Axton opened his eyes and beheld the ceiling of the room that he was in. It had been undecorated before, back when he had logged out previously, but apparently, Daxter’s companions had done a bit of redecorating while he was out. It should not have been that long, though, but regardless of the time differences between real life and the game world, he now was staring up as a rather interesting mural.

“Huh.” Axton said with mild surprise and confusion. “Didn’t think I’d ever see something like that.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t expect to have to wake up to a bunch of kids staring me in the face.”

Axton turned his head to look over to his side. Sure enough, Thomas had logged in before him and was just relaxing in another bed, his hands behind his head and on top of his pillow with his legs bent and crossed over each other.

“Yeah, but that has to be a better sight than that.” Axton said, using a swift and short jerk of his head to point in the rough direction of the ceiling.

“Yeah, but I’m fairly certain that this mural was not something you would ever have expected to see. Very classy art style, though. Not many of those kinds of paintings endured the collapse.”

“Now hold up just a minute.” Axton retorted and he sat up quickly and made more potent eye contact with his friend. “You can’t be serious. That is an actual classical art style from before the Fall? No way in hell that anyone paid any money for something like that back in the ye olden days.”

Thomas shook his head. “Man, people have always been morons, and having lots of money doesn’t make you have taste. From the surviving records, someone once sold a toilet lid and seat-mounted on a picture frame for over a million American Dollars. And this stuff up there? Looks to me like the work of the late, great Pablo Picasso. The dude made some weird art, but damn if it didn’t sell for a lot. Some of the more famous stuff is still around, though you won’t find much art in my possession. I’ve got better things to waste my money on.”

Axton shook his head and then looked up again at the mass of odd shapes and colors that, if he had to guess, were intended to be people, animals, buildings, or something entirely different. He was no art critic, but while he could not appreciate the value in the ‘art’ that he was looking at, his friend certainly could and did.

“Well… we should probably stop staring at the ‘art’ on the ceiling and get to actually playing the game, shouldn’t we?”

“Yeah, we should.” Thomas replied with a sigh as he pivoted from his original position to land his feet on the floor. Axton had already set his feet down when he had changed his own position on his bed, and the two nodded and then stood up at the same time.

“You know, I can never get over the fact that you made your avatar a giant.”

“Hah!” Thomas laughed before striking a pose. “Not just a giant, my friend!” he added while faking an accent, “A black giant with a fine taste in tattoos, numerous scars from combat, a body rippling with potent muscles, and a very, very bad case of baldness!”

“Hey, man,” Axton interjected with an angry tone. “Being bald isn’t all bad. You don’t have to worry about styling your hair, for one, and you don’t need nearly as much shampoo.”

The two friends looked at each other in silence, with Thomas still in his bodybuilder pose and Axton still with his hands on his hips and a scowl on his face. Seconds of silence turned into a full minute and a half before both of them could no longer contain their emotions.

Neither could tell which one of them broke the façade first, but someone let a short, quick puff of air escape their lips which led to both laughing at themselves.

“Fucking hell.” Thomas said, shaking his head with a smile on his face. “What are we; Abbot and Costello?”

Axton regained his composure soon after, not bothering to ask who the people that Thomas referenced were. They were likely comedians from before the fall, but while he didn’t know the specifics he could tell from his friend’s reaction that they were likely a duo that used comedy that played off of each other.

“We should start playing now, shouldn’t we?”

Axton nodded in response and followed Thomas out of the room they were in. The two walked down a few corridors, through a few sliding doors, over a few catwalks above the machine shop/ engineering bay of the ship they were in, and made it all the way to what looked to be the engine room.

“Uhh… Thomas?”

“Yeah?”

“You do know where we need to go, right?”

Axton was met with utter silence, which confirmed the suspicions that had been growing over the past hour and a half of in-game time.

“This is why we use the map, my man.” Axton took the front position ad waved his friend to follow him. It would be a long and rather annoying trip back to where they had started, and it would be a roughly fifteen-minute trip from there to the bridge. That is, if nothing else stopped them along the way and if the map was actually correct.

The pair made their way back the way they had come, passing everything that they had passed before, but this time in reverse order. The pair had nearly made it to the bridge when an alarm rang out over the ship’s linked loudspeakers. At the same time as that, red lights began to blink on and off in rapid succession along the length of the corridors, and all of this was punctuated by a message that echoed out in between the angry honking sound that was the alarm.

“WARNING! WARNING! PIRATE BOARDING CRAFT INCOMING! SYMBOL DESIGNATES HOSTILE PIRATES AS ANDROMEDAN MARAUDERS! ALL HANDS MAN YOUR BATTLESTATIONS! GIVE NO QUARTER AND EXPECT NONE TO BE OFFERED! BOARDING CRAFT EXPECTED TO IMPACT SECTIONS 8, 12, 2, AND 5! FIGHT TO THE DEATH OR RISK ENSLAVEMENT AND TORTURE AT THE HANDS OF THE ANDROMEDAN EMPIRE! WARNING! WARNING!”