Jak & Daxter: Safety
Chapter 7
by Tempo & Sillyneko
An eager ottsel couple shows Jak what he's been missing. Meanwhile, battle plans are also laid.
Note: This is set after Jak X.
Jak blinked against the dawn light and squirmed against the bedcovers. A dried stickiness tugged at the fur of his crotch. He looked down. To either side, naked ottsel bodies nestled against him.
Exactly what had he gotten up to last night? The fading throb of a hangover reminded him how the night started: in the bar. From there, he remembered being ambushed by amorous ottsels and…
His eyes shot wide against the blinding light of morning. He'd kissed them. Sweet Precursors, he'd done a lot more than that.
A sinuous furry form slipped against his shoulder to nibble his jawline.
The hero flailed into an stifled eep.
Daxter groaned into his cheek ruff, voice soft. "I can hear yer brain cookin' from here. Ya doin' okay?"
Jak blinked. "Headache."
The orange ottsel rolled over and rattled a bottle of aspirin from a bedside drawer. He returned with a pill and a sloshing half-glass of water.
Jak studied the glass through bleary vision and dawn light. "How long has that been there?"
A grin entered his smarmy voice. "I could give ya something else to swallow, Jakster."
Taking the glass with a grunt, the blond popped the tablet and sipped the dusty water. He'd never thought about it, but his new body probably didn't need a big dose of anything to feel the effects. Mulling over the overdose of drama he'd taken in the past few weeks, he handed the empty tumbler back.
"So yeah, last night happened." After putting the cup back on the nightstand, he slid a paw down around Jak's fuzzy tummy. "You're ours. Get used to it, go back to sleep, or lemme groom you."
"I don't know about all this…" Jak's whisper floated through the half-grey light of sunrise. "What if I screw up your relationship?"
"I do; ya won't." The other ottsel sighed. "You've been in this thing since the beginning, but with none a' the perks."
"But this is more than just fooling around." His hand drifted down to curl over his friend's elbow. "I mean, I'd thought about you guys, but this..."
"It's okay ta want this. You deserve a little happiness. And we deserve a little you." A quiet chuckle stirred his neck fur. "We'll work out the fiddly details as we go. That's how this junk works."
On his stomach, Tess jostled, basically draped across him. He noticed his hand between her legs and didn't dare move it.
"But Dax..."
Daxter nuzzled into a soft kiss as his ears dipped under the weight of a blush. The press of delicate ottsel lips against his felt so natural, so easy.
Jak wanted it never to end, wanted to stay bundled up in a loving ottsel tangle, wanted to be everything for these two people who were so wonderful to him.
His lifelong friend drew back, smirking even as a blush lit his ears. "That answer yer questions?"
The world's newest ottsel nodded. With no objections left, they sank into comfortable silence, then into happy dreams.
Awaking in his friend's embrace, Jak drifted back to consciousness. He looked to his bedmates. A bright sunbeam painted the colorful bedspread, warming three shades of equally colorful fur. Jak was hard pressed to hold back a purr—the sound was still foreign in his throat, and tickled when he tried. Heh. It was kind of funny in a way. A bed almost too small for one human woman seemed a palatial nest to three ottsels; staying nestled in it so late into the morning, entirely decadent.
A soft chuckle arose near Jak's ear. His head was tucked under Daxter's chin, those scrawny wrapped arms around his waist. Tess' chin rested on Jak's shoulder, her arms hugging his middle right above Daxter's. In a literal hero sandwich, the green-blonde ottsel couldn't deny the embraces anchored him to this time more than anything had in the past. Between his old best friend and his new girlfriend, he got the message at last:
We love you.
We want you.
You're safe with us.
- / - / - / - / -
Tess finished toweling off on the edge of the tub. Her body still brimmed with sensation: even the cool sleekness of the bathtub under her paw pads seemed luxurious. She hopped to the floor and wrapped a hand towel around her hair. Snuggles, a nice long shower, and now blueprints were swirling in her head: this was shaping up to be a great morning.
She padded across the hallway and into the bedroom. Atop the bed, Jak lay on his back, legs up in the air and giving the occasional twitch. Daxter snoozed atop him. Once in a while, one or the other would nuzzle closer or heave a contented little sigh.
She leaned against the doorway. So this is what her life would look like from now on: unchecked adorableness interspersed with orgasms. Her teenage self never would've dared to dream this is how her life would turn out. She slipped out of the room and skipped down the stairs.
Once in the kitchen, she made some toast, with strawbana jam, and headed to the back room and began work on a massive bomb.
A couple hours later, Jak tramped, yawning, downstairs and wandered in the direction of breakfast. As he rummaged around the kitchen, he could hear Tess tinkering with something in her workshop. He switched on the coffee maker.
Sitting at the bar, Jak munched on some cereal with yakow milk; of all the advances civilization had made since his childhood, the move from porridge to cereal was near the top of his list. It was a really simple solution, but it made so much sense. And as simple as Dax made their new relationship sound, he may be right. They weren't losing anything from their friendship, just adding nice things. And Tess. Whom he was already friends with anyway.
He smiled at himself. Here he was, the morning after losing his virginity, getting all philosophical over a bowl of Zoomer-O's. Daxter would laugh at him.
The ottsel in question meandered downstairs a few minutes later. His fur stuck up in several directions, though he'd at least put on a bathrobe. He shambled to the bar, clambered onto a stool, and dumped some cereal into Jak's recently-emptied bowl.
Jak considered several ways of bringing up last night. Nothing seemed to do it justice. The greenish ottsel crossed his arms and settled on: "What're we gonna tell Samos?"
A burst of noon light flooded the dim barroom. On cue, the sage himself appeared through the front door. "Yes, what are you going to tell Samos?"
"Whaaaa!" Daxter clutched his pink dressing gown around his scrawny body and hid behind the blond ottsel. "Jak! He's learned to teleport in when ya speak his name!"
Jak snickered.
"Oh save it, you thistle sprouts." The squat sage banged his walking stick on the floor. "I'm here because everybody in town found out about your little transformation before me."
At the old man's heel, Jak's crocodog trotted in. The creature hurried over to Jak, sniffed him twice, then plunked down to pant at him with devotion. From the bar stool, he patted the critter on the head.
"Sorry, Samos." He rubbed the scruff of his neck. "Things've been a little crazy since I changed."
"Frankly, I'm surprised he noticed, considering he transforms into somethin' new every ten seconds." Daxter waved a paw. "But, yeah, go ahead and mock him, just like ya did me."
"I'm not here to belittle Jak's new form. After all, the Precursors themselves tried to change him into this." He jabbed a gnarled finger in the orange ottsel's direction. "You on the other leaf, Daxter, need your ego deflated at every opportunity."
"Hey!" Daxter scowled.
Jak grinned at his boyfriend. "You know you're a Precursor now, right? And he's just a sage? You're technically a lot more powerful than he is."
Samos glared.
"Hey, that's right!" Daxter leaned over Jak's shoulder. "You can start worshipping us any time, loghead."
The sage scoffed at the notion. "I have no intention of worshipping anyone who fled my house in the middle of bathtime and ran around the village naked."
The ottsel winced.
"He's got ya there, Dax." The greenish ottsel looked back at his companion. "Maybe you'd have better luck with the monks."
"Oh no: I just spent the whole morning talking the monks out of trying out that gadget you found in the ruins." A bird flew out of the sage's hair and fluttered to perch atop his walking stick. "They only listened because I told them how you'd already been chosen to be one of the mighty and infinitely wise Precursors."
"That's probably for the best." Jak hooked a thumb toward his fellow ottsel. "Daxter'd pout if he wasn't special anymore."
"Hey! I'm special. I'm the original." Dax crossed his arms. "Anybody else is just a copyottsel."
Samos cleaned the various lenses of his spectacles on his shirt with a harrumph. "Jak, you just let me know when you get tired of the bar and need somewhere else to stay."
Dax puffed up indignantly.
For a moment, Jak considered breaking the news of his new relationship to the sage too. The guy deserved to know, especially after finding out about the new fuzzy chapter in his life second-hand. But no. Someone else deserved to know even before Samos.
He had to tell Keira.
- / - / - / - / -
A few hours later, Jak and the rest of the ottsel trio wandered into Keira's workshop. The racing zoomers sat forgotten, some clearly mid-assembly. He cleared his throat, a sound which which didn't seem too high anymore. "Hello?"
Clad in goggles, gloves, and a grease-stained apron, Keira greeted them with an absent "hey..." without looking up from swirling various beakers of eco.
The ottsels padded over to her workbench. Tess shook her foot after stepping in a grease puddle.
Jak leaned against the leg of the worktable and looked up. "Progress?"
Daxter hopped up on a stool and snatched a glowing object from among the equipment. "Oooh, what's this doohickey?"
"That—" She took the pyramid of luminous material away from his eager orange paws. "—is a solid eco crystal. The Precursors use them to power some of their larger machines. The only problem is..." She squeezed the dropper, letting a drip of eco fall on the crystal. Instantly, it formed into a jagged prong of glowing eco. "...crystals tend to grow."
Jak took a step back. "Whoa!"
"I've wondered for a long time why the Precursors would bother with dark eco. It's dangerous and unpredictable. At first, I thought it was some kind of byproduct, toxic waste they sealed up to protect the planet. Now, though, I'm starting to think it actually serves a purpose." She took a dropper full of dark eco and applied some to the crystal. The moment the hazy purple fluid touched it, the entire structure crumbled and melted into blobs of various colors on the tray.
Cocking her hips, the female ottsel crossed her arms. "It breaks down the crystals."
"Exactly." Keira turned from her experiment and crossed her arms over her breasts. "I think the Metal Heads consumed enough of our planet's dark eco that it can't keep the rest from crystallizing. With all the Precursor technology buried in this planet, it was only a matter of time until some old eco crystal acted as a seed."
The greenish ottsel stroked his tiny beard. "How do we fix it?"
"That's the easy part: dark eco. The tough part is making a delivery device." She held up a map of the planet with a hole drawn straight to the center. "Given a few months and enough resources, I can construct a subterranean drill vehicle that can take us—"
"Umm..." Tess raised a paw. "I have a giant eco bomb."
Everyone turned to her. "What?!"
"I made it this morning." She shrugged. "Mostly from parts of one Baron Praxis ordered from Krew."
"And you knew how to rebuild it from the ground up?" Keira asked, looking impressed.
"Well, yeah!" Tess bounced a little. "Krew wasn't very hands-on when it came to actually building weapons. That's why he had me."
Jak's ears rose in shock. "You built the piercer bombs? The things that almost cracked open the Precursor Stone and blew up the planet?"
"Ya know, that makes a lotta sense." Daxter made little grabby gestures at his fellow ottsels. "Krew always did have weird fat baby-hands."
"I didn't know what they were for. I just worked from Krew's schematics." She shrugged. "It's basically a really big shaped charge for dark eco."
"Well, ya coulda made it harder to disarm them, since yours truly managed it in about five seconds."
"Actually, Daxxie, I left all the wires exposed because I wanted it to be able to be shut down. Battle plans change fast and a weapon's not much good if you can't control it." She patted her boyfriend's shoulder and shrugged. "Krew never really knew much about weapons; he just knew they meant power."
The mechanic crossed her arms and nodded. "I'll start buying up all the dark eco I can get my hands on."
"Uhh, Keira?" Jak looked at the floor and traced a toe along the concrete. "There's one more thing we should talk about."
She took off her gloves and goggles to set them on the table. "Is there something else about the eco situation I should know?"
He rubbed the scruff of his neck. "...More like my romantic situation."
Her jaw dropped open. "Oh."
"That's right: Jak's datin' me now." Daxter threw an arm around his new boyfriend's waist. "And you don't get ta be jealous, Little Miss String-Along."
Keira's chin dipped as her eyebrows rose. "Won't Tess be jealous?" Her eyes darted to the third Precursor.
The female ottsel opened her mouth to reply.
"Why would she be?" Daxter snatched her by the hip, hauling her into the embrace. "He's dating her too. Too bad, so sad."
Keira crouched in front of the trio. "I admit I'm surprised, but… I can't say I'm sad, exactly." Her expression shifted in thought. "So maybe it's for the best."
Still chilled by the sudden turn in conversation, Jak stammered a little.
She turned to him. "We're still friends, right?"
"Sure." He ran a paw over his blushing ears. "Of course."
"Oh, good." She smiled. "In that case, I've been meaning to ask: can I pet your little ears?"
Another fluffy little ottsel chapter! The unedited version (optional) can be found on adultfanfiction dot org.
Edits: Kohaku Nightfang
