Guess who's back! OK, I apologize, this one's a little short, but I wanted to get the ball rolling on the Haven side of the coin before I moved on with Torn's side of the story. There is a method behind the madness. Probably.
Haven
Jak pushed his wet hair out of his eyes as he and Daxter waited behind a shack in Dead Town.
"Why's it always gotta pour when we have to sit around outside?" Daxter hissed, fur slick with rainwater. "You can just take off yer wet clothes. I gotta live in wet fur."
Jak knew he was complaining just to have something to say. "I'll bet Tess will help you dry off when we get back."
"Now that thought warms me right up. My Tessy holding me close, right between-"
There was a soft rustling, then a metallic clank. Jak took the safety off his gun, then peeked around the wall.
Metalheads were removing a sewer grate from below and emerging into Dead Town. They weren't being particularly quiet or covert, so clearly they didn't expect anyone to be around to observe them.
Only three came up out of the grate, but Jak didn't shoot. He quietly waited until they had moved away, then stole back to Haven.
Once he'd reached safety and hopped a zoomer (not stolen, this time-he'd actually parked it in an alley near the city gates) Daxter started chatting to him again.
"So Jethra was right after all, huh? I hate it when she's right."
"Yep."
Everyone knew the Metalheads used the sewers. That was pretty well established. But Jethra had, a few days ago, raised the possibility that the way they were getting in was from Dead Town sewer openings that had never been covered after the Metalheads had moved in. Thus far, the Underground had assumed the Metalheads had dug their way into the system somewhere, or that the Baron was letting them into the system as a part of their bargain.
Jak had been scouting out sewer openings in Dead Town for two days now, figuring out which ones were being used by Metalheads, and was returning to HQ with a map.
"There's no way we got all of them in two days. We're going to have to go back out there, Dax."
Daxter groaned and started up a token protest about his delicate constitution. Jak smiled and carefully wove their way back to the Underground.
Ashelin was waiting when they arrived. She was sitting just inside the door, clearly trying to be inconspicuous.
"Red! What brings you back among these riffraff?" Daxter asked, shaking himself. Ashelin glared as water droplets started landing on her armor.
"I came to talk to you," she told Jak, voice low. Jak raised an eyebrow.
"About what?"
"About my father and the Precursor Stone. And...about Torn, too."
Jak's expression darkened, but he said nothing.
"Listen," Ashelin said, shifting her weight nervously. "He might...still be alive. There's a chance. I think-"
"What?! And you're just mentioning this now? He's been gone for weeks!" Jak surged forward, getting into her space. Ashelin didn't back away.
"Well, I don't know!" She hissed back. "But there's somewhere in the Wastelands he might have gone. Somewhere my father doesn't know about."
"No one lives outside Haven's walls," Daxter countered.
"Someone does. Damas."
Jak blinked, not recognizing the name immediately. His grip on Haven's pre-Baron history was shaky at best. But Daxter had a good head for names.
"Damas? The poor sucker Praxis overthrew? How could he be livin' out in the desert?"
"The last king is alive? And you never told us?" Jak hissed. The metallic taste of Dark Eco was on his tongue as his temper rose.
"I couldn't risk you letting it slip to my father!" Ashelin replied.
"What?! We're the ones at risk of leaking information?" Jak clenched and unclenched his fists, trying to relive some of his tension. "OK, Ashelin, assuming this is true, and Damas is alive, how do you know it and how do you know Praxis doesn't?"
"I was scouting solo outside the city once, taking a high-risk mission to piss off my father," Ashelin said with a sigh. "The KG does patrols and scouting missions outside of the walls, sometimes. And I saw a transport leaving under cover of darkness, going out into the desert. I followed it some of the way, then came back when it started going way out into the badlands. So I staked it out the next night, and the next. Finally, I overheard enough of their conversation to figure out that they were going to some kind of settlement in the Wastelands, run by a man named Damas."
"Is Damas a common name?" Jak asked. "How do you know it's him?"
"Yeah, Red, and how come nobody else has ever seen this transport, if there are people besides you who scout outside the walls?"
"I'm getting to that!" Ashelin snapped. "Well, I took a chance on the fourth night and approached them with my hands up, no weapons. They had their weapons trained on me, but they let me talk. I told them who I was, and basically that they had better be more discreet in the future because someone less sympathetic would stumble on them."
"And they just...believed you? Let you walk away?" Jak asked incredulously.
"No, idiot. They interrogated me about KG operations, and I gave them answers as a show of good faith. Then, once I had satisfied them, they left, and warned me that they had people in the city, so if someone gave out the word about Damas and the settlement, they would know who did it."
She sighed, and ran a hand through her dreads. "And then...later, after I had talked to them a few times, they gave me this." She pulled out an odd-looking communicator, round and earth colored, with a glass bulb in the middle.
"What is it?" Daxter asked.
"A beacon, they said. If it's activated, some of their people will...come to your location, I guess. Sounds like they're usually used for Wastelanders who get caught in sandstorms or get lost in the desert."
"Did Torn have one?" Jak demanded impatiently.
Ashelin's brow furrowed, and she closed her eyes. "No. He should have. I should have given him one. I should have told him all this. But..."
"But what?" Jak asked, nearly shouting. He could feel hot tears welling up, the old white-hot grief and anger coming back to him after weeks without Torn.
"I was stupid, OK?! I was proud and I loved my father and I made the wrong choice. I'm sorry, alright?"
"Oh you're sorry? Oh, good, great, that fixes everything! Nevermind that you let the person who had the best chance of saving this city die, and that you never trusted him in the first place!"
"What is going on out here?!" Tess and Jethra came storming out into the entryway, and Jak realized that he and Ashelin had been shouting.
"Hey, don't worry, everything's fine," Daxter began, trying desperately to smooth things over. "Jak just got a little hot under the collar, you know how it is, and you know Red over here is always smokin', am I right?"
"What were the two of you arguing about?" Jethra asked, undeterred by Daxter's deflection.
Jak and Ashelin looked at each other, and it didn't escape the blonde's notice that she had put the beacon away again where Tess couldn't see.
"Ashelin? Do you have anything you want to say?" Jak asked, unable to measure whether she'd be willing to come clean to Tess or not. He was giving her an out.
The Baron's daughter tensed, then sighed wearily.
"We should probably all sit," she said. "This is going to be a long talk."