When I Grow Up
By Necralis
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Necralis: Well, my peeps, it's been a while, ain't it? Welcome to my new chappie. I hope you enjoy it! There was a slight crisis when I lost my inspiration, but it all came back and I feel all better now…so, I guess I should shut up and let you read! Also, honestly, Kiz. I'm surprised at you. I thought you knew me better than that. As if I would do an ending like that.
Vader: She isn't THAT stupid. Almost, but not quite.
Necralis: Actually, you're lucky you're getting an ending at all, since you two were the ONLY ones who bothered to review. Oh well. I am supposed to be doing this for myself. I'll continue…if JUST for you.
DISCLAIMER I own Miala, her family, the plot, various gadgets and the techie (except for his looks. Anyone figured that out yet?). I do not Jak and Daxter, nor the world they live in nor the enemies they fight. JUST my OC, whom I hope is not a Mary Sue. Onwards with the show!
Chapter 7
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It was cold – very cold, lying against the steel roof of the Fortress Prison. The metal felt like it was cutting into his cheek, and the tips of his ears were going numb.
He hauled himself up to a sitting position, cursing occasionally as condensed water dripped from his goggles into his eyes. It was raining – drizzling, more like – the soft curtain of water muffling all sound, even the occasional burst of gunfire from the direction of the Slums.
Jak saw grey. Lots and lots of grey. He couldn't understand how an incredibly polluted city, bordered by a desert and protected by an electrical field could have fog, until he drew breath and suddenly found himself doubled over in a coughing fit.
It wasn't fog. It was smoke. Choking, smothering, carbon monoxide mixed with an overabundance of moisture from one of the city's rare bouts of rain. Of course, it might have just been the altitude – he was standing on the roof of the Fortress Prison. While not overly high up, it was elevated enough to rise above the relatively clean air near the ground. Miala was not coughing, but she had lived in the city all her life – long enough for the pollution to have wrecked her hair and messed with her system, but she had gotten used to the smoke.
Daxter didn't seem to need to breathe. He was too busy talking.
A screech from the ottsel knocked Jak out of his thoughts. Daxter and Miala were on the other side of the roof, arguing loudly about what they should do when they got inside. Miala wanted them to try and be as quiet as possible, Daxter was all for going in guns blazing. The fact that he now actually had a gun probably helped – Miala had given him her old Pinger, keeping for herself the Blaster she had stolen from the techie.
It was now slung on her back, in a holster she claimed she had found 'just lying around' – finding things lying around usually meant they were stolen, if Krew was anything to go by. Jak found he didn't care. It seemed to distract her from paranoia.
Jak carefully hooked a speaker into his ear, clipping it to the leather band on his goggles.
"Are these really necessary?" he asked Miala. The girl cut off in the middle of an obscenity and glared at him.
"Do you want to get separated again? You just talk into these and I'll hear you – no lengthy screwing about with coms, see?" Miala said as she hooked one around her own ear. "Don't worry, my brother used them all the time when we played capture the flag-"
Jak held up one hand, silencing her reminiscence. "Ok, Ok, I get the point, we'll use them."
Daxter crossed his arms and pouted angrily. "How come I don't get one?"
"Because I don't like you," Miala said, coolly.
"I've heard that before…" Daxter muttered angrily.
"Funny, that," Jak kicked at the steel roof of the prison and listened to its hollow clunk. "How'd you get in last time, Dax?"
The ottsel sniffed primly and snuck his nose in the air. He didn't say anything. Jak sighed, picked up the ottsel and set him on his shoulder armor. "Don't you dare start that now, Dax. We need you."
"Me? But she started it!" After glaring at Miala for a few seconds, Daxter leapt off Jak's shoulder and scampered the edge of the building. "Down there," he announced, pointing over the edge. "There's this little ledge and that leads to a vent…"
Miala wasn't listening. She was staring into the fog, her thoughts a million miles away…
"I'm coming. Keeping on, just like you said."
Jak, meanwhile, was wincing. "More vents." He shuddered. He hated small spaces.
"Yeah, more vents, you weenie. Don't worry though, after that we get to this weird little landing and there's a cover-"
Daxter stopped talking because Miala had glanced over the edge for a split second then simply walked off the side. A clatter of boots announced her landing on the ledge, after which she yanked away the vent cover and crawled in.
"Women," muttered Daxter, though he did not seem very upset. "No patience."
--
It was also cold in the Prison, but it was a grimy, dank sort of cold…there had not been any cleaners for two decades because of the risk that they could turn traitor, so for a while the work had been done by simple, automated robots, until they too were found to be too risky. Occasionally an unlucky KG was assigned to clean the Fortress as punishment duty. But mostly it just festered, becoming ever darker and dirtier, adding to the hell that the inmates were forced to endure. The lucky ones that did not get taken away for the Baron's 'humanitarian research'.
It was all steel, steel and wires and unseen energy humming behind the walls. Corridors all seemed to blur into one another, the only sight of other life – apart from the rats – being the occasional patrol or wild-eyed prisoner. The featureless walls were broken by equally featureless doors, which led into identical rooms, which led into bizarre medical facilities or odd, closed-in glass observation centers.
Closed-in was not an entirely appropriate description. Claustrophobic did it more justice.
A lone Krimzon Guard was standing on duty next to a doorway, his helmet resting next to his boots instead of on his head, where it was supposed to be worn at all times. The reason for this was immediately apparent as he rubbed one eye, yawned widely, and started cleaning out his ear.
He had a split second to regret his lack of headgear when the vent cover he was standing beneath fell out of its housing and klonged heavily on the top of his head, knocking him out cold.
Had the KG still been awake, he would have witnessed a green-haired girl vaulting out of the vent and landing in a crouch. As she straightened up and started dusting herself off, a small orange creature followed her, misjudging his leap and nearly impaling himself on the silver handgun he held in his paws.
The final member of the little band of rescuers had to clamber awkwardly through an opening hardly wide enough for his shoulders, before he tumbled out and landed unceremoniously on his rear. The fuzzy creature leapt to his feet and started posing like a Charlie's Angel, before he noticed the unfortunate sentry.
"Hey, Jak, for once the curse decided to pick on someone else!" he said, grinning his patented overly wide grin.
Jak leaned over, trying to see if the sentry would wake up soon. "It would be just our luck if he's one of those guys that has to report in every few minutes-"
Which was when the speaker in the helmet erupted into static, static distorting a voice which said, "All Alpha. Report in,"
"You had to say it, didn't you," Miala growled.
Jak resolved to find out which deity he'd pissed off.
"Uh…maybe they'll think he's just asleep," Daxter said hopefully. Then he glanced back down at the man on the floor and prodded him carefully. "Actually, he IS asleep."
"Don't be optimistic, Weasel-Boy," Miala sighed. "Optimism is just another way to be stupid."
The voice of the com was becoming louder and angrier.
Jak glared angrily at the Guard for a moment. Shooting him would leave more evidence that they were here…"I think we should go," he muttered.
They went.
--
Logic said that they should keep together in the hopes that, if and when they met some more Guards, they would be able to overpower them with greater numbers. Of course, logic also said that one cannot be thrown into prison for doing nothing, or tortured for no reason, and as for the whole time-travel thing, well...
Logic is such a liar.
Jak never gave much thought to logic because of the number of times it had proven it didn't like him. So when they came to a fork in the corridor, Jak decided to ignore the insistent little voice in his head (and also the one on his shoulder) that said they should stick together.
"I go right, you go left."
"And your reasoning behind this would be…"
"We'll be to cover more ground…and you don't wanna waste these speakers things, right?" Actually Jak wanted to get away from her, if just for a few sweet minutes…never mind that he'd promised to rescue her brother, he could do that without her, right?
His run on thoughts were yelling at him so loudly, he didn't register Miala's reply.
"Ah, what, sorry?"
"You heard me," she said pointedly.
Before Jak had time to point out that no, he hadn't heard, she was gone, bouncing down the corridor as though she was having the greatest fun in the world, manic determination in her eyes.
Jak thought he might have heard the echoes of a whisper… "I'm coming, bro…I'm coming to save you…"
"She scares me," Daxter muttered.
Jak grinned wickedly. "I thought that was my job."
Daxter rolled his eyes, the picture of exasperation incited by his friend's ignorance. "No. You don't scare me. You embarrass me."
"Oh yeah. Must remember that next time you get hold of all that liquor down at the Hip Hog-"
"Fuck you," Daxter said without malice as he bounded back up onto Jak's shoulder, setting his usual heroic pose firmly in place.
Jak almost laughed. Almost. "Please don't."
He started off down the corridor, ears pricked for any sound apart from the usual clangs as his boots came down. His eyes darted nervously from side to side, and occasionally he slipped into the shadows as a Guard patrol passed by. When this happened, Jak generally kept his hand on Daxter's mouth, as the ottsel had an unfortunate tendency to sneeze at completely inopportune times – like when they were inches away from being caught. The muffled protesting squeaks the ottsel made at these times were enough to make him twitch slightly.
He was about six minutes into this sneaking, jumping-at-shadows mentality when he realized he didn't know what he was looking for.
It took a little while to find a door that wasn't locked, and then a little while longer to get Daxter to stop posing long enough to find a decent hiding place. Crouching behind a large stack of ammo crates, it took a moment's experimentation with the earpiece before it let out an ear-splitting squeal of feedback, followed by a few moments of swearing – Miala was at the other end.
"Oh sh- for Mar's sake, Jak, warn me before you do that again!"
Daxter leapt down from Jak's shoulder armor again and started aiming at non-existent enemies.
"Since you seem to be the leader of this little operation-" Jak let sarcasm creep into his voice for Miala's benefit, "-what are we supposed to be looking for? How do you plan to get this guy out? And, while we're at it, how the hell are supposed to find him in the first place?"
Jak could almost hear the wheels grinding in the girl's brain as she stopped cursing for a moment and thought. He almost groaned aloud. She didn't even think about the plan before getting in here? I'm so walking into a deathtrap-
'Not planning? Certain death? Hot temper? Sounds like someone we know, eh, Errand Boy?' said a snide little voice in his head.
"Oh, be quiet," he muttered aloud without thinking, causing Daxter to stare at him.
"We need to find a computer terminal. There's bound to be a list of prisoners and stuff – you know, a log?" Miala told them, her voice weaving its way past the static that clouded the transmission.
"Roger that. Anything else?"
Miala wasted another few seconds on silence. "Try to keep quiet. No gunfire unless it's absolutely necessary. You hear that, Jak?"
Jak didn't hear it because her voice was drowned out by an ear-shattering pop – the unmistakable sound of a Pinger going off.
Jak glanced at Daxter. The ottsel was trying to look innocent – a losing proposition, considering the smoke rising from the hole near his feet. Another stream of smoke was rising from the barrel of the Pinger Miala had given him, which was pointed directly at the hole.
If glares had been bullets, there would have been an identical crater in the middle of Daxter's head.
He said, "Whoops."
"Did I just hear what I think I heard?"
"If you mean the sound of Daxter giving away our position to every single KG in this whole bitch of a facility, then yes, Miala, you just heard what you think you heard," Jak growled, watching Daxter grin sheepishly, and feeling a sudden urge to rip that grin off his face with his bare hands. "What does your plan say to do when this happens?"
"I think-" she stopped talking for a moment and swore as gunfire and shouts sounded in the background. "I think this is where stealth goes to hell-"
There was a final burst of static, then the com went silent.
--
I hate ottsels. I hate ottsels. I hate ottsels.
Miala repeated the words in her head as though they were a mantra. They ran round and round in her head as she pounded down the corridor, casting aside the broken speaker that had been hooked into her ear, alarms shrieking her presence to the Guards, and anyone else within a five-mile radius. Bullets whistled by her ears and shouts echoed up the corridor behind her – angry yells, targeting her.
Pursuing her.
She sprinted through the labyrinthine corridors, darting left and right at random, hoping to lose her pursuers or find some kind of hiding place – but the curse had decided to pick on her today, and instead she ran straight into a patrol.
I hate ottsels. I hate ottsels. I hate ottsels.
She kept repeating them as she skidded around a corner and came face to face with seven KG. They looked none-too-pleased to see her.
In one swift motion she dived to the floor, rolled and came up firing, her shots bouncing off walls or pinging into nothingness or all too rarely connecting with flesh, burning a sizzling hole and dropping the Guard she'd hit. Two of them went down this way, their dying screams gurgling into static as they fell.
I hate ottsels.
The five remaining KG kept coming, dodging behind stacks of equipment with the speed their training brought, moving with ease in spite of their heavy armor. Unfortunately for them, it offered little protection against the immensely more powerful shots of her stolen Blaster. Recoil was problem, another reason why her shots had a hard time finding their marks – she was too inexperienced with two-handed weapons for her to compensate properly. But it was still an improvement. Her old Pinger's shots would simply have rebounded away.
Still it was not enough to earn her an advantage – she was losing ground, and they were all firing now, the bullets sizzling past her ears. Letting forth a constant stream of obscenities as the gun ran dry, she ducked, reloaded the weapon and kept blasting away as fast as the trigger mechanism would allow.
Not enough…as she ducked behind a flash-ridden console to reload, an idea came to her…flicking a switch on the whip-cord attachment on the Blaster, she suddenly leapt out of hiding and shouted, "Jak! There you are! Thank Mar!"
The Guards turned, panicking, terrified that the most wild of bar stories had come true…but there was nothing there.
Dumbasses, she thought, quietly.
When they hurriedly looked back at the girl, she had vanished. They gave a shout of surprise and started searching fruitlessly amongst the crates.
Miala clung to the metal support beam she'd managed to snatch when the whipcord had snagged the ceiling, and prayed. All they had to do was look up…a single shot could bring her down, far enough to break bones if they didn't shoot her as she fell… But even more feverishly, she repeated the mantra that was going through her head since she walked in here…
I hate ottsels. I hate ottsels. I hate ottsels.
--
When Torn had first told them the meaning of the word fubar, Jak had snorted and Daxter has laughed so hard he'd become dehydrated (or at least, he'd said he'd been dehydrated – Jak wasn't convinced he hadn't been trying to milk sympathy from Tess). It was actually a Krimzon Guard term for a situation, one so advanced it required the use of profanity to describe it properly.
What it stood for: Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.
Five minutes.
That was how long it took for the plan to get fubar.
Fighting for his life with an ottsel screaming in his ear, Jak suddenly didn't find it very funny.
"WILL YOU CUT IT OUT?!" he yelled at Daxter, who completely ignored him, possibly because he couldn't hear him over the ear-splitting yelps he was making every time a bullet came within five feet. Jak hurled himself forward, tackling a Guard off his feet, making Daxter scream all the louder and the other Guards grunt as they cleared his path. After a moment of very confused fighting, the KG was on the floor with his neck broken and Jak was up and firing, sending off each shot with an appropriate curse.
"We're gonna die, we're so gonna die…" Daxter's claws were beginning to dig into his armor.
"Dax, you aren't helping…"
Daxter actually seemed to hear him this time and yelled, "What the hell am I supposed to do?"
No more energy for speech…Jak risked waving his Blaster in front of the ottsel's nose, on whom the light suddenly dawned. Raising the Pinger that had caused all the trouble in the first place, he start firing…
"We're still gonna die, you know," he pointed out.
"Pessimist," Jak tried to say, but cut himself off with a shout as fiery pain blossomed through his shoulder and the world suddenly flickered like a dying light bulb. Trying to ignore the pain or at least prevent himself from swatting the ottsel off his shoulder before he busted an eardrum, he flicked his gun to Vulcan and sent a deadly barrage hurtling towards the Guards.
That girl had better be fucking grateful for this… hissing through his teeth, Jak brought his gun-barrel crashing down onto the helmet of a KG…the man collapsed without even a shout, tripping him up as he fumbled for a new clip…
Jak bared his teeth. Better be real grateful…
- -
Miala wasn't afraid of heights, or at least, she could stand on the top bough of a hundred meter tree in Haven Forest without breaking a sweat. So why was it, that when she was only seven or eight feet above the ground, supported by a metal beam much sturdier than a tree branch, that she could barely move her limbs, much less scramble to safety? Fear was freezing her body and mind – thought had slowed to a trickle. She would not have been able at move at all had adrenaline not saturated her system, due to the multitude of "hostiles" (as they were calling her) beneath.
It must be something to do with the situation, she thought sluggishly as she inched along the beam; hand over hand, hanging upside down like a sloth. It was all she could do to keep moving and not dissolve into a shrieking mess.
Risking a glance that caused savage pain to attack the muscles in her neck, she counted thirteen…fifteen Guards milling around below her…they were confused and angry, speculating amongst themselves where that weird girl with the green hair and funny eyes had gone and worried about the lack of replies to their queries from the higher-ups. All would have been well for her, if those fifteen KG had not been grouped right in front of a door that was conveniently labeled "Operations Center". Cords and wires that were set in the roof (readily visible from her position) ran into it…something in there needed a lot of juice, something important…
Something like a computer containing prisoners' records?
It was possible…if she didn't screw up at all…she had the element of surprise after all…even if numbers were considerably stacked against her…no one ever expected an attack from above…right?
She tried to bolster her courage and realized that she had none.
Right?
Without thought, without even the faintest ripple of consciousness to note that she had made the decision, she simply gave in to the frantic screams of her aching limbs and let go…dazed, yet somehow deeply happy she had done it, she tumbled in mid-air and landed, feeling oddly jelly-like. Determination rose and sent strength into her limbs, and she smiled in satisfaction.
I'm coming to get you, Myka. Just hold on…Fire, spin, kick, fire again…nothing could stop her, she would find her brother, find him and save him and see him again. That was the most important thing, the noises of the fight fading into insignificance…she ignored screams and cries of pain, ignored gunshots and scuffles and the clangs of armor against the floor when the Guards fell…
But she could not ignore the pain.
Pain…she suddenly came back to total awareness with a jolt, the sounds and sensations crashing in on her like cold water…suddenly her knees were buckling, and she placed her hand against her side and pulled it away…
There was blood on her hands…her blood. She had been shot without even noticing it.
'What?' she thought in a detached sort of way.
Then the ground came rushing up to meet her and she didn't think anything at all.
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BWA HA HA HA HAAAA! CLIFFIE! I waited all this time to bring you a cliffhanger! I am SOO evil.
Vader: And insane.
Necralis: Yep! Now! I won't bother you with my distracting babble. Review and I will update quicker! TTFN!