a promising sign. Damas could only hope his firstborn would continue to be open to getting to know them.

Mar blinked slowly as he digested this information. The big boy had been calling him "little brother", now that he thought of it. But Mar had thought they'd just decided to be brothers, like how he decided to adop' his puppy! But if he and Jakky shared the same daddy-

"Are you Jakky's Ba too?"

Sig laughed awkwardly. "Uhhhhh no. At least, not originally. I wasn't related to his ma."

He glanced up at Jak.

"You can call me what you want," he joked, "long as you aren't knockin' my marksmanship."

Jak looked just as awkward. "I'll uh, I'll stick with Sig."

He fiddled with the string of the trompo and wound it up. When he was satisfied that he'd twisted the cord correctly, he shifted his weight and prepared to throw the top again.

"Okay squirt, last spin, then you pick which side of the bed the dog gets tonight."

Daxter stretched out his spine and leaned on the stuffed Flut-Flut.

"You want us to camp in here with ya, kiddo?"

Mar started to nod, then a thoughtful look came over him. He snuggled closer to Damas’s chest.

"Um," he mumbled, then looked a little guilty as he signed, "Yes, only I think maybe Daddy might get scared tonight. And I am a big kid now, so I should help him be not scared."

Jak actually cracked a grin, alleviating some of the guilt on the little boy's face. "Oh yeah? You're gonna be his bodyguard tonight?"

"Yeah!"

"Well who's going to stay with Chopper?" Jak teased.

A look of consternation wrinkled Mar's brow, then just as quickly melted into stubbornness.

"You! You sleep in my room with Chopper!"

The boys sent a skeptical glance at Mar's alcove bed. While it had been commissioned with growth in mind, it was still over a foot shorter than would be comfortable for a teenager. If he stayed in a fetal position the whole night, Jak supposed he could manage it. After all, on his first night in Spargus, Jak slept in the indoor oasis, curled up between potted palms and safely out of sight.

Apparently, that wasn't acceptable for a long term stay. Not that Jak intended on staying that long. Not while the Baron was still alive and still a threat to his brother.

He told himself he didn't need a bed. Why bother when he wasn't even meant to stay that long? He'd done his part, he'd brought Mar back to his -- er…their -- family. Any moment now they'd probably give him an air train pass back to Haven.

Keep your expectations low enough, and it's harder for people to disappoint you.

Sig noticed his quiet and cleared his throat meaningfully at Damas. And for his part, Damas interpreted the sound as quickly as Daxter could read Jak's faces. He stood and, after reluctantly handing Mar to Sig, excused himself.

Daxter folded his arms. "Where's he off to?"

Sig held Mar's hands and bounced him up and down. He smiled. "Oh, just moving some bedsheets around to make a curtain."

"Is he into interior decorating on the side?" Daxter demanded, "And does he do free consultations?"

"What."

Daxter shoved Jak's skeptical face. "Hey, if Krew's dead, the bar's mine. And the way that man decorated is a travesty!"

Sig laughed outright. "Well, the "incident" left poor Tess at the bar all by herself for a couple days, so I'm sure she's tweaking lots of things here and there."

He leaned back against the squishy blue bean-sand-chair thing. "Nah, this is just a privacy curtain for the sitting room. Til we can find just the right room for you two chili peppers."

With a wink, he added, "You won't have to fold in half just to sleep if we put you on the couch. If your old man remembers to get his clean laundry off of it."

"I'm working on it!" Damas shouted from the other room.

"You...don't have to do that," Jak mumbled.

This much attention without a task attached to it was...weird. It made him nervous.

Sig gave him a no-nonsense look. "You're teenagers," he said bluntly, "You need boundaries. As much as you and Mar love each other, he can't be up in your space every minute of the day. Having a room of your own lets you...regroup, y'know? Have some privacy when the world gets to be a little too much."

Jak started. It was as if the big man had been reading his thoughts. He did feel overwhelmed. He needed a safe place to withdraw to. But he didn't know this place. He didn't know where the safe places were! Jak folded his arms tightly over his chest and let the channeling ring dig into his skin, cold and hard and proof he was there, and real.

"What's the catch?" Daxter asked on his behalf.

It didn't seem like the question surprised Sig much. He wrapped Mar in a tight hug, then set him down on the floor. With a grunt, he pushed himself to his feet and feigned nonchalance.

"Well, you gotta keep your room clean enough to walk in. Easier said than done for some kids."

Jak relaxed slightly. So there was an exchange. Easier to accept things when he knew exactly what the terms were. Borrow a room for a while in exchange for keeping it clean. Made sense, they'd need it again later, probably. But it didn't seem like a fair exchange. Surely there had to be something else they wanted from him!

"What else do we have to do?" he asked.

There was no hostility in the question, only mild curiosity. But Sig winced all the same.

"Well, considering we ain't Krew, or whoever you worked for in the Underground, nothing. This isn't a job, cherry, it's a home! We're not employing you, we're trying-"

He scratched his head, stumped for how to phrase it. How to explain to the boys that they were entitled to being cared for.

"We- Damas and I- we just want to give you back the childhood they took. Dunno what that looks like yet, but...give us a chance? We just want you to be okay."

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#jak and mar are separate people au #fic prompts #writing prompts #jak and daxter #jak and daxter au #dadmas #king damas #dad sig #damas and sig are platonic life partners in this one #jak and daxter mar #long post #blackmail au #snippet friday #free day friday #jak has to learn how to be a kid again 🥲 #don't worry though. by the time they defeat Kor he will have amassed a staggering amount of legos #also he will have built hotwheels tracks around the walls of his room everywhere

[border-spam]

Leech Lord : Jak-Knife

JK belongs to / is written by / designed by @godkingsanointed​

“That Bandit’s a ghostwalker, my God-King. You don’t want ‘em here, trust me. Sometimes dead clans leave corpses behind that aren’t straight in the head enough to know that’s what they are... Crawl across the plains looking for somewhere else to belong, looking for a new family clan ‘cause all that’s left of theirs are Rakk picked bones. Seen plenty over the years, and they trail bad luck behind ‘em like a disease. That one’s marked like a Hellion, those got slag-burned into the ground by Atlas back in Old Haven. Your majesties weren’t here when that happened, but we were, and I remember. Leave them to me, the scout teams always need fresh meat for replacements.

They won’t stay alive long enough to be a concern.”

- Mouthpiece

Whether death follows JK or they sprint after it in pursuit is something they’ve never really been sure of. It could be either - some great predator snapping at their heels while they grew up in a Bandit clan that wasn’t kind to the small and gentle, or a force they are drawn to effortlessly like the migratory animals that follow Pandora’s monsoon seasons.

Could be either.

Could be both.

Same outcome they figure, so why would it matter.

They'd been a kid when it happened, well, a kid to anyone not a Bandit. In that life 16 years old is more than enough to run with a raid party, adult enough to work yourself to the bone, to show you can earn your keep when your brother is "useless" and you've got to be worth 2 bellies of food or watch as one of you goes hungry. Jak-Knife and Gutpunch, one a runt squinting up from under a stolen warrior's mask crafted for someone twice their size, the other a gentle giant born into a life that no aspect of their soul suited. They'd protected him, them with their little body and dull pocketknife versus the sometimes cruelty of a clan who's survival was based around only the fittest, only the strong staying part of it.

Not evil, just living as was needed. Pandora is harsh, there is no room for softness if you want to stay alive on her rocky flats, that's just the way things are. Nature isn't cruel, it simply is.

They were 16 when the Lance came.

16 years they'd lasted in the Hellions, till the day the gates of Old Haven had been opened for the Crimson Lance's money carriers. They'd done their job, they'd cleared the town at the request of the white Siren, been promised a home for the clan, a place to belong, and in the end, their payment came in bullets sprayed from Atlas gun barrels.

By the time JK had woken up and tried to heave Gutpunch's corpse off their back from where he'd shielded them, it had been two days. Groggy and confused, they'd panicked, desperately trying to scrabble out from under his bulk as the remaining Lance stopped piling bodies to burn and ran towards the sound of gunfire outside the gates.

Vault Hunters. Worse than the lance.

They couldn't take him with them, he couldn't move now, but they couldn't leave him like this, not a brother. Not when he was all they had who'd understood when they'd try and explain why their meat was wrong, how the flesh didn't sit right, when he was who would help them tighten rags around their chest and listen as they ground their overly developed canines and growled to the stars at night when it got too heavy to bear. They couldn't leave him behind after a life together, so they took his mask. Scrabbled at the bindings and peeled the effigy from what was left of his head. They realised as it separated from flesh that it had been all that was holding the remnants of skull together... but this was his face. The meat under it was Gutpunch, but the mask... they'd wear it now. He'd still be with them.

Jak-Knife had ran from the massacre of Old Haven on shaky legs, ducking as bullets whistled through the air around them as Crimson Lance and Vault Hunters traded fire in panicked waves. No hits, not directly, but a spray of Slag from a barrel ruptured by a narrow miss had sliced across their right, thick and acrid in the air as it burned through skin and into muscle. There had been no time to feel the pain, no time to stop, JK had run till their feet bled and the weight of Pandora's inky night blanketed them in exhaustion they couldn't fight any longer.

They'd started to stumble forward once they stirred in the morning. Like Mouthpiece said, a ghostwalker. No clan, no brother, no belonging. They walked and didn't stop for a long time.

Walked to New Haven, to the walls outside the town and a woman with her own terribly scarred face masking a heart softer than others would guess. Not a home there, not really, but allowed stay. A kid is a kid, even when wearing the blood-streaked mask of a Bandit. She couldn't turn them away.

They were 18 when Hyperion came.

Ran again amidst the screams to do so, ran into the wastes of Pandora and a world that made more sense to them than the town being torn apart behind them. Missed her though, Pierce. She'd been kind. A lot of those people had been kind, and now they were dead. Hyperion, Atlas, same thing. Just monsters lead by monsters.

They'd walked to the Slabs, to a jovial King who mocked their size with a tone that both bristled their muscle and left them feeling... welcome. Not a home there either, not really, but there had been jobs to run and food to earn. They'd been allowed stay, and so they did. Stil a Hellion though, still Slag-burned and covered in their clan's flame emblems and splashes of neon across their gear.... still wearing Gutpunch's blood coated mask.

The Slab king had heaved himself into their cramped sleeping quarters one night and whispered that there was a funeral for her soon, Pierce. They could go if they wanted, he'd whispered from under that massive helm. Told them with a gentleness they'd never heard before that he understood loss, having things you loved taken away from you for no reason bar cruelty. That he remembered Old Haven and wished he didn't. That they should go. They'd be welcome there.

So JK had walked again, out of Thousand Cut's Slab fortress and to a somber funeral in the icy fields of Three horns that was filled with Crimson Raiders - a mix of Vault Hunters and ex Lance, and stood in memorial amidst people that made the blood under their skin burn, all to show the respect she'd earned to a woman who'd treated them like a human.

A merc now they figured, easier than being a wanderer and Sanctuary needed mercs. Found themselves in the bar some nights, wary eyes glaring from mismatched lenses as they sat silently at corner tables while watching the rest of the loud patrons, back against a wall and a clear exit always planned.

She'd noticed. She liked big 'n mysterious. Liked how her flirtations rolled off them and were replied to with genuine questions about her. Quiet, gentle-voiced comments about the drinks, how well she played her marks, how clever that gunbelt around her thigh was positioned for quick access if she needed to control a situation with more than just her looks.

Moxx liked this one, and a friendship slowly bloomed into something beautiful.

It had been her who had put their name forward when the leaders of the Raiders had become concerned over the darkness slowly seeping across Pandora's horizon, of the bizarre war cries of fanatics leading raids on smaller Bandit camps and shanty towns...

The "Children of the Vault" was a name being passed through hushed whispers in slums and rot-dives, and Lilith had rolled "Calypso" across her tongue enough times when reading scout reports to know the taste it was leaving behind wasn't anything good. They wanted an in, and what better spy to infiltrate a Bandit cult than a Bandit. Someone who understood clan hierarchy, who could report back in words she could understand from a viewpoint she could never see.

JK had been... wary. To say the least. The Raiders weren't friends, they'd filled their ranks with ex Crimson Lance like they hadn't committed atrocities, they mowed down Pandora's natives like mad Skags who needed extermination, and Krieg...

They all knew of Krieg. Everyone had seen how he'd been really treated. JK certainly had, but they also knew Krieg had been one foot into the great hunger, that he'd been so close to the flood that he'd spoken in half Psycho-cant and half Bandit, and tore at his skin to sate the itch of the song that the mad ones screamed about. That the raiders would let him burn alive in a fury if it meant a successful mission, and they couldn't help but wonder how respected he'd really been. Some kind of mix between respect and pity they figured, mocked behind his back as "Just another Psycho", someone who got the job done even if he limped back covered in blood and bullet holes, but was whispered about as needing to be watched.

He had been called a Raider, and yet - masks like his and JKs covered the command room's wall like trophies. Murderers of their clans walked Sanctuaries halls and narrowed untrusting eyes even at Krieg's hulking silhouette as he passed. It wasn't right, and JK struggled to feel as welcome as the others insisted they were now that they had a use.

But they'd taken the job, because Moxxi said they should and Moxxi was clever, Moxxi cared about them and wanted to see them be happy, so they'd agreed. She had whispered in an accent they’d learned from long nights in her company was for real things and not her act, that this would help people, that the COV was worrying her more than she was concerned about getting intel to Lilith, and they'd nodded in agreement.

Bandits don't congregate, Bandits don't merge clans under one banner... they wanted to know what this beast clawing into Pandora's soil was capable of. They'd heard the rumours like everyone else, twin Sirens apparently. Bullshit, everyone knew Sirens were women and there were only 6. Jack had hammered that information through Bandit clans and across Pandora's E-Com network clear enough. These were obviously frauds using trickery to control those eager to believe, wouldn't be the first time a Siren cult had used Bandit clans as a personal army, and JK had felt roiling disgust at the realisation what they were agreeing to do for Lilith? Just another shade of the exact same thing.

Funny, wasn't it. Very funny.

So they'd walked out of Sanctuary and towards the hub of the birthing COV.

They'd been 20 when they had first seen a real God.

The Holy City didn't exist yet, just a pile of rickety buildings thrown up by worshippers that surrounded an old Dahl fortress bleaching slowly in Pandora's sun. They called it "The Cathedral", but it looked like the crumbling bones of some great dead thing jutting from the red sands like a cracked skull. Maybe those were the same thing, JK had thought. A cathedral, and a beast of the flood. Both seemed like something that should be worshipped to them. They liked this place.

Neon paint and rusty metal spines were everywhere among the shantytown, raucous laughter cut through the clang of metal, and the air itself was heavy with an unmistakable stink of unwashed bodies and leather. They felt it so quickly as they'd crunched through the dirt paths that split the weaving rows of scrapped together tents, making their way to the recruitment line. A fleeting tickle of a sensation that hadn't filled their belly in so long. That this was like...

home.

The twins themselves were cagey and difficult to pull usable intel about. They gave sermons from the crumbling balconies of the fortress to the swathes of screaming acolytes below, too far for JK to get a clear eye on them but dressed like Sirens at least. Swirling loops of pacifying blue along the woman, and the man... jagged lines and curved whorls of a vicious red they'd never seen on any living or dead Witch. He was off. That one was wrong, and his sister made her agreement on that clear enough in how she acted next to him. She was the star, she was in the limelight, and he was relegated to a place behind her when she spoke to her worshippers and basked in their screeched worship. Odd for a "God-King" to be left in shadows, they'd thought.

Odd indeed.

They reported back to Lilith in Sanctuary whenever the opportunity arose to leave the growing "City", cult movement, basic info on what they could see as a blossoming threat to raiders, and it was always met with sneers of disgust and pity. Monsters, she'd sighed. Just using the bandits as fodder. JK's eyes flicked to the masks decorating the trophy wall behind her.

"Whatever you say, commander".

Mouthpiece had kept his word. Fully aware of what had happened to JK's clan and uncomfortable with seeing something he believed to be a walking curse among the COV's war parties, he'd purposefully sent them on suicide runs with some of the less physically capable recruits. "Trial by fire" he saw it as, simple logic when it came to survival on Pandora. Let the weak earn their place - if they die, they die. That's the law of the land, and losing the soft only leaves the clan stronger. Except, JK' scout parties just kept coming back. It had seemed almost a fluke the first couple of times, scouts didn't last long after all, but as it repeated again, and again, Mouthpiece and higher members of the raid parties began to notice.

A combination of Hellion war training and their years of working side by side with their brother had left an understanding of why having others watch your back was more beneficial than only caring about your own neck, especially when you weren't as big as the next guy. JK was a survivor, they'd never been willing to lay down and die so the rest of the clan could be down a "weak link", and their knife-edge instincts merged with a care for the other scouts not usually seen amongst Bandits meant they were teaching the team. Unifying them as a group who responded to signal whistles, barked cant, warcries that triggered defence formations and eyes on flanks. They were leading without being called a leader, and as that first year slowly ticked by, they were being noticed.

Sharp eyes that scrutinised numbers and statistics were watching the growing ratio of successful raids to lost bodies from the recessed shadows of the looming Cathedral while Jak-Knife trained and barked orders at recruits in the garrison that sprawled in the white hot sunlight below, and eventually, the day came where the God-King knew their name.

They'd stood shoulder to shoulder with their boys as they lined facing the burning light at Mouthpiece's demand. The mask lenses had done barely anything to block out Pandora's vicious sun as he'd approached, and they'd shuddered at the warchief's hissed warning to show due respect, or die where they stood. He wasn't accepting of failure, they knew that from the hushed whispers that spread across the camp at night. He expected perfection, and word from within the now sprawling architecture of the growing Cathedral was that neither twin took insult lightly. She sucked the life out of the undeserving and he, well, he supposedly just ripped heretics clean apart.

Father Troy had been all sharp angles and gaunt bone as he'd stopped his slow pace in front of them and hunched to lean down to their eye level. They'd realised how wrong they'd been about his appearance as the heavy furs that splayed across his shoulders like a mantle blotted out the sun behind him and framed his jagged silhouette in light.

Tyreen wasn't short.

Troy was a monster.

It had been hard to pick up on his scale when they'd only seen him next to his sister, they'd just figured she was a smaller woman and him a tall man, but the reality of his size was beyond intimidating now that they could see with frightening intimacy that the scrapped together prosthetic that he held at his side so effortlessly was as long as they were tall.

A glint of gold teeth through a smile they'd thought more Skag than human snapped them out of their shock, and he'd congratulated them. Thanked the "Jak-Knife" he'd been watching so closely for their excellent work on the field, waved the disturbingly proportioned metal claws of his arm towards their team and praised their group promotion, slathered honey-thick words from a barbed tongue about how they'd be blessed by being the honour guard for a God now - a fine reward for their outstanding work... yes?

The others had gasped in stuttered praise and whimpered thanks while Jk had nodded respectfully, knowing damn well that Calypso wasn't really asking at all.

The newly titled vanguard escorted him everywhere, and that meant a shift in JK's life within the blossoming city that they could not have prepared for. They no longer slept on bare ground when not visiting Sanctuary for updates, they were brought into the twin's cathedral, were able to see its glory with their own eyes for the first time. The inside wasn't anything like the still decrepit outer walls surrounded by scaffolding that workers scurried across like ants, it was like nothing Jak-Knife had ever seen.

A bastion of worship, vast cavernous stone halls spread with clan banners in colours they'd almost forgotten, neon blazing lights framing sprawling stained glass windows depicting Saints and Clergy who's names they'd heard but never put a face to.

Ur-Aurum, scowling from under heavy brows, framed in monochrome and gold. Coins and bullets pouring from his open palms.

Ur-Machina, sharp and vibrant in reds and coppers, oil-stained hands resting gently on the slab of gilded war tech she rested daintily against.

Ur-Vendit, pristine in parallel lines and perfect angles, sneering through a swathe of shining colours as numbers and cash totals ran like ivy through the window's frame.

And something new that had been being assembled along the great hall when they first entered, a half-finished window titled "Oracle" - just the fine lines of lead and a great, staring eye all that they could make out as they followed the priest irritably urging the vanguard group to hurry as they were lead to their chambers.

For the first time they had experienced, JK not only belonged, but they were envied. Their gear was decorated, armour and weapons upgraded at the Father's blessing, and the titles that came with the role were impossible to avoid, whispered in reverence by warriors who would have spat at their feet only a few years ago.

God-King's chosen, God-King's first, God-King's hand, the nods of respect passed to them by warlords like Mouthpiece in passing filled their chest with pride under the weight of its binder, and the trips back to Sanctuary became... harder.

For all they had achieved within the now monstrous in scale COV, the Raiders saw them no differently than they had when they'd first sat alone in Moxxi's. They were still a Bandit, and nothing more. JK was side-eyed, muttered about, treated like an outsider who needed to earn their keep by passing on intel they were risking their life for, all while in the back of their mind being more than aware that they could have this place raised to the ground with a damn WORD. Lilith didn't understand what it meant to be as close to Calypso as they were, that they were beginning to earn his ear.

She wasn't aware that a fucking God cared about their opinion enough to ask for it on long technical rides or when escorting him between meetings, to her, and to the rest of the Raiders, they were still simply a lost native behind a mask that was being handed scraps of decency by people better than them - and the strain of that reality was difficult to ignore. Moxxi tried her best, always there to console and remind them she valued who they were, the beautiful mind they had shared with her in tender moments and long intimate conversations over the last few years, but the insult burned in their gut still.

They weren't just Jak-Knife. They were the God King's chosen, and they were betraying someone who valued them to share internal information on Saints and departments, cashflow and raids, with people who willingly partnered with the Crimson Lance, people who just plain did not seem to understand who they were, what they had earned through sacrifice and blood shed.

But Troy? The longer they spent around Troy the more his own mask began to slip, and the harder it came to see him as any form of enemy. The blessed Father couldn't hide his weak spells or the times illness left him barely able to stand from a bodyguard who was at his side almost every waking moment, there was no way to do so regardless of how much he clearly wished there was. JK saw everything... the spasms, the fainting, heard the whistling of weak lungs when in silence next to the damaged God, saw the black circles under his eyes that the expertly applied makeup he wore could hide at a distance. He'd been aggressive about it at first, vicious and hurtful in his reactions when they'd try and assist, but over time, as they made clear that the mockery and pity he was expecting was not going to come, he'd softened. He'd thanked Jak-Knife one night as they scraped together a fire on the salt flats to chase the bitter cold away and keep their king warm.

A God had looked at them with ice blue eyes that reminded them of a face they could no longer remember, and whispered genuine appreciation for them. How could they continue to betray him. How could they hurt him for people who didn't even count JK as human?

They saw a delicate and sickly side of one of the twin God's that felt wrong to share with the raiders, that left a bad taste in their mouth to discuss with Lilith, so they simply didn't. The rationalised that the raiders did not need to know about the self-doubt or painful loss JK saw crack through Troy's facade in private, the raiders didn't need an update on how one of the twins wasn't healthy, that he could struggle sometimes to get to his feet before an audience, or would need a discreet support from the solid weight of their muscle next to his spindly frame after some events.

Lilith didn't need to know it, and as time passed, JK found they were beginning to keep secrets. Little ones at first, justified under the intel not being valuable, but the ease of witholding useful data only increased. Their position, the growing camaraderie with the COV's grunts and militia, the respect in the eyes of worshippers who looked to the Vanguard all fed into the slow realisation that their loyalty simple did not belong to the Vault Hunters, it was to Moxxi, who loved them. It was to Troy, who every day became closer to the memory of Gutpunch they'd try and visualise on lonely nights, see his crooked smile and cool eyes flicker across a face they could no longer place.

The closer JK got with the man behind the King's mask, the harder it became to give over information to the raiders that had any real tactical value...

And that had been Troy's plan, ever since the day he'd discreetly planted a tracker on them while they'd squinted against the blinding sunlight to first look into the face of a God.

#Bl3 #Borderlands #Borderlands 3 #Troy calypso #Tyreen calypso #Leech Lord #Sbsart #My hcs #My writing

[darkwarriorproject]

Me again! Not sure if I'm just bitter about what happened to Damas in 3 (*sob*) but am I the only one disappointed in this; like how in 2, you get to fight Praxis and Kor, which is fair enough. But you don't get to fight Erol, and while it is somewhat funny to me to HC him as someone who would get messed up in a true fight with Jak, the fact you only fight him in 3 (when he's not really Erol anymore) kinda sucks, after all the crap he did. Same for Veger; especially after THAT bit in particular-

yeaaahhhh the lack of a Veger fight was IMMENSELY disappointing (you don't get to kill off the Best Dad and then not even provide the catharsis of a bossfight/beatdown!!! 0/10 game design) and even moreso because Veger was in many ways the most despicable villain of the series.

like Kor was your typical nonhuman Big Bad with a ‘destroy humanity’ motivation (and same goes for the Dark Makers); Praxis was a tyrant who did unspeakably awful things in the name of ‘protecting’ some abstract idea of ‘the City’ while throwing a lot of individual people under the bus; Krew was greedy & self-serving & sold out all of Haven for his own personal gain; the Acherons were deluded & obsessed with their ‘remake the world’ god-complex.... but while all of the other antagonists did objectively worse things, none of them had such a blatant kick-the-dog moment as That Scene, where Veger gloats and laughs at Jak's pain & grief, knowing full well that he 100% caused it (and this is also the one time we see Dax get truly furious at an antagonist instead of just snarking & mouthing off at them; if that doesn't say it all idk what does). Veger hated Jak on a very personal level & delighted in hurting him, even when doing so had no bearing on his goals.

...which brings us to Erol, bc Erol was also motivated by a personal vendetta against Jak. [quick note: i don't even consider ‘cyber’ to be the same character/person as Erol; imo his arc ended with his death at the final race in Renegade & ‘cyber’ is just a robot with his face stuck on... but i digress]

the Erol situation is interesting to me tho, because it shows how Jak never really saw Erol as an equal or a real threat-- even though Erol hurt Jak a lot in prison, he was never included in Jak's main revenge mission (which was against Praxis alone) and Jak effectively let Erol choose the terms of their showdown by agreeing to meet him in the races (he had multiple opportunities to attack Erol but didn't). they BOTH know that Erol would never stand a chance against Jak in a fight, but that's not really the point; their showdown is less about who would win and more focused on the chance to publicly humiliate the other-- they're fighting for the admiration & support of the people of Haven, as the Champion/Commander vs the Underdog Renegade Hero. and of course Erol also left Jak with lasting trauma, but I think Jak understood that Erol was merely a pawn/lackey serving under Praxis, so he was better able to cope & didn't need Erol dead the same way he did Praxis.

but yeah tl;dr.... when you really look at it, the final bosses of all three games are ‘world-saving’ scenarios that fail to resolve the primary emotional conflicts at the core of each game (getting Daxter's body back in TPL, the revenge quest in II, the exile/dadmas arc in 3); Jak always loses what he wants for the sake of ‘being the Hero’ & those losses are never adequately addressed by the narrative, which leaves the endings a bit underwhelming (especially the 3rd game, boooooo).

#jak and daxter #character analysis #Veger #Erol #Jak #Baron Praxis #scritches #duskglass #replies #game meta

[greyvvardenfell]

Fictober 2018 // Day 2: People like you have no imagination. // Dragon Age: Inquisition (Jakariel Lavellan x Dorian Pavus)

Jakariel could feel himself falling asleep even as he tried to will himself not to. The drafty room his advisers had commandeered as a council chamber in the Haven chantry held nothing to distract him from the boredom of the meeting and the journey back from Redcliffe after the near-disastrous rendezvous with the mage rebellion was catching up to him at last. His muscles ached, the wound on his ribs from a wildly-cast Venatori spell burned under its elfroot poultice, and the angry, endless arguments of Cullen, Leliana, Cassandra, and Josephine were fading into a hum, luring him into more pleasant thoughts of more pleasant people, like one particular mage he’d met in the sprawling lakeside village —

“Jakariel!”

He startled, blinking the Fade from his golden eyes. “Yep, yeah,” he said, deep voice thick with disuse. He cleared his throat. “I agree with, um —” Jak met the gaze of the closest adviser, “—whatever Josephine thinks.”

Josephine hid her smile behind her hand as Cullen and Cassandra shared exasperated looks. “You really ought to be paying attention, Herald,” the Seeker snapped. “This is no time to be dozing off.”

With effort, he resisted the urge to roll his eyes. “Of course it isn’t,” he said as he leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Even for me, your savior made flesh.” Jakariel arched his back in a luxurious stretch and splayed his nimble archer’s fingers.

Cassandra made a noise of disgust. “Do not mock us, Her— Ser Lavellan. These are desperate times.”

Jakariel couldn’t restrain his eye-roll again. He rose from the rickety chair and held up his left hand, fist clenched around the glowing line of unearthly green across his palm. With one pale blond brow raised, he surveyed the room and watched each adviser’s eyes drop to the floor to avoid him. “If there’s one thing you don’t need to remind me of,” he said slowly as he let his hand fall, “it’s the nature of our current situation.”

The small chamber fell silent, the chill more pronounced in the wake of Jakariel’s words. He stepped up to the table cluttered with maps and charts and began to look them over, grabbing one at random and scanning it. “Catch me up,” he said to no one in particular when the sketchy reproduction of farmlands outside a town he didn’t recognize offered no clues. “And if anyone calls me ‘Herald’ again, I swear I will turn around and walk out.”

The four councillors looked at each other briefly before Leliana spoke, her Orlesian syllables flowing over each other like rich velvet. “Your findings in Redcliffe were most troubling, Jakariel. Of course, the Templars will no longer meet with us after discovering that we have consorted with the mage rebellion, as we thought. Cullen has been unable to make contact with any of the friends he still had in the order since your return.”

The commander’s jaw clenched as he turned away. “I stand by your decision,” he said quietly. “Whatever was lost, was lost.”

Jak frowned. Cullen, as reticent as he was, had revealed to him in confidence some of what he’d lost already, and Jakariel was loathe to add to his burdens.

“And on top of that,” Josephine interjected, “Fiona’s diplomats, followed by our own, have thus far been slow to make progress in the Circles more further removed from population centers, those that were isolated longer.” She shook her head, loosening strands of her sleek black hair from its bun. “The mages, such that we have, are a boon to us, but there are problems we did not forsee.”

“Isn’t that how this kind of thing goes?” asked Jakariel wryly, earning a laugh from both Leliana and Josephine.

“You learn quickly, Jakariel,” the ambassador said, patting his arm.

“So I’ve been told.” Jak shuffled a sheaf of papers, buying a moment of time. “Have we heard anything from the mage who helped me? He, ah, he said he’d be in touch.”

Josephine tilted her head, eyes bright. “Enchanter Pavus?”

“Mm. He didn’t leave Redcliffe with the rest of us, said he had some things to wrap up there. Or something.”

Leliana, Cassandra, and Josephine shared glances. “We received word that he would be arriving sometime today. Soon, I expect, with the fair weather,” Leliana said, a smile behind her words.

Jakariel tapped his stack of papers on the tabletop, aligning them neatly. “Good. I hoped he’d be coming this way. He’s a talented mage and probably has good intel on the Tevinters.” He kept his tone even, tamping down his racing heart.

“I’m not sure about that,” said Cullen, his brows furrowed. “A Tevinter mage’s intelligence on other Tevinter mages shouldn’t be taken at face value. We don’t know how deep his involvement in this goes.” He shouldered forward and rested his gloved hands on the table, bearskin flowing down his back like a lion’s mane. “He could be a threat.”

Jak felt a thrill of rage build behind his sternum and flow out to the tips of his fingers, pushed on by the surging beats of his heart so recently kicked into action. He narrowed his eyes and sucked in a breath, carefully funnelling the feeling into biting contempt. “With all due respect, Cullen, you weren’t there.” He placed the pile of maps on the table and smoothed them carefully, taking his time as he chose his words. “I fought side-by-side with Enchanter Pavus through a future hellscape as real as this room. He saved me more times than I can remember in less than a day. Without him, your resistance would have died with me, just like Alexius wanted. You didn’t see what we saw. None of you did.” He paused to take in the others. “Again, all due respect, but you cannot imagine what it was like. I couldn’t have either, before I was there. People like you, you can’t base things on imagination. But I can. And I can say without a doubt that Dorian — Enchanter Pavus — is an ally, a strong one. A friend. And we can’t deny friends being dropped right in our laps, especially when the ones we try to recruit, like the rebel mages, aren’t going to plan anyway. I can say, and will say, that there’s no one I’d rather have on our side, present or future.”

“I couldn’t have said it better myself.” A new voice, proud and strong, filled the small chamber, forcing the drafty chill from Jakariel’s bones with its presence. Leaning against the doorframe, Dorian himself cut a dashing figure, despite being worn from travel with a half-healed cut across one prominent cheekbone. “Does that mean I’m hired?”

Cullen straightened immediately, falling into his commander role like he’d never shown weakness in his life. Cassandra and Leliana stayed back while Josephine hurried up to greet Dorian eagerly, ushering him into the room. Jak couldn’t keep the blush from his nut-brown cheeks as he too stood taller, meeting Dorian’s gaze as the mage came closer.

“It’s nice to see you again, err, Enchanter,” Jakariel said hesitantly.

“And you,” Dorian paused, a smirk on his lips, “Herald.”

“Ugh, please, Jakariel is fine.”

“I must insist with the same vehemence that you call me Dorian. After all, we’re friends, aren’t we?”

Dorian’s eyes flashed with something Jak couldn’t place, but he laughed through it. “I don’t give speeches like that if I don’t mean it.”

#fictober18 #only an hour and half late! #it's work's fault #and also my fault #because i don't function before noon #and also this was about 700 words longer than i thought it would be #but yay early jakariel/dorian! #i had to look up so much stuff about the end of in hushed whispers because it's been so long since i played inquisition! #otp: playing with fire #rey writes things

[rhinozilla]

JnD Horror Week

Day 5: For the Greater Good

Samos can only hold his tongue and wait as the Rift Rider and Rift Gate begin to take shape outside his hut at the edge of Sandover, knowing that the village’s days are numbered.

--

Samos knew. This was it. As soon as Keira started assembling the pieces of wood and metal behind their hut, and the villagers had curiously helped him and Jak maneuver the massive curved pieces of Precursor metal into the shape of a ring…he knew that their days in Sandover were truly dwindling.

“I think it’s a…sled.” Keira had been thinking aloud for the past hour.

The floor of her work shop had been carpeted with the partially dismantled Rift Rider that…she herself had built so long ago…and that she would build again in just a few years’ time…

The image of his daughter, older and harder than the child that she was in this moment, standing among the grey of Haven, came unbidden to him, and Samos grimaced. The teenaged girl that he’d met in Haven a lifetime ago had had to survive in that dying city completely on her own.

“Or…no, because see there’s a…what?” Keira huffed, moving around to the back of the Rider. “It looks like a mix of Precursor technology and…something else…I’ve never seen wiring done this way…Whoever built this was either a genius or crazy.”

Samos couldn’t stop a chuckle at that, stroking his beard as he turned to look out at the ramp attached to the side of the hut, where Jak and the Sculptor were arguing over how to assemble the Rift Gate.

“They’re all circles, man!” The Sculptor waved his arms over his head. “That’s not where that piece goes!”

Jak groaned and rolled his eyes, bending over and shoving at the heavy arching metal piece.

“No! Dude, just let me!” The Sculptor tried to muscle Jak out of the way.

Jak let the metal piece fall with a loud thud. He did a half bow and made an impressively passive aggressive gesture for the Sculptor to go ahead and do it his way. The Sculptor looked like some of the wind had gone out of his sails at hearing how audibly heavy the metal was, but he puffed up his chest and gave it a go anyway…and could barely budge the thing.

Jak stood back with his arms folded and his eyebrows up until the Sculptor gave a sigh of surrender. He then offered a reconciliatory smile, and Jak returned the grin, moving to help again. Always ready to forgive and move on to get the job done.

Samos could see the young man, reloading a gun half as big as his entire body, emptying clip after clip into the incessant hoard that rushed them at the old Haven Stadium. Abandoning the gun and transforming in a roar of purple lightning and claws to tear into the enemy.

Daxter shuffled into view, lugging the sealed, bulbous shape of the Precursor time map. Samos couldn’t understand what he was saying, but the loud, grating tone of his voice could carry for miles.

Daxter was…exactly how Samos remembered the obnoxious boy on Jak’s shoulder in Haven.

“Oh my…what is it?” The old bird woman had curiously stepped into Keira’s workshop, marveling at the semi-assembled Rift Rider.

“Just more Precursor crap!” Daxter made to chuck the time map into the ocean.

The weight of the thing made his throw look pathetic, and Jak easily caught it before it tumbled far. The Mayor had tottered over as well, tapping his fingertips together as he tried to study the strange technology that they were handling.

Keira straightened up, standing in the middle of the Rider and turning in slow circles to get full view of it. She looked to the old woman.

“We found it in the same place where we recovered that ancient Precursor ring out there…At least, it will eventually be a ring once SOMEBODY stops MESSING around!”

Over on the ramp, Jak, Daxter, and the Sculptor all looked at her, thoroughly called out.

The woman chuckled. “Where do you think this new ring gate will lead? It’s so… so large. Oh, do be careful, dear. It all looks awfully…strange.”

Samos didn’t speculate with the others as they started throwing out guesses about the destination on the other side of the gate. Their theories quickly grew wild, and Samos distanced himself from the conversation, stepping away from the hut and to the edge of the small island that his home was positioned on.

The rickety foot bridges connected the little islands that led to the main land. Blue lights sparkled off the center of the turning windmill over the Mayor’s house. The old woman’s Flut Flut bird cooed at the Sculptor’s muse, where it preened itself on its owner’s porch. Over the tree tops, he could just barely see the floating discs and globes that hovered over the Precursor ruins in the jungle.

The ocean kissed the sand at the edges of their islands, leaving frothy white lines in its wake. The water, so painfully blue, darkening the sun bleached sand. The splashes of vibrant green trees that blanketed the landscape. The rich browns of the cliff faces and rock formations. Everything here was so saturated in life, absolutely busting at the seams with colors that hurt the eyes if you stared too long. Samos remembered the headaches that he had suffered for weeks after first coming to this sparkling place…far from the washed out Haven in all its shades of grey and beige.

Laughter danced across the breeze as the Mayor, having lost some bet or other regarding the Precursor metal, foisted a power cell over to Jak and Daxter, who commenced one of their victory dances as they received their prize.

Samos cast his eyes over to the smiling villagers, at the innocent curiosity that kept them circling the commotion at his hut.

Soon they would all be dead.

He grimaced and started up the steps to the main level of his hut, eying the volumes that lined his shelves and the idle swirling of energy inside the smaller warp gate by his window.

He tried to remember if his older self…when HE had been the younger one all those years ago…if he had said anything about this place. No, surely there had been nothing to say.

War was waiting for him and Jak upon their return to Haven City. Blood and pain and horror waited for them there. For over a decade, he had been training that child to return to a future that would damn near break him. A decade ago, it had been inconceivable to him that the small, gentle, happy child that he had brought with him to Sandover would become the angry, vengeful, cold young man that Haven so desperately needed.

Samos tried to force the image away, but immediately cursed his cowardice and instead tried to ease the image with the greater truth…the memory of that same caustic man reassuring the little boy and giving advice about a wumpbee nest that Samos knew for a fact that the boy had NOT followed.

It seemed that every Jak found that nest on his ninth birthday, and every Daxter was always right by his side when things went sideways. Every Keira built the Rift Rider to take them through the gate. Every Samos would keep what he knew to himself and would let that Rift Rider carry them away from this peaceful place, abandoning it to the metalheads.

These people were not fighters, not in any sense of the word. Why would they need to be? Threats to them had only ever been the dry season, the wet season, even Misty Island…which was too far away to truly worry them.

Only Samos and Jak were strong enough to put up any true fight…even they would fall under the onslaught of the metalheads that would eventually invade this place. They might come from deep within Misty Island…or emerge from the dark eco silos around their world…but they would come. Somewhere…and soon…they would invade. The other Sages would fight too…and they too would fall. Haven would rise, with its walls and its regimes, and the metalhead forces would swell.

To save a future of thousands, this village of less than dozen had to be sacrificed.

“It’s a rider!” Keira suddenly called out. “Daxter, bring that weird orb over here. I think it might fit into this console! I think whoever designed this meant to use it to travel through that big gate!”

Yes, Samos thought to himself, always only to himself, the day was coming soon.

#jndthemeweek

[karla-the-elemental-dreamer]

Getting To Know The Dream Guides - Q&A (Jak - Jak&Daxter)

As of 24 FEB 2022, My three current active dream guides are Riku (KH), Terra (KH), and Jak (J&D). In order to get to know them a bit better, they have participated a Q&A, where they are to give the most passionate responses they can. All questions are the same, except for the last one, which has been personalised to each of their worlds/personalities/a unique dream event. Here are Jak's responses: ------------------------------------- At what stage of your dreamer’s life did you arrive in? Regardless of if you were a dream guide yet or not? Jak: I came when the politics was getting a bit rough, especially for her city. I kinda knew what she was experiencing, because of what I had gone through in Haven City with the metalhead wars, and all the people fighting for the city in that sense. So… I dunno why exactly, but I just felt compelled to come and help her. ------------------------------------- What do you like most about your dreamer? Jak: She’s a hard worker. Like, she may not have a rich-man’s job, but you can see the effort she puts into her projects every day, and how she’s helped so many people. She’s very smart, very talented, and she’s just a good person. Trying to be a cool guy, I grumble a bit when she puts her arms around me, but then she knows, and she just keeps them there… And then I just can’t resist and I hug her back. But like, having seven hobbies in her arsenal, and doing them all so well? Wow.

-------------------------------------- Is there anything about your dreamer that you find challenging? Jak: I guess I’ve gotten used to her now; but especially at the beginning, I found some of her ways very strange. I can’t explain how exactly… I just did. Though to this day, I still have one gripe. She does have a very nice and unique fashion sense, but c’mon, who wears a party dress while in the wasteland? I just wish that sometimes, she’d wear clothes more appropriate to the occasion or other surrounding conditions. ------------------------------------- What would be the most memorable moment with your dreamer? Jak: There isn’t really anything monumental that stands out, because I enjoy quite a lot of things with her. But I guess I could say it always feels special when she comes to my world, being Haven or Spargus. I used to get quite offended at the start when she said that Haven, or pretty much my whole world, was boring, but now I understand why. So these days, I try and make that experience better for her through the people she meets rather than the places she goes to. A developing trend, the place where her and I have our deep chats, is Spargus, by the waterfront; that is, when we’re not at her house. It’s more natural and I feel she likes it more than Haven. And then as I’m one of her dream guides, she’s leased me a property in a neighbouring suburb, about 15 minutes away from her house… And she gave the title not only to me, but to Keira as well. So Keira and I have our very own house in my dreamer’s world, and it’s always a pleasure when she comes to visit. Whenever she’s there, it’s like Keira and I are looking after our own daughter. --------------------------------------- What tip would you have for a new dream guide to this dreamer? Jak: Before you sign up for anything, always read the terms and conditions, and even ask questions if you have to. When I gave her the Seal of Mar, I thought I was just going to protect her by using my weapons and smashing the heads of a few of her ‘foes’. Little did I know that I was signing a contract to become dream-daddy number three at the time. So when she started calling me over and wanting me to quote on quote, stay with her, and look after her, I was asking myself “oh no, what have I done?”. But with spiritual messages from my deceased father, as well as encouragement from her, and the support from Riku and Terra, I turned out to be just fine, and am having a lot of fun with her. So to summarise all that, go with the flow, and like Riku said, take the time to understand her and gauge what she really needs. And if you need a little bit of a pick me up, ask your friends and family. -------------------------------------- What would have to be your biggest accomplishment? Jak: I’ve only been with her for 3 months, so it hasn’t been that long. But I’d say my biggest accomplishment is taking that leap and becoming a fully fledged dream guide. I didn’t think about it too much at the start, but being her dream guide, along with two other people that are kinda like friends to me now,is something really special, and I find myself becoming a better person from the time I’ve spent with them. ------------------------------------ As you are working in a team of three, what are your opinions on your colleagues? Jak: When I first met Riku, I felt that strong conviction from him. He’s not one to share much personal stuff, but neither am I. I sense that something in his past may be the reason he’s more reserved and keeps to himself these days. But he’s a great leader and he’s very wise. He’s done a lot for our dreamer over the past two years. With Terra, I don’t know him too well despite where he lives and who his friends are. I wish he’d talk more, he seems a bit quiet a lot of the time, but then I know he had a very dark past and people weren’t that kind to him. So I sorta get why he’s withdrawn from opening up too much about himself to people not from his world. With that being said, he’s still a cool guy, and I appreciate the stuff he taught me when I started out back in

November last year. ------------------------------------ Personal Question: There were tensions between your dreamer and Keira early on in the dream timeline. How did you feel about this and has anything changed? Jak: Girls… They can be a handful. As much as I love my girlfriend, I know she can be a bit overprotective, like when her and Ashelin first met in my Renegade adventure. I think the same thing happened when she first became aware of my dreamer. Like… Keira said she was happy for me, but when she met my dreamer in-person, she was quite rude and condescending to her. At the same time, my dreamer said that the notion of Keira and I being in a relationship was more than fine, and that she supported us being together, but when Keira was around, I sensed my dreamer becoming more closed off, and like she couldn’t bring herself to say anything to Keira or even engage with her at all. This was hard for me to witness and deal with, as I had to keep Keira reassured that I wasn’t cheating on her, and at the same time, consider my dreamer’s concerns and try and make the environment a little more friendly. Eventually, it got to a point where Keira was being so rough with my dreamer, that my dreamer snapped, and even threatened to take Keira’s name off the property deed. That was the main situation that caused Keira to relax a little bit, but there were still some things after that, that were a challenge to achieve harmony between the three of us. There was an issue where I was the one that snapped, sadly at my dreamer, but then while I was off in a stink, Keira was the one that came to her and said she understood how my dreamer was feeling and what she was thinking. So Keira actually likes my dreamer now. Whereas Keira initially thought I was cheating on her with another girlfriend, Keira now knows, and sees my dreamer’s true identity, as my, I guess you could say, ‘soul child’. So I think Keira’s quite fascinated about her these days, and has even sometimes slotted herself into the equation, hoping to co-care for my dreamer alongside me. My dreamer talks to Keira, but always emphasises that Keira does not have the authority to act as a dream guide. I’m working on them… Slowly…

#jak #jak 2 #jak 3 #dream guide #karla #oc #dreamer #q&a #jak and daxter #trivia #did you know #elemental dreamer