There's very little I can say about this particular piece of work except that it occurs a few months after the end of Jak 3. Oh, and also I will have no OCs for this fic. For those of you who have read my other works, please don't have a heart attack at the news. It's hard on me too.

Chapter 1: Something Interesting -- How Else Did You Expect It to Start?

"When you said you wanted the two of us to go to a secluded place, this wasn't exactly what I had in mind," Daxter muttered crossly.

He stood atop a fallen metal beam in the midst of a collapsed building. What remained of the roof was held up at an odd angle by debris that had somehow managed to pile up just enough to allow passage for anyone small enough to slip through the entrance. Even so, they still had to scramble along on their bellies in some areas.

Below him, the female ottsel used her tiny paws to clear a space to make her way into a buried room.

"Tess, this is the old KG fortress. It's abandoned. There's nothin' here!"

"C'mon, Daxter! Just think of it as an adventure without the monsters," she coaxed.

"Yeah, but usually Jak does all the heavy lifting. Why am I hauling this thing around again?" he wondered, looking down at the bronze sphere about half his size.

It wasn't really that heavy, but he had to complain about something Jak would have done if he'd been there with them. He tossed it into the air experimentally. Tess' back was to him and she had no idea what he was doing as she pulled another split brick from the hole.

"Be sure not to drop it. We're gonna need that Power Cell once we find the computers."

"If there's any to be found in this junk heap!" He now appeared to be playing volleyball with the Power Cell, but paused to look around with a shudder. "Let's hurry up. Even destroyed this place gives me the creeps."

His fur was standing on end and he kept expecting some ghost to rise from the rubble and accost him. Or whatever ghosts did. Then again, the surrounding sense of danger made his little muffin-face so much more attractive…

Tess gave a triumphant cry and her orange tail disappeared into the dark hole. Her voice drifted back out, "Here it is! I knew they would have reinforced this area. Daxter, come quick!"

The other ottsel scurried into the hidden room, but he had to strain in order to get the Power Cell through. Immediately on the other side was a sharp drop a little over three feet straight down. Not far for him since he commonly leaped four feet to sit on Jak's shoulder, but Tess still walked more like a regular person and hadn't quite learned how to use her springy legs to jump high, so most likely she would have some trouble getting back out.

The room was filled with computers, all their screens dark, but Tess was excitedly hopping around one in particular.

"We can use this one! It has the core-cable attached and should contain all the files on the baron's experiments."

"Already? Wow, toots! I had no idea it would be this easy. Here's the Power Cell. What now?"

"Just let me put this in its slot…"

She opened the Precurian artifact and four small pieces of it floated in midair around the glowing center. It locked into the computer's open panel and began to supply power to the machine.

She cheerfully clapped her hands as the screen lit up, appearing to have suffered no damage. Daxter tried to keep up as Tess flipped through different programs and files, but after thirty seconds he was thoroughly lost. He shook his head and walked a few feet away.

"I don't get why you're so curious about what happened here all of a sudden."

She glanced back at him for a moment, her blond hair appearing blue in the light from the computer monitor. "It just doesn't add up. Where did the baron get—oh! I think I found something!"

He ran forward and for a second did nothing but squint confusedly at the photos there, screwing his face up into an expression of disgust. "What the heck are those? Did a bunch of squiggly lines eat each other and then throw up?"

They were dark tiles with a light shining on them from an odd angle so that the shapes of the engravings appeared shadowed and less than clear. It was probably that ambiguous quality that made him want to get a mop and bucket.

"It's a Precurian alphabet. The translation should be here somewhere. Do you want me to read it to you when I find it, snoogums?" she asked playfully.

"I'll take a summary, thanks," he called, completely neutral on the subject.

Daxter meandered over to the corner where part of the roof had collapsed. Tess continued to tap on the keyboard, occasionally letting out a yip of excitement as some new information appeared on the screen. It wasn't as if he didn't care. He just…wasn't much good at gathering info, and it wasn't all that interesting when he didn't understand anyway.

He stood beside a pile of rubble and saw a sliver of wood about the size of a toothpick. For lack of anything else better to do, he broke it off.

There was a long, ominous creak and the male ottsel slowly turned to look upward, ears falling flat against his head in sudden, wide-eyed fear. Daxter realized for the first time that the ceiling was only held up by a splintered beam.

Make that splintering. Apparently the structural reinforcement Tess had expected was little more than kindling.

He groped his way toward her without taking his eyes off the dangerously thin stretch of wood. "Uh… Sugar? I'm thinking of a really good idea that involves the two of us and that exit."

"But I'm not done!"

"That ceiling doesn't look like it's willing to wait. Let's get outta here now!" He grabbed Tess by the arm and dragged her toward the small hole they'd come though.

There was a final snap and the ceiling dropped two feet, bracing temporarily against more of the piled rubble. But the jolt weakened what remained of the plate overhead and chunks of stone began to fall, nearly crushing them as they hightailed for safety. They heard crunching metal and the light from the computer monitor went out behind them.

Daxter leaped the final distance and landed easily on the small ledge, but as he'd predicted earlier, Tess was having trouble. She slipped on the loose debris and fell to her knees, coughing as dust churned up around them.

He called her name followed by a heroic, "I'll save ya, baby!" Then he laid flat and lowered his tail.

Tess grabbed hold and hauled herself up. Daxter braced himself but the various contortions on his face revealed how painful having his tail yanked really was. He uttered a quick thanks to the Precursors when she finally reached the top, then hitched up his pants slightly.

"Good thing I wear a belt. Now let's hurry up and get outta here before the rest of this place collapses! I don't think I've ever wanted to get out of prison this badly before."

The girl gazed regretfully back at the closed entrance to the computer room. "I can't believe I lost my Power Cell. It cost me six hundred Precursor Orbs!"

"Six hundred?! Stupid inflation."

:&:

Keira met the ottsels at the bar and raised her eyebrows curiously when they came in covered with dust.

"Looks like you two had a rough time. Where were you?"

Daxter sat down on the bar. "There was a movie playing downtown so we went to see it—oh, and by the way, don't try sneaking around under the seats if you go because the ladies in this city don't scream, they kick!—followed by coffee and bagels, and then we swung by the ol' prison to find some information."

"The prison?" the mechanic asked as she leaned forward, suddenly intrigued.

"It was Tessy's idea. She said something about stuff that was bothering her, so we checked into it, then checked out before we got buried."

"Did you find anything?"

"Just a little," Tess said, somewhat depressed. "I located the main file for the Dark Warrior Program, but the roof caved in before I had a chance to read much. Apparently Baron Praxis based his experiment on a legend found in a place built by the Precursors. The file didn't specify exactly where the writings are. Only that the area he got all his Dark Eco from was there too, collected into one large well."

Keira's eyes brightened with recognition and Daxter scratched his head. "Y'know, that sounds a little like—"

"Misty Island?" a deeper voice said from the doorway. Jak strode in and everyone turned to look at him almost guiltily. "That is what you were describing, right?"

He wasn't tall, and by most standards he would be considered short for an 18-year-old, but the way he stood and the self-assured aura surrounding him made Jak appear larger than he really was. Since he returned regularly to the desert city called Spargus, he still wore his loose, short-sleeved outfit and tan armor, plus the ever-present goggles on his forehead, giving him a roguish look. Even so, he would not have been so intimidating if his eyes weren't fixed in a perpetual glare.

As he stood there waiting for an answer, Tess seemed to feel his impatience and stuttered uncomfortably.

"I-It didn't have a name. All I read after that was how difficult it was to reach and that the Dark Eco was so unstable it had to go through a distilling process of some kind before it could be used."

He crossed his arms, but his expression continued to reveal nothing whatsoever about his feelings on the matter. "You mentioned a legend."

"Um… I didn't really get a chance to…"

Daxter jumped up and laid a comforting paw on her shoulder. "Don't worry, sweet-cheeks. It's a start. We'll find those writings and figure out what they have to do with my best pal, right?"

Keira leaned forward, crouching a bit so she was closer to his height. "But Daxter, Misty Island doesn't exist anymore. It's not in the bay. Haven't you noticed?"

"Ah… I was just seeing if you noticed first," he amended not very convincingly.

Without a word Jak walked past them into the back room. The ottsel glanced at the two women as they gazed after him with one of those indefinable girly emotions, then he hopped down and went after his friend. Everyone always turned so stiff around him whenever the subject of those experiments came up, as if they weren't sure how he would react.

He found Jak behind several racks of liquor, leaning against the wall and staring out the window.

"Hey, big guy! It's not like it's the end of the world. I'm sure there are other places with mysterious Precursor puke-art out there."

"Dax, why were you and Tess looking for information on the program?"

"No real reason. She was curious about where we grew up and I told her about livin' in Sandover. That naturally led to how we got here and then she wouldn't let it drop. Kept sayin' there was something fishy about how the baron knew we were comin' an' all that."

"I've wondered that myself."

Jak continued to stare out the window. The faint vibrating sounds of zoomers could be heard outside and his friend didn't say anything else for a minute. Daxter wondered if he'd said something wrong.

"We're going to need oxymasks."

"Huh?"

"Misty Island must have sunk beneath the surface of the ocean. That's why nobody else has found it yet. Ask Keira if she can get us a submarine."

I always wondered if there might be more connections to the past than were implied in the 2nd and 3rd games. But if we drop the playable parts, which game would you consider to be the best in terms of story and wit?