#jarod road 96

[one-fancy-flapjack]

Hear me out cake something something, daddy issues, something something.

[danieesketches]

Jarod totally owns this shirt, you cannot tell me otherwise.

[murszi]

I really like terrible characters who are pieces of shit and have no good qualities. I would enjoy every horrible thing they do and every horrible thing that happens to them with a smile on my face.

[kaemelo]

When I was making Paradise Motel, I wanted at first to setup a ragdoll for... You know. Reasons.

So I create a new NPC, I follow a ragdoll tutorial, I setup everything in order for it to work, and I hit play. And this is what I get :

(we ended up making a falling animation for the body instead)

[funk7-m4x]

Oh whoops! Sorry I dropped my head canons, be careful with them. Or don't, I don't care

[ghostwitchs-art]

[dumvixerum]

Little drawing of Jarod, my angry boy

[jonny-bee-meofter-dark]

I need his gun in my mouth. And by his gun haha well let's jusr say. His gun

[nirikeehan]

wip wednesday??

okay I haven't done this in a thousand years but @theluckywizard tagged me... and I recently went insane after playing the game Road 96 and decided I needed to write a 12k long deep dive on the character Jarod.

...If you know, you know.

Anyway, it's called A Small Victorious War and the first chapter is already on AO3. Here is a bit from chapter 2, where he's looking for his missing teenage daughter, Lola, after she ran away to join a terrorist group.

Tagging: @ar-lath-ma-cully | @oxygenforthewicked | @rowanisawriter | @carnalapples | @exalted-dawn-drabbles | @monocytogenes | whoever wants to do it!!

---

He made a few calls and knocked on a few doors. He learned Mr. Winters had also left town, which set the familiar fury simmering in his gut. A group of these Brigade members were headed deep into the south, in Petria’s vast desert region. Aside from the oil fields, the area was mostly undeveloped, which meant they would be difficult to track.

And then there was the note. Please don’t look for me. He’d pursued people who didn’t want to be found before, and the rocks one had to overturn were usually unpleasant for everyone involved. He’d walked away from some of those with regrets. 

“This is our daughter, Jarod,” Maria said over the phone. “It’s different. How could you not want her home safe?” 

He didn’t say they should respect her wishes, exactly. He was less articulate, angrier, perhaps a bit accusatory about why Lola might choose to run away from her mother’s residence, where she spent most of her time. 

“Don’t you dare try to blame me for this,” his ex-wife said. “She’s sixteen years old. She’s too young to know what’s in her own best interest. You were always too easy on her. You let her do whatever she wanted, and look what’s happened.” 

Jarod hung up on her then, because otherwise he would start screaming. No, he never would have encouraged Lola to join a terrorist group. But he had, looking back on it, encouraged her to think for herself, which was maybe just as bad.

He imagined finding whatever compound the Brigades had taken her to, and dragging her out by the arm, kicking up dust as they went, the hatred bright in her eyes. I’ll never forgive you, she spat, and wrenched away from him when he got her into the cab, his fingerprints on her skin already beginning to bruise. It was this image he couldn’t shake, no matter how hard he tried. And he remembered how passionate she was about the idea that conditions in Petria could improve. She truly seemed to think it possible. 

So he stopped looking. 

His apartment was quiet that summer, and so was he, saying little more than the rote script required of him in his daily life. So where we headed today with Happy Taxi? And when Maria called he would tell her he’d let her know if he made any progress and she would ask him if he was drunk, and he would hang up again, angry, because his speech wasn’t that slurred. 

Then, as summer melted into September, he received mail from Lola. 

He called Maria immediately, the words blurring on the page, his mind racing too fast to properly absorb them. “I got the letter,” he said when she picked up, to which Maria said, “What letter?” and Jarod became very quiet. 

Lola had, apparently, only written to him. 

He had assumed that Lola would, as a matter of course, write to both parents. As he stood there, at the side table by the door of his apartment, reading the letter by the light of the streetlamp outside, he tried to ascertain why it was him she chose. He gripped the phone tighter in his hand and breathed slowly. 

“She’s all right,” he said, because at least that much seemed accurate.

“Where is she?” Maria demanded. “Is she coming home?” 

“Doesn’t say,” he said. The letter was dated the fifth of September, postmarked the sixth. Today was the eighth, meaning it must have been mailed somewhere within a hundred miles, to be delivered with such swiftness. So she was likely back in the north. The return address was a P.O. Box, but listed a town he didn’t recognize and suspected to be fabricated.

“Jarod, what does it say?” Maria asked. 

A few other things, including something “big” that would “change everything” in four days. Given the date on the letter, that meant tomorrow. This was, he suspected, why she wrote to him and not her mother. The promise of results. That her actions weren’t only frivolity. That she’d been right that day in his living room, grasping his arm, full of fervent hope. 

And she’d also signed it, in her signature way, All my love, except it was encased in a word bubble and spoken by a cartoon dinosaur that she had drawn, which made him think perhaps she had forgiven him for the plastic dinosaur incident. He wanted desperately to write her back and tell her it wasn’t too late, that she could still walk away from this, still go to university and study paleontology, he would help her, he would do anything. 

“She says she loves us,” Jarod lied, “and that she’ll be in touch again soon.” 

[ghostwitch145]

"You can talk to me, I'm trustworthy" -world's most untrustworthy man

Full transcript under the cut

"You can talk to me, I'm trustworthy"

"That's not very nice"

"Speaking of dinos, have you seen this movie that came out...'Gigantic Park?'"

"WHAT? ...I'm just kidding"

"I really like the rooms abstract paintings..."

"You're not sure if you've seen the movie 'Gigantic Park?'"

"We're called 'Happy Taxi', but we could be called 'Honest Taxi', too"

"Oh...Hi Steve"

"That's a pager...guess you don't know much about cutting edge tech"

"Before we get much further, I should let you know that I have some...anger management issues...Now you know"

"I don't like that"

"The ice machine is down? Oh no..."

"Wow...This is the worst drink I've ever had"

"It's one of those good-news, bad-news situations"

"Not a lot gets by you, I can tell"

"Yes, gambling is a filthy habit"

"I like to smoke after therapy"

"I'm not sure if I'd know what to say if I was in your shoes either"

"Steve's not a connect-the-dots kinda guy"

"I'm not a violent person myself, the sight of blood and I faint"

"He...Uh...Talked too much..."

"You were sleeping on cardboard...I couldn't have that"

"Now, you should take a snooze. You're a teen and you're brain is still developing"

"I hope it doesn't take away from your Happy Taxi experience"

"Be careful out there, and don't ever call a taxi"

"No...I'm a sad angry man with a gun, see the difference?"

[jonny-b-meowborn]

After months of obsessing over him I finally drew the one and only Old Murder Man

[dinosaurlover-96]

Hello,Road 96 community

[danieesketches]

Art imitates life

[murszi]

Headcanon

I think Jarod had a stroke after Lola's tragic death. That would explain why he doesn't have full control over his face. After that, he never fully regained his facial function.

[maripr]

Jarod road 96 in everyone of his encounters: (Deep sigh). I miss my wife, Tails daughter, player character. I miss her a lot. I'll be back.

[funk7-m4x]

Imagine them trying to get his bitch ass to smile

He never would and Pim would cry