Resurrection

It hurt to breathe.

That was his first clear thought.

It hurt to move, heck it even hurt to think.

What had really happened? Where was he?

A flash of memory came forward from the depths of his mind as he tried to remember.

Oh, yeah.

The monster.

A really big, really angry and really strong thing, looking very much like a metalhead elder, something similar to a mutated version of Kor.

The thing had come bashing after them the very instant they’d gotten close to what Jak had figured must have been its nest. The good thing was that they’d had the car and a really big amount of ammunition. The bad thing was that they’d been forced to leave the vehicle pretty soon, due to the cave getting smaller as they tried to find a new escape route.

A very bad decision it turned out.

The beast had managed to corner them at a cliff, leaving them no other way out but the one it was blocking with its own body. And that was when things had gone bad.

Jak had done all in his power to keep the creature away and had emptied all his ammo while trying to hurt the seemingly invincible thing.

Daxter now wrinkled his nose in concentration.

Somehow he had fallen off Jak’s shoulder some time in the midst of the battle. He remembered hitting the ground and being surprised as to how he’d gotten there.

Jak had called out for him, of course. And then…

The monster had turned its attention to Daxter instead. As if the darn thing could put things together and figure out stuff.

Daxter had only had a brief moment to collect his thoughts and realise what was about to happen, before the monster’s tail had swept up against him and forcefully thrown him once more off his feet and into the air, only this time Daxter had noticed there wasn’t going to be something to fall onto on the way down.

He had screamed.  

And he had heard Jak cry out as the monster had hit the man as well.

Daxter knew he had been falling for quite some time and he had been able to think about all the horrors that awaited him, as well as what might have happened to Jak.

This was where his memory faltered a bit.

He knew from the feeling of cold and hard material against his back that he was laying on some sort of ground. But he couldn’t remember hitting it. Besides, if he had hit it when falling from such a height, he wouldn’t be thinking now, that was one thing he knew.

Then what had happened?

He decided to open his eyes and have a look at his surroundings.

His eyes met with the darkness of the cave, only interrupted by small spots of light somewhere far up in the dome-like ceiling.

The silence was the first thing that got through to his confused thoughts.

There was no sound of fighting, no monster growling and no shouting, nothing.

Where was Jak?

The first explanation coming into his mind was immediately pushed away with a decisive force. He wouldn’t think of that. Not ever.

Jak was alive.

He couldn’t die.

Not because of some bad Kor-imitation hitting him.

No, he had to be somewhere else, probably looking for Daxter. Maybe Jak hadn’t seen that he had been thrown off the cliff and was searching the cave for him?

Yes, that was an explanation that Daxter could endure. It sounded probable.

All though, a tiny thought in the back of his head started to remind him about the fact that he had seen Jak turn around, just before Daxter had fallen past the edge of the cliff. He had to have seen him then.

Daxter shook his head violently to get rid of the negative thoughts, an action that caused his entire world to spin and made him nauseous enough to quickly turn around before he threw up whatever his stomach decided wasn’t supposed to stay inside of him any more.

Great, now my throat hurts too!

He absentmindedly clutched his throat with one hand as he tried to steady himself into sitting upright.

Something felt awkward though. Apart from the throbbing in his head, that was.

He slowly moved his hand up to touch his right temple, the spot where the main cause of his headache seemed to be. He could feel dried blood beneath his fingertips, but that wasn’t what got him confused. It was what he could feel beneath the crust of blood.

A lock of hair and bare skin.

Holy…I’m dreaming, right?

He quickly moved his hands up in front of his face and watched in awe as the realisation slowly dawned upon him.

“Bless the precursors…” he mumbled in a hushed voice.

Fearing this was still just a dream he slowly let his eyes take in the rest of his body, as much as he could see of it in the darkness. He slowly wiggled his toes.

“I’m not dreaming…”

Daxter felt like screaming out in joyful shouts, but he managed to keep the cheers in, remembering the possibility that there still might be some sort of monster inside the cave.

“I’m me!” he whispered to himself with glee, the smile stretching out in his face. He even managed to chuckle at the pure impossibility of that fact. He shouldn’t be like this; he shouldn’t even be alive, for all he knew! But still, here he was! And he wasn’t two feet tall and covered with fuzz.

This thought made him realise something else. He was naked.

Just like when he had turned into a small orange animal, now when he was back to normal, the only pieces of “clothing” that the young man had on him was the brown fingerless leather gloves and the leather cap with his goggles on his head.

“Now, this has to look silly,” he muttered and took the cap off his head, letting his fingers comb through the thick and tangled hair as he did so. He still couldn’t quite believe it had finally happened.

He searched his memory once more for any sort of clue to what had been the cause for his unexpected transformation back to normality.

Nothing but a slight tingle in his skin.

And so he looked at his surroundings.

A faint glimmer of something fluent caught his eyes not far away from where he sat.

He put the cap and goggles back onto his head and carefully crawled towards the glimmer, not daring to trust his legs just yet and not quite willing to accidentally fall back into whatever he had managed to crawl up from.

The smell reaching his nose made him freeze in his movements.

“N-no way…”

Dark eco.

There was a pool of it right in front of him.

And he was alive?

“Some freak of a miracle I turned out to be…” he breathed out in disbelief and backed away from the black pool.
        
He sat down and tried to think of what to do.

He obviously couldn’t get back up the same way he’d gotten down. Sure, he could probably climb the cliff (at least he would have been able to as an ottsel), but to do that he first of all would have to swim across the puddle of liquefied darkness, and he wasn’t going to try that.

Just because he survived it twice, it didn’t mean he could survive it once more. Besides, the stuff stung something fierce.

The memory of the first shocking transformation made him tremble from the inside and out. It had taken him a very long time to stop dreaming of drowning in the burning darkness of that pool.

It had also taken him quite some time to adjust himself to the thought of no longer being the same person he had always been. Jak had helped with that though.

Daxter shook his head to get rid of the uncomfortable feeling of uncertainty that suddenly had come crawling back into his trail of thoughts as his memory had once more come across Jak.

He had to find a way out. He could worry about finding Jak later, when he knew where he was himself.  

So, what other options for an escape did he have?

He turned around and tried to see what the cave looked like.

There was a small strip of a cliff edge leading to an entrance in the wall some way off to his left. Otherwise, he was trapped where he was on a small shelf sticking out above the eco.

Seeing no other alternative than to try for the only way out in sight, Daxter took a deep breath and pulled himself up on his feet. He tried a couple of wobbly steps, before he turned towards his challenge.

“Alrighty then, I simply have to think of something else than that lethal ooze underneath and I’ll be fine,” he said to himself in a try to collect some sort of courage.

“I can’t believe I’m actually doing this…If I die, Jak is so dead…”

Using what balance he could muster when being without the tail he had grown so used to, Daxter started so walk slowly along the thin edge with his back tight against the wall and eyes fixed on where he put his feet. He didn’t see much, but what he was able to see he made sure to take use of.

Shaking like a leaf, partly from the cold draft of the cave and partly from exhaustion and fear of loosing his footing at the wrong moment, Daxter reached the dark hole in the wall and quickly jumped inside, glad to get further away from the ever so dreadful pit of dark eco.

After catching his breath and steadying himself somewhat, the young man even dared a small victory dance, feeling not so little proud of him self for having made it this far. Then he stopped and took a closer look at the tunnel he had entered.

“Now all I have to do, is find my way out of a black hole in, a black cave, surrounded by black water and infested with black monsters of doom…” he muttered slowly, just a little bit sarcastic. “Ah, well. Things can hardly get better, so why be picky?” he sighed and started to walk, one hand on the wall so as not to loose track of the direction he was supposed to go in.

He missed his fur. It had kept him warm. Or, at least warmer.

He missed warmth. And company. The safety of sitting on Jak’s shoulder, sheltered from the wind and protected from any danger within reach of his friend’s eyes.

Once again he had to stop himself as the familiar uncertainty over his friend’s fate came back to haunt him.

Yeah, he missed Jak. He had been spending about 90 percent of his days being in the guy’s immediate presence for most of his life. It would be weird if he didn’t miss him.

The feeling made him ache inside.  

He bit his lip, for the first time noticing his protruding front teeth from childhood were back, and pressed back the tears threatening to break forth in his eyes.

There were a lot of things he missed at the moment.

A chilly breeze from the cave he had left behind made his skin crawl.

“I really miss my pants…”