Nathan Drake; An Irritatingly Detailed History

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1976-1991

Nathan Morgan, younger brother by 5 years to Samuel Morgan, was born to Cassandra Morgan and some asshole in 1976. (Don't worry, the asshole isn't important.) Not long after Nate turned 4 his mother committed suicide, and his father relinquished both of his children to be wards of the state a year later. (During the year between their mother dying and being given up to the state, the children were moved around extensively and lived transient lives, to an extent where their father would often say "Why bother unpacking? We're just gonna move again in a month.")

Nathan and Sam were inducted into the Saint Francis Boys Home in Boston at the ages of 5 and 10, respectively, and were raised by the nuns and overseeing father there for the next 8 years. Attracted to history and adventure at a young age, Nathan studied the biographies of Sir Francis Drake, British explorer, intently. His youth was pockmarked with bullying from other children, many of whom claimed that his mother was in Hell for taking her own life, and the occasional fistfight when his older brother wasn't around to protect him. A quiet and introspective child, Nathan spent most of his time reading and wishing he could leave Saint Francis' while Sam - kicked out of the home for petty crimes when he was old enough to work at 15 or 16 - proceeded to be something of a bad influence on his impressionable sibling.

When Nathan was 12 he missed a school trip, held back at the home for fighting after another boy stole his book, and was lured out of the building and across several rooftops at night to meet Sam. His older brother presented him with the prized gift of a gleaming new motorcycle and a catch: at 17, concerned about having to support himself and his younger brother, Sam was going off to work and would be gone for the duration of a year. Nathan's disappointment was short-lived when his older brother informed him that he had tracked down the location of their mother's belongings, given away by their asshole father after he put his children in a home. Upon breaking into a stately manor for the goods, the brothers were confronted by a wealthy elderly woman who knew their mother - Cassandra Morgan was a historian, and she and the woman had been doing research to prove that Sir Francis Drake had living heirs.

The revelation didn't last long when the police arrived to accost the amateur "burglars," and, coincidentally, the aging woman suffered from a heart attack right in front of the boys. Nathan and Samuel Morgan fled the scene. Once they had escaped the grasp of the cops it became clear that Nathan couldn't possibly return to the Saint Francis Boys Home, and in memory of their mother's work they adopted the surname "Drake" to start a new chapter in their lives.

1991-1992

Following their absconding from the Saint Francis Boys Home, Nathan and Sam worked odd jobs and followed their bliss to an assortment of worldly places in pursuit of knowledge and wealth. At the age of 15 Nathan found himself in Cartagena, Colombia, wandering the streets like a modern-day Aladdin and stealing fruit from carts while stalking an even greater score. At the local Museum of Maritime History, a special exhibition was being held on Sir Francis Drake. Two of the items on display were of particular interest to Nathan, being a budding scholar of all things Drake: Drake's ring, inscribed with Sic Parvis Magna, or, Great things from small beginnings, and an antique astrolabe that belonged to the sailor. In the process of attempting to steal the artifacts Nathan came into contact with a well-to-do woman named Katherine Marlowe, and her hired acquisitions man (and then-paramour) Victor Sullivan. Sullivan, whose mustache was enviable and temperament one of good humor, saw something of himself in the kid who refused to give Marlowe the Drake-related objects she desired, and Nathan was able to skip out of the museum with Sir Francis' ring and minimal incident.

Sullivan found Nathan later, after the heist, and commended him for his work before telling him that it needed refinement. They fell into a tentative friendship, strengthened after Sullivan paid Nathan's bail when he was later apprehended by the authorities - breaking into a museum after hours has its consequences - and Sullivan took the roles of mentor-in-crime and begrudging father figure. (It is implied that Sam Drake and Victor Sullivan know each other well, but do not particularly like each other - it's possible that Sully thinks Sam is a worse influence than he.)

1999-2000

While Nathan considered himself something of an aficionado on Sir Francis Drake, Samuel was attracted to pirates. In an attempt to access a building they believed would house a lead on the location of Captain Henry Avery's missing treasure haul, the brothers Drake teamed up with an associate of Sam's: Rafe Adler, an affluent and fame-hungry young man whose parents' wealth enabled him to do all sorts of things, like...pay his way into the Panamanian prison, which is where Nate, Sam, and Rafe found themselves in 1999. An instigator of prison fights, Nate was pulled from the yard to sit in solitary while waiting for one of Rafe's paid-off hires. The warden in question, Vargas, led Nate to an off-limits, historic part of the prison. It was there that one of Henry Avery's men, Joseph Burnes, had been imprisoned, and it was there that Samuel and Nathan believed they would find a clue to begin their search for Avery's hoard.

All Nathan uncovered in the old cell upon scaling the four-hundred year old building was a wooden cross inlaid with silver and gold, hollow, and missing its contents. He told Vargas that he found nothing. Upon reconnoitering with Sam and Rafe they realized that the figure on the cross wasn't Jesus Christ, but Saint Dismas, the penitent thief on Christ's right at Golgotha, who the Son of God would lead into paradise. Sam informed them that there was a cathedral of Saint Dismas in Scotland, which also happened to be the last country Avery was ever spotted in. Unfortunately his educational lecture was cut short when Nathan's prison "friends" showed up for a fistfight and brought a shiv, forcing the warden to drag his guards into the situation. Patting down Nathan, they found the cross and the warden recognized that he was double-crossed.

A terse exchange between men happened in the warden's office not long after: they would split the treasure four ways, and Vargas reached for a handshake with Rafe only to have his lungs punctured by the same shiv that the prison thugs had been wielding five minutes prior. Vargas got a single shot off, alerting the guards to his distress and Rafe - twitchy-eyed with an itchy trigger-finger - snatched away the gun before leading a panicked escape through the prison while Nate and Sam hastily followed. In the confusion and alarm as the men fled, Sam almost didn't make a jump to a far building and Nathan frantically began to pull him up. A smattering of assault fire from the guards peppered Sam in the back and Nathan watched his brother slip from his hands through a corrugated metal roof. Pulled away from the crossfire by Rafe, both he and Nathan stumbled to freedom beyond the walls, the latter too dazed and in shock to register the remainder of their flight.

Some months later Rafe Adler purchased the Saint Dismas Cathedral and the surrounding land in Scotland, scouring it with Nathan for clues of Henry Avery's treasure. Still recovering from his brother's death and concerned by Rafe's growing mania Nathan decided to leave the project.

2000-2006

For approximately six or seven years or so after Sam's death, Nate and Sully became serious partners in crime acquisitions of questionable legality, doing a number of jobs that primarily took place in South America. Mostly, Nate was shot at while Sully flew his seaplane, the Hog Wild.



𝕋𝕙𝕖𝕣𝕖 𝕞𝕦𝕤𝕥 𝕓𝕖 𝕒 𝕓𝕖𝕘𝕚𝕟𝕟𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕠𝕗 𝕒𝕟𝕪 𝕘𝕣𝕖𝕒𝕥 𝕞𝕒𝕥𝕥𝕖𝕣,
𝕓𝕦𝕥 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕔𝕠𝕟𝕥𝕚𝕟𝕦𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕦𝕟𝕥𝕠 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕖𝕟𝕕 𝕦𝕟𝕥𝕚𝕝 𝕚𝕥 𝕓𝕖
𝕥𝕙𝕠𝕣𝕠𝕦𝕘𝕙𝕝𝕪 𝕗𝕚𝕟𝕚𝕤𝕙𝕖𝕕 𝕪𝕚𝕖𝕝𝕕𝕤 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕥𝕣𝕦𝕖 𝕘𝕝𝕠𝕣𝕪.
- Sir Francis Drake, 1587

In 2007 Nate employed the help of television host and journalist Elena Fisher, offering the scoop of the century: if she funded his excavation, he could give her the coffin of Sir Francis Drake. Somewhat disappointingly when they dredged the thing up from the ocean floor, there was no body, only a beaten diary that somehow survived and pointed toward the mysterious city of El Dorado. Nate took this as an indication that Drake had faked his own death, and their excitement was broken by the arrival of pirates, the escape from which was expedited by Sully, his mustache, and his seaplane.

Sully and Nate then bid farewell to Elena, heading to the Amazon by following Drake's clues. Instead of a treasure, however, they stumbled upon the ruins of an ancient civilization, in the process learning that El Dorado was not a city, but a statue. They then found a WWII-era German U-Boat, the entire crew dead inside the submarine, the only indication of a new lead being a piece of paper torn from Drake's diary and a gold Spanish doubloon. The paper suggested a new location for the statue that was El Dorado: a southern tropical island. Intercepted by another treasure hunter named Gabriel Roman upon leaving the Amazon, Sully was shot in the chest. Nate escaped and encountered Elena again, and they made their way to the tropical island with only one plane-wreck (the Hog Wild did not survive). Upon moving inland they learn that Sully, held captive by Roman and Roman's employer, Navarro, was alive - he was saved by Drake's journal, pressed into his breast pocket.

Following the group the pair of them rescued Sully and briefly overheard a conversation between Roman, Navarro, and the leader of the pirates who had first attempted to seize Drake's coffin from Nate and Elena. It seemed as though something was killing the pirate's men, but it was waved away as superstition.

Separated by unforeseen circumstances from Sully, Nate and Elena advanced into a vault that purportedly contained treasure, discovering that Francis Drake has died on the island. The ring that Nate had stolen in Cartagena so many years ago - the ring he wore around his neck - was left on Francis Drake's body. As they moved to leave, the leader of the pirates sprinted past them, pursued by mutated humans with supernatural agility, before being ultimately gutted by them. It was then that Nate and Elena realized Drake's intentions: understanding that the statue was what changed the people, he had attempted to keep others from suffering the same fate and in the process had died by their hands.

Nate and Elena became separated after finding a German submarine base, concluding that the mutated humans that killed the pirate must have been the German naval officers from the 1940s. Upon trying to find Elena again Nate met up with Sully, and both of them were taken to Navarro and Roman. Elena was safe, blessedly, albeit captured as well, and Navarro and Roman contemplated opening the statue in spite of Nate's protests. Roman cracked the lid and the insides - the Mummy of El Dorado - had putrefied into some malevolent type of airborne virus. Upon inhalation Roman began to mutate violently, and Navarro shot him before informing Nate that he had always intended to sell the mummy as a biological weapon.

The other mutated humans poured into the chamber and Navarro, who was lifting the statue out with a helicopter, became entangled in the rope after it crash-landed on a nearby tanker. Nate and Elena, both of whom managed to survive their pursuit of Navarro by clinging to the helicopter, realized that Navarro was unconscious and Nate...gently helped the man over the side of the tanker and into the water. The statue, wrapped around Navarro's leg by rope, disappeared as well.

Elena returned Francis Drake's ring to Nate, informing him that she thought he would miss it, and their passionate embrace was sadly interrupted by Sully, who had taken capitalistic advantage of the pirates by stealing several large crates of treasure and loading them into a speedboat. Going home empty-handed is for squares.

2007-2009

For two years after the adventure at El Dorado Nate and Sully took small jobs, largely under the radar, to keep from attracting too much attention in the black market sphere. It is implied that Nate and Elena did a stint of dating, but that it didn't last particularly long because of obvious reasons.



𝐼 𝒹𝒾𝒹 𝓃𝑜𝓉 𝓌𝓇𝒾𝓉𝑒 𝒽𝒶𝓁𝒻 𝑜𝒻 𝓌𝒽𝒶𝓉 𝐼 𝓈𝒶𝓌,
𝒻𝑜𝓇 𝐼 𝓀𝓃𝑒𝓌 𝐼 𝓌𝑜𝓊𝓁𝒹 𝓃𝑜𝓉 𝒷𝑒 𝒷𝑒𝓁𝒾𝑒𝓋𝑒𝒹.
- Marco Polo, 1324

In 2009, Nate received an invitation from two of his oldest friends, Harry Flynn (con artist, treasure hunter, amateur historian) and Chloe Frazer (treasure hunter, action girl, Best Getaway Driver in The Business). It was an "acquisition" job for an expensive client: a jade lamp from a museum in Istanbul. The lamp, covered in Mongolian script, would have been a gift from Kublai Khan to Marco Polo in the late Middle Ages, and the idea was to screw over the client and follow the lamp's clues to Polo's long-lost fleet of ships. (Independently, Nate and Chloe were banging and had every intention of pulling the wool over Flynn's eyes.) While on the job Flynn double-crossed Nate, leaving him to be captured by police and sent to Turkish prison. Bailed out by Victor Sullivan three months later (this was a recurring theme, as you can see), who was notified of Nate's status by Chloe, Nate remained largely suspicious of Chloe's intentions but reluctantly teamed up again to go after the fleet.

They had a general idea: when retrieving the lamp with Flynn, the men had broken the jade to access its insides and found pieces of blue tree resin and a blank piece of parchment. Upon lighting the resin on fire, it revealed that the "blank" paper was actually a map that pointed to a mountain in the rain forests of Borneo.

Arriving in Borneo they learn that Flynn has been working with a Serbian war criminal, Zoran Lazarevic, for the last three months, and Flynn's employer has been getting impatient with the lack of progress. Using Chloe as a mole - her ties to Harry Flynn not yet severed - Nate and Sully managed to sneak on-site and peruse the contents of Lazarevic's research. Sully and Nate move to higher ground and discover what was left of Polo's crew, all dead, their teeth black and their bodies scattered in a cavern. Also present was the same blue resin as before, which Nate lit and used to follow a trail of blood to a figure clutching a Phurba and another piece of parchment that indicated the tool could be used to gain access to the fabled city of Shambhala. Unfortunately, Flynn and Lazarevic arrived at the cavern not long after them, learning that the next step was Nepal. Sully and Nate fled, and barely got out of it with their lives - for that reason, Chloe and Nate became the ones to search for the Nepalese temple. (Read: Sully is getting too old for this shit, Nate.)

In the Nepalese city they learned that Lazarevic, superbly wealthy with an immense fondness for heavy ordnance - fanned a local civil war to a flame and used the explosions and gunfire to cover up his search for the same temple (a daunting task, when there were over fifty temples alone in the city). While there, Nate and Chloe stumble upon Elena Fisher, foreign correspondent, and her cameraman Jeff. Intending to prove that the war criminal is alive in spite of NATO claims, Elena was unsurprised to see that Nathan Drake was somehow involved in the chaos, and described herself to Chloe as "last year's model." The four locate the temple and access a lower chamber that gives them new headway: Shambhala was in the Himalayas. Caught by surprise outside the temple, the group was threatened by Lazarevic. Chloe pulled a gun on them to protect her cover as a mole, and Zoran killed Jeff. Not for the first time, Nate and Elena made their timely escape and followed Lazarevic's men to a train yard. With Elena behind the wheel of a stolen Jeep Nate managed to leap onto a departing train in time to make his way through (and above, and along, and under) the cars as they barreled through the jungle and mountains.

Near the front cars Nate encountered Chloe again, who told him to leave because Lazarevic was fucking mental, and Harry Flynn arrived just in time to shoot Nate in the stomach. Realizing he had nowhere to go but back through the gauntlet he fought through, Nate made his bed in the back of a train car and shot a can of propane just as some of Lazarevic's goons walked past it. The train cars exploded and rolled down the mountain, and Nate woke up hanging off of a cliff and bleeding out. Dragging himself back to solid ground before the train slid over the edge, he fell unconscious and woke up in a Tibetan village several hours later.

Once awake he was greeted by Elena and a Tibetan villager named Tenzin, as well as an older German man by the name of Karl Schäfer. Schäfer, who believed in the phurba's ability to open the door to Shambhala, encouraged Nate to investigate what remained of Schäfer's expedition in the mountains with Tenzin. His wounds tended to Nate followed Tenzin up one of the peaks to an ancient ruin, only to learn that Schäfer's expedition had been funded by the Third Reich in search of supernatural powers. Schäfer had been the only survivor, made particularly apparent when hairy, toothy beasts appeared and attacked both Nate and Tenzin as they clambered back out of the ruin. Upon escape they saw that Lazarevic had found Tenzin's village and was having it razed to the ground.

Schäfer, kidnapped by Lazarevic, was being taken into another mountain through a monastery, and Nate and Elena followed.

Lazarevic's goal was something called the Cintamani Stone, which would give him unimaginable power, and when Nate and Elena did find Schäfer - now mortally wounded by the warlord - he insisted they destroy it. After locating the entrance to Shambhala they are accosted by Lazarevic, then the creatures who attacked him and Tenzin before: when two are killed, Zoran lifted a furry hood to reveal a mutated human, who changed upon eating the blue resin. Making their way out of Lazarevic's custody as another group of yeti-humans attacked, they came across a central chamber in the middle of Shambhala. An enormous tree with a large center of petrified blue resin - the Cintamani Stone - was what fed the city, and inevitably drove people insane.

Flynn, wounded and wielding an arm grenade, committed suicide in front of them and harmed Elena with shrapnel in the process. Leaving her in Chloe's capable hands to get them out of the city Nate followed Lazarevic to the base of the great tree, where his wounds had been healed by drinking the sap. After a brutal showdown with the meta-human Nate left Lazarevic's body to be torn apart by the other yetis as Shambhala collapsed around him.

Tenzin's village, which survived the onslaught, was where Nate was reunited with a recovering Elena again, and he parted ways from Chloe, who seemed to understand that they had some kind of Thing.

2009-2010

Nathan and Elena, whose chemistry was always startlingly complimentary, got married. Not long afterward they experienced serious nuptial troubles and became estranged, largely due to Nate's intense fear of commitment and problematic wanderlust.



Ƭнє ∂яєαмєяѕ σƒ тнє ∂αу αяє ∂αηgєяσυѕ мєη, ƒσя
тнєу мαу αcт тнєιя ∂яєαм ωιтн σρєη єуєѕ,
тσ мαкє ιт ρσѕѕιвℓє. Ƭнιѕ ǀ ∂ι∂.
- Thomas E. Lawrence, 1922

In 2011, Nate and Sully dropped by a seedy pub in London to make an exchange with some equally seedy-looking characters (Charlie Cutter, a plant, and Talbot, some...guy): Sir Francis Drake's ring for a fat load of cash. Deciding Talbot's money was phony dough, a bar brawl ensued and our boys found themselves thrown into a pile of garbage in an alleyway, where they were met by none other than Katherine Marlowe - the same Marlowe Nate first encountered in Cartagena, all those years ago. She snapped Drake's ring from Nate's neck and Cutter, an "eager goon," shot both Sully and Nate in the chest as Marlowe left the scene. (Thankfully, as Cutter was their shady friend, they were only sporting expertly-placed blood packets and playing possum.)

They pulled the ol' switcheroo: Marlowe had taken a counterfeit ring, and the three men hastened to their getaway gal, Chloe Frazer. She pointed them to a warehouse she had seen Marlowe & Co. enter after the fist fighting. All four of them infiltrated a secret tunnel deep underground, through defunct train lines, to find Marlowe and Talbot in an Elizabethan chamber with the same astrolabe Nate had tried to steal as a fifteen-year-old in Colombia. Creating a diversion to distract them, the team entered the chamber undetected and they found the astrolabe and the journal of T.E. Lawrence, as well as a map.

In deciphering the code on the map Nate learned that Sir Francis Drake had worked with fellow Elizabethan court attendant John Dee, and that the two men had intended to find a "city of immeasurable wealth" in the Arabian desert.

Sully and Nate followed the first clue to an old chateau in France with a medieval tower while Cutter and Chloe hit clue number two in Syria. Once in the medieval tower, they found a.) a metric shitton of enormous spiders, and b.) part of an amulet that they anticipated would lead them to yet another clue. As they made to depart they were accosted by Talbot and another series of nameless goons, who retrieve the amulet half and also...set the chateau on fire. Barely making it out they made headway to Syria, sensing that Cutter and Chloe would be under fire as well.

The four retrieved the second half of the amulet and god-damn fucking TALBOT showed up in the nick of time to pluck it from their grasp, as well as T.E. Lawrence's journal. With no further clues and Cutter's broken leg - an injury sustained when jumping from a building to escape Talbot, Marlowe, and a whole lot of fire (the bad guys liked fire) - the intrepid heroes retired Charlie from the mission and headed to Yemen, where they already had an in.

(Elena. Elena was the in, and gave them journalist permits to move fairly freely.)

Still wearing her ring despite their estrangement, Elena accompanied Nate and Sully into a subterranean tunnel system and into a massive star chart room that pinpointed the location of the city in the desert: the Atlantis of the Sands, Ubar, or Iram of the Pillars...take your pick on names. Unfortunately, as the three of them left the Elizabethan chambers, Nate was drugged by Talbot and ran through one Hell of a hallucination before regaining consciousness in front of Marlowe in an unassuming cafe in the city. She then proceeded to unload all the details she knew about his life from a file, and informed him that she knew everything about Elena, too. Desperate to protect his loved ones and told that they had taken Sully hostage - who, bless him, was the only one who understood Drake's star chart, having been a Navy man back in the day - Nate agreed to cooperation...after a fashion. Pursuing Talbot through the streets, Nate got the crap beaten out of him and woke up on a ship belonging to one of Marlowe's hired thugs, Rameses.

Fighting his way through several levels of dilapidated cruise ship-turned-pirate ship in the middle of a storm of the coast of Yemen, Nate made his way down to the hold only to discover that Sully wasn't there, and that it had been a ruse to keep him occupied. In his efforts to escape the ship in the massive swells, Nate sprinted through a swiftly capsizing vessel and was flung into the sea, where he washed up on shore several hours later. Wandering brokenly to Elena's apartment, she greeted him with relief, having thought him dead, and told him that Marlowe and Talbot had Sully, and they had a plane to catch soon if they were going to save the ass of their cigar-smoking friend. Nate fell into a brief and uneasy sleep on Elena's lap, reaching for her ring-hand and apologizing. In return, she said: "I know."

Having finagled his way onto the departing cargo plane the next morning after saying farewell to Elena, Nate crept through the duct work and was snatched out of it by a hired hand. In true Nathan Drake fashion the fistfight led to a firefight and cargo boxes were ripped out of the plane before the plane itself suffered explosions from all the gunfire. Thanks to his killer luck, Nate managed to pull a chute on a falling cargo box as he (and everyone else) plummeted into the Rub' al Khali.

Nate wandered the desert for days, dehydrated and hallucinating, before stumbling upon a ghost town and encountering both Marlowe's men and a tribe of Bedouin led by a man named Salim. Grateful for Nate's assistance in dispatching Marlowe's men once armed, Salim invited Nate to come with him to his camp, where they discussed Iram of the Pillars and Sully's kidnapping, as well as the ancient story of Ubar's downfall: King Solomon had purportedly captured a number of evil Djinn in a brass vessel, and cast it into the depths of the city's cistern. Salim lent Nate a horse that he might hasten to Marlowe's convoy, and Nate managed to pull Sully from a flaming truck before the pair of them properly reunited and entered the gates of the fabled city.

Iram of the Pillars, in fairly good shape having been abandoned for the last few hundred years, turned out to be an enormous, sprawling oasis in the desert that pulled its water up from a deep aquifer. Upon walking into the first open-air building and coming across a tower, the pair refreshed themselves in a nearby fountain, only looking up when they heard a shot ring out. Sully collapsed in shock, and looking past him Nate watched Marlowe and Talbot striding away while his best friend and childhood mentor bled out in his arms. Nate lost it. Sprinting after them like an Olympic runner without a cause he was surprised when the men he pulled his gun on burst into flames, their faces demonic masks as he ran halfway through the city in search of the man who killed Victor Sullivan. Eventually coming to the central cistern, tired and nursing his manic grief with bullets, Nate walked right into Sully.

Sully informed him that Nate "went crazy" after drinking the water, and ran off spewing a hail of lead - which would sure explain the bodies strewn across every square inch of Iram of the Pillars. Whatever was in the brass vessel that Solomon had submerged - whatever had forced all of those people to kill each other - was something that Marlowe and Talbot undoubtedly wanted to use as a biological weapon. Little wonder that Francis Drake had hidden all evidence of his quest to find it from his monarch. Interrupting Marlowe and Talbot as their crane pulled the vessel from the water, Sully and Nate destroyed the winch and compromised the already crumbling foundations of the city. It collapsed around them.

Caught in a swirling mess of quicksand as they fled, Marlowe desperately clutched for Francis Drake's ring as it disappeared and begged Nathan's help. Despite everything she had ever done to him, he flung his bandolier out and tried to reel her back in as the stairs began to shift. The sand was too strong, and claimed Marlowe as Talbot went after Nate and Sully in a fury. Dispatching Talbot with a bullet the pair were lucky enough to meet Salim at the entrance of the city, where he provided them with horses to escape the enormous sinkhole.

Back in Yemen, Nate and Elena made peace, the both of them understanding their respective faults more clearly and distinctly appreciative of how they complimented each other. The little family - Sully included, of course, as he was the one who held onto Nathan's wedding ring for him - walked across the tarmac to the Hog Wild.

2015



𝓘 𝓪𝓶 𝓪 ℳ𝓪𝓷 𝓸𝒇 ℱ𝓸𝓻𝓽𝓾𝓷𝒆, 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓘 𝓶𝓾𝓼𝓽 𝓼𝒆𝒆𝓴 𝓶𝔂 ℱ𝓸𝓻𝓽𝓾𝓷𝒆.
- Henry Avery, 1696

In 2015, Nate and Elena were living a "normal" life. Nate worked for a marine salvage company, Elena wrote columns for a travel magazine, they lived in a semi-suburban house in New Orleans, Louisiana. Things were good, in spite of their attic full of adventure-y skeletons, where Nate kept most of the artifacts and pieces from his old life, not-so-respectable in the real world. Still, there appeared to be lingering dissatisfaction: in spite of his wandering attention span and desire for more thrills Nate ignored a proposition from his boss that they salvage a wreck off the coast of Malaysia, for which his boss did not have the proper permits. "Done with that life," Nate rebuffed Elena's insistence that he should take the job, because he'd made a promise to follow legal procedure from now on.

Staying late at the office one night, Nate heard someone come into the salvage trailer past business hours and confronted them. When the stranger turned around slowly, informing him that he was here looking for his shorter, less-handsome brother, Nate was shocked to see that it was Sam. Sam, who he had last seen fallen through a corrugated metal roof in a Panamanian prison, his internal organs perforated by bullets, fifteen years ago. The Brothers Drake reunited, they shot the shit until the sun came up as Nate told him about all of his adventures, his wife, his expeditions and exciting scars, but the levity was cut short when Sam informed him that he was in trouble.

The only reason he'd gotten out of Panamanian prison in the first place was because of his cell mate, crime lord Hector Alcazar, who had his men infiltrate the prison to bust him out in the middle of the night. It seemed as though Alcazar had planned this since first hearing Sam talk about his one and only obsession: the treasure hoard of notorious pirate Henry Avery, confident that upon release he could find it. He would find it. Escape was a double-edged sword: with Sam's freedom came a hefty price tag, and Alcazar gave him three months to locate Avery's legendary haul. Sam went to the only person he knew would understand.

Nate, out of that life, refused at first. But drawn in by adventure and intrigue and life-threatening situations, and encouraged by the return of the brother he had thought was dead, he called Elena and like a COMPLETE ASSHOLE told her that he would take the Malaysian job.

Shortly thereafter Nate and Sam met Sully at the Rossi Estate off the coast of Italy, a sprawling villa well-known in certain spheres for its black market auctions of priceless artifacts. It was there that Sam tracked another cross of Saint Dismas identical to the one they once found in Panama, but intact instead of broken open. Seeing as none of them were wealthy enough to buy the damn thing, they made plans for Nate to kill the lights while Sam lifted the piece from the stage. While there, they encountered none other than Rafe Adler, who it seemed was attempting to purchase the cross himself, and his right-hand woman, Nadine Ross. After a bidding match between Sully and Rafe to stall for time while Nate got to the power, they nicked the cross and set off a villa-wide panic when the lights came back on. In the process Nate ran into Nadine, who apparently ran an army-for-hire (called Shoreline) that Rafe was employing, and she kicked the ever-loving Hell out of him before he met up with Sam and Sully and they pealed out of the driveway.

The cross held a piece of parchment that pointed to Henry Avery's grave (Henry Gravery, anyone?) in Scotland, so the brothers Drake set off to visit the Cathedral of Saint Dismas in the hopes they might be able to access the next way point without arousing Rafe and Nadine's suspicions. Sully, down off the coast in his seaplane, waited anxiously, stil uneasy about Nate calling Elena the night before to tell her that his trip in Malaysia might take longer than expected. Trekking through multiple chambers after finding the "grave" they located the next hint in a booby-trapped room meant to test one's greed: in taking a single coin from a plate of scales, they had a heading of a dormant volcano near King's Bay, Madagascar. Shoreline arrived just in time to trip the booby-trap, and Nate and Sam escaped with minimal incident (i.e, the entire complex fell apart) when Nadine's army got a little too eager with the dynamite. They narrowly escaped to the Hog Wild.

Arrival in Madagascar was punctuated by another concerned call from Elena, who noted that maybe Nate shouldn't have gone to do a job in Malaysia during monsoon season. He agreed, and panicked when she stated that she could just come to visit him, because it had been more than a couple of weeks since they saw each other. Too dangerous, he said, and I'll see you soon.

Mudding up the slippery rocks in Madagascar in a rented Jeep with a winch, Sam, Nate, and Sully told terrible pirate jokes and investigated a number of centuries-old towers pocking the island: each one marked with a sigil that belonged to a different famous pirate captain. Nate postulated they might have pooled all their funds and worked together, but it seemed an uneasy alliance for untrustworthy folk to make back then. Meanwhile, Shoreline goons were roaming the mountainside as well, looking for the same leads. They narrowed the search area to two of the twelve towers, and split up to find the right one. Nate and Sully got to it first, uncovering paintings and artifacts that confirmed his theory the pirates were all working together to create a new society for themselves: the fabled "Libertalia," a pirate refuge hidden from the East India Trading Company and England herself. Sending photos to Sam over the phone Nate was dismayed to answer a call he thought was from his brother; as it turned out, Rafe had cracked their cells and was picking apart all the clues they were sending back and forth. He now had the advantage. Chased across the countryside by Rafe's hired guns, Nate and Sam met Sully back at their motel, finding Elena inside as she pored over their maps, research, and work.

Livid that Nate had lied to her, of all people, and withheld the fact that he had returned-from-the-dead family, she confronted him and stormed out. Rightfully pissed off at himself, Nate snapped at Sully to keep an eye on Elena and rented a boat with Sam to investigate their clue, if...halfheartedly. Island-hopping and puzzle-solving in the process, they located the precise island where Avery had established his fabled pirate colony, and were caught in a storm as they neared it. Driven into the water by agents of Shoreline upon approach, Nate and Sam were separated and Nate washed up alone.

After a great deal of wandering he was eventually reunited with Sam, and they meandered through the streets of a once-thriving pirate city, confused by how everything appeared to have been left behind, as though suddenly abandoned. Upon reaching the city's treasury they found evidence of a slaughter: soldiers versus civilians, barricades, and long-dead bodies. The treasury itself was empty, and it appeared the common people had staged a revolt against their twelve pirate leaders, who claimed the treasure for themselves and moved it to another part of the island called "New Devon." Sam and Nate set off again, trapped not long afterward by Nadine and Rafe, and Nate begged the latter to let him help them find what they were looking for so that they could save Sam's life from Hector Alcazar. Rafe, surprised, told Nate that Hector Alcazar had died in a drug bust months ago, and that he had gotten Sam out of prison. That Sam had been working with him to find Avery's treasure.

For the last two years.

Shocked, Nate could only stare at his brother, and Rafe moved to shoot him. Sam took the bullet and knocked Nate over the edge of the cliff they had been standing on and into the river, and Nate woke up with his long-suffering wife cleaning the blood off of his face (bless her). She had gotten to the island with Sully's help, and Nate finally admitted the truth about his past - and his name - to Elena, who agreed to help him find his brother. During the walking, leaping, driving, and climbing, they found a way to reconcile the broken parts of their marriage and work together. In doing so they made it to New Devon in record time, which was a sprawling, if flooded neighborhood packed with twelve enormous houses belonging to the twelve pirate lords, noting that the exterior gates were strewn with hundreds of gibbeted bodies, the examples Avery made of the rebellious citizens of Libertalia.

At Thomas Tew's house, Avery's second in command, Elena and Nate found a dining table with ten bodies around it: in an effort to quell the discord between the captains, Avery and Tew intended to drink to peace...and poisoned the cups of the others. Learning that Tew and Avery became incredibly paranoid and turned on each other for the treasure, they walked through a series of booby-trapped catacombs and out into a ship graveyard, where Sam was fleeing from Shoreline mercs. Reconnoitering with Sully after a firefight, Sam begged Nate to help him find the treasure, and Nate refused. Reluctantly Sam followed the group to Sully's seaplane until an accident separated them, and with an apology Sam headed back to the mountain in the center of the island to find Avery's treasure. With Elena's blessing, Nate followed.

Into the mountain, Nate found Avery's ship, the Fancy, no doubt glutted with gold but grounded on rocks in the cavernous inlet. Sam, having stolen a boat, made his way into the ship. From a distance of relative safety Nate overheard Nadine expressing her doubts about how many people (her people) had died over this stupid treasure, and when Rafe physically attempted to slap sense into her, she sucker-punched him before her own men turned their guns on her. Grudgingly, still thinking it wasn't all worth it, she followed Rafe to the Fancy, and Nate pursued them. When close, the ship suddenly exploded: someone inside had accidentally triggered another one of Avery's booby traps, which caused severe damage to the hull and killed most of the mercenaries inside.

Inside the fiery ship Nate discovered the treasure hold, where Sam was pinned under a heavy beam, and Rafe - bloodied and furious - was eager for a fight. Nadine, who had long since tired of this bullshit, disarmed both Nate and Rafe and told them that this obsession would kill them as it had their predecessors. Tew and Avery, swords in each other's guts, had died nearby. Deciding that none of this was really worth it, Nadine skipped out and locked the door to the hold behind her, leaving Rafe to pick up Tew's blade and begin an assault on Nate, who was...definitely not very skilled at fencing, but a tenacious sonuvabitch. Having always played dirty Rafe got the upper hand and Nate crushed him with a heavy pile of gold swag hanging from the ceiling as the ship burned around them. Prying Sam free, the brothers escaped the Fancy before it was entirely immolated and met up with Elena and Sully again. Back in Madagascar, Nate officially parted from Sam to find a better future with Elena, and Sam joined forces with Sully on the Next Big Con.

Once they returned to Louisiana Nate's marine salvage boss, Jameson, informed him that he was selling the company. To. Nate. Which was weird, y'know, because he didn't remember buying a company? Elena helpfully contributed: she purchased the marine salvage company from Jameson and acquired the necessary paperwork for that job in Malaysia, and told Nate that they needed the adventure. They couldn't live a normal life. They would forge one of their own, their way.

Even if they both hated the idea of all the paperwork.