Valentine toggled up a map to see what the best way would be to get to her uncle's old place. All over the map piles of rubble were shown, along with the most recent enemy activity. For as far as she could see there wasn't a route out there that would take them less than days to get by.
"Ugh, this is horrible! What happened to decent roads?"
"Only a war." Keira said in an attempt at a joke. When Valentine didn't react the way she should at a joke the woman continued.
"Anyway, it's not that big of a disaster. HQ has been designing some underground roads for the time being, so we don't have to clear the rubble after every attack. Also the rubble helps keep the smaller robots away from here, which means we have to spend less resources on keeping them out."
Valentine puffed up her cheeks, trying to figure out how Keira was handling the monitor as the new underground roads popped up. Things had continued to develop while she was out in the desert and though she didn't like to admit it she was really having trouble keeping up with this piece of machinery. Not to mention the new infrastructure was pretty impressive.
"Wow, you and Jared designed all of this?"
"Well, Jared did most of the work. Like I said, I mostly make sure the traffic grids are placed in a way that's convenient and effective. Maybe when Spargus finds the time we could come over and install grids there?"
Valentine shook her head. "Won't work. All of the sand would clog up the Zoomer engines, which is why we use the Leapers and the buggy cars. Damos showed me some footage from way back, when they tried to implement the Zoomers like in Haven. I never saw something blow up so fast as that thing."
"Hmm… well, I'll upload this map to your communicator. You should be able to make it to the station in less than twenty minutes." Keira promised, starting the download as she spoke. It was silent for a moment between the two women.
Valentine couldn't believe that they were actually having a polite conversation without dirty looks. Like… wow.
"Say… take care of Jak, okay? He doesn't look like it, and he'll never admit it, but he really does need someone who makes sure he doesn't walk right into his own death." Keira finally said, scratching the back of her head as she did so.
Slightly taken aback Valentine looked back at Jak, who had just accepted a backpack from Ashelin, who took the opportunity to lecture him on proper gun usage. "I will. And yeah, he does need someone to watch his back. I mean, Jak just runs into any kind of situation while thinking he'll come out just fine."
Keira nodded at those words. "Tell me about it. Every time there was something going on back in Sandover he was the first one to take a closer look, Daxter right behind him. It was hell."
The two women laughed shyly, before Valentine decided to say goodbye. That moment was perhaps more awkward than anything that had preceded it, thanks to neither of them knowing exactly how they were going supposed to part now. An uneasy wave and an almost hug later Valentine gathered her two guys and they were riding down the elevator, on their way to the station.
"This war has been interesting up until now." She finally stated, massaging her temples. Apart from her and Keira not being after each others guts anymore, there was still the whole Jak equals Mar issue. She didn't think her brain would ever be able to survive that.
Jak nodded, getting out of the elevator at the ground floor. "Tell me about it. Things have been one surprise after the other. And we still should have captured Veger or something."
"Yeah, screw public opinion. I mean, they're the ones that let us be kicked out of the city in the first place, so why should we care about what they think? And let's be honest, who in their right mind would think Veger is one of the good guys." Daxter chimed in from his usual spot on Jak's shoulder.
Valentine kept a close eye on their route to be followed on her communicator, the pathway lit up by bright lamps at the sides. "Because Ashelin still has to have a city left after all of this is over. And the monks seem to think Veger is a good guy."
Or at least they thought so up until recently. She had known that the monks believed the Death Star or whatever they called it was bad news. She just hadn't known that it was 'end of the world, run for your life' bad news.
Seem was probably safe. Probably. The monk had her own brand of smarts and a good dose of common sense to boot if you could look past the religious bit. But the Precursors were welcome to make sure one of their most devout followers were safe if Valentine was concerned.
"You're thinking too much again." Jak told her, giving her a soft nudge with his elbow.
"Am not. And how would you be able to tell?" she replied, crossing her arms over one another. The place was rather chilly.
"You always have this look on your face like you're going to kill the next person that talks to you on your face when you're thinking." Daxter pointed out with a big grin. Which was not the smartest thing to do if there had been a possibility she might actually go through with her murderous intentions.
Jak coughed. "I was just going to say something about the way you scrunch your nose when you're thinking."
That made her smile. She rewarded Jak with a kiss on the cheek, ignoring Daxter's offhand comments. They entered one of the elevators where she stuffed her hands in her pockets. "Well, who wouldn't be thinking everything over in these circumstances?"
"Me." Daxter answered.
"I'm not so sure that's a compliment to yourself, Dax." Jak said, shaking his head at his best friend.
"That depends entirely on where you're standing. And I've always been a big fan of the ignorance is bliss point of view." Daxter clarified at once, looking pleased with himself for that to boot.
The two guys kept jabbering between themselves which suited Valentine fine for the moment. She liked to brood things over and that was hard when people were constantly asking you what you were doing. All too soon they reached Uncle Vin's old station, where the doors refused to open no matter how many four-letter words Daxter unleashed upon them.
"I've generally found technology never that impressed with those parts of anatomy." She told Daxter, who called the door a 'twit' just for safe measure. She looked at the small number pad next to the door, thinking about what her uncle would have used as a password. She ruled out birthdays and the like immediately. He had been the first to really hammer it into her head that if you wanted your stuff hacked that was just the type of password you needed.
The same went for any important date in the city history, combinations of names of people her uncle liked and his favorite equations.
"Val, you okay?" Jak asked her when she didn't start typing in numbers right away.
"I'm fine. I'm just trying to think like uncle." Which wasn't that easy. She had never quite progressed that far on the path to general paranoia as that good man had. Maybe a little, considering her home security system at the time.
Daxter snorted when he head that. "You do not want to be spending any time in Vin's old brain. He was a special brand of crazy."
She flipped the rodent on the nose for that comment as she kept mentally raffling off numbers that might have been special to her uncle. Finally she tried the day she had escaped the Baron, but that didn't pull through. Nor any of the other days she could remember doing anything special. Which meant that she was looking at things the whole wrong way.
Who else had been important for her uncle? He hadn't had a lover as far as she knew off. The only person he had ever felt completely comfortable with that she knew of had been her mother.
Knowing better she entered her mothers birth date, coming up with the expected ACCESS DENIED. What would have been a day that had been engraved in her uncle's memory for the rest of his life, but would have also been a date few other people would ever consider to be important?
A sudden lump in her throat formed as she dialed in the date her mother had died. ACCESS GRANTED flashed over the screen, momentarily blurred by tears. He had always said she looked like her mother, even though she thought more like her father. She wiped her eyes with a sleeve. "Dammit."
Jak was by her side in less than a heartbeat as she walked inside. "Val, you sure you're okay?"
"I'm fine. Just that… uncle was such a huge sap. I wish I could have said goodbye better than I did back then." She said, taking deep breaths so she wouldn't burst out in tears there and then. Her jaw quivered, betraying how she felt held her about the waist in case she needed support.
Daxter started talking with his usual tact. "Well, maybe it's for the best you didn't open that can of worms. Let's be honest here, if I didn't know you better I'd say cray cray ran in the family and-"
"Watch the way you're talking to my niece there!" Vin's voice suddenly reverberated through the room, a holograph of his face appearing in the air. The head floated back and forth, before flying closer to Daxter.
"YIKES!" the orange creature cried out, running for cover behind Jak's legs.
"Vin!"
"Uncle Vin!"
Vin's head retreated a bit, looking around at both of the heroes who seemed to be very happy to be seeing him back. "Valentine! Oh, I never thought I was going to be seeing you again! You're looking wonderful my girl. Did you get a bit of a tan while you were gone?"
"Uncle! You're… well… how are you… what?" Valentine stammered, not able to keep up with the way things were evolving at the moment. Family members didn't exactly raise themselves up from the dead every day of the year.
"Why are you still alive?" Jak blurted out, feeling just as confused. Daxter was still hiding behind his friend, not sure if he wanted to get more involved in this or not.
The holograph spun in the air for a moment, flickering in and out of existence. "Well, it's a funny story really. Right before the Metal Heads got into the station I managed to fuse my brain with the Eco pool in the station. Oh, life has been a blast since then. I'm never bored, and those monsters can't get me in here. Can they?"
Valentine thought back about how poorly Ma'al and Meta responded to technology that wasn't a weapon. "I think you're safe in there. But… I still don't get it."
"Oh, I got the idea from you. You injected yourself with the Metal DNA, and of course you and Jak are both fused on a basic level with the Eco. So I thought, what if that kind of thing runs in the family? I was looking into the research for a while, though the invasion really did speed things up for me." Vin explained, zooming this way and that in the room.
"Why didn't you tell anyone you were still alive?" Jak asked, following the floating head.
"Oh, why would I want to do that? I mean, with Valentine gone I didn't have any family left around here. And people were already having trouble rebuilding the city, it's not like they needed to be worrying about me on top of that." Vin said, his head zooming closer to Valentine.
"I'm happy you're doing okay, uncle." She said, smiling at the holograph. Sure, it was weird and unconventional, but she had accepted stranger things in the past week.
"I'm doing way better than okay. But what are you guys doing in here? I never expected anyone to come back in here, so I was really surprised when someone cracked the code." The head said, floating around the three to take a good look at them.
"We need to get into that floating war factory. Only problem is, it's protected by some cypher." Jak explained, moving closer to Valentine.
Vin's head nodded in the air, a picture flaring up in the air next to him. Closer inspection revealed large red vehicles moving back and forth. "Oh, I know all about that place. I have live footage from all over the city so there's no way anything can escape my attention. But why would you want to go up a dangerous place like that?"
"To put a stop to those robots it keeps spitting out every day. Ashelin told us thing are getting worse by the day and the Freedom fighters could really use a break. I don't suppose you would be able to just disable the bots the moment they land?" Valentine explained, taking a seat next to the dusty dashboard.
The holograph her uncle used disappeared to reemerge next to her, shaking wildly in the air. "Absolutely negatory. That floating factory doesn't have any connection points to the main land and we both know I need some sort of relay point if I want to hack them. The robots don't even have a communication station for anything other than the factory, and I've checked. I thought it would be fun to ride one of those things around for a bit, but alas."
"That means we still need to get up there, right?" Jak asked just to be sure. He could recognize bad news no matter what form it was delivered in.
"Completely correct. The way things are now, I couldn't even get you the floor plans for the thing. And as for the cyphers…" Numbers started to zoom past on the screens in the background, turning the entire room in a flickering chaos.
"Well, I started working on that as soon as I heard why you are here. It's way in the main access frame of the old Krimzon Guard records. My old mentor used to help designing those things and he was one mean son of a bitch. I can't hurry too much if I don't want to get my circuits fried."
Valentine brushed away some of the dust from the keyboard. "Anything I can do to help?"
Vin shook his head as he flew over to where Daxter was still keeping a watchful eye over things. "No, nothing you can do my dear. But Daxter here could really help me out if he was to take care of some of the bug nests that have been nesting behind the main console. They're making me itch something awful."
Daxter waved out both his arms wide, taking a very recognizable 'nope' position. "No thanks. I know what the bugs in this city look like. I'm not in the mood to get closer to any of them. Those creepy crawlies… anything with eight legs is six too many!"
"Well, you don't HAVE to help me." Vin said, casually showing the first few seconds of a video on the screen, pausing when Daxter took note. Valentine noted a roaring fireplace behind the Ottsel accompanied by one of his more suave smiles.
"In the meantime we could always watch this video I found hanging about the web. I'm sure you won't mind."
"No, no, NO!" Daxter shouted, clambering up the monitor, trying to hide as much from the view as possible. "This is top classified information. Only two people in the entire world are allowed to view this and none of them are you guys. Pull that down Vin!"
Vin chuckled. "I sure would like to, but I'm afraid that itch is so bad… I don't think I'll be able to concentrate for long enough. Maybe I should just press Play and see what happens…"
"Fine! I'll do it! I'll take out your bugs for you. For crying out loud." Daxter searched around a bit before finding an old newspaper that had been lying there ever since the station had been closed. As he rolled it up he sent a poisonous look towards the hologram, not pleased with the blackmail he was currently suffering from.
"This is no way to treat a friend, Vin!" he shouted, disappearing in the mass of coils and electric sparks.
"Just to be clear… how bad do we not want to see that video?" Jak asked, casting a furtive glance to the frozen screen.
Vin blinked, realizing he still had the video up on the screen. After pulling it down he answered, "Well, that depends. If you're researching animal behavior I can assure you that video could be invaluable to researches. But as close friends with Daxter I would have to say-"
"That it's none of your fucking beeswax Jak! I won't ask about any of your business if you'll stay away from mine." Daxter's voice sounded muffled from wherever he was at that moment, every once in a while a dull twhack interrupting his words.
Vin shook his head. "Which is exactly why I always tell people they shouldn't send that sort of stuff through anything with a memory system. But in this instance I couldn't be happier, since now my itch is clearing up. I've had that for months now."
Valentine shook her head in wonder, amazed at how Vin had been able to pinpoint that particular video from who knew how many were floating around. "Uncle, you are a wonder. Any progress on those cyphers?"
"You'll have them in a few minutes, dear. Why don't you tell me about all of your adventures while I'm searching?"
The usual me talking is below this, so you can skip it if you're not interested.
Yay, new chapter is out! So this is proof I'm not dead, right? Unless I'm typing this from the grave, which would be spooky and pretty cool if you think about it. Anyway, I'll probably get at least one other chapter out this month but in two weeks or so my cramming period starts spanning all the way to the end of January so I wouldn't be holding my breath for new chapters. They'll get there. I want to to see this fic through to the end, like seriously. I'm gonna finish this thing.
We all know - or some do, but let's pretend we all do so you don't feel excluded - that Sage is my proofreader. They suggested some minor changes which I made in the original document so if there are any typo's or grammar mistakes they would be mine. I'm lazy and didn't feel like rereading the entire thing since I'm running on about four hours sleep per day.
Thank you to Oblique for being an all around cool person. And Keira and Valentine aren't buddy buddy just yet, but I consider any step to not hissing like cats progress with those two.
Also, how's this for an alternate universe of my fic : instead of capturing Valentine for the Dark Warrior program she was told her parents were traitors who betrayed Mar and his dad and then works for the Baron, believing he's doing everything for the greater good. Then there's some moral conflict about Jak and her own position in life and what is real and what isn't and all that stuff.
Don't judge, it's how I get through the coma-inducing classes.