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“That’ll be eighteen hundred rupees,” said the barista.
‘Eighteen hundred?’ Zelda repeated the number in her head.
“Yes, ma’am,” the barista replied. Zelda realised she’d spoken aloud.
“Shit, right,” she said, reaching for her purse and plucking out her wallet. “Do you take Maestro?”
“We do” the barista chirped. She had an unwavering, unblinking smile which stoked Zelda’s general malaise as she handed her card over.
Revali shifted his weight to his other foot and scoffed. “For eighteen hundred rupees, these had better be the best coffees in Hyrule.”
“Needn’t be rude,” Zelda said, her gaze not leaving the barista who was turning her card over in her hand. Situational agony clawed its way up her spine as this smiling barista eyed the name on her card.
‘Don’t,’ she thought. She didn’t have time to be recognised right now — not with Ancient Sheikah History 217 at 16:30. The cashier apparently did not make the connection — Zelda was a common enough theophoric name after all.
Revali rolled his eyes and sighed. “Whatever,” he said. “It’s your money, Princess.”
Zelda froze. So did the barista. Revali stretched his arms nonchalantly. The queue wondered what was taking so long.
“Oh, wow, are you really Princess Zelda?” asked the bubbly barista in a near shout. Zelda felt as if her heart had turned into a lead ball and fallen on her stomach. Her gaze became more and more distant as the barrage of oddly personal questions continued, unintelligible through the swirling ocean of anxiety that clouded her hearing and numbed her lips.
‘Shit’ she thought. She knew she had to either ease off the tension of the situation or break it, and she knew she had to do it quickly. In a panic, she leafed through options in her head as quickly as they came, until instinct took over.
“Do you live in, like, a castle or some-“
“Mate, I don’t fucking know you,” were the words that came out. Zelda didn’t know where they came from; they certainly weren’t the words she’d planned, but they were apparently what she had served. The cashier’s dumbstruck look compounded the new silence.
‘Apparently we have chosen to break, rather than to ease’, she thought.
“My apologies,” said the barista, shrinking a bit. She ran Zelda’s card, and held it back out to her.
“Thank you,” Zelda mumbled, thoroughly mortified.