A/N: Some liberties have been taken with the back-story and game mechanics to make it work as a narrative, especially with the yellow orbs and their use and meaning. This was written with only knowledge of the first three PS2 games and not any of the supplementary games there after. I might have gotten some of the minor details wrong.

CHAPTER 1: Status Quo

"Say, Jak," said Daxter slyly. "Whaddya say we just call the area clean and not try to cross this gaping hole in the earth's crust? It's not like anyone else is ever gonna come anywhere near here. So… why not call it good enough."

The suggestion seemed eminently reasonable to Daxter, but Jak approached the chasm without wavering. "The Metalheads won't stay on the other side."

"True but we can – aaaaaaahh!" Jak leaped out, his hands catching a section of pipe with the precision of a trapeze artist.

Daxter clung nimbly to Jak's shoulder the way only a nine pound two ounce ottsel could. Jak wasn't actually trying to throw him off, but he damn well wasn't making it easy, either. The slim, muscular elf concentrated on half-climbing, half flinging himself across a particularly treacherous section of the Precursor ruin; the floor, if there even was one, was lost in the darkness below.

If it had been anyone else's shoulder, Daxter would have been swooning with terror about now, but sadly, this kind of insanely dangerous maneuvering was par for the course with Jak. Daxter just trusted his companion would do the physical magic he always did, and somehow end up on the other side of the chasm intact. Though, you know, he thought to himself, every once and a while it would be nice to have a normal, intact bridge.

The Precursors were crazy, Daxter decided long ago. They'd ingested a bit too much of their own technology and went off on some permanent bad trip. Nothing else could explain why they chose to construct their factories and homes in such an insidiously dangerous fashion. Perhaps they were paranoid and deliberately booby-trapped the crap out of everything; perhaps they just didn't mind occasionally falling forty feet into pools of poisonous black goo.

They sure didn't make it easy on the people that followed them. Daxter could almost forgive them for their crazy architecture, but the artifacts went beyond the pale. The Precursors seemed to have a pathological hatred for labels. That round canister thingy up on that shelf over there, hey, it might just be full of old rotting biscuits. Or it could teleport someone across the planet. Or it could just explode. That was the crapshoot a person took when wandering around these old ruins.

Sometimes someone found something really useful, like a big green eco vent, which would keep the whole city in good health for years, and make the finder rich, rich, rich. Most of the time a guy was lucky to leave the place alive and -- unaltered.

In any case, whatever rationale the Precursors had, they were all gone, leaving their little hazardous waste sites all the hell over the planet, just waiting for some greedy idiot to stumble upon something, and unleash some bit of far reaching, disastrous technology on the world.

Like this one: "Jak, I smell rats."

Jak grabbed a broken piece of pipe and swung himself over to a more stable section of flooring. He patted himself down then looked around. They were in a twenty foot section of relatively normal looking hallway. Well, normal for Precursors, which meant huge hunks of rock held in place with spit and hopeful thoughts.

"Yeah. I felt them a moment ago. Three, I think."

Jak's face was impassive, but he exuded his usual combination of masculine pride and teenaged invincibility. The second was a bit less appropriate considering the fact he'd already passed his twenty-second birthday, but Daxter couldn't really fault him for it. The elf had survived the impossible more times than Daxter could count.

Daxter didn't ask how Jak could tell there were three Metal Head rats closing in on them. The elf's sense of smell wasn't as good as Daxter's was, and his eyesight was limited to what light the glow sticks attached to his bandoleer shed. But Daxter didn't doubt Jak was right in his count. He wasn't actually sensing the rats, after all, but rather the evil bit of technology they each carried with them. Jak had an uncanny affinity to Precursor tech that bordered on psychic. It was his greatest skill, and the reoccurring bane of both of their existences.

The rats squirmed out of various holes. They were big things, bigger than Daxter, and a hell of a lot uglier. Nasty, course brown fur, sharp oversized teeth and claws, and their beady red eyes glowed unnaturally. In the center of each of their heads was a smooth, yellow gem about the size and shape of a bird's egg.

Daxter could smell the hostility. The rats skittered across the stone floor in their direction, intent on tearing Jak to bits.

Jak calmly pulled his gun from his hip and put a round into each of them. Two went down immediately, the third continued to crawl forward even as it died, teeth gnashing at the air. Jak put it out of its misery with a second round.

Daxter felt a slight pang of sympathy for the critters. In the ordinary scheme of things, they weren't particularly dangerous. Maybe they'd maul a kid if it poked them with a stick, but usually they ran from anything bigger than themselves. The problem was the yellow gem. Any time the gem sensed an elf nearby, it drove whatever creature it had hijacked into a killing rage that only ended with the elf or the metal head dead. Pretty as these smooth glassy orbs were, they were hellishly nasty weapons.

Jak knelt down by the first corpse and waved his hand over the golden orb in its head, turning the device off the way only Jak and his strange Precursor powers could. The gem seemed to dim a bit, but it could just have been Daxter's imagination, they didn't actually glow. Jak then took a knife out and slid it around the edge where tech met flesh. He grasped it and it pulled free of the creature's skull with a faint wet schlupping sound.

Daxter tried not to look at the hole left behind. He knew very well that the gem had eaten through fur, flesh and bone all the way down to the grey matter. And then it spun thousands of metal threads, spiderweb thin, but slice-your-finger-off sharp and very strong. These threaded themselves all through the creature's brain without actually killing it.

Daxter morbidly wondered if the poor critter had any conscious awareness after the orb implanted. He hoped that it didn't, because that would really suck. And these things didn't just attack stupid vermin – over the years, Jak had had to pry a few of these out of elves as well. Dead elves, that Jak had killed himself.

If Jak wasn't around, the gems went inactive after the host body died. They then just lay around looking pretty and shiny and valuable. One had only to brush one's skin against the device to trigger it to shoot metal threads out like little harpoons. If an elf was lucky and armed with a sturdy knife, he could cut it off before it found his brain. Usually he got less than ten seconds to do that. Once it was implanted, the he might as well be dead. Attempts to remove the network only shredded the victim's brain. There was no cure.

Jak tossed the gem to Daxter, who didn't flinch. It was just a hunk of rock now, thanks to Jak's power. He tucked it into Jak's backpack.

"Money in the bank," said the ottsel. Jak was paid handsomely by the gem – not because the government had any use for the evil things, but rather because it was one less hazard for elf kind. All in all, the two made a decent living off of killing metalheads. Which was good, because Daxter, being a small furry animal, couldn't exactly find a normal paying job, and Jak –

Jak had his own problems. He would never have a normal anything.

Daxter shook off his melancholy feelings while Jak retrieved the other two gems. They made their way down the corridor to yet another oversized room, heaped with junk that appeared to be half-sculpture, half device.

The elf suddenly turned his head. "Bunch more coming."

"Let 'em at us!" Rising up on his hind legs, he raised his paws in little fists and shadow punched the air. "We'll turn 'em into mincemeat." We being, of course, Jak, but the elf didn't mind Daxter taking some of the credit. And hey, Daxter wasn't without his uses in a fight.

Jak gave him an indulgent smirk and tapped his shoulder, and Daxter immediately hopped up, his short claws hooking into the dark green mesh of Jak's vest. The metal heads wouldn't normally attack an ottsel, but he had Jak's scent rubbed all over his orange fur right now, and from past experience he knew they would chase him down, unless there was a body of water handy for him to jump into. As contrary as it seemed the safest spot to be was up on Jak's shoulder, where Jak could protect him.

Bunch turned out to be an understatement. It seemed that every metal head in the entire complex had found them at the same time. Most were rats, but there were other creatures as well. Jak unloaded his gun quickly into the mass.

Daxter didn't have the luxury of watching. He was reaching into Jak's pack to retrieve a new magazine, getting it out and into Jak's hand just in time. The process repeated. Occasionally, without warning, Jak would spin about, or even do a summersault to put a bit of space between himself and one of the creatures. Only Daxter's quick reaction time and his near perfect balance kept him attached and prevented him from being squished.

A sudden lurching quality to Jak's stride told Daxter he'd been injured. Daxter flew to the backpack and dug out a green eco pack by feel. He didn't wait for Jak to ask but went ahead and cracked its thin shell, spilling the glowing green substance down the back of Jak's vest. It sank quickly into his skin and Jak resumed his normal gait. All healed, just like magic. Some Precursor stuff was quite worthwhile.

When he wasn't busy retrieving ammo or healing Jak, Daxter scanned his 6. Today there was plenty going on. "Up and behind!" he warned, seeing the glint of a yellow gem as a rat looked down from the top of a piece of random precursor machinery.

Jak spun around and shot. Daxter heard the creature's scream as it fell, but then they were moving again, and he lost track of that particular enemy. Numerous other things had his attention.

"Uh oh," said Daxter. "You got eight of them coming at ya, Jak,"

Jak spun again. Daxter didn't see it, but he knew when Jak dropped his gun and went to kicking the creatures. It took most of his attention to keep from being thrown off, but he managed to snag another green eco pack. If he could just get it to Jak in time--

But it was too late to prevent the inevitable. There were too many of them at once, which would mean that Jak would be pushed past his breaking point. And that would bring the Other.

Jak's skin seemed to glow, and Daxter felt a familiar cold, bitter ache. Dark eco seemed to ooze from the elf, creating a dull aura that made him hard to look at. Daxter clenched his teeth and tried not to be scared. Normally dark eco was stuff to be avoided at all costs. Like it's green cousin, it was an indefinable substance, sometimes pooling like liquid, sometimes floating as a gas. Also like the green stuff, it liked living things, and when someone got close enough it would home in on them and absorb right through their skin. Unlike green it didn't put a person back together the way they were supposed to be. It altered them. Usually in painfully fatal ways.

Jak was the exception. He could absorb the stuff up without even flinching, and use it to change his form when circumstances pushed the issue. It was a neat trick – except "Dark Jak" was a hell of a scary thing to be close to.

Daxter spared half a glance to confirm his friend's corpse pale skin, and white hair. The horns that appeared on his head weren't quite as intimidating as the claws on his hands, but as far as "things an elf shouldn't have" were concerned they were pretty impressive.

Dark Jak went into motion, and at that point all Daxter could do was hang on, and not get in the way. Dark needed no weapons; he was fast, vicious, and completely unaffected by pain. Although it seemed endless, the chaos resolved itself within five minutes, and soon all that was left was Jak's heavy breathing and the overwhelming smell of blood.

Daxter leaped gratefully down, shaking off the lingering cold of the dark eco.

"Well, good job, there," he said, trying not to let his nervousness show. Usually Dark disappeared the moment the danger was over – but sometimes he… lingered. This appeared to be a lingering day. When Dark gazed at Dax as if he were actually pondering some important matter, it was time for a bit of small furry intervention. Besides the staring was getting kind of creepy.

Daxter gestured around at the shredded carcasses. "You killed 'em all, Dark. Jobs over. So why don't you go back to sleep and let Jak come back."

Dark cocked his head. Then with two swift steps reached down and grabbed Daxter, pulling him up to his chest. The grip wasn't entirely comfortable, but there was no menace in it. One clawed hand, swept across his fur, petting him.

"Yeah, yeah, I love you, too, you lug." Daxter rubbed his cheek against Darks chin. "I'm perfectly safe. All the bad ole rats are dead. You can go."

Dark's skin warmed back to its normal tan, Jaks hair deepened in hue from white to greenish blonde. The horns melted away, and then there was just ordinary Jak there, holding Daxter to his chest, rubbing his fur in a thoughtful manner.

"I turned again, didn't I?"

"Yeah. No problem. Dark creamed them."

"He didn't hurt you?" Jak asked, worriedly.

"Hell, no," Daxter said, squirming out of Jak's grip and climbing back up onto his shoulder. "He just wanted a cuddle before he went. He's really a softy, when he's not tearing things to tiny bits."

Jak looked doubtful.

Daxter changed the subject. "Hey, look at all that money on the ground. Let's go collect it up, before the scavengers come and carry it off."

Thirty-six gems. Not a bad morning's haul.

Jak looked around. "The place is clean," he pronounced. The place stank of rat and looked like a slaughterhouse, but Daxter accepted Jak's judgment.

"Shall we head back?" asked Dax. He checked the pocket watch in one of the backpacks pouches. It was only a bit past noon. "Early day, but hey, I could use a beer."

"Sure," said Jak, and they turned around to head back across the chasm, to their zoomer. From there it was a quick trip to the city, and sanity.

Wanna hear a joke? It goes something like this: A Loser Elf walks into a Precursor ruin and sees a gorgeous babe on the other side of a big ole pool of black eco. He hears this voice that says: "If you cross the moat, and you'll become irresistible to women."

Well the Loser, he's scared and all, but he realizes she'll never give him the time of day the way he is, and the girl's beautiful, and why the hell not. So he swims across the pool.

And when he climbs out on the other side, he's the most adorable, cute, furry animal she's ever seen.

What? Not funny enough for ya? Well try this one --

A Loser finds the girl of his dreams and falls in love. And surprise, surprise, she loves him back. Only they can't consummate their love because the girl is an Elf, and the Loser is a freaking 9 pound ottsel with a prick the size of a matchstick.

So one day they come across a bunch of precursors who say, "If you want we can transform you so you are the same species and you can live happily ever after." They eagerly agree. Whazam! The gorgeous girl is transformed into a flipping furry critter.

"Let's go home and make love," says the female ottsel.

"Hell, no," says the Loser. "I'm not into fucking animals."

Daxter rolled across the polished wooden bar laughing raucously at his own jokes. His progress was halted when his head connected with Jak's glass stein with an audible crack. Jak grabbed his drink, and thanks to his preternatural reflexes, only an inch or so of its dark foamy contents escaped as it tipped over.

"That's not the way it happened," said Jak, his face stuck in a somber look. Maybe because it wasn't so much that Daxter had voluntarily leapt into that black pool of eco to get a girl as it was that his good old best friend had accidentally pushed him in. Ooops.

"I've taken a few artistic liber- liberties with the story."

"I think your pet has had enough," said the bartender, dryly, reaching out with a rag to wipe up the spillage that hadn't soaked into Daxter's fur.

"I'm not a pet. I'm a goddamn ELF!" screamed Daxter. "Just as smart. Just as capable. Just as fucking autonomous as the lot of you."

The bartender looked skeptical, and turned his back on them.

"You know," said Torn, taking a sip from his beer, "It's a good thing Tess isn't in the bar right now to hear you laughing about her choice. She sacrificed a lot to be with you."

Daxter lolled his head over in the boss-man's direction. He could barely make out the deepening glower through the tangle of tattoos all over the dude's face. And that annoyed Daxter to no end, because Daxter could tell that Torn would have been good looking if he hadn't let some priest use his mug like a sketchpad. What a fucking waste. But that's what religion got ya.

"Oh truss me, " slurred Daxter. "She already knows these jokes. She knows them by fucking heart. Choice – it was a mistake, made out of fucking love – something you wouldn't know about…" He turned away. He didn't need Torn's disapproval. The dude wanted to look like a freak, that was his own damn choice. Daxter's looks were a fucking cosmic joke. And Tess's were a goddamn crime. Torn had no ground to stand on the issue.

Torn tsked and rolled his eyes. "Has being a Precursor lost its appeal?"

Daxter pulled himself wavering to his feet, a rush of anger making his fur stand on end. "Don't you even go there. Tess and I got nothing to do with any Precursors."

Oh, yeah. About that. The biggest discovery in a century: The Precursors were really – surprise -- ottsels!

Except, no. They really fucking weren't.

A year ago bunch of ottsels had dropped into the city in a fancy spaceship, and told all the naïve elves that they were the Precursors. They used that lie to get the elves to give them artifacts to decipher. Funny thing, every single artifact turned out to be very dangerous and needed to be disposed of by the "Precursors." What a load of malarkey, but it was damn good racket while it lasted.

But oh, Ottsels were Precursors. How Daxter had latched onto that idea, because, hey, being a Precursor was pretty cool. After five years of being thought of as some kind of sub-sentient animal, having the dangerous mystique of being one of the Great Makers was heady. People gave Daxter fucking respect for once. And poor Tess, caught up in the enthusiasm, wanted to be a Precursor too. She just wanted to be someone special. She wanted to be with Daxter. Fuck. So she asked to be one. And they'd changed her into an ottsel without giving her a chance to reconsider.

It was too damn good to be true. And no matter how hard he wanted to deny it, the ugly truth couldn't be ignored. The ottsels were just too fucking stupid to keep up the pretenses for long. They really weren't a terribly bright lot – maybe on par with Lurkers. They had no idea how to turn Daxter and Tess back into elves. They didn't even understand how their own spaceship worked. They just pressed the pretty buttons in the right order and trusted they'd arrive someplace.

They certainly fled fast enough when Daxter asked the hard questions. Ottsel's are Precursors. Hardly.

"Why divorce yourself from the mystique?" Torn was going way over the line here, but it was obvious he didn't really care. He probably thought Dax's fury was cute and comical. Most people did. But really he should have known better.

"Mystique, nothing. Those assholes ruined my Tessy-kin's life, and acted like they'd done her some huge favor. They robbed the city fucking blind. And you know as well as I do they weren't no Precursors. You've seen the ruins. You can't possibly think that some critter that looks like me would build all those oversized corridors. If I were making a home I'd have things built on my scale. With a lot more cozy holes and a lot less bottomless pits." Daxter shook with rage.

Torn chuckled dryly at Dax's distress.

"Oh my life is funny to you!" Dax took a step forward and fell flat out on his stomach. He lifted his head and glared at Torn, but the elf's eyes were just eating the situation up like it was some kind of physical comedy.

"Dax," said Jak, his voice so soft Daxter almost didn't hear it, even though he was now lying directly under his chin.

Daxter closed his eyes when he felt Jak's hand scratch behind his ear just so. And damn it, it was hard to hold on to outrage at the universe when something felt that good. Daxter relaxed, sank down across the countertop, defeated by the oh so happy fingers.

"I'll get your old body back," came the soft words. "I haven't forgotten. I'm still looking."

Daxter beat his tail contentedly against the bar. What was he just yelling about? Who knows. He was drunk and that felt damn good. He rolled over so Jak could get at his belly, too. Yeah. Right there. Right there. Perfect.

Sensing the moment defused, Torn slipped smoothly back into mission commander mode. "So the area you searched didn't connect up to Sector 4b."

"Not in any way I could traverse," said Jak, all business.

Torn put a hand to his forehead and rubbed. "That's inconvenient. We are still looking for a safe way to access the white eco vents you found last week. This looked like a short cut."

Jak stopped scratching Dax's belly long enough to take a swig of his beer. He then went back to work "It was missing floor in three sections, so just as well. Other way was safer. So what next?"

"You might find this interesting." Torn pulled out a map, which hijacked Jak's attention to the point where he stopped petting Dax entirely and skootched his chair over to sit closer to Torn. Daxter sighed out his disappointment, then crawled to where he could take a look. The thin green and blue lines on the parchment wavered in his drunken mind, but he was able to get a sense that the map was a lot denser than previous copies had been.

Jak whistled. "Damn."

"Blue is confirmed, green's extrapolation" said Torn, "But this is the way we think the ruin lines up."

Daxter made his eyes focus. The scale of the map made his jaw drop. No wonder the lines were dense – this was a map of the entire goddamned continent. "You mean all these precursor ruins are connected?"

Torn nodded again. "It's Shamus's belief that perhaps there really is only one precursor ruin and that it extends from pole to pole all the way around the globe. What we've been calling independent ruins would be the underground equivalent of turrets. The bulk of their dwelling space appears to be these pod like structures three to five miles underground, all interconnected with tunnels. It's possible they never walked on the surface of the planet at all."

"That's a lot of house to rattle around in." Daxter ran a claw over one cluster of ruins more than a hundred times the size of Haven City. "How many precursors were there, ya think? In their heyday, I mean."

"Billions," said Torn, in all seriousness. "Judging by these structures. Billions."

The number made Daxter dizzy. There were maybe a million Elves on the entire planet. Perhaps three times that many lurkers. The precursors had them both beat over a 1000 times over? Daxter began babbling, "How can that many of anything just vanish, and without leaving a single corpse or skeleton? It fucking isn't natural."

Before Daxter realized what was happening his mouth was wrapped around a thick chunk of pretzel. He shut up and looked over at Jak who had picked a second stick out of a bowl lying on the bar top, and was tapping it against his short greenish goatee. He felt a burst of fury at having been so casually shut up, but that quickly melted to wry relief. He'd been making a drunken fool of himself all afternoon. The big guy was just looking out for him. Daxter sucked on the salt, while Jak went back to idly rubbing his head.

"I can't clear all that out," Jak said, stating the blindingly obvious in a deadpan voice.

"We don't expect you to," said Torn. "But it's something to be aware of."

Torn spread another map, one built on saner proportions. "This is the area we want you to clean out tomorrow. Hopefully there will be an easier way to get to those vents."

The two talked. Missions, strategies, options, resources – money. Daxter was there of course, and he wasn't exactly excluded from the conversation, but he wasn't really included either. His agreement on whatever the two cooked up was simply assumed.

I'm not even a proper sidekick, Dax thought, pulling himself up to steal a few more sips out of Jak's mug. I'm gear, like a backpack or a bandoleer. My opinion is not required. Just do my duty, and feed ole Jak his ammo and his eco when he needs it. Keep an eye out for the nasties and my trap shut.

Hell, so my love life is not only non-existent, it's not even possible. Who cares! So what. I'm a great pet. Pets don't need lives. They just need to make their man happy, and yeah, I can do that.

Daxter looked up at Jak, and yeah, he had that mellow look that petting Daxter always gave him. Theirs was a relationship built on mutual addiction, all right. Symbiosis they called it. Being an ottsel wasn't all that bad, after all. If he were still an Elf – would Jak even be hanging with him anymore? Would Torn or Ashlein give him the time of day? And Dax knew that Tess wouldn't have looked twice at him. Riding Jak's coattails wasn't really such a bad thing. Should just stop grumbling and get comfy with the status quo.

Jak noticed his gaze and smiled, reaching up to scratch under Dax's ear the way that turned him to moosh every single time.

At least my job is easy, thought Dax as he let the last of his misery dissolve in pleasure. I just need to let things go.

They ended up stopping by Tess's on the way back to the apartment. Or rather Mitch's. After all, did Ottsels really own anything? Anyway, Jak needed more ammo, and wanted a look-see at what the smiths had cooked up. The last thing Jak needed was another hunk of steel – the dude was plenty dangerous with just his feet and hands. But a guy's gotta have a hobby, and somewhere in the last three years, Jak had turned into a major gun geek. His collection already threatened to overwhelm their precious closet space, but since Jak made the money, Dax couldn't very well make a fuss over how he spent the excess.

Besides this was pretty much the only time Dax saw Tess anymore. Not because he didn't like seeing her, god no. It was just part of the whole "pet" package. You went with your man. Dax's man like to spend his time climbing all over freakishly dangerous ruins. Tess's guy liked to hang in his workshop finding new and clever ways to kill things with projectiles.

Tess liked doing that, too. Before she got turned small and furry, she'd been a damn fine gunsmith. The best, in fact. Torn and his resistance had used her all the time, which is how she and Daxter met in the first place. Daxter's eyes half shut on the memory of Tess, sitting on a box, wearing her tiny shorts, beautiful bosoms hanging out of her shirt. And oh god, her hair, blonde and long, and her figure – not as tiggy-thin as his previous crush, Keira, just perfect. Va-voom. Now she was… well nice in a fuzzy kind of way. Cute at the expense of sexiness. Not an exchange Daxter would have cared to make.

"Hey Dax," called Tess called. Daxter looked up. Tess was clinging to the awning of the shop, looking down at them. She was slimmer than Dax, with orange stripes against soft cream, a tufted main of yellow accenting the top of her head. She wore a small leather utility bag belted around her sleek middle.

"Tess babe!" Dax called up. "Whatcha doing up there?"

She leaped nimbly down to Jak's other shoulder, letting her tail briefly fall over Dax's back in the ottsel version of a handshake. "Repairing a hole from some stray fire," she said, cheerfully, as though bullets ripping up her shop were just part of a normal day-to-day activity – which in a way it was. The city was not a safe place by any means.

"Hey Jak! Come see! We've got good things!" She leapt to the ground and scrambled through the open door into the building's interior.

Jak made a small interested grunt, which was his way of saying, "Hi! How are you? Sure I'd love to see what you got." His face was articulate enough to make up for his verbal deficits.

They headed inside, making their way past the perpetually empty reception desk to the machine shop. It was cluttered with heavy metal lathes, and drills, a smelter, and a rather frightening amount gunpowder. Mitch was like Jak-- when it came to his job he was willing to take a lot more risks than an your ordinary Elf. Speaking of which, hunkered in the middle of it, like part of the oversized machinery himself, was Tess's meal ticket.

"Hey Mount Mitch," called Dax, covering over the nervous thrill with what he considered a friendly banter. Truth be told, Mitch scared him, which was really pretty funny considering what Dax did day to day. It was just that Mitch was so… well huge. Not actually fat, but just large in every possible way an Elf could be. His biceps were wider than Jak's thighs. He was hairy too: Big mutton chops, and enough fur on his arms to qualify as some sort of animal. Ew. Dax privately speculated he had some Lurker blood in him somewhere, but he didn't dare actually say it.

Why did Tess choose him? Dax thought resentfully. Why couldn't she have stayed with us? But he was well aware that the only person who thought Tess would come back to live with them again was himself. Jak only had room on his shoulder for one ottsel, and Dax already had that position.

Tess scampered nimbly over the mess, and climbed Mitch's arm to take possession of her territory. Sitting comfortably on his shoulder, she wrapped her tail loosely around his throat, and rubbed the side of her muzzle against his ear. "Hey babe," she said. "I'm gonna take Daxxy back to my room why you boys talk shop."

Mitch nodded and dismissed Dax with a vague wave of his oil stained hand. Dax had no desire to hang around while Mitch and Jak talked. Knowing the two of them, they'd spend about fifteen minutes grunting over the specs of some weapon, and then the next couple of hours taking turns shooting their way through the course. Boring.

Tess lead the way to the second floor of their shop, where the two actually lived. Tess and Mitch had separate rooms, a fact that calmed some of Dax's jealousy. Tess's room had a small area designed for Elves to sit and visit, but the majority of it was filled with what Tess called Ottsel Palace– a series of platforms and tunnels, ramps and ropes, designed for a small critter to drape him or herself over in a myriad of ways. Dax had to admit that he was moderately envious of the set up, but Mitch's offer to build him a version had to be turned down. Jak's apartment was just too small for that kind of thing, and during their adventures in Precursor land, Dax had plenty of opportunity to exercise his climbing muscles.

Tess didn't lead him to the ottsel run though, instead she took him by her specially made desk. It was only a few inches off the ground, with its own light and various easy to set clamps to hold down large sheets of paper. Dax rubbed up along side her and looked at what she had. Not surprisingly it was the specs for a new weapon.

Tess twitched when she got excited, and her fur puffed out a bit. It was really cute – for a critter.

But Dax couldn't get himself too excited over the gun. What amazed him was how steady the lines of her drawing were. Ottsel hands were perfect for climbing up walls. They sucked at holding pencils. Dax had pretty much given up the idea of writing.

He felt a kind of sick sadness creep over him again. Tess was trying so hard to live her life normally. If it weren't for Dax, stupid things like being able to draw her ideas wouldn't have been an issue.

Perhaps sensing his melancholy, Tess butted her head under his, pushing up his jaw with her forehead. Their whiskers touched in a ticklishly delightful way. An ottsel kiss, the closest thing they ever came to intimacy. They sometimes twined their tails or petted each other roughly with hands not designed for that sort of thing. But no further. Dax didn't want to even think of the idea of Tess having a litter. There was no way he was going to perpetuate this farce into another generation.

No, one day they'd both be elfin again. Then they'd go beyond nuzzling. But until then…

Dax pulled away, "Your handwriting's amazing Tessykins"

Tess wiggled happily. "I've found that if I wrap a pencil in clay and grip it … just… so… I can hold onto it for quite a few minutes." She demonstrated. "But you know, Dax, if you and Jak would keep your eye out for some kind of Precursor stylus while your poking about in the ruins, I'd really be grateful. It would be so nice to have something actually built for my paws."

It was exchanges like this that drove knives into Dax's heart. Tess clung to the Lie. No she didn't just cling, she had become the Lie. Without it she had no identity. Her self-esteem was gossamer thin these days, and without that special distinction, she'd fall apart.

So he didn't challenge it. But he didn't dare offer her false hope either. "I don't know," said Dax. "Labeling stuff is not the Precursor way. Maybe they didn't even write."

"All those Precursors," said Tess, a bit disappointed. "There had to be someone who needed to make a mark at some point."

Dax smiled over the pain. "Yeah. I'm sure there was, and Jak and I'll find it for you."

Later that night Daxter woke up to the stillness of the small hours. This was a pretty common occurrence. Since turning ottsel he rarely slept more than 4 hours at a time. Sometimes he'd get up and take a quick moonlit romp through the city. Mostly he'd just lie, curled on Jak's chest, and feel him breathe. Thinking. Thinking.

It was coming up on six years since the change. The act that started it all was so… mundane… compared to all he and Jak had been to since. One minute he'd been leaning over a pool of dark eco – wondering what the heck it was because at the time dark eco wasn't exactly something you just happened across. The next minute a piece of precursor tech had gone bang, and Jak shoved him – hard – into the mess.

Since then they'd traveled ridiculously far, and consulted dozens of experts and hunted through endless Precursor ruins hoping for some way to reverse the process. The closest they'd found was the machine that turned Tess into an ottsel.

Some help that was.

In the dark he could see the shelf where Tess used to curl up to sleep. Jak had boxes of ammo piled on it now, but in Dax's minds-eye, he could still see her up there, curled tight into a ball, looking down at him with ill disguised misery. Up until the point she'd moved in, Daxter had never given the slightest thought to his sleeping arrangements. After hanging out two inches from a guys face all day long, it really didn't make sense to avoid him at night. But now he was self-conscious of his body curled comfortably up on Jak's chest. It was nothing short of an affront to Tess. She should have been the one that Dax curled up next to… but he couldn't. Jak slept poorly the nights that Daxter left him to sleep with Tess. And sleep deprived was the last thing Dax wanted Jak to be when they entered a Precursor Ruin.

Perhaps if Jak had spread his affection to Tess it wouldn't have mattered, but Jak never did. Guilting Jak just made the elf mad and Tess embarrassed. Meanwhile Dax had felt uncomfortably like a rope in a game of tug-of-war. No one was happy with him and he wasn't happy with either of them. The worst part of the whole affair was the relief Dax had felt when Tess moved out.

Well played, Loser. Well, fucking, played.

Daxter curled tightly so that his feet tucked up under his chin, and his tail slid against his ear. Why the fuck did the Precursors like ottsels so much? They must have some redeeming quality – or why program their equipment to make them? If he could just find that reason, maybe Daxter would find some contentment. Dax looked deep into himself, but inspiration didn't come.