#king damas
Dagummit. I drew them Judging me again.
I want to draw characters using ASL more, but just like with any other language where I only know a handful of words, I’m paranoid that my own drawing abilities will cause mistranslations (but if I don’t practice, I’m never gonna learn, so there’s that)
Demolition Trio au: Jak came back in wounded after doing who knows what and Mar caught him.
(I know he’s actually saying “tattle”, not “tattletale”, sorry)
Things like this are probably why Kleiver keeps hinting that Damas will never let Jak leave Spargus at the beginning of Jak 3
Fic Prompts: Free Day Thursday
“Lighthouse, be advised: if my hair goes prematurely gray, it’s gonna be because of this darn fool teenager.”
Sig hoisted himself up over a crate and ground his teeth together. “And when we get home, for the record, I recommend installing safety rails or baby gates on anything you don’t want the kids climbing up or hoverboarding off of. Because if Jakdoes it – and he will – Mar is gonna copy him.”
“I’m almost afraid to ask,” Damas responded with goodnatured dismay, “But what has Jak done thistime?”
“Whathasn’the done?” Sig fumed. He ducked a spinning drill the size of his arm and dodged a saw blade that swung up out of the mining platform. “He hears about a metalhead nest at the strip mine and what’s his solution? Go monkey around on the shipping crates until he can loosen one enough to drop onto the egg cluster!”
“While he’s still standing on it?!” Damas sputtered.
“That’s it. That’s his plan. If I had any doubts about whose son he was before,” Sig said with a huff, “I don’t now.”
“Wellthat was a little uncalled-for,” the king grumbled, but noticeably he didn’t correct Sig.
He knew well and good that he had been a reckless teenager once.
It didn’t take long for reports like this to become a regular thing for Sig and Damas. Often, multiple reports came in on the same day, making Damas wonder if Jak ever slept.
“Lighthouse, do you have any qualms about sharing custody with a Lurker tribe? Because the boys just went and got themselves inducted in as honorary members.”
“Lighthouse, I am this close to slapping a Sage. The Baron’s got some kind of doomsday plot in mind, and instead of mobilizing the troops, the old fart just told Jak to handle it "no matter how”. I’ll be backup, of course, but would it kill these people to stop delegating all their missions to the kid?“
"Lighthouse, do not let this child near Kleiver and the garage until he’s done a driving test. I just watched him hijack a Hellcat and immediately drive it straight into a wall. He thought it was gonna handle like a zoomer. A zoomer!”
“Lighthouse, I can’t wait until you get to go on the range with Jak. You two are gonna have a blast fightin’ over that high score. He mightjust beat one of your top five records!”
The longer reports were usually full of descriptive retellings of events, or humorous complaints about Jak’s penchant for mayhem. Damas liked getting to know the boy in this round-about sort of way; it gave him something to talk about with him on his few visits thus far. The longer the report, the more questions he could think of for later.
By contrast, the one that utterly chilled Damas’s blood was short, and to the point.
“Lighthouse…have you ever heard of the Dark Warrior Project?”
The folders Sig smuggled to him during his next “vacation” were the work of a depraved mind. Damas had spent several sleepless nights learning the true depths of the suffering Praxis had inflicted on his son – his elderson, at least. Although Damas had no doubt that Mar would have met the exact same fate if Praxis had gotten his hands on him. And he suspected that Jak had known that too, even when he’d first met the child. The way Jak hovered over Mar whenever he was back in Spargus, the way he fought in both the ring and in Haven-
Jak wasn’t fighting solely for revenge anymore. He was fighting to ensure that the little boy who so looked up to him would neverendure the hell he had survived. And in Jak’s mind, as long as Praxis and Errol lived, Mar was in at least some danger. So Jak had redoubled his efforts to wipe the usurper and his pet torturer out once and for all.
If he was able to pull it off, if he didend them with his own hands, Damas wondered if his council would approve it as grounds for receiving his next battle amulet.
Damas set the folder and receiver down and drew a hand over his face. Spargus didn’t have the numbers to risk open war with Praxis – especially not with the Metalheads posing such a threat. The most help he could offer Jak would be scouts and infiltrators, working to destabilize those in power. Sig was doing a good job of balancing both helping the Underground and quietly sabotaging Krewe, much as Kleiver had done years ago, before Mar was born. But he was only one man, and Haven was a large city. If more citizens would actually take up arms, it would be easier-!
A faint scuff of skin against stone caught his attention, and Damas slid his hand down an inch to peer out over his fingers. Mar stood centimeters away, mimicking him. When Damas shifted his arm to lean his cheek on his fist, Mar did the same. The king smiled despite himself, and Mar swiftly mirrored his expression.
“What are you doing out of bed?” Damas asked. He reached out to brush a hand through the child’s unruly curls. They were almost long enough to braid now.
Mar took advantage of his outstretched arm to use as leverage and climbed up onto his father’s knee. He let out a big, gusty sigh and pouted.
“When is Jak coming back?” he asked.
Damas slid the folder on the Dark Warrior Project out of Mar’s reach and frowned. “It’s hard to know, son. Jak is…” he tilted his head back in thought. “Your brother is trying to help a lot of people right now. But he’s just one person. He can’t do everything at once.”
Mar’s frown deepened. “How come Jak and Daxter get all the scary chores from the scribbly man-” he had meant Torn, but having never learned to sign the word “tattoo”, the little boy instead indicated coloring on his face. “He yells and drinks the stinky bottle whenever Jak does chores.”
Damas blinked. “The stinky bottle-? Oh. Oh.Er…”
He wasn’t sure how to explain it to Mar, but after two weeks of Sig’s reports on Jak’s movements, he could sort of guess why the Underground leader was drinking.
Havenites didn’t have much of a reckoning for what would be a surprisingly normal Spargan adolescent. And that was withoutthat pesky little addition of the House of Mar’s tendency to channel eco in bizarre ways.
“Well,” Damas finally said, “Sig is there to help Jak with his…chores, and so is his orange rat friend. They’re very busy, but I’m sure they’ll visit when they need a rest.”
Mar snuggled against his chest with a faint hum of disapproval. “Daxter’s not a rat, Daddy. Daxter’s human,” he signed with a long-suffering look.
Damas eyed his son skeptically. “Mar, he’s covered in orange fur, and he’s two feet tall.”
“He used to be human! Jak said he fell in the angry eco and he grew a lot of a lot of a lot of hair and got tiny!” Mar nodded his head furiously in agreement with his own words. “I’m never gonna play with angry eco! I wanna get tall like you!”
“Angry…eco…?” Damas echoed in confusion. What was-?
“Dark eco? Are you talking about dark eco?”
Mar nodded again. “Yeah, the angry eco. It makes Big Brother go all white and grumpy. He doesn’t get little and fluffy. How come Jak doesn’t get little and fluffy?”
Damas shot a glance at the horrible file on the table. “Er…Jak didn’t…didn’t encounter the dark eco the same way his friend did.”
To his relief, Mar accepted this with a shrug and went on happily giving a decidedly garbled retelling of what was presumably the explanation behind Daxter’s ottsel status.
“Alright.” Damas stood up and shifted Mar to the floor. “Time you were in bed.”
Mar pouted again, but let himself be led back to his cot in Damas’s chambers. The crocodog pup raised his head from the foot of the bed, made a sleepy sound, and settled back down. It didn’t fully relax until Mar was tucked back in under the blanket, but such was the nature of crocodogs. They were fiercely protective of any human lucky enough to be considered part of their pack.
Mar wriggled around until he’d made a little nest of blankets beside his puppy. “Can Jak come home tomorrow?” he asked.
With a sigh, Damas knelt beside the cot. “I don’t think so. Haven is at war, Mar. That makes it tricky to go visiting other places.”
“But I want Jak to come back now!”Mar protested.
“I…” for an instant, the words stuck in his throat. Damas looked away. “I do too, little one.”
The more he knew about the Dark Warrior Project, the more uneasy he grew about Jak being so far from the comparative safety of Spargus. They hadn’t even had a chance to properly discuss his identity yet – Damas had no idea if Jak would even be receptive to building a connection with some alternate version of his probably-dead father. Nevertheless, he found that he could not be fully at peace until he had both Mar andJak under his watchful eye.
More reasons TPL Jak should not be left unattended in Spargus: the agility tutorial part of the Arena looks too much like the area of the swamp Jak used to goof off in
(Individual panels under the cut)
Jak: “Can I try?”
Sig: “Kid, that’s not a playground! Just stay up here.”
Damas: “If you think you can handle the agility course, show me.”
Jak: “Thanks Damas!”
Sig: “Damas, we have to be consistent with him!”
Damas: “Ah. Too late.”
Fic Prompts: Free Day Thursday
Demolition Trio au continuing from last time to skip forward to closer to the end of the second game.
Lighthouse, this is Jak, do you read me?“
There had been no warning tone from the receiver, and it was nowhere near the appointed time for a report. The small radio crackled in the center of the table Damas used for council meetings, drawing stares ranging from curious to wary.
"That ain’t Sig,” Kleiver said in a hushed voice, “How’d the squirt get this channel?”
Damas kept his face still and reached for the receiver.
“This is the Lighthouse. Go ahead, Jak.”
“Is Mar with you?”
Damas tensed. The boy sounded like he was worried, but trying to hide it.
“He’s in the tower. Why?”
On the other end, Jak exhaled softly.
“We were set up. Kor’s a metalhead – he’s the metalhead. Baron’s dead, and Krewe let the metalheads into the city.”
Priya, one of the veteran warriors in the council, cursed creatively. “Metalheads can disguise themselves as humans?!”
It was a terrible thought. They would have to heighten security. But if the leader of the metalheads could infiltrate the Haven resistance for years with no one the wiser, how would the Spargans know if they’dbeen compromised?
“Good work, Jak,” Damas said evenly. Panic would do no good now. Especially not as king. “That is valuable information. I will keep Mar with me, if you are concerned about him. Where is Sig?”
There was a moment of silence, and a heaviness fell over the council even before Jak’s solemn voice answered.
“Sig’s…Sig’s gone.”
Damas had guessed the words were coming, but he felt them each like a blow regardless. He leaned back into his chair and closed his eyes.
Oh Sig…I hope it was on your terms, old friend.
Kleiver slammed a fist into the table. “What happened, ankle biter?” he demanded, “Sig’s one o’ our best! You expect me to believe Havencoulda offed the likes of him?”
“It wasn’t a guard,” Jak hissed, “It was a $%@! Metalpede. Knocked him straight off the bridge. I…”
His voice dropped in volume and became harder to hear.
“I didn’t want to leave him. I wanted to at least find him. But I have to finish what he started.”
Tarmac, another veteran warrior, rubbed his forehead and sighed. “Sounds like you did exactly what you were supposed to do, kid. Not that it helps, I guess. What mission were you on?”
Everyone stiffened when Jak said, all too calmly, “We were ready to breach the Nest.”
Damas’s eyes snapped open and he snatched the receiver from the table. “You what?!”
“I have the Precursor Stone. I have Mar’s Cannon. I can blow the whole front of the hive off once and for all. If…if anyone wants to come join the party, Daxter and I wouldn’t mind a little company. If you’d rather earn some gems, Haven could sure use the help.”
Jak grew quiet again for an uncomfortable length of time. The council could barely hear him whispering to the orange one, Daxter. It sounded like they were disagreeing about something. Then Jak returned, sounding ominously solemn.
“Lighthouse, I’m finishing Sig’s mission. I’ll have boots on Misty Island in two hours at most. If I don’t- If- if I-”
The boy breathed in deeply and let it out slowly.
“…Damas. If I don’t walk out of this, tell Mar his…his big brother loved him. Like, a lot. And thanks. For, I guess for giving us a home. Jak out.”
“Jak-!” Damas gripped the receiver so tightly the plastic groaned under the pressure. “Do notenter that nest without backup, that is an order!”
He stood quickly and snatched up his staff. “Mobilize the advance scouts. I want a unit ready to move out before the top of the hour. All healers will need to be on standby.”
As he spoke, he marched toward the door. When silence followed, he spun on his heel to glare at the council.
“Well?!”
Priya set her wrinkled jaw. “Aye, lordship! And what about possible infiltrators?”
Damas’s jaw worked in silence for a moment. “Until we have confirmation of infiltration, we will continue as normal. If there aremetalheads among us, we cannot afford to rouse their suspicions.”
“And the kid?” Kleiver asked boldly.
“Do not concern yourself with my sons,” Damas answered flatly, surprising them, “I’ll see to it that Mar is protected before we depart.”
