A/N: Woo, nice long chapter for your reading pleasure, and the beginning of Part II!  I have been waiting for this chapter since I first started this story, for both the Precursor history that I made up and the other thing at the end which I won't spoil for you.  I'm so excited!  I'll do my best to get the next chapter out soon, since on the 19th I am moving off to college and it'll be a while before I can get back to something approaching a normal routine. crosses fingers  But I shall try!  Oh, and if you don't like my explanation of the Precursors, well… tough! cackles madly

Disclaimer: I don't own this.

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Daxter had expected something, some test of his loyalty, anything after that creepy feeling and oath that his heart had sworn outside.

There was nothing, not a single thing whatsoever.

He felt rather foolish, standing there stupidly a few paces inside the doorway.  His eyes opened, his fists unclenched, and he continued to walk, grinning at himself.  The halls were now clearly defined, though there still was only a single way to go.  And so he walked on and on as the tunnel wound its way through the earth, part of him still expecting a surprise attack or… something.  But there was nothing but the sound of his breathing and the soft patter of his feet.

It was all rather anticlimactic.

Daxter's stomach was just starting to complain about lack of food when he found another, much smaller set of doors, these ones fully intact.  When he placed his hands on the metal to open them, there was a whirring, the seal pulled back, and they opened.

It looked like Daxter had just stepped into a junkyard.  Stuff was piled everywhere in huge stacks, some of which actually reached up to the ceiling, and Daxter had no idea whatsoever what all of it even was.  There seemed to be some things that served as furniture and there were mounds of what appeared to be very old clothes; other things didn't seem to have such a clear purpose, such as the shining round disks with writing on them that the ottsel couldn't even begin to decipher and the big, black boxes with dark glass in the front and cords sticking out of them.  He scrambled over and around the piles, heading for the center of the room in the hopes that there he could make some sense of the place.

It didn't help in the slightest.  In fact, there was no center of the room- it was taken up by the largest pile of junk in existence.  At a loss, he slowly threaded and clambered his way to the back of the cave.  There, at least, there was finally some empty space.  Two tunnels, etched in elaborate rune patterns, led off of the junk room.  On a random whim, Daxter chose the left path.  It was smooth and well lit, and it took Daxter only a few moments to reach the end.  Another sealed door awaited him, though much smaller than even the previous two, large enough to only emit one normally sized person through at a time.  He opened it.

Expecting the still, dead air that had awaited him behind the first airlock, Daxter choked and gagged as moldy air that smelled like decay assaulted his sensible nostrils.

It was an old library- at least what remained of an ancient library, anyway.  It wasn't nearly as large as the previous room, made smaller by the mass of bookshelves and desks which lined the room.  Water dripped down on a bunch of the bookcases from a crack in the stone ceiling, which made the wood shelving warp and many of the books rot, creating the stench that had assailed him as he entered the room.  There were hundreds of books, in various states of decay, scattered all about the room.  The library had obviously been behind the airlock to preserve the precious volumes, though by the looks of it, that goal had obviously failed years ago.  However, the rot had spread even to those books not in the water, and few of them remained in any sort of decent order.  He selected a book at random and pulled it off the shelf, eeping as it all but disintegrated in his hands.

Daxter wandered about the library for a while, looking at some books and ignoring others.  The extreme majority of the books were in a number of languages, none of which Daxter could even begin to understand, and after looking at the first few, full of their sharp and prickly symbols, he set about searching for one in his own language.  There was so much in all the books that he couldn't read, and he couldn't escape the feeling that the information that he needed to help Jak was contained within them.  But there just had to be something that he could understand that would clue him in to the solution that he so desperately sought.

The little ottsel finally found a book that he could read at the very top of one of the nearly floor-to-ceiling shelves.  Sighing, he carefully scaled the bookcase, praying that it wouldn't break underneath him.  His orange fingers carefully closed around the bound volume and he slowly drew it from its spot, hanging by one hand from the ledge above while his feet stretched down to the shelf below.  He had it almost out, and it hovered on the edge of the wood for an instant as Daxter held his breath. 

Then it fell.

The heavy volume slid from the shelf and sped towards the ground, Daxter in tow, as he refused to let go of the book.  He turned in the air to try to protect it from the inevitable impact with the packed dirt floor.  His back struck the ground and the book hit him in the stomach, knocking the air from his lungs.  He lay there for a moment, trying to catch his breath and wiggling various body parts to ensure that they weren't broken.  The instant he could, he swore at the top of his lungs for a while, sorely tempted to throw the thing across the room.  Eventually deciding against it, though not until he had given it a hearty glare, Daxter sat up and gingerly opened the cover.

He turned the pages with care, not wanting one of the few legible things in the room to be ruined by his carelessness.  He took a deep breath, praying to the Precursors in whose temple he sat, and began to read.

Before I begin, I suppose I ought to explain myself.  To do that however, I kind of have to explain what had happened, which is my goal in writing this in the first place, so bear with me, for it will be confusing.

For the record, my name is Sarra Jessica Mar, Third Generation since the War, and one of the members of the Mar Shelter.

Our world… has changed.  Oh, how can I explain what it was like when I never even saw it for myself?  But I have to try.  All of the other books that have been saved were in the Old Scripts, and, though our dialects have not changed, our writing has.  Luckily, my family is one of those who believe the Old Scripts should not be lost, and I have been taught at least the Script of my language.  Fewer and fewer people can say the same nowadays, and the Old Scripts are rapidly dying out, as are any of the Old Tongues other than English, the one which I speak.  I guess… I guess that when the Survivors realized that things would never again be the same, they wanted to change everything that they could so that it wouldn't be a constant reminder of what we lost, and our written language was first to go.  Now it's the mix of odd squiggles and dots that I'm writing in now, universal for all the Shelters- at least, it was until communication was cut off.  "The past ought to stay in the past," the Survivors said, and most agree.  The Survivors refused to teach their children the Old Script, and those in turn refused to teach their children, which never taught my generation, and so it will continue, and I doubt that things will change any time soon.  I'm lucky that I'm a Mar, since then I get to learn about the world Before, but I still wish that the Survivors hadn't been so stubborn.  It's gotten to the point where speaking of the Old World is a bad as screaming a curse at the top of your lungs, and that's not how it should be.

Ah, yes.  The War.  From the books that were salvaged and the many journals that were written during and right after the war by the Survivors, I have been able to piece together at least something of a picture of what life must have been like before the War, but I do not truly know.  The last survivor finally died two years ago, which is what motivated me to translate as much of the Old World stuff as possible before it became lost forever.  It was a time of great advancement and technology.  Man had set foot on the moon and peered down into the depths of the seas.  Tens of billions of people lived and died on the surface of the planet called Earth.  It was like any other civilization with times of peace and times of war; disease and starvation killed off many of the poor while the rich thrived in the powerful countries of the world.  I know that I do not do it justice with my description, but how do I explain it?  Perhaps you will gain a better understanding of it as you read the personal accounts that I intend to transcribe.  But this volume is devoted to history, and so I must continue.  After a brief description of the events of the past years, I will launch into more detail.  To do that, however, at least a bit of the happenings must be understood…

The countries of Earth had great power and even greater weapons, weapons which could destroy the entire world.  Weapons which did.  Some, predicting the inevitable outcome of a worldwide war, the third and most dangerous of its kind with the new advances in warfare, built a series of underground shelters- not many, no more than thirty in total, scattered all around the world, though the largest concentration of them were on the North American and European continents, where there was money enough to do so.  The shelters were stocked with enough food and water to last the occupants until a number of years after the end of the war.  Only a select few were to be let into the havens, which were kept secret from even the military and governments of the world.  Certain people, such as scientists, doctors, writers, teachers, cinema and sports stars, and musicians, people who held exemplary jobs and excelled at them, would be allowed in, in the hopes that their genes would be good enough to produce above-average children to repopulate the world.  No one expected the repercussions of the War to last as long, or be so bad, as they did and were… and are.

But as the humans began destroying themselves, there was a leak in the secret shelter network and people caught on to the locations of every single shelter.  There was a rush to get to "safety" as the first bombs began to fall, and the shelters were flooded with panicked people beyond original capacity before the doors were finally closed, and even then, people were attacking the doors to the havens with frightening intensity.  But the doors, designed to withstand nuclear attack and people alike, prevailed through both.

The nuclear weapons destroyed the surface world.  Half a million made it to the shelters underground.  The rest, totaling somewhere around sixty-four billion people, died.  The world above was swept over by the nuclear winter that the weapons created, and all animal and plant life all but ceased to exist for a time.  At the same time, the shelters were swept by sickness, for though there was enough water from underground springs, there were too many people in the shelters and disease spread like a wildfire.  Nearly half of those that survived the nuclear holocaust died, and eight shelters were completely wiped out.

Starvation was also a problem.  Even with all of the deaths from disease, which not a single shelter went without, there were still more people than there were rations.  Thousands more died from hunger, and the bodies only added to the epidemics.  Some shelters died out entirely; a few, such as ours, found alternate means of sustenance.

And then they came.  Part animal and part metal bests, they were given the name of "Metalheads".  Creatures with a taste for human flesh, they appeared out of nowhere and headed straight for the only place where they could find it: the shelters.  If they could get people on the surface they did, but the few left above were poisoned by the radiation and were mutating, dying faster than they could be eaten.  And so the Metalheads clustered together and found ways to enter into the shelters, where they killed the helpless inhabitants with ease- and the blood only made them hunger for more.

We don't know, even now, where they came from.  The best guess is that they had somehow been made as a weapon and broke or set loose… or something.  All we know is that we traded one terror for another.  They had only a few forms at first: they were distinctively catlike and doglike.  But as time went on, we began to see more and more, from underwater Metalheads to flying ones.  However, there was one common link- they all resembled creatures from our world, with only very small differences.  It is highly doubtful that they developed on their own.  The fact remains that they are mutating even faster than we are, and no Metalhead species is the same as the one before.  In that way, I suppose, the Old World lives on; but given the choice, everyone alive today would take the opposite.  We fight them as best we can, but our ammunition supply, something that had not been stocked heavily, ran out years ago, and we must deal with what's within our shelters before dealing with what's without.  Due to the near constant attacks, communication has stopped between the Shelters of late, and we have had no updates for months.

There is still so much that we don't know about the underground world that we are forced to inhabit.  Some time after the lack of rations became a serious problem, search parties were sent out into the underground tunnels leading off of the Mar Shelter.  Some walls were dug through, other tunnels excavated, and some simply wandered down; but process was slow for some time.  And then, by some miracle of fate, we found the mushrooms.  Again, we don't know where the mushrooms came from or how on earth they managed to survive in the bowels of the earth, but they were the only food we had, and so we ate them happily.  Our colony thrived for a time.

And then we began to change.  It was slow at first, little things: our eyesight improved and we were able to see in the dark more easily, our hearing sharpened.  Then our physical bodies began to alter bit by bit, most predominantly the ears, which, after we went through some time of eating the mushrooms, began to develop a soft taper, almost like elf ears.  It was an oddity, nothing more- until the first few newborns were born with longer, pointed ears.  Because we could see no harm in it, we did nothing to stop it, though there was a suggestion to cut the babies' ears just after birth.  But no one ever got around to it, and so it gradually became accepted.  I myself was one of the children born with pointed ears, and they are much longer than they ought to be, extending out off of my head a ways.  I personally like it, and many others of my generation have been piercing their ears up the yin-yang.  Our lifespans also changed, lengthening quite considerably and preserving youth for far longer than had ever been thought possible.  It is odd that the world reached one if its dreams, prolonged youth and beauty, when the deaths of so many people and the destruction of the world still weighed so heavily on the Survivors' minds.  Anyway, the lengthening of the lifespans was nice, but it added to the problem of overpopulation, though the Metalheads were and are doing their best to assist us with that  However, we have not yet found any long-lasting effects, and it very well may be that we end up randomly croaking one day from some hidden effect of the mushrooms.

Along with the mushrooms came the discovery of the Eco.  It's hard to describe what it is; Eco is just another thing that we simply do not know about and have no way to dissect its secrets.  Someone called it "Eco" one day and the name simply stuck, and it's now a large part of our lives.  Blue Eco was the first to be found, and its odd effects are still a mystery.  If you were to dip your and in it, your whole body would seem to accelerate, and people would have had no problem winning the Olympics if they had had it before the War.  Its white-blue colour is the perfect form of light for us, since our stocks of wood and other such fuels ran out long ago.  Pools of it are left around in various places to light our paths, and it does sink into the ground some, so that when it's removed, the ground glows with its residue for some time.  As for the Green Eco, we have no clue as of yet what it does, but I'm sure that time will tell.  It also gives off light, but not nearly as much as the Blue Eco does.

Incredibly, politics has not been too much of an issue in our Shelter, surprising since it was such a huge point in the Old World.  Here, at least, people have accepted that the Mar family, who were pivotal in establishing this Shelter in the first place, are running things as well as can be expected.  Perhaps, even after all these years, the people are still too much in shock to challenge my family, I don't know.  But at least in this Shelter, the people are at peace with one another…

Hours later, Daxter closed the last book in his language and rubbed his gloved hands over his head, mind reeling with all the information that he had just stuffed into it.  He had poured through everything that he could read, and had learned more about the Precursors than he had ever dreamed he would know- how they lived, the eventual split in the Mar colony, one of only three surviving Shelters, where many decided to risk it above ground, such was their longing to see the sun again, the separation that created the distinction between the Precursors and his own race, the long and bloody struggle against the Metalheads, everything except what he needed.  He had been particularly excited when he found information about Eco, but it barely mentioned Dark Eco other than to say that it was extremely deadly and not a single word was breathed about White Eco.  Daxter had a stinking suspicion that what he sought was in one of the foreign, not to mention ruined, books that sat on the molding shelves.

Thoroughly disgusted, he left the library and headed for the opposite tunnel that led off of the junk room.  It wound even farther underground, and Daxter spent quite some time crawling over and around stalagmites that had been forming in the rough, lightless tunnel.  Eventually he spotted a blue glow from ahead, and he slowly made his way towards it, gaining speed as there was more and more light by which to see.  The ottsel burst into the cavern at the tunnel's end and stopped dead, mouth hanging open and eyes bulging.

He stood on a narrow stone ledge overlooking a vast lake of Blue Eco, in such quantities and so bright that it hurt his eyes to look down at it.  The path ahead became a narrow bridge that stretched out across the sea and led to another dark tunnel.  Still marveling at the fortune in Eco that shimmered below him, Daxter walked over and into the next corridor.  This one didn't last as long as the previous one had, and the next glow, decidedly greenish in colour.  This time the large cavern was full of Green Eco, complete with a bridge leading on.

He kept going, coming across lakes of Yellow Eco, then Red.  By the time he reached the Dark Eco, Daxter was positively flying, despite the looming prospect of falling into the rippling darkness below him.

There was only one type of Eco left.

Daxter skidded to a halt as he finally entered the last area, eyes riveted on the prize that stood innocently at the back of the room on a high ledge.  The entire room was bathed in its slivery glow, so bright in the darkness that it made Daxter's eyes water.

A single, small jar of White Eco.

Daxter took a step forward, then another, breathless with hope.  This was it!  This was what would save Jak, rid him of his demon forever, finally set him free.  It wasn't much, but it was so strong, it was enough.  It HAD to be enough.

And then came the earthquake, a tremor so strong and sudden that it threw Daxter from his feet, disorienting him for a moment.  A rattling noise, the sound of glass wobbling over stone, made him look up in horror.

The jar of Eco lay balanced precariously on its side at the edge of its shelf, ready to fall.  With a cry, Daxter flung himself up off the ground and onto his feet.

Then it fell.  Daxter hurled his small body at hit, thinking of nothing but the precious White Eco that was streaking to the ground like a falling star.  The entire world seemed to slow down as he dove for it…

And missed.

He fell back to the ground as the jar smashed down next to him, glass shattering and Eco dousing him from head to furry foot.  The little ottsel felt a moment of crippling despair, all hope of saving Jak shattering before his eyes just as the glass did.

And then came the true pain.

It was like his dream, only a thousand times worse.  His skin burned, his bones ached, his blood boiled in his veins.  A primordial scream tore itself from his throat as his small muscles stretched and tore and bones broke from one another and reformed themselves.  Daxter's mind blanked out, completely in shock from the searing pain that swamped him and his eyes rolled up into his head until only the whites were showing.  His hands ached as they rippled and expanded beneath his worn leather gloves and the blood circulation to his fingers was completely cut off until the gloves burst at their seams; his goggles crushed his head until they slipped off over his rapidly lengthening hair.  The pain escalated and his screams lengthened until he couldn't even pause to take a breath as his skin stretched to breaking point over bones and then ripped, sending fur and blood flying through the air as he thrashed about on the ground.  And through it all, his mind refused to completely lose consciousness.

Eventually the pain receded, leaving him with only an echo in his mind that his nerves refused to forget.  After a time his eyes slowly opened, and he gazed around blearily.  There was still some White Eco around him, though it had gone dark and died where it had come in contact with his blood.

Blood?

He levered himself up onto his elbows, trying to pierce through the pain cloud that still remained in his mind to remember what had gone on.  And only then did he catch sight of himself.

The shock abruptly sent him spiraling down into the darkness that was so fondly calling his name.

He was human.