#jndthemeweek

[darkwarriorproject]

jnd horror week #2: ‘underwater hazards’

some Lurker-Sharks spoil young Jak's offshore treasure-hunt (+ bonus doodle ft. the Spargan Kraken! these games sure love their sea monsters haha)

[raylaui]

JnD Theme Week - Day 5: Sages and Scholars I image Keira would set up shop in the forest at some point. Not as a permanent thing, but as an escape from the city. As she learns more about her sage capabilities, I would image the city would start to grate on her nerves a little. And, perhaps she misses the outdoor feeling of Sandover? She would still be an inventor at heart, despite her sage training. The zoomer under the tree is a prototype, made from green eco infused wood. It (hypothetically) would generate it’s own power without the need for power cells. 

[rhinozilla]

JnD Horror Week

Day 2: Underwater Hazards

In this unfamiliar future, Jak and Daxter encounter an old familiar enemy.

–

“How many times have we saved this city, and they still give us the crappy missions!” Daxter whined, pressing his face to the front window of the Titan Suit.

Their latest assignment had Jak and Daxter out at the pumping station, installing new pipes to replace an underwater segment damaged by the Metalheads. They had been tediously shifting and maneuvering the heavy steel assemblies for two hours now. It was made worse by the frequent need to replenish their air supply at the nearby oxygen port. Fortunately Keira had modified the suit to extend their air supply capacity to nearly fifteen minutes, but it was still frustrating having to stop and start so often.

It didn’t help that Daxter’s chattering seemed to be using their oxygen more quickly than usual.

“At least we aren’t in the sewer,” Jak grumbled. “Or the city.”

“Yeesh, you might be right about that,” Daxter snorted. “That place has been even more of a dump since they started rebuilding it. What a mess!”

Jak didn’t respond immediately, focusing on aligning the new pipe section with the existing structure. The Titan Suit’s controls were crude but effective, and unfortunately pushing the controls harder did not magically make the suit’s arms more forceful. All it did was make the sides of his hands sore from tying. With a sluggish shove and a groan, the pipe slid into place, and he used the Titan’s claws to wiggle it a bit to make sure it was secure. Another team would be coming out later to weld everything down. He didn’t envy them that job.

“Sometimes it’s better to tear down the old and start fresh,” he finally replied.

He could practically hear Daxter rolling his eyes.

“Oh, don’t get deep on me, buddy. If you ask me, bullet holes in the walls and crumbling buildings ain’t my idea of progress.”

Jak shook his head, pausing when the quick beep of a proximity alert started going off on the left side panel of the control board.

“Look at the old water slums,” Daxter went on, not appearing to notice. “They’ve been demolishing it for, what, a week now? I think it’s dead by now, sheesh—“

“Daxter, shut up,” Jak snapped, squinting through the glass to see what was incoming.

Daxter picked up on his tone and also turned toward the side, trying to see what the proximity alert was picking up. The alert grew more urgent, and Jak started to turn the suit to face the threat head on. He saw the outline of the thing a second after he could have done anything about it.

“Lurker shark!” Daxter screamed anyway, involuntarily popping away from the glass and leaping back onto Jak’s shoulder inside the cockpit.

Jak yanked up both arms of the Titan Suit, lurching them forward to take the offensive. The massive shark was a shadow of orange, yellow, and grey. Its jaws stretched open, capable of swallowing the suit in two bites if it was so inclined…and it looked so inclined. A familiar, bottomless fear dragged his stomach down to the floor, and he could hear his heartbeat violently ratcheting up his throat.

The shark dove to the left at the last second, avoiding the hasty attack. Jak swore as he started to bring the arms down to defend. The suit’s mechanisms were not as quick as his own reflexes, and the weight of the surrounding water slowed them down considerably. The shark impacted the left leg of the suit, forcing the inverted knee to bend and the suit to list immediately to the side.

Metal screeched, and he distinctly heard something get knocked loose, followed by a hiss of gas gushing out of a punctured tube. A damage alert started beeping.

“Was that the oxygen? Did that bastard just rip out our oxygen?!” Daxter yelled.

Jak didn’t have time to tell Daxter that their oxygen supply wasn’t routed through the legs, that the steam coming out of the damaged pipe looked like one of their hydraulic lines. Which meant that the left leg was all but useless. He tested the controls and…yeah…yeah the left leg was completely crippled.

“It’s coming back!” Daxter pointed, just as the proximity alert fired up again.

This time, Jak didn’t waste time looking for himself. He gripped one of the damaged pipes that he had removed from the pump assembly. The weight of it threatened to compromise the balance of the suit on one leg, and Jak activated the left side boosters. The burst of energy from the vents swung the left side of the suit around, and with it, the pipe.

Jak yelled out as he swing the pipe around like a bat. The impact that it made with the side of the lurker shark was solid, and there was a satisfying crunch. The shark roared, exposing rows of sharp, gleaming, yellow teeth. He released the pipe before the force of the swing took the suit off its one good foot. The pipe hit the sediment floor of the bay and kicked up a smoky grey curtain of sand and dirt.

“Let’s get outta here! This thing doesn’t have weapons!” Daxter crawled down Jak’s arm and did a lightning fast run down of the entire control panel, assessing for himself and confirming loudly that, again, the Titan Suit was not equipped with weapons.

Inky black was leeching into the murky water around them, painting a trail toward the shark, and Jak hit the overhead lights on the suit. Two vibrant beams of light burst forward, illuminating—and hopefully blinding—the creature.

The beast was definitely a lurker shark, the same that had tormented them back at Sandover when they dared to swim out too far, but the passage of time had been ugly to the species. Patches of grey and poisonous purple forked across its normal orange and yellow scales. Tumorous bulges distended unnaturally from its fins and around its gills, in what he guessed were pockets of dark eco or whatever else the Baron had been dumping into the ocean.

This new, mutated shark did not move as quickly as what he remembered, but it made up for it with the malicious way that it lurched toward them for a second attack. This time, Jak was ready, and he pulled at the controls for the arms. The mechanized limbs rushed up and outward, extending its pronged claws and making a sickening impact directly into the shark’s incoming headbutt.

The shark’s face practically went concave, and more glistening black blood burst out of the new wounds. The monster’s cry of pain faded quickly, and the body turned to dead weight, carried only by momentum into the front window of the Titan Suit.

“Ew, turn on the wipers!” Daxter waved his arms back and forth, imitating the motion.

Jak grimaced and used the arms to shove the body aside. As the mass cleared their visual, they didn’t even have a second to react before a second lurker shark filled their window view, successfully closing its jaws around the right shoulder of the suit.

The power lights inside the suit flickered, and Jak sensed more than saw that the entire right arm had gone cold. He swung the left arm up and drove the claws of it into the side of the shark. He’d been aiming for the gills, for something vital that would dislodge the beast, but hit only meaty flank. Unaffected, the shark closed its jaws further, and electricity jumped out of the open wound on the suit’s right shoulder, burning the shark’s mouth and causing sparks to fly inside the cockpit near the impact point.

“Dammit.” Jak released the right arm controls, reaching across his body to activate the side boosters again.

They sputtered and then kicked on, throwing the suit to the right side, driving the suit, with the lurker shark attached, into a rocky formation near the oxygen port. The shark released the shoulder with a pained yelp, dragging its upper jaw downward across the belly of the suit. Teeth screamed across the glass, and a cloud of bubbles and torn tubbing danced across their field of vision.

“THAT was our oxygen,” Jak barked. “Son of a bitch…”

The blue interior lights flashed to red, indicating their compromised air supply.

“We can get to the port,” Daxter was yammering. “If we can get to the oxygen port, then we…Well, then we can die some other way, but I don’t wanna suffocate at least!”

Jak sneered and got eyes on the lurker shark again. The monster was doubling around, preparing for a second strike. Anger bubbled up in his chest, and he welcomed it. Fear was a paralytic, but anger was a familiar motivator. He turned on all of the forward facing exterior lights, doubling the power of the light blasting out toward the shark. The shark’s trajectory wavered a bit, unable to aim properly at target that it couldn’t see.

He pushed the lever activating the boosters on the front of the suit, blasting them backwards away from the shark and toward the oxygen port. The suit groaned in protest, the dead weight of the left leg dragging on the ground slowing them. The cracked glass of the front window creaked as the suit slammed onto the oxygen port. Cool, damp air gushed into the cockpit as it refilled, but there wasn’t time to appreciate it.

The lurker shark made contact directly with the front window, and a spider web of cracks branched out from the point of impact. The suit tilted backwards, and Jak gasped as their center of gravity shifted. The suit helplessly toppled backwards under the assault, unable to stabilize on one leg and with only one arm to catch itself.

The surface of the water rippled nearly twenty feet above them.

“Jak?!” Daxter’s voice managed to go up two octaves with that one syllable.

Jak didn’t have to wonder about his friend’s panic. Water was dribbling into the cockpit, splattering onto his chest from the bowing cracks in the glass front window.

“Great, so instead of suffocating, we’re gonna drown! And if we don’t drown, we’re gonna get eaten by that freaky lurker!” Daxter cried, even as he rummaged into Jak’s bag and dug out his gun, shoving it into Jak’s hands.

Jak immediately took the weapon, arranging it into the Peace Maker mod. If they only had one shot at this, then they’d better make it count. He exchanged one confirmation look with Daxter, and then lifted the gun barrel toward the compromised glass.

“Hold on, Dax,” he grunted, seeing the lurker shark angling to make a final assault on the front of the suit.

Daxter didn’t need telling twice. He slipped down the front of Jak’s tunic, wedging himself between Jak’s chest and the eco ring, which securely pinned him in place. Regardless, Jak felt Daxter’s claws involuntarily dig into his ribs.

The shark was getting closer, jaws opening wide and teeth reflecting the dying light of the suit’s forward lamps. At the last second, Jak reached up and yanked his goggles down over his eyes. He retrained his aim on the shark through the fractured web of glass…paused for a final moment, and then fired.

The glass exploded outward in a sheet as the energy burst from the Peace Maker punched its way through. Water immediately shoved the shards of glass back into the cockpit. What was water and what was glass, Jak couldn’t register, because the force of the wall of water knocked all of the air out of his body. He fought the surge of panic that dumped into his veins, urging him to kick and thrash and claw his way out. The water filled the space quickly, and equilibrium voided the weight of the water that had shoved him back into his seat.

The purple explosion from the Peace Maker met the lurker shark face on, or that was what he guessed, seeing as the corpse hanging in the water didn’t have much of a skull left.

Jak scrambled up out of the demolished suit, bending his knees and bracing his feet against the outer cage of the cockpit. He shoved up off of the suit, clawing for the surface that was twenty feet away…fifteen…ten…five…

He broke the surface with a desperate gulp for air. A combination of oxygen and water crashed into his mouth, and he momentarily sank below the water line again, flailing for purchase. Re-orienting himself, he angled toward the wall of pipes that rose up from the deep and reached up to a platform nearly forty feet above them.

Ugh, too far.

He kept an adrenaline-fueled hold of the gun as he swam to the piping structure. He shoved the gun up out of the water and onto the wide flat top of the nearest pipe. He reached up and grabbed some of the smaller pipes to haul himself out. He coughed and sputtered, his body trying to expel water and drag in air at the same time and failing at both.

Mindful of Daxter pinned to his chest, he avoided toppling forward on his face, instead turning and flopping onto his back on the grimy steel. He felt Daxter squirm, and he deflated in relief. A fuzzy orange head poked out of the neck of his shirt.

“Holy SHIT, whose idea was that?!” Daxter was also choking on water and air, but that didn’t slow him down as he complained.

He dragged himself out of Jak’s shirt, rolling to his seat on the large pipe and leaning back against Jak’s side as they both heaved for air.

“We…didn’t…drown…” Jak panted. “At least.” He offered a thumbs up inside Daxter’s peripheral vision.

“You just—“ Daxter raised a hand, sighed, and let it drop. “You aren’t wrong…but you are bleeding.”

Jak disinterestedly noted the red lines over the bare skin of his neck, face, and hands where the glass had been slammed into him. He waved off Daxter’s fretting, already coming down hard off the adrenaline high. Daxter insisted on cracking open a health pack, and Jak didn’t have enough left to tell him not to. It must have been worse than he thought, because the relief brought on by the health pack was much more intense than he’d expected and left him feeling light.

After a few minutes of just breathing, he finally dragged himself up into a sitting position and looked out across the harbor. Daxter grumbled as he took his perch at Jak’s shoulder, taking the time now to try and wring the water out of his fur.

“Tess is gonna have our asses,” Daxter remarked, jumping down and poking at the soaked Peace Maker.

“She’s just gonna have to get in line,” Jak mumbled, looking out across the deceptively placid water.

Bubbles were still churning the water occasionally above where the ruined Titan Suit lay, but farther out, the water looked like glass. The two lurker shark corpses had not floated to the surface yet, and he grimaced. He didn’t want to be here when they did. He’d hated those things when they were kids. But seeing the way that this place had twisted and mutated the sharks…the way this world had done to so many other things from Sandover…dampened that hatred to something more melancholy.

He stewed in that heavy silence for a minute, unsure how to drag himself out of it, the way Daxter usually did for him.

As if on cue…

“So…which one of us is telling Tattooed Wonder that we tanked one of his Titan Suits?”

[loorlyraandsariea]

Resistance -- JAKtober Day 8 -- ‘Painful Transformation’

Jaktober has officially begun with the JnD Theme Week provided by @darkwarriorproject, and so for the first prompt I’ve got my girl Loor trying to resist the change into her Dark side, Lyra... it’s not going well. 

[creepyscritches]

B. F. D. BIG FUCKING DOGS

[geistvirus]

Day three and the theme for today is Lurker. Lurkers are challenging creatures to draw. They are an odd mix of primates and frogs.

“Brutter got a fish this big.”

I really like Brutter. I really love the tiny detail of how he tries to be part of Haven City’s citizens by adding two feathers to his hair as two long ears. I was sad when he didn’t have a role in Jak 3, but I was really happy when he reappeared in Daxter for PSP. This sweet fun boi needs more love and fish.

[taz-clark]

JnD Theme Week, May26. wildcard.

chose a lurker crab because i think you could get really creative with different variations of it.

[wolf-girl2210]

My Personal Channeler Head-Cannons

·         Channelers tend to be born in select families however occasionally a channeler will be born to non-channeler parents.

·         A lot of the time a person’s eye color coincides with which eco will come most naturally to them. EX. Blue eyes can channel blue eco easier, green eyes channel green eco easier. Brown and hazel tend to be a tossup between red and yellow eco.

·         Not all channelers can handle all eco’s. Most can only handle one or two types.

·         The Mar line is considered unusual due to many channelers from that line being able to handle all eco types. Whether they are good with those eco types is another thing.

·         When channeling eco a person tends to be more or less emotional due to the eco type. EX: Green eco gives a feeling of peace and Serenity, Blue eco tends to make people hyper and excited, Red eco tends to give a person a feeling of power and strength, Yellow eco can hyper focus some. Dark Eco enhances all emotions whereas Light eco tends to numb them.

[siglindofhavencity]

Day 2 JnD Theme Week: Crocadog

* * * Pas grand chose à dire hormis que je trouve toujours mignon de mettre des bandanas aux chiens ^^" J'ai toujours été frustrée que le crocochien disparaisse comme ça, sans raison, entre le 2 et le 3 (même si je sais que ND a fait en mémoire à leur chien qui est décédé entre temps) Dans le prochain jeu JnD (quoi? j'ai le droit de rêver), je veux Jak avec le crocochien qui l'accompagne (j'ai en tête Fable 3) Oui, pour moi, le prénom du crocochien de Jak c'est Morgan, comme le chien de ND à l'époque. * * *

Not much to say except I still find it cute to put bandanas on dogs ^^"

I was always frustrated that the crocadog disappeared like that, for no reason, between Jak II and 3 (even though I know that ND did in memory to their dog who died in the meantime) In the next JnD game (what? I have the right to dream), I want Jak accompanied by his crocadog (I have in mind Fable 3) Yes, for me, the name of Jak's crocadog is Morgan, like the dog of ND at the time.

[molo-tovi]

Day 5 of Jak and Daxter theme week I don't think Jak's first ride with the flut flut could have gone complete as planned so here's a happily running birdie with petrified Jak and Daxter on its back.

[jak-of-a-few-trades-blog]

Metal Head Fic

Title: Squish

Words: 1600

Summary: Gol and Maia, surrounded by their fallen enemies, meet an elderly man.

Setting: Sometime after Kor’s arrival at the start of Jak II, during the “first” metal head war.

Note: Another piece I wrote for the Jak and Daxter theme week, this time for the theme: metal heads. I wanted to explore an option as to what happened to Gol and Maia, especially since dark eco was such a precious resource. And if we’re talking about metal heads, why not talk about their leader? Who knows what he did during that time gap. (They chat a little bit about the Hora-Quan, or now known as metal heads, if that counts).

————-

Sitting cross-legged in the air, Maia huffed loudly to her brother. Gol returned the look cautiously, floating above the remains of the scattered bug-like legion. Not taking a threat seriously was how they lost last time, and yet she apparently learned nothing from their entrapment and thought little of a Precursor silo being ripped open as well.

For him, at least, it was anything but dull. The hostile welcoming party was an inviting warm up after those years of confinement. Commanding such a great amount of dark eco exonerated his lungs momentarily, letting himself breathe clearly as another blast shot down a wave of enemies.

Once the last creature dropped, a cane followed by footsteps sauntered along the metal base of the citadel, alerting the dark eco sage.

Read More

[darkwarriorproject]

jnd horror week #7: ‘survival’

he would do whatever it took to stand in defiance of those who had forced this terrible poison on him.... even if it meant embracing the monster he had become.

((opening scene from Cascade, which has updated in case anyone missed it!))

[raylaui]

JnD Theme Week -Day 4: Forbidden Uses

How did Gol and Maia test the limits of dark eco? How did they discover its power; their power? How did they manage to have their presence in nearly every part of the known world, between lurkers and spiders, between tropical and frigid climates? I think some of it may have had to do with them actively poisoning the land. 

[rhinozilla]

JnD Horror Week

Day 4: Manufactured Monster

Ashelin decides to see for herself the labs where the Dark Warrior Program took place. Every square inch of it is a nightmare, but the only monster that she finds is the one showing her around.

–

Places like this were supposed to be underground. They were supposed to be hidden away as a shameful thing, to at least grant the rest of them the illusion of ignorance at what was happening. In the privacy of the elevator, Ashelin clenched her jaw, grinding her molars as the lift took her to the laboratory level of the Haven City prison.

No, that wasn’t how her father had done things. Why hide away your horrific deeds in dungeons when you could house them in one of the largest, most imposing buildings within the walls…where everyone could look at that fortress of a prison and know how easily that it could be their fate if they didn’t keep in line.

The scientist who met her when the elevator doors opened had the backbone to look her in the eye…and the intelligence to at least pretend to be remorseful of his role here. He had the appearance of someone young who had aged quickly under the stress of his work. The unfinished tattoos peeking out from the collar of his lab coat told her that he had failed to complete training to be a Krimzon Guard, but by his closely cropped hair, stiff posture, and dead expression, he had gotten pretty close.

“Your High—“ he started to bow.

“No.” Ashelin lifted an abrupt hand. “Let me stop you right there. The only reason that you are not rotting in one of the lower cells is because you are the last of the slime who worked on the Dark Warrior Program. Just tell me what I need to know, and count every breath that you take as a personal mercy from me.”

The man’s automated smile faltered only a bit. “So, I give you the tour, and THEN I get imprisoned anyway? How very gracious of our new governor.”

Ashelin narrowed her eyes and kept her shoulders square. “Just get started.”

As he led her down the main hallway to the…ugh…research and development section of the lab, Ashelin tried to not let her imagination explain the stench of blood and bile that floated from the walls. The scientist was already speaking, but it was information that she already knew. The Dark Warrior Program had not been abandoned after Jak escaped the prison. Far from it, he had been such a “success” in her father’s eyes that his experiments had been accelerating in intensity right up until his regime was overthrown.

She was aware of at least eight other people who had been imprisoned and forced to endure the dark eco experiments. They had found the remains of five bodies as the first phase of demolition began, only half-cremated and hastily buried under the northern corner of the prison. They were easily identified as casualties of the Dark Warrior Program from the poisonous purple gas that emanated from the body cavities along with the contorted, mutated state of their corpses.

Failed experiments thrown out like garbage.

“—and anyone with any affinity for channeling eco has become so rare, but somebody who could channel ALL forms of eco? How could he not be the best candidate?”

Ashelin was glad that she had left her weapons at home, or this sick bastard would have already had multiple bullets blown through his body.

They took a left turn, and the floor started to angle downward. She paused enough for the man to look back, a disgustingly reminiscent look on his face.

“It was easier to roll the subjects on gurneys…once they couldn’t walk on their own anymore…or had died, of course.” He got halfway through a shrug before thinking better of the gesture.

“I should have waited another ten minutes before ordering the Guard not to shoot on sight,” Ashelin seethed. “Waited until they found you.”

“But then…what about your private tour of our grand facility?”

Forget weapons, she could snap his neck with her bare hands.

The yellow glow of the chamber ahead of them drew her attention away from his back.

This room wasn’t as large as the main prison room, where the injection mechanism and restraining chair was. She had seen that area already. This…This was what she had needed to see, what she was forcing herself to witness.

How could she lead Haven out of this dark period without a full knowledge of what that darkness was? She needed to see it, in all of its nightmarish truth, before she turned this whole building into a flaming crater.

The yellow glow, as it turned out, was coming from three glass columns against the far wall. Each one was four feet in diameter and at least ten feet tall. They were filled with amber liquid…and bodies. The missing three bodies of the last Dark Warrior Program’s victims had never really been missing at all. Instead, they were here, suspended in preservative fluid, not even allowed to rot in a grave with dignity.

Two of the three corpses were warped by dark eco like the other five recovered bodies. Horns extended from their hairlines. Half lidded eyes hung open, black all the way around. Thick purple veins created webs along their bare skin. Teeth extended into fangs that pushed past shredded lips. Fingernails jutted out of nail beds, onyx and curved so as to serve no other function than to destroy. Their flesh was stretched taut over emaciated pelvic bones and ribcages, contrasting the unnaturally developed muscles of their arms and legs. Precise, surgical lines traced their torsos where the autopsies had been performed and their flesh resealed.

The body in the third container had no outward mutations, but her chalk pale skin and the telltale black eyes gave away her condition. There were considerably more autopsy lines criss crossing this corpse, searching for the internal changes brought on by the dark eco.

The scientist caught Ashelin staring and clearly misinterpreted her expression.

“She was our most promising subject. She lasted longer than any of the others, dying just a few weeks before we got Jak. In a lot of ways, he has her to thank for his success. Each of our failures moved us closer to the solution. We learned from our mistakes, corrected them with every subsequent experiment. She…came the closest, that’s for sure…the strongest natural channeling gift that we had ever seen…before Jak.”

Ashelin’s skin crawled as she took in the vacant expression on the body. She had only witnessed Jak transform once, seen the toll that it took when the dark eco receded and he changed back to normal. For the briefest moment, those black eyes had been as vacant as this woman’s. Just an absolute nothingness when neither the monster nor the man had the reins. A blink later, those eyes had been blue, and the vacancy had filled with chronic horror as Jak had realized what he had done in that state.

She couldn’t take it. She looked away from the body behind the glass.

“Jak was a child.” It slipped out of her, and she cringed.

“Children are like sponges.” The scientist waved a dismissive hand. “We found that they were more resilient than adults…more…capable of adapting to the biochemical changes that the dark eco introduced to their genetic structure.”

“Adapting…” She let the word hang in the air.

The scientist hummed, looking at the woman behind the glass with something close to admiration. “Yes…By introducing the dark eco before the subjects reach maturity, we found that most of them were able to absorb it…growth spurts and hormones and all that…What better conduit for the chaos of dark eco?”

“You talk like there were other minors that you did this to.”

“There were others.” So casually admitted. “They burned up before we could advance to the final phase of the program.”

Ashelin shook her head, pinching the bridge of her nose briefly. “After all this…this carnage…you all continued to push forward? To ruin more lives and kill more innocents?”

“Under your father’s orders.”

She bit her tongue and turned away. She wasn’t about to be sucked into the topic of her father’s morality, least of all with this cretin.

“We do have recordings of the treatments.”

Her head snapped around to stare at the scientist. “You WHAT?”

“The Baron insisted on having audio and visual recordings of every dark eco experiment on every subject that made it to the chair. Some of us took the liberty of making additional recordings of the subjects out of the chair, in their cells, purely for research purposes of course.” He clasped his hands behind his back. “I could show you—“

“I want them destroyed.”

For the first time, the scientist looked knocked off kilter. “You…destroyed?”

“As of this moment, I am seizing custody of every tape, back up tape, and any and all other audio and visual records relating to the Dark Warrior Program,” she said curtly.

“You can’t! Years of painstaking research…We are within reach of harnessing the most powerful substance on the planet…Destroying all of our knowledge would not bring those people back from the dead; it would only make their deaths pointless.”

“Their deaths were already pointless.”

“I thought the purpose of this jaunt through our labs was for you to see everything that we did, to fully understand what happened here. I guess it’s easier when it’s all notes on paper…preserved bodies…blood stained cell blocks…But to see it happen in motion, that’s where your fortitude falters, Madam Governor?” He had moved over to a metal cabinet, opening the doors to reveal packed rows of tape recordings.

He plucked one seemingly at random, turning on his heel and stalking back over to her, stopping before the desk that stood between them.

“Or maybe you’d prefer a more personal viewing, to mourn the dignity of your hero in private.”

He tossed the tape on the desk, and she didn’t need to look at the numbered code written on its face to know that it was Jak’s file…or one of his files.

She snatched up the tape and immediately snapped it in half, breaking those halves into more halves until it was a mess of metal and plastic falling to the desk.

“You’re disgusting,” she hissed. “I expect to take ALL of these records with me when I leave here today. The Freedom League will come to collect the three bodies, to be given proper burials far away from this hellhole. The rest of the research conducted here will be confiscated and dealt with as I see fit. If I find out that you have withheld even the smallest piece of information on any of these people that you destroyed, then I will personally make sure that instead of a solitary prison cell, you find yourself in the middle of the Wasteland. I guarantee you will find more mercy from me than you will from the desert.”

The scientist looked furious, but his anger was impotent. Ashelin took what small satisfaction she could from his rumpled state. The feeling only lasted as long as it took for her to throw all of the recordings into three large hard plastic crates. The crates were equipped with hover tech, and they lifted a foot off the ground when she activated the circular nodes on the sides. That enabled her to maneuver them herself. She didn’t want the files out of her sight until she watched them turn to ash in a fire.

“You’re welcome, by the way,” the scientist finally spoke.

Ashelin bit back the urge to vomit, guiding the hovering crates toward the inclined hallway, going back the way she’d come. She didn’t acknowledge his statement.

“If it hadn’t been for the Dark Warrior Program, Haven City wouldn’t have had its great hero Jak and all his…gifts…to fight the Metalheads…the Dark Makers…the KG Bots…”

Ashelin reached the elevator, punching the button and impatiently waiting for the doors to open.

“If it hadn’t been for the Dark Warrior Program,” she snarled, “you and your fellow vermin would have only been arrested instead of—“

The elevator doors opened, and two large Freedom League guards greeted her. She jerked her head in the scientist’s direction.

“Take him.”

She maneuvered the crates into the lift as the guards apprehended the scientist, who looked confused at her thinly veiled threat.

“Take him…where, ma’am?”

Ashelin knew exactly where she wanted that beast to go, but she used all of her remaining restraint to carve out a more appropriate response.

“Out of my sight.”

[the-blue-sandglass]

JnD Horror Week

(Sorry I’m late!)

Jak turns into Dark Jak for the first time. With all the pain that comes with it.

Painful Transformation

It had only been in a matter of seconds, the world fading in and out and consciousness beginning to float in and out of reach.

Someone else was there, but at this point it was nearing inaudibility as the ringing of agony chimed repeatedly in his head, filling his skull and pushing it to the verge of cracking open, to the point he barely could make out the words being thrown at him as they turned into high-pitched pleads.

“Sa...something….just this once!”

He did say something this time. For the first time, ever since two years of suffering had dropped upon him.

“I’M GONNA KILL PRAXIS!”

Voices that he would usually call familiar.

A face he would welcome fading in and out, in and out.

The world turned purple, yet he saw scarlet red.

Jak’s fists clenched, his nails digging into the flesh until it nearly bled. What one could only describe as a heavy breath and a growl escaped his lips, one after the other, getting more rapid each time.

The chains snapped open like a noose falling from the pole of the gallows, oh by the Precursors how badly it would burn if he gripped onto that power.

But how bad it would burn, even worse actually, if he chose to resist further. It had called one too many times, the pounding in the head of the supposed ‘eco-freak’.

It was banging like a drum and screeching in his mind, every waking moment. Every moment of resistance made him weaker, yet not resisting would do the same.

What other options remained? Take it now, and live?

Or refuse it, and wake up hours later to his own demise at the barrel of a gun? And that would only be if he was lucky.

There was no other choice.

His teeth gritted together hard enough he was expecting them to break just as the chains did, his insides reeled as they completely ignited. The Dark Eco flowed and sparked in his blood, electrifying his whole body; like a thousand needles had been shot through his body. Jak spoke again.

No, he did not speak.

He didn’t even scream.

It was an unnatural roar that echoed through the now lone chamber, reaching his feet as power flowed through him; that sense of power...it was enough for him to continue to cling onto it.

But just barely.

It almost came as a surprise that the substance, that evil substance...the one he now needed, and could never be rid of; didn’t even rip through his flesh as it sparked around his body. As he finally got back onto his feet, for a split second and in a brief and near desperate hesitation, he clutched his head in a desire to go back.

All the while wondering if there was a way back; if he even had a chance to go back.

But it didn’t last long.

He rounded the metal of that damned Dark Eco chair, anything familiar instead becoming another target, anything from the days of before becoming desperately thin in his head. Even if he didn’t acknowledge it, the power and the agony sparked from his body.

Down the aching scars.

Down the marks of the chains.

Yet every part of his body felt like it was pulsing, on the verge of exploding there and then. It was like that power was about to overflow at any moment, tear every part of him to tiny pieces and leave nothing left but the freak he had become.

No, not a freak. A monster.

Just like he had been told, over and over again.

The claws were the first part that overflowed as he had thought they inevitably would, that chaos erupted sporadically all over as he went for the attack.

Went for the kill.

Every single drop of fury, of despair, of sorrow, of hatred, it formed together and removed all reservations or restrictions.

If you were like this - what reason was there to have a regret to lug around with you as a needless weight?

None of it mattered anymore, he was so certain; even if he wanted it to, as his body had yielded completely and screeched in agony all the while.

Even as the face before him distorted, he could see the terror and the fear. It was almost familiar now - but he was liberated, free of regret or concern.

Only to realize the burning once again; his chest felt like it was about to collapse in on itself like he would fall to his death and into the abyss below. That dark lightning surrounding Jak’s body began to die, that power being torn from his reach. He didn’t resist it once he realized who that familiar voice was.

There was a way out, a face he knew.

A face he didn’t just know from the mocking he’d hear from beyond the bars of the cells.

(A/N: Hopefully this was alright! This is actually my first time writing something for Jak and Daxter like this-)

[geistvirus]

Day two for JND theme week. Today’s creature from Jak and Daxter games is everyone’s favourite anklebiter Crocadog! Who happens to be wondering what your ankles taste like.