Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“WAIT!! STOP!”

Of all the things I was expecting to happen this morning, being late for the bus was… actually one of them. The thing is, I was chill with the driver. If he saw me running up the sidewalk trying to get on, he’d stop and let me on real quick before continuing on. The problem was that he was out sick today. Someone else was driving, and they were determined to just keep on going and stay on schedule. 

“C’mon, stop the bus, he’s trying to get on!” I heard someone call out from inside, to no avail. It was good to know at least someone noticed the sweaty blonde kid trying to keep up with the 200 ton vehicle. Considering I’m the only kid in my class that’s never gotten under 10 minutes on the Mile Run, I was pushing it as it was. I couldn’t be late to school, and this was the only bus that came anywhere near my neighborhood for the next hour or so. Since the driver wasn’t keen on stopping, and I was almost out of breath, I put my plan B into effect. 

Reaching behind me, I pulled out something I had tucked between my backpack and the back of my hoodie: my pride and joy. A little project leftover from a sophomore year art class where we had to paint skateboards. They let us put wheels on them if we wanted, and that’s exactly what I did! Learned to skate pretty well with it in the next two years, and now it was going to help me hitch a ride to school. I was quick to throw it to the ground under my feet and hop on, kicking off a couple times to try and keep up with the bus while also gently pulling back towards the rear bumper of the vehicle. I had one shot before it turned onto the bigger streets and I’d be lost in the slew of morning traffic. Yet somehow, I managed to whip around behind the bus and latch both hands onto the top and bottom of its back bumper and hold on. That was my big plan: to Marty McFly my way to school. The whole way too school. If I came back home that day with calluses on my fingers, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

I heard a tap on the back window above me, and looked up to see someone slide it open. A familiar face peeked her head out. The good thing about having friends in the same neighborhood was that we all took the same bus.

“Heeeeey Zelda,” He said sheepishly as she looked down at me. She had a hand up and was holding her dirty blonde hair out of her face, especially making sure the wind generated from the moving bus didn’t sweep it into her face.

“Hey Link. Late again?”

“Yeah, the driver wasn’t stopping.”

“I could tell!” someone called out from inside. “I tried to get him to stop, but he was like ‘Oh, if he didn’t get on the bus then, he isn’t getting on it now.’ Like, can you believe that??”

I didn’t have to see the face to know Zelda’s best friend was the one talking. 

“Hey Nav.”

“Hi Link! You remember you’ve got tutoring today.”

“How could I forget when you’re-”

“-The one doing the tutoring?” We’d said that last bit together as if in sync.

“See, I told you he wouldn’t forget!” she said to Zelda. I couldn’t see her, but just the sound of her words manifested the all too familiar image of her smile going ear to ear. The kind that turns your eyes you’re so proud of someone.

“Don’t patronize me, Navi, I’m bad at algebra, not stupid.”

“Says the one having to tail after the bus,” Zelda snorted.

“Hey! That’s only because he wouldn’t stop!”

“And you weren’t here on time in the first place because…”

“I slept through my alarm, you should know that this happens!”

It was at this point another person’s head found its way out the window, with just enough room to squeeze in next to Zelda. Lucky for Navi, she cut her hair short the previous summer. It barely went down below her chin, so she wasn’t in as much danger of having it blow around everywhere.

“At that point, I’d just set a louder alarm, man.”

“I’m not trying to wake up the whole house, Nav.”

“If it’s that loud, I think you need to see a doctor.”

“A doctor for what?” Zelda asked, cutting in. “Sleeping?? Some people are just deep sleepers, you know.”

“To this extent though?” Navi asked.

Zelda looked like she was going to open her mouth to retort, but paused for a moment, glanced down at me with her expression unchanged, then closed her mouth. Very suddenly the bus came to a stop. I hadn’t had the thought at the time to pay attention to the break lights and was unprepared for it. I suddenly lurched forward and smacked my face on the back of the bus as my feet were almost swept out from under me as my skateboard tried to glide under the vehicle with its momentum.

“AgH! Ow ow ow ow-” I kept one hand under the bumper while covering my now definitely bleeding nose with the other. A small price to pay for getting to school on time, though.

Once the bus pulled in front of the school, I got out from behind it and made my way onto the sidewalk while tucking my skateboard away again. The first thing Zelda did once she got off was run toward the back to meet me.

“Oh my god, are you okay dude??”

“Yep, I’m fine. Nose is just bleeding is all, it’s fine,” I assured her as she handed me a tissue from  her bag. I held it up to my nose. “It ain’t my first one. Should stop before my first class.”

“Speaking of which, we should get a move on, Zed!” Navi called out. She was in the middle of wrestling her navy blue blazer from the edge of the bus door before she finally got it free and walked further onto the sidewalk. “We gotta print the homework before class, remember?”

“RIGHT! Right.” Zelda looked back to me.

“Wait, don’t both of you have printers at home, though??” I asked, genuinely confused. For a moment I thought that maybe, maybe , pitch perfect Zelda and Navi had forgotten to print their homework out before school.

“Navi’s printer broke, and the new one her dad got isn’t gonna arrive for another week.”

“Yeah, it was something about shortages or delivery delays or something? My dad was SUPER pissed about it,” Navi explained as she came over to collect Zelda. “But anyways, we should get going before the bell rings!”

“RIGHT! Bye Link! Don’t bleed all over yourself! See you at break time!” She said all this as Navi was dragging her away toward the library. I just waved goodbye with my free hand, trying not to think too much about the whole thing as I just made my way to my locker to get my own stuff together. First class of the day was English, and I had made a big oopsie and left some of my notes I needed at school. Handwritten notes, which I needed in order to work on my project for English. A project I needed all the time I could get in order to get it done. Yeah suffice it to say, I was going to have to speed run the whole thing in today’s class period.

I went sorting through my slew of things, still holding the tissue to my nose as I sifted through books and random junk I’d forgotten to bring home - a bag of stale chips, a piece of gum from the last resident of the locker that’s been stuck to the ceiling of it for the past few years, gym shorts I needed to wash, a stick of Old Spice with a bite taken out of it(a friend paid me $10 for me to do it in a moment of weakness), a bottle of AXE body spray I hadn’t dared to use since september, a poster I didn’t have the guts to put up anywhere in my room - before I finally found my notes haphazardly buried underneath my copy of the book I was doing my project on (Jekyll and Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson). I was in the middle of stuffing it in my bag for safekeeping when I overheard some talking. Some heated and very angry talking, mind you. But it was just familiar enough to draw my attention.

“C’mon you two, just one sheet of homework! Is that so hard to do?!”

I glanced around the corner to see a trio of people at another set of lockers. What I saw was a classic sight in any good cheesy high school film: a big buff bully harassing a pair of nerds. It looked like he was trying to get homework to copy off of or something. Unfortunately, I happened to be pretty tight with the nerds in question.

“We’re not supposed to have the same code on our homework, Mike, it’ll be obvious you copied us!” went the taller of the two victims.

“Well then why dontcha give me your sheet then, you limp noodle,” went Mike, the bully in question..

“Hey! Only I get to call him a beanpole!” shouted the shortest of the three, getting up close to Mike to try and be intimidating. Considering Mike had at least a foot on him, he was trying to stand on his tiptoes in order to do so. “Besides, it’s literally just following the instructions in the book, any second rate STEM kid could do it, knucklehead!”

“Oh, you wanna go you little-”

“WHOA whoa whoa, guys!” I called out to them as I approached. Lucky for me, my nose stopped bleeding by this time. Hopefully things went well and that wouldn’t change the moment I came within a foot of Mike. “What’s going on here exactly you guys?”

“Oh Link, thank goodness!” said the taller of the two. “Mr. Goss here is trying to steal homework again.”

“Nah man, Embers’ lying,” Mike retorted, referring to the taller of the two(his name was Garrett Embers). “I just wanted to see if we got the same answers.”

“Mikey-”

“Don’t ‘Mikey’ me!”

“Alright fine fine, but Mike… don’t try and pull that garbage, I heard the whole thing. Like Vinny said, you could just look through the book real quick-”

“Like I’m gonna have time for that.”

“Sounds like you’re just looking for any excuse to copy off of someone smarter than you,” Vinny said. Mike was quick to stoop down and grab the front of his shirt. And despite it all, Vinny had the same smug look on his face as it all happened.

“You wanna say that again, shorty? I’ll end you!”

“WHOA WHOA!” Was all Garrett could manage as he backed up.

“HEY HEY HEY Mike, calm down man!” I said this as I got between the two of them, breaking them up. “You don’t gotta go punching people, man, just stain his clothes or something if he pisses you off.” To be entirely fair, I pulled that response completely out of my butt. Mike’s go to, I’d noticed, for getting back at someone that was pissing him off was to physically lash out. Technically, staining clothes is a physical act of violence depending on how you look at it. But I think the absurdity of the suggestion caused his brain to short circuit for a moment. I took that moment to grab Vinny and Garrett and drag them away.

“Alright, well, good luck on the homework, Mike! You got until after break time, dude, so don’t dilly-dally!” I was able to get the three of us into the adjacent hallway before he could say anything in response.

Garrett and Vinny… they were good friends of mine. The two of them usually stuck together whenever I wasn’t around, so if you were looking for one, chances are you’d find the other too. Garrett was a beanpole of a kid, that’s no lie. He’s 6’5” and probably weighs the same as I do. He’s a really soft spoken guy, though. You could bump into him and he’d apologize first. Vinny was the polar opposite. Dude never hit much of a growth spurt and is 5 feet tall at 18 despite it all. Despite us all being locals, I feel like Vinny’s the only one I know who would actually call out “HEY I’M WALKING HERE” while crossing the street. Quick to pick a fight and not quick to know when to shut up.

“What were you doing there, Link, I was gonna get him!”

“Yeah, Vin, sure sure.” I stopped beside the water fountain with both of them. “I’m not saying Mike doesn’t deserve it, I just don’t think you should be the one to enact vengeance on him.”

“Why not?”

“Because to be quite frank, I’ve never seen a bloke who’s old enough buy cigarettes while also needing a booster seat,” Garrett said bluntly. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the ungodly noise that came out of me as I tried to suppress a laugh made my nose start to bleed again. Vinny, meanwhile, looked like he was about to let steam out of his ears like a dang kettle.

“Alright well at least I’m not ducking through doorways, Garrett .”

“Better than being able to comfortably sit in those chairs at the kindergarten.”

“Better than having to learn to sew just to make crap that fits you!”

“GUYS! Guys-” I let out a wheeze as I tried to keep it together. I felt like if they kept going back and forth I was gonna pee myself.

My near laughing fit somehow got them to shut up, but it was all quickly interrupted by the ringing of the school bell.

“Bollocks!” Garrett called out as he more securely slung his bag over his shoulder. “I have to go! Calculus is on the other side of the school.”

“I know that, man, we have the same class!!” They both went off on their way in a light jog. “See you later, Link!”

“See you guys!” Despite what one might think, I don’t have infinite time to just loiter in the hallways. I’m not special, I had a first period class too. Difference was that it was much closer than wherever Garrett and Vinny had to run off to for calculus. The English class was close enough that I still had time in the passing period to chill for a moment once I got there. And chill I did with the one person in the class I knew…

“Link, THERE you are!” said a girl in the desk next to mine as I sat down. “I was starting to think you actually got sick or something.”

“Miranda, when was the last time I ever called in sick?” I started to get my stuff out of my bag and get ready for the day.

“Back in November when you got some nasty food poisoning from Thanksgiving leftovers.” That made me pause what I was doing, looking over at the smug redhead next to me. The look on her face practically said “gotcha!”

“I… well that was bad leftovers, I learned my lesson there,” I said as-a-matter-of-fact-ly as I laid my stuff out. “Besides, lord knows I’d be missing out on your frankly…” I paused for a moment as I glanced down at the notes and doodles on her desk. “... interesting way of making presentations for this class.”

“Oh! That reminds me!” She bent down to get something out of her bag. For a whole moment I only had a view of the patches and hand-painted designs on the back of her denim jacket before she came back up and showed me what she was looking for. “I finally got around to making some decent pencil sketches for my presentation! They started out more crude than some of the other stuff I’ve done for class, but I’m feeling proud of these ones!”

I just took a moment to look at her work before going, “Nice!” That was the one thing I liked about Miranda’s stuff. She’s explained it to me before, but basically she likes to put a bit of personal pizzazz into her school work. Anyone can find stock photos off the internet, but why do that when you could draw them? I couldn’t relate because I suck at art, but she’s got a knack for it.

“You think the teacher is gonna like them, though?”

“What’re you talking about, he always likes them!”

“I dunno, he deducted points when I drew stuff for my Hamlet presentation.”

“Well to be fair, I don’t think that much blood was good for a high school class.”

“It was a tasteful amount of blood, thank you.”

“Mr. Matheson, Miss McKnight, please be seated!” called out the teacher as she walked in. We were quick to retreat to our own desk spaces as our English class finally kicked into gear. And despite it all, I somehow managed to get my presentation done in the time allotted. After all, I didn’t have time to dilly dally. I had an even worse class to get to.

Pang!

The sound of inflated rubber hitting the wood boarded floors always found a way to activate my fight or flight. Dodgeball. The bane of every unathletic teenager’s high school career. And that day’s match wasn’t my best. So let’s not talk about dodgeball! Let’s talk about the other reasons I loathe PE. For starters…

Mike is in the same class period as me.

Every time Coach McKay - no shade to him, he’s a really nice coach - decides to just relax and let us play dodgeball, I feel like I’m fighting for my life. I’m glad I’m good at jumping out of the way of things, otherwise I’m pretty sure Mike would’ve ended me a long time ago. That, and there was one other thing keeping Mike from committing aggravated assault via rubber ball every time we were in class together. And that was the fact that he had the class with his girlfriend, too. Can’t beat people up while your girlfriend’s watching, after all! If there’s one thing I can give Uma Qadir credit for, it’s making sure Mike’s not an insufferable person whenever she’s with him. 

Unfortunately for me that wasn’t the only thing she was good at.

The one time I tried throwing a dodgeball at someone, my main target ended up jumping out of the way. My throw cork screwed straight towards Uma, and to my horror, she caught it one handed. 

If I could’ve just died on the spot to avoid what was about to happen, I would’ve been fine with it. It would’ve been better than seeing Uma look at me with a stare that could kill before proceeding to put her whole body into that throw. I closed my eyes, prepared to die right then and there, accepting that I wouldn’t be able to jump out of the way in time.

Lucky for me, the ball never hit me.

I opened my eyes to see that someone had jumped out in front of me and caught it.

“Be careful there! You could’ve hurt him,” said Mina, one of my only friends in the class.

“That was the idea, Van Der Zee,” she grumbled back. “It’s dodgeball!”

“Well I think I got you out either way.”

“Right, right. I admit defeat!” Uma raised her hands in the air before walking off to the side to sit with the other kids. I got so caught up in the euphoria of not getting dodgeballed into the shadow realm that I somehow managed to get spooked when Mina tapped my shoulder.

“You too, Link, she caught your ball.”

“Oh! That’s right, you’re right, my bad.” I walked off to the side with everyone else as well, taking a seat and just deciding to watch as the rest of the game went down. Mina Van Der Zee was one of the only people in my PE class that year I actually got to know and became friends with. The coach made us partner up for sit ups or something - you know, the ones where your partner holds your feet and counts your reps before you switch places - and we didn’t want to be awkward so we started a conversation. We’ve been acquainted ever since. She doesn’t have much time outside of school to hang out, but we still keep in touch and text sometimes. But for the most part, our socialization takes place solely during PE. It helped to keep me feeling safe and grounded when Mike was in the same class period, but I was lucky Uma also seemed to be able to keep him out of my hair.

Still, Mike’s a big reason why I always feel relieved to get out during Dodgeball. It takes me out of the danger zone.

“-and all of that is due TOMORROW!” 

“Dang, Nav,” was all I could think to say as I took a bite out of the PB&J I packed myself that morning. “Here’s to praying you don’t call in sick tomorrow or something.”

“Don’t jinx it, dingus,” Navi said, lightly punching my shoulder. “Besides, knowing my mom she’d probably still make me go.”

“I can relate,” said Garrett from the other end of the table. “Had a really bad cold once when I was little and my mom STILL made me go to school. Could barely breathe during class because my nose was so plugged up.”

“Oh gosh, you poor thing,” Zelda said.

“That, my friend, sounds like a war crime,” Miranda went from her spot next to Navi. She’d started sitting with us a month or so ago, after I finally got her to realize it was fine.

“Everything sounds like a war crime to you, M,” I said.

“Well maybe because my folks knew a sick kid should be taken care of at home and not sent out into the world to sneeze all over everything!” Miranda retorted, slamming her hands on the table for emphasis.

“You act like my parents didn’t teach me to sneeze into my bloody elbow,” Garrett said, slightly disgusted.

“You can’t trust a young child to follow instructions all the time and I will die on this hill.”

“See, someone understands!” Vinny adds.

“Calm down you guys,” Zelda said in an attempt to mediate. “It’s good to know you’ll at least be a decent mom one day, M.” Miranda took a bite of her pasta from home.

“Bold of you to assume I’ll have a kid.”

“Oh! Hey guys!!”

The conversation came to a stop as we all looked up. To be fair it might’ve looked intimidating to anyone else to see 6 different teens turn to look at them in near unison, but this kid wasn’t just anyone.

“Oh! Hey Simon!” Zelda greeted him warmly. “How have you been?”

He took a seat next to Zelda at the table, nearly towering over the rest of us without even having to stay standing. Simon was Mina’s little brother. He was 3 years our junior, but he was a nice kid so we still let him hang out with us. He’s also on the school’s football team though, so he’s not only tall, but he also looks like he’s done a pushup every day of his life since he was born. Maybe that’s why we never really objected to him sitting with us at the start. Now we know he’s a really sweet kid and fun to hang around, but at the start we just saw this big wall of muscle and were too afraid to tell him otherwise.

“I’ve been good! How about you guys?” He asked. “I think you were talking about something about kids and… sneezing?”

“Garrett’s folks made him go to kindergarten sick one day and he was telling us about it,” Vinny relayed. “And then Miranda went on a rant about bad parents or something.”

“It wasn’t a rant, I was just criticizing the Embers for their past mistakes in parenting.”

“Yeah, by ranting about them.”

“There’s a thin string keeping me from drop-kicking you into the garbage can, you know that?”

The last bit got a chuckle out of Simon, which was the one thing that made it near impossible for me to hold back my own laughter. Vinny frowned, but then smirked like he just came up with the best insult ever.

“Yeah, and in retaliation I can shave your head while you’re asleep or something. You already got a head start on that, you Tank Girl looking ass.”

Miranda was the one to laugh this time if you could believe it. If there’s one thing she knew how to do, it was taking jokes directed at her. And her half shaven head of hair was a perfect target for that kind of thing.

“Tank Girl looking ass… that’s a new one!”

“Hey no, you’re supposed to be mad, c’mon,” Vinny said, half smiling at her reaction. It was the kind of reaction Vinny could only give to a close friend. Not everyone can have someone laugh at the insult they dish out at them and take it like he can.

“I always forget this is how you all usually talk,” Simon said with a chuckle. I just shrugged my shoulders.

“You put a motley crew of 6 at the same table and you’re bound to get stuff like this eventually.”

The rest of the school day went by relatively quickly. School is the same for a lot of kids, so I assume most people will agree when I say a majority of my classes don’t have much in the way of notable events. My final class of the day, however, was different.

Different in the sense that it was harder.

AP World History is my last class of the day, and like most AP classes, it's not a class you can just skim through and get a passing grade without trying. And I knew this. I also knew that I sucked at remembering to get homework done on time, though. I had a bit of leverage, though. The AP World History teacher was a man by the name of Ganymede Doirich, or just Mr. Doirich since this was a semi-professional learning environment(his last name was pronounced "Dar-uh-huh", being one of those weirdly spelt Irish ones and all).

He was a big guy, probably around the same height as Garrett if I'm being honest, with a darker complexion and his hair combed back over his head in that way office workers comb back their hair. But what made him intimidating was the fact that he was built like a brick wall, like unstoppable force meets immovable object kind of brick wall. He may be intimidating, but it's in a well meaning way. You know, like a "I care about your future" kind of way.

The lesson wasn’t much to talk about. We’d started learning about World War II, which is never a good time for anyone to learn about. The more important thing was something I saw another kid in the class do as the bell rang, when I was about to go up and ask the teacher about something. Someone beat me to it, putting something down on his desk.

“... What’s this?”

“My essay, Mr. Doirich,” said the kid as he looked all smug. “I finished it last night, sources cited and everything. I was hoping perhaps I could get some extra credit for turning it in a day early is all.” I knew this kid, and frankly loathed him. Reily Valenti.

Reily was an interesting dude. The kind of guy to respond to bullies by telling them they’ll be bagging his groceries in the future. I wouldn’t be surprised if this guy tried to do that funny anime thing where he pushes up his glasses and makes the lenses all shiny in an attempt to intimidate someone. At the very least he toned it down in class. Maybe he knew the teacher wouldn’t put up with it? I dunno. What I do know is that Mr. Doirich took one look at Reily’s printed essay before gently taking it.

“I’ll think about it,” he said. “Now, do get home in a timely manner, Mr. Valenti, I’ve got work to do here.” Reily was still smirking as he walked out of the classroom. That was my cue. I nervously shuffled up to the teacher’s desk before I took the plunge.

“Hi, Mr. Doirich,” I began.

“You can call me Ganymede, Link, we’ve been over this,” he said, instantly warming up the moment he heard me speak. And just like that, the intimidating demeanor melted away in an instant. It made me relax a little bit.

“Right, Ganymede, sir,” I started over as I leaned on his desk, a hand under me. “I was wondering if I could maybe get an extension on the essay.” Doirich stopped what he was doing. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d heard a record scratch that I was unaware of. He looked toward me with a confused look on his face.

“Link, you do know next week is spring break, right?”

“I know I know, I just…” I took a moment to really think about what I wanted to say next. I knew it had to be good or else I risked getting laughed out of the room. “... I’ve been having trouble focusing is all, and finding good sources is hard because every good scholarly source is behind a paywall-”

“Oh that’s right, I HATE that.”

“See, you get it! I just… need more time to actually find stuff I can read so I can get all the requirements for this essay done if that makes sense.” The teacher sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“You do know just because I’m intimate with your mother doesn’t mean you can ask academic favors of me, right?”

“Intimate is a very humble term for it.”

“Well ‘dating’ sounds cheesy, Mr. Matheson.” There was a pause as I just looked at him, trying to put on my best “I’ve been a good student all semester, could I just have an extension just this once and I’ll never ask anything of you ever again” face.

Mr. Doirich paused, then sighed, then put some of his papers away.

“Monday after Spring Break. No later. Entirely finished. Got it?”

“Got it! Thank you so much sir!” I went out the door of the classroom before yelling back, “I won’t let you down, sir!”

As all days do, the school day that Thursday came to an end. And as all kids do, I had places to be that afternoon.

“Link! Over here!”

I looked over to see Vinny and Garrett in the school parking lot. Garret was in the driver’s seat of his car - a second hand Kia Soul - while Vinny was waving his hand from the passenger seat to get my attention.

“We’re heading to my place for pizza, you wanna join?” Vinny asked. Pizza at Vinny’s was always a good time, because that usually meant free food as well as Mario Party, but this one time I unfortunately had to pass.

“Sorry dude, I can’t tonight.”

“Oh, right right right, you gotta see your mom off before she drives to the airport tonight.”

“Yep! That and more!” I pulled my skateboard out and laid it out on the ground before scooting off toward the crosswalk. “I’ve got places to be! Things to pick up!” I glided across the crosswalk and began my long journey roughly in the direction of Fresh Meadows.

“... Games to play!”

Chapter Text

When you find out a store has a name like “The Dragon’s Lair”, you assume it’s got to be something either super nerdy or super awesome. Maybe it’s a really awesome antique store. Or it could be laser tag. Maybe it’s one of those really fancy metal or glass working stores with all the artsy stuff everywhere. Or, in my case at least, it could be a Tabletop RPG store that also happens to sell video game paraphernalia. I worked there for one summer while trying to be even remotely independent, and for now that’s how I’m doing it for a bit: being a seasonal employee at the nerd store. It does come with benefits, though, even outside of summertime. Namely getting a 10% discount on stuff I order through the store. It was a perfect arrangement for what I had planned to pick up that month.

I stopped and picked up my board right outside the storefront in Queens. It definitely looked very strange compared to everything around it. The Dragon’s Lair was seated near the corner of the block, being bordered by the deli on the corner to its right and an empty space on its left with signs all over its windows saying different variations of “FOR LEASE, CALL THIS NUMBER”. The Dragon’s Lair looked almost like it was clawing its way out from between the two stores, with a giant custom made resin dragon seated over the sign standing guard over the whole property. The rest of the store’s facade included more resin, this time sculpted and painted to look like the jagged face of a rock cliff. Or perhaps the jagged walls of a cave someone walks into looking for spooky cave paintings and bats.

Either way, the only real indicator that this was a manmade store and not a sliver of a mountain the rest of the block was built around were the giant windows up front displaying all they had to offer. Things like Dungeons and Dragons sourcebooks, the newest Magic card set and whatever other add ons that entail(I wouldn’t know, I’m not one for playing magic to be honest), pop figurines that are at least $2 less than at big box stores, and - of course - games from every popular console under the sun. Plenty of used and new Wii U games were still being sold inside, but the window display had something else there: the brand new Nintendo Switch

Well, not brand new. It’s been a couple of weeks at least since it dropped, but I was stupid and didn’t do anything in the way of preording. It was worse considering the game launching with the new system was a game I’d been dying to play for the past 6 years: Breath of the Wild, originally supposed to come out in 2015 but ended up delayed for 2 more years. I told Bennet - my boss at the Dragon’s lair, he’s cool - to let me know the moment either of these two items came in stock. I wasn’t expecting anything for a while. Gaming companies usually take forever to ship out  new units, and it takes even longer for big box stores to get those shipments and have them ready to sell. I don’t know if it was some stroke of luck or fate smiling upon me or God exists and he heard me praying that earlier sunday to have something to do over Spring Break, but somehow, some way, Bennet had given me the call yesterday that they’d gotten a return for both a console AND a copy of Breath of the Wild to go with it. Something about cranky mom saying that the system was broken, but when Bennet had done a checkup on the thing, the console was completely fine. He didn’t have to tell me twice for me to put down the pick up order.

I walked right in, the bell above the door ringing to signal my presence. The store was relatively dead that day. Most people usually visit for things like the release day of new Magic decks or DnD nights over the weekend(Bennet was trying to get me to join and meet new people, but weekends usually meant stacks of homework for me so I rarely had time for 3-4 hours straight of imagining having fun). So today, it was just me…

“HEYO! Welcome back, dude!”

… My boss, Bennet Zukowski. Now, Bennet’s a pretty… interesting guy. He has an engineering degree, but he looks like he dropped out of college after one semester so he could have more time to chill with friends and party hard. He’s got the stubble, the ponytail, the acne scars, all that. He’s even got the leather biker jacket to really cement the whole look. Despite the fact that he looks like a rejected mockup of either Bill or Ted, he’s a pretty chill guy. The one thing that doesn’t really lend to the whole “college dropout hipster” look of his is his eye. Namely the fact that his left one was fake.

He’d told me about it before. Bennet was born without his left eye, so he’s had to wear a glass one his whole life. Makes for some fun pranks and stuff. I once came in to work over the summer and he had it switched out for the funky red eye from Naruto(I haven’t watched it, but he said it’s called the Sharingan) and it took me until the end of my shift for me to realize his eye was all weird. He also told me about how he once got away with cheating on a test because he told the substitute that his other eye was the glass one, keeping his glass eye pointed down at his paper while he looked at the kid beside him with his real eye. Overall, definitely weird but neat.

“Hey Bennet. Anything good happen today?” I asked, patting the head of Fluffy(he was the store’s mascot - a giant plastic dragon that Bennet found at a yard sale once) as I came in.

“Oh you know, the usual,” he said as he kneeled down to get something behind the counter. “Luther came in to get another set of magic cards, bunch of scalpers showed up right when I opened to sweep out all the pokemon cards-”

“Again?! I thought you were getting better about those!”

“They’re like locusts, man, they get in and get out faster than I can realize what the hell they’re doing.”

“They gotta buy them before they leave though, don’t they??”

“Stella opened today.”

“Ah. Gotcha.” Stella was the new hire taking my spot until summer time. She was 16 and easy to intimidate, so it doesn’t take a genius to figure out some scumbags intimidated her into letting them buy all 50 packs of pokemon booster packs they had for sale.

“BUT! Some good things came out of today,” he said this as he came back up, a big box in his hands. My eyes could’ve popped right out of my head then and there and I wouldn’t have minded. Despite the fact that it was a secondhand item, the box didn’t even look like it was opened! “Like for instance, the zelda geek finally gets to play the new game.”

“YES!” I was quick to dig around my bag for my wallet. “God, Bennet, I owe you a big one, dude.”

“Don’t sweat it, Matheson,” he said as I finally got my wallet out from the depths of my backpack. “Just make extra sure you’ll come back to work come June.”

“DEAL!” I slammed down the $300 or so that I had scrounged up from weeks and weeks of doing chores, cutting out soda from my diet completely, and picking up loose change off the sidewalk. Bennet slid the money into his hand before presenting the box to me like a knight presenting a lovely sword to his squire.

“Your 50 hours of gameplay awaits,” he said with a smirk.

“50?! Holy crap,” I said, pulling out my phone.

“Yeah dude, have you seen the teasers for it??” he said, surprised by my surprise. “As far as the past games go, this one’s got the longest gameplay run time.”

“No kidding,” I said, swiftly going to text Navi about canceling the tutoring session. “Open world and all.” I waited anxiously for only a few seconds before I got a text right back: “Ok! Have fun on that algebra test tomorrow then :P”

“Well, I do believe your adventure in Hyrule awaits, young hero,” Bennet added with a smile.

“Thanks, can’t wait for my discounted fantasy adventure,” I said with a chuckle. That got a laugh out of Bennet.

“C’mon man, I’ve heard good things about this one,” he reassured me.

“I haven’t,” I said bluntly back. Bennet seemed supremely confused before I elaborated. “I’ve been avoiding spoilers like the plague!”

“Ah, you’re one of those gamers, huh?”

“I simply would like to experience it all first hand myself. I haven’t used social media for at least two weeks, man.” 

“Damn. That’s some dedication there.”

“Yeah,” I said as I opened up my backpack, ready to tuck the box away and get going. “And it’s about to finally pay off.”

The switch box didn’t end up fitting in my bag. I rode my board the whole way back home with the zipper open and a secondhand switch box sticking out the main pocket of my backpack. How I didn’t get robbed with my fancy new covetable gadget displayed out in the open like that is anyone’s guess, but I suppose it was a combination of people being respectful and me skating by too fast for anyone to process what I was carrying quick enough to actually try and snatch it. Besides, it was a Thursday evening. Who goes out stealing things on thursdays? No one goes out on a Thursday with stuff good enough to steal.

Lucky for me, the whole robbery thing wasn’t even much of a forethought anyways. Forest Hills wasn’t too far from Dragon’s Lair after all. My mom and dad bought a place there a loooong time ago. Long before me and my sister came into the picture. It was just long enough that my mom doesn’t struggle paying for it now that it’s just the three of us there. Then again, when I was around 7 she managed to land a pretty big gig doing graphic design work for some wildlife conservation organization based up in Maine. Speaking of Maine, that was another reason why I was glad the store was so close to home…

“I’M BACK! I’m back! I didn’t miss you yet!” I called out, half laughing as I skated up to the driveway. The site I came home to was one I hadn’t seen in a while. My mother and my sister were out in the driveway, working together to load a couple of suitcases into the trunk of my mom’s car. My little sister was the first to look up from what she was doing. A big smile took her over and she let out a gasp before shoving what she had into the car and running over to greet me.

“Link! You’re back!” I didn’t have quite enough time to brace myself for her big hug, but it also didn’t knock all the wind out of me.

“Oof! Ariel, be careful, you might actually knock me over some day,” I said with a chuckle.

“Sorry!!”

“Darn, how come I don’t get hugs like that?” My mother asked jokingly. My sister was quick to remedy this by running over to her and giving her a big squeeze as well. I walked over, tucking my board in between my back and my pack before giving my mother a hug right after.

“Glad I could catch you before you went off,” I said. “Hopefully you have fun at the uhhh-”

“Conference, it’s a conference,” she reminded me. “I’m just going so I can keep up to date on what’s going on with the organization.”

“But until Friday?”

“Wildlife conservation is no joke, young man,” she replied, giving me a boop on the nose on the “no joke” bit. “You’ll just have to be prepared to go see a movie or something the Saturday after I get back.”

“Sounds good to me!”

I paused for a moment as a new voice chimed in. I glanced around my mother to see someone taking another bag from the house. Someone who made me stop for a second to process what I was seeing exactly. My mother realized what I was doing before turning around.

“Right, right, I almost forgot! Link, your uncle’s coming with me to the conference, so your cousin Fiona’s going to be staying with you and Ariel while we’re gone. Isn’t that going to be fun?” She revealed this to me as if we hadn’t seen each other in years and missed each other dearly. Luckily, me and Fiona were smart enough to hide our discontent for the whole situation while my mom was still around.

“Good to know!” I said. “It’ll be nice having someone else to help me keep an eye on this little rascal!” I said that as I picked up Ariel by her waist, causing her to giggle and flail as she kept going, “Put me down, doofus! Put me down!”

“And you know what to do tomorrow and all that?”

“Yes, I know I know.”

“Alright, repeat it to me before I go so I’m not stressed out on the flight there.” I took a deep breath before putting Ariel down and holding up my fingers to count out each thing I needed to do…

“Make sure Ariel and I eat breakfast, make sure Ariel gets to the bus stop, make sure I get to school on time, make sure I pick up-”

“Oh, I can pick up Ariel!” Fiona butted in. “I’ve got my car, I can drive over to the school.”

“... Right. Right.”

“Oh, yes, so you can just Ariel off instead of her having to take the bus, perfect!” My mother added. The rest of the conversation went on without me as my cousin started proposing ways she could help and do my things for me, and my mother subsequently agreed that it would be the better option. And just like that, I was out of the conversation as it suddenly went from me being in charge to Fiona being in charge.

“Oh good lord, look at the time! I have to get going.” My mother threw her last bag in the car before shutting the trunk. “Goodbye you two!” She pulled me and Ariel into a shared hug as she gave us both a kid on the head. She met Fiona on the way to the driver’s side of the car. “And you be on your best behavior, young lady,” she joked, Fiona giggling in the middle of it.

“I will, I will, don’t you worry,” she assured with a smile. My mother gave her a little pat on the head before finally getting in the car and driving off. She waved to us as she pulled out of the driveway and went on her way to the airport. Fiona and I smiled and waved the whole time she drove off…

… and then we dropped the façade.

“Since when were you staying here for the week?” I asked as we went back inside. By that time, Ariel had already beat us inside and was in the kitchen, fridge open as she tried to look for something to eat.

“Marion just said,” she retorted(Marion’s my mother’s name). “My dad’s going with her to the conference in Maine, so I’m staying here with you guys until they get back.”

“Yeah, I get that, but what was that about the car and all that?” I asked, arms crossed. “Mom and I already laid out everything last- Ah! Hey!” I cut myself off as I went toward the fridge and took something from Ariel’s hand.

“Hey, c’mon, just one?” she asked, trying to grab back the pineapple popsicle I’d snatched from her before she could break open the plastic.

“Ariel, no, mom gave you cookies to eat at school during lunch, you know the rules.”

“Yeah, but it’s a fruit pop, it’s technically healthy!”

“Well how about this?” I said, putting the popsicle back in the fridge before leaning down to her. “If you eat healthy tonight and stick with the one desert rule, I’ll let you have two popsicles tomorrow. Deal?”

“DEAL!” She didn’t even seem to think about it she had said it so quickly. I nodded my head.

“Good. Now then, as I was saying, why ?” That was all I could ask as a means of continuing the conversation. Fiona just looked at me and sighed, sitting down at the table as she went to check her phone.

“I dunno… maybe your mom asked if I wanted to stay with you guys ahead of time since we live close by,” she began, explaining it to me as if I were a child being explained the plot of a movie and not a young adult being explained a thing everyone else apparently knew about. “And maybe she didn’t tell you because she didn’t want you feeling butthurt for having to be babysat by your cousin.”

“Babysat??” It was that specific word that threw me off hard. “Why would I need to be babysat? I was the one doing the babysitting. I’m 18! A legal adult! I’m old enough to babysit my little sister and man the house!” I’d have been content to just end it there. I went to the fridge to try and see what I could make for dinner. But then Fiona started it back up again with something that managed to push a button. Not all of them, but a button.

“Probably says something about you, then.”

I paused. I thought for a moment. I closed the fridge door and turned back to her.

“What are you implying?”

“What do you think I’m implying?” She said, “You’re not exactly the best authority figure to have manning the house.”

“What, is it because I can’t drive??”

“Probably not the main one, but that’s a biggie. You wanna take care of your sister when she has school to get to, you need to know how to drive.”

“Okay, well I’m sorry the freeways around here are terrifying and I never want to be behind the wheel on them!”

“That’s not my problem, Link, you gotta get over it.”

“Oh yeah, like how you get over every time I mention that AT LEAST I CAN COOK!”

“Oh HERE WE GO!” She angrily got up. “I burnt the instant noodles ONE TIME!”

“ON FOUR DIFFERENT OCCASIONS!”

“IT WAS A BAD CASE OF NOODLES!!”

“Right, well then I guess the pizza money mom left was just for if we feel like it, huh?”

“Just shut up about it, will ya? It’s like there’s nothing else about me you know how to make fun of.”

“WHATEVER just…” I paused for a moment as I tried to think of something before letting out an aggravated huff. I grabbed a bag of pistachios out of the pantry before walking towards the stairs. “Just don’t try and boss me around, alright? I’m an adult, and I can do adult things without another mom telling me what to do.” That seemed to shut her up to my (then) delight as I made my way up the stairs. “I’ll be in my room, call me when the pizza’s here if you get one.”

I made my way up the stairs, ready to just plop down in my bed and conk out for the rest of the night, when someone blocked my path. In the way that small kids can, Ariel had managed to sneak off upstairs while me and Fiona were talking. And here she was again, looking right at me.

“How come you and Fiona are always fighting when she visits?” she asked, clearly upset. I cringed at myself for that one. I knew Ariel didn’t like it when I yelled. One too many instances of me being frustrated with a game clued me into that pretty quick. I kneeled down to her level.

“Gosh, I’m so sorry you had to hear that, Triple A,” I said with genuine regret in my tone. “It’s just… Well, Fiona and I don’t always feel the same way about things. She likes sticking to rules, and I like… you know, viewing them as suggestions.”

“Like the one-dessert-a-day rule?”

“Yes, exactly!” I said, patting her on the head. “As long as you don’t tell mom I’m letting you have two popsicles tomorrow.”

“My lipssss are sealed,” she replied, arms crossed. “Just… Please don’t yell at her again.”

“I’ll do my best, for your sake.”

“And hers too!” she added. “Wanting to follow the rules means she’s scared of getting in trouble, you know.” That made me stop for a moment.

“Huh… technically you’re correct.” I patted her on the head again before standing up. “I’ll see you later, Triple A.” She waved goodbye to me as we both split off and went into our own rooms down the hallway. Ariel’s was much easier to spot between our two rooms, having all sorts of pretty signs and paraphernalia hanging on the outside, some of which were old art projects from her preschool days that my mother absolutely refused to get rid of. Mine was very simply decorated. A classic “Danger: Keep Out!” sign was all a guy needed.

Entering the room, the first thing I did was set my backpack down at the foot of my bed. The next thing I did after that was pull the switch box out of it and set that on my bed. I’d been waiting all day to finally experience this moment. The set up of a console was something I had only experienced through watching my mom get frustrated over figuring out how the Wii sensor bar was supposed to work. Now I was plugging everything in and booting up my switch for the first time. I had an old flat screen monitor a neighbor was selling for around $30 set up on top of a dresser, and that was my gaming setup. All I had to do was plug in the dock to the left of it and figure out where the HDMI outlet was on it. It didn’t take long before I’d finally had everything set up and ready for configuration.

That took another few minutes. Things like adjusting for the size of the screen, switching on dark mode so I wouldn’t burn a hole in my retinas every time I wanted to play, and giving the console a name. You know, so you could get attached to the glorified tablet with detachable buttons. After all that, it was finally ready. I was finally ready. I pulled out my copy of breath of the wild, broke open the case, and clicked the game cartridge into the switch. This was happening. Finally, after at least a few weeks, I was finally going to be able to play the most hyped up game of the year. I clicked start, and it jumped right into it…

I was used to being able to pick a name for myself in games like these. That’s usually a mainstay in terms of save file mechanics. And it was for a very good reason in this series. Having this one skip naming all together and call out to Link by name threw me off. It felt too personal for me, too real. Like I was the one being woken up after 100 years in some pool of water in a dimly lit room filled with orange and blue lights. Like I was the one being told to grab the mysterious tablet with an eye on it off of a blowing pedestal in the same room as me.

Like I was the one being told I was a light that had to shine on Hyrule once again.

And soon, I was out of the mysterious room, running into the light of day as the wilderness came into view. The beautiful graphics that had been teased and hyped up since that fateful day in 2013. I’d been waiting five years to experience this game, and finally I saw it. That iconic shot of him standing on the edge of a cliff, looking over the wide expanse of Hyrule. I had everywhere to go, everywhere to explore, everywhere to fight monsters…

… and then I smelled smoke.

For a moment I thought maybe my cousin was downstairs trying to prove my notion about her being unable to cook wrong. But then I actually noticed where the smoke was coming from, and it wasn’t downstairs. My room. It was coming from my room. My switch was smoking.

“WHOA whoa whoa whoa!” I was quick to get up and run toward it, my thoughts going a mile a minute. I didn’t have a fire extinguisher in my room, nor did I have any kind of water I could pour on it. Not that I wanted to pour water on it and risk short circuiting it. Without thinking of the fact that the dock ultimately didn’t keep the switch itself on, I did the one thing I could think to do to remedy the situation: pulling the plug out of the wall.

The moment I did so, a loud BOOM sounded through the whole room as I was knocked back by some unseen force and onto the ground. And just like that, the lights went out… all over Queens I would later discover, though I’m unsure whether that was because of me or because of something else. I didn’t have time to actually find that out myself. I was too busy laying on the floor trying to recuperate after whatever just happened to me. And soon, someone opened my bedroom door and came in with a phone flashlight on.

“Oh my god, Link, what happened in here?!” It was Fiona, obviously startled by what happened. I looked up at her and saw that Ariel was right behind her, also very startled.

“I-I-I don’t know,” I said as I sat back up. “I was trying to play something on my new switch and It started smoking!”

“Smoking??” she said worryingly as she rushed toward where my switch and dock was on the top of the dresser.

“Yeah!” I reaffirmed. “I was freaking out and didn’t know what to do, so I unplugged the dock and then it just-”

“Link, the switch isn’t smoking.”

I paused for a moment after Fiona had relayed that to me.

“Fiona, I think I know smoke when I smell it.”

“Yeah, but even if it was, it’s not anymore.” I saw her gently touch a hand to the switch, as if feeling a doorknob to make sure someone’s not heating it with a fish tank heater from the other side. “It’s not even hot.”

“Do things like this cool down THAT fast??” Ariel asked, genuinely curious.

“Very rarely. It’s more likely it was never hot to begin with.”

The lights flickered on and off for a moment before coming back on in full.

“Okay well how do you explain the power outage then?”

“A fuse could’ve blown or something,” she reasoned. “It happens all the time.”

“But wouldn’t that mean you’d have to go to the fuse box to turn them back on?”

“A lot of houses have breakers that auto reset, Link. This house is probably one of them.”

I opened my mouth to talk, paused for a moment, then closed my mouth.

“Alright, that checks out I guess.” I stood back up off the floor.

“Whatever, just… be more careful I guess?” Fiona said. “Maybe point a fan at it?”

“I’ve got one in my room, I can bring it over for ya if you want!” Ariel offered.

“No no, it’s fine,” I assured. “Thanks though.” The two girls just nodded to me before leaving the room. Fiona said something to Ariel about getting her to bed at a reasonable time, and then I was alone again. I had to just sit for a moment and really process what had happened. I knew some consoles would run slower and overheat if they were trying to run a game that was super intense on graphics. Definitely remember as a kid turning my school laptop into a little leg warmer while trying to play minecraft on it. But that didn’t make sense. Maybe if it were a game made some time in the distant future, but this was one of the first games for the switch. How could they make something that makes it overheat that fast?

I went to inspect my switch again, making extra sure that it came out alright. No obvious scorch marks. And Fiona was right, it didn’t even feel hot to the touch. Almost like I’d never turned it on at all. None of this made sense to me at all. I knew what I saw. I knew that it was smoking, I knew that the moment I unplugged it and looked like it exploded. Yet here it was, sitting like I hadn’t even turned it on and started playing yet. Leave it to me to get gaslit by a gaming console.

I squinted at it in suspicion before deciding… Maybe that was my cue to go to bed. The last thing I needed was to try to play Breath of the Wild again and have the switch react that way again. Or it could’ve done something even more violent, who knows. All I know is I didn’t feel like blowing an entry way into the bathroom right next to me in the crudest way possible. I slid my pair of joycons back into the sides, hearing the satisfying click as they locked back into place.

As I went through my before bed routine of taking off my clothes and putting on more comfortable sleepwear, I kept finding myself glancing back at the console. I’m not sure why. Maybe I was still suspicious of it. Maybe I was waiting for it to start smoking again so I could pull Fiona in here to prove I wasn’t seeing things. Maybe I was looking at it and thinking that maybe the mom who returned it was onto something, and the switch had some kind of defect that made it overheat as violently as it did. Or maybe I really was just seeing things.

All I knew is I should probably sleep on it. Check it more thoroughly in the morning once I was in a better state of mind and well rested. Hopefully it wouldn’t be something that would stress me out all day at school tomorrow.

Chapter Text

The next morning, I wasn’t woken up with the usual. Not by my alarm, not by Ariel or Fiona knocking on the door, not any of that. No no no.

I was awoken by Fiona screaming in the bathroom.

It startled me awake, causing me to bolt upright in my bed and throw the covers off.

“FIONA! Fiona, I’m coming!!” I yelled out as I grabbed something from under my bed and ran out toward the bathroom. I swiftly opened the door, my dad’s old baseball bat that I kept under my bed held over my shoulder. I’ve had that thing since the first time my mom let me stay home without her, and this was the first time I ever got a chance to pull it out and possibly use it. After all, for all I knew, there was a home intruder in the bathroom holding my cousin hostage. It wasn’t. Fiona was the only one in there, but whatever happened could’ve been arguably worse.

“I just huh heh oooohohohuh,” Fiona was talking in the way one does when they’re either out of breath or just at a loss for words in general. I was just confused.

“Did… did you try to dye your hair or something??”

“NO!” She said, grasping her hair in her hands. “That’s precisely why I’m FREAKING OUT!” For reference's sake, my cousin has black hair. Most of the guys on my dad’s side have darker hair. Ariel and I only ended up blondes because of my mom. What I’m trying to say is Fiona’s hair is black and always has been. Yet here she was, grasping in her hands what was very much blue hair. Not even a darker blue that could pass for black if you didn’t look at it for too long. It looked like someone took a bucket full of cloudless sky and swapped it with her shampoo.

“Calm down, calm down, it’ll be fine,” I said.

“How are you staying so calm?!”

“I’ve had to be the man of the house since I was 9, I know how to-”

“No, how are you staying so calm with what’s going on with YOU?!”

That made me freeze for a moment. Anyone looking from the outside no doubt could have pinpointed the exact moment the gears began turning in my head. 

“What’re you talking about!”

“Oh for the love of-” She didn’t bother trying to explain anymore, simply grabbing me by my shoulder and shoving me in between her and the bathroom mirror. Fiona was gripping so tightly to my shoulders to make sure I stood there staring long enough for it to sink in, and it didn’t take long at all. I was just left standing there, staring, eyes wide and mouth half agape like I wanted to say something but simply couldn’t find the word. My hair might’ve stayed the same despite what the nature of Fiona’s predicament might suggest, but it wasn't the hair that had changed. I raised a hand up, went to touch the tip of my left ear and found my fingertips colliding with it about 3 or 4 inches before I would’ve hoped it would. Fiona’s hair might have turned blue, but my ears were suddenly very much pointed. I felt around them for another second with both hands before it finally sank in and I let out a startled noise. Then Fiona let out a startled noise. Pretty soon the two of us were just making startled noises at each other with no idea what to do.

“What on earth is happening?!”

“You found me screaming and freaking out in the bathroom just now, do you think I would know!?”

“Did you think I would?!”

“You guys are yelling again…” Fiona and I stopped our freak out and looked toward the bathroom door. It looked as if Ariel had just gotten up. She looked tired, rubbing her eyes, like she was still trying to wake herself up. That’s not what caught my attention first, though…

“Oh no, no no no-” I rushed over to her and gently took her face in my hands.

“Whuh… why’re your ears like that, Link?” she asked, half tired as I turned her head from side to side, inspecting it. Just like me, Ariel’s ears were suddenly pointed. Not as severely as mine, but just enough to be noticeable.

“I could ask the same thing,” I said with a nervous chuckle at the end. It was almost like that sentence was what snapped Ariel into “being awake and ready for the day” mode, because her eyes immediately went wide as she put her hands on the sides of her head.

“... Cool!”

“No, not cool!” I blurted out. “Ariel, this isn’t normal!”

“I know it isn’t, but it’s neat!”

“Not for me it isn’t,” Fiona cried out. “I’m not going to school until I can get my hair washed out.”

“Good luck with that,” I said monotonously. “I could call you in sick or something maybe?”

“I’d definitely appreciate that.”

“Alright, I’ll just do that before I leave.” I turned to Ariel. “As will I with you.”

“No way!” She protested. “We were going to watch Arrietty today in class! We just finished reading The Borrowers, it was going to be a big thing!”

“Okay okay, you can go to school then, just…” I paused to think about what to do before I left the bathroom and went into Ariel’s room.

“Hey, you’re not allowed in there!” Ariel shouted at me.

“I am if it’s an emergency like this!” I shouted back. Ariel’s room was a mess of bright colors and old barbies stuffed in boxes in the closet in order to make the room give off some sense of maturity. She was born in 2005, yet her room looked like the most 90s bedroom ever. I slid open her closet door, looking through her assortment of hats and jackets and all that before finally finding something.

“AHA! Here we go!” I pulled down a beanie my mother had given to Ariel from when she and my dad honeymooned in Ireland, walked back over, and pulled it over Ariel’s head. I was able to pull it down just far enough to cover the tips of her ears.

“There! Now it just looks like your head is cold.”

“People are gonna think I look weird, though,” she complained.

“Not as weird as they would if they see you with elf ears,” I retorted. She looked like she was about to retort right back, before she stopped and thought for a moment.

“... true.” She put a hand on her chin. “I’ll just need to put something on that’ll match the hat so it doesn’t look as weird, then!”

“Atta girl!” I gave her a pat on the shoulder. “Besides, I was in elementary school, too. No one’s really paying attention to silly hats at that grade. If someone points it out, just tell them their shoes are untied.” That got a little giggle out of her.

“Alright, cool, cool, that’s settled,” Fiona said, finally seeming to calm down for a moment. “Ariel’s got a hat, and I’m staying home, but what about you, though? You didn’t call yourself in sick, so do you have something to cover your ears with or no?” I stood back up and crossed my arms before going into my room to fetch something.

“Fiona, I’m the kid in this family that skateboards to and from school,” I said. I spent a few moments digging through all the stuff haphazardly hung up on a coat hook before finally finding what I was looking for underneath all the jackets and t-shirts. I walked back out with my find - a green beanie that matched my hoodie of choice. “Bold of you to assume I don’t own a beanie.” I slammed it on in emphasis, making sure to tuck the tips of my ears inside it. Once I was all done, I did some jazz hands at Fiona, like I was presenting a cool birthday present to her and not what was basically a disguise to wear at school.

“And none of the teachers will make you take your hat off inside?” Fiona asked.

“Not mine,” I assured her. “My teachers really don’t care about that stuff. I just gotta make sure not to eat in class or something.”

“Okay, I just wanna make sure,” she said. “No need to like… freak everyone at school out about whatever’s going on here.”

“No, of course! If I couldn’t keep this on all day, I’d have called myself in sick too, don’t worry.” I paused for a second as something hit me. I ran back into my room to check my bedside clock and…

“SHOOT! I’m gonna be late for the bus!” I went through my before school routine as Ariel also freaked out too, quickly looking through her closet to find stuff that matched her beanie. Fiona just sat in the bathroom, partly in shock as she tried to put together all the things that were going wrong that morning. I emerged from my room as I was pulling a leg of my jeans all the way up, zipping up my fly and buttoning it as I hobbled down the halfway before running down the stairs.

“ARIEL, WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR BREAKFAST!?”

“ BAGEL !”

“DOES UNTOASTED WORK!?”

“YE!”

I was quick to pull out a bagel, splitting it in two so I could get one half and she could get the other. Lucky for me it was one of those bagels that was mostly cut down the middle, so it was just a matter of pulling it apart with my hands. A few moments later, Ariel came down the stairs with her ensemble for the day on. Lots of greens and blues, with a denim pair of skorts on and a baggy green sweater with flowers embroidered on it to go with her ireland hat with shamrocks on it.

“Okay, I’m ready!!”

“Good, good!” I passed her the paper plate with her half of the bagel on it. She held the bagel in her mouth before leaving the paper plate on the table and running to the door. I went after her as we rushed to the bus stop. “Ariel, wait, your bag!!” And thus, we left the house. Fiona was home “sick” trying to scrub her hair clean. Me and my sister decided the beanies were cool again as we rushed toward the bus stop, and I was prepared to try and act like everything was fine so no one at school found out what was wrong.

I ended up skateboarding myself to school this time around. Ariel still got on the bus, and from what I found out later that all went well. But I knew what the school bus to the high school was like. The last thing I needed was some funny guy to pull my hat off for a joke and then get outed as a Lord of the Rings reject to everyone else there. Somehow, some way, I was able to get there before the bell. I was out of breath by the time I reached school grounds, but I was there on time. People were still milling about and waiting for the first class of the day to start. Meanwhile I was trying to figure out where the best place would be to hang out before class started and I’d have to start getting super serious about making sure no one figured out things weren’t fine.

That latter bit failed the moment I felt someone grab the back of my hoodie.

“Link!”

“GAH!” I’d been so startled that it took me seeing who it was to realize it was just Zelda. “Oh thank god, it’s just you,” I sighed with relief. Zelda pulled me closer to her, and it was around this time that I realized that she had the hood of her NYU jacket pulled up over her head. It was the first time I’d ever seen her wear it like that. Even when it got really cold the way it does in New york, she never pulled up her hood.

“Link,” she said, quieter than I was used to. “We urgently need to talk. About urgent matters. Urgently!” She took me by the hand and dragged me along with her, causing me to let out a startled noise as she pulled me along. Lucky for me, everyone else was too busy with their own pre-class hanging out to notice me being dragged like a ragdoll by a young lady on a mission. Soon, we found ourselves behind the school, right by the dumpsters. It wasn’t ideal, but I guess it was technically somewhere private. No one wants to hang out right next to the cafeteria’s garbage?

“Okay, okay, you can let go now,” I said as Zelda let go. I flexed my wrist back and forth like an artist who’d been working too long without a proper rest. “What’s the urgent issue that needs to be discussed urgently exactly?” I said that with a hint of a chuckle considering how ridiculous it sounded. The joking smile dropped the moment Zelda took the hood of her jacket off her head.

Pointy ears. Just like me.

“Oh my god, you’ve got weird elf ears too??”

“Yeah, I don’t know what happened, I just- wait, too ???” She looked at me with wide confused eyes. I pulled the beanie off of my head, which got an even more surprised reaction out of her. “I… I just… wow… huh.”

“Oh my god, him too!?”

The sudden shout caught me off guard, but I was quick to see where exactly it came from. I flinched back away from Zelda, thinking she had a giant bee or something stuck in the hood of her jacket. Spoiler alert, it wasn’t a bee. It took me a moment, but soon I recognized who it was…

“NAVI?!”

“Ding ding! And the boy wins a prize!” she called out sarcastically as she sat up on Zelda’s shoulder.

“Are you, um… are you okay??”

“Oh yeah, I’m just fine, Link, I’m fine- except I’m now POCKET SIZED and can’t even pick up a pencil because they’re massive now and I’m supposed to be doing school stuff before everything gets out for spring break and I’m just- Mujhe pasand nahi hai(I don’t like this).”

“Hey, calm down, calm down, it’s fine,” Zelda reassured her.

“Wha- why didn’t you guys tell me earlier??” I asked frantically. “Like, call, text, skype, something?!”

“Oh yes of course, of course!” Navi went. “Hello friend Link, I’ve suddenly turned into a fairy and your best friend since childhood looks like she came out of a ren faire! Just thought we’d let you know that we’re totally not crazy!” She looked back up at me with a frown.

“Right… well, good thing to know I’m not the only one looking like a Lord of the Rings extra.” I clasped my hands together and held them in front of my face and sighed. You know, in the way people do when they need a moment to process things before continuing on in a calm manner. “I’m assuming your folks freaked out?”

“Oh yeah no, definitely,” Navi said. “You know how my parents are, and they had no qualms about calling me in sick when they actually saw what’s up.”

“Are your parents fine at least??”

“Yep! Just me that got the height demotion it seems,” she said, the facade of “this is fine” dropping once she finished before just mumbling more stuff to herself in hindi.

“Wait, hold on-” Zelda glanced down at her friend. “You actually told your folks??” Navi looked up at her, eyebrows furrowed like Zelda had asked her the most obvious question in the world.

“... you didn’t??”

“Have you MET my dad??” Zelda blurted. “If I had told him he would’ve rushed me to the hospital to try and get the ends of my ears cut off or something.”

“Oh oof, nope, don’t like that image,” I said, holding a hand over my left ear. “Just imagining that hurts. Makes me glad my mom’s out of town.”

“Oh, luckyyyy,” Navi said with a dismayed look. “Forgot your mom was leaving early to- WATCH OUT!”

The warning came very suddenly. So suddenly that I was too caught up in the suddenness of it to actually hear it and ended up grabbed by the back of my jacket and thrown against the wall of the school building.

“MATHESON!”

“HEY, WHOA WHOA WHOA!” Zelda called out, immediately retreated a few steps, a hand held over Navi’s head to keep her shielded. Lucky for me when I got slammed into the wall, I’d turned my head just enough to be able to see who it was that assaulted me…

“Mike??” Sure enough, the resident bully was there looking at me like he had capital murder on the mind. “What the hell are you doing back here???”

“None of your business!”

“You were going for a smoke behind the school again, weren’t you?”

“NO! Well, maybe I was! It ain’t your business!”

“Right right, sorry- how’d the STEM homework go yesterday by the way, did you get it done on time?”

“Actually yeah, it was pretty easy once I read the book again- WAIT, NO, STOP! Stop changing the subject ! I know that you freaks probably have something to do with this crap!

“Define ‘this crap’ real quick,” Zelda said. “I’m already lost.”

“By ‘this crap’ I mean THIS crap!”

And with that, Mike threw off the hood of his jacket. I didn’t know what I was expecting to be honest. Elf ears? Maybe. And to be frank, he was stuck with those, too. But then there was his hair. God, it took so much for me to keep my composure because it looked BAD. Pompadours are one thing(especially the one Mike was currently sporting. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it made a cartoon “boing!” sound when he pulled off his jacket hood), but obnoxiously bright fire truck red does not look well in tandem with them.

“Oh yeah, you were onto something, that most definitely looks like crap,” Navi blurted out.

“I KNOW and I HATE IT !” Mike cried out.

"I get that! I totally get that! I don't like having to wear a beanie of all things either!" I told him, still smushed up against the wall. "But please put me down, I swear we're just as confused as you are, man!"

“Yeah, sure. You said something to me yesterday about staining stuff to get back at people,” he said angrily. A look of realization hit my face. The kind of look you get when you know you messed up. “How am I supposed to know you didn’t do that to me to get back at me for your nerd friends?!”

“Mike… what??”

“And when exactly would he have had time to put dye in your hair??” Zelda asked. “Or in your shampoo or whatever you use in your hair? The guy went home the moment school ended yesterday.” I could tell she was trying to get him to actually think for a moment, and, to my relief, it worked. Mike let me down off the wall and I took in a big GASP of air and coughed.

“Alright, so!” I began, looking between Zelda, Navi and Mike as I tried to pick my next words carefully. “Something weird is obviously happening. I don’t know what, but it’s pretty clear that it’s affecting all of us whether we like it or not. So we’re going to have to put aside our differences to figure out what to do.

And then the bell rang.

The school bell ringing was one of those things where it takes a moment for it to click in your head that “oh hey, that means class! Get a move on!” Zelda let out a sigh.

“Or we can just try to get through the day and meet up after school?”

“That works!” I said. “Let’s meet up in front of the school and then head back to my place.”

“Oh hell no,” Mike said, digging through his backpack for something. “I’m not trusting you suckers to just stick around and wait for me.” We watched him pull out a notepad - not just any kind of notepad mind you, one of those fancy yellow ones with the lines and stuff - and jot something down on it in pen, tear off a sheet, and hand it to me. It took me a second to realize he’d handed me his phone number.

“Make a group chat or something,” he said. “So I know for sure you won’t leave me here.” And just like that, he walked off to class, leaving us alone. I looked at Zelda and Navi to get some insight about what they’d be doing.

“You two gonna be fine?” I asked.

“As long as I can keep the hood up, we’ll both be good,” Zelda said.

“Plus it's all warm and cozy in here!” Navi said. “Really nice.”

“Alright, alright,” I said, half chuckling. “Just be sure to keep it all under wraps until after school, okay?”

“Will do!” That was the last thing Zelda said before she left to head to class. Being left alone by the dumpsters, I headed off to class as well. I made a mental note to keep an eye on who was at school and who wasn't. If my best friend and bully were affected by whatever was happening, who’s to say my other friends weren’t as well?

Miranda was the first person I noticed was gone. We shared the same first period, and I knew for a fact she was excited for class today. We were presenting our book reports that day before spring break, and she’d been talking about nothing but Frankenstein and all the things she couldn’t wait to talk about. Most of it was about themes and stuff, about messing with nature and trying to bury your mistakes only for them to come back and haunt you. I texted her to ask where she was and decided to wait.

Garrett and Vinny were the next two I noticed weren’t there. I usually saw them during the passing period since we had to walk by each other on the way to our separate classes, but I didn’t see either of them. And usually they wander around together, so not seeing either made sense. If one of them was gone, the other probably would be, too. I sent them a text as well, and resolved to check back after PE.

PE was a bit of a different hassle. I had to ask Coach McKay to take my first nonsuit day(a day to just sit out of class and relax off to the side without changing clothes) of the year, seeing as he probably would’ve made me take my hat off when I went to change into my uniform. I just hoped he wouldn’t overthink the request since I usually never took nonsuits. But he was fine with it, and told me to just sit in the bleachers in the gym while everyone else did the exercises today. I breathed a sigh of relief as I went over to join whoever else was over there. And to my surprise, I saw Mike seated on the bleachers as well. Right next to his girlfriend. Who was wearing a beanie to cover her hair and ears. I tried to sneakily take a seat, but I was spotted in an instant. “Matheson!” It came from Uma instead of Mike this time. “What’re we, chopped liver? Come sit with us!” I hesitated for a moment, but eventually walked over and sat a little ways away from the two of them.

“See, I told you it happened to him, too,” Mike said to Uma.

“Just because he’s wearing a beanie doesn’t mean he’s got the same issue as us,” she snarked back.

“What’re you talking about??”

“The ears thing happened to Uma too,” Mike explained. “So I told her about what’s up with us.”

“Wha- how do you know she ended up looking weird too??”

“You think I wouldn’t tell my boyfriend when something was up?” she asked. “Healthy relationships are all about communication, shaqra'.” I looked confused for a moment at the last word before she added, “And that means ‘blondie’ by the way.” 

I huffed, and then went to look back out over the gymnasium. That’s when I realized something…

“Huh. Mina’s not in class today.”

“Van Der Zee?” Mike asked.

“Yeah, she’s in the class with us, but she’s not here.”

“Maybe she took a nonsuit too?”

“Mikey, baby, if she took a nonsuit, she’d be sitting with us,” Uma said. I just pursed my lips. That marks 4 friends gone from school today. And 4 other people came to school with disguises.

“Coach McKay, are you alright??” I heard a kid ask. I looked down to see a kid addressing the Coach. Darius McKay was our 50-something year old PE teacher, and despite the stereotype when it comes to public school PE teachers, he was very much jacked. He’s told stories about being a former Marine, so the jacked-ness makes sense in that regard. Overall, I feel like if there were a lockdown with an intruder on campus, McKay’s the teacher most likely to physically attack the guy if he has to in order to keep his class safe. I could see why some kind was asking if he was okay. His arms were covered in what looked like medical gauze. 

“I’m alright, kiddo, no worries,” he assured. “Just a skin rash is all. Shouldn’t be contagious or anything.” He picked up one of the dodgeballs on the ground and juggled it between his two hands. “Besides! I can play with you all just fine even with the bandages!” And to demonstrate, I watched him wind up and then throw the ball. To the surprise of all three of us, he sent that single dodgeball FLYING through the gym like a jet before colliding with the glass door in the back. It hit the dead center of it like a bullseye, the impact creating a spiderweb of cracks that didn’t shatter the door, but made it very obvious that someone nearly broke it down.

Everyone in the gym was dead silent. Kids were either horrified or looked like they just witnessed the most awesome thing ever. Coach McKay was just standing there, trying to pretend like what just happened wasn’t his fault.

“You know, on second thought,” Coach McKay said as he walked over to a foldable beach chair near the equipment closet. “I think I’ll just sit this one out and let you kids play.

Break time couldn’t have come sooner. And as a first for all of us, Mike and Uma joined me in the cafeteria as I went to sit with Zelda. Zelda seemed to have been expecting Mike, but Uma’s appearance at the table surprised her.

“Why’s Uma-”

“She’s a part of this whole thing too somehow.”

“Ah.”

“Don’t ask,” Uma said as she broke open a lunch box and grabbed something to snack on.

“Alright, well, glad we’re not the only ones dealing with this,” Zelda said, pulling a bread roll out of her own lunch bag to snack on. She broke off a small piece and passed it to Navi inside the hood of her jacket. We were just trying to sit there and simulate some form of normalcy, but soon someone showed up and threw all that off.

“Hi link!” Zelda let out a snarled noise, pulling her hood further over her head at the same time as I looked over. I saw a very confused Simon standing there, looking at the table like we were strangers to him. Nothing about his getup suggested that he was also under the effects of whatever was making everyone look like YA Fantasy rejects.

“I didn’t know you and Mike were friends,” Simon said, gesturing to Mike and Uma. I grappled for an explanation for the whole of 3 seconds before I thought of an excuse.

“Well, you know, never too late to try and befriend the school bully and change them for the better, right?” I said, looking at Mike and trying to gesture with my face to just go along with it. Mike’s look of pure confusion shifted into realization, like a lightbulb going off in his head.

“Oh, uh, yeah! Yeah, what blondie said,” he said, leaning forward on the table, head propped up in his hand, smiling nervously. Simon still looked between the two of us suspiciously before taking a seat next to Zelda at the table.

“How has your day been then?” he asked, trying to start up a conversation despite it all.

“It’s been good, been good,” I said. “You know, school being school.”

“Can’t wait for spring break!” Uma butted in. In my anxious attempt to try and make everything seem fine, I’d forgotten the prime thing happening that I could use to my advantage.

“Y-Yeah! Me too!” I added back in. “Finally saved up enough and got a switch yesterday! Gonna spend the whole week playing games.”

“Oh, sounds like a lot of fun!” Simon said, taking a sip of a milk carton he’d gotten from the lunch line. “Mina and I are just gonna be at home I think, you know just at home and-” And it was at that moment that it happened. I watched his eyes slowly wander down to Zelda’s hands as she broke off another piece of bread and tried to sneak it into her hood. Only, she was sneaking it very well. I felt like I could pinpoint the exact moment where Simon spotted Navi hitchhiking in Zelda’s jacket

“GUH!”

I was quick to realize what had happened, putting a hand over Simon’s mouth to shut him up. Everyone else took another moment to realize what was up and we were quick to just get up and take Simon aside, trying to look for some place to talk in private. Eventually, we just snuck around the corner and slipped into one of the gender neutral bathrooms. Once I was sure we were out of sight of the other people at the school, I took my hand off of Simon.

“GASP! What was that?!” Simon blurted out almost immediately after dramatically gasping for air. “In her jacket?! What was it?!” we all looked to Zelda as the subject of Simon’s distress stuck her head out.

“Hi. It’s me. It’s Navi. Please don’t panic.” Simon still seemed to be processing what he was seeing, and very much was trying not to freak out.

“Huh… wha- what happened to her??”

“We don’t know,” I said bluntly. “But we know she’s not the only one with weird stuff going on.” I pulled my beanie off, revealing the ears. Then Zelda pulled her hood off. Then Mike pulled his hood off as well. Each time Simon’s face twisted into a more and more confused look.  That left just Uma, who looked over to see Mike looking at her expectantly. She groaned.

“Fine, fine, I’ll take it off.” She pulled her beanie off, allowing her hair to practically explode from underneath it. Like I’d assumed, her ears had become pointed like the rest of us. What I was expecting was her hair being an almost scarlet shade of auburn. It wasn’t as intense and saturated as Mike, but it was noticeably different.

“Whoa…”

“Yeah, I know Miss NYU, it’s red,” she began the process of trying to stuff her hair back into the beanie while I turned to Simon.

“We have no idea what’s going on here,” I told him. “But you can’t tell anyone about it, okay?” He just nodded his head vigorously before I noticed a change in expression. It was almost like us telling him all this made something click in his head.

“Huh… I wonder if this happened to Mina, too.” That gave me pause.

“What do you mean? Is that why she wasn’t here today then??”

“Yeah, she woke up this morning acting all weird,” he began. “She wouldn’t take her blanket off herself. She kinda looked like een kleine oma.” I’d interacted with Mina and Simon to pick up a little bit of their dutch sprinklings. I think he was trying to say Mina looked like a grandma with the blanket on. “Maybe something freaky happened to her, too?”

“Whoa, hey, pointy ears are hardly that freaky,” Zelda said. “Why would she need to hide her whole appearance if it's just ears?”

“Well I mean like, really freaky. I dunno, like Uma or Navi.

“I dunno if you noticed, but Navi’s definitely stuck at a higher level of freakiness than me here, kid.” Uma said this with her arms crossed.

“Alright, well, I just mean maybe her face and her hair looks different, too.”

“I see, I see…” I said as I pulled out my phone. I noticed that Garrett had texted me back. He let me know that he and Vinny were sick, but they were fine. As for Miranda, the text had been read. There was no reply to it.

“Where do we go from here, then?” Navi asked, trying to get comfortable on Zelda’s shoulder. “Something’s going on here and it’s obviously WAY bigger than we thought.”

“Well I say we try to find an adult or something,” Uma suggested. “Someone we trust. Surely there’s someone you guys wouldn’t mind telling about all this, right?” The suggestion gave me an idea. After all, there was only one teacher at the school I felt comfortable telling about any of this.

“I think I may know who to talk to.”

Chapter Text

The cafeteria’s in a pretty secluded part of the school, far from where a lot of the other classrooms are. I guess when they made the layout for the school, they didn’t want kids having it too easy when the end of lunch bell rang. We still had plenty of time to get to our next class should the bell ring, though. After all, I knew the best route to…

“Why are we at the AP History classroom??” I gestured for Simon to stay quiet. The last thing we needed was to get caught by a hall monitor. The three of us huddle up right outside the door, making sure to stay clear of the window right beside the classroom entrance.

“The only teacher in this school I trust enough to confide in about all of this is Mr. Doirich,” he explained.

“Why?? He’s the scariest dude in the whole school,” Uma said.

“Why do you say that? And… since when were you in his class??”

“I took him last year, dingus. And… have you seen the man?? He’s got the most intense resting angry face I’ve ever seen. It’s like he’s disappointed in everyone all the time.”

“Well… whatever, he seems to like me at least.” I put a hand on the handle of the door, but before I could move to actually head inside, Navi opened her big mouth…

“It’s because he’s dating your mom, isn’t it?”

I stopped dead in my tracks. I didn’t have to look behind me to tell that someone was trying to hold in laughter. I could hear the snickering.

“Oh yeah, Mike,” I said, turning to see the bully crossing his arms, cheeks all puffed up as he tried to keep it together. “Because you’ve never met a kid with a single mom - grow up .”

“Nah man, it’s just… Doirich has the hots for your MOM?”

“YES! If you’d like to put it that way, yes .” I put my hand back on the classroom door. “You guys just wait here. I’ll talk to him.” I took a deep breath before opening the door and walking inside.

Being the break period, the class was entirely empty of students. But what was suspicious was that it wasn’t as clean as I was used to it being. There were papers and things left on the tables, books that hadn’t been properly put away, and pens and pencils laying about on all the tables. It didn’t take long before I heard a sound come from the side office - a smaller and more private room for the teacher to do work - on the far end of the room, in the adjacent wall from the whiteboard.

“Um, Mr. Doirich?” I asked sheepishly.

“Huh- OW!” I watched as he stood up and immediately hit his head on the underside of the desk. He came out from beneath it before emerging from the room and into the main classroom. “Oh, Link, it's just you.” I was taken aback a bit by the sight of Mr. Doirich when he showed himself. The first thing I noticed was the fact that he was taller. Granted, he was already a bit taller than I was(I’m a measly 5’8” for reference), but now his head was just a foot away from scraping the ceiling of the classroom. Speaking of his head, the teacher had it completely covered by a cloth, showing nothing but his eyes. I was thinking he was trying to make it look like a head scarf a traveler in the desert would wear to keep the sun off of them, but to me it just looked like he was trying to wrap his hair after getting out of the shower and didn’t quite know how to secure the towel.

“Yep! It’s me,” I said, trying to lighten the mood a bit. “Do you have a moment to talk about something real quick, teach?”

“Unless you changed your mind and have your essay ready to turn in today-” he said as he went to look for something in his desk, flipping through papers and tabs “-then I’m afraid I’m a bit busy right now.”

“Alright, fair fair, but uh…” I tried to think of something to say. Something I could use as an excuse to stay there. Then it clicked. Right. The excuse was RIGHT in front of me. “Why are you wearing a scarf like that, sir?” There was a pause. Doirich stopped in his tracks. I couldn’t see 3 quarters of his face yet I could still see the gears turning in his head as he tried to figure out what to say, what excuse to make, what to do to get me off his back.

“Dandruff,” he said gruffly. I couldn’t help but look at him with a mix of concern and… I dunno, whatever the emotion for “being impressed” is. Definitely wasn’t the excuse I was expecting, but it was creative at least? “I had really bad dandruff this morning. Just dandruff everywhere , I didn’t know how to take care of it before the school day, so I just decided to cover my hair.”

“Uh huh, uh huh, well all due respect sure, I call bullcrap.” Doirich was in the middle of turning around - probably to scold me about talking to him like that - but his furrowed eyebrows suddenly flew up when he turned to see me with my beanie removed, ears out in the open. Again, I could see his eyebrows knitted together as he tried to process what he was seeing.

“... Huh. Uhhh hehe,” he laughed nervously as his eyes darted around my face, still trying to put things together. “I see you’ve gotten into that new fangled cosplay thing the other kids are doing.”

“ Oh my god- Dude!”

“I know, I know! I was joking!” He said, raising his hands up in a defensive way. “Obviously this proves something is going on here that’s out of the ordinary.”

“Yeah, and it’s happening to both of us it looks like,” I added. “So could you take the scarf off maybe?” He took a moment before he nodded his head.

“Right! Right, of course,” he said as he went to remove it. Instead of unwrapping the scarf like I’d expected, he opted to just grab it from the top and tear the whole thing off in one fell swoop. The sight of what was going on under there left me aghast for a moment. There were a lot of things about Ganymede’s appearance that I was used to. The big one being his office-worker hair coupled with his beard, all of it being heavily salt and peppered. Any real indication that he was a 40-something year old dude was gone though, as the removal of the scarf revealed that not only were his ears pointed like the rest of us, and the gray bits in his hair were gone, but that his hair on his head was long. And I mean long . It looked like a lion’s mane exploding out when he’d gotten the scarf off. On top of that, both his beard and hair had turned the same red as Uma. It wasn’t quite the same shade - it was more of a brighter orange-red than hers - but it was close enough for me to make the connection.

“Whoa! You look like you stepped out of the Lion King or something,” said with a chuckle. That earned a nervous chuckle from him too.

“Yes, it… definitely was weird to wake up to,” he said. “I mean, I know one of my aunts has red hair-”

“That can happen??” I asked, taking a seat on his desk.

“Anyone can be born with red hair, it’s just about genetics and mutations and such,” he said. “But as far as I know, it usually doesn’t manifest out of the blue in your 40s!”

“Neither do pointy ears, but here we are,” I added. I paused for a moment before letting out a grumbly sigh as it all sunk back in. “God, there’s gotta be an explanation for this.”

“You said it,” he replied, taking some books from the numerous piles he had around the room. He was flipping through pages, trying to find something as he continued. “Every time I think I’ve figured something out, it doesn’t fit quite right and I end up with more questions. Going from scientific back to the supernatural, you know?”

“Yep, yep. I appreciate you trying to keep this all grounded,” I said. “But honest to god, I think magic is real and it's messing with us big time.”

Ganymede let out an exasperated sigh. “I hate that you may very well be right.” He looked at a page in one of his books before closing it and grumbling to himself. “What kind of grounded explanation could there ever be for something like this, anyways?” He set the book down on the pile.

“So if it is magic, then that might just raise more questions,” I said. “Like… Why us? Why now of all times? Why right before Spring Break?? I should be relaxing and having fun then, not worrying about-” I was cut off as I heard a pained noise escape from my AP History teacher. I looked over to see him putting a hand on his temple, rubbing in to try and soothe it. “Are you alright, Mr. Doirich?”

“Yes, I’m fine, it’s fine,” he assured, keeping a hand on his head. “I’ve been getting these little headaches all morning, just give me a moment.” He retreated to the side office once again. “Keep talking, though, I’ll just try to find some ibuprofen.”

“Alright alright, uhh… what about?”

“I don’t know really, um, urgh…” he paused for a moment, one hand gripping his desk and the other on his head. “What other theories do you have? Assuming you’re right and this is a result of something supernatural.

“Right! Right, uh, well, I dunno.” He shrugged his head. “Nothing really cryptic-y happens in NYC I don’t think? Then again this could be something completely new.” I leaned back on the table, trying to lay comfortably over top of it like I was snoozing on a couch and staring at the ceiling. “Or worse, we’re in a young adult fantasy novel and one of us is supposed to be a chosen hero who was secretly a magical person their whole life.” I sat back up. “I guess whichever one of us is the hero depends on which demographic this hypothetical YA Fantasy book is targeted towards, but that’s not really…” I stopped for a moment as a noise in the side office grew too intense to ignore. Ganymede had been making groaning noises, but they’d been minor enough that I just assumed his headache was still giving him trouble. But then it got worse. It was when they became so loud that something was obviously wrong that I stopped and began approaching the side office. “... important?”

I closed in on the entrance, where I saw Ganymede leaning over his desk, both hands placed under him and gripping the wood in an attempt to keep himself upright. His back was turned to me, but that didn’t do much to stop me from seeing one thing: a plume of black and purple smoke, leaking from his mouth like steam as he let out an exasperated sigh. He straightened himself out a bit, acting as if he were completely fine.

“Yes… yes, this will do nicely.” He said it in his usual voice, but there was a tinge of something else there. Something deeper, more grating(like hot sandy wind blowing past you), something… wrong.

“Huh. I guess you found some really good ibuprofen then?” I asked, trying to remain calm and trying to justify his out of nowhere line from just then. It was then he turned and looked back at me. His eyes were curious. Then disappointed and slightly annoyed.

“Oh… it’s you.”

“Of course it’s me,” I said with a nervous smile as he emerged from the side office. The sheer height he had on me now dawned on me as he approached me, and I did my best to subtly back away from his advance. “Who else would it be, right? Teach? Ganymede??”

“Ugh. Even over here, you’re just as unfunny as back home,” he groaned, a sneer of annoyance on his face. It was there for only a moment as he raised a hand behind him. It didn’t take a genuins in street smarts to see the look in his eyes and realize what he was about to do.

“I’ll delight in being able to bury your bones so early in my endeavor.”

I ducked.

Ganymede’s hand came down and launched a cluster of energy from its fingertips, missing me narrowly and exploding behind me on the ground in a cloud of electricity and danger. I didn’t have to think twice before I bolted for the door and ran out of it, slamming it behind me. I had nearly forgotten that the others had been waiting for me the whole time from the other side.

“Whoa, what’s going on in there?!” Navi asked, looking like she was on the verge of freaking out if it weren’t for Zelda cupping a hand over her like a shield.

“Something…” I took a deep breath. “Something is horribly wrong with Mr. Doirich and I think we should run.

BOOM!

Almost as if on cue, the door to the classroom was blown open by a blast of electricity. It caused nearly all of us to jump back, and it made me turn around out of instinct. What I saw was the same black and purple magic rolling out of the room like fog. And to my horror, Ganymede emerged from the room as if this was the most normal thing in the world, the same black and purple steaming off of him like hot water. But it was his eyes… there was something wrong with them. They weren’t Mr. Doirich’s eyes. They were someone else’s. Someone evil.

Suffice it to say, we ran.

“What the hell is wrong with him?!” Mike blurted out.

“You think I’d know?!” I asked, putting an arm behind Zelda to keep her with us when I saw her start to lag behind a bit. “We were just having a casual conversation and then he decided he wanted to kill me!”

“Guy GUYS he’s floating at us!!” Simon called out, sounding like he was trying to stay calm but was also very much terrified. It snapped me out of my conversation, but only because it made me glance over my shoulder and look. Sure enough, Simon was right. My AP History teacher was currently floating down the hall like a vengeful phantom intent on chasing us out of the building. But I noticed something as we kept going. He wasn’t gaining. I don’t think he was actively trying to catch up, really.

“Oh my god, he’s screwing with us!” I said, turning back to look in front of me. “He’s chasing us, but he’s not trying to gain on us!”

“What the hells?!” Went Simon as he glanced back at the teacher before looking back in front.

“Here! We can lose him this way!” Zelda called out. She grabbed my hand and dragged me around a corner and down the hallway leading toward the quad. It was a way out of the school, and a way away from the teacher currently out for my skin. All six of us dove around the corner, and for sure figured we’d lost him. After all, we didn’t see him come around the corner after us, even when it made sense distance and speed-wise for him to do so.

“Neat! I think we lost him!” Uma called out triumphantly. I was soon to realize he’d simply decided not to waste his energy on us and try a different method.

BLAM!

Something burst up from the floor of the hallway and grabbed onto Uma’s leg. It was a hand: a nasty, three-fingered hand with chipped nails and gross calluses on it. Uma let out a cry of alarm, being completely caught off guard by it. She used her free leg to kick the hand, causing whatever it was to let go and let out a squeal. Not a human squeal mind you. More like the squeal of a pig.

“The hell is that thing?!” Mike blurted out, just as confused and terrified as the rest of us.

“Don’t know, keep going!” Uma grabbed him by the arm as she said this and dragged him with her. We all continued running for some kind of exit. You know those horror games where there’s just hands coming from all directions at different intervals trying to grab you, and all you can really do is keep running and just barely escape each one’s attempt to grab you and drag you away? The further we ran down the hallway to get out, the more this became the case for the six of us.

It wasn’t just hands, though. This time, full creatures were emerging from every which way trying to attack us, grab us, anything. We had a face to put with the hand in the floor and it didn’t help ease our fears. What was coming at us was an army of… things. Things with pushed in snouts and sharp teeth and soulless eyes. It was like Gollum from Lord of the Rings and a pig started a family, and that family was dead set on invading the school and eating us for breakfast.

Zelda let out a startled cry as one of them squealed and grabbed her hair. It was quick to kick it in the stomach and push it back into the locker from when it emerged, causing the shelves inside to collapse and drop at least three 6 pound textbooks on its head. Hopefully whoever owned that locker didn’t need to get their books any time soon. Another came out from the mens room right by where all the science classrooms were, trying to grab and bite Mike, but it ended up punched in the face and slammed into the wall before it could even open its mouth. Mike grabbed its head and slammed the bathroom door on its face to knock it out, for good measure.

“These things are coming from everywhere!” he said. “How the hell are we gonna get out of here?!”

“I dunno, just keep running??” I replied. “We’ll get to the exit eventually, and then-” I was interrupted by a war cry of a squeal, which gave me barely enough time to leap out of the way. Another one of these goblin looking creatures had made an attempt on my life via the damn janitor’s mop. The handle snapped in half from how much force it put into the swing. I could only imagine what would’ve happened if I hadn’t leapt out of the way. 

“Keep running! I like that plan! Let’s enact it right now!” Zelda grabbed my hand once more and dragged me behind her as she bolted down the hall. The others didn’t hesitate to follow.

“THEY’RE USING TOOLS!” Mike called out in reference to the mop, terrified.

“Which means we gotta get out of here!” Simon restated. He slapped a lock to his left as he ran, keeping it from opening and slamming the door into the face of an emerging monster. “How far is the quad now??”

“It can’t be far!” I shouted back. “If we keep running, we’ll get there!” It was a naive plan, but it was all we had. And then the plan was quickly made unusable as the one thing all american school kids feared… happened.

We heard the tell tale feedback of the PA system turning on, and then…

“Attention students. We’ve detected multiple dangerous intruders on school grounds and are issuing a campus-wide lockdown effective immediately. Please head to a secure classroom if you’re not already in one and follow lockdown procedures.”

We’d had a drill twice before that year, but that was for the worst case scenario. On one hand I was very much glad it wasn’t for a sicko with a gun. But on the other hand, an army of violent goblins that are the same height as me felt like an even worse situation to be in.

“No no no the outside doors have remote locks,” Zelda stated. She didn’t even have to finish for me to realize what that meant.

“We’re locked in here!” Navi looked around frantically. “Shoot, no, there’s gotta be a way out.”

“Why don’t we just head to a classroom?” Simon asked. “We can be safe there!”

“Do you not remember what blondie said?” Mike asked it as if Simon was the dumbest guy there. “The history teach is trying to kill him, man!”

“Yeah! Staying in one place will just make it easier for him!” I shouted, hysterical at this point. My mind was going a mile a minute as I tried to remedy the situation, to try and think of a way out. “We gotta get out of here!”

“Oi! You five!”

The moment we heard it we were all quick to turn toward the source of it. I myself was also quick to slap my beanie back onto my head, trying to swiftly hide the ears again as someone I knew approached us.

“Coach McKay!” I blurted.

“Coach, what’re you doing here?!” Mike asked.

“Looking for stragglers like you in the hallway,” he said in a serious tone of voice. “Follow me! You can lock down with me in my office until the police get here.”

“We can’t! We gotta get out of here!”

“Miss Qadir, that can wait until you’re all safe.”

“But Link isn’t safe!” Zelda blurted out, promptly ripping my beanie off. I’d tried to frantically cover my ears, but McKay had already seen. He was staring at me, flabbergasted. “Some dude in the school is after him and he’ll just be a sitting duck if he stays here! We’ll all be!”

“Y-Yeah, what she said,” I said sheepishly.

“You know the school in and out, Coach, is there any way we can get out through??” Mike asked. For once in my life, I was glad to know Mike personally. He was on the school’s football team headed by Coach McKay, so he had some leeway in terms of asking favors of the man. McKay looked conflicted, in the way that a guy does when he wants to follow standard procedure to keep us safe, but is also wondering if the standard procedures can even keep us safe. Eventually, he sighed.

“Well, glad to know I’m not the only one with weird things happening to me,” he said. That’s when I remembered his bandages from earlier. “We have to get to the gym.” He motioned for us to follow suit. We went swiftly, not looking to waste any time.

“So it’s not a rash then?” I asked.

“Well yes and no,” he said, getting out his keys. “Yes, it’s a rash technically, but my skin’s just really dry and-” We heard an inhuman cry from behind us, causing us to all duck. Another one of those goblins came out of nowhere and leapt through the air to try and attack McKay, but he was quick to hold up an arm to shield his head and block the attack. The goblin hit his forearm face first, creating a loud THUNK more characteristic of someone hitting a rock than a human being before it slumped to the ground. “... sturdy.”

“Dang… how come you get the cool rock arms and I just get weird hair??”

“I don’t think the universe can trust you with the power of rock arms, Mike,” Navi said bluntly.

“There we go!” McKay found the right keys and proceeded to unlock the gym. “You know that big widow at the top of the bleachers?”

“Yeah, the one overlooking the front lawn!” Uma said.

“There’s a latch near the bottom. Let's us open it on hot days,” he explained. “Flip it and pull up and you kids should be able to get out onto the roof and find a way safely down from there.”

“Thanks so much, McKay!” I said as he got the door open. A screech came from behind us all, and Zelda let out a scream. Something skittered quickly down the hall and toward us, mouth open as it let out some awful mix of a snarl and a reptilian growl. I had barely gotten used to the pig-like goblins when all of a sudden this lizard man looking creature was barreling down the hall toward us. It was a lizard on a mission, and that mission was to mess us up.

McKay acted quickly, diving between the six of us and the lizard, holding his own arms in front of him to shield himself. 

“COACH, NO!” I called it out right as the creature leapt into the air like a velociraptor, intent on sinking its teeth into my PE teacher.

CLANG!

But it didn’t. All six of us sat there stunned for a moment as the lizard crashed into an orange ethereal barrier, one that popped up right as it would’ve sunk its teeth into the PE teacher. I just had to stand there for a moment to try and process what had just happened. Either whatever god that’s out there was looking out for us… or whatever weird thing that’s happening is getting so weird that Coach McKay just summoned a magic shield without trying. 

“Well don’t just stand there, kiddoes!” He said, pulling his arms out of his face and looking toward us. “Guess I’m more fit for this than I thought, haha. I’ll hold them off! You get out the window!”

“Sir yes sir!” Mike grabbed his girlfriend and brought her along with him into the gym, and the rest of us followed.

“Good luck, coach!” I said as I made it inside.

“Thanks. Don’t fall off the roof!” He said right back, shutting the door to the gym and locking it behind us.

“SHOOT!” I turned back around as Mike cried out in frustration. I didn’t realize why until it hit me. You see, the cool thing about the school is that a lot of it was super modernized for convenience sake. The not so cool thing is that the bleachers were collapsable, and were currently folded up against the wall to the point that there was no way we’d be able to get up to the window unless we unfolded them.

“It’s fine, it’s fine!” I shouted back. “McKay’s got the door guarded, just find the switch!”

“HERE!” Simon called it out as he slammed a hand down on a switch velcroed to the wall. We heard the mechanical wirrrr of the bleachers as they slowly started to unfold. “Agh! It’s going so slow!!”

“If it went any faster, it’d break itself,” Zelda said. “We gotta be patient.”

“There’s monsters right outside the door, I don’t think we have time to be patient!”

“McKay’s holding them off, I’m sure we’ll be fine!” I said as I ran to the other side of the gym to join them. “Besides, these don’t take too long to unfold, maybe 30 seconds, tops!”

And that’s when we heard it.

The lot of us stopped where we were, color draining from our faces as we looked toward the locked gym doors. We hadn’t heard any monsters, or squealing, or lizard sounds, none of that. What we heard was a scream. Coach McKay’s scream .

We all knew it, but didn't want to say it. We just stood there, and waited. Waited for a follow up. Waited for something to reassure us that he was fine. And then the door handle jiggled. It took a few frustrated squeals from the other side as the jiggling became more violent to make us scared.

“Screw it, I’m climbing!” Uma said. Mike was quick to grab her.

“Don’t, have you ever read the warnings on the side of this thing during class?? Your hands and stuff could get crushed while it's moving!”

“If we don’t at least get the latch of the window open now, we’re never gonna make it out of here!”

“Well, unless you can do some weird magic stuff like the Coach to get up there without the stairs, then we’re gonna have to pray.”

“WAIT WAIT WAIT hold on, idea!” Zelda reached a hand inside her hood.

“WHOA hey, no NOOO Zed, stop it!” Navi kept saying stuff rather angrily as Zelda grabbed her and held her out.

“Navi, fly up there and open the window!”

“I can’t do that! I haven’t tried flying before!!”

“Well there’s no better time than when we’re under pressure!” We all stood anxiously as we heard the monsters from the other side try to ram the door, I’m assuming with either their shoulders or more mops. I was silently hoping it was with mops so we’d have just a bit more time.

“You’ll do fine, Navi,” I said. “It’s just like flapping your arms! But… on your back!”

“Oh yeah that helps sooo much,” she said sarcastically.

“No time, IT’S GO TIME!” And without warning, I watched as Zelda held her hand behind her before chucking Navi up toward the top of the bleachers. It was very sudden and very much made me almost want to scream seeing the little blue glowy thing that was Navi tumble through the air, screaming. And then, a miracle happened: she managed to balance herself out and hover.

“Huh??” The little glowing ball sat in the air for a moment. 

“I… I did it! I’M DOING IT!!”

“I KNEW YOU COULD!!” I called out. Another loud bang came from the other side of the door as the monsters kept trying to knock it down. “JUST HURRY WITH THE LATCH!!”

“RIGHT! RIGHT!” I watched as Navi zoomed through the air and toward the bottom of the window, zipping around to look for the latch. “HERE! FOUND IT!”

“JUST GET IT UNDONE ALREADY!” Mike called out impatiently. More banging from the other side of the door. It only took around 7 seconds, but it felt like forever as we heard more scratching and squealing and screeching from the other side of the door.

“I GOT IT!” Navi called out. And right as she did, we all heard the click of the bleacher’s as they finally stopped unfolding from the wall.

“ALRIGHT, GO GO GO!!” I called it out like a sergeant ordering his battalion to charge. Or, more accurately, retreat. Everyone was quick to dash up the stairs of the bleachers and make a break for the window. Our one mistake was not setting up a marching order. We were going up the stairs as well as trying to cut in front by leaping from line of seats to line of seats. For reference, that was like trying to jump two steps at once to get up the staircase faster. There was one other thing we hadn’t been aware of: not all the monsters were at the door.

We heard Uma cry out in alarm, tripping and falling onto one of the steps. We looked back just in time to see her trying to get something off of her leg. We were too far up the bleachers to run back for her in time, but by god if Mike didn’t try.

“BABE!”

“MIKEY!” Uma tried to grab onto a seat while kicking at whatever had her ankle. It was at that point I noticed that it was a vine. Some kind of plant had sprouted up through the splintered floorboards of the gym floor and was trying to drag her away. “Get off me!!” Uma said angrily as she tried to kick at the vine and get it to loosen its grip. Mike’s hands shot down to her ankle to try and tear it off. He managed to get it off  and get Uma back on her feet as the plant seemed to retreat. Zelda, Simon and I were busy lifting the window up and getting it open now that Navi got the latch. 

“C’mon guys, we gotta go!” I called out. Mike and Uma ran as fast as they could, trying to make it. And even then, Uma wasn’t fast enough. I watched as something reared up behind her: a plant with a bulb at its end, splitting open like a seed to reveal a maw full of teeth.

“UMA, WATCH IT!” Navi called out. That gave her just enough of a warning for her to roll out of the way, right as it tried to snap down on her, missing her and latching onto the stairs instead. But while she managed to dodge the teeth, she couldn’t dodge the vines. Another one latched onto her ankle this time. Her cry of alarm activated Mike’s fight or flight, allowing him the reaction time to try to grab Uma’s hand to try and hold onto her and keep her from getting dragged back down the stairs.

But he wasn’t fast enough.

Uma’s hand slipped from his grasp and she cried out as the plant dragged her down the stairs and toward the gym floor. And just like that, she was dragged away into the hole in the ground and disappeared in the darkness below the gym.

“UMA!!” Mike was so close to dashing down the stairs after her, but Simon grabbed him.

“There’s no time, we need to go now!!” He said. To this day I’m still not sure how Simon was able to out-brute Mike in the moment, but perhaps after the initial event Mike was just at a loss. I’d be too if my girlfriend got dragged away into the shadow realm by a plant.

All 5 of us slipped out the window of the gym and onto the roof of the school, at this point just trying to find a way down off the roof and toward the front lawn of the school. The outside of the school was entirely devoid of monsters. It seems like they were all still confined to the inside of the school, like a pack of zombies trapped inside a train car by the locking doors. We made our way down to the edge of the roof before climbing down the rain gutter to get to the ground. The moment we made it to the ground, Simon collapsed onto the ground.

“I never thought I’d miss the feel of grass,” he said, gripping it in his hands.

“Well I never thought I’d miss my girlfriend as much as I do right now, but look where we are now!” Mike was quick to start heading toward the parking lot.

“Mike, where are you going??” I called out.

“To my damn car!” He replied angrily. “I’m gonna get out of here, and then do a round trip around queens to try and figure out where they took her.”

“Mike, we don’t even know if she’d still be in queens!” Zelda said.

“Well they couldn’t have gone far in that little time.”

“There’s a lot of obvious magic going on, who’s to say they couldn’t have teleported her somewhere else?!”

“Well whatever, I can still try to find her!”

“Or, OR…” I waited until everyone’s attention was back on me. “Or we could do what I had originally planned to do after school.” I pulled out my phone, adding contact after contact to a new group chat. “We meet up with everyone else, trying to figure out what’s going on here with us and Mr. Doirich…” I finally hit “send” on a message to about 8 different people. It was simply a time, a place, and a request to get there as soon as they could.

“And hopefully, at the end of it all, find out where they took Uma and set things right again.”

Chapter Text

Mike allowed us to hitch a ride in his car, but then again what option did we have? We sure as well weren’t going to walk to Forest Hills. Speaking of that, the moment I gave Mike my address, he wouldn’t shut up about it.

“Wow, uh, didn’t take you as the type of guy to be loaded,” he said.

“I’m not. Not really. Mom just got lucky paying off the house before the neighborhood got all expensive.”

“Well still, you give off like… apartment dwelling skateboarding hipster vibes, I never would’ve guessed.”

“I… no matter how I respond to that, I lose.”

To my relief, we soon made it to Forest Hills. Zelda hopped up out of the passenger seat while me and Simon shuffled out of the back. Mike locked his car once he got out.

“This it?”

“Yep! You ever forget the address, just look for the only house on this street with the Mezuzah by the door,” I said, walking up to the front porch. “Welcome to casa Matheson, I’ll break out some snacks so don’t worry about looking for those, and don’t touch anything that looks breakable or my mom will kill me.” I came up to the front door and knocked. It took a minute - just long enough for the others to catch up - but I was able to hear a little bit of conversation behind the door.

“Someone’s at the door!”

“I know, I heard the knock too. Could you answer it, Ariel?”

“Why me??”

“I can’t answer the door, I can’t let anyone see me like this!”

“Fair enough.” Then the door opened. “Hello!” said Ariel. “OH! Hi Link!”

“Oh thank goodness, it’s just Link,” said Fiona. I saw her slide in from out of frame, and we all immediately tensed up. Last I’d checked, all Fiona had to deal with was her hair turning blue. Now the rest of her was blue. Blue and shiny, almost like she wasn’t made of human flesh but of resin or maybe even metals or crystal. That and her arms were gone. And if not that, she’d suddenly decided that wearing cool dual-colored cloaks was something she was into.

“Whoa.”

“Yes, I know,” she scoffed back at me, the end of one half the cloak touching itself to her forehead as if she were face-palming. Yep, her arms were gone then. “It didn’t just stay in the hair, just get in here .” The five of us entered the house. She looked over at the group of us, at first being startled to realize she’d shown herself to seemingly three other strangers, but upon seeing two of those three people with hoods on, it all clicked. “Alright, let me guess: this isn’t an isolated incident?”

“Not in the slightest,” I said as Zelda and Mike removed their hoods. Fiona didn’t even flinch really. Except when she noticed…

“Is that-”

“Yes! It’s me!” said Navi. “I know I don’t look like my profile picture or whatever joke you’re about to make, just please don’t talk about it.” She sat back down on Zelda’s shoulder. I sighed, rubbing my temple.

“Yeah, a lot happened at school, but we’re basically meeting up at the treehouse to discuss where to go from here. Wanna join us?”

“What else can I do here, Link?” Fiona followed after us into the backyard, and the “gliding” description soon became very literal. Fiona had forgone walking at this point and instead was innately floating, like she was… actually, Fiona made the comparison before I could piece it together.

“Dang, how are you doing that so easily??” Navi asked as we made our way to the backyard. “It took me being thrown into the air and under pressure to figure out how to fly.”

“I used to figure skate in middle school,” she explained. “It’s really not much different once you get the hang of it.” Ariel tagged along, her little Ireland beanie in her hands instead of on her head as she followed along.

“Aw luckyyyy,” she said. “Why couldn’t I be a fairy?”

“Trust me, Ariel, you got lucky,” Navi said nonchalantly.

“But you get to fly and stuff!”

“I do, yeah, but I also can’t hold a pencil.” That made Ariel stop talking and think.

“... Dang. You can’t draw cute little dogs in your school notebook.”

“Haha, yeah,” went Simon, ruffling Ariel’s hair. “The most important thing one can make with a pencil.”

We came out the back door of the house and into our backyard. You can probably guess how this goes: big house, big yard and all that. There’s something extra in our yard, though. Something my dad built back when I was only seven. When he and my mom bought the house, there were a lot of trees around the property that they thought looked… not so great. That and a couple were dead and in danger of falling over onto the house, so they had to get rid of a few of them. However, they kept one of the trees: a big oak tree in the backyard, perfect for bird watching and acorn picking. Little ole me thought it was also perfect for tree climbing, and the last thing my parents wanted was for me to fall while trying to climb up it.

My dad’s solution? Get some extra scrap lumber from his workplace and build a treehouse. One with windows, a little balcony, and a staircase to make bringing chairs and stuff up to the treehouse easier. Going up those same stairs toward the little house brought to my attention some of the little things we’d left behind once the project was finished. A half done paint job by my sister once she was old enough to hold a brush. A little rope ladder I’d tried to make all by myself when I was 11 that was left hanging unfinished from one of the windows. And of course, a masterpiece isn’t complete without a signature. Somewhere around the top step of the staircase, my dad and I had carved our names into the wood. You could tell who did who’s name. I wasn’t that great with wood working tools at that age. Then again I don’t think any 7-year-old is. Regardless, it was still a nice reminder of a nice memory.

We walked into the treehouse. For the most part it was a fairly simple set up, with a circle of chairs and floor pillows around a wooden table that my dad made by hand. Doors and windows with little curtains that still managed to get eaten up a bit by moths. Overall, the whole place had a homemade feel to it that wasn’t easy for me to find anywhere else. The first thing I did once inside was draw all the curtains.

“Alright, just like… take a seat I guess? Wherever is comfy,” I said as I pinned the curtains closed with some binder clasps. I looked down at my phone as I finished up the last one to see if Miranda or the others responded to the group text yet. I’d gotten a text from both Garrett and Vinny, mentioning that they’re both on their way. Miranda, on the other hand, simply replied with a thumbs up emoji. I looked back up from my phone to see everyone else in the middle of taking seats in the tree house. Simon and Zelda opted for floor pillows, while Mike and I had the same idea and sat down in one of the chairs. Fiona also took one of the chairs, sitting all ladylike. Navi was the outlier, sitting criss-cross on the table in front of Zelda.

“Alright, now I think it’ll be polite to wait for everyone else to get here before we try to talk about all this,” I said. I pulled out my phone. “Garrett and Vinny said they’re on their way only a minute ago, and I know they live in the next neighborhood over, so it’s going to take them a minute before they-”

“ACK!”

We all went silent as we heard someone cry out in alarm from outside. It sounded familiar but I knew that couldn’t be right. There’s no way they drove over THAT quickly, right??

“Okay hold on, let me try again!”

“No no no, please, let’s just go up the bloody stairs!”

“If I don’t get the hang of this now I never will, Garrett!”

Yep, that was them. Without so much as a warning in the form of Garrett freaking out or something of that nature, we heard an audible woosh as Garrett let out another cry. And before we knew it, both of them came crashing through one of the windows, crashing into the curtains and managed to tear the rod it was attached to right out of the wall as they both collapsed onto the floor. And… yep. Just like that, Garrett and Vinny had launched themselves through the window of the treehouse and were now laying on the floor. Vinny was face down while Garrett was on his back, the curtains covering his face while his arms were wrapped around his stomach. It looked like he fell down onto the bottom of the window frame as they flew in, so I assumed that’s how he was hurt. Other than that, I could only assume what Garrett’s thousand-yard stare at the ceiling looked like.

“Gosh, you two alright??” Zelda asked, about to get up to help when Vinny held up a hand, gesturing for her to stop.

“Yep. Just fine,” he said, face still buried in the floorboards. It was around now that it clicked for me that his hair had turned purple. It was all strewn about on the floor, hiding his head and face. The rest of him looked like the little brother from A Christmas Story. Despite the weather very much NOT being that cold, he was covered in snow gear meant to cover every possible inch of exposed skin. He had been wearing a hat as well, but it had fallen off when he flew in through the window. “Just give me a sec, I’m gonna lay here and recover for a moment.” A chuckle came out of me at those words.

“Alright, fair fair,” I said. I heard a groan from Garrett as he sat up, being quick to throw his hood up as he got the ripped-out curtain and rod off of his face.

“Vinny! Don’t EVER do that with me again,” he said angrily. “You can throw yourself through as many windows as you please, just DO NOT drag me along with you.”

“You guys alright?” I asked. Garret sniffled as he straightened himself out.

“Just fine, but that whole thing made me hate March even more,” he said. “Whatever he just did I think stirred up the - sniff - the pollen from the oak tree and- haCHOO !” The sneeze had startled me, not because of the nature of sneezes, but because of what Garrett had sneezed out. Diamonds. Just… diamonds . Little flecks of magic in the air, right from his face.

“... god, my allergies.”

“Shoot man, people are just sneezing magic now?!” Mike asked with wide eyes. That’s when Garrett actually noticed him there.

“What’s Goss doing here??” He asked, sounding like I’d betrayed him by inviting his mortal enemy to my house.

“Like it or not, Mike’s roped up in whatever’s going on and I’m not leaving him in the dust,” I said. I went back to checking my phone to see if Miranda had given an update. “Feel free to take a seat wherever, man. We’ve got cheetos.” Garrett wouldn’t take his eyes off of Mike, as if he were waiting for him to try and pull something, moving slowly toward one of the still open floor pillows and sitting down. He kept his eyes on him as he monotonously grabbed a cheeto from the bag on the table and ate it.

“So is it just us then or- GAH!” Garrett startled himself upon looking around the room at everyone, catching a glimpse of Navi on the table near the end there. He didn’t seem scared, just… confused. “Wha- how are you that small??”

“If I knew, I wouldn’t be here!” Navi yelled back.

“Navi?!?”

“YES IT’S NAVI!” She huffed before sitting back down on the table. “God, Garrett, I don’t look that different.”

“I… I’m sorry,” he apologized. “It’s just, the little glow you have now, the lighting, it made you look different is all.”

“Wait, really??” She turned to Zelda. “Does it really??” Zelda gave the so-so motion with her hand, an eyebrow quirked. Navi paused for a moment. “Huh. I really am just a cool little lady with mood lighting, huh.”

“One way to put it,” Garrett said. “Better than me.”

“Well what exactly happened to ya?” I asked, trying to get Garrett to spill. I didn’t manage to get anything out of him before a knock came at the door of the treehouse.

“What- I thought that was everyone,” Mike said as I made my way over to the door. “Just all you guys and your nerd friends. Who else is there??” I answered his question without words by simply opening the door to the treehouse. What was standing there was something I most definitely wasn’t expecting. What I saw was a figure, and a short figure at that. Whoever it was would probably only reach Ariel’s chest if they stood next to her. The only other weird or even vaguely confusing thing about their appearance was their outfit: long sleeves and pants that looked too baggy for them, a scarf around the face, a pair of very dark sunglasses, and a big floppy sun hat with a veil around it. It was the kind of hat that you’d see a really serious trad goth wearing on a really sunny day. I was just standing there, confused, before the figure spoke.

“My Frankenstein report deserved better.”

That was when it clicked. It was Miranda .

“Good god, come in, take a seat dude,” I said, stepping out of the way.

“Thank you.” She walked in nonchalantly before taking a seat on one of the last available chairs.

“Goodness gracious, M, what happened to you??” Zelda asked, a hand over her mouth in shock.

“Dunno,” She said, grabbing a cheeto and eating it. “Woke up ready for the day and next thing I know I’m 3 feet shorter and sunlight hurts more than it should.”

“Yikes. Glad I’m not the only one who got a height demotion,” Navi said. She and Miranda gently bumped fists in solidarity. I closed the front door of the tree house before going toward the window where the curtain rod had been yanked off.

“If sunlight hurts, I’m gonna have to get this back up,” I said.

“Hold on a sec, Matheson-” I turned just in time to see Mike pull something out of his backpack. It was a tool set. The kind that folds up small enough to keep in a bag. The ones that are mostly carried around by handymen and dads. He joined me by the window before pulling out a hammer and some spare nails before nailing the curtain rod back in place instead of screwing it.

“Damn dude, didn’t know you were a home depot kinda guy.”

“More so Lowes actually,” he specified. “They’ve got a better selection of the stuff I… nevermind, just go sit down or something.” He went back to nailing the curtain rod back to the wall while I returned to my seat, more confused than when I got up.

"Alright, well I think that's all of us," I said. "Now… obviously some intensely weird stuff has happened today. But we all know each other here. This is a safe space, with closed windows and doors, so there's no need to worry. So on the count of three, let's all take our disguises off and open up about what happened. Alright?”

“You guys go first,” Miranda said, staying seated. “I wanna make sure the curtains are all closed before I do any of that.”

“Alright alright, fair.” I looked at Vinny and Garrett. “Any grievances, you guys?”

“No no… I think we’re fine by all regards. Just tell us when.”

“What he said,” Vinny went, pointing up at Garrett.

“Alrighty then, so on three,” I said, putting a hand on my beanie. “One… two… THREE!” The moment I counted to three, we all tore off our disguises.

“Oh! Just ears then??” Garrett asked. It took me by surprise before I actually got a chance to look up and back at him. Garrett also got stuck with the pointed ears… as well as hair that looked like he’d gone through a whole year's worth of intense stress in less than a day. I say that because his whole head of hair had gone from a pretty dark brown to stark white.

“God, Garrett, white hair is not a good look for you.”

“It’s silver actually, but yes,” he corrected before sitting back down and looking defeated. “Vinny told me I look like Lady Gaga and it… I haven’t been able to get over it.”

“Well speak for yourself, man, at least you’re not PURPLE!” And… yeah, whatever happened to Vinny spoke for itself. The poor guy’s skin was now a very faint lavender, and his hair had gone from its usual black to a more saturated lavender. The dude looked like he’d bathed in purple kool aid last night instead of taking a shower, but lord knows that wasn’t why he ended up looking like this.

“Oh shut it, Vin, you got magic at least,” Garrett said. “All I got was pointed ears and hair taken straight out of a Cyberpunk game.”

“Whoa whoa whoa, wait a minute, you can do magic??” Miranda asked, seemingly intrigued.

"Yeah!! I can control the wind and stuff!"

"Oh, awesome!" said Miranda.

"Not awesome!" said Garrett. "Not when he's launching us both through windows without my consent."

"Geez, how come literally everyone with weird hair gets cool powers but me?!" Mike blurted out as he sat back down, arms crossed.

"Oh I'm sure your hair isn't this ba-" Mike cut him off by throwing off his hood. And let me tell you, I know what it looks like when Garrett's trying to hold in a laugh. His cheeks get all red and puffy as he tries to breath calmly before he makes a fool of himself. Luckily, that didn't happen, because Garrett didn't get a chance to hold anything in and just burst out laughing. I'd honestly never seen him laugh this hard. Or... really, I'd never seen anyone laugh this hard. The last time I saw someone laugh like this was when Ariel was around 4 and she saw a real live chicken for the first time. It's a miracle she didn't pass out that day.

“Oh god, that looks like rubbish, Goss!” he said, wiping his eyes on his sleeve. Mike obviously didn’t take it very well.

“Oh look who’s talking,” he grumbled. “You’re telling me I look like rubbish? Least I don’t look and sound like I’m on my way to lose Eurovision.”

“You take that back!”

“Make me!”

"Eyo, ladies, ladies, you're both pretty, but we've got bigger fish to fry," Miranda said, finally being convinced that the treehouse was safe from the sun and pulling off all her stuff. She'd only removed her hat, scarf and sunglasses, but it was enough to see what was up. First things first, she'd pulled her hat off with her hair. As in, her ponytail ended in a hand. But aside from that, her haircut and color was the same, and her piercings were the same as well... that was about it. She most definitely wasn't human anymore, being more in the same state as Fiona and Navi, being completely changed otherwise. Her skin was pale except for some dark patches and glowly marks along her arms and legs. Overall, my poor English class friend looked more like a gremlin on its way to a rave than a high school student.

“Alright, she wins,” Vinny said. “Don’t think anything here tops being gremlin-ified.

“What about me??” Navi asked, zooming up into the air like an angry bee before stopping right in front of Vinny’s face. “I can’t hold a damn pencil, Vincent!”

“Well you’re a fairy! People like fairies,” he explained. “If someone sees you floating around they just think it's pretty and cool. Someone sees Miranda, they’d probably smack her with a broom.” Navi stood there hovering for a moment before she just let out an angry groan.

“I HATE that you’re RIGHT!” She zipped right back to her spot on the table and sat down. “UGH! All of this just sucks butts.”

“I’m just confused as to why this is all happening!!” Simon blurted out. It was at this point that we were reminded that he was even here.

“Alright so uh… what’s happened with Simon, did he get something weird, too?” Vinny asked, gesturing toward him.

“No, not really, but Mina stayed home from school,” he explained. “I want to find out what happened to her just as much as you guys.”

“That brings up an interesting question, actually,” Garrett said. “Did any of your folks find out??” I saw a few people raise their hands. Navi’s was expected, but I was surprised to see Garrett and Miranda raising their hands. As well as Fiona.

“Fiona… I’m hoping you’re just referring to me and Ariel.”

“Yeah, just you guys,” she affirmed. “What, you think Marion would believe me??”

“Right, right…” I looked at the others. “So, how did your folks take it then?”

“Not good,” said Garrett, starting out. “I think my mother nearly had my head. She thought I’d bleached it behind her back before she saw the ears. My folks didn’t change, so I’m not sure what happened there.”

“Same here!” Miranda said. “Though they seemed way less freaked out in that sense. They were more worried about Shadow thinking I was a chew toy.”

I heard Mike snort next to me before he just covered his face and went “Sorry sorry, go ahead.”

“But yeah, they were worried about me getting hurt or something so they forced me to stay home from school.” She huffed. “I was totally prepared to sneak out and give my book report whether the universe wanted me to or not, but then I found out I can’t go in the sun, and that was that.”

“Can someone open the door please?” Called someone from outside. The voice caught me off guard. It was Ariel, but I hadn’t seen her leave the treehouse at all. I opened the door to let her in, and was greeted by the sight of my 9-year-old sister coming in with an ice box. It was almost half her size, and she was using both arms to carry it in.

“Ariel, what do you have there?” I asked as she plopped the box down next to the table. She grabbed the edges of the styrofoam lid before popping it off to reveal what was inside.

“Stress relief!” she declared. The icebox was full of all the remaining fruit pops from the fridge.

“Isn’t it a bit cool out for popsicles?” Mike said.

“Your loss!” Miranda reached out and took a red one before tearing the plastic off.

“I needed this,” Garrett said, grabbing one of them. “Very thoughtful of you, Ariel.

“Cool, cool!” I said as I sat down. “Alright, it seems we’re all in the same boat here, then. We just gotta figure out what exactly caused all this and where to go from here.”

“Surely there’s a common thread here,” Simon proposed. “Like… I dunno, maybe a similar string of events this morning that all of us may give us a clue as to a root cause! Like how some animals end up totally different but they’ve got some little feature that proves that they came from the same-” Simon stopped in the middle of what he was saying. His expression suddenly went to what you’d expect for someone infodumping about something they know and care a lot about, to something of a mix of horror and confusion. I didn’t realize what he was looking at until I turned. And there was Garrett, trying to do something as simple as enjoying a popsicle and… his tongue. To put it simply, it looked like someone tore one out of a snake and slapped it on him. It seemed Garrett didn’t notice it either because the silence clued him into the fact that something was up, making him look down, and then promptly freak out.

He dropped his popsicle onto the floor and covered his mouth with his hand as he let out a cry of alarm.

“GOD! Why?? Is nothing sacred?!” he asked himself. “I can’t even enjoy a popsicle without this magic crap making it awful!”

“God, now you’re even more of a freak, Embers!” Mike chuckled.

“Shut up, I don’t need this from you!”

“Oh lighten up, dude, it’s not like it’s anything new.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?!” Vinny asked, starting to get angry.

“What, did you not hear me from down there?? You guys have always been little freaks, and now you just look the part better.”

“ That’s it !”

To my surprise, it wasn’t Vinny that jumped up out of his seat. Vincent Rodgers, the man I knew to throw hands with anyone making fun of his friends, was the one to actually try and hold back my 6’5” friend as Garret tried to leap up from his seat and nearly jump over the table to physically fight Mike.

“WHOA, GARRETT!!” I called out, going to try and hold him back. Mike was so startled, he was just pressed up against the back of his chair, eyes wide.

“You think it’s easy?! Having to go to school and live day in day out with git like you making my life hell?!” It was common knowledge among the friend group that Garrett’s british-ness became more intense the angrier he got. He hadn’t been angry enough to use the word “git” since he stubbed his toe on a chair someone forgot to push in under one of the desks in one of the classrooms at school. “Tosser’s like you are why kids hate going to class!” He snapped his fingers while pointing at Mike, probably in an attempt to emphasize his point, but Mike rolled out of the way and cried out as something flew past his head. It stuck in the wall behind him, hitting the space right beside one of the windows. We were dead silent.

Miranda was the only one with the courage to move, shuffling toward where the mysterious item had landed in the wood grain. She’d used her ponytail hand to gently poke it before gripping one end of it and pulling it out of the wood. That’s when we realized that it was, in fact, a knife.

“Oooo neat!” She said, turning it around in her hair hand. It disappeared in a flash of magic before she could do anything else with it, though.

“Ok, as terrifying as that was,” Vinny said. “That’s pretty sick.”

“No, it’s not!” Garrett blurted. “I just nearly killed someone by snapping my fingers!”

“Everything just keeps getting weirder and weirder,” Simon said, a hand on his face as he looked between everyone and really thought about it all. He paused before glancing over at Fiona in her chair. “You know, uh, ma’am, you’ve been pretty quiet this whole time.”

“I’m just uh… trying to process all this,” Fiona said, gesturing at everyone in the room with her cloak hand. “There’s a lot happening here. Our appearances are entirely different, some of us are doing magic, I don’t have hands , and we don’t know why this is happening! We can’t afford any infighting, you guys!”

“There’s gotta be SOMETHING we could look at here!” Miranda said. She looked at me. “Is there anything specific that might’ve happened to you before you and Fiona woke up this morning all weird??”

“Not really??” I answered. “The only other thing that was weird before now is…” I paused for a moment. I’d like to imagine that everyone could pinpoint the exact moment I put it all together. It was like you could hear the click in my head.

“... my switch!”

We’d migrated to the living room a few minutes after the realization had hit me. My switch had caused a Queens-wide power outage last night because of something one could argue was magic. So surely, despite Fiona believing that the power outage was because of something else, after everything that happened that day, I couldn’t help but think for once that maybe my cousin was wrong. I took the handheld console off of its dock before coming back down the stairs towards where everyone was gathered in the living room, hearing the tail end of an awkward conversation.

“So can you like… taste the air like a snake?” Miranda asked from her spot on the back of the couch. We’d gotten her a change of clothes at this point: a pair of baby jeans and a much more fitting sweater that my mom still had lying around from when Ariel was reeeeally little.

“What, no, why would I be able to do that??” Garrett replied from his spot below her, sprawled out on one end of the couch and laying on his back.

“Well you know, the weird tongue and stuff.”

“Just because it looks like that doesn’t mean I can do the jacobson’s thing!”

“I’m sorry, man, I just figured it’s gotta do something .”

“Alright, I found it,” I said as I approached the gathering. “And M… don’t harass Garrett about all that, dude’s uncomfortable with all this as it is.” She just nodded her head. I sat down at the opposite end of the couch from Garret with my switch in hand. “Here’s the suspect in question, you guys.” I raised it in the air, only for Fiona to take it in her weird fabric hands. I watched as my cousin turned it over in her hands(?) before holding it with one and trying to hit the power button with the other.

“It doesn’t seem all too out of the ordinary,” she said. “God, will it turn on??”

“No, Fiona, you gotta apply more pressure I think,” I said, gently taking it back. “I don’t know if your weird fabric hands are the best for that.” I pushed the power button on the top of my switch, expecting to get the usual response from the switch. You know, the home menu “press the same button 3 times to unlock” response. Instead, I felt it jerk a bit. Like there was some internal mechanism that locked up in such a way that the sudden stop caused the whole thing to react. And pretty soon, the back end of the case was starting to do something weird. Grooves and cracks that hadn’t been there suddenly carved themselves into the back of the main screen, lighting up in gold and orange as it all happened.

“WHOA whoa, HEY, the tablet thingy is doing something freaky!!” Vinny called out from where he’d been stationed on a floor pillow. He looked like he was ready to hit it with something. Hopefully not anything fragile nearby. The grooves stopped carving themselves into the back of the tablet, and then the screen lit up with a big bright blue eye, surrounded by much the same lines carved into the back of the tablet. It was sudden enough that it startled me, causing me to flinch back and drop it. Lucky for me, Miranda acted quickly. She was able to catch it just before it hit the ground.

“Be careful, dingus!” She held it up for me to grab again. “There’s a shortage right now on these things.”

“Yeah, AND more importantly it’s our only clue as to what’s going on,” Fiona added, eyeing Miranda.

“Well yeah, DUH, but we all knew that already,” Miranda replied. The girls sat back down as I looked toward my switch, with the blue eye displayed in the middle.

“What are you?” I whispered it to myself, not really looking for an answer right away. And yet…

“Well, I don’t quite have a name per say.” I flinched, but had the sense to not drop the console this time as it spoke to me. “But these consoles allow their user to name them during the set-up process, so you may refer to me as Audrie if you’d like.” I was just stunned, stuck in the fact that my switch was talking to me. And I’d given it the most awkward name possible…

“Wait, like our aunt Audrie??” Fiona asked, raising an eyebrow at me.

“Yeah, because she got me into games,” I explained. “She let me play on her old N64 when I was little and I played a little bit of cousin Joel’s old Ocarina of Time save file. I thought it’d be neat to, like, honor her or something?”

“Whatever your reasoning, that is the name you assigned me,” the switch - or Audrie I supposed - continued. “I find it reasonable for that to be what you call me.”

"Okay then, Audrie ," I said, trying to get used to the name. "I'm still super confused as to how and why you're talking to me right now. I don't suppose you have an explanation for that, do you?"

"Yeah no cause like, switches aren't supposed to do that," said Miranda.

"Indeed you are correct," Audrie acknowledged. "But I believe myself to be an exception. I am your switch on a hardware level, but my software is, to put it lightly, of another world.” The lot of us looked at the device with confused looks.

“What is this, god damn halo?” Mike blurted out, seeming to be the most confused out of all of us. “What are you??”

“An artificial intelligence from another world,” Audrie continued explaining. “Not of earth, but another plain of existence.” We all sat in anticipation as Audrie paused. And then, she name-dropped it: “Hyrule.”

I burst out laughing. Honest to god, I wasn’t sure how else I would’ve reacted in the moment.

“RIGHT right, suuuure, okay, cool prank,” I said, turning the switch over in my hands as I started pressing buttons. “Really funny dude, 10/10, how’d you get this software download?”

“What- no, it’s the truth!” Audrie shouted back at me.

“Can you prove it then??”

“Well… no, not exactly, but-”

“What the hell’s a Hyrule??” Vinny asked, leaning on the table with his head balanced on his hand.

“Like from Zelda, numbnuts,” Miranda snarked. “That’s the main setting of the game.”

“Yeah. A game!” I reiterated. “Hyrule’s fictional!”

“How else would you explain this madness and your altered appearances, Link ?” Audrie had made sure to emphasize that last word. To emphasize my name. That’s where I went from denying the explanation to realizing that it… was probably right.

“Shoot. She’s right,” I said. “Link, Zelda, fricking Navi - who names their kid Navi!?”

“I’ve explained this to you before dude,” Navi said, hand on her head. “My mom took it from Navik! Like the Hindi word for sailor ! BECAUSE MY DAD’S A FISHERMAN!!”

“Yeah but still, that’s more than just a coincidence!” I said. “Having that name is one thing. Being friends with people named Link and Zelda is too weird!” Navi shot  up from her spot on the table, fluttering so close to my face she could’ve balanced on the end of my nose while talking to me.

“So what, are you saying we’re really video game characters or something?!” she asked angrily.

“If that’s how you wish to phrase it, yes.” The both of us looked at the switch with hints of confusion.

“Wait, actually??”

“Yes, actually,” she reaffirmed. “Hyrule and this world are copies of each other. They’re like reflections in a broken mirror: some things look the same, but there’s just enough that’s different to call them their own being. You and your friends, to put it simply, are what the goddesses refer to as Parallels. You’re your own people, but you also exist as mirrors of people from my world, from Hyrule.” She let out a mechanical sounding sigh. “And you were our only way of defeating Ganon.”

“G-Ganon?” I asked. “Like, big bad evil dude with a capital-G Ganon??”

“Who’s Ganon??” Mike asked Miranda.

“Main villain.”

“Ooooh. Shoot, that’s not good.”

“Ok well, keep talking, why’s Ganon here ??” I asked, trying desperately to get more information out of my talking game console.

“We believe instead of waiting to be reborn, he escaped his sealing to this world to try and conquer it instead,” she explained. “Hyrule has an action plan for him every time, but Earth doesn’t. We couldn’t send our own heroes after him into this world, so instead we sent… a spell of sorts. One that was supposed to grant you the magic and powers capable of allowing you to defeat him.”

“As well as changing our looks??” Garrett asked, holding a strand of his now silvery white hair.

“A side effect, yes,” Audrie replied. “But a change in physiology would’ve helped your bodies handle your new magic better.”

“Oh, SURE, alright.” He sat back down on the couch with his arms crossed. “So all everyone else needs is pointy ears but I need to get put in DRAG!”

“Whatever the case, I know how you are to defeat Ganon.”

“Spill it!” Simon blurted. “That’s the most important thing you could tell us!!”

“Alright, please calm yourself, Simon.”

“ O mijn God she knows my name. ”

“I’m pretty sure she knows all our names,” I said. “Doesn’t make it any less out of the ordinary, though.” I held Audrie close to me as I sat down next to Garrett on the couch. “But yes, spill it .” Audrie took in a mechanical breath before letting it out.

“There are four parallels in this world,” she began. “They’re mirrors of the four champions of Hyrule, who are integral in Hyrule’s current day and age to defeating Ganon and sealing him away. Ganon’s minions have already kidnapped all four of them and have them locked up all over your city.

“Oh, damn it, it’s a fetch quest,” Zelda sighed, putting her head in her hands. “Where are they??”

“That I don’t know, but I know who they are,” Audrie explained. “You’ve already encountered two of them before they were taken by Ganon’s army.”

“Uma and the Coach!” Zelda said, piecing it together. “They’re two of the champions?!”

“Precisely!” Audrie said.

“Darius McKay and Uma Qadir are parallels to the Goron champion Daruk and the Gerudo champion Lady Urbosa.”

“Damn. Babe’s got a title and everything,” Mike said.

“Still kidnapped, though,” Zelda reminded him. Mike cupped his chin.

“Right, right, we’ll have to get on this quest crap fast then.”

“Okay but wait, continue please!” I said. “Who are the other two??”

“The other two are Reily Valenti, parallel of the Rito champion Revali, and Mina Van Der Zee, parallel of-”

“Mina?!” Simon interrupted Audrie before she could finish, the realization hitting him like a brick. It’d been like the flick of a switch when her name dropped. Simon’s expression this whole time had been like a little kid about to go on some grand adventure to disney world or something. Hearing that his older sister was involved made the whole fun-loving expression drop in an instant as he realized just how serious this was. “You mean he’s kidnapped my sister?!”

“I’m afraid yes,” she said. “Based on what I know, she was one of the last to be taken.” Simon just paused for a moment upon hearing this, his whole body seeming to lose its puppy-dog energy as he slunk back down into his seat. “I’m afraid that’s all I’m able to tell you-”

“What- why are you stopping there??” Fiona asked. She’d been calmly sitting and listening the whole time up until then. The lack of more information had set her off it seemed. “We’re sitting ducks here, any information helps!”

“Yes, I’m aware,” Audrie said. “But this switch console isn’t good on memory.”

“Wait, do you need an SD card or something??” Simon asked, trying to make a joke despite the emotional rollercoaster he’d just gone through. The room went silent. “... O mijn God you need an SD card??”

“Oh, neat! I’ve got one of those!” I said. “It’s in my backpack, let me just…” I went rummaging around in my school bag, knowing that I’d snagged one on the same day I picked up my switch from the Dragon’s Lair. I rummaged around in the main pocket… then rummaged around more frantically… then more frantically-

“Uh, any day now Link,” Fiona said, with a nervous smile on her face. That was when I stopped, trying to figure out where the card could be. I hadn’t taken it out and put it in my switch right away when I got home. Audrie would’ve probably known if I did. I went through everything I did that day, everything that went on during school, and then I realized…

“... Fiona, don’t get mad, I think it’s in my locker!!” I swear I wouldn’t have been surprised if her jaw hit the floor.

“Your SCHOOL locker?!”

“No, my Planet Fitness locker- YES MY SCHOOL LOCKER!!”

“How did that happen?!” Zelda asked.

“I think when I was unloading stuff into it, I accidentally shoved the SD card in there??”

“God, Link, you’re hopeless!” Fiona said.

“It’s fine. It’s FINE!” I picked up Audrie again. “Is there anything else you can do that doesn’t require the card??”

“Well of course!” she said happily. “I have a Compendium that allows me to identify certain creatures and items you may come across that come from my world, a way to store weaponry and food-”

“Weapons?!” Mike blurted out. “Uh, thank you, but I’d rather not get in trouble for having a knife at school again.”

“Again?!”

“Don’t ask, Matheson.”

“Well whatever the case, you don’t expect to go out there with Ganon’s monsters running around with no means of protection, do you?” Audrie asked. We all paused, the room going silent again, before we just nodded.

“Fine then. Anything else you can do?”

“I have a sensor as well!” she said. “Whatever is logged in my compendium can be tracked with it. Much like your earthly metal detectors.”

“SICK! I think that’ll all be a big help!” I said. I went to put her away somewhere when I paused. “Uh… do you mind being carried in something??”

“Whatever’s most convenient, hero.”

“Right.” I pulled a standard switch carrying case out of my backpack, unzipping it before slipping Audrie inside. The eye in the middle of her screen shut as she shut herself off. I closed up the case before hooking it to one of my belt loops. “Well, guess we can go to the school and kill two birds with one stone then.”

“What do you mean?” Navi asked.

“Audrie didn’t know where the champions are being held,” I said. I went and grabbed some things I figured I’d need going forward. Some snacks, a water bottle, a charging cord for the switch, stuff like that. “But I have a feeling our starting point was gonna be the school regardless of whether we’d need that SD card or not.”

“Alright, what makes you say that?” asked Zelda.

“Simply put, Ganon has possessed Mr. Doirich,” I explained. “That much is obvious now that we’ve had my magical talking game console exposition dump to us. And knowing Mr. Doirich, he’s probably got extensive notes on his whole master plan in his side office.”

“Okay but he’s possessed by some terrifying evil final boss guy,” Simon reminded me as I shoved a bag of pistachios into my backpack. “Chances are he acts nothing like him!”

“Wrong, my Dutch friend!” I said, pointing a finger at him. “When he was levitating in the hallway, do you remember what pose he was making while floating at us?”

“Wha… no??”

“To be fair, Matheson, you don’t really turn around to look behind you during a foot chase.” Mike crossed his arms at me. “That’s like… rule #1 of foot chases.”

“Alright well I looked. And he was T-posing.” There was a bout of silence.

“Come again.”

“He was T-posing, Mike,” I reiterated. “The guy’s dating my mom. He’s come to my house before, and multiple times has tried to reference memes and stuff to… I dunno, bond? Point is, Ganon wasn’t doing that of his own volition. I think he’s inherited some of Mr. Doirich’s quirks.” I slung my backpack over my shoulder, looking at everyone seated in the living room.

“Either way, checking his office for notes is our only shot at figuring out where he’s keeping the champions.”

Chapter Text

We wasted no time getting to the school. We ultimately decided to take two cars, seeing as Garrett had his own and Mike’s truck couldn’t hold all of us and the last thing we needed was to try and get kids riding in the truck bed and get a ticket on our way to try and save the world. I rode along with Mike in his truck with my two best friends, my cousin, and my little sister(we couldn’t leave her alone at home with everything that was going on after all). Everyone else was riding with Garrett in his car. The only thing I was worried about was that it’d been a few hours since we were last at the school. Were there still kids in there? Would we need to set up a rescue mission on top of everything else?? Luckily, Fiona’s tendency to want to stay on top of everything answered that one before we actually got to the school.

“Link, oh god,” I turned to see my cousin fumbling with her phone as she passed it to me.

“How are you able to use the touch screen without hands??” I asked as I looked down at the screen.

“I think it’s like those touch screen gloves with the special fingertips,” she explained. “As long as I press hard enough, it works.” I read over what she’d found as she talked. She went on to try and drive the analogy home more, but I don’t remember what exactly she said. I was too busy reading this article, which came out quite literally an hour ago, talking about how the school was fully evacuated after a bunch of monsters showed up out of nowhere and became a threat to students and staff. But that wasn’t it…

“Fiona, how far into this did you read??”

“I stopped after they talked about the monsters building a damn barricade around the school with trees and stuff,” she said. “Why?”

“Because the school’s not the only place overrun by monsters.” I held the screen toward the girls in the back of the car, and they all looked in horror as they read the rest of the article. Navi fluttered over, having to use her whole palm on the screen to scroll further into the text. She read it off to the others.

“Until further notice, NYPD recommends that residents of the wider New York City areas of Queens, Manhattan and Brooklyn remain indoors to avoid encountering and possibly being injured or killed by dangerous creatures.”

“Oh so the Bronx and Staten Island are fine?” Mike asks.
“I dunno about Staten Island, but if the monsters know what’s good for them, they probably won’t go to the Bronx.” We all just nodded our heads in unison. We knew.

“That doesn’t make sense, though,” Zelda chimed in. “How are there THAT many monsters in Manhattan that they need the recommendation? Knowing Manhattan, the goblins are probably-”

“Bokoblins,” I said from the front seat. “This is a Zelda magic curse or whatever. They’re probably bokoblins.”

“Okay, well… whatever they are, knowing Manhattan, they probably all would’ve gotten run over by cars or something before they become much of a problem.”

“That would probably happen, like, once before they figure it out,” Mike said as turned a corner. “They’re smart enough to use tools, I don’t think they’re THAT stupid.”

“Well either way, it looks like this is happening all over New York, not just the school,” Navi said as she kept reading. “Locals have taken to dubbing this disastrous event the-'' Navi abruptly stopped and looked at the screen like she’d just smelled something bad. “... The Tolkeining?!?”

“I’m sorry, the what ?” I pulled the phone back to look. Sure enough, all these fantasy monsters showing up in New York led to the news naming this whole crisis after famous High Fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkein. “Ah! Yes! Because every fantasy thing probably has something to do with Lord of the Rings, doesn’t it?!” I slammed my head down into the glove box. “The Tolkeining doesn’t even sound cool…” I handed Fiona back her phone.

“Well whatever it is, it’s happening everywhere, and it looks like the school is barricaded,” Fiona said as she put her phone away.

“Right, I should probably let the others know,” I said as I pulled my own phone out.

“Yes, do that!” Zelda said with a nod of her head. “Last thing we need is for Garrett to try and park where it’s not safe.” I texted Miranda, knowing she was sitting in the back seat and not driving, and told her that Garrett will need to park somewhere outside the school because it’s too dangerous. I ended up with a thumbs up emoji back a few moments later.

We both parked along a sidewalk outside the school, about a block away behind campus. It was somewhere discreet so that if any of the monsters wandered too far from the school, they wouldn’t immediately see us and try to attack us. We were all sitting in the bed of Mike’s parked truck, putting together an action plan for infiltrating the school…

“Alright, here’s what we know,” I said, pulling out my school provided planner. I flipped to a page near the back with a full birds-eye view of the school in the form of an easy to read geometric map. I had been writing down notes and plan ideas the whole drive over from my house to the school, so I had a pretty extensive plan in place. “We need to get whatever notes might be in Mr. Doirich’s classroom, as well as my SD card from my locker.” I jabbed a finger into the map. “We’ll go in through the back door by the dumpsters so we can avoid as many monsters as possible, but the problem is that both the classroom and my lockers are on opposite sides of the school from each other. I say we split into two teams so we can get in and out as fast as possible.”

“So who’s going with who?” Zelda asked.

“Getting right to that!” I said. I pointed at Zelda(and subsequently Navi), Fiona and Mike. “You guys are coming with me to Mr. Doirich’s classroom. We’ll stop by the gym closet first to get weapons before continuing on our way.” I pointed to Garrett, Vinny, Miranda and Simon. “You guys will head to my locker to get the SD card. I’ve got my locker number and combo written down for you, so just take that with you and you’ll be fine. Vinny’s already got a handle on some of his magic, and Miranda’s… hair hand should be of big help too if you guys get into a fight.”

“Hell yeah, I get to punch pigs in the face!” Miranda blurted out. “Well… different kind of pig, but STILL!”

“Sure, have fun with it, M.” I passed Garrett a sheet of paper with my locker number and combo on it. “Don’t lose this, man.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” He shoved it into the pocket of his skinny jeans.

“And YOU!” I said, pointing at Ariel. “Are staying in the truck.”

“WHAT?! Whyyyy? I wanna help!” She whined at me as if I told her she couldn’t have dessert, not that I just told her not to come with us to the very dangerous, monster infested place.

“I know you do, but I don’t want you getting hurt,” I said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Besides, if you got eaten by a pig monster, mom would kill Fiona and I.” She giggled nervously at that. Fiona then patted her head with her cloth hand.

“Just stay in the truck and I promise we’ll make it up to you, okay?” Ariel nodded her head at my cousin. “Good! Good. Now listen to your brother, stay here!”

“Just don’t run the battery, okay?” Mike ordered.

“My car is right there, we can just jumpstart it,” Garrett said.

“Yeah, but I don’t want the kid knowing that!” Mike whisper-yelled back.

“Too late, now I do.”

“DAMN IT!”

“Whatever, whatever!” I got everyone’s attention again. “We all know what we’re doing, yeah?” Everyone nodded their heads at me. “Alright then.” I let out a deep sigh. “Let’s get started on saving the world, guys.”

We snuck around the back of the school, thinking it would be safer to go that way instead of from the front. And… we were right. Nearly all the monsters were posted up front around the parking lot and front lawn. The only thing we had to worry about in the back? A single bokoblin, fast sleep on top of the same dumpster the bad kids at school would hang out near in order to sneak a cigarette. We all hid for a moment behind a tree and some bushes as we figured out how to go about this. We knew there were two separate doors we needed to get through, but there’s no way we’d make it into what were no doubt locked doors with the creature there. If we tried anything, it would no doubt be loud enough to wake it up.

“Vin,” I whispered, gently tapping my shorter friend’s shoulder. “You still know how to pick locks?”

“With all the times I leave my house key at home, absolutely,” he whispered back.

“And how much of a handle have you got on the wind magic thing?”

“I see where you’re going with this-” He didn’t even answer my question directly before I saw him doing something with his hands. If I hadn’t known better, I would have guessed he was pretending to use the force like a lot of little kids do outside of automatic doors and escalators. We all waited patiently for Vinny to do his thing. We waited… and waited… and waited.

“Vin, you good?” I asked.

“Yeah yeah, I’m fine,” he assured quietly. “This is just more difficult than I thought. I think they’re one of those high tech locks.”

“Well get on with it, Rodgers!” Mike whisper-yelled, gently grabbing Vin’s shoulder to emphasize. This startled the poor kid, and instead of meticulously manipulating the air inside of the locks like I assumed he was trying to do, he suddenly caused a HUGE updraft underneath the bokoblin. Not only did he wake it up, but he sent it flying about 30 feet upwards before it came back down, hitting the ground with an awful thud as it made a smell dent in the lid of the dumpster. We all just kind of sat there for a moment, dead silent, not sure how else to react to what had just happened.

“Well… at least we don’t have to worry about being quiet,” Fiona said. “If that doesn’t knock it out cold, I dunno what will.” We were quick to flee from our hiding place and toward the two separate back doors.

“Remember! Text me if anything goes wrong,” I said before we split up.

“Noted!” Went Miranda, giving me a fist bump with her much smaller hand. We went our separate ways, me and Alpha team entering near the gymnasium, and the others on Beta team going into the hallway in the other building.

There was something rather eerie about traversing the halls of the school while no one was there. It wasn’t that any of the kids had never been there after hours. Miranda had spent many hours after school at Jazz Band practice, sometimes not getting home on those Mondays and Wednesdays until 7:00 at night. Both Garret and Vincent had their fair share of after school library study groups, whether it was solo or with a friend or two. And even if the season had ended the month before, Simon recalled many times he’d stayed late at football games, some of them even going until 10:00. All of them had bore witness to deserted hallways at school, for one reason or another. But it was different this time. The one thing no one thinks about are the acoustics in a long hallway, and it allowed them to hear everything.

Groaning, growling, squealing and grunting. Claws dragging on the floor and teeth gnashing. Sharp things scraping on the walls and makeshift weapons scratching up the doors and lockers they brushed past. Two bokoblins having a spat over a bag of carrot sticks they’d found in a garbage can right outside a door to the front lawn. A lizalfos making frustrated noises as it tried to hunt down a gnat buzzing around its head. An awful click-clacking that Miranda couldn’t help but imagine was the sound of a skeleton shambling around in some far off classroom, lost and trying to figure out where to go. All these awful noises bounced around the halls in tandem, and the four teenagers couldn’t tell what was far away or right around the corner from them. All they knew was that they wanted to find the locker and fast.

“There!” Simon whisper-yelled. “You said it was 132, yes?”

“Yeah, that’s it!” Vinny responded quietly. The four made their way over, Garrett getting there before the others as he leaned down to fiddle with the lock. They all had lockers. They all knew how the padlocks worked. All the different twists and turns you needed to make between numbers. They weren’t sure if Garrett had forgotten the specific order of moves, or if he was just under a lot of stress, but he seemed to input the combination at least 15 times, becoming more frustrated after each attempt.

“Oh for Pete’s sake, what’s wrong with this bloody lock??” he whispered to himself, half angry and half nervous. An aggravated sigh came from Miranda. Simon and Vincent had been just watching nervously, intensely hoping he got it eventually, but their looks of concern quickly morphed into confusion when they saw Miranda finally decide to do something they hadn’t seen her done before.

“Here, let me try something,” Miranda offered. She gently pushed Garrett out of the way, both hands on his shoulders to move him aside. It wasn’t the pushing that confused the boys. It was the floating. Miranda was floating in order to reach Garrett’s shoulders.

“Hold on a bloody moment,” Garrett said as he stepped aside. “Since when can you fly??”

“Since nonyabusiness ,” she retorted. “Now stand back a bit you three.” All three of them took a few steps back. Knowing Miranda had hidden the fact that she could float - and subsequently get the hang of it enough to do it so casually in the middle of a stressful situation - they couldn’t help but wonder what else she could do that she hadn’t told them about. What other terrifying ability did she have that she was about to use to get the locker open?

And then she punched it.

“ Miranda !” Simon has to keep a lid on so many emotions in order to not scream that at her and keep it at a whisper.

“What??” She looked toward the boys, her hand hair grabbing the edge of the now half-open locker that had been so heavily dented that it no longer closed properly enough to be locked. “Now it’s open! Link will thank us later.” She turned back around as she opened it up. The other three approached to help search through it. But something became abundantly clear very quickly…

“That’s weird.” Vinny picked something up. “Since when did Link use spray deodorant??” Garrett peaked inside to see more than just that. There were also a few pictures taped up on the inside walls of the locker. Pictures of people that none of the teens knew. And that’s when it clicked…

“Vin, I don’t think this is Link’s locker,” Simon said.

“What do you mean??” Vinny seemed genuinely confused, as well as offended that Simon would even suggest that he’d gotten it wrong. “The paper said 132, and this is 132!” Garrett snatched up the piece of paper Link had given them, looking it over. It took him a moment, but once he noticed it, his face scrunched up like he’d just noticed someone pissing in his cereal.

“Bloody hell, Vinny, that’s a seven,” he announced. “It’s 732, not 132!” He passed it back to Vincent, who looked it over again with angry eyes before they shifted into very nervous and embarrassed eyes.

“... Ah. I see.” He just put it away in his pocket. “Well in that case, we’re in the wrong building.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Miranda. “We gotta sneak somewhere ELSE now??”

“No, no, this is fine,” said Simon. His arms were tucked close to him, almost to hint at the fact that he was trying to hold it together both physically and emotionally. “The other lockers aren’t too far from here. Just across the quad.”

“What if there’s more monsters??” Garrett asked frightfully. He couldn’t help but follow behind their 15 year old companion as he went on his way to the quad entrance.

“Miranda just broke open a locker with her hair,” Simon reminded him. “Vinny can control the wind and lift those… bokoblins? That’s what Link called them, yeah?”

“Yeah yeah, bokoblins,” Garrett reaffirmed.

“Yes, bokoblins. Vinny can control the wind and lift them high enough to knock them out when he drops them,” Simon continued. “And YOU can summon knives with the snap of your fingers.”

“Yes, but I did that on accident . Who’s to say that’s how it’s supposed to be done??”

“Well then try snapping again,” said Simon. “The hallway is fairly empty, just try hitting uhhh…” He paused, looking around for a moment before seeing something on the wall right outside what looked to be an office of some kind. “That!” he said, pointing to a corkboard with school events and sign-up sheets posted on it with thumb tacks and pins. “You snapped your fingers and pointed at something when you did it the first time. Maybe try and point at the corkboard?”

There was a pause from everyone else. Garrett looked between his hands and the corkboard before taking a deep breath in. He shook out his hands, hopping from one foot to the other as if he were trying to hype himself up for a marathon or a boxing match, not a magic trick.

“Alrighty, just a snap and point… just like in Legally Blonde.”

“That’s a bend and snap, poser.”

“Miranda, I don’t need this from you right now,” Garrett growled back. He held his hand above his head, hand in position before snapping and pointing at the corkboard. Nothing happened. Not for a few moments. Everyone was silent. “... Wha- did I do it wrong this ti-?” He was cut off by his own scream when the floor suddenly rose up from under him, knocking him up into the air like a trampoline, causing him to collide with the ceiling of the hallway before he fell back down and onto his face. The other three had seen it. Somehow, someway, the diamonds they’d witnessed him sneezing out earlier at the treehouse had manifested under him in a platform, raising him up at least 10 feet in less than a second before disappearing and letting him fall to the ground.

“God, are you alright dude!?” Vinny said, afraid to go over and help him up.

“Just fine. Just peachy. Maybe I’ll just not use magic for right now,” he said, slowly peeling himself up off of the ground. “Seems I’ve got too much of it or something.”

“So how come Vinny’s able to use it just fine and you’re having so much trouble??”

“I don’t know, Simon,” Garrett growled. “Maybe Vinny’s stubborn enough to bend it to his will or something.” He stood up and cracked his back. “Let’s just go to the quad and hope there’s nothing there.” The four turned the corner to where they all knew the entrance to the quad was: two pairs of double doors, entirely glass so that one could see outside into the beautifully maintained quad. Lush grass, beautiful trees full of blossoms, lunch tables and chairs bolted into the concrete, and stone benches with murals on them as a tribute to senior classes from the past.

And a giant pig-like monster, much bigger than the bokoblins, taking a nap in the dead center of it.

“I had to say something!” Garrett whisper-yelled, hands on his head and anger in his eyes. “I HAD to say something!!”

Our first stop was the equipment closet, knowing we had little to no magic to our advantage like the other guys, but we had enough skill when it came to using baseball bats and lacrosse sticks to be confident in using those in self defense. Although for a moment, I wondered if it would’ve been better to have Vinny join us upon realizing the equipment closet was probably locked. Mike was quick to prove me wrong, though.

BAM!

Mike somehow managed to kick the door in. He’d done it so hard that you could see in the wooden door frame just how badly he’d broken the door lock while doing so: splintered wood, warped parts, cracked metal and everything.

“Jeez, Michael,” went Fiona as she floated in behind him.

“I’ll fix it later,” he said, going straight for the football equipment. “The school spends good money on athletic crap, so I’m sure we’ll find SOMETHING.” The equipment closet of the gym had things set up rather haphazardly. It looked something like the closet from Zoboomafoo if it were just a little bigger, with just a little less of a chance of having everything fall on top of you every time you went to grab something out of it. A lot of it was organized by sport, although that wasn’t the case for everything. There was an industrial sized trash can full of dodgeballs over by the lacrosse equipment, as well as all sorts of sports junk from cut programs dumped in the same corner. That’s where I saw Zelda go first, digging through the pile before finally pulling something out. Something that caught me ENTIRELY off guard.

“Haha! I knew they still had these!” she called out triumphantly. She’d pulled out a bow. The kind they give to girl scouts while out on camping trips so they can earn their archery badge or whatever. It wasn’t the real thing, but it was just potent enough to make a difference if you decided to aim for someone’s eye instead of the targets made of hay bales.

“Since when did we have those?!” Navi asked, still holed up inside Zelda’s hood for her own comfort.

“They had an archery program I joined freshman year,” Zelda explained as she pulled out multiple arrows and a quiver, strapping the whole getup on so she could be ready. “They cut it last year, but it looks like they didn’t get rid of any of the equipment.”

“Yeah, are you kidding??” Mike piped up. “Those are good quality bows and arrows, I bet McKay fought tooth and nail to keep them at the school just in case they brought the program back.” I watched as Mike pulled a set of football armor off of the wall, sliding it on like it was nothing. He was on the football team, though, so I assumed sliding that crap on and off was second nature. 

“Maybe be sure to put gloves on or something too,” I suggested as I went rooting around for something I could use.

“Good idea! Can’t let my knuckles get all bloody if I try to punch something hard,” he replied.

“No, like… in case they try to bite your hand or something,” I specified.

“Oh, good idea!” Fiona chimed in. “Don’t know where they’ve been and stuff. And they’re teeth were all weird and rotten anyways. Bleh!” She leaned back in the air, cloak hands out in front of her partly folded into her chest to really sell the grossness of it all. Mike just nodded his head, grabbing a pair of football gloves off of a hook on the wall.

“How about you, Fiona?” I asked as I finally dug something out of the equipment: a baseball bat. “You grabbing anything?” I looked back at her, her monotonous expression combined with her cloak hands made me realize I’d answered my own question. “Oh, right… can’t grab things.”

“Plus I’m pretty sure I can just kick them or something,” she said. “You know, like… heels and stuff.” she held up a foot to emphasize her point, showing off her fancy high heels that she was wearing for… whatever reason. I didn’t want to question it, just shrugging my shoulders.

“Zelda? Nav? Thoughts??” I said as I turned to the other two girls.

“Valid choice of weapon,” was all Zelda said.

“My dad makes me wear heels when I go out for this exact reason,” Navi added. “You just take them off and like…” She made a gesture with her hand to mimic hitting someone on the back of the head with the heel of a shoe. 

“I’ve seen Uma nearly kill a man with her shoe this one time, so I have no objections,” Mike said. And he did NOT elaborate. To be fair, I was a bit afraid to ask for context. I just assumed some guy was being creepy with her and she reacted the way any woman would.

“You’re taking a bat?” Navi asked, staying put in Zelda’s hood as I twirled it in my hand.

“I used to be in little league when I was in middle school,” I explained. “I can bash in the bokoblin’s heads AND knock some projectiles at them.”

“If you find any projectiles,” Zelda said.

“Anything’s a projectile if you’re brave enough to hit them,” I replied. I twirled the bat in my hand again, getting a feel for it before we finally decided to head out. 

We busted out of the equipment closet with the gusto of a battalion on the attack. We were immediately met with two bokoblins I could only assume had heard us talking and came to investigate, and they were about to get their world rocked . I knocked one in the head with the bat, causing it to fall and tumble like a ragdoll onto the ground. It fell limp before its whole body suddenly bruised purple and dissolved into smoke. Mike tackled the other and slammed it into a locker to try and knock it out. That was when I got an idea.

“WAIT wait, Mike, hold on a sec, hold it there!” I unzipped the case clipped to my belt loop, pulling out Audrie and holding her up like a camera. “Your compendium needs pictures, right?”

“Precisely!” Audrie replied. The eyeball on the back of the switch opened up like a reticle, locking onto Mike and the Bokoblin. I watched as both of them were highlighted by the switch, almost like those high tech cameras in sci-fi movies. The bokoblin came up as exactly what it was, while Mike came up as a Hylian.

“Say cheese, dude!” I said. Mike gave me a rather upbeat smile next to the beaten up bokoblin as I snapped the picture.

“Link, behind you!” called out Navi. I turned quickly, Audrie in my hands as I instinctively took a picture of what was behind me. It was another one of those lizard looking ones, and Audrie logged it as a Lizalfos.

“Link, duck!” I instinctively did as told, ducking to the ground as Zelda came up behind me and fired an arrow at the lizard creature. She managed to clock it right between the eyes, causing it to trip, fall and tumble right in front of us like a limp noodle. Just like the bokoblin, we watched it bruise all over before dissolving into smoke. Zelda picked her arrow back up, humming triumphantly to herself.

“How’s that for ‘shotty aim’, Sharon?” she grumbled to herself. Wasn’t even going to touch that.

“Well hey, now we’ve got two monsters in the compendium!” I said, pulling Audrie out. “... how do I access that exactly??”

“Just give me a moment!” She said. I watched the eye on the screen close as everything on screen kinda swirled away in a whirlpool of blue light before an entirely new screen came up. It wasn’t unlike a photo album on your phone, but much more magic-y I guess. There were a couple of different categories, but most important was the only one I actually had pictures for: monsters. “Now I can track both bokoblins and lizalfos should you choose to do so with my sensor system! As well as provide whatever information may be useful to you and your allies.”

“Neat!” I tucked her away in the switch case. “I think those are the only monsters in the school, so we’re all set there!” As if the universe couldn’t make a fool of me more than it already had, I heard something up above us. The hallway outside the gym was a tall one. The ceiling was easily about 10 or more feet higher up than the one in other parts of the school. Just high enough for something that could fly to get around inside.

“AH! Lizard! Flying lizard!!” Navi called out. “WATCH OUT!” I jumped back and away from something as it dove down in front of me to try and grab me. The five of us watched as it lingered on the ground for a moment before looking up at all of us. All I could think to do was gently raise Audrie up and snap a picture of it to add it to the compendium.

“Aeralfos?!” I called out when I looked at the entry.

“Yes! They’re just like lizalfos, but they possess wings and can fly,” Audrie told me.

“Yeah, I could tell!” Mike blurted out. The reptilian creature raised its head and roared at us, letting out a sound more akin to an angry leopard than a lizard.

“Okay, new plan!” I said, putting Audrie away. “RUN!!” And just like that, the five of us darted away. The awful flap of leathery wings clued me into the fact that it was willing to chase us down regardless.

“Okay, this is how we’ll do it,” Simon said as he opened up the janitor’s closet. It was a small one, with only enough space for basic cleaning supplies and the occasional handheld mop, broom or dust buster. “That thing is very big, but it’s also asleep.” He grabbed what he figured was the sturdiest thing in the closet: a wooden broom with the scratchiest bristles there. “If we can just be quiet and sneak around it, and use the plants and benches as cover should something happen, then we should be able to get to the door on the other side of the quad.”

“And if it wakes up and sees us?” Miranda asked.

“It’s too big to get in through the doors,” he replied. “If it wakes up and sees us, then we make a run for it.”

“Fine by me,” Garrett said. Simon took a deep breath in before gently and quietly pushing on the glass door. Lucky for them, it had been left unlocked. He pushed it fully open, gingerly stepping out into the quad. He held his broom in one hand and the door open with the other, allowing Miranda, Garrett and Vincent to shuffle out one by one. Miranda floated out, sticking close to the shade and shadows to keep away from the sun. They snuck around the perimeter of the quad, watching intently as they scooted around the monster’s napping spot to make sure it didn’t make any sudden movements. They didn’t want to stay in the quad longer than they needed to, but they also feared what would happen if they tried to rush things. Unlucky for them, they wouldn’t have to wonder.

Miranda was the one to stop her advance for a moment. She’d spotted something up in one of the trees. Something she’d never seen nor expected to see on school grounds. She wasn’t entirely sure, but they very much looked like… bats. A pair of bats, hanging upside down from a tree branch, wings wrapped around them like blankets as they slept in broad daylight. Miranda tilted her head to the side like a confused dog as she looked at them. And then they woke up. Their eyes were wide open, bright yellow and orange, and staring straight at Miranda.

The other three were clued into something being very wrong when they heard Miranda scream.

“Miranda!!” Garrett called it out as that’s all he could do when he saw what was happening. What they saw was a pair of bat-like creatures swarming and attacking her, even going as far as to drag her into the sun before the three of them jumped in to help. Miranda managed to knock one of them off of her with her hair, while Vinny used a flick of a wrist to send a gust at the other and knock it right into a wall. Both fell to the ground before dissolving into smoke. There was a moment of relief once it was clear Miranda was alright… and then a realization hit Vinny.

“Wait… you’re not burning in the sun,” he said, pointing toward Miranda’s… well, the fact that she was entirely fine. “You could’ve gone out into the light this whole time!?”

“I didn’t want you guys judging me!” she yelled back.

“For WHAT, M??” Garrett said. “For wanting to scoot around the terrifying dark hallways instead of sneaking around outside where it wasn’t awful?!”

“You guys always judge me, a goth punk, for dressing goth punk! I figured it would get y’all to at least not stare as much!”

“We have other things to worry about than what you’re wearing, Miranda!”

“Like that!” Yelled Simon. The three turned from where they were and looked. In the midst of an ultimately meaningless argument about clothes and being judged by your peers, they hadn’t realized that they had woken up the monster in the middle of the quad.

And it was looking right at them.

It felt like we’d been running for forever when we finally figured out a way to deal with the flying demon lizard in the hallway. Up until then, we’d been ducking and dodging every time it tried swooping down to get us, nearly catching our hoods and hair sometimes and almost tearing our faces open at other times. We’d finally noticed something when Navi yelled “WATCH OUT!” to me once more.

I jumped back and out of the way as the Aeralfos swooped down with a broken metal chair leg in its hand, driving it into the floor so hard that it pierced the vinyl. That freaked me out almost as much as what I had instinctively done to get out of the way of its attack. I did a flip. A backflip. You know, that thing kids assume is only possible if you’re an olympic gymnast or a power ranger. And I did it without even thinking about it.

Maybe it was a good thing I was freaked out by it. It made me stop in my tracks long enough to notice something about the way the Aeralfos was acting. It was struggling to pull its weapon out of the floor. It was strong enough to stab the vinyl in a flash, but not strong enough to pull it back out in a timely manner. It seemed I wasn’t the only one who noticed, because Mike made an attempt on the creature right as it pulled its weapon out of the floor. Mike was quick to backtrack, but the creature still managed to take a swing at him, causing Mike to flinch back as it made a pretty substantial gash in his helmet, to the point that you could see the buckling columns below the plastic outer shell.

“Damn it! This thing’s quick!” he called out, doing the smart thing and keeping his arms up in front of his face in case it tried to go for the head again. It didn’t take a genius to figure out the attack pattern here. I guess I over-thought it and figured real life monsters would be harder to deal with, but even real creatures have their habits they don’t learn from. I didn’t have to try and relay my plan before Zelda took aim with the athletic bow and fired. Unlike the lizard from earlier, it didn’t stick in its head. It just bounced off the side of it as if she’d aimed at a sheet of metal instead of a flesh and blood creature. He snapped its head around to face her before letting out a feline growl.

“Shoot!” Zelda blurted, about to reload.

“No no, this is good!” I assured her. I started running backwards and waving my hands around in the air. “HEY HEY, OVER HERE!!” It tilted its head to the side at me. “OVER HERE YOU FLYING GECKO!!” That seemed to get it pissed off enough to actually pursue us.

“You jerkwad, what’re you doing?!” Fiona called out from beside Zelda.

“Just follow my lead!” I called back to her. “Run wildly and make a lot of noise!!” I kept waving my hands around and yelling while running around the hallway. The girls did the same, with Fiona gliding around like she was figure skating on the vinyl while Zelda was lightly jogging. You know, like she was just doing another run for PE and not fighting a terrifying bat-winged lizard man wielding a broken metal rod with malicious intent. I probably should’ve been more clear about exactly what I was doing, because now the Aeralfos was just swooping between the three of us, trying to figure out who to target and who would be the easiest game.

And it eventually settled on my cousin.

“Fiona, watch out!” Navi called out from Zelda’s shoulder. It was just enough warning for Fiona to dip out of the way right as the Aeralfos jammed its weapon into the ground where she once stood.

“NOW! ATTACK!” I blurted out frantically. Fiona and Mike were quick to descend on the creature, Fiona being first since she was closer. I watched as my cousin mercilessly kicked it in the head, trying to leave a mark somewhere to show that she was making progress. Then Mike dove in.

“Move it, ballerina!” he shouted. He grabbed the Aeralfos around the waist, doing a classic football tackle to get its hands off its weapon and knock it onto its back. We watched as Mike went absolutely feral, punching it in the snout over and over. Overall, the both of them made some great progress beating this bat lizard into the ground. Until it managed to get its hands on his chest and shove him off. I watched as the Aeralfos made an attempt to fly off.

“Oh no you DON’T!!” I called out, leaping at it with my makeshift weapon held over my head. I let the bat fall right on top of its head, bashing it so hard I ended up jump-scared by the monster’s body poofing into smoke the moment or so after I hit it.

The five of us stood in the hallway, huffing and puffing, just trying to recuperate after what just happened.

“Jesus Christ, Matheson,” Mike puffed out. “Glad you never got mad enough to do that crap to me.” He nervously chuckled.

“Still time for that, I guess,” I replied, letting out a deep breath. “Glad that’s over with, though.”

“An impressive job indeed!” said Audrie from where she was zipped up on my hip. I took her out of the case as she continued. “Perhaps you should allow me to store your weapon for you for ease of access.”

“Alright,” I said. I held up the bat for a moment before pausing. “... How do I do that exactly?”

“Just turn your device over until the eye on the back of the switch faces the weapon you wish to store,” she explained. “I’ll take care of the rest.” I did as she explained, turning the switch over until the screen faced the ground and the eye faced upward. I held the bat above the eye and watched the magic. The iris in the center of the design dilated and contracted like the reticle of a camera, as if trying to focus on the bat. Then I watched as a beam shot up from the middle of the reticle - not unlike a laser pointer beam - and ran up and down the length of the bat. It was almost like when you make something with a 3D printer, but in reverse. The beam traced over every inch of the bat, bit by bit logging it into some pocket dimension as it disappeared over the course of the few moments it took for Audrie to store it. And then it was gone.

“Wicked…”

“Can she do that with everything??” Navi asked. She froze up. “Can she do that with PEOPLE?!”

“No no no, just weaponry and foot,” Audrie assured her. “Living creatures don’t store too well.”

“Either way, this’ll make things WAY easier!” I said, looking around for a moment. I pointed the reticle at the piece of broken chair leg that the Aeralfos had left in the ground, logging that one into the switch as well. “Haha! Nice!”

“Alright, don’t get too excited,” Navi said, fluttering over next to me. “We don’t know that Audrie’s not like an iphone or something.”

“In what way?” I asked.

“In the sense that she has limited storage, duh!”

“Well in that case, I’ll lay off on finding new weapons until the others get back with the card.”

“That’s it, we’re dead!” Garrett cried out. The massive creature loomed over them like a wall of shadow. It was almost 20 feet at the shoulders, and its chipped claws and mouth full of teeth and tusks didn’t do much in the way of quelling their fears of what it could do to them.

“Throw a knife at it or something!!” Miranda yelled.

“I can’t!” Garrett yelled back. “What if it goes wrong again?! I can’t afford that here!”

TACK!

Simon was quick to act, throwing a rock at the monster’s snout. It caused the creature to flinch back, wrinkling its nose as if it had breathed in a bit of pollen and that was all. But it was just enough for Simon to get a head start toward the doors on the other side.

“Run you fools!” He called out. He rammed a shoulder into the door to knock it open, and held it from where it was safe inside the other building.

“You don’t have to tell me twice!” Miranda blurted. She quickly zipped through the air and toward the door, narrowly escaping the wide sweep of one of the Moblin’s hands, crying out in alarm. The other hand was about to come down on top of her - not unlike a child trying to catch a fly between its fingers - but was stopped mid air by something no one was expecting.

“Ey! Get your hands off her!!” Vinny yelled forth, pointing a hand to try and send a gust of wind at its hand to throw it back. That didn’t happen. Instead, he and the other kids looked on with eyes wide in shock as the Moblin’s hand caught fire. Garrett was the one to put the pieces together and looked at Vinny.

“Did you-”

“It appears I did,” Vinny said, cutting Garrett off. “So it ain’t just the wind then! Neat!”

“Not neat! Be careful with that!” He said as they both made a run for the door. Miranda had already made it inside, and she and Simon were wildly gesturing for them to get a move on and get inside.

“Don’t rush us,” Garrett called out as Vinny turned back to him. “We can only run so-”
“TREE!!” Vinny had called it out so suddenly that it made Garrett more confused than anything. Only until he had the thought to turn around right as the Moblin threw a tree torn right out of the ground right at him. Vinny had the thought to duck, and watched as the tree actually hit Garrett. The moment it did, he saw his friend’s body disperse into magic.

Knowing what he knew about this curse and all the monsters, and how tree branches hitting people full force usually went, he looked on in pure horror.

“... holy smoke, it killed him!!” he cried out.

“Nope! Just nearly made me shit myself is all,” someone said over in the doorway. The other three teens turned to look further inside the door, seeing a very startled and wobbly-legged Garrett standing right beside a trash can inside the building. “Don’t just stand there, Vincent, RUN!!”

“DON’T CALL ME THAT!!” Vinny went running to the door, leaping inside as the four teens leapt out of the way of the doorway. The Moblin had made a leap for it, only able to fit its arm inside the doorway as it tried to reach around and grab them. The three of them went running further down the hallway to get away.

“Jesus Christ, Garrett! You do realize what you did, right?!” Miranda called out. She had a big grin across her face, like she’d just watched the circus perform for the first time ever. Garrett just huffed and puffed as he tried to calm down after the whole thing. 

“... Nearly died??” he asked.

“No dude, you freaking TELEPORTED!!” Vinny said. “That’s sick!!”

“Right, cool cool cool,” he said, definitely not caring and still trying to calm down. “Let’s just get the card and get out of here please.” He didn’t need to tell them twice as they went looking through the locker numbers. They were in the 600s. Only a matter of time before they were finished at the school.

Chapter Text

Luckily for us, we didn’t encounter anything else on the way to Mr. Doirich’s office. I don’t know if they were all just somewhere else or if the screeching of the Aeralfos getting beat to death scared them all off, but either way we weren’t complaining. We found the AP History classroom, door closed, and were about to head inside when a thought came to me.

“Hey, Nav!” I whisper-yelled.

“Ye?” she peaked out from Zelda’s hood.

“Can you sneak in and make sure the coast is clear??”

“What!? No! What if there’s someone in there!”

“You’re the size of, like, a pencil, Nav. If someone’s in there, I guarantee they won’t see you.”

Navi looked at me for a solid 3 seconds before she let out an aggravated sigh.

“Fine fine, but if I get fly-swatted, it’s your fault.” She fluttered around the door to try and find a way in before noticing the half open transom window right above the door. She slipped inside, and all that was left for her to take a look around while we anxiously waited.

“You see anything, Nav?” Zelda whisper-yelled to her. She didn’t get an answer right away. Instead, Navi slipped right back through the transom window.

“Coast is clear, you guys!” she announced. She didn’t have to tell me twice before I opened the door. We all slipped inside, and I was quick to tell that the state of the classroom was pretty much the same as when I left it earlier when my teacher tried to kill me. Books and papers were everywhere, pencils and pens were still strewn about, and the side office door was wide open.

“That’s the place, ain’t it?” Mike asked, already on the way to the side office.

“Should be!” I said. Mike opened the door all the way, looking inside. His look of neutral investigation soon turned to slight surprise.

“Whoa…” Mike paused for a moment before walking inside. We all approached to take a look, and had similar reactions to what was inside. “Looks like Pepe Silvia in here or something.” What we found was Mr. Doirich’s side office covered top to bottom in all sorts of papers and notes. In the time between us escaping the school and coming back to try and find clue, Ganon had managed to write a lot of his plans all over nearly everything he could’ve written them down on - lesson plans, calendars, gradebook pages, post it note - all connected with various colors and patterns of washi tape in place of thread or string. Whatever it was, he’d put it together in a hurry.“Shoot dude, I thought there’d be just like… one or two things in here,” I said, looking at the whole of the makeshift detective wall that had been put together here. “What are we supposed to take??”

“Maybe just all of it?” Zelda proposed. She was looking around at the post it notes, reading them off to me. Lots of things about parallels and the goddesses. Zelda found our yearbook pictures pinned up somewhere with “Triforce!” written beside them. We didn’t say anything. Just looked at each other with similar expressions of “good god what did we get ourselves into.”

Mike, meanwhile, was just confused about some of the various Zelda terminology and couldn’t help but ask. This was to the point that we hadn’t even noticed Fiona investigating a half open filing cabinet drawer and subsequently opening it. It seemed she’d found something.

“Hey HEY hey! Look at this!” She called out to us. We all turned to look. She gently maneuvered her cloak arms to pick up something that had been sitting on the top of all the organized folders and papers. It was… something. It was folded in quite a bit on itself. You know how when you fold a paper too many times, the edges get really thick and hard to fold without using brute force? Yeah, that’s what this thing looked like. Fiona passed it to me as Navi fluttered around my shoulder to take a look. I unfolded it onto the table to get a better look at what exactly Fiona had found, and we all came to realize pretty quickly what it was. It was a map of New York City.

For a moment I thought it was one of the ones we have to fill out as a worksheet in the regular Freshman history course, but it was too big to be that. It was just a regular paper map of the New York City boroughs, with all the landmarks and such indicated and everything. And it was completely marked up in red ink, showing exactly where each of the champions were being held.

“It’s a map of the whole city!” Mike declared.

“Yeah, and Ganon was dumb enough to label every single place he’s holding the champions,” I replied, folding it back up and tucking it away in my backpack. “Anything else you guys need here?” Everyone shook their heads. “Alright, back to the car we go then.” Everyone else went on their way out of the side office, but I ended up lingering behind for a moment to grab something. Something that caught my eye for all the wrong reasons. Something I’d need to investigate later.

“So where are they holding everyone??” Asked Mike.

“Looks like four different places,” I said. “I don’t think we have to go in any order, so when we get back to the car we can talk about where might be the best place to start.”

“Well I know the best place to start: wherever they’ve got my damn girlfriend,” Mike retorted as I spotted a meter stick leaning against one of the desks. I walked over to pick it up and investigate it while Zelda continued the conversation with Mike.

“Slow down, dude. We don’t even know where she is exactly,” she told him.

“Well we will once we get back to the car, though,” he snarked back.

“Yeah, but we should jump to grab her first, we have to take this one step at a time.”

“Well I can’t afford to take it a step at a time when it’s my girlfriend being held hostage!”

“We’re barely scooting by in the school as it is! What if she’s being held somewhere 10 times more dangerous. Whatever’s going on, we’ll need to prepare! And some places will be easier to prepare for than others.”

“Uggggh, fine. But if something happens to Uma because we didn’t get to her first, I’m clocking you.”

I logged a meter stick into Audrie’s system while this was all happening. Zelda seemed to have it covered. The switch hummed mechanically.

“Strange…” she said.

“What’s strange?” I asked.

“The goddesses planted plenty of weapons around her,” she explained. “But not these. Real weapons.”

“They did??”

“Yes! When the spell first affected this realm. And we’ve yet to find any!”

And as if on cue, something burst through the door of the classroom, crashing head first into the desk nearest the door. The five of us froze where we were, stuck standing and staring at the creature that had stunned itself on the desk. Another lizalfos, no doubt there to kill us.

“There! 732!” Simon had called out. They’d been sneaking around the other building very briefly before they finally found the right one. Garrett was quick to run toward the padlock, ready to have this whole terrifying experience done and over with.

“Alright, we’re getting the card and then getting out,” he said, spinning the padlock back and forth as he input the code. “Any objections?” The other three shook their heads. “Good! Good.” He got the lock undone, popping it open and taking it off the locker door. He gently opened it, and Miranda reeled back.

“Jeez! How much stuff does he have in here?!” She asked, her hair reaching forward to dig around before just reeling back and away without touching anything.

“Too much, I think,” Simon said. Garrett was the only one to actually go digging through the locker, trying to find the SD card.

“God, Lincoln, clean out your locker,” he grumbled to himself. “It takes, what, five minutes? What is this, old crisps?!” Garrett tossed a half eaten bag of chips out of the locker. Miranda caught it with her regular hands, looking at the bag with a raised eyebrow and a disgusted sneer.

“Ew, salt and vinegar chips?” she said with a “Bleh!” at the end for emphasis.

“That’s not the half of it,” Garrett said, handing her something else: a stick of old spice deodorant with a bite taken out of it. Miranda couldn’t even take it in her hands. She just looked at it in disgust and confusion.

“Oh yeah, hehe,” Vinny chuckled to himself, being the one to finally take the stick from Garrett. “Best 10 bucks I ever spent.”

“Well, I don’t believe it can get worse than that,” Simon said with a nervous chuckle. As if on cue, Garrett started laughing.

“Oh goodness, he still has that Lara Croft poster you gave him for Secret Santa, Vin,” he told them. Then he paused as a look of horror came across his face. “ Oh god, he still has that Lara Croft posted you gave him for Secret Santa .” Garrett decided to simply move the poster aside as he kept looking.

“Ohohoho I’m never gonna let him live that down,” Miranda chuckled. 

“AHA!” Garrett shouted triumphantly as he pulled something from the piles of junk and such in the locker. “I believe this is it?” He was holding a thin plastic and cardboard package between his fingers, and it couldn’t have been bigger than a large index card. It was detailed with all sorts of nintendo imagery, and all containing a tiny yellow card in the middle with a star printed on it.

“That’s gotta be it!” Miranda said, gently taking the card from his hands. “Anyone got a bag!”

“Don’t need one!” Simon pointed out. He reached a hand into Link's locker before pulling something out: a plastic shopping bag.

“Why does he have that??” Vinny blurted out.

“You never know when you’ll need a spare bag,” was all Simon said as he held the bag open. Miranda placed the car inside before Simon tied it off and hung it over his arm.

“Alright, it’s done! We’ve got the card!” Garrett blurted out. “Now let’s get the hell out of here!” The other three couldn’t have agreed any faster. They went back another way, with Garrett leading the way this time. He could figure out which way to go in order to get back to the back door of the school, but their trip back out wasn’t going to be quite so easy. Not when they passed by the cafeteria on the way there, causing Vinny to pause in front of the door for a moment. Something was… off. He could feel it. Or rather, he could smell it.

“Vin, what’re you doing??” Garrett asked incredulously as he realized his friend wasn’t following.

“Do you smell mold??” He asked, cautiously entering the cafeteria.

“What??” Garrett approached, the other two following for the sake of sticking together. Simon’s nose wrinkled.

“Ugh. I smell it,” he said, following after Vinny as he ventured deeper into the cafeteria. He opened the door to the kitchen and they followed further. “Mold and… something else.”

“What else exactly? I’m not good with discerning smells,” Miranda huffed. It took Simon a moment, but it was just long enough for Vinny to look around the deserted kitchen before noticing something in one of the drains on the floor.

“It’s mold and um…” Simon paused again before snapping his fingers at the realization. “Silly putty.”

THWAP!

Vinny let out a startled cry as something leapt up from the drain and snapped a tendril around his wrist. His instincts led to him setting it ablaze, causing it to retreat back into the drain as he tended to his wound.

“Jesus christ!” He called out. “There’s like, living acid or something down there!” He said, cradling his wrist. Although his skin was unharmed, the sleeve of his jacket had been eaten through. They didn’t have much time  to process what had happened before something started bubbling up from the drain. Something gel-like. Something green. Something dangerous.

They didn’t have to look at it twice before the four of them made a run for it.

“GO GO GO, NOW!” I called out.

The five of us bolted for the window at the rear of the classroom, the one facing the quad. We were on the ground level, so jumping out of it wasn’t any more dangerous than staying inside the classroom. I don’t know what we would’ve done if that thing was locked. We leapt onto the paved walkway lining the quad, running for the grass before we all came to a stop upon seeing something in the middle of the lawn. We instead turned and went diving behind one of the decorative garden walls to hide from both the lizard in the AP History classroom and the 20 foot tall creature I could only assume was a Moblin in the middle of the quad. All five of us sat there, some of us with our hands over our mouths to try and keep quiet. The quiet did not stay.

“Crap crap crap CRAP!!”

I glanced up and over the very top of the wall we were using as cover just in time to see  four familiar faces run out of another door into the quad. Vinny seemed to be trailing behind Garrett, Miranda and Simon, using his short legs to his advantage by holding up the back, tossing fireballs at… something in the hallway.

“VIN!” I called out. “OVER HERE!”

“LINK!!” Miranda cried out as she zipped over like a baseball being hit into a home run. She zoomed right into Zelda’s arms like a kid fleeing to a parent to get away from something that terrified them.

“WHOA wait a sec, you can fly?!” I asked.

“More like a float, but yeah,” Garrett said as he and Simon joined us.

“That isn’t the half of it,” Simon huffed. “She can float, Vinny can set things on fire-”

“I noticed that,” I said.

“And Garrett!! Can do a lot of things, actually,” he said.

“Too many things,” Garrett reiterated. “I’m not snapping my fingers again for as long as I live.”

“You might need to get snapping, dude!” Called out Vinny as he dove behind the wall with the rest of us. “We got big problems, Link!”

“What kind of problems!?”

“Well, good news, we found the card!” He said, pointing to a plastic shopping bag on Simon’s arm that obviously had something in it. “Bad news, something’s in the cafeteria and I think it’s mad .”

As if on cue, we heard something slink out of the same door that they had. What I saw looked like jello. Melty, green, living jello, flooding out of the door like warm molasses. I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and watched as the lizalfos tried to exit the AP History classroom through the window, falling onto the sidewalk before skittering into the grass. Very quickly, we didn’t have to worry about it or the Moblin. The green sludge flooded its way through the quad, swallowing up the half awake Moblin in its wake before lashing at and grabbing the lizard in an instant. Both of them tried to escape before getting encased in the slime and disappearing into the green. It reminded me all too well of a picture I remember seeing at work over the summer, over by the D&D source books and dice. The only thing different was the color of the gelatinous mass doing the engulfing.

We watched as the slime balled itself up in the middle of the quad, quivering and twitching as it took a moment to collect itself. Finally, after what seemed like forever, it expanded into a more formal shape, the blob becoming top heavy as it held itself up on pseudopod-like tendril feet at the bottom. And finally, we watched a pair of orbs - which I realized, to my horror, were the left-over eyes of the lizalfos - float up to the front, wobbling around in the surface of the goop before finding a foothold in what would quickly become its face. And those awful eyes were facing right at us.

“What the HELL is that thing!?” Navi called out as she took a spot on my shoulder, horrified.  As if on instinct, I retrieved Audrie from the switch case and held her reticle up at the thing. I was hoping to get some insight on what we were up against. But the name that the reticle gave me was less like the other, one-word names I was used to. What I got instead was something akin to a title:

“SCATTER!” I shouted. We all ran in different directions away from the wall, spreading out to different corners of the quad. The creature I had decided to refer to as a Chuchu in my head so I didn’t keep mentally calling it “the giant green slime monster that just ate a lizalfos and used its eyes as its own” made its first move. 

SLAM!

It lifted up a tendril of slime before slamming it down on where we all had run away from, cracking the garden wall underneath it. It hadn’t broken it in half, but it took a big chunk out of the top.

“Crap nuggets!” I heard Zelda call out. “This is the part where we run, right??”

“It followed us out of the kitchen like molasses!” Vinny said as I watched him light his hands on fire, tossing one ball and then the other at the monster. “It can fit through doors and stuff like nothing! We go into the building to try and run, it’ll just have less space for us to run!”

“Yeah, the best we can do is fight it out in the open,” Went Simon, hiding behind one of the trees as the Chuchu attempted to grab him with another tendril. It narrowly missed him. “AGH! Goddelgoos inktvis!”

“Shoot! I should’ve grabbed a lacrosse stick or something!” Shouted Mike. “I’m not punching THAT!”

“Then throw a rock at it or something!” Zelda told him as she pulled back her bowstring and fired. She managed to stick the bolt in one of its eyes, causing it to cry out with a sound not unlike someone screaming from under water. Freaky .

“Alright, cool! We can attack the head!” Garrett said.

“More like the eyes!” Vinny said, getting ready to throw more fire at it. “Been throwing god damn fire at its big ugly face and NOTHING! There’s no way we’ll be able to hit them from down here!”

We went on for a little longer, not sure how else to go about fighting this thing. The bokoblins and everything else were easier. It’s easy to hit something when it has actual flesh to bruise. This was like someone handing you a human sized thing of jello and asking you to try and make it cry because it's vaguely creature shaped, therefore it should be possible. It took another minute of throwing rocks, firing things at its face, and skittering around the quad trying to avoid tentacles like a pack of startled rats, until someone got an idea.

“Link, cover for me!” Miranda called out. I noticed her glancing at something on the outside wall of one of the school buildings. “I’ll be right back!!”

“Wha- MIRANDA!” I couldn’t get anything else out of her before she zipped inside of one of the school buildings. The only clue I had as to what she was planning to do was the direction in which she had looked before she ran off. She was looking at a wall, yes. A wall with a weatherproof outdoor outlet on it. 

“LOOK!” I heard Navi shout into my ear. I looked up just in time to dodge out of the way of another tentacle. I fell back onto the grass as the Chuchu drew its appendage back.

“Agh… thanks, Nav!”

“Don’t thank me, everything’s terrifying!” She blurted out. “Pig men, flying lizards, jello monsters made of acid! Everything’s out to kill us and I’m the most vulnerable one here.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not gonna let anything hurt either of us.”

I looked up from where we’d taken cover to see everyone else around us. Plenty of people were just hiding and trying to figure out what to do in this situation. In particular, I noticed my cousin seated with Garrett behind a bush, both of them terrified, with my cousin curled like a little kid trying to hide from the monster under their bed. I’d never seen my cousin look so scared. On the other end of the spectrum, I saw Mike take a loose brick out of the sidewalk. That particular brick had always bothered me. Too many times did I almost trip on it as it slipped around under me. But that brick didn’t deserve what Mike was using it for.

“Eat this, flubber!!” He proceeded to yeet that brick with the force of a thousand angry gorillas, managing to hit it right in its eye(the same one Zelda had stuck an arrow in, in fact!). It still barely put a dent in our effort to bring this thing down.

“Damn! That was the only loose one,” Mike hollered. “What the hell do I do now!?”

“EXACTLY WHAT I TELL YOU!!”

We all looked over to see that Miranda had returned. It became very clear just where she’d gone and what she was planning to do. She’d gone to the janitor’s closet not far from here and returned with one of those big, cylindrical, industrial-sized vacuum cleaners, and had already plugged it into the outdoor outlet she’d eyed earlier. She held up the tube with her regular little person's hands, and was ready to drag the vacuum itself behind her with her ponytail hand.

“You guys ready to see what jello getting sucked up a metal tube sounds like?!” She smirked. 

Despite her now being 3 feet shorter, nothing else seemed to change with her. She ran at the jello creature with the gusto of a gladiator sprinting over to wrestle a lion, the vacuum being dragged behind her like her little ball and chain. It was the exact energy you’d expect from a girl with a “this machine kills fascists” patch on her jacket. She skidded to a stop right by the base of the Chu-Chu, sticking the tubed end of the vacuum hose right into it. All I can say is that the sound of jello getting sucked up a metal tube is… interesting. It’s like when you try to suck up a slushie through a metal straw and it gets stuck a bit.

I was expecting the monster to just get sucked up into the vacuum and have that be the end of it. Instead, I watched as it suddenly started wobbling, its eyes darting around as if looking for something to help it out, before its giant head just fell over onto the grass. Its eyes were stuck wobbling in its big head, right at our level, vulnerable and in the open.

“NOW! ATTACK IT!!” I heard Zelda call out. I watched Simon, Vinny and Mike leap out from their hiding spots, being the only three out of us to be in a position to fight, and they proceeded to beat the crap out of the jello creature’s face.

“Why are you not fighting with them??” I heard Audrie ask from where she was secured on my waist.

“I don’t have anything to hit it with!” I informed her.

“You do indeed!” She assured me right back. “Take whichever joycon controller that fits your dominant hand!” That confused me for a moment, but we were fighting a giant green slime monster, so a lot of confusing things were happening today. I decided it would be better to just roll with it. I took Audrie out of the case before sliding the left-hand joycon off of the console.

“Alright, so now wha- WHOA!” Before I could even finish, the joycon flashed with a bright green light, stretching from a tiny 3 inch controller into a 3 foot blunt weapon. And just like that, I had my baseball bat from earlier again.

“Whatever you have stored in my inventory, you can access by simply tapping different buttons on the d-pad,” Audrie told me. “For quick access to your tools and such.” I took a moment to observe that the bat had a joycon d-pad right where I had placed my hand to hold it. I tapped the left button. The bat flashed green again and transformed into the meter stick I took from Mr. Doirich’s classroom. A smile came to my face.

“Neat!”

The newfound giddy excitement at having a cool new tool to use was short lived as I heard Garrett cry out, “IT’S GETTING BACK UP AGAIN!!”

“Miranda!” I called to her from across the quad. She looked at me with determination on her little imp face. “We’ll try to distract it! Just sneak behind it and do that vacuum trick again!”

She saluted me before slipping around into the Chuchu’s blind spot. I grabbed a pebble off of the ground.

“Navi, hold on,” I said.

“Wait wha- ACK!!” Navi cried out as she gripped tightly to my shoulder. I leapt out from behind the cover, throwing the pebble at the Chuchu’s eyes. It didn’t hit the eyes, but it got its attention.

“The hell are you doing, Matheson?!” Mike shouted at me.

“HEY!! JELLO BRAIN!! I’M OVER HERE, DINGUS!!” I watched the Chuchu eye me with angry fervor as it tried to slam a tendril down on top of me. I was able to leap out of the way as it crashed down and broke through the garden wall. This time it made it all the way through the stone and slammed down into the dirt.

“JESUS!” Navi called out as the Chuchu pulled its tentacle back up.

“I think it’s getting more desperate,” I said. I pulled my bat out and readied it as another tendril came down to try and hit me. It missed, got stuck in the dirt, and then I hit it hard. Another gargled scream came from the creature as it pulled its tentacle back and away.

“HA! It DOES hurt it!” I cried.

“Perhaps not as severely!” Garrett called out to me. “But just enough to deter it from- EEP!” He rolled out of the way with Fiona in one arm. He pulled them to safety right before the Chuchu slammed another tendril into the ground, this one also going right through their cover like a knife through warm butter.

“Good god, we’re gonna die here,” Fiona breathed.

“We’re not going to die!” Simon shouted to her from the other side of the quad. Simon let out a cry right after as he barely dodged out of the way in time to miss another tentacle. He wacked it with the broom he’d brought along with him, causing the creature to warble out a cry before drawing its appendage back.

“TIMBERRRR!” I heard Miranda shout from where she was. As if on cue, the creature started to wobble again. Once more it tried to keep itself balanced, and once more it toppled over into the dirt.

“HELL YEAH, MY TURN!!” I yelled. I leapt to where the other guys on the attack were heading, the baseball bat held high above my head before I brought it down like a hammer, smacking the thing’s eyeball so hard it sunk back into the gunk in retreat. Another scream gargled out of it. Mike, Simon and Vinny were also going to town on this thing. The imagery was like something out of a horror comedy to be frank. Just four dudes full of rage beating a giant blob monster to death with whatever blunt weapon they could find. Or, I guess just committing arson in Vin’s case.

But like all things that seem to go our way during all this chaos, something must go wrong.

I had just let my hand fall so I could slam my bat into the thing’s eye once more, only this time, the eye was the only thing that sunk back into the goop. My weapon did as well. I pulled back, but soon discovered that the creature’s body really was like molasses. As the Chuchu stood back up, it wrenched the bat out of my hand, and the thing reverted back into a joycon inside its body.

“Shoot!” I blurted out.

“Don’t fret!” went Audrie. “The creature’s digestive acids can’t break down the joycon!”

“Yeah, but they can keep me from getting it back!” I yelled back, rolling out of the way as it tried to slam a tendril down on top of me again. This was bad. Very bad. “Audrie PLEASE tell me there’s something else you can do to help!”

“Not without the SD card I’m afraid.”

“OF COURSE NOT!” I leapt back and out of the way of another tendril, opting to run for cover instead of stand out in the open and complain. For a moment, I looked around the quad. Looked to see what everyone was doing. Looked to see if Miranda was doing her part, and…

“Shoot shoot shoot shoot SHOOT!” She said it over and over as I watched her start to take apart the vacuum.

“Miranda, what the hell are you doing?!” Fiona called out, frantic.

“The vacuum bag is full!” She explained. “I gotta replace it! COVER FOR ME!”

“Oh for Pete’s sake!!” Mike opted to try and find something else to throw, and I watched this man ponder his options, only to opt to find another loose brick in the ground, pull it out, and throw it at the monster. “Get a move on, Miss Deetz, we don’t have all the time in the world here!”

“She’s doing the best she can!” Simon yelled back at him.

“Well her best ain’t gonna help us much if the jello monster eats us before she’s done!”

“Then keep hitting it, you pancake!”

The moment he was done yelling his insult at Mike, he let out a cry of alarm. I froze up as I watched the jello monster suddenly hit him with its tentacle.

“SIMON!” Called out Zelda. She shot an arrow at the monster’s appendage, causing it to gargle a pained noise as it pulled its arm back. Simon just held a hand to the side of his head as he ran for cover.

“Simon, are you alright?!” Zelda asked frantically as she pulled him with her behind a tree.

“I’m alright! Just a head wound! I’ll be fine,” he assured her. I hoped he wasn’t pulling one of the oldest tropes in fiction and just saying that so we wouldn’t worry. But it was just enough to distract me.

“LINK, WATCH OUT!”

As I looked over to see what was happening, it was like the world was going in slow motion. There were two things of note going on. The Chuchu had taken advantage of me being distracted by a fellow student getting injured to slam a tentacle down on top of me, just fast enough that by the time I noticed there’s no way I could’ve dodged it. The other thing? My cousin Fiona, armless as she was, leaping over to try and shield me from the blow. I don’t know what I was doing. Maybe I subconsciously took her up on her offer of being a meat shield and was grabbing her to hold her in place. Maybe I wanted to grab her so that I could try at the last minute to tuck and roll us both out of the way, even though I knew it was useless. Either way, I put my hands on Fiona’s shoulders, closing my eyes and preparing for the worst.

But the worst didn’t happen.

Instead, I heard the Chuchu gargle out another scream. I opened my eyes to see what exactly had happened, and saw the Chuchu pulling back its now partly severed goop tentacle as it cried out in pain. My cousin was nowhere to be found. And it soon became obvious why when I saw what I was holding in her stead. I put the piece together rather quickly. The Chuchu’s appendage was severed by my own hand. And Fiona wasn’t where she used to be because I was now wielding her in my hand. My cousin had saved my life, thought I don’t think turning into a sword for me to defend myself was part of her plan.

<<Wha- what happened?? Link?!>> I heard the familiar voice of my cousin shouting at me in my head. <<What did you do!?>>

“This wasn’t me!!” I said as I held the sword up close to my face. It helped to feel less weird if I pretended my reflection in the blade from her face or something. “As far as I can tell, this was all you!”

<<Yeah, sure, I just accidentally turned myself into a sword!>>

“Weirder things have happened today, Fiona!” I twirled her around in my hand to try and get a comfortable grip on the weapon. I didn’t have time to really process what had happened - or look around to see if anyone else saw what had just happened - before I heard a click as Miranda closed up the main compartment of the vacuum.

“I GOT IT!” she shouted to us.

“Alright, everyone get ready!” Vinny called out as he lit his fingers ablaze. I held the sword, ready as I’ve ever been as I watched the Chuchu start wobbling again. It wobbled, and wobbled… and then fell.

You know when kids are lined up to hit a pinata, and the moment one of them manages to knock it to the ground and crack it open, the rest of the kids just run to try and grab whatever they can get? Yeah, minus us grabbing candy, that’s exactly what the ensuing scene looked like. Just three teenage guys running over to curbstomp a jello monster into the ground. Except, I decided not to beat it to death this time around. I had a new weapon and a much better idea.

“Guys, out of the way!” I called. The moment Vin and Mike saw me running up with a real-ass sword in my hand, they didn’t have to be told twice. They dang near JUMPED out of the way as I leapt forward, sword over my head, and then plunged the blade right between the eyes of the jello monster. It let out a cry of agony, trying to pull back to get away, but unlike last time where it was able to pull my weapon away, all it managed to do was passively allow me to slide the front of its face open with my dandy new blade.

We all stood where we were as the Chuchu pulled itself up and cried out all gurgly and warbled, like someone screaming under water as they try to swim up and gasp for air. We all watched it wobble, trying to compose itself, before it froze up. It wasn’t like what happened with the other monsters, where they bruised all over and dissolved. Instead, we watched as the Chuchu stayed frozen in place before it sublimated all at once.

POOF!

The entire monster disappeared in a ginormous puff of black and purple smoke, dissipating like early morning fog before the lot of us were left standing in the middle of the quad, wondering where to go from here. My joycon that it had swallowed dropped to the floor, as well as… something else. Something that floated down toward the ground in much the same manner as a feather or piece of paper being dropped from high up. Maybe it was instinct, or perhaps a part of me knew that this was for me, but I reached my free hand out and caught it before it hit the ground.

“What is that?” Navi asked absentmindedly.

“Something for Lincoln,” Audrie explained from her spot on my hip. “A container of vitality for him to add to his own, to make sure he makes it to the next challenge.”

I didn’t have to do much else as I held and inspected the gilded object before it simply flashed and disappeared.

“So… a heart container?” I asked.

“Well… yes, that’s the term, though it sounds sillier in your world than it does in Hyrule,” she said.

I just nodded my head. All this was really happening, huh? I slid the joycon back onto Audrie with my free hand as I felt the sword shake in my other. Suddenly the whole thing flashed with bright light and became limp in my hand as I flinched backwards and dropped it. Soon, my cousin shot up to her feet as she reappeared from the flash.

“What the hell was that?! What just happened!!” She asked frantically.

“Huh…” we both looked as Audrie hummed mechanically, her singular blue eye looking over my cousin. “I suppose that’s where the planted weapon was.”

“Wha- wait wait wait, so am I like… a SWORD or something?!” Fiona asked, waving her cloak hands around. “Is that what I’m supposed to be here??”

“A sword spirit it seems,” Audrie explained. “You embody the sword that seals the darkness. The one weapon in this world capable of defeating Ganon and sealing him away back in Hyrule.” Audrie’s one blue eye looked up at me. “The weapon only the hero can weild.”

The both of us froze, looked at each other, then looked at Audrie, then back at each other. We weren’t mind readers or anything like that, but we both shouted the same thing in that moment, in unison:

“YOU’VE GOTTA BE KIDDING ME!!”

“Put aside your cousin grudge for a moment,” Garrett said as he walked over to us. “We’ve got more important things to deal with.” He looked over to where Zelda was by the tree. “Simon, please tell me you still have the-”

“The card, yes!” Simon held up his arm with a grocery bag around it. I didn’t pay attention to that at the moment.

“God, Simon, you alright?!” Fiona asked, approaching him.

“I’m fine! Really! It’s just a scratch,” he assured. Fiona pushed some of his hair out of his face to examine him. It wasn’t anything bad, but the look on Fiona’s face said it all. It was definitely going to leave a scar.

“I’ll have to see if there’s a first aid kit around here or something, this looks bad,” She said.

“Well whatever it is, I’m sure I’ll be fine!” He said. “I can patch it up myself.”

“Well, wounded or not, we’ve got bigger fish to fry,” I said as I retrieved something from my bag. I pulled out a folded up piece of paper. Something that would no doubt help set the real quest into motion.

“Ganondorf had notes. Let’s go over them.”

Chapter Text

“Alright…”

I laid out the map below us. We’d all made it back to the cars in one piece, and Ariel had stayed where she was. The only problem was she’d fallen asleep in the car and when we woke her up, she complained for a solid 5 minutes about how bored she was. While we all took a moment to relax after everything we’d gone through, I figured the next time we left her in the car, it’d be with a book or something. After a few minutes, we all gathered in and around the bed of Mike’s truck as I laid out the annotated map we’d looted from Mr. Doirich’s office.

“This is the map we found in the AP History classroom,” I reminded everyone. “And lucky for us, Ganondorf annotated the whole thing with all kinds of crap.” I pointed to a few big red circles to emphasize them. “And he was even kind enough to circle the four places of utmost importance!”

“And we know who is where, yes?” Asked Simon. By this point he’d gotten a first aid kit out from the trunk of Garrett’s car and bandaged up the Chuchu wound on his face. Now it just looked like the poor kid tripped and fell on his face or something.

“Yep!” I replied. “Mina Van Der Zee is being held off the coast of Coney Island. Looks like she might be on a boat or something. With all the stuff going on, I wouldn’t be surprised if Ganondorf somehow managed to commandeer one of the Ellis Island Ferries.”

“Dude could’ve also just gotten his own boat,” Vinny proposed.

“True true,” I replied. “But he’s just as likely to have stolen one.”

“Besides, what’s the fun in getting a boat if you can’t be evil and steal one?” Miranda interjected.

“Well anyways, aside from that, Coach McKay is being held in Central Park, Reily Valenti is somewhere at the top of the Empire State Building, and Uma’s being held at Latourette Park in Staten island.”

“So we’ll go to Staten Island first then!” Mike said.

“No no, hold on!” Zelda stopped Mike right there while he was ahead. “We have to think about this logically, dude.”

“Yeah! We should try saving Mina first!” Simon recommended.

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

“Well I can’t just leave my sister sitting in the middle of the harbor all alone, being held hostage by a mad man.”

“Well I doubt Ganon’s going to try and harm them in any way,” I reassured him. “Besides, they seem to be pretty important people. He could be keeping them alive for his own benefit, and we can use that.”

“Plus, Vinny’s got Thalassophobia,” Garrett blurted.

“He doesn’t need to know that!” Vinny growled. “As long as I’m on a boat, I’m fine!”

“Right, sure, just like at winter formal when the whole thing was held on that party boat in Gravesend Bay?”

“Listen, I threw up from sea sickness, NOT fear!”

“Either way, I think it’d be better to save someone other than Mina or Uma first. Vinny needs to get psyched up to go near the water, and Staten Island is a big place with who knows what going on over there.”

“Well if we’re not rescuing his sister or my god damn girlfriend first,” Mike butted in. “Who the hell are we saving first??”

“Coach McKay,” Zelda answered. “I cross referenced the locations on google maps, and using the school as our starting point, Central Park is the closest by subway.”

“Hold on a moment! I thought we were driving,” Fiona said.

“Too risky,” I informed her. “If we drive everywhere, Ganon’s gonna be looking for cars.”

“Would the same be true for the metro, then?” Garrett asked. “The schedules of each train are public, after all.”

“Yeah, but there’s a difference between us and Ganondorf,” I said, leaning in close so everyone could hear me. “Unlike us, Ganondorf has no clue how to read the subway maps or navigate the stations.” Garrett made a face like he was about to say something, paused, and then stopped for a moment.

“Gosh, I didn’t even think about that.”

“Oh yeah, I remember having to deal with that when I first moved here,”  Miranda said. “Back in West Milford, all you had to worry about was bus schedules. If it took me 2 months to get the subway down, it’s gonna take an interdimensional incarnation of evil with no familiarity with earth waaaaay longer.”

“That’s cool and all, but I still don’t see why we’re going for Coach first,” Mike said. “I say we go to Staten Island fir-”

“Mike, let me break it down for you for a sec,” I said, cutting him off. “We’re going to be fighting a lot of monsters no matter where we go, so we’ll need someone with actual combat experience if we want even the smallest chance of surviving.”

“Well we survived the school just fine!”

“Simon got hurt!” I blurted out, pointing over at Simon with his bandaged face. “That probably wouldn’t have happened if we had someone else to help us out, man. Plus, need I remind you, Coach McKay is a former marine! Of all the teacher’s, he was the one willing to put himself in harm’s way to get us out of the school and - oh yeah! He’s got a MAGIC SHIELD, TOO.”

Mike paused for a moment. He was making that face someone makes when they’re pissed, and very much want things to go their way, but can’t think of a valid argument or excuse to get things to go like they want them to. He let out a little huff.

“Fine, Matheson,” he grumbled. “We’ll go to the park first.”

“Cool cool!” I said with a nod of the head. “I promise you both, we’ll save Mina and Uma as soon as we can. But we gotta think logically first.” I pulled Audrie out of the switch case. “But before we do any of that, there’s something we gotta do first.” I held out a hand to Simon, who passed me the plastic bag he’d been carrying around all afternoon. I untied the bag, opened it, and pulled out the unopened SD card.

“You found it!” Audrie hummed.

“Correction: Garrett and the other guys found it,” I replied as I broke open the cardboard and plastic. I retrieved the card from inside before turning Audrie over. “Alright, uhhhh, this isn’t going to hurt you or anything, is it??”

“I am a machine, Lincoln.”

“Right right…” I gently pulled open the kickstand on the back of the console before sliding the tiny yellow card into the slot beneath, waiting for a little click . Almost immediately, the console rumbled as Audrie hummed mechanically. I turned the console back over to see the design on the screen pulsing and jittering blue, as if processing a huge new flow of power and information. It only lasted for a moment before the eye in the middle blinked a few times.

“Update finished!” She said. The design disappeared for a moment as she pulled up something. I quickly realized what it was as I saw names and topographical designs fade onto the display. A map!

“Sick! Audrie’s got a map of all the important stuff!” I said. The school was labeled as such, but now with all the telltale trailer trimmings of a monster hideout displayed in little map-designs as well. It was almost like a warning that came much too late. But then Ariel noticed something…

“Hold on a sec,” she said, gently putting her hands on the switch to turn it towards her. She pulled a joystick back, causing the whole thing to zoom out to reveal… “The map is of the whole city, but it only has Queens!”

“Yes, because Queens is the only region I have conclusive information of,” Audrie informed us. “Having come into this world in the middle of Queens helped with that.”

“Well how do we get the rest of the map!” Ariel asked. “I don’t want Link getting lost!”

“Ariel, I’ve been alive in this city longer than you,” I said. “I’ll be fine!”

“That’s not what I meant!” she said, trying to shove me in anger, but it felt more like a gentle and playful push that didn’t do much of anything. “There’s monsters and stuff everywhere! What if everything’s all weird like at school?”

“A good fear to have!” Audrie said to her. “My map can be updated at any subway station in the other four boroughs! All Lincoln needs to do is tap the system to any subway ticket turnstile to update the map.”

“Wow, it’s that easy?? Alright.” I didn’t fuss much more with it, gently tucking Audrie away into the switch case.

“Snrk! You think the map’s gonna have fast travel or something like a real video game??” Miranda asked.

“I dunno,” I said. “Zelda doesn’t have much in the way of fast travel anyways.” I went to fold up the map before hopping out of the truck bed.

“Alright well, get in the cars, losers,” Mike blurted out, going to the driver’s side of his truck. “Never thought I’d say this unironically, but let’s go take a walk in the park!”

Central Park is in Manhattan, the borough right beside Queens and across the water. We knew pretty quickly that we’d have to take the A-Train from Queens to get there. It’d be a long ride, but it was the safest way to go. Plus, we realized on the way to the subway station in Queens that McKay wouldn’t fit in the car, so the subway was really the best possible way to get to and from where we were all going with all the people traveling with us. Even then, there was something we had to do in the car that I was dreading having to do…

“What do you mean I gotta stay here again?!” Ariel shouted back at me. “You guys got to go fight monsters and stuff, and I nearly bored myself to death in here!”

“Too bad, we don’t know how dangerous it's going to be,” I said. “Just, PLEASE, stay here, alright??”

“But It’s gonna be super boringggguh!” She whined. “Besides, what if a crazy guy tries to smash the car window or something to kidnap me?”

“Well if they do break my truck window, I’ll kick their teeth in,” Mike assured her. That seemed to catch my little sister off guard. She just stood there and blinked at him in shock before he huffed. I watched Mike lean in closer, looking back at me before whispering something to her.

“I’ve got Moon Knight comics under the passenger seat, just don’t tear them up or something, okay?”

I saw my sister’s eyes light up. “Okay! Thank you! I’ll stay in the truck then!”

I gave my sister a pat on the head as she hunkered down in the trunk and we locked it all up. And like that, the 9 of us were on our way to the station. It took all my strength to pretend I didn’t hear Mike, the big bad football playing bully, indirectly admit to my little sister that he reads comic books.

We made our way over to Broadway Junction, the closest station to the school that could lead us to the A-Train and get us to Central Park. It wasn’t one of those subway entrances most tourists imagine when they think of one. You know the ones: the holes in the sidewalk with the railing around it, where you walk down a long flight of stairs into the underground. Broadway Junction began above ground, with a door on the side of a building that made it seem more like a regular above-ground train station or airport than a subway station. Now that I think about it, I guess the best way to put it is Grand Central Terminal, but not as fancy and more modernized and streamlined looking.

Coming to the main entrance, we all cautiously walked inside. We weren’t sure what to expect, but there was one thing apparent when we arrived. Unlike every other time I’ve ever taken the subway at Broadway, the whole place seemed… eerily quiet. It could’ve just been because no one wanted to risk going outside with all the monsters, but I’ve lived here my whole life. I was sure as heck someone would say “Screw it!” and risk getting mauled by pig men to go hang out with friends in Manhattan. And yet here we were, the only people walking into the station that day as we made our way toward the escalator.

“Fiona, if anything happens, do the sword thing as fast as you can,” I said.

“Yeah, sure! Because I totally know how I did that,” she scoffed back at me. I just sighed back, pulling out Audrie before sliding the left joycon off of her. It quickly flashed into the shape of a baseball bat in my hand. Everyone else had their own means of protection, whether it was magic, their hands(Mike), or something taken from the school(Simon kept his broom that he'd taken from the janitor's closet). I turned to the others.

“Alright, just be careful you guys,” I said to everyone else in the group. “We don’t know what’s down here, but whatever it is we’re gonna have to fight through it if we wanna get to the A-Train in ti-”

THUD!

We heard a noise further back near the door and immediately jumped into action. Raising weapons, readying magic, and getting very close to jumping in and throwing hands… until we saw what had made the nose.

It was my sister, dressed in her school clothes and such from earlier, standing all tensed up next to a trash can that had been knocked over.

“Ariel, what’re you doing here?!” I whisper-yelled at her as everyone put their weapons away.

“I was just trying to lean against it, I didn’t know it was half empty-”

“Not that! Why aren’t you in the car??” I walked over and kneeled down to be on her level before she answered me.

“Well, I was just thinking about how you’re going all the way to another part of the City!” she explained. “All across the river and everything! The school was super close, but the park isn’t!”

“... touché .” I took her hand. “Fine, you can come with us. But you have to stay close to me and not wander off, okay?”

“Mm-hmm!” She took my hand with both of hers.

“Be brave, liefje,” Simon said as we both rejoined the group. “You’ll do fine here. I believe in you!”

“Yes, what Simon said,” Fiona said rather dismissively. “Just be careful, please, Ariel.” She didn’t respond anymore, not verbally anyways. Every other instance of someone telling her she’d need to be careful was met with her just nodding her head monotonously. That was something she was known to do. You tell her something too many times, all she does to respond is just nod her head or go “Yup” or “uh-huh” without really processing what it is you’re telling her. I knew this about her, and I knew to not let her out of my sight for that very reason.

We came down the stairs toward the underground train platform. We came to notice fairly quickly that these weren’t stairs we were descending, but the escalators that were out of order. That was one thing you could appreciate about escalators. Any other quick and efficient way of going from floor to floor in buildings was good and all until they broke down. If an escalator loses power, you can at least use it like a regular staircase until it gets fixed. I’d like to see someone try that with an elevator.

“I hope the train’s still working,” Zelda said. “Then again, the lights are working. It’s probably just the escalator then.”

“Indeed you’re correct!” Went Audrie from the switch case on my waist. “My sources say the escalators are experiencing a malfunction, but the trains are running on time despite the station being largely deserted.”

“Huh. What do you know?” Zelda chuckled. “Even when the world has gone down the toilet, the NYC subway is still running.”

We finally came to the bottom, stepping off into a middle ground type area. It was a lobby of sorts. The kind of place where we were all used to seeing people milling about, whether rushing to catch their train or hanging out off to the side of the walkways with guitars or street performing routines to get a little extra cash with. But there was no sound of such bustling or crowds. It was eerily quiet. Too quiet for a subway station.

It was all made worse by the fact that we did indeed find people in Broadway Junction that day.

None of them were moving. None of them were speaking. None of them even looked in our direction when we came in, like people usually do when you enter a room or make noise. All of them were sitting and standing still, faces down and eyes off of us.

“I don’t like this,” I heard Ariel say from my side as I held her close to me.

“Just… try and ignore them,” I said to her. We continued on through the station, content to get a move on and just catch the train. But like I’d expected, not all of us could just shake it off.

“What do you think their problem is??” Mike grunted. His arms were crossed as he walked alongside us.

“I don’t know… I think they’re like us,” Zelda guessed. “They’re just not having a good time either.” We continued on, approaching the turnstile. I kneeled down for a moment to fish something out of my bag, finding it in a timely manner for once in my life: my metro card.

“Anyone need me to swipe for them?” I asked.

“Nope! Vin and I have ours,” Garrett said.

“Got mine too,” Zelda said.

“I might need a swipe,” Simon said sheepishly. “Mina and I don’t usually have to use the subway, so we don’t have cards.”

“I think I qualify to get on for free since I’m under the 44 inch height limit, so I’m good,” Miranda said with a chuckle. I just nodded my head, about to go and swipe when I felt the little buzz of air I was used to whenever Navi fluttered past the side of my face. I was too busy swiping my card and letting myself through to notice her hover in the air for a moment looking at something. It was only when I glanced back and saw her flutter closer to it that I saw what had caught her attention. It was another person in the subway, the same still body with their head turned toward the ground, seated on a bench just beside the turnstile.

“These people are so weird,” she mumbled as she turned on her back in the air. She flipped herself back upright and straightened out before I suppose trying to test her luck. She stuck her tongue out at the person before she just began making all sorts of faces. Now I knew what it was like for those people who stood around the guards at Buckingham palace and just did whatever wacky stuff they could think of around them. I got a little chuckle out of me as everyone else came through the turnstile. 

“Hold on a sec, Navi, hold that face for a second,” I said with a giggle. I don’t know why I did what I did at that moment. I could’ve very much just rummaged around my bag for my phone and taken a picture using that. I guess I was too lazy to look for it and instead decided to use Audrie’s camera function for something less serious. As stupid as my thought process was at the time, I’m glad that’s the decision my brain came to. It was only Audrie’s camera that was able to identify something that I hadn’t been able to. It picked up Navi as a fairy. It also picked up the bystander in the subway as… something else. Something that immediately reawakened some awful childhood memories of playing Ocarina of Time on my cousin’s old N64. Unfortunately, I was too late to warn Navi.

The figure’s head suddenly snapped up, its eyes locking onto Navi as its face finally came into view. It was a human face, but a gaunt one. A rotten one. One that looked closer to the shade of wood than human flesh. Its eyes were dark and sunken into its face, its rotten jaw full of gnarly teeth crackled a bit as it let out an awful, blood curdling shriek. Something like a mix of a startled elephant call and the sound of rickety train tracks. It was the kind of scream that made your blood run cold and your body go into fight-or-flight the moment you hear it. It was a scream that was different yet exactly the same as the monsters I remembered. And it was a scream so awful it caused Navi to freeze in her tracks like a deer in headlights, leaving her vulnerable to this creature in the subway.

And just like that, the junction went from being eerily quiet and still to being all too alive for our comfort. The other bystander’s turned their heads to face us, making the kind of awful sounds as they contorted their heads around to look at us with their soulless eyes. They looked up from the sides of walkways, up from their seats at benches, over from where they stood loitering by walls and barricades - all at us. It was like we’d farted during church, and the other congregants were out for our heads because of it.

“Run,” I called out calmly yet urgently. I jumped back over the turnstiles as everyone else heeded my warning and went to get through. I ran toward the bench, keeping my eyes shut as I sntached a frozen Navi out of the air, turned around and went running back to the turnstile. Garrett was in the middle of trying to swipe his card frantically when Mike huffed.

“Screw this!” He leapt over the turnstile, bypassing the payment all together as he ran for it. “Don’t try to fumble with the cards, numb nuts, there’s ZOMBIES!!”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Garrett said back to him as he got through, trying to keep his composure. “There’s been giant hogs and lizards, but zombies seem like too much even for all this!”

“Nope, he’s right. They’re redeads!” I informed them as I leapt back over the turnstiles. “They’re zombies!”

“ Oh good god they’re zombies !!” Garrett looked like he wanted to drop dead right there. Just anything to get out of this situation.

“Don’t look them in the eyes!” I was warned. “They can paralyze you if they meet your gaze!”

“Okay, cool! I’ll just do what I usually do when I talk to people and look at their noses,” Zelda said as she readied herself for what was going to happen. Ariel looked terrified, clinging to my jeans as we kept making our way away from them. I was quick to pull the left joycon off of Audrie and summoned my baseball bat, but I didn’t trust myself to make sure she was still with me as long as she was doing the running herself. I kneeled down so I could hoist her up on my back and carry her to make it easier to bring her along safely.

“I’m not going to let anything happen to you, Triple A!” I said. I swung a bat and smacked the hand of a redead as it tried reaching through the bars of the surrounding walls to grab us. “I promise!”

“Mm-hmm…” she said it in the way kids do when they’re scared out of their minds. Of all the creatures we had to encounter while Ariel was tagging along, it had to be redeads. Being a big brother meant knowing what my sister’s scared of so I can make sure she’s not unnecessarily exposed to it. One of those things is zombies. Even if I knew redeads weren’t the “if they bite you, you become one” kind, Ariel still has a fear of zombies ever since she accidentally walked in on me watching Night of the Living Dead with some friends a few Halloweens ago. I wasn’t one to judge. I had an irrational fear of quicksand when I was her age and refused to play in sandboxes or go to the beach until I was 11. But this wasn’t a random environmental hazard. These were living creatures with instincts to kill.

“AHH!” I looked to see Garrett scream as one of the redeads got the idea to jump the turnstile after us and grabbed his arm. “G-G-Get off of me!!” I watched the poor dude kick it back and away from him, only for its arm to tear off at the elbow as it fell backwards. Cue more screaming from Garrett as he went to pry the severed arm off of his shoulder.

“Since when did Zelda have ZOMBIES?!” called out Vinny as he kicked one of them in the face before joining up with Garrett.

“I wanna say since 1998?!” Zelda answered from a little ways away as she fired an arrow into the hoard, sticking it through the head of one of them. “That sounds about right, right??”

“Yeah yeah!” Miranda corroborated. “At least since Ocarina of Time!”

“Yeah, but you won’t turn into one if it bites you!” I shouted as I knocked another one in the face as it jumped the turnstile. “I still wouldn’t recommend letting them!”

“NO DUH!!” Simon blurted out. The poor kid was in the same grouping as the rest of the girls, and they were all doing their best to fend off more redead as I noticed something I’d totally forgotten about. The junction was having construction done on one of the walls of bars around the turnstiles. A large section of the wall wasn’t barricaded, and the redeads were now shambling through it to get to where we all were on the other side. At least the turnstiles would’ve bottlenecked them, but this made things so much worse.

“Damn! I’m out of arrows!!” Zelda shouted, opting to turn the bow over in her hand to try and salvage her situation by using it as a blunt weapon. Almost as if on cue, as Simon was trying to use the broom he’d snagged to push the hoard back, it snapped in its hand. Whether that was from the redeads or from the sheer force he was using to push them back, Simon looked at the two pieces as he said something in Dutch that I was fairly sure was a curse word. The next sequence of events was a sight to behold.

Simon dropped what was left of the broom handle, seeing as it was probably too short for him to use as a weapon. Instead, I watched this kid desperately grab the edge of one of the one of the benches. I wasn’t sure what he was trying at first. After all, the benches in Broadway Junction were all bolted to the floor, so it’s not like he could toss one at them or something. And then, something happened that I could only chalk up to a result of adrenaline. He’d very suddenly tore a plank off the side of the bench, sending bolts and such flying. You know how when you’re pulling on something, and it comes undone when you don’t expect it and you’re still pulling so hard that you end up getting knocked over? Something similar happened here, except a redead was on the receiving end of it as the sheer force of Simon trying to tear off the plank led to him smacking an approaching redead in the face with enough force to break its head back.

“Haha! Awesome!!” Mike shouted with a big smile. He was snapped back into the situation when he turned and punched an approaching redead in the face, knocking it back into another zombie and causing the both of them to fall over into a wall of bars. I did my part in all this and smacked another one in the face, knocking it over and onto its back where it laid limp as I tried to make my way to someplace safe while the redeads kept approaching. Ariel at this point had her face buried in my hair as she tried to keep herself from crying. At that moment, another redead tried to reach for me. I wasn’t quick enough to react, putting up my bat and trying to use it to shove it back as it tried biting and gnawing at the wood. Ariel let out a scream. The kind kids let out when they’re scared out of their wits. She made a movement like she was trying to kick her legs at it to hit it, but quickly stopped as she realized it was making her slide off my back. She held back onto me, tighter this time as all she could do was watch. 

“ARIEL!!” I heard my cousin call out from the other end of the room. I watched my cousin do her best to make her way over, figure skating through the air, slipping past zombies, all the graceful ballet-esque moves she could pull to get near us. And then I watched her leap out and kick the redead in the side of the head, knocking it off of me as I stumbled for a moment to stay standing.

“Careful!” Fiona zipped over and threw her cloak hands out at me. I grabbed the ends of both with my free hand as she pulled me back to my feet. I’d nearly fallen down the stairs down to the train platform. 

“GUH! Thanks!” I said.

“Don’t thank me yet!” she said right back as she looked at the hoard. “Are you sure the train’s running on time?!”

“I’m fairly sure! We just gotta hold them off until then!”

I heard another whimper come from my sister as she buried her head into my hair. Fiona noticed this.

“Ariel! Let’s play a game!” She said. My sister looked up at her with a confused look on her face. “Uhhh Link and I are going to fight all these zombies! Yeah! And whoever beats up more zombies wins! And we need you to keep score, okay??” I sat frozen for a moment as my little sister just nodded her head and wiped her eyes on her sleeve.

“Okay! Yeah!” I said, realizing what my cousin was doing. “You’re on!” I feigned a competitive smile as I readied my bat in my left hand. There wasn’t much else to say about that. The redead kept coming, but me and Fiona did our rivalry-type thing and lined them up to knock them down. Kicking and swatting and knocking their heads in and knocking them to the floor. 

All while I heard my little sister under her breath going, “One… two… one, two, three… three… four… four….” I hadn’t realized the genius in Fiona’s framing it as a game until I noticed Ariel was starting to stop crying. Everything else happened around us as we slowly but surely made our way down the stairs, backing up toward the subway platform.

“Take this!!” Vin growled, smacking a redead on the arm and setting it on fire. I couldn’t help but think this was something he’d always wanted to do to someone minorly inconveniencing him: Just set them on fire! It was a good instinct, though. If there’s one thing I remembered, it was that redeads were super weak to fire. But it wasn’t all good. The now flaming zombie managed to lock eyes with my short friend and let out a similar cry to the one Navi had been making face at. Halfway through stepping down to the next step, Vinny had frozen in his tracks. The worst case scenario had happened, and it was made worse when the redead went to reach for him with its flaming hand. I wanted to scream for him, but didn’t have to. I watched Miranda come in and punch the redead out of the way, knocking it back and into the hoard. They all fell over in a small wave, the image making me think of the sound of bowling pins.

“Vinny, are you okay?? Are you dead?!” she asked frantically before grabbing him with her hair hand and shaking him. “DUDE!”

“GAH! M, I’M FINE!!” Vinny cried out. “PUT ME DOWN!!” He was set down on the steps.

“Good! Now get a move on!!” She gently shoved Vinny down the stairs as they both went running.

“Everyone, get a move on!” I shouted up the stairs. “Try and help each other out! I can’t get back up the stairs!”

“Duly noted!” Garrett replied as he backed up toward the stairs, beating back the redeads the only way he could: with the severed arm that he’d pried off of his shoulder. I watched Zelda make a run for it, sliding down the railings alongside the stairs like a disney princess(which I suppose makes sense, since… you know) before leaping off at the end and sticking the landing on the train platform.

Mike had made it down there with her, having run down the stairs and down to the bottom long before the rest of us. He was looking around wildly before pausing.

“The train’s coming!” he shouted back. “I can hear it down the tunnel! Get ready to run, boys!” He paused as he took into account the five young ladies with us. “And uh… honorary boys!”

Fiona and I kept backing down the stairs, trying to keep our balance as we kept beating back redeads. We’d knock on back, and another would crawl over top of its limp body to come after us right after. We were making progress, but at the same time not doing anything at all. And that became very clear when I noticed something. I noticed a familiar zombie - the one that tried to gnaw through my bat and was subsequently kicked to the ground by my cousin - slowly coming after us in the hoard continuing its attack. And then I saw another - the one Vinny had set on fire - slowly pulling itself back to its feet to try and come after us again. My eyes darted from one end of the hoard to the other, looking at each individual redead, as the realization hit me.

“They’re coming back,” I said. I looked to my cousin, who had been doing her best to keep a level head this whole time. Now she was looking at me with a look of horrific realization at what I was saying. “They’re coming back! From the dead!! We can’t kill them!!”

“ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?!” Miranda shouted as she bowling-pinned another redead back toward the turnstiles.

“You guys have to run for it!!” Zelda shouted up at us.

“There’s too many of them!” Vinny called back to her. “We’d have to knock them all back in one go to have a chance at running!”

“I can’t do that, clotheslining only goes so far!” Miranda told him.

“Not you!” Vinny replied. He looked to Garrett, who’d opted to throw the severed arm at one of the redead like a projectile as a last resort. “Garrett, you’ve gotta push them back!”

“Wha- how?!” Garrett yelled back as he started cowering down the stairs toward the train platform. “I can’t fight them all!”

“No, not that! You made a platform or something back at the school! Maybe you can make a barrier and push them all back up toward the turnstiles!”

“What’re you, crazy?! I did that by accident, I don’t know how to do it on command!”

“Just snap your fingers at them!” Simon called to him, turned back up toward the top of the stairs while he was running down to meet with Mike and Zelda. “You’ll be hindering the zombies either way!”

“I can’t do that!!” Garrett yelped. “What if I hurt one of you!? I don’t even know how to do magic on purpose!!”

“Then just do what I do!!” Vinny yelled at him.

“Do WHAT, Vincent?!”

“BELIEVE IN YOURSELF!”

There was a pause, the only sounds in the stairwell being the groans and moans of the hoard of shambling redead.

“Haha, very funny, VINNY!!” Garret growled.

“I’M SERIOUS, BEANPOLE!” Vinny shouted back at him. “I know I have magic! I know I can do things! If I just believe that I can do it - if I have no doubt in my mind - I can do magic! Just do what I do!” Garrett stood where he was as we all were backing down the stairs, thinking on Vinny’s words. “You know you can do it! Just because you’re scared doesn’t mean it’s not possible! JUST BELIEVE, GARRETT!!”

There was another pause. Another instance of dead silence mixed with the sounds of the hoards of the dead. Garrett just stood in the stairwell, looking toward the monsters, and then he let out a nervous sigh.

“EVERYONE, GET TO THE PLATFORM!” Garrett shouted back at us. The lot of us took that as a sign to run as he stood on the stairs, looking like he was about to perspire into the next dimension as he held a hand up and snapped his fingers. I didn’t see what had happened on the staircase, being too focused on getting to the bottom of the stairs. It was right when I reached the bottom that Garrett appeared beside me in a flash of magic, startling me.

“CRAP!” I blurted out. Ariel gently smacked my forehead upon hearing me swear. “Ah! Sorry, sorry, okay.”

“Everyone, get behind me!” Garrett shouted. Nearly everyone ran the rest of the way down the stairs, trying to get to the platform as fast as humanly possible. Including me! I wasn’t going to take any chances, running behind him with Ariel still hanging out on my back. Garrett had his arm pointed toward the stairwell, his hand in prime position to snap his fingers at a moment’s notice. Even though most everyone else was, I wasn’t paying much attention to the hoard up the stairs. I was paying more attention to my friend. To Garrett, mumbling reassurances to himself.

“I can do it, I can do it, you’ve done this before, just do it but differently-”

I just stood there, watching the redead shamble down the stairs after us. Some were walking, some tumbling, some crawling, and all were out for our bones.

“Just make a barrier, make a barrier, make a barrier-”

“ANY DAY NOW, EMBERS!!” Mike roared at him. All it took was a scream from one of the redeads that had gotten a little to close for it to happen.

“MAKE A BARRIER!” Garrett snapped. It was both figurative and literal, his fingers snapping the moment he said it. And the moment he did all this, the redead came to an abrupt stop. The hoard crashed into a wall that wasn’t there as a barrier of diamonds appeared in an instant and pushed them back up the stairs like a snow plow driving up a hill. The redead were pushed back up the stairwell like piles of ragdolls, and we could only stand there in shock as they were pushed back toward the turnstiles while kicking and screaming.

“I… I did it,” Garrett breathed. He started laughing to himself. “I did it! I did magic on purpose this time!!”

“Cool, cool, awesome!” Navi said as she slowly and cautiously crawled out from the hood of my jacket that she’d hidden in during the latter half of this whole debacle. “Can we please go before they try to crawl down the stairs again??”

“Give it a sec, is everyone here??” Zelda asked, looking around. Pretty much everyone was accounted for. A bit shaken up, but accounted for nonetheless. And then, after all that, we watched as the A-Train rolled up to the platform, coming in hot but slowing down until it came to a stop and the doors opened. We all sighed in relief, as if we’d waited 100 years for it to arrive.

“Alright, everyone get on before they start back down the stairs again!” Fiona said, gesturing with her cloth hand as she floated right beside the door. She didn’t have to tell us all twice as we piled into the car. She floated in right after us as soon as we were all in the subway car. We all sat down, the old and frankly stiff seats never having been so comfortable. As I took a seat with Ariel, the train’s speaker system came on.

“Stand clear of the closing doors, please!”

It was the first time I ever felt relieved to hear that phrase. We all watched the doors of the subway close, leaving behind the eerie lobby and the hoards of shambling monsters as it left the station. My sister opted to get up and sit closer to Fiona.

“Link won, by the way,” she revealed to us, a little smile on her face. It made me smile. Partly because I won. Partly because my little sister was able to have at least a little fun during what was no doubt a terrifying situation. Someone else sat down beside me, leaning their head onto my shoulder. It was Zelda, who seemed exhausted. Whether that was emotional or physical was anyone’s guess. But she needed a rest either way. We all did. For the first time all day since this all happened, we had a moment to relax and rest. An hour. An hour was all we had.

Then the really hard stuff would begin.

Chapter Text

“Haha! Amazing!!”

It was around the 20 minute mark of the trip that Garrett stopped resting and started practicing. A few of us were. Wherever we were going, we would need to get a handle on whatever powers were thrust upon us anyways. You had people like Vinny doing something I imagine most magicians in books and movies do when they get bored, playing with a ball of magical fire and wind in his hands.

Miranda was seated next to him, doing something with her ponytail hand that I recognized from earlier that year. Miranda had broken her arm in August, and sometimes she’d do these little finger exercises - flexing and extending all her digits, flexing her pointer finger at the second knuckle, tapping her thumb to the tip of each finger - as recommended by her doctor to help the bone heal just the least bit faster. She was doing those same finger exercises with her extra hand, and I could only assume she was doing so to get a better function and grip with it.

“Hey, M, check it!” Vinny leaned closer to her as he held his clasped hands out in front of him, like he was about to pull the one on top away to show her a cool bug he found. Instead, he pulled it away to reveal a little flame in the shape of a bat that he made flutter up into the air before fizzling out. Miranda didn’t look overly surprised, but she had a look on her face to show you that she was at the very least mildly impressed. 

On the other end of the car, Garrett was also practicing magic in some way or another, snapping his fingers, firing knives into one of the crusty old subway seats with a giddy smile on his face. Once, twice, then a third time. The third time caught us all off guard as Garrett summoned, not a knife, but a sword. A sword that flew through the air much like the knives and embedded itself in the seat. The entire car went silent as he just backed up away from the crime scene and sat down, arms folded like a kid who’d accidentally knocked over a fragile vase. Zelda had since woken up from her brief nap, and I watched her cover her mouth with her hand as her attempt to hold back a laugh resulted in her snorting.

I looked around at the rest of the car. Fiona and Ariel were down at the other end of the row of seats. Both of them were dead asleep, with Fiona’s cloak-like arms draped around my sister like a blanket. Both of them were snuggled up and relaxed. It made me glad to know they were taking some time to relax. Mike, meanwhile, was across the car from Zelda and I. He’d spent that last 20 minutes doing… something with some stuff he’d found in the subway and the school. It took me a moment, but I recognized the shape of it. He was trying to build a slingshot, but quickly noticed that he hadn’t any string.

“Whatcha doing there, Mike?” I asked.

“Your mom.” He chuckled to himself like he’d given me the sickest burn ever. I just sat there with an unamused look on my face as Navi made a raspberry at him.

“Yeah yeah, you’re hilarious, Goss,” she snarked.

“Alright whatever, I’m making something in case there’s more weird monsters at the park,” he explained. “I can’t just punch everything. Something’s going to have the reaction time to either bite me or cut my hand off. So I figured a slingshot would be the easiest thing to fabricate.”

“Where’d you even find the stuff to make that??” Navi asked, fluttering off my shoulder and closer to him to look.

“Just around,” he said. “Plus that big lizard broke open my football helmet at school, so I used some of the insides of that to- actually, could you hover there for a sec?” Navi hovered back to where she was before and stood still in the air. It took me a moment to realize Mike was using her as a flashlight. “Only problem is, I haven’t found anything that would make good string.”

“Perhaps I might have something!” Went my switch. I pulled out Audrie, more out of curiosity than anything.

“... you have string??” Mike asked, perplexed.

“Something similar enough!” she informed us. “I’ve been storing materials from the enemies you’ve slain thus far. Take a look!” Her eye faded to a screen with a grid filled with all sorts of items, not unlike your typical inventory screen in games. What I saw was an assortment of things: some uneaten snacks that had been in my bag(which consisted of one unopened bag of pistachios, which showed up as the exact amount of nuts), as well as plenty of monster bits and bobs that consisted of bokoblin horns and teeth, an aeralfos tail and wing, waaaay too much chuchu jelly(upwards of 80 or 90 pieces of it), and… something else.

“What’re these even for??” I asked.

“Oh! Well, if you find certains bugs or frogs on your travels, you can simmer them in boiling water with any of these parts to create special potions and-”

“No, I meant these .” I couldn’t help but touch a finger to the screen, causing the thing I was referring to to appear in my hands to my ultimate dismay. It was another type of monster part in my inventory that had been labeled as “redead tendon”. Lucky for me, I didn’t have to take a picture of it to see that the switch was already providing a description of it. I took in a deep breath as I tried to keep my composure, only to realize that it… wasn’t as gross as I’d assumed.

“Wait a sec,” I picked it up out of my lap and held it up. “This looks like those elastic bands you buy at the craft store.” Mike took it from my hand, holding it in both of his as he pulled gently.

“Huh. You’re right.” He held it in his right hand. “It’s just some elastic. Like the kind you sew into a waistband or something.”

“Well, Ganondorf creates redeads from scratch, so perhaps that’s the best he had to work with,” said Audrie. I nodded along, until her words actually sank in.

“Wait, he makes them??” I asked. “Aren’t they zombies?”

“In Hyrule, yes,” she explained. “But based on my sources, Ganondorf is more partial to creating his own monsters without relying on outside resources. The redead we encountered in the subway station appeared to be made from clay.”

“Huh…” Zelda paused before nodding her head. “Cool, cool, so I don’t have to spend the rest of the train ride worrying about Ganondorf turning a bunch of innocent New Yorkers into zombies.”

“Well either way…” Mike trailed off as he took the piece of elastic as he drove one of the many nails he had from earlier through the two attachment frames, pulled them out, and then pulled the two ends of the elastic through the holes he made before tying them off. “I think it’ll work perfectly!” He pulled back the elastic to test the draw strength, aiming the unloaded weapon around the car just to get a feel for it.

“Neat!” was all I could think to say. I meant it, though. Not every kid could DIY a slingshot out of barely anything.

“Jeez, wish I could just do that,” Zelda huffed. She turned to me. “You know stuff about these games, can Zelda do anything cool with magic?” I paused for a moment, trying to remember something, anything.

“Uh, well… she can summon stuff made of light?” I guessed. “Try something like that!”

“Oh! Alright, okay,” she stood up off the subway seat. “Maybe I can make my own bow instead of having to find more arrows then.” She made a gesture with her hands like she were holding an invisible bow and arrow. And then said bow and arrow were no longer invisible. Just like that, a new bow suddenly flashed into her hands. It caught the both of us off guard with the suddenness of it, but Zelda’s look of surprise was quickly replaced with a look of giddiness.

“Heck yeah!!” she pulled the drawstring back, causing light to gather in her hand and extend out into an arrow, ready for firing. “Shoot, wait, is there something for me to aim this at?”

“Try here!” As if on cue, Simon held up his makeshift plank weapon that he tore off a bench back in the subway station, holding it above his head as he sat on the ground in the middle of the car. Zelda took him up on his offer, aiming for the top edge of the plank and firing. There wasn’t a lot of fanfare when it hit: no big sounds, no splitting of wood, none of that. Just the sound of a quick sizzle and a flash of light as the arrow burned a hole through the middle of the wood.

“Sick!” Zelda called out.

Simon had pulled his plank back down to look. “Geweldig! Less wind resistance.” That got a chuckle out of me. I looked over to see that the bright flash of light had woken up my cousin and little sister, though both didn’t make an audible complaint, simply just opening their eyes like a kitten you just startled awake while trying to pet its head.

“Hey, maybe since we’re all practicing, you could try the sword thing,” I said to Fiona.

“I told you already, I don’t know how to do it,” she grumbled. “Not like I need you putting your hands on me again anyways.”

“Is… that your actual reasoning, or are you just saying that because god forbid you have to trust me?”

“What!? No, no! This is a life threatening situation, Lincoln, I trust you.”

I quirked an eyebrow at her, hoping to coax her into some kind of elaboration. But then we felt the subway start to slow down. I sighed.

“Looks like we’re pulling into the station,” I said. Everyone else stopped their shenanigans and straightened up, some holding onto the railings or sitting down to keep from falling over. Here I was, hoping Mike was right in his mundane-ness to call this all a walk in the park. But knowing how these things usually go, it was going to be anything but.

We arrived at the station, coming out at a sidewalk across from the perimeter of the park. But we didn’t come up the stairs right away. I had to take a moment at the turnstiles to figure out the whole updating-the-map thing. That whole ordeal was the action-adventure equivalent of a technologically-illiterate older gentleman trying to figure out how to configure your phone on a wireless charging platform, and I’d rather not recount it. What matters is I now had a whole comprehensive, Zelda-themed map of the Manhattan borough.

Based on the location of the station, we were able to figure out fairly quickly where to go to get into the park. Despite what some people might think, Central Park isn’t just a solid rectangular plot of land. There’s places where streets cut through it where you could very easily drive your car to, whether that’s to get to one specific place in the park without having to walk, or just so you can speedrun looking at all the pretty trees and stuff. This time, that very much wasn’t the case. Wherever there was an entrance to the park, it was either blocked by walls of plants and foliage that had grown so close together that it might as well have been woven together by hand, or it was blocked off by steep rocks.

One such location was one of the entrances a tourist might actually assume is there: a nice little gateway leading to a pathway inside the park. The only problem was that it was blocked off by rocks, like some of the other pathways around the perimeter.

“Are you kidding me?!” Mike growled. “What, did he take the time to just stack rocks or something??” As he was talking, I walked over and ran my hand on the wall as I noticed something. Namely, the fact that it wasn’t all one solid piece of steep rock. It was more like Ganondorf had tightly packed a bunch of individual rocks together inside the gateway. I put two hands on one of the rocks and tried pulling, but it wouldn’t budge.

“Link, don’t,” Zelda said as she pulled me away. “Even if you could do that, the whole thing would come down on top of you.”

“Oh yeah, you’re right,” I huffed. “I feel like this is where we’re supposed to get through, though.”

As if on cue, Miranda’s hair hand shot past us and tried punching the rock wall. It didn’t work.

“Well, good thing I can’t feel pain in that hand,” she said nonchalantly.

“Alright, there’s gotta be more to this,” I grumbled as I pulled out my switch. “Maybe the compendium can tell us??”

“Well, not the compendium, but the SD card allows me to use another feature that may be of help!” Audrie told me. Her screen fizzled out before fading into yet another screen full of features. I won’t say what happened next, because it's funnier to think about what happened next from the perspective of an innocent animal in the park.

Picture this: You’re hanging out in Central Park. It’s a nice day, regardless of all the awful things going on in New York City. Perhaps the park is the one thing still left untouched by all that chaos. One of the gateways is blocked off by tightly packed rocks, but the park is still nice.

And then said wall of tightly packed rocks is blown open by a group of teenagers with a god damn bomb.

“Ah yes,” I said, coughing a bit as the dust from the whole thing settled. “Bombs! A mainstay in these games.”

“How did it do that!?” Zelda walked over to look at the switch.

“There’s this other tab here-” I pointed to the screen. “-with all these different features and stuff. Apparently it can make bombs out of thin air too??”

“Yes, but I’d recommend not using too many in public,” Audrie said. “I sense the people of this world are more likely to grow hostile and hysteric if they hear bombs going off.”

“Right, right, of course!” I switched back to the map tab before I started to approach the gate into the park.

“Lincoln! A word of warning!” Audrie called out right before I could step inside the park. “I won’t be able to offer my assistance once you enter the park!”

“Wha- what do you mean?!”

“Ganondorf is a powerful man, and he can recognize that I’m from his home plane. If I stay active when you enter here, he’ll be able to tell that we’re here. You’ll still be able to use the compendium, the map, and my other features, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to offer my personal assistance until we leave this place.”

“Well, uh, okay?” I chuckled nervously. “Any other places this shut down thing might happen later?”

“Only any other places I feel suspicious of,” she assured me. “I’ll warn you before we enter any such place!”

I could only nod my head solemnly.

“Don’t worry, dude,” Navi said, playfully punching my shoulder. Or trying to at least. I could barely feel her touching me to be honest. “You’ve got us! We’ll help you out any way we can.” I nodded my head, taking a deep breath before stepping inside the park with the others following. The moment we entered, I watched as Audrie switched herself into airplane mode, the sheikah eye disappearing from the screen all together. I only had access to the compendium, the map, and the newly added runes. I wasn’t alone, but it sure felt like it.

When one goes to Central Park, they expect to see some plant life. That’s what a park is all about. But as we walked deeper and deeper in, we noticed that there seemed to be too much plant life, like the groundskeepers hadn’t tended to the place in half a year. Lots of tall grass, overgrown bushes, and pathways covered up above by a canopy of trees. It was kind of beautiful, the way the light dappled through the leaves and onto the pathway. I couldn’t enjoy it. I knew why it looked like this.

“Be careful, you guys,” I told everyone. “There’s a lot of places for monsters to-”

“AHH!” I turned to see Mike cry out before fear-punching something as a reaction. A deku baba - the same plant that attacked us in the school gym as we were fleeing - had popped up out of the bushes and tried to attack us before Mike socked it in the face and knocked it back into the foliage. There was a bout of silence before he chuckled.

“HA! That’s what you get for kidnapping Uma!” He blurted out before making a rather rude hand gesture at it. We continued down the pathway - the Bridle Path for those who’ve been - on our way to try and find a more open area to get a lay of the land. We didn’t see any other deku babas down that path, nor really any other monster. We weren’t sure if that was because Ganondorf had poorly planned out his layout of monsters, or maybe Mike’s first reaction being to sock one in the face intimidated all the other monsters into staying hidden in the brush. I’d like to think it’s the latter.

My plan at the time was to follow the path down to Sheep’s Meadow. It was one of the most wide open places I knew of that was close by where we were, so I figured that'd be the best place to set up a sorta “home base” to congregate at depending on what we were supposed to be doing. It became clear that something was up the further we got down the path. March was one of the colder months in New York city. Even if it was late March and a little warmer, it still didn’t explain why it seemed to get hotter and hotter the further we got down the path.

“Heh. This feels familiar,” I heard Navi say as I started having to push aside plants on my way down the path.

“How so?” I asked as we made it to what looked to be the edge of the foliage and the edge of Sheep’s Meadow.

“The heat’s making me think of when my parents and I went to visit family a couple years back in Hawaaaaaat’s that?!?”

She said that the moment we came out of the woods, and it was then that we saw the source of the heat. Sheep’s Meadow, as mentioned before, is a rather wide open space. It was open enough for one to set up something like an outdoor fair or a soccer game. Just lots of grass surrounded by trees. What we saw as we crested the path was Sheep’s Meadow with a gigantic building smack dab in the middle of it. One covered in reliefs and carvings indicative of dragons and flames, with a big pair of double doors at the top of a staircase at its front.

“God, I hope no one got hurt,” Zelda said. “Looks like it might’ve popped up here while people were still at the park.”

“Well I don’t see any dead people, so I assume no one did!” Vinny called out as he looked around. “Don’t see many monsters either.”

“Well, as much as I’d hate to say it, the big terrifying building in the middle of the pasture might be a good place to start here?” My cousin recommended, gently nudging my shoulder before gesturing to it. I just nodded my head and signaled for everyone to follow. We went quietly, staying close to the ground while looking around to make extra sure there was nothing nearby that would hear us. It didn’t look like anything was actually in the meadow, but we were better safe than sorry. We made it to the front steps of the big new building, and Zelda and I were the ones to approach the front door. It was big and ornate, with a HUGE lock on the front of the double doors.

“Looks like we need a key for this one,” Zelda observed. I wanted to try something before we decided to go looking for a key or anything, putting my hand in front of the keyhole.

“I dunno, I could probably fit my hand in and- ACK!” I was right, the keyhole was big enough to fit a hand into. I was going to try and pick the lock the way one does with a bobby pin and paperclip, but since I could fit my hand in I could just use my fingers or something. Nope! I figured out where the heat was coming from. It was from inside the complex and it made the lock hot enough for me to pull my right hand out almost right away. I shook it out to try and relieve the pain.

“Yeeeeah, maybe don’t try and pick the burning hot metal lock with your hand,” Zelda chuckled. I stuck a tongue out at her as we walked down the staircase back toward the group.

“Welp. Door’s locked.” I told them as I crossed my arms.

“Do we need to get a key or something??” Simon asked.

“Oh! Maybe I can pick it!” Vinny offered, a mischievous smirk on his face.

“Oh, yes! I’ve never seen someone pick a lock before!” went my sister.

“No no, the lock’s too big for that,” Zelda said. “Link could stick his whole hand in it.”

“Yeah and unfortunately, the lock’s too hot to pick with your bare hand,” I told him, getting a feeling that’s the type of question he was 2 seconds away from asking. I pulled my switch out to check something. “I dunno, maybe wherever the key is, it’s marked on the-”

This was where I noticed it. Another window, one that only became apparent as I opened up back to the inventory page. It’s like when you open up your laptop, and see a tab open that you don’t remember seeing earlier. I clicked over to it real quick and…

“... Link, is that a mission log?” Zelda asked nonchalantly. I don’t know why I didn’t say anything at that moment. Maybe the way she asked it made me scared to admit that I had been dumb enough to not notice the big other tab on the switch that I could look at?

“Link, could we have checked where to go on that this whole time?!” She gently bopped me on the head. “Dummy!”

“It’s not my fault!” I retorted. “I didn’t see it!”

“Zed ZED! Calm down! He sees it now!” Navi shouted at her friend in an attempt to defend me. “And now we know where to go since the switch can flat out tell us!” She fluttered off my shoulder and balanced on the side of my hand to get a good look at the screen. “Looks like there’s four different places we gotta go?”

“Yeah, because the key’s split up into four pieces,” I explained. “Says so in the side quest description.”

“Oh neat, a description! Anything else we should know?” Miranda asked, peaking over my shoulder like a little kid.

I glanced over the words one more time. “Uhhhh just that each location is going to involve us encountering, quote-en-quote, ‘escaped exotic fauna’ from the Central Park Zoo.”

I heard a gasp from Zelda as a giddy little smile appeared on her face. “ This is my moment. ”

“Why’s she so excited?” Asked Mike.

“Zelda volunteers at the zoo,” I said.

“I work as a Discovery Guide on weekends,” she said proudly, putting a hand on her chest the way people do when introducing themselves. “If we’re dealing with animals, we’ll be fine! But we might need to split up to get this done quickly.”

“Split up?!” Garrett yelped. “With wild animals running around?!”

“We’ll be fine!” Zelda assured as she looked at the switch screen. “This time around, I’ll decide the groups so that you all are equally balanced and stuff. Plus… some of you guys might not realize who exactly you need to be partnered with.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?!” Went Mike.

“Have you ever partnered up with someone for a group project at school-” she asked. “-not because they can take half the load and actually help, but because you were good friends with them?”

“Oooooh I think I got it, yeah.” He stayed quiet after that.

“So for that reason,” she said, looking closely at the markers on the map and figuring out what to do. “ I’m going to figure out who goes with who and where…”

The group had split off and gone their own ways, knowing roughly where to go each way. They resolved to meet back up at the giant complex in the middle of Sheep’s Meadow once they completed their tasks in each section of southern Central Park. Though some weren’t fond of the pairings, they figured it could’ve been worse. One of the first groups to get to where they needed to go was the pair assigned to investigate Gapstow Bridge.

“So, where’s the key piece again??” Vinny asked as they entered the bridge in question, leisurely beginning their trek to the other side.

“Somewhere ‘round here!” replied Miranda. She was peeking over the edge of the bridge like a little kid, her feet lodged into a couple of footholds she’d found in the brick. “My best guess is in the water somewhere?” Vinny let out a noise upon hearing the possibility of having to swim. It was like a mix of a deep exhale and groan. He looked over the edge of the water, trying to see if he could spot where the key was. He hoped it wasn’t in the water. The last thing he needed was to get wet. Then he saw warm air come up in a spout as something came up for air. Then another something. Miranda and Vinny quickly realized what the challenge was here. The animals they had to deal with in The Pond were the Central Park Zoo’s sea lions.

And to Vinny’s dismay, he saw one of them holding a piece of metal in its mouth. A piece of metal that could only be the piece of the key they needed.

Vincent took in a deep breath before letting out an aggravated exhale.

“Hooookay, I see how it is,” he grumbled, going to step up and over the edge of the bridge.

“You need any help?”

“Nope! I’ve got it! You can stay there in case something happens.”

“Didn’t Garrett say you have a fear of water, though? Really, I don’t mind-”

“It’s fine! I’m fine! I don’t need your help, okay?!” Miranda had to stand still for a moment after he snapped back at her. “I’m not afraid of some pond water! Or these swimming circus critters!” 

Miranda watched him look down at the water before taking a deep breath. He had an idea, but who knows if it would work?

“Avatar, don’t fail me now…” Vinny put his hands under him as he started doing his thing with the wind. It took him a moment to psyche himself up, and then Miranda watched as he leapt from the top of the bridge and towards the water. Whatever he was planning, it obviously didn’t happen as quickly as he thought it would, as Vinny let out a scream of terror as he got close enough to the water’s surface for him to assume he was going to fall right in. Miranda covered her eyes with her hair hand, not wanting to watch her friend fall in.

But then, he didn’t.

Miranda did what most impatient children covering their eyes do and peeked through her fingers. Vincent had not fallen in, but instead was floating right above the surface of the pond. The water underneath his feet was being blown out of the way, the draft keeping him up just above the surface of the pond. He let out a triumphant laugh.

“Ha! Yes! AIR SCOOTER !” And just like that, Vincent was off. Like a scene out of a ghibli film, or perhaps like a magical moment between a surfer and a pod of dolphins, Vincent skated across the surface of the pond as the sea lions played in the water around him. Vincent wasn’t there to play, nor was he there to watch the sea lions leap around in the water around him. He wanted to get away from The Pond as fast as possible, and to do that he’d need to find the one with the key as fast as possible. Lucky for him, there were only three lions to worry about, and he was able to spot the one with the key in its mouth.

Vinny had to be smart about this. The last thing he needed was to fly at the sea lion, miss, and possibly fall into the water. He didn’t need to embarrass himself in front of a friend. This was an important moment. He had to time it right. He had to get the maneuver over to snatch the key just right. He had to get this all right, right, right! 

One sea lion leapt out of the water. Then another. Then-

SNATCH!

Vincent rolled to the side in the air, one hand outstretched, grabbing the key right out of the sea lion’s mouth as it leapt through the air out of the water. The creature fumbled as it was knocked off balance, clumsily falling back into the water as Vinny straightened himself out in the air.

“Haha! I got it!!” he called out, holding up his closed fist with the key piece within it. Miranda was ecstatic. He actually did it! She clapped her hands to validate Vincent’s excitement, but the moment was short lived. One must understand that The Pond at Central Park is a rather darkly colored body of water. It’s one of those ponds where you have to strain your eyes to tell what's the bottom and what’s simply just the suspended in-between of the water. As such, there wasn’t much Vinny could do in order to spot the sea lion that leapt up from the water, bumping into him and knocking him off balance and into the pond.

“VIN!” Miranda was quick to throw her head forward until her eyes were turned toward the water below the bridge, slingshotting her hair toward where Vinny had fallen in. She pulled the shorter than average young man out of the water as he thrashed around like a seizing snake, his panic overriding his instinct as a learned swimmer to tread water. She was quick to pull him back, plopping him down on the bridge with a splat.

“God, Vin, are you okay!?” she asked, getting close to him before he bolted up in his seat.

“No! I’m not!” He got to his feet before waving his hands around like a very angry and overworked conductor, making the wind shoot up around him and through his clothes to dry himself off in an instant. “I fell in the water! The big, dark, murky, scary water! With wild animals all around me!”

“Hold on, hold on, you freaked out because you got wet??”

“No, M, because I’m terrified of water if I can’t see the bottom!” he confessed, going to walk to the other end of the bridge and onto solid ground. “You know, that thing Garrett called me out for back at the truck!”

“I thought it was just thalassophobia that was a problem,” Miranda said as she turned to him and followed behind. “Ain’t that just the ocean??”

“Nah, just… if my feet don’t touch the bottom, I’m not having a good time,” he explained. “Any body of water can fill that criteria.”

“What about pools?”

“Pools are fine. Pools you can see the bottom. Lakes and oceans? You can’t .”

“Well then why did you go into the water if you were scared of it, dingus??”

“Because I gotta be brave, damnit!” He snapped back at her. There was a bout of silence before he calmed himself down and sighed. “When you’re… when you’re a little guy, I guess, people always poke fun atcha when you’re by yourself. If I act all tough and stuff, it deters other guys! Bullies and stuff don’t find it worth it to pick a fight if the funny little guy is yelling at them loud enough to shatter glass.”

Miranda couldn’t help but think about that. Her, someone who liked to dress in a way that wasn’t entirely normal, knew full well of trying to gain scary dog privileges while becoming the scary dog herself. Even going so far as to lie to her one friend’s other friends about being sensitive to the light so she wouldn’t be judged as harshly for simply dressing the way she wanted to. To all this, she just nodded her head in understanding.

“Little dog syndrome. Know that one a little too well,” she said. Sje lightly punched his shoulder in a playful way. “But we’re both working together and stuff, you don’t have to be a big tough guy because you ain’t alone, or something.”

“Well in that case, you don’t have to lie about burning in the sunlight to keep us from judging you,” he remarked. Miranda froze for a moment as a look of guilt crossed her face. “We’re all working together now, and it’s a safe space. I don’t think anyone’s gonna have the sense to make fun of you when we can use all the help we can get.”

She just nodded at him. “ Touché .”

And then suddenly, something bobbed up out of the water. It was rather audible, so they noticed it right away: a wooden chest.

“Is that a treasure chest??” Vincent asked, half chuckling, as Miranda went and plucked it from the water with her ponytail hand. She set it down on the bridge.

“It would appear so!” she said. She pulled the top open and took a glance inside. Despite what one might assume about finding chest’s bobbing in lake water, the inside as well as its contents were completely dry. And the contents?

An earthy red jacket, with a zipper up the front. It felt strange in Miranda’s hands, like it was made from rope rather than fabric. Rope and… something she thought was sequins when she first spotted them scattered throughout the weaving of the jacket, but she soon realized it felt more like fingernails than plastic. Once it clicked as to what it was, a little smile came to her face.

“Why did WE gotta go to the playground??” Ariel vented. She was walking between Fiona and Simon, both of which were content to be going where they were going. Ariel very much was not. “It’s just a bunch of rock climbing for babies!”

“Well sometimes it's okay to be a little bit baby-ish,” Simon said, gently patting her shoulder as she trudged along with her arms crossed indignantly. “Do you ever think about mothers and fathers believing the playground to be baby-ish? And how many still go with their children there to play?” Ariel stopped pouting for a moment as she pondered this. Ariel caught up in things like this sometimes: trying to act mature and grown-up instead of taking a look at things from an actual grown-up’s perspective. Her thoughts were stopped when she heard something and looked back up ahead of them.

The Heckscher playground was a space that one was supposed to enter through a taller structure, one that had a covered pathway with an awning and such. Through it, one could see the array of swing sets and slides and climbing structures, but the three of them locked their eyes on something in the dead center of one of the rubber flooring areas. It was a cage - those fancy ones zookeepers used to transport animals from one place to another - surrounded by these strange looking creatures. Creatures that were poking and prodigy something inside the cage with forks and sticks, their pointed tails wagging maliciously behind them as they giggled madly. Ariel was immediately filled with rage when she saw what it was they were poking and prodding at inside the cage: a poor, defenseless monkey.

“HEY, GET AWAY FROM IT YOU BULLIES!” she cried out, breaking off from the group and running toward the monsters, arms flailing.

“Ariel, no!!” Fiona called out, unable to go running after her before it was too late. The loud screaming and flailing of the little girl that was easily twice the size of the goblin-like creatures caused the pack of four to scatter like rats, running off to different parts of the playground. Ariel huffed and puffed, sitting down as Fiona and Simon caught up with her.

“Ariel, what were you thinking?? You could’ve gotten hurt!” Fiona scolded.

“Well they were hurting it!” she said right back.

“Hurting what??” Simon walked over, keeping his voice low and calm despite what had happened in an attempt to keep things from spiraling out of control. He kneeled down beside Ariel as she pointed to the cage. That’s when he and Fiona saw it.

“A monkey??” She kneeled down beside the others. “Why were they torturing a- GASP!” What was inside the cage was a young japanese macaque. Fiona knew them as those adorable little monkeys that survived the harsh cold of their natural habitat by bathing together in hot springs. But she didn’t gasp because she was reminded of any of those pictures of videos. She noticed that it was gripping a piece of the key in its hand. She was also quick to notice that the ventilation gaps in the cage were too small for the monkey to simply slide the key to them. Not that she believed they could convince it to do so, but you never know.

“We have to find a key for its cage I think,” Fiona said.

“Well perhaps it’s like some of those monster fighting games!” Simon proposed. “All those mini bokoblins ran off once we arrived. Maybe we have to defeat them all to progress.”

“Oh! So we have to beat up those little pig guys to get the monkey out?” Ariel asked.

“Precisely!” Simon responded with a smile.

“Well, there were four of them,” Fiona reminded him. “I think the best course of action is for me to take two and you to take two.”

“Sounds good to me!” went Simon.

“And Ariel!” Fiona got Ariel’s attention. “You stay here.”

“WHAT?! Whyyyy?”

“Because you got lucky when they ran off. I don’t want those… you called them mini bokoblins, Simon? Miniblins . I don’t want those miniblins hurting you, okay?”

Ariel simply nodded indignantly as she sat down with her arms crossed.

“Just stay here, and we’ll be right back!” Fiona said, gently floating away toward the playground. “Let’s do this, Simon!” And like that, they were off.

Ariel sat where she was, angry but obliging. She had nothing else to do, so she did the one thing she didn’t get a chance to do at school: she pulled out her lunch box and went to peel and eat the orange she didn’t eat during lunch. She heard a little trill from the cage, causing her to look over.

“I ran out of time during lunch and didn’t get to eat my orange,” she said, as if the monkey had asked her a question. It made her feel better to talk to the monkey with no one else around. “So I’m eating it now! It’s a nice snack.”

She looked back to see the monkey eyeing her food. Ariel was an empathetic child. She didn’t know how long this monkey had been locked up, or how long it had been since the poor thing had last eaten. So, Ariel being Ariel, she pulled off one of the pieces of orange and passed it to the monkey through the ventilation gaps.

And while Ariel was having luck with her creature-related endeavors, Simon and Fiona were not. Climbing up and down slides, trying to catch them in the middle of open spaces, things like that. The Heckscher Playground boasted a little play structure made to look like a castle. Simon always wondered whether or not it was meant to look like the Belvedere Castle on the other end of the park. Right now, all it looked like to him was a big pain in the neck as he tried to catch the same miniblin over the bridge connecting two ends of the structure.

He’d jumped and tried to catch it, only to fall flat on his face as it ran out from under him. He groaned to himself as Fiona ended up beside him, huffing and puffing as she floated beside the bridge in midair. 

“It’s like herding cats!” she complained.

“No kidding!” Simon said as he stood back up, brushing himself off. “It’s like when Mina and I tried to pet our cat, Henrick, when we were little. We’d have to work together to corner him from both sides befores we could pick him up.” Fiona paused for a moment. The childhood reminiscing sparked an idea in her head.

“Perhaps we should work together to corner Henrick then!” she said, looking at him. Simon appeared confused at first. Up until it clicked in his head.

“Ah! Yes! Let’s catch all four Henricks then!” He was quick to run off, Fiona trailing behind him and yelling about how they should come up with a solid plan first. Simon didn’t need a plan, though. He just needed to draw upon his experience as a little cat wrangler when he was younger. It was rather easy. Fiona would chase them, and Simon would catch them. He was never all that great at pursuing, but he was good at snaking in and out of places - and people in the case of football games - in order to sneak over to where he needed to be. Over and over, he and Fiona made good timing each time.

They cornered the two that had been sneaking around the castle first, seeing as they were already there when they enacted their new plan. Then Simon hid as Fiona found another one hiding behind a bush and chased it out into the open. Simon sprung down from one of the castle bridges like a lurker in the dark, coming down right on top of the miniblin and defeating it. The last one took a little more effort. Fiona had to chase it all over the playground before Simon could actually get the jump on it. It was a funny sight, watching the miniblin try to escape down a metal slide where Simon was waiting at the bottom. And once it realized this, it was already too late. And in one fell swoop, Simon smacked it across the face with his wood plank and took it out like that. Once it was all done, they let out exhausted sighs.

“Finally… Ariel, we’re ba- huh??”

They’d just gotten back when Fiona saw what was going on. The cage was opened, just like they’d assumed, but the monkey was sitting content next to Ariel as she talked to it and shared orange slices.

“A-Ariel, you really shouldn’t be feeding the monkey,” Fiona said as she cautiously floated closer. “It’s a wild animal.”

“Technically, it’s from a zoo,” Ariel said as-a-matter-of-fact-ly. “It’s used to people feeding it.”

“Well still! You shouldn’t be feeding it either way.” Fiona went to pull her little cousin away when the monkey suddenly stood up and went to walk off. It motioned for them to follow, not waiting for confirmation as it continued on.

“Look! It wants us to follow!” Ariel said. She got up and sprinted after it. Well, sprinting is an overstatement. 9-year-olds can really only run so fast compared to older kids like Fiona or Simon. But somehow, she was able to keep ahead of them as they pursued her up the castle shaped climbing structure and toward where the monkey was leading her. The lot of them ended up in one of the faux towers, stopped at its entrance as the monkey didn’t wait for them and climbed over the side of the tower, hopped into a tree, and then disappeared into the brush.

They were left with a wooden chest, sitting in the middle of the tower. Ariel was the one to open it, not hesitating for a moment. What she found inside confounded her. The confused look on her face was enough to clue the older kids in on this. She drew from the chest… something. Something with a handle, a pointy bit, and a roll of chains inside it.

And they had no clue what it was for.

“This sucks…”

Mike had been saying different variations of that phrase for the past few minutes as him and Garrett made their way toward the Wollman rink. It was a place Garrett and his folks went to almost every winter, so he was leading the way while Mike took up the back.

“How come Zelda couldn’t have put me with Matheson’s cute cousin?” Mike thought aloud. “At least she knows how to skate.”

“Can you stop please?” Garrett said as he stopped and turned to face him. “I’m as unhappy about this as you are, but I’m sure Zelda knows what she was doing, pairing us up for this. After all, I’ve got a handle on this whole magic thing.”

“Well what’s that gotta do with it?”

“Well just that in the sense that I have powers to protect us with, and you… don’t.” Despite it being true, that seemed to infuriate Mike.

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?! I’m just as capable as all you guys!”

“Punching things isn’t going to work for every situation, you know.”

“Well it will for most!”

“Yeah, until something bites your hand off in self defense!”

“Well at least I don’t have to believe in myself to be able to punch crap!”

“Oh, like that invalidates my abilities at all?!”

“It’s the most basic anime crap that anyone can do, and your angry short guy friend had to teach it to you!”

“Well! Maybe that’s because it’s hard for me to believe in myself when burly football idiots at school are always belittling me!”

Mike’s face went from an angry scowl to a shocked open-mouthed frown. The same kind of face someone gets when their mother calls them by their full name, first, middle and last. He didn’t dare retort, and just stood in silence as Garrett ranted on as they walked.

“Yeah! You heard me! I’d rather work with anyone else in this group because at least they’re my friends! You’re just the bloke that tries stealing my homework from me every morning before STEM class and constantly makes fun of my appearance. You know that I already know that I'm taller and skinnier than everyone else, right? I don’t need you reminding me of all the crap I hate about myself! Gits like you are why I wear long sleeves and pants in the middle of June.”

There was a long pause. The comment about long sleeves was causing Mike’s speculatory half of his brain to go places he didn’t like. He didn’t get a chance to ask for clarification before they arrived at the skating rink, stopping right outside it. The whole place was a mess. Piles of snow and ice shavings all over the place, jagged spires of ice growing up and out of the barrier around the rink, and all the trailer trimmings of a frozen piece of open space that had been left in the cold for far too long.

“Wow, this place is not up to code,” Mike said with a nervous chuckle, trying to alleviate the awkward atmosphere. It didn’t work. Perhaps things could’ve gone differently for the two of them. But Garrett had gotten a feel for this “venting” thing and craved more. He’d always been the quiet one. The shy one. The one afraid to speak his mind or stand up for himself for fear of other people striking him down. He walked into the rink and stood utop the nearest and tallest snow mound.

“Hey, monsteeeeer! We’re trespassing! I’m on this snow mound and it’s mine now!” He started doing a cocky little dance to solidify this. Mike just looked at him as if he were an idiot, or maybe someone who’d gone to the ice rink in only their underwear. His expression changed to something else when he saw something behind Garrett on the rink.

“I’m feeling the anger of a thousand suns and am aching for a fight, whoever-you-are!” Garrett called out again.

“Uh, Embers??” Mike tried to warn him.

“If you want your snow mound back, I guess you’ll have to try and kill me!” Garrett couldn’t see it, but Mike sure did: a creature right behind him, nestled in the snow, ready to pounce on the taller of the two from behind.

“DUDE!”

Mike leapt forward and grabbed Garrett around the waist, tackling him and bringing them both down into the snow. Garrett was very ready to snap at him again, but he didn’t get a chance to as his eyes locked onto something as it leapt over them like the world’s worst hurdles. The two were quick to sit up and look over as the creature landed. And that’s when they saw what they were up against: a snow leopard. A bigger, buffer, much scarier snow leopard.

And to their horror, it had the piece of the key hanging from a collar around its neck.

“What in the HELL?!” Garrett’s anger dropped the moment he laid eyes on the feline, shooting to his feet before snapping his fingers at it. The creature was able to leap out of the way of both knives he’d tried to fire at it, terrifying him even more as he shot to his feet and tried to keep his distance. Mike was quick to notice that Garrett had managed to summon more than one knife this time before he pointed and fired. He was quick to act after that.

“Cover for me, Embers!” He called out. Garrett couldn’t even squeak out a reply before Mike was up and running for the grassy hills around the ice rink.

“Goss, you better have something good!” he called back.

Garrett did his best to fight back while Mike went looking around. Just like in Sheep’s Meadow, people seemed to have left in a hurry. He ran around, looking past ice chests, mini folding tables, beach chairs, all sorts of things that would indicate someone had gone here to enjoy the scenery. And then, finally! Mike pulled a picnic blanket off the grass before making a run for the rink.

“Embers, make a bunch of those knives, but don’t fire them!” he ordered.

“How many exactly?!”

“Four at least!”

Garrett didn’t reply, simply snapping his fingers and calling forth four floating knives before balling his hand up to keep them from prematurely firing. He stood where he was, legs wobbling, as he watched the angry feline creature get ready to pounce. Then Mike made it to his side.

“Alright, keep ‘em still!” he commanded.

“I’m trying!!”

Mike was quick to set his plan into motion, tying the four corners of the picnic blanket he’d found to the ends of each of the four knives. He was going as fast as he could, and yet it didn’t seem fast enough. Not when the snow leopard had already started bounding toward them again.

“MichaaaaaAAAEL!!” Garrett cried out.

“NOW NOW, FIRE!!”

Right as the leopard leapt into the air to try and come down on the two, Garrett pointed. The four knives went flying, all of them soaring around the leopard and allowing the creature to get caught up in the picnic blanket. It went flying backwards as it got tangled up in the cloth, falling to the ground and rolling to a stop like a very angry burrito.

“Grab it grab it grab it!!” Garrett called out, trying to keep his voice hushed yet authoritative at the same time. Mike was quick to run over and yank the key piece off of the creature’s collar, looking at it with a huff. The creature writhed around a bit more, causing the burly teen to flinch back before the feline freed itself. The meek little snow leopard had returned to its normal shape - the one most earth people think of when they think of a snow leopard - and its first action was to flee from the two and into the woods.

“That’s right, you better run!” Mike called out with a laugh. He turned back around, a hand raised in the air to high five Garrett before he stopped. Garrett very much wasn’t comfortable enough for any kind of friendly gesture, even after all that. Mike just put his hand down. “Good job, Embers.”

“Yeah,” he sighed. “Good job to you, too.” They were content to leave, until Garrett’s foot snagged on something. A chest had appeared in the snow, a chest that both of them were sure hadn’t been there when they entered the rink. Mike was the one to get it open and pull out what was inside. The contents confused the both of them as they looked to the other for some kind of idea as to what they were looking at. It was a hammer. A big hammer, but a hammer nonetheless.

The Ramble is one of the prettiest places in Central Park. Long pathways full of foliage, flowers and cool waterfalls and rivers were a rather normal sight along it. Overall, it was a nice sight if you didn’t mind hiking. Personally, I like to sit and admire things. I could put up with walking as long as it’s mostly flat, but the Ramble… was not that. Zelda, Navi and I were the only ones traversing it that day, and we all had our guards up. Partly anyways. Zelda seemed surprisingly calm and collected considering all the crap we were going through.

“So, pray tell,” I said lightheartedly. “How come us three are going this way and not somewhere else? I assume we’re not here to admire the scenery or anything.”

Zelda shook her head. “No, none of that.” She paused for a moment before sighing. “To be frank, I just wanted a place for us to talk alone.”

“Uh oh… should I be here for this??” Navi asked, halfway through backing away into the hood of my jacket.

“Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s fine!” I said to her.

“Well I dunno actually,” Zelda continued. “I… I saw you grab something in Mr. Doirich’s closet. Something other than the map.” That made me go pale in the face. “What was it? It didn’t look like the other notes Ganon scribbled down.” I cleared my throat to try and shut her up before I answered.

“It’s nothing, really!” I assured her. “Nothing you need to be worrying about. I just wanted to look at it later once we get some down time is all.” Zelda looked as if she was about to ask me even more questions, but then her eyes darted up into the foliage.

“Shush! Look up!” She whisper-yelled, pointing behind me. I turned around enough so Navi could see where I was looking, too. That’s where we saw what had caught Zelda’s attention: a big gray-blue bird, with a crest of feathers on its head and black lines on its face accentuating its eyes. It was perched peacefully in one of the trees above, and it held something in its beak: a metal piece of a key.

“Oh! I don’t think I’ve ever seen a bird like that around,” Navi said. “My mom takes me birdwatching with her hear sometimes on the weekends, so I’ve seen almost-”

“Well that’s because it’s not native to here,” Zelda said, interrupting her. “It’s a Victoria Crowned Pigeon!” The bird turned its head to the side as its attention was drawn to her. “They have a couple in the Tropical Zone of the Central Park Zoo!”

“I’m guessing that’s where you work?” I asked.

“Yeah. Another reason I wanted to go here with you guys.” She looked from me and Navi back up at the bird. “We’ll need a way to get it down.” My first instinct was to reach a hand over and cover up Navi.

“NO! Definitely not! Navi’s been through enough as it is, and I don’t think her rat anxiety can take it!”

“Wha- rat anxiety??” Navi was confused. “What’s that supposed to mean?!”

“That’s just the term for it! When a small little guy is always scared because pretty much anything can hurt them.”

Navi went to open her mouth to retort, paused, and then closed it. “Alright, fine. I guess I have rat anxiety.”

“Well either way, relax you two,” Zelda huffed. “The Crowned Pigeons at the zoo aren’t even fed anything that flies. They’re more likely to peck at a worm than Navi.”

I wondered for a moment how else we were supposed to get the key from the bird. I thought about the aeralfos from the school and wondered what game mechanic we were supposed to exploit here. Did we have to chase this bird down? Fetch something to give to it? Fight another bird on The Ramble that this particular bird had a grudge against? It became very clear that I was overthinking things when I heard Zelda make a noise.

I looked over to see her with her arm outstretched, a kind smile on her face as she made some clicking noises with her tongue at the pigeon. The bird tilted its head at her as it looked at her intently for a few moments. And then in the next few moments, it indulged her, fluttering down from its perch and onto her arm. This shocked me, not because it worked, but because of the sheer size of this bird. It was like a full grown turkey had landed on her arm.

“Dang, it’s huge!” I said.

“Well, they are the largest species of pigeon in the world,” Zelda replied as she gently caressed the underside of the pigeon’s chin. “And this one seems to be a real big sweetie.”

She kneeled down to pull something out of her lunch bag. It was a ziplock full of grapes, something I assumed she had for school lunch and just didn’t get a chance to eat. She plucked one from the bag and offered it to the pigeon, at which point it took it in its beak and downed it. Well, at least someone was going to eat them. Zelda let it finish before gently moving her arm in the way bird keepers do to get the bird to take off and head on its merry way. And as it left, it left the key piece behind.

“That… that can’t have been it, right??” Navi asked me. “There has to be something else to this one!”

“Maybe,” Zelda said with a shrug. “But maybe there just happened to be a nicer, more peaceful way to get the key, and we did it.” She tossed the key piece to me, and I caught it with both my hands. Just like that, we were done. Or so I thought.

“Hey! Look! Something in the waterfall!” Navi called out, pointing toward a nearby water feature. We looked to see that, indeed, there was something near the waterfall. A chest had very suddenly appeared underneath the curtain of water.

“When did that get there??” Zelda asked, thinking aloud as I hopped the fence to investigate. It wasn’t locked in any way, so I was able to pop it open fairly easily. The contents of the chest were what confused me. I gently pulled them out and made my way back to Zelda.

“Well, guess these are for you!” I said as I passed them to her. They were a pair of earrings: orange-red, hooped earrings with little spurs on them.

“You think the others got these too?” Zelda asked.

“Probably.” I looked back down the way we came. “Guess we just gotta meet back up with them and find out.”

Chapter Text

It took a little while before the others met back up with us at what we’d taken to calling a temple. It had all the trailer trimmings of a stereotypical eastern temple, so it just seemed fitting(then again, the only thing I really had to compare it to were history textbook pictures and the Thai temples I’d pass by sometimes going through Thai Town in Queens, but still). Everyone came back around the same time, though, and we were quick to get the separate pieces of the key and put it together. I was worried for a moment we might need to weld it or something, but to my relief the bits just kind of came together. It was like magical magnets, each piece flying into another and sealing together with a flash of red light. Once the final piece came together - the head of the key - we all looked at it for a moment in awe.

“Good lord, it’s huge!” Fiona said with wide eyes.

“Well the lock’s pretty big, so it makes sense,” I replied, about to put it into the lock when Miranda stopped me.

“Yo, wait a sec, hero boy!” She said. “Vin and I found a thing at the bridge.” She held her hair hand out in front of her, opening it to reveal a folded up piece of clothing to me. “Figure you might know what it is? That or use it.”

“Ah, yes! We found something, too!” Simon said.

“Us to,” added Garrett. Mike lightly punched his shoulder.

“Hey man, I was gonna keep the thing.”

“Goss, with all due respect,” Garrett replied through clenched teeth. “We don’t even know what it is!”

“Of course we do, it’s a hammer!”

“A hammer??” I asked. Garrett didn’t say anything, just handing to me a hammer about the size of a large hydroflask. I let out a huff of surprise as I held it in my hand. “Huh! Definitely a hammer, yeah! And a powerful one, too!” I handed it back to them. “Mike should keep it, it’s a good weapon.”

“Way ahead of you!” Mike said, snatched it up from Garrett’s hands.

“We found something too!” shouted my sister, eagerly shoving something at me. It didn’t take a genius - or even a die-hard Zelda fan - to figure out what my sister was holding. Embarrassing as it is, I may have let out an excited little squeak when I saw it.

“Hookshot!” I blurted out, gently taking it. “It’s a hookshot!”

“What’s it supposed to do?” Fiona asked.

“Well you see-” I held the hookshot in my right hand and held it up. “-you hold on tight to this handle, push this button under here with your thumb, and-”

SHOOM!

The hookshot suddenly did its thing and fired, the pointed end of it bouncing off the metal doorframe of the temple, bouncing back, and landing right on my head, causing me to let out a yelp of pain.

I heard a snort from a couple of people trying to hold in laughs, but I didn’t have the energy to hound them about it. That was my bad.

“Alright, well, I’ll hold onto this one,” I stashed it in my backpack. “Seeing as most everyone else has a way to get up to high places but me.”

“Well what about me?” asked Zelda.

“Just say the word and I’ll pass it to you!”

“And what about me??” asked Mike, half miffed.

“I dunno, Vinny can whirlwind your butt up.”

“I don’t think even magic’s enough to get that off the ground…” Vinny said nonchalantly. I had a feeling a fight was about to break out, so I interrupted it before it could start.

“We can discuss the shared custody of the hookshot after we save Coach!” I said, holding the boss key up again. I didn’t wait for any affirmation before shoving the business end of the thing into the lock, needing to use both hands to get it to turn. The moment I heard the big and fairly loud and audible click in the lock, I took a step back. The key crinkled in on itself inside the lock, as if trying to destroy itself as the lock itself started melting and dripping off the door. It dissolved and evaporated the moment each drop of metal hit the ground, and we all stepped back as the final bit of the lock melted away and the doors opened inwards.

The next thing we felt was the equivalent of opening your car door for the first time on a fairly hot day and getting a massive wave of heat you weren’t prepared for. We stood there for a moment to get used to the sudden change in the air. Some of us did so better than others. I heard Navi cough a couple times.

“Oop! Yep. Hawaii.” She grumbled. She held a hand over her eyes, like people do when they shield out the sun, looking inside the door. I was stuck looking in as well. The inside was… dark. Dark as in I couldn’t make out anything. Nothing but the largeness of the open space inside. The temple was entirely empty, with ground made up of stones and grout spanning for what looked to be the length of the school gym.

“I’m getting a bad feeling about this one,” Navi said as she went to bury herself into my hoodie. She let out a surprised sound as I took off my jacket.

“Yeah, so am I,” I said as I tied the sleeves of my jacket around my waist. It was enough that I was wearing jeans, but I wasn’t going to force myself to fight in a burning hot building wearing a hoodie.

“Yeah, same here,” Zelda agreed. She took her NYU hoodie off, gently setting it on the steps of the temple. “Well… we were going to have to do this eventually.” At first I thought she meant the temple itself, because duh! But I realized what she really meant when she turned around.

“Ariel, Simon, I think it's best if you two stay out here,” she said.

“What?! Again!?” Ariel blurted. “But I wanna help!”

“You can help by staying safe, both of you,” Zelda replied. “If there’s one thing I know about these games, a big wide open space means big monsters, and the last thing we need is you getting hurt and Simon getting hurt again .” She patted Ariel on the head.

“No worries, Miss Masters,” said Simon politely as he put a hand on Ariel’s shoulder. “I’ll keep this little rascal out of trouble while you're in there saving the world.”

“Thank you, really,” she replied. She turned around to face me as I nodded my head.

“Alright you guys, let’s head in.” The other 8 of us went right on in, ready for whatever would come. Soon, the temple doors would close behind us, and the next big challenge would begin…

The moment the doors to the temple closed, the first thing Simon did was scream. It was muffled thanks to the hands he had on his face, but it was loud enough for Ariel to stop her bored swinging on the railings and look at him. She’d definitely recognized it as a frustrated scream, and it took her back a bit.

“Are you okay??” she asked as Simon stopped and put his hands down.

“Yes! I’m fine!” She watched the older kid sit down, quickly and angrily, his arms crossed as he sat indignantly on the top step of the temple. Ariel was a perceptive kid. She’d thrown plenty of tantrums in her time, and she knew when someone else was doing the same. Even if Simon was trying to keep a lid on it, she could tell he was mad. 

“You told me to be fine about it,” she said, breaking the silence. “Why’d you tell me to be all understanding when you’re upset, too??”

“I fully understand!” He said back. “I’m just fed up.” He leaned forward onto his knees and held his head up with his hands. He seemed like he was content to leave it there, but Ariel wasn’t. She sat down where she was on the top step, little by little adorably scooting closer to Simon’s side. More silence. Simon didn’t even seem to notice that she was seated right beside him now. She rocked back and forth in place before finally deciding to ask.

“Why’re you so fed up then?” she asked innocently.

Simon let out a deep sigh. “Just… this!” He pointed back at the now closed temple doors. “They’ve always treated me like a kid. Link has always treated me like a kid! So have his friends. I mean… when my sister first introduced me to them, I was…” He paused for a moment, thinking. “Well I think I was around your age, actually.”

“Really?” she said.

“Well, I don’t believe I was quite that young exactly, but I was in 6th grade. Fresh out of elementary school,” he clarified. “She introduced me to her new high school freshmen friends after the first week of the school year. Then she got caught up in her medical school preparations. I hang out with them more than she does these days! I’ll be old enough to drive a car next year, and they will probably still treat me like a kid.”

“We’re all kids though, aren’t we?”

“Technically speaking, yes, I suppose.” He sounded frustrated when he admitted to this. “But in that case, all of us should be staying out here. And even then, I know your brother makes you stay out here because he wishes for you to remain unharmed.” Simon put a hand to his head as he leaned forward again, looking like he wanted to curl up into a ball and shrivel away. “I feel like they make me stay out here so I’m not a burden.”

The moment he said that, Ariel let out a rather offended gasp. It was like he’d called her a rude word, and not like he’d simply voiced his thoughts about himself.

“Shut up!! That’s not true at all!” She said, gently shoving his shoulder the way children do when they’re upset but don’t have the strength to actually knock them over. “You helped my cousin beat up a bunch of little devil guys on the playground! And you’re a big guy, so chasing them through all the jungle gyms was probably really hard!” That last part made him chuckle. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that her cousin was the one who did all the chasing. “Plus, you play football! So you gotta be super strong!” That made his smile falter.

“Yeah, sure, football makes me strong, let’s go with that.” Simon was back to looking at the ground with his head in his hand. 

Ariel tilted her head to the side. “... Why’d you say that like you were mad?”

“Don’t worry, it’s not you,” he assured. He had to ponder for a moment. A moment was all it took for him to figure, if he was going to confess this, it might as well be to the one person who genuinely believed in him. “The truth is I… don’t very much like football.”

Ariel let out a gasp. “Well if you don’t like it, why do you play it??”

“My parents have always wanted the best for us,” he explained. “Mina’s studying to be a doctor since they make a lot of money, and they wanted me to play football and get an athletic scholarship. Football has the most of those anyways.”

Through all this, Ariel had been thinking. Thinking about what this all implied. Thinking about what other options Simon had. Finally, she asked.

“So… what would you do instead if you didn’t have to play football?” she asked.

“Well, technically I already do it,” he revealed. Ariel seemed surprised. “My folks don’t know, but sometimes, in secret… I like doing laps in the school’s natatorium.”

Ariel seemed more confused than shocked. Simon chuckled. Right, she’s nine, she wouldn’t know what that is.

“The truth is… I’ve always wanted to join the swim team.”

We were right about the inside of the temple. It wasn’t a fully built dungeon like I had been expecting, but a wide open space with a floor made up of nothing but stone bricks packed tightly together. There were no mazes of rooms, no dastardly contraptions, none of that. Just a big open space that looked roughly the size of a baseball field, with just enough room for something about the size of a T Rex to go stomping around in. I didn’t like the implications when I came to that realization, but I didn’t get a chance to worry about it as I spotted something on the other end of the room.

It was a bright orange light, barely visible in the weird red and black smokey air, like when you shine a bright flashlight through thick fog. As we slowly approached and got closer, we were finally able to make out what it was, and suffice it to say, we were all shocked and mortified.

It was Coach McKay, magic shield out, trapped underneath what looked like a gigantic thick sheet of rock that would no doubt have crushed him if it weren’t for his magic.

“COACH!” Mike was the first to call out to him as he rushed to get to the other end of the room.

“No, get back, Mike!!” Coach screamed back. Too late. Mike was suddenly knocked back by some unseen force, falling back on his butt before he backed away like he was trying to do the world’s fastest crab walk. I ran over to help him up, but that only brought me close enough to see who had smacked him back. He was seated beside the sheet of rock keeping McKay where he was, legs crossed in boredom. He was dressed to the nines in robes and jewels, like a stuck up monarch trying to look intimidating. All this, and he was pretending to not even notice us as he closed up the book he was reading, removing his reading glasses before tucking them away.

It was my AP History teacher, but more accurately, it was Ganondorf.

“There you all are!” he said with a chuckle. “I was starting to wonder if you children were going to show up at all! I thought I’d be waiting here forever for you to figure out where to go.”

“Well, bold of you to assume I wouldn’t know where my teacher keeps his notes,” I retorted with a smirk. Ganondorf frowned.

“I see… I’ll have to be more careful about my planning in the future, then,” he resolves. I felt Zelda give me a small smack on the shoulder. I didn’t realize why until Ganondorf’s words sunk in. The one quirk we could explort, and he knew of it and got rid of it just like that.

“Well that’s not important,” I said. “What’s important is… actually, where’d you get the new threads??” I was of course referring to his new robes and jewels. It definitely wasn’t what he was wearing before. I knew what Mr. Doirich usually wears, and that wasn’t it. Ganondorf didn’t dignify me with an immediate answer, a snrk coming out of him as he smirked at us.

“You need not know where I’ve been,” he said, his voice all deep as he spoke to us threateningly and forebodingly. “Nor the source of my more fitting attire. None of that is important-”

“He broke into that game store in Queens and stole Zukowski’s cosplay commissions!” McKay blurted out.

That single information hit me like a bag of bricks. It was like a freight train of images hitting me so hard that all I could do was burst out laughing at the thought of Ganondorf - the big bad of the Zelda series and one of the most recognizably evil characters in gaming - breaking into a nerd store to get clothes. A scowl made its way onto Ganondorf’s face as he clenched a fist in one of his hands. Red and black smoke puffed out from between the fingers, like he’d squeezed a stress ball covered in flour, and then the Coach cried out as he tried harder to keep his shield up. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that he’d made the rock overtop of him heavier.

“Stop hurting the Coach, you jerkwad,” Mike blurted out. I don’t know if it was just how he was or if the presence of two adults from school made him feel the need to tone down his insults. Probably the latter. “He’s not invincible!”

“I can assure you, Michael Goss,” Ganondorf growled out his name like the words themselves were an insult. “Darius is much stronger than he usually would be. The rock is still very much manageable for someone like him.” He waltzed closer to us, looking all diplomatic as he did so. It was like he was trying to be intimidating while not trying to scare us into attacking. Like he was trying to show us he meant no harm while making it clear that he could kill us if he so wished.

“Now then, let it be known that you both have something I want, and I have something that you want,” he said, eyeing me and Zelda. “I’m not some boorish monster. And I know how my host feels for you children, so I don’t wish to leave her having put the names Lincoln Aaron Matheson and Zelda Gormlaith Masters in today’s obituary.” I couldn’t see it, but I could feel in my bones that anger Zelda’s scowl seemed to be radiating. If looks could kill and all that.

“Get to the point,” she snarled.

“I will indeed,” he said back, voice going from a boorish rumble to smooth as silk. “I’m willing to let the champions go, and let you children leave this temple with your lives…” we thought for a moment that was the end of it… until he offered up the rest of his proposition. “But only if you-” he eyed me. “-and the little princess give me your pieces of the triforce.” The moment he was done talking, he held up his right hand. His fist was clenched, though not in anger. It seemed like he was clenching it in some strange show of power. And then the back of his hand lit up. Even those unfamiliar with Hyrule and all the lore associated with it would recognize the triangular mark on his hand as it lit up like Christmas lights. The top of the triangle was the one glowing the brightest, implying that the other pieces were simply missing.

Zelda let out a small surprised noise as she looked down at her own hand. The back of her right hand was glowing as well, this time with the bottom left of the triangle shining brightest. I put the figurative pieces together as I glanced down at my own hand - my left one, unlike the others - and saw the same symbol on the back of mine.

All of us shared the same mark, the same three triangles stacked on each other, and each with a different piece of the triangle glowing bright than the others.

“The triforce seems to work in mysterious ways in this world,” Ganondorf continued. “I can’t take them with my… usual methods. But if you two willingly hand them over, then we can put an end to all this right here…”

I knew what was going on here. Even an idiot would know what’s going on here. I knew one thing, and it was that I wasn’t going to hand it over. The look on Zelda’s face was all I needed to know that she felt the same.

“Absolutely not,” I said. Ganondorf’s diplomatic and understanding smile faded, and it slowly curled into an annoyed and frustrated scowl. It was one of the scowls where you start mentally counting down the seconds until they start to throw hands

“Fine then!” He snarled, those two words dripping with enough venom to kill a man. He grabbed my right arm, knocking Zelda to the side as he hoisted me in the air by my wrist. I let out a startled cry as I tried to pry his hand off of me while he backed away, gripping me like a vice as he dragged me along.

“Link!” Vincent cried out my name as he went to try and go after me, only to let out a surprised yelp as he stumbled back. A flick of Ganondorf’s free hand was all it took for him to call up a jagged wall up and out of the space between the bricks in the floor. It looked like those old bones people pull out of tar pits, with jagged bits of barrier being covered in black, red and purple sludge. Ganondorf didn’t speak. He didn’t even scold my friends for trying to run to my aid, instead just looking intently at me with eyes full of hatred as his grip tightened one last time. And that’s when it started.

Like that, something started leaking from the palm of his hand and out between his fingers, like a slimy pack of worms slinking up and down my arm. If there had to be a moment where I regretted taking my jacket off, it would be then. It felt like having gelatinous acid dripped down my arm, like covering my hand in honey made of fire. I could do nothing but scream as I felt my skin cracking underneath the slime, drying up and chapping. It was like those pictures of the desert, where the ground is so dry it’s all cracked like rocks. I came to the horrid realization that he was basically trying to mummify me.

But he didn’t.

Right as the magic coursing from his hand was about to make it to my shoulder, Ganondorf’s look of hatred suddenly flashed away as he let out a quick a grumbled “NO!” 

He dropped me. I was quick to scoot away from him on the floor, my left hand clutching my injured arm close to me. Ganondorf staggered back, one hand on his head as he looked angrily, not at me, but at the air.

“You… will NOT harm him!” he growled out. The words were pained, like he was straining himself just to be able to get them out. For a moment, the evil look in his eyes was gone, and my AP History teacher was back. But only for a moment. The look of relief on my face disappeared as Ganondorf shook out his face and blinked a few times. The kind look was gone once more.

“That’s… that’s never happened before,” he admitted. He let out a frustrated grunt as he straightened himself out. He cracked his neck. “I suppose even under all this stress, Doirich breaks through… for you.” He let out those last two words like he was still trying to hold onto the least bit of control of the situation, and that admitting that was of the utmost humiliation. “I suppose I’ll have to fall back on my old ways and have someone else do the dirty work for me.” He turned to Zelda, who was in the middle of getting to her feet when he eyed her.

“Princess, if you’ll indulge me for a moment, I believe you volunteer at this… so called “Central Park Zoo” they have in this city, correct?” he asked. 

Zelda just nodded her head hesitantly. “Y-Yeah, I do.”

You know those moments where you realize something was a threat, but it catches you so off guard in the moment that you don’t realize it? Ganondorf’s next words could fit that criteria.

“Then, pray tell… do you know what the true name for a Firefox is?”

And just like that, he was gone, chuckling deeply as he backed away and disappeared into a cloud of evil smoke. His disappearance dropped the jagged barrier behind us, allowing the others to run over.

“Link, good god, are you okay?!” Miranda dropped to her knees as she inspected my arm.

“Definitely not,” I say, trying to move my arm, only to freeze up and let out a yelp. The whole thing hurt to move, like every bone inside of it was broken. It didn’t help that the cracks in the skin were weeping with the same red and black sludge that had made it this way, like when you pop a zit and it keeps leaking fluid after you’ve gotten all the pus out. We didn’t have time to worry about it or tend to it. Our attention was quickly stolen by a noise up near the ceiling of the temple.

The thing about the temple was that the ceiling had at first appeared to go on forever. The further up it went, the darker it became. I thought that maybe it was because the light simply couldn’t reach the ceiling, but I realized at that moment it was because it was compact with black smoke. Coming out of this thick cloud of smoke were multiple beams and poles, coming down and into the walls of the temple as well as the ground nearby the edges of the room. They didn’t look like the rest of the temple, where everything was made of something fireproof like metal or stone. They instead looked to be made of wood. Climbing-grade wood. Garrett and Fiona were the ones to put two and two together.

“There’s something on the ceiling!” My cousin alerted us. She floated up to her feet and slowly went back toward the door. Garrett simply skipped the verbal theorizing and went straight for trying to pull the doors of the temple open. And to all our horror, they wouldn’t budge.

“... and we’re trapped in here with it!” he cried out.

It was then that the creature made its appearance.

A thick set of claws at the end of a stumpy arm reached out from the smoke, grabbing one of the beams and pulling itself out. The creature climbed down from the ceiling, some of the smoke clinging to its form just long enough to obscure its appearance. But we could see all the important bits of it: limbs ending in dastardly curved claws, a maw full of teeth, a long tail trailing behind it… and lots of red, black and white fur.

The monster finally made it to the bottom, landing right in front of us. It was easily the size of a T-Rex, just like I’d feared, but it became even taller as it reared back on its hind legs, its front limbs held high up above its head as it roared at us. Everyone was too scared to react. Everyone… except Zelda.

“AMAYA?!” she cried out in shock.

“It has a NAME?!” I cried back as I tried my best to open up my switch case with one hand and retrieve Audrie.

“All these monsters do!” Miranda snarked.

“That’s not what I meant, Miranda! Like a NAME name!” I held up the reticle toward the monster's face, awaiting whatever it would reveal to me. Despite what I knew, and what it looked like, I knew this couldn’t have been what I thought it was. Unfortunately, the switch just loved to prove otherwise…

“Oh no no no, this is bad!”

I looked in confusion at my switch.

“Audrie, what’re you doing back on!?” I asked, carrying her as the 8 of us dove out of the way of the giant red panda dragon as its front legs fell down and landed where we once were.

“Ganondorf knows we’re here!” she told me. “It wouldn’t have mattered if I stayed off or not!”

“Okay, okay, makes sense.” I let out another cry as a sudden jolt of paint fired up my right arm.

“Goodness, your arm!”

“It’s fine, I’m fine- ACK!”

“Clearly not! Your arm is infected with Malice!”

“MALICE!?”

“A technical term for Ganondorf’s magic!” she explained. “It’s birthed from Ganon’s hatred for the hero and the goddess. For you and your friend!”

“How lovely.”

“It looks like it’s seeped into your arm!”

“I-I’m sure I’ll be fine!”

“LINK!” Someone called out. A big hand of hair grabbed at me, pulling me out of the way as a stream of fire came down where I was once standing, scorching the stone underneath. I suddenly found myself at Miranda’s side, with all the others either standing with her or in the middle of getting up and running to join back up with us after they’d leapt out of the way of Amagia. We watched the panda let out a primal cry before it grabbed onto one of the wooden poles and scaled it, disappearing into the black smoke above us.

“Did someone hit it??” Mike asked. “Why’d it going back into the-” He was cut off by his own scream as a stream of fire suddenly came down from the ceiling, sweeping across the floor of the temple like a laser point as we all leapt out of the way. The only way I can describe the scene that unfolded is by talking about The Prince of Egypt.

It’s a movie I saw when I was pretty young, but I rewatch it from time to time for the good music. But there’s one scene that the events taking place in that temple reminded me of all too much. It was when the Jews were fleeing Egypt, and they needed time to get across the Red Sea and escape their pursuers. God’s way of buying them time was to create a wall of fire to stop the Egyptians in their tracks. The way the movie showed this was much like how Amagia was continuing her assault from the ceiling of the temple.

Just like in The Prince of Egypt, Amagia was making an attempt on our lives with a pillar of fire, zig-zagging all over the place in one line and then another to try and cover all her bases. To try and catch us off guard, even just once. To try and burn us all to a crisp and eat us like roasted chicken. She’d done this over and over so many times that it soon became fairly clear just what attack strategy the dragon was going with here.

“I think it’s hiding in the rafters so we can’t fight back!” I called out to the others, diving out of the way once again as a stream of fire blue past me. It was close enough to simulate the feeling of a fresh sunburn on my face as I fell over onto the stone.

“Screw this! I’m punching it!” Miranda blurted out. I watched her put the palm of her ponytail hand to the ground and shove off, like she was pushing off from the bottom of a pull to zip toward the surface. Instead, I watched my friend launch herself through the air with nothing but her hand, disappearing into the black smoke cloud above us.

She then immediately screamed as she fell right back out of the smoke, on fire .

“SHOOT, M!!” Vinny shouted desperately as he waved his hands around like a conductor that needed to catch up with the band. The wind picked up and swirled around Miranda breaking her fall and putting her out at the same time. She dropped to the ground a short ways with a little “Oof!”

“Ow, shoot, guess I’m not punching it,” she said, half joking.

“No kidding!” Vin said as he helped her up. “Didn’t think the panda would actually get any of us!”

“It didn’t even get me is what’s crazy!” Miranda said. “It wasn’t anywhere near me. I think the air up there’s just THAT hot! It was like a kiln or something!”

We all leapt away again as another stream of fire swept through the room. I ended up behind a fallen piece of rock with Zelda, the both of us ending up on the ground. The first thing Zelda did was grab my switch as well as fish something out of my bag.

“Wha- Zed, what’re you doing?!” went Navi. She’d been hiding herself this whole time in my hair while everything had been going down, only just now peeking her head out.

“Checking something!” Zelda shouted back. She pointed the switch reticle at both the earrings and the jacket Miranda had given me. One thing I hadn’t thought about was that the switch could identify what the items were.

“These both can resist fire- Link, you idiot!” Zelda tossed the jacket back at me while she scrambled to get the earrings on.

“Wait, what??”

“These! Are the fireshield earrings and the goron tunic!” she explained. “Or, I guess a goron jacket but same thing! They let you resist fire if you wear them! And you didn’t think to put them on?!”

“I dunno, I kinda got caught up with the giant fire-breathing red panda!”

“Okay WELL!” She paused for a moment as she tried to think of a reply. Instead she just grabbed one more thing from my backpack: the hookshot.

“Whoa, Zed!” I called out to her as she aimed up and fired it. The sharp end stuck in one of the climbing beams up near the ceiling, and like that, she flung herself through the air. “ZELDA!”

She disappeared up into the black smoke, and for a moment I just stood there and freaked out as I tried to think of what to do. My one means of following after her was gone, and who knows what she was doing. Then I saw a light flash up from above, the light bow illuminating Zelda’s shape in the smoke as she summoned it into her hands.

“I’m fine, Link!” she called down. “Just gimme a sec and follow my-” right as she went to try and dislodge the hookshot and drop it down to me, the whole room rumbled. The light of the bow allowed me to see why. Amagia had found Zelda, and slammed a paw down on the beam right beside her, causing her to cry out, turn and run. On the bright side, it became clear that Amagia was so preoccupied that the barrage of fire had stopped on the ground. The bad news was that my best friend was in trouble, and I had no way to get to her.

“ZED!” Navi called out. “HANG ON, WE’RE COMING!!”

“Someone get the hookshot down!!” I cried out.

“On it!” Vinny went to try and do something with his hands to knock it down from the beam with the wind, but it wasn’t working. Over and over, and nothing. We realized fairly quickly that the temperature difference was messing with the way Vin’s magic was working.

“Hold on, I’ve got this!” Garrett said as he snapped and pointed. He missed. The knife stuck in the beam a foot or so away from the hookshot and disappeared in a flash of magic. Again and again, I watched my friend try to knock it down, but the distance and trajectory seemed to be messing with his ability to aim.

“Shoot dude, give me that!” I watched Mike walk over and straight up grab Garrett’s hand, pointing it up at the hookshot as if he were aiming a hunting rifle and not a kid’s arm. “Okay now SNAP!” Garrett snapped his fingers. Another knife flew through the air, like a paper airplane being thrown by a skilled hand, successfully hitting the sharp end of the hookshot and knocking it down from the beam. It fell and hit the ground right as I got the red jacket on and zipped it up.

“Yes! Thanks you guys!” I ran over to grab it, but a shout caught me off guard.

“Lincoln, you are in no state to fight right now!” Audrie called out. “Your arm is too heavily injured!”

“That might be!” I said as I went to take the hookshot with my good hand. “But I’m not gonna sit around while Zelda’s getting hunted down by a giant, fire-breathing red panda dragon!” There was a pause from Audrie. The blue sheikah eye in the middle of her display darted around, like she was trying to figure out what to do. Then she let out a mechanical sigh.

“I can fix your arm,” she says. “But only if you’re ready to do this on your own.”

“Alright.”

“Are you ready to exit the tutorial and do this by yourself!”

“Yes! YES! Whatever! Do what you gotta do, but I need to help Zelda!!”

Audrie didn’t say anything further, simply letting out another mechanical sigh as the symbol on the scream faded away, flowing into the orange wiring in the switch before streaming up through the air, shooting down and wrapping around my right arm. Starting from the fingertips and going down, with wires and magical veins training down from the back of my hands up toward the shoulder as the skin went from chapped and mummified to fully fleshed and… blue. First an ethereal glowing blue, and then a darker blue as the magic solidified itself. All the while, the malice was being squeezed from my arm, like ringing out a sponge. It dripped from the skin like sap out of tree bark, dripping to the ground and immediately evaporating the moment it touched the stone. All until finally, finally , the pain completely left my right arm.

I didn’t take the time to really think about what had happened, grabbing the hookshot off the ground and aiming up toward the beams.

“MATHESON!”

I looked over just in time to catch the hammer that Mike had yeeted at me from the other end of the room. I didn’t reply, simply nodding at him before firing the hookshot and flinging myself up off the ground and into the smoke. I don’t know what I was expecting when I got up there. Maybe I was expecting to catch fire like Miranda did and just die right there? Lucky for me, I did not. The jacket actually worked. Was safely pulled up to the climbing platform and was able to pull myself up and onto my feet. The smoke wasn’t so thick that I couldn’t see anything through it. It was a maybe 20 or 25 foot radius I could see through it before the scenery faded into the gray. I was barely able to tuck my hook shot away before Zelda suddenly appeared out of the smoke, running and telling me “JUMP!”

Before I could react, she grabbed me, jumping from the beam we were on toward a climbing platform below us, nearly giving me a heart attack seeing as, the way it looked, she was dragging us both down to the ground about 70 feet below us. It became clear why she jumped. We looked back up to see Amagia emerge from the smoke, pursuing us as she let out another chittery roar. Zelda didn’t have to drag me to get me to run alongside her. Soon we were parkouring across the climbing platforms, a giant angry panda on our tails.

“Okay so uh, please tell me you’ve got a plan!” I said, nearly tripping as I leapt from one beam to another, narrowly missing a swipe from Amagia.

“Indeed I do!” Zelda replied. “If Ganondorf has Mr. Doirich’s quirks, Amagia probably has some of Amaya’s! I’m going to try and distract her, and you’re going to do your hero thing!”

“Well I dunno what my hero thing for this one is!” I yelled back. “Besides, that’s, like, an innocent red panda under there! I don’t wanna kill her!”

“Maybe it’s the helmet!” Navi proposed.

“Why would it be the helmet??” I asked.

“Well, Audrie said the goddesses planted weapons for us, right? The hammer that Mike and Garrett found was probably one of them! And I say that the helmet on the panda dragon looks very evil and especially hammer-able!”

I pulled out the hammer in question, taking a look at it as I heard the chainsaw-growls from behind us.

“Well, I dunno if that’ll work, but we don’t have any other options!” I readied my weapon hand. “Breaking the little face helmet it is!”

“Alright, cool, now to find a safe place to do it!” Zelda motioned for me to go ahead of her as she disappeared off to the side and into the smoke.

“Hey, would you be cool if I scream warnings into your ears for the next couple minutes?” Navi asked.

“Definitely.”

“Neat!”

As if on cue, Amagia emerged from the smoke, her chainsaw growl that I didn’t even think red pandas could make echoing through the air.

“WATCH OUT!” Navi called out. I was quick to jump out of the way as a paw came down, smashing through the climbing platform, causing multiple wooden beams to break and fall down toward the ground.

“Crap! She’s strong!” I observed, rolling out of the way and onto another platform as I kept running.

“Alright, well keep your guard up then!” Navi said, keeping a vice grip on my shirt so she wouldn’t get left behind. Another swipe of the paw caused me to flip back and away again, landing beautifully on another beam.

“Okay, how do I keep doing that?!” I cried out.

“I dunno, but I saw you try to get a hit in to speed things up a bit!” Navi said.

“Zelda’s still trying to put her plan into action!”

“Well for once, I say we can’t wait for Zed! BASH IT’S FACEPLATE IN!!”

If there’s one thing I didn’t want to do, it was say no to a tiny lady hellbent on bloodshed. Amagia came at us again, leaping low and falling face first into the ground as I leapt up and out of the way of its paws. As I fell back down, I held the hammer out and swung. BAM! It made an audible noise as I bashed the helmet and created a spiderweb of cracks across its face. It was a lot, even enough to cause a piece to fall off as Amaya backed away and let out a pained cry, but it wasn’t strong enough to crack the whole thing open.

“NICE! Hit it again!”

“Nope! We’re running!” I said to my fairy friend as I turned tail. I made it about three platforms away before my foot caught on one of the beams and I fell, falling flat on my face. I looked back up, turning myself over and wrenching my foot from between the beams. I didn’t get a chance to stand before Amagia came to a stop a few beams behind me, eyeing me. The dragon let out another chainsaw growl as it stalked toward me. I was ready for it to make a leap for it and devour me. I sat and braced for it, ready to die right then and there in the rafters as my breath caught in my throat. But then, Zelda did something I wasn’t expecting.

“AMAYA!!”

The dragon stopped in her tracks, turning to look at Zelda with her head tilted to the side. That’s when I realized what Zelda’s plan was. She worked at the zoo. Amaya was a zoo animal. I should’ve known I’d see Zelda there, her lunch bag open on the ground beside her and an apple slide grasped in her hand and held high above her.

“ SNACKIES !!”

A chittery little squeak came out of Amagia as she turned away from me and went bounding towards her. Not in a threatening way, but more of a bouncy happy way, the way you’d expect a red panda to after seeing the possibility of snack time. The only problem was that she was now 100 times larger than she used to be and could easily kill a man if she stepped on them by accident.

Zelda realized this, dropping her apple slices, turning and running. Lucky for her, she managed to leap out of the way just in time, jumping away as Amagia came crashing down onto the platform, chowing down on the apple slices and staying put on the platform.

“Go! Now! Before she finishes eating!!” Navi commanded. I made a run for it. One beam, then another, jumping and leaping. It was like Tarzan tree surfing up there through the smoke, trying to get to where Amaya was as quickly as possible. And soon, I flanked around the left side of her before pushing off a beam and toward the side of Amagia’s face. The panda dragon barely had a chance to look up from her snacks as I brought the hammer down on top of her forehead, with a loud and satisfying BANG!

Amagia let out another cry of pain, backing away and onto another platform as the helmet completely shattered, the pieces falling off of her head and onto the ground as she writhed around. She fell backwards, causing the beams and poles underneath us to collapse. Zelda and I screamed as we lost our footing, falling through the floor and toward the ground below. We were able to grab onto each other, totally prepared to hit the ground and go SPLAT! Lucky for us, Vinny had been paying attention. The wind below us kicked up, lifting us lightly and breaking our fall, causing us to gently float to the ground before being let go.

“Oh my god, we did it!” Zelda cried out triumphantly. She let out a startled noise as something fell into her arms from above us: an unconscious and now regular sized red panda. Amaya was a lot cuter when she wasn’t stomping around up by the ceiling.

“Is she okay??” Navi asked, zipping out of her hiding place to investigate.

“Yeah, she’s still breathing,” Zelda explained. “She should be fine.”

And then we heard it.

A creaking, snapping, and buckling from above. We looked up to see the climbing structures, now useless after the battle ended, come crashing down. We didn’t have any time to run for cover, so the lot of us just dropped to the ground, covered our heads, and hoped for the best.

“NO!”

It took a moment for us to realize that nothing had landed on us. Out of nowhere, Coach McKay had leapt into the middle of our group, putting up his magic shield and stopping the falling debris from landing on top of us. The moment he was sure we were safe, he dropped the shield and fell onto his knees.

“Damn, you kids are always getting into danger, huh?” he said, chuckling. 

“COACH!” Mike threw his arms around the guy. “Thank you, thank you!!”

“How did he get out??” Zelda asked as she stood back up.

“Oh! That was all Mike’s doing, actually!” Miranda said.

“The big godzilla panda knocked a bunch of beams down from the ceiling,” he explained, gesturing with his hands as he went on. “We just propped the stone on top of him up with a few of them and distributed the weight so he could drop his shield and get out!”

“Nice thinking!” Zelda replied. Her face quickly shifted to one of surprise and awe as something gently floated down in front of her. We all paused and looked to see that, once again, another heart container had fallen from the ceiling for us to take. “Link! There’s one here too!”

“I can see!” I said. I paused for a moment, thinking about it for a second before looking at my friend. “I think you should take it.”

“Huh?!”

“Yeah, Zed, you were the one that came up with the plan to defeat Amagia. You should take it.”

There was a bout of silence as Zelda looked back at it. She paused, and then reached a hand out to grab it. It disappeared in his hand, the flashes of magic flowing into her fingertips before it fully disappeared.

“ Wicked .” She had the look on her face from someone who was going to try and jump in front of a train to test out her increased vitality. The moment was shortly lived as Miranda gently pushed her aside to get to me.

“What about you, though??” she began. “How come Zelda had to tell you what to do with all the stuff?? Hookshots latch onto wood, dude! Pretty much anything wooden in a Zelda temple is supposed to be hookshotted!” She chuckled. “Did you turn off your brain for a sec there, Zelda geek?” She was about to pat my head when she stopped and looked with a shocked face.

The whole time she was talking, I’d been trying to turn on the switch. I was trying to get an update from Audrie about the whole thing, but no matter what I did I couldn’t get her to respond. I hadn’t realized what was up until I remembered what happened before I made it up to where Zelda was. I glanced down at my right arm, looked back at the switch, and then it all sank in. Everything hit me all at once. And then I did something that was… pathetic. I wish I could’ve reacted differently, but at the moment, it was all I could think to do.

I started to cry.

Chapter Text

How do you explain something to your friends? Specifically, something that you wanted to tell them before, but you’ve kept the whole thing up for so long that you’re not sure how in hell they’d react if you came clean. One of those lies that seems small until the situation becomes way more dire than you thought it would. Whatever it was, I wish I could’ve had the forethought I do now about how I should’ve broken this news to them. I had the decency to wait until we’d all left the temple, until we’d joined back up with Ariel and Simon outside, until we’d gone somewhere safe. And then I just let it out after everything was said and done. The floodgates were opened, and the first person to respond to it in any way was Navi from her seat on my shoulder…

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU’VE NEVER PLAYED A ZELDA GAME BEFORE?!”

Zelda had been in the middle of wrapping my right arm when I’d revealed this. If she was shocked, she made no show of it, instead opting to finish off her bandaging work and tie it off. I could only think of nodding my head at Navi, which caused her expression to drop, like you could see her heart sink.

“W-What about aunt Audrie’s??” Fiona had asked, floating in closer. “You said you played a game at her house on cousin Joel’s old N64, right??”

“Yeah, and cousin Joel was there when it happened,” I said. “I got to play exactly one level, and he made me play the freakiest one!” I leaned forward, a hand over my head as I nervously clutched my hair, like a little kid trying to hug a teddy bear to calm down. “Him and his friends were there, telling me all the freaky lore as I played through it, and the moment I beat the boss, I didn’t want anything to do with it.”

“So… you have played,” my cousin said, putting it all together. “But the experience traumatized you so badly that you never touched another Zelda game?”

It took me a minute to collect myself. “... basically, yeah. I didn’t have the guts until Breath of the Wild was announced. And I didn’t even get to play that one before all this Zeldapocalypse crap happened!”

“So, you know nothing is what you’re saying?” Fiona asked.

“Well I know the basics… that Link is the main character and his name isn’t Zelda, Zelda is actually the princess but sometimes she’s not a princess?? And then Ganon’s the big bad. Link’s got an annoying fairy companion in Ocarina of Time-”

“Annoying?!”

“And there’s something about breaking pots,” I continued on, ignoring Navi’s interjection. “Also something about the CDI and that it’s bad.”

“This is a bit much for me,” Miranda said. “I met you and became friends with you because you were a big Zelda fan. What the hell, dude?!”

“I know, I just… I dunno why I pretended!” I admitted, feeling my eyes start to water. “That doesn’t matter. The point is, I should’ve told you guys earlier, but we’d gotten so far into this big dangerous quest that I thought it would be better to keep up the lie! So that you guys could feel safe knowing ‘Well, everything is terrifying right now, but at least Lincoln knows what’s going on!’” I put my head in my hands, letting out a strained sigh before sitting back up again and wiping my face with my sleeve. “I didn’t want to let you all down, but now you guys know that I’m in the same boat as you guys.”

“What the hell, man?!”

“Mike, quit it,” Zelda scolded. “We’ve just been through a lot, and we’re all freaked out enough as is without someone trying to start an argument. You’re not gonna help by making the obviously apologetic kid even more stressed.”

“Well on the bright side, you can just ask your switch about this stuff, right?” Vinny asked with a nervous smile. The smile faded slowly as I shook my head and held up my switch.

“Something… something happened in the Trial of Fire,” I explained. “When Ganondorf grabbed my arm and messed it up, Audrie said she could fix it and I wasn’t really paying attention to what she was telling me.” I held up my freshly bandaged arm. You could only see my darkened fingers, adorned with veins around the knuckles and the long nails. “I think she might’ve given her, like, essence I guess? To keep my arm from shriveling up and falling off or something. Just… a lot happened in there, man.”

I felt a firm but understanding pat on the back. I turned to see that it was McKay. All things considered, he was physically fine after everything he’d been through. He’d even seemed emotionally fine after we’d found a quiet place to sit and recuperate underneath a tree in the park. But the look on his face was one of understanding and empathy.

“God, you guys…” he couldn’t finish for a moment. “You shouldn’t have had to get roped up in this. You’re all still kids.”

“Are you faring much better, Coach?” Simon asked.

“Not really?” he admitted with a chuckle. “Combat experience is one thing, but I was taught how to defend myself from regular people. Not… warlocks and lizard men and giant red pandas with fire breath!” He nervously laughed at that last bit. We all did. Amagia was something I didn’t think I’d ever have to deal with. People talk about how schools should teach kids how to do their taxes. I, for one, think they should teach kids all the tips and tricks to surviving various animal attacks. Maybe if they taught me how to properly throw hands with a panda, I wouldn’t have struggled as much as I did.

McKay sighed, “But what has the world come to where you’re apparently the only ones who can set things right again?”

There wasn’t much we could say in response to that. What can you say to that? Do you just agree that it’s messed up? Or just explain that you have to do it anyway because who else can? The bout of silence was broken up by the sound of birds taking off from a nearby tree, startling my little sister.

“M-Maybe we should go somewhere else,” she proposed, scooting closer to me.

“A good idea!” My cousin agreed. “It’s getting late, so we need to find a safe place nearby to get a good night’s sleep.”

“That and maybe study up on Zelda Stuff,” Zelda joked. “... actually, that might not be a bad idea! We could just get a bunch of books and stuff about it and cram before the next Trial.”

“Yes, of course, because they definitely have all sorts of books about Zelda,” Garrett snarked.

“Well, I was thinking about gameplay guides,” she clarified. “But this is all real life, and real life doesn’t really follow a linear storyline, so that probably wouldn’t work. I wonder if there’s a lore book or something…”

I’d been largely spacing out that whole exchange. Gameplay guides and such weren’t going to be of too much help. But Zelda mentioning lore books gave me an idea. And not just that, an idea that was actually feasible.

“The Hyrule Historia?”

Zelda had never heard of it. We’d finally gotten on the A-Train back to Queens, and I’d brought up my idea the moment we started our hour-long trip back to the borough.

“It’s a Legend of Zelda lore book,” I explained as I tried to get comfortable in the perpetually uncomfortable subway seats. “My old workplace had some copies of it, so we could just go and grab it there!”

“You work? What, do you work at a nerd store or something?” Mike asked with a chuckle.

“Technically, yeah, but it’s more of a game store, but that’s also a good way to put it,” I said, not giving Mike the satisfaction of an offended remark.

“... wait, actually?”

“Oh, you must be talking about that store in Queens Doirich stole the clothes from,” McKay said. “Dragon’s Keep, or-”

“Dragon’s Lair.”

“Dragon’s Lair! Thank you, Lincoln!” He leaned back in his seat. “It’s one of those comic book shop places. It’s got a bunch of board games and Dungeons and Dragons stuff, too.”

“Dang, so it IS a nerd store.”

“Sure, I suppose that’s one way to call it,” Coach said with a chuckle. “Maybe don’t throw that word around so liberally, it feels weird to think about that being me.”

“Wait wait wait…” Miranda scooted closer. “Coach, sir, are you saying you used to play DnD??”

A booming laugh came out of McKay. “Yeah! Used to play 1st edition with my college buddies back in the 70s.” The specified decade gave me way too many images in my head. Mostly those of a nerdy, college-aged Darius McKay wearing bell bottoms and sweater vests. Coach was just looking at a flabbergasted Mike with a smug smile on his face. Mike looked like a surprised fish, his mouth agape like he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words.

“What? You surprised your ultra manly football coach used to play ‘nerd games’ or whatever you wanna call them?” he asked with a hearty chuckle. He patted Mike on the back, seemingly a little too hard as Mike let out a small noise. “People can be both, Michael, ain’t nothing to be ashamed of.” I wasn’t sure what exactly he meant by that, but that’s not what I was worrying about.

“Well, whatever! We at least know the place,” I said. “I know how to get there from the station, and I still have my spare keys in case we get there after closing. But it’s only 5:00 pm, so it shouldn’t close for another 2 or 3 hours at LEAST. So we go in, get a copy of the Historia, and have the nerdiest study session ever at the table where they have weekly D&D meetings. Everyone cool with that plan?”

Everyone was nodding all around. I’d like to think it was because my plan was just that good, but it was probably more along the lines of “we’ve got no other ideas so let’s go with this one.”

“Assuming you even know what it looks like,” Fiona was in a huff. She’d been seated a ways away, her cloak draped around a napping Ariel once again.

“Just because I’ve never played a full game doesn’t mean I don’t know what the book I’ve seen every day I’ve worked at that store looks like,” I retorted. “It’s green and gold, and it’s got the triforce on the front! And the gold is reflective, so it’s not like it’s hard to miss!”

“Worse comes to worse, we can take a few minutes to look around,” Simon added. “If it’s like a textbook, it’ll probably stick out like a sore thumb in a comic store.”

“See, he gets it!” I said, looking at my cousin as I gestured to Simon. Fiona just huffed, her cheeks puffed up like a little kid who’d lost an argument and was angry about it.

“Well whatever it is, I’m glad we can do something boring for once,” Mike said as he stood up. “Lots of crap happened at the school and the park and all that. Here’s to hoping the trip to the comic store is less hair-raising!” He raised a closed fist as if raising a glass for a toast. I raised a hand with him, as did a couple of the other guys in the car. The smile on Mike’s face faded quickly as he relaxed a bit and leaned on one of the poles in the subway car.

A pole that didn’t look the way it should’ve.

We hadn’t realized it at first. The poles in the subway that you hang onto to keep from falling aren’t something you pay too much attention to. You notice the metallic sheen and the gleam it has out of the corner of your eye, but there’s not much else to look at. Perhaps we mistook the whiteness of the pole Mike had grabbed for gleam and paid no more heed to it. But Mike did. Mike was touching it, and the “GUH!” he let out as he let go of it and stumbled back into the wall of the car was all the indication we needed to know that something was wrong.

“What the hell?? There’s something up with the poles!” he called out. Looking at it at a glance, it wasn’t hard to tell that something was off. It was a stark white instead of metallic, and it was now a matte surface with no sheen to it whatsoever. I came to a rather disturbing realization that you could even confuse it for… flesh.

After the emotionally exhausting day, I could only really mouth “What the-” before the lights in the car started flickering. The subway was still moving. I could feel it. But the lights were flickering as if power was being cut from the train. To this day I believe it was just the world trying to mess with us in the most cliche, horror movie-esque way possible. That’s when the pole in question started crackling.

The noise was sudden enough to catch our attention, and we looked just in time to see the pole bend in one place, then another, cracking each time until it wrenched its top out of the ceiling. It was revealed to be topped with a hand with bony fingers tipped in long nails. It’s first move? Grabbing Mike by the neck of his hoodie like he owed it money

.

Mike let out a scream as he tried to grab its wrist and pry the hand off, but it seemed to have him in an almost death-like grip. Zelda was the first to act and make progress, swiftly pulling her hands up in the position needed to summon her bow of light. She fired a single shot at its forearm(although it was hard to tell what part was the forearm, since the hand bent in three different places), severing it with a sizzle as the arm and the hand that had been attached to Mike fell to the floor. Everyone else was busy watching as the limb melted into the floor like the fat on a steak being seared. I was busy looking around, trying to keep myself from breathing too fast as I tried to figure out the best course of action to get the hell out of there.

“Oh no…” I looked toward the ground at where the hand used to be. “No no no, this can’t be happening. We gotta get out of here!”’

“What the hell’s going on?!” Vinny got up and looked around before his eyes settled on me. “Link??”

“I remember this,” I said, gesturing vaguely to the room. “I remember this way too well, we gotta get off the train.”

“We’re not going to be at the station for another 40 minutes at least, Link, what’re you on about??” Garrett asked, trying to keep a lid on his emotions as well.

“I thought you never played a Zelda game before,” Vinny said with furrowed brows. “Were you lying about that too?!”

“I said I’ve never played a full one!” I reminded him. “I played that one dungeon on Ocarina of Time that scared me into not picking up another one for years!”

“Jesus, what kinda level did you play that scared ya THAT bad?!”

There was a pause as we heard something. It was the same crunching and crackling noise the hand had made, but fainter this time, and coupled with the sound of a hand being dragged across a wall with the backs of your nails pressed to the surface. We looked over at the other end of the car, toward the closed door leading into the next car over, and saw it through the window. It was a figure. One that we could only see the silhouette of thanks to the lights going out, but it was a harrowing one nonetheless. Stubbed appendages dragged across the window of the door, looking more like the pronged mandibles of a bug than hands. That or like its hands had been cut off and now the bones of the forearm were sticking out. Or maybe its hands just looked like that.

It dragged its hand across the window before pulling it away, instead curling its fingers around the edge of the door and pulling it open. We didn’t see its body first. We saw its face. It’s bald, pale, lipless face, with all its blood-stained teeth on display for all of us to see. It had eye sockets, but nothing in them. Yet it could still make eye contact with me at the opposite end of the subway car as I finally had the courage to answer Vinny.

“... The Shadow Temple.”

“What the fRICK!!” Vinny’s voice cracked as he backed away toward the other end of the car. The creature pulled open the door the rest of the way as it started to slink its way into the subway car, sliding along the ground like a deflated kickball trying to perambulate like a slug. It didn’t make it very far before Coach Mckay lept between us and the monster.

“You kids, get to the other car!” He called back to us and he put up his arms as if blocking a punch. He threw up his shield as the creature stopped in front of him, letting out a frustrated groan as it tried to force its way past McKay. It was like watching a pile of lard try to push a boulder out of its way.

“NOW!” McKay called out again. I didn’t get a chance to reply before I felt a hand grab my wrist.

“Link, come on!” Miranda cried as she dragged me toward the next car.

“No- Wait! COACH!!” I never got a chance to finish what I wanted to say to him before we all quickly filed into the next car over. Everyone else piled in behind Miranda and I, with Garrett coming in last as he slammed the door behind him.

I watched my friend lay a hand flat on the door as he mumbled to himself “Barrier, barrier, barrier…” as diamonds checkered their way up the front of the door to keep the monster in the other car.

“You guys, we can’t run from that thing!!” I blurted out.

“Sure we can, stupid,” Mike snarked. “McKay’s holding it up in the other car and Embers has his-”

“That’s not what I meant!” I shouted back. That caused the whole car to go quiet.

“... what do you mean??” Zelda asked.

“That thing is a Dead Hand,” I informed them. “We can’t run from it because it can burrow and appear wherever it wants. As long as its hands are nearby.”

CRACK!

As if on cue - and what a horrible cue it was - we heard that same awful click-clacking of joints echo down the car as we saw railings, poles and arm rests suddenly bent in ways they shouldn’t have. They suddenly pulled their ends out of the walls and ceiling of the car, turning towards us as the gleam disappeared and the gaunt flesh and bony hands on the ends became much more apparent. They all turned their palms toward us, as if they had invisible eyes in the middle and they wanted to lock their gaze on the group of us. We were all prepared to deal with the hands alone, but then an awful noise echoed back at us from the other end of the car.

We stood still as the sound of creaking and straining metal sounded at us before the rubber flooring of the car started to crack and crumble. A pronged hand tore up through the rubber as he pushed the pieces out of the way, twisting the metal underneath around in a whirlpool like way, as if it were made of tin foil instead of steel. Its head was the first thing to start rising out of the hole it dug in the floor, its face turned straight up at the ceiling. I didn’t want to have to wait for it to start shambling toward us to take action. It was a questionable thing to do, but I knew ultimately that it was what needed to be done.

“Okay, new plan,” I said, pulling the left joycon off of my switch and flinging it down to summon the baseball bat, like I was extending one of those old fashioned toy lightsabers you could buy at Disneyland or a local toy store. “We can’t all fight this thing or else the car will get crowded. So, everyone who wants to fight this thing with me, say Aye!” I didn’t hear any responses, but I did turn to look back at everyone just to be sure. Out of the 9 other people in the car, I saw 2 people raising their hands: Miranda and Simon. I let out a disappointed sigh. Of course.

“Alright, Miranda, you stay with me,” I said, causing her to smile in a determined manner. “Simon, you go into the other car with the others and stay with Coach McKay.”

“Wha…? Alright, fine,” he huffed. I had been too preoccupied with the monster in the room to really notice how frustrated he sounded.

“Garrett, you stay here too!” I called out.

“What, why?!” He looked startled. “I didn’t raise my hand or anything!”

“Because you’ve got a handle on your magic, dude, we could use that.”

“A-Alright, fine!”

“Good! Now drop the barrier on the door so everyone can get out!”

Garrett did as I had asked, putting a hand on the barrier and mumbling more things to himself as he dropped it.

“Alright, one at a time, don’t trample each other!” Garrett said as if he were directing people out of a crowded theme park attraction and not trying to get people out of the same room as a monster.

“Wait, Link! Don’t stay in here!” Ariel called out as Simon scooped her up.

“I gotta, Triple A!” I yelled back. “I’ll be fine!”

“You better!” she yelled back, half crying as she and Simon disappeared into the other car. Once everyone was out, Garrett slammed the door shut. And right as he did, the Dead Hand pulled itself all the way out of the floor.

“God, that thing looks like angry cottage cheese,” someone said into my ear.

“Wha-” I looked down at the side, catching a glimpse of something on my shoulder. “Navi, what’re you doing here?!”

“Helping you, dumb butt,” she scoffed back. “This thing can burrow into the floor, that practically screams ‘sneak attack’, dude!”

“Alright, fine fine, just stay close to me, okay?” I twirled the bat in my hand as the hands suddenly shot toward us to try and get a hold of us.  The former support pole shot toward me. I swiftly stepped back to get out of its way, slamming my bat down with enough force that the arm let out a sickening crunch as I broke whatever bone was there. The hand crumbled to the ground before dissolving into the floor like melting butter. Another hand shot toward Garrett, but he was quick to duck out of the way before walking out of reach of it. Another shot toward Miranda and succeeded in grabbing her face. However, getting as close as it did to Miranda’s mouth was its first mistake. Yeah, she bit it. HARD.

While it was definitely out of left field, it did help to confirm one thing: the Dead Hand could feel everything we did to its hands. It let out a pained groan as it retreated back into its hole in the floor, twisting the metal back in on itself to keep us from following.

“HAHA! It can feel that!!” Miranda blurted as the hand melted in her mouth. “Let’s go to the next car!”

“What, why?!” Garrett shouted, exacerbated. “Can’t we just stay here where there’s no more hands and no more monster??” Miranda was already on the other side of the car and trying to get the door open.

“It can feel when we cut up those hands,” she said. “Maybe if we fight a bunch of them, it’ll weaken the Dead Hand!”

“You can’t be serious…” He said.

“No no, she might be onto something,” I said. I ran to the other end of the car, jumping up onto the seats to avoid the twisted metal floor before stopping by the door with Miranda. “You couldn’t cut down the hands in the game, but this could very well be a whole new mechanic to this thing. It needs those hands to hold people in place so it can crawl over and attack them, after all!”

“Oh god, we really are doing this…” Garrett let out an aggravated sigh, like he wanted to scream but didn’t have the guts nor the energy to make quite that much noise. “Fine, FINE! Let’s get a move on then!” Garrett was quick to run to the other end of the car as we finally got the car door open. That’s where our plan fell into motion.

I felt like those explorer’s slicing through thick vegetation with a machete, breaking fingers and arms with my baseball bat as we went. Garrett was next to me in each of the cars, wildly snapping his fingers to sever each hand at the joints, all while Miranda cut out the middleman entirely and was punching each arm out of the way, hoping to knock them back into the walls hard enough to shatter the bones each time. Went kept going, car after car, not seeing the Dead Hand itself show itself again, but seeing the hands of the creature each and every time. And each and every time, we’d do our best to strike down every single one in the car before moving onto the next.

This went on for 8 cars. I should’ve realized something was wrong by then. I figured at the moment that maybe this was one of the longer trains. One of the ones that goes on for 11 cars instead of 8. That was my hope at least. Not that I’d been keeping too much track of it all, but even without counting them, you can tell when there’s too much of something. That realization hit me around the time we’d crossed into the 17th or 18th car.

“Guys, something’s wrong here,” I said, stopping once we made it through the door.

“What do you mean??” Asked Miranda. She grabbed one of the arms in the car with her ponytail, crushing its bones in her grip before letting it fall to the ground.

“The subways only have 11 cars, max,” I said. “And this is car 18!”

“What are you saying the hand monster turned the A Train into P.T. or something?!” Garrett asked, looking like he wanted to curl up into a ball and cry. He looked around wildly before turning back to the door behind him. “Let’s just head back then! We obviously can’t-”

“No.” I said it firmly as I took Garrett’s hand. “We’ll just have to fight it the old fashioned way.”

“What, you mean how you fight it in the game??” Navi asked from my shoulder.

“Yeah,” I twirled the bat in my head. “Get ready, you guys. You gotta go for the head.”

As if on cue, the floor was torn up a little ways away.

“There!” Navi called out. The Dead Hand didn’t even pull itself all the way out of the hole before Miranda fear-punched it with her ponytail hand. And just like that it dove back into the floor and sealed up the metal behind it. We just kinda stood there before Garrett and I turned to Miranda.

“... what?” she looked at us, confused. “You said to go for the head, and I went for the head!”

“Yeah but now we don’t know where it is,” I said, wildly looking around.

“God damnit, can’t we just move onto the next car or something?!” Garrett asked as he stomped toward the other end of the car, not even moving out of the way of the twisted metal as he came up to the door. He reached for a hand as he turned to look back at us. “I would like to get this over with as soon as-”

SHICK!

The door slid open without Garrett having to do a thing. The four of us froze in place as we saw what had opened up the door in front of Garrett. It was the Dead Hand again, its head at just the right level to go for Garrett’s face.

Garrett let out a shrill cry as he leapt back, barely getting out of the way as the Dead Hand tried to clamp its teeth down around his face. Miranda shot forward to join him and make sure he was okay, leaving me alone at the other end of the car. That was where it happened.

Very suddenly, something shot toward me and grabbed my right arm. I don’t know what came over me at that moment. Maybe it was being grabbed without consent. Maybe it was my memories of the Shadow Temple and knowing what came next, but I started thrashing and screaming. I tried to swing my bat around to knock them away from me, but it was like quick sand. The more I tried to thrash around the free myself, the more the hands came up and latched onto me. Two of them grabbed my sword arm. Another wrapped up around the front of my torso and grabbed my shoulder. Another latched onto my hair and pulled my head back like an angry mother. All of this happened in less than a few seconds, and once my friends had noticed what was happening and went to try and help me, it was too late.

“LINK!” Navi had fluttered off of my shoulder, trying to pry one of the hands off of me by grabbing onto one of its fingers and pulling. 

The metal in the floor in front of me twisted open as the Dead Hand pulled itself up out of the ground and plopped down in front of me. It didn’t have to do any creepy shimmying or any of that. All it had to do was sit there and lower its head. This was something I always feared as a kid. You never saw the Dead Hand close up. Playing on a 4x3 TV made it impossible. That combined with the N64’s graphics meant you couldn’t really tell what you were looking at. But kids have an imagination, and mine seemed to run wild trying to imagine what this awful bag of flesh and blood looked like if it were in the real world. Images of those black eyes and the lipless mouth full of blood stained teeth haunted my nights for a good week after I played the Shadow Temple as a kid.

Part of the horror of things like Dead Hand is not knowing things about it. In the moment, however, I felt more scared than ever seeing the Dead Hand right in front of me.

Within a moment’s notice, the Dead Hand lunged forward, its mouth wide open as its hands all pulled away at the last moment. The next thing I felt was its teeth in my face as I let out a scream of pain. Instinctively I grabbed at its head to try and claw at it, poke its eyes, something to get it off of me. I’d taken all sorts of self defense lessons when I was a little kid, and nothing worked on this thing. To my relief, at the very least, I could hear the muffled cries of my friends as they jumped into action. And just like that, the Dead Hand let go of me. I stumbled back, legs wobbling under me before I fell back and onto the floor.

I looked in front of me as the Dead Hand reeled back and away from me, letting out pained noises as it used its stubby hands to reach up and scratch some of Garrett’s flying knives out of its head. My fear subsided for a moment as the movements reminded me of the T Rex in “The Land Before Time” as it tried to scratch a bunch of bramble thorns out of its nose with its tiny arms. The only problem was that it hurt to laugh. Once the Dead Hand was able to get Garrett’s knives out of its head, it slinked back into the floor like bacon grease going down a drain. That was when Navi and the others went back over to me, obviously startled and worried.

“LINK!” Navi said frantically as she zipped around my head, examining my injuries as I held the side of my neck. “He bhagavaan(oh gods), please be okay!”

“Well obviously he’s not! That thing nearly took his bloody head off!” Went Garrett, trying to figure out what to do. “Does anyone have neosporin and some plaster??”

“What’re you gonna do, make an art piece out of him??”

“I meant a bandaid, Nav, god!”

“Right, sorry! But I don’t think a bandaids gonna help when he’s bleeding out the neck! We’re gonna need stitches or-”

“Hey, Nav! Hold still!” Miranda blurted. I watched her grab Navi with her regular little gremlin hands, rather firmly I might add. I hadn’t realized what she was doing until she just started shaking Navi around like a rattle. Or, I suppose looking back on it the motion more closely resembled someone using a salt shaker. Or trying to get all the ketchup in the bottle out. I just spent a solid couple seconds wondering what possessed Miranda to think throttling Navi was suddenly a good idea. Until I sneezed.

It was then I covered my nose and stood back up, sniffling. “God, what did you do??”

“Saved your life, dingus,” Miranda said, letting go of a very frazzled Navi. I was confused, but that was before I realized that my neck and face weren’t stinging with pain anymore. I put a hand to where the Dead Hand had latched onto me, feeling around. And sure enough, all the open wounds and gashes were gone.

“While Navi was fluttering around you like a lunatic-” Miranda explained. “- I noticed some dust coming off her wings was healing some of your cuts along the edges. Figured shaking her all over ya would do the trick.”

“Would it have killed you to warn me?!” Nav blurted back with a scowl.

“Well we should keep a note of that!” Garrett said. “Good thing to know that Navi has magical healing pixie dust!”

Right then, the metal under the floor started to creak again. We all knew what this meant. Miranda floated over beside me and readied herself while Navi seated herself on my shoulder once more. Garrett hadn’t been quite quick enough as the creature pulled itself out of the floor right behind him and went for the throat again.

The good thing is he was quick enough to just poof out of the way. All the Dead Hand could snap at was a cloud of magic as Garrett appeared near us, right in front of the door into the other car.

“BLIMEY!” He said with a few stressed breaths.

I don’t know what came over me in that moment. Maybe it was because of all my friends being huddled up beside me and terrified. Maybe it was me being upset that I was supposed to be the one fixing all this and I was the one that ended up almost killed by the monsters. I was the one that had to be rescued. I was the one that needed saving. I was the hero of Hyrule or whatever the heck my title was, and I was nearly taken down by a second-rate miniboss that haunted my dreams when I was 7. So I suppose all that combined in just the right way for me to finally realize that I’d had enough.

I held out my baseball bat, pressing one of the arrows on the d-pad to switch the weapon over to something else: the metal chair leg I’d stolen from the aeralfos. I’d gotten a surprised look from both Garrett and Miranda, but paid no attention to anything they might’ve said or commented about it. I just looked at the creature at the other end of the car in its blackened eyes.

“Miranda, Garrett…” I waited for them to look at me to know they were listening. “... handle the hands.”

I started walking. The chair leg was held beside me as I watched hands coming out of the walls and ceilings, reaching as if to grab me before Miranda or Garrett took care of them. Knives then knuckles then knives again as I made my way toward the other end of the car. I walked right up to the Dead Hand, waiting for it to lower its head to face me again. I knew it only took it a few moments for the Dead Hand to rebalance itself enough to open its maw and attempt to snap my head off with its teeth. I knew this, and knew the right moment to do what I’d wanted to do ever since I played my cousin Joel’s N64.

Right as the Dead Hand lunged at me, I shoved my sword arm into its mouth, shoving the sharp end of the chair leg up through its soft palate, doing it in like Harry Potter did the Basilisk.

The sound the thing let out was unlike anything any other monster had let out over the course of the whole day. I pulled the chair leg right out, letting the Dead Hand reel back, its neck twisting in pain before it finally fell to the ground. All the arms in the room let out their awful click-clacks as they crumpled in on themselves and fell to the ground as well. And like that, the Dead Hand was really dead.

“Link… Bud… What the hell was that??” Miranda asked with furrowed eyebrows.

I let out a loud sigh. “I dunno really. I had to fight this thing in the Shadow Temple as a kid. Guess killing it in real life after all these years felt… cathartic? Or something?”

There was a long bout of silence before Navi fluttered over and put a hand to my face, as if trying to comfort me. Maybe because she couldn’t give me her usual understanding pat on the back since she was so much smaller.

I was quite ready to tell everyone to fall back into the other car so we could let everyone else know that we weren’t dead, but then something caught my eye as the body of the Dead Hand melted into the floor. It was something I hadn’t expected to see: a small chest.

“Huh. That’s weird.” I walked over to it while everyone else looked confused.

“Wha- a treasure chest?” Garrett asked with a raised eyebrow. “What, did it eat it??”

I would’ve laughed at his quip if I wasn’t so caught up in investigating the sudden appearance of the chest. It wasn’t locked, so I just threw the top open, finding… something.

“Whoa, okay, this is new,” I said as I took it by the sides and pulled it out. What I’d found in the chest was a piece of glass roughly the size of a dinner plate, with a frame of metal around the edge. With the purple tint to it and the three prongs on the top as nothing more than decoration, it helped clue me in as to what this was supposed to be. It was something important. Something I remember being rather integral in the dungeon I played all those years ago as a kid.

“What is it??” Navi asked as I tucked it away into my bag.

“Nothing much,” I said. A smile came to my face. “It’s just a surprise tool that’ll help us later!” I couldn’t help but chuckle at my own joke, but all it got was a light punch from Navi(then the only punch she could really do was a light one).

We didn’t waste any more time, falling back and making our way into the car where the others were. And to our surprise, opening the next door over led us right there, almost like we’d never gone running through the entire train in the first place. We decided not to acknowledge that. Maybe because we were so emotionally exhausted from what had happened. One of the first things I saw was my little sister seated with Simon, trying hard not to cry but still ending up very watery eyed. When she looked back at me, the first thing she did was gasp, shoot to her feet and sprint over to me to give me the biggest hug I’d ever gotten from her. I simply hugged back, patting her on the head. Zelda didn’t say anything, but looked at me with a confused look and a tilted head.

All I could do was give her a small smile and a thumbs up.

Chapter Text

It had been a while since the whole thing with the Dead Hand. I hadn’t quite recovered from it, but I sat in the subway car much more comfortably knowing that it was dead. I probably felt even more safe knowing that I killed it and it was for sure dead. Now all that was left to do was wait until we pulled into the station in Queens and find our way to the Dragon’s Lair. But people have to pass time on trains somehow…

“Damn, this thing’s huge!”

Mike had asked about what went down in the other car, and the only thing I could think to do was show him what we’d found once we killed the thing. He was holding up the lens and looking through it with wide eyes.

“Yeah, it surprised me too!” I said. “The thing’s the size of like… a hand mirror in the game.”

“Well what’s it supposed to do??”

“It’s supposed to reveal hidden passageways and secrets when you look at them through it.”

The look on Mike’s face went from wonder and curiosity to pure unbridled “uh oh” in a moment’s notice. He gently passed the lens back to me.

“Yeah maybe put that away before one of us accidentally points it at one of the girls.” It took me a sec to realize what he meant, but I was quick to put it back in my backpack. “But hey! That thing’s pretty big. I bet if we found the right tools, we could make that into a sick pair of goggles!”

“Oh, yeah! Wouldn’t wanna try to hold that giant thing during a fight or something,” I said. As I thought about it more, I chuckled. “Dude, who would we even get to make goggles out of this thing, though?”

Mike didn’t say anything. The conversation kind of died after that. But that didn’t matter all that much, because pretty soon we started to feel the tell-tale slight g-force of the subway starting to slow down in the station.

“Alright, let’s be super careful when we come out of the train this time,” Zelda said.

“Please tell me you kids didn’t have to fight something in the subway…” Darius sounded so done, but the look all 10 of us gave him was enough for him to know. “Oy vey…”

Once the subway doors opened, we stopped for a moment, trying to figure out who should go out first. It hadn’t really dawned on us to go out all at the same time in a huddle. Stuff like that felt like it’d make it too easy for any redeads that were still there to eat all of us at the same time. Every good team has a scout, after all. Just like when we went to Mr. Doirich’s classroom, we eventually settled on…

“What, no! Why me again?!” Navi fluttered around my head like an angry bee.

“Because you’re small enough that they won’t notice you, Nav!” I said right back as she stopped and hovered in front of my nose.

“Yeah… Except the thing saw ME first when we came through here!”

“That’s because you went right up to their face, Navi, just keep your distance or something!”

She paused before letting out an aggravated huff. “Fine. FINE. I’ll check.”

We all stood back from the door as Navi fluttered out the door, taking a look around the station. We all sat intently as we watched the little blue light zip back and forth on the platform, up the stairs and then back down. Then she fluttered back into the car.

“Alright, the coast is clear,” she whispered to us. “Just be quiet you guys!”

I don’t need to go into detail about the scene that ensued. Just imagine a group of teenagers with one child and one supervising adult sneaking out of the subway station like we’d just stolen something but were doing our best to not look suspicious… while somehow looking super suspicious. We snuck onto the platform, back up those stairs, back through the turnstile, and soon we were back outside. With it being so dark out, it was hard to tell what was around and what was safe to sneak through. It would’ve been slightly safer to drive, but at the same time, there were too many of us to stuff into the cars.

We had ultimately decided to walk to the Dragon’s Lair.

    Somehow we didn’t get ambushed on the way there. I suppose even monsters have to sleep, and it was pretty late out all things considered. Most days when I was out late enough for the street lights to come on, it was always still crowded to some degree. They don’t call this “the city that never sleeps” for nothing.

But there was a stay-at-home order in effect now. One meant to keep people from getting eaten or scratched up by bokoblins and lizalfos roaming the streets looking for blood. Of all things, it made me think back to this story I remember hearing on the radio when I was 12. Some story about how the entirety of a private zoo was set loose on this small town in Ohio. Living in Ohio is bad enough, but imagine trying to go and work on your farm or whatever people do in Ohio and you see a lion or tiger hanging out on your property. Little me could only imagine how those poor people must’ve lived until it was all taken care of, but present me now knew full well what it was like because I was living through it.

But like I said, it seems even monsters have to sleep.

We made it to the Dragon’s Lair without issue. It was a familiar and comforting sight in all this chaos, with its resin facade pulled straight out of a cheap county fair ride and its window displays full of geek stuff. My cousin looked in through one of the display windows, her cloak hands cupped around her face. I noticed my little sister awkwardly shuffling up next to her and mimicking her, putting her face to the glass as well.

“It looks closed to me,” Fiona informed me. “All the lights are off and everything.” I nodded vaguely to her as I went to get the door open. Then I paused, the key in one hand and my other on the knob.

“... any day now, Link,” went Zelda behind me. I didn’t reply to her. My only answer was to turn the knob, letting go as I lazily let the door creak open and into the store. The store was definitely closed, but the door was unlocked.

“Do you think someone beat us here??” Navi asked from my shoulder. I could feel her grip the shoulder of my jacket tighter now, however little of a difference in grip that may have been.

“If someone did, make sure to keep your guard up, guys,” I said to everyone else. And with that, I pushed the door open and walked in. Seeing the inside of the store didn’t make us feel any safer.

The entire place looked like it had been ransacked. That or someone had a spare key and decided to use said spare key privileges to get their revenge on the trading card and TTRPG aisle. Source books were on the ground, pages were bent, magic cards were in every place they shouldn’t have been, and so much more. It was like someone stuffed half of the Dragon’s Lair’s stock into a canon and fired it into the store aisles.

“I don’t see anyone,” Zelda said as she looked around.

“That’s what they all say before something pops out atcha!” Miranda said jokingly, gently shaking Zed’s shoulders.

“M, stop it, this is serious,” Vin scolded quietly.

“Yeah, I think something terrible happened here…” went my cousin as she floated forward and looked around. She reminded me of a ballerina figure in a music box the way she was turning around to get a full look at the place.

“Well, Bennet probably got out of here before Ganondorf showed up,” I reasoned. “He’s probably safe somewhere else!”

“God, I hope so,” Garrett sighed, sitting down at the table D&D was held at every week. It was one of those dresden board game tables, with the wood plank that fits over top of it so it can be used as a regular table, but can be removed to reveal a large pit in the center of the table to set up a map and minifigures and whatever else people set up to play D&D. For the sake of what we were doing, we kept the plank of wood overtop it as a few of us sat down. 

I was about to sit down as well, until I remembered something. I set my bag down on the table and pulled the dinner plate-sized lens of truth out and handed it to Mike.

“You see those stairs behind the counter?” I said, pointing at the check-out. Mike nodded his head. “Bennet does his cosplay commission stuff in the room up there. I’m sure he has something to make ‘goggles of truth’ with or something.” That was all he had to hear to start making his way there.

“Yo wait, there’s a cosplay loft here?!” Miranda looked up from where she was at the table before zipping up over the table to follow.

“Well, I’m off the clock, but I feel like I should go up with them in case they blow something up,” said Coach with a chuckle to the rest of us. As funny as it was, the image of Mike or Miranda accidentally blowing up my bosses cosplay workshop was also a bit harrowing. But I figured Darius would be good enough supervision to keep that from happening…

    When he finally crested the top of the stairs and made it into what Miranda had dubbed the Cosplay Loft, Michael felt like a kid in a candy store. Never had he been in a space with so much… stuff! Stuff that he would have a field day with if he weren’t there just to make a pair of goggles. There was what you’d typically find in a place like this, with finished outfits and props hanging up on the wall in front of the stairs. But then there was the equipment that was no doubt used to make those outfits and props.

    Lined up on the wall were all sorts of little sections and stations, all for different things. A desk in the corner had a sewing machine and wracks of fabrics up above it on spinning spools like wrapping paper. Another desk nearby was heavy duty and stainless steel, with one of those plastic mats with the measuring lines on top of it, with EVA foam, hair dryers and heat guns, and a bucket container of gesso nearby. What surprised him the most was a little room off to the side of all this. It looked like it might have once been a walk-in closet, or perhaps even a second bathroom. It had a single wall knocked down to open up the room, showing off the kind of mini workshop Bennet had turned it into: inside was a desk with a 3D printer, various tools, and a fancy, industrial grade glass sculpting mechanism. The kind that factories used to make the lenses for ski goggles.

    “Ohohoho, PERFECT!” Mike ran up the rest of the stairs as Miranda and Darius followed behind. Darius had been surprised, taking a moment to wonder how a man had the money for all this. That and how a man could manage to fit all this up here. The tables at the very least were probably a pain to pull up the stairs. Miranda just had to spend a moment standing in front of the finished costumes and props hanging up on the wall and in wracks and on hooks.

    “Dang, these must’ve cost a FORTUNE to make!” She said, putting her little hands on a shoulder plate. One made from sculpted foam and painted to shine like real metal.

    “Well, I’m sure whoever he’s making these for is paying him,” the Coach inferred, finding something on one of the tables. He showed it to Miranda. It was an itemized list of materials. Something to keep track of all the money that was spent on the project and taking into consideration the service fee.

Miranda just nodded her head with a little, “Oooooh.”

The two of them looked over as they heard something over in the mini office with the 3D printer. Miranda had wondered why Link had sent Mike up here with the lens. Of all the kids, she figured maybe his cousin, Zelda, or even the whiny tall kid from STEM would’ve been a better choice for this. But then she saw Mike at work. The kid she knew as a dumb jock on the football team was using the tools in the office to gently pry the frame of the lens off so he could get to the glass pane underneath.

Her attention was drawn away by a beep beep beep somewhere in the same general direction. To her surprise, Mike had started up the 3D printer while he was working with the lens. She wasn’t sure what he was making, but she could take an educated guess as Mike started carefully cutting two pieces out of the glass plate of the lens. Maybe Link hadn’t realized it, or maybe he knew full well, but Miranda had known him for a while. Link didn’t know this dude enough to figure that he’d have the credentials to be the one to make the goggles. He just so happened to suggest that he check out the loft.

“Damn… how’d he figure out all this stuff?” she wondered aloud. “This type of stuff takes years to learn.” Mike wasn’t paying enough attention to hear her, she figured, as she never got an answer out of him. She got one out of McKay, though.

“I dunno either, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he taught himself all this,” he said as he took a seat in one of the nearby chairs. He could see the puzzled look on Miranda’s face, the scrunching of her piebald face making it look like she was wearing a very confused masquerade mask.

“I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but Mike’s…” she looked over at him in the office room. “... well, he’s the last kid I’d think of if you asked me to name someone who knows how to do that .” She gestured to Mike as he pulled the first cut piece out of the lens, grinning to himself as he examined his handiwork. “Car stuff, maybe. Lotta jocks I’ve met know car stuff. But none of them know how to 3D print crap and… cut glass? I dunno, man.”

Darius chuckled. “Well, I don’t rightly know where he learned glass cutting,” he admitted. “But I’ve known this kid since he first tried out for the football team when he was a freshman. Figured out pretty quickly why.” Miranda sat intently, listening like a little kid seated on the floor mat for reading time. “He was all bright eyed and bushy tailed, and he was in the STEM course at the same time.”

“So he wanted to go into engineering??”

“He still does, more than anything! From what I can glean, he wanted to join the team so he could play his way to a sports scholarship. All the good schools for this stuff ain’t cheap, after all. He seems like the kinda kid who grew up watching shows about Nasa and all the inventors behind the scenes and decided that’s what he wanted to do.”

Miranda could relate to that. She thought back to when she’d watch Nickelodeon as a kid. They used to show the process behind their cartoons during the commercial breaks and it's what made her really love art.  It might’ve been a combination of that and her mom putting on VHS tapes of Bob Ross when she was really little. Something about watching a guy with an afro paint was relaxing to little baby Miranda. She was brought out of her momentary flashbacks by something the coach did that kind of surprised her: he let out a sad and solemn sigh.

“But… the course at the school isn’t kind to kids like him,” he said. “Mike’s a smart one, but the way the class is run… the way the teacher structured the thing always bothered me. It’s like he thinks he’s running a physics class or something. Nothing but worksheet after worksheet, test after test. It’s a STEM class! An engineering class! They should be building things, shouldn’t they? Do some kind of hands-on work. Do something like what he’s doing right now.” He gestured to Mike, building away in the little office. “Now I’m watching him barely scoot by in that class, and he keeps overworking himself so he can still qualify for the team…”

Darius went quiet, allowing Miranda to stew on that. Sports teams at the school always had some minimum GPA requirement. Things she knew about Mike started to make more sense as all the pieces clicked into place.

“Huh… so that’s why he’s always trying to copy off of Garrett and Vin.” she thought out loud.

This caused Darius to go rigid. “Wait, what??”

“It’s done!” Mike called that out just in time, and Darius never got further elaboration from Miranda. He looked at an ecstatic Michael as he stood up, brushing off his hands. “It’s gonna be a bit until it’s cooled off enough to fit into the frames, but the lenses are done!”

He was on his way out of the little side room when his foot caught on something. Something that made a sound like plastic against metal. It drew the attention of the three of them toward it. What they found on the ground was a pretty retro looking object. Something that looked like it was pulled from a thrift store, or perhaps a bestbuy from the 90s. It was a VHS player. At least, that’s what Mike and Miranda recognized it as. But McKay was old enough to know it was more than that.

“What’s he doing watching movies up here??” Mike asked as he kneeled down to get a better look at it.

“Not movies,” Darius corrected. “I looked like one of those old CCTV VHS recorders.”

“So a security system??” Miranda asked, head tilted as she looked between the coach and the machine.

“Basically, yeah!”

While the two of them were talking, Mike got curious. Something had definitely happened downstairs. All the merchandise didn’t get tossed everywhere on its own, after all. Thinking this could hold a clue as to what happened, Mike decided to press play.

    “What’s it look like again??” Vin had asked

    “For the last time,” I huffed as I peeked out at him from a few aisles over. I’d tried checking the one with all the switch and WiiU games on display, while he was over by the comic books. “It’s a green book with gold leaf detailing.” I ducked down to keep looking. “It reflects in the light! It shouldn’t be THAT hard to find!”

    “WELL IT IS!” He grunted back.

    “Oh would you two calm down for ONE moment??” I heard Fiona growl in frustration from where she was. “If you spent as much energy trying to look for it as you have arguing, we would've found it by now.”

    “Says the one looking in the aisle with all the plushies,” I said under my breath.

    “I dunno, maybe someone misplaced it while shopping,” she said. “People do that all the time, putting things back where they’re not supposed to be.”

    “Sure, whatever…” I went back to my search as we all went our separate ways.

    “Why don’t you guys just…” We all looked up to see Simon with my little sister. They were both sitting on a beanbag chair near the books. Not the comics, but things like concept art books and other such things. “Check over here??”

    There was a pause from the three of us. Right. We’d gotten so caught up in the nerd aspect of the whole thing that we forgot the Historia was… a book.

    “... right, that’d be a good place to look,” my cousin reasoned. She was the first to get there as the three of us made our way over. There was one thing I wish I could’ve taken into account when we went to investigate. You see, this bookshelf had a rug underneath it. It was one that was meant to look like the controller of the old Nintendo Entertainment System, and it was one of Bennet’s favorite things in the shop. And it was pulled to the side, away from its usual spot, leaving the wood floor underneath completely bare.

    The Tape started at 8:00 in the morning. An old box television on one of the desks showed off four different camera angles inside the store: one showed the front counter and the store entrance, another showed the back door, another was pointed toward the back of the store, and one was inside the employees only area. It looked the way one would expect a VHS to look, all grainy with the slight blue hue overlaid on top of the visuals. It was exactly how you’d expect one of these things to look. Mike’s expectations were subverted when he watched the visuals for the front door camera, and there was a ringing of the bell above the door to accompany the manager opening the door.

    “Wait, this thing has sound??” Miranda asked, putting her hands on Mike’s shoulder and peeking over it like a little kid.

    “Some of them did,” Darius explained. “You’d be surprised how advanced some of this older stuff is. Regardless, Zukowski probably spent a LOT of money to get a system like this.”

    Mike paid attention to the video feed, watching it intently. For a while, not much happened. Mike kept skipping through the sections of the tape where not much was happening. Or at least, nothing worth watching intently. Things like setting up the shop, tending to customers, regular things like that. He was tempted to just skip whole chunks of the tape to get to whenever Mr. Doirich would’ve broken in, but Miranda stopped him.

    “WAIT WAIT WAIT go back!!” She put a hand on the rewind button before pressing play. Miranda’s keen eye had spotted something. They knew stores like these usually would get packages and other such shipments of their stock. But the camera showing the back door of the store showed them something far more interesting.

Bennet had dragged in quite a few boxes of stuff. Not regular cardboard shipping boxes. These were wooden crates, like the ones stacked on pallets in warehouses, but smaller. Small enough for someone of Bennet Zukowski’s stature to drag them inside with his hands. They watched him for a moment, watched as he pondered these crates for a moment, wondering out loud if anything he’d ordered before had come in crates instead of boxes. He came to the conclusion that everything he ordered came in cardboard boxes, and thus wondered what these were. They watched him take a hand drill off a nearby table and unscrew the top of the crate before using the claw of a hammer to do the final yank to get the lid off.

What Bennet, and subsequently the kids and the coach, saw inside was a load of stuff. Mike couldn’t help but imagine that this is what the inside of those powerup blocks in Mario Kart might look like, full to the brim with all sorts of gadgets and gizmos. Bennet just looked very confused. But he didn’t do anything with them, saying something aloud about not ordering any props as he pulled something out of it. Something that caught the kids’ attention: the lens of truth. It had been in the shop. And they soon figured out why it didn’t stay in the shop.

One of the other camera angles suddenly became enshrouded with a purple, red and black blast of magic as someone broke through the front door. Mike’s eyes suddenly switched over to the camera showing the front entrance of the store as a familiar tall and bulky man came in through the door. One who at this moment was still wearing Mr. Doirich’s button-up shirt, office pants and dress shoes.

Miranda’s eyes stayed fixed on the camera in the employee only room, watching as the sheer resonance of the blast frightened Bennet so much that he fell over and dropped the lens. Like a scared kitten, she watched the owner of the store crab crawl backwards and under the breakroom table, hiding behind the fridge in the breakroom. It was positioned in such a way that he was completely hidden from the security camera, and therefore completely hidden from the door. She wasn’t sure what he was planning. Perhaps he panicked. Mike’s eyes went back to the camera in the backroom, watching as the tape kept playing.

Ganondorf entered the back room. He’d found the box that Bennet had opened. He investigated it with an amused look on his face as he talked to himself about it all. Most of it was stuffy purple prose. The exact kind of pretentious stuff a fantasy villain would say. One thing that stuck in Miranda’s head was a comment he made as he picked up one of the items in the box: “Were the goddesses really so foolish as to leave all these items for the hero in one place?”

Miranda had her eyes trained on Ganondorf so intently that she hadn’t even noticed Bennet near the back of the room, waiting and watching as Ganondorf circled the crate, talking to himself as he examined thing after thing, object after object, like an auctioneer assessing his stock before the big event. He was waiting until the right moment. And that was when Miranda and Michael’s eyes switched back to where Bennet was. They watched the young man dash out from his hiding place, swiping the lens of truth off the ground and past the crate as he made a break for the door. And for a moment, Miranda and Michael wondered if this was when Bennet escaped and went somewhere safer, like Link had predicted when they’d first entered the store.

And then Ganondorf spotted him.

They watched as Ganondorf angrily called out at him, raising a hand and calling forth that awful red and black sludge from the floor, watching it leap up through the floorboards and solidify into jagged walls that blocked off the front entrance of the store, as well as its display windows should he have tried to break through one of them. Mike jumped forward in the tape a bit before Miranda could stop him.

“Hey, dude, stop it!” she pressed play and stopped the fast forward. “That could’ve been important!”

“Yeah, but look here.” He pointed to the screen as the tape played out again. He’d jumped forward only a few minutes, and they sat and examined the camera in the break room again. The crate had been pushed aside. What they saw instead was Bennet Zukowski, tied to a chair with the same evil goop that Ganondorf had used to barricade the doors. It hung loosely around his hands like spiderwebs after a rainfall, looking as if Ganondorf had simply coated a rope with molasses. Regardless, it still held him in place long enough for Ganondorf to interrogate him…

“I’m telling you man, I was just here working is all,” Bennet had said to him, trying to appeal to the man’s reason. “I just want to know what you’re doing in my shop?”

“Oh, sure, you were working here… precisely why you were hiding behind the fridge like a little thief trying to rob me.”

“Rob YOU?? You broke into MY store first! And you knocked down all the minifigures and the dice boxes! Do you have any idea how long those take to sort!?” Bennet had seemed genuinely angry. Miranda had rightly assumed it was because he did the lovely sorting work himself. As it would soon turn out, he didn’t.

“I mean, Link spent hours getting all the colors to look cool and line up in a gradient, and then you just-”

“Link??” Ganondorf looked at Bennet with a scowl. “Lincoln Matheson? He works for you??”

Bennet was frozen for a moment. He looked as if he didn’t know whether to be confused or scared. “... yes? He usually works summers, but sometimes he fills in when someone calls out-”

He was interrupted by an annoyed grunt. “Of course. The Hero of the Sky and Time and Twilight were annoying as is. But this… Hero of the Beyond takes the cake. How does one insolent brat have so many allies??”

“Hero of the…? Did something happen that I should be aware of, sir? I don’t quite follow…”

“I’m aware that you don’t follow,” he says. Mike and Miranda watched the tape as a smile came to Ganondorf’s face, like he was a villain from a Christmas special getting a wonderfully, truly awful idea. “But Link will, I’m sure.” He turned back to the manager. “He’ll follow you right to this store, most likely to ask for help.” He looked to the crate. “Or, more likely, to make use of these trinkets the goddesses left for him.” 

Bennet could only sit there as Ganondorf approached and got closer and closer to him, the man having to kneel in order to meet his eye. That’s when he held up his right hand. It hovered dangerously close to Bennet’s glass eye.

“Perhaps you can be of use in that regard, little thief.”

Ganondorf grabbed onto something of Bennet’s. Bennet screamed bloody murder. Then Mike shut off the VHS player. The three of them sat there for a moment in shock. None of them could find words. Not until a thought came to Miranda and she began freaking out.

“Wait wait wait, keep playing it!” she ordered. “If he’s still in the store, we can try and help him!” And thus, Mike skipped forward in the tape. Past Ganondorf holding the manager captive in the backroom. Past where he grabbed at Bennet’s face and made him cry out in agony. Past all that. And that’s when they saw it. Something they couldn’t really believe. Something that showed up on the camera pointed toward the back of the store. Something that Michael didn’t even have time to process before he ran back to where the pieces of his goggle project were.

“Mike??” Miranda didn’t get a response from him as he put the lenses in the frames and tied a strap on. Then he dashed down the stairs. “Mike!”

“Michael!!” Darius went after him along with Miranda.

Mike had remembered what Link had said about the lens of truth. He knew what it could do. And he knew Link was going to need it down there.

    “Found it! I found it, guys!” I shouted. Vinny and Fiona looked at me as I pulled something down from the bookshelf. Just as I’d described it: a green book with gold leaf detailing that shined in the light. Its symbol of the triforce flanked by a wheel of arcane designs and imagery was like a light in the darkness that was this whole quest.

    “Nice!” Vin said as he looked over at it. “Jeez, it does look like a textbook kinda.”

“MATHESON!”

    My attention was grabbed by Mike as I turned to see what he was screaming about. I looked in time to see him rush back down the stairs from the cosplay loft before football-throwing something to me. It startled me, and I had to drop the book to catch it, but I managed it nonetheless. It was a pair of goggles. The ones Mike had mentioned us making while on the subway.

    “Matheson, put them on, quick!!” He commanded me. He looked like he was about to die from stress when he said it, and that only made me more confused and frightened, trying to figure out what on earth was happening.

    That’s when I felt the floor underneath me give way.

    Like the floorboards had secretly been super old and rotten this whole time, they cracked, buckled, and caved in under my feet the next moment. The same section of the floor that the rug had been pulled away from. It all clicked in that split second before gravity took hold of me and I fell.

I cried out, trying to reach for something but to no avail. The hole opened up wide enough that Vin wasn’t safe either, slipping and falling in near the edge of the chasm and letting out his characteristic PsychicPebbles-like scream that I’d heard one too many times while playing Mario Kart.

“LINK!” I heard my cousin shout as she purposefully jumped into the hole , floating down gently around us. Looking back, perhaps she wanted to make sure we ended up okay, but also… how would she have known she’d float safely down? For all she knew, she could’ve fallen like me and Vin!

The inside of the hole was dark, so dark you couldn’t even make out where the ground was. It was eerie. It looked as if we might fall for forever. 

And then we landed.

BONG!

It felt like the universe had thrown us full force at the surface of a trampoline, as the two of us suddenly hit the ground and bounced off of its surface like beach balls. I had tried my best to angle myself so I didn’t get launched anywhere. My efforts weren’t needed. Vinny stopped us both from bouncing by firing a gust of wind underneath the two of us, breaking up momentum and allowing us to land safely on the ground.

I just… sat for a moment. Trying to recuperate. That and trying to figure out what the heck had just happened. My cousin landed right next to me, touching down softly enough that she didn’t bounce.

“ARE YOU GUYS OKAY!?” I heard Simon call down from above.

“THEY’RE ALRIGHT!” My cousin called back. “LOOKS LIKE THEY LANDED ON SOMETHING SOFT!”

“Yeah, what did we even land on??” Vinny asked as he walked around. “This a vinyl floor or something??”

It took a moment to put the pieces together. I’d been caught up on the fact that the chasm smelled like wet garbage. Which was partially true, I would come to realize, as I realized we were so far underground that we’d actually ended up in the sewers. Peaking over the edge of the platform we’d landed on proved that, as you could see the churning green waters far below us. It must’ve been one of those wider rooms in the sewers, where water from multiple different pipes spills out into one pit. But the sewer water and all that wasn’t what had made it all click. It was what my cousin had said:

“What, did we land on a trampoline or something?” She tapped her heeled boot on the ground, trying to test the elasticity of the ground. It barely budged now that we were on top of it. I tapped my own foot on the ground. Then again. I tapped it two more times to confirm. Every time I tapped my foot on the ground with enough force, it made a noise right back at me that didn’t sound like vinyl or any kind of regular foot falls on flooring.

“I don’t think it's a trampoline,” I said. I took one last look around to confirm something before I said anything more. That’s when I realized that the platform we’d fallen onto was circular. The whole thing hit me like a bag of bricks. The one dungeon. The one dungeon in any of these games that I had played and experienced myself. We’d landed on a bouncy surface that was most definitely not a trampoline, and I knew that could only mean one thing.

“Look out!” I called it out as I leapt and grabbed my cousin, tumbling with her and dodging out of the way as something came down and slammed onto the ground. We looked in shock as it pulled itself up off the floor. It was a hand. A giant, floating hand, with only a little bit of its wrist attached. Suddenly the second one came down. Then the first again. But they weren’t attacking this time around. They were just… gently hitting the ground.

Each little smack caused the tense floor beneath us to bend and snap us up into the air a little ways, like when you sit on the end of a mattress and someone lands full force on the opposite side of it. Each time, we were knocked off balance, and each time we struggled to regain it before getting knocked up into the air once again. I wondered if this was how birds trying to sit on telephone wires felt.

“What’s happening?! Why’s it just hitting the floor like that?!” My cousin kept spouting out nervously, her ability to float just above the ground coming in handy as she easily negated the tension of the ground. I would’ve probably asked her the same thing, had I not noticed something about these hands.

I was used to them looking gray, desiccated, like the hands of a mummy or perhaps even just a corpse in general. But I recognized these hands. The chewed up nails, the calluses, the hot glue scars. All the things I’d been wondering about, all the holes that I needed filled in were suddenly getting filled in in all the most horrible ways. I didn’t want it to be the truth, but figuratively and literally, I’d have to face it no matter what. I knew how this fight went down when I was kid, so I did what any seasoned gamer would do and put on the goggles.

Almost immediately, my heart leapt into my throat.

There was something in the darkness hanging there. Something big, with a pair of nooses tightened around its torso to keep it upright and floating. Its arms ended in stumps, and its face had only one eye open. The left one. The one that was bright red and glaring down at us.

“Little thief, little thief…” it hummed in tune with its gentle thumping on the ground. Then it's one eye locked on me. “Little thief, just like me…”

What I was looking at was my boss, Bennet Zukowski, hanging from the ceiling and staring down at us with a sneer on his face and a big red demonic eye where his glass eye should’ve been. I didn’t even have to pull out the switch to see what had happened. The title card flashed into my mind like an awful memory…

    “GO FOR THE HANDS!” I shouted, leaping out of the way as one of them tried to slam on down on top of me. The thumping of the drum launched me a foot into the air, nearly throwing me off balance, but I was able to stay standing and keep running around and zig-zagging. I slid the left joycon off and brought back my bat. Then I thought about it for a moment… then I switched to the meter stick instead. That was close enough to a ruler, right? It’d be better if we were fighting a guy’s hands of all things.

    Bongo Bongo tried to bring a hand down on top of me.

    WHACK!

    I aimed up and swiped at his fingers with the meter stick, causing Bongo Bongo to let out a low cry of pain. The hand drew itself back away from my strike and shook itself out. 

    “Ah! His hands are the weak spot then!” Went Vinny. I didn’t get a chance to watch my friend attack at first. I was busy trying to keep out of the way of the other hand as it came down to try and sweep me off the floor and grab me. I leapt out of the way, but at the cost of falling onto my stomach. I heard Bongo cry out again, looking up to try and see why. Vinny had landed a hit on his other hand… with the Hyrule Historia.

    “VIN, WHAT’RE YOU DOING?!” I called out to him.

    “What?! It fell down here with us, and it’s a thick book, so-”

    “Dude, no! That book is WAY too important for you to be using it as a blunt weapon! Give it to me!”

    Vinny let out a noise like a huff and a snarl mixed together, and slid it to me across the floor. I was able to grab it off the ground and shove it into my backpack. The moment I was able to slip it back on, something grabbed me. One of Bongo’s hands latched onto me and dragged me into the air.

    “LINK!!” Fiona called out frantically. She couldn’t reach me, however, simply gliding around underneath the hand in case she could catch me.

    My arms were free when I was lifted off the ground, so I did the one thing I could think to do: I pulled out my hookshot and aimed for the eye.

    BAM!

    Bongo Bongo let out a cry as he let me go, and I dropped right into my cousin’s cloaked arms.

    “What the- is there something there?!” She said.

    “Yeah. The hands are visible, but you can only see his face with these babies,” I replied, pointing at the goggles as she set me down. I got ready to aim again, but right as I fired, a hand came down beside us, knocking us up into the air and knocking off my aim. The hookshot trailed in a droopy line and fell away from Bongo Bongo’s face, completely missing his eye.

    “Damn it!” I blurted out.

    “Yeah, welcome to the club!” Vinny angrily shouted at me. “LOOK OUT!”

We all leapt back and out of the way as Bongo Bongo forgoed slamming a hand down and just swiped it along the ground, trying to sweep us off our feet. Everything was happening so fast, and I wanted to try and figure out what to do as soon as possible, and then thought of an idea JUST dumb enough to work. I watched as another hand came down a little ways away, and… jumped. I jumped right before it hit the ground, and when I landed, the tension in the ground had already dissipated enough that I was able to keep my balance.

    “Aha! It’s like a rhythm game!” I shouted out. I leapt out of the way of another hand, jumping in time so that I’d land at just the right time yet again. “Vin, try jumping before its hand hits the ground!”

    “NOTED!” he replied, pushing himself out of the way with a gust of wind.

    “Stop wasting your magic! Just jump!” Fiona told him.

    “Magic’s better!”

    “How?!”

    “Tiny legs! Not good at jumping!!”

    We kept on like this for a while. Leaping out of the way of hands, jumping right before the hands hit the floor, aiming for the eye at all the times we could. It was the one boss fight I felt confident in. The one boss fight so far where I actually knew what I was doing. Just avoid the hands, attack the eye, rinse and repeat. That’s all there was to Bongo Bongo.

    Or so I thought.

    Based on what I remembered, Bongo Bongo wasn’t that hard or long of a boss fight at all in Ocarina of Time. We’d stun its hands, I’d hit its eye a few times, and then it’d pull away so we’d be forced to continue our assault on its hands. But games like Zelda usually followed the rule of three. If you did everything right and attacked as much as you could in one interval, you could knock down a big guy like Bongo Bongo in three rounds. Not so here. We were in round 4 when I realized something was up.

    “That’s not right!” I said to my cousin as she kicked one of the hands, causing it to pull away. “We should’ve been able to take him out by now!”

    “Well what’re you aiming for exactly??” she asked.

    “His eye!” I said. I got a split-second idea to fire the hook shot at his eye full force, tryin to get it deep enough that I could try pulling it out. It’s not like it's a real eye, or even Bennet’s eye. He has no real eye there! But it seemed the hookshot wouldn’t work. Bongo Bongo let out a low growl of a scream as its eye lid came up a bit like it was trying to fight back tears. The wound in its eye started oozing malice, and it came out with enough force that the tip of the hookshot was forced out of his wound. It's like when your eyes water to flush something out of your eye, but way worse.

    “Dang it! I can’t pull it out with the hookshot!” I said.

    “Is it not sticking or something??” Fiona replied. We both leapt back as one of the hands tried to sweep across the floor again to knock us over.

    “It’s sticking! Just not long enough for me to try pulling its eye out!”

    “Ew! Why are you trying that?!”

    “Because you’re supposed to go for its eyes in the game! I think if we pull it out, it’ll put an end to all this!”

    “Wait a tick!” We looked over at Vinny as he came to a realization. “Didn’t Audrie say something about Fiona being a sword that seals away darkness??”

    “You’re asking like he’ll know what you’re talking about!” Fiona replied, taking a jab at my not-knowledge of the games.

    “No no, he might be onto something!” I said. “Maybe I have to use the sword to properly expel the eye from this dude’s face!”

    “That can’t POSSIBLY be it!” Fiona cried out. She looked like she really didn’t want to believe it. She couldn’t believe it! That she was the only one here who could fight the big scary hand monster head on.

    Another hand came down, this one barely missing us as we all dipped out of the way.

    “Do you have any OTHER idea?!” I said. I smacked the hand with my meter stick, causing it to pull back and shake itself out. 

    “I’ve told you before, I don’t even know how I did it!” she yelled frantically. Another hand came down, this time closer to Vincent.

    “Have you tried believing in yourself!?” Vinny asked as he smacked the hand, setting it on fire to make it not our problem for the least bit longer. We could use all the time we could get.

    My cousin just looked at him with furrowed eyebrows and pursed lips. The only thing that could’ve made the expression more complete would’ve been a little eye twitch.

    “Just think back to what you were doing in the quad!” I said to her, zig-zagging and trying to aim for its eye again with the hook shot. “Maybe you’ll remember how you did it.”

    My cousin took my words into consideration and stood there for a moment, eyes closed, deep in thought. Vinny and I did our best to keep up with the monster. It shook out its flaming hand, putting out the fire. And then I watched as it did something that made me freak out for a moment. It pulled its hands close to itself as it lowered itself to the ground. With how he was suspended in the air by nooses and ropes, it looked like when someone in a construction yard lowers a palette on a crane or something. It took me until the moment all of Bongo Bongo was laying against the top of the drum that I realized he took up the entire top of the platform.

    And then he started sliding. FAST. He was going to try and take us out by sweeping us off the drum. Vinny and I started to freak out, not sure what to do and not sure how to get out of the way in time. And while all of this was happening, my cousin had been sitting where she was, blissfully unaware of what was going on, just mumbling to herself…

    “I was thinking about the fight, about Link, I’m in charge, I need to keep my dumb cousin safe while aunt Marion is gone, I needed to protect him, so I- GASP! That’s it!! LINK!!!”

    Everything happened one after the other, like jump cuts. My cousin leapt to my side as Bongo Bongo slid toward us. A flash of light and some quick reactions later and when I opened my eyes again, I found myself with the sword in my hand, and the business end of the blade stuck at least a foot deep into Bongo Bongo’s eyeball.

    I stood there for a moment before gripping the blade tight and pulling back. I pulled back hard enough that I managed to pull the eye out with a gross SQUELCH that echoed through the sewers.

    “GuuuUUUH!” I swung the blade around like crazy to dislodge the eye. “Oh god, please don’t cut my pay for that!” I quipped at Bongo Bongo. The eyeball slid off the sword like an olive off a toothpick, bouncing a couple times before I lost track of it. Not because it bounced off in any which way, though. It was because in Bongo Bongo’s pained tantrum, it swiped one of its hands across the top of the drum, catching up both me and Vinny in its fingers. I heard my cousin screaming in my head as the three of us were swiped right off the edge of the drum.

    This was it. This is how we died, wasn’t it? We fight for our lives with my boss and win so well we pull his eye out, only to get knocked off and into the sewers of New York. If we didn’t get washed away and drowned, we’d sure as heck get every disease known to man down there. The drowning would’ve been painful, but at least it would’ve been quicker. Plus, we didn’t know if the sewers operated on game logic. For all we knew, the moment we fell into that gunk, we were dead right then and there. But then I remembered something.

    I turned right back around, wrapping my sword arm around Vinny to make sure I had them both held close while using my free hand to aim the hookshot at the edge of the drum. I fired, I hit, and I let the device reel itself in. And just like I’d predicted, it pulled us back toward the platform.

    “HAHA! It worked!!” I shouted excitedly. For once, my intuition was on point. And then all three of us hit the side of the drum face first. We were able to get back onto the drum, but I still ended up with unwanted flashbacks to the day before when I tried to trail behind the school bus on my skateboard. The broken nose and the smell of blood didn’t help with that.

    <<Jeez, are you okay??>> Fiona asked.

    “Yep, I’m fine…” I assured her as I tucked the hookshot away. I put my free hand to my nose and quickly reset it myself.

    “Dang, dude… don’t you gotta see a doctor for that stuff??” Vinny asked as he approached me.

    “Yeah, I guess, but it happened one too many times during skateboard mishaps,” I explained. “Figure it's better to do it myself than spend money to get a doctor to do it.” Vin just nodded in understanding. The conversation came to an end when we heard a soft groan from a little ways away.

    We turned to see Bennet, my boss, laying on his stomach on the drum. He was back to normal(aka not giant sized and homicidal), completely knocked out, and his severed hands were laying in front of him, in front of his bloody stump arms.

    “SHOOT shoot shoot shoot!” I ran over to investigate him, looking at his hands, then back at him.

    <<Oh my god, his hands!>>

    “I know, I know, I-I-I-” I paused for a moment. I looked back up at the ceiling, toward the hole we fell through. The one way back up into the shop.

    “NAVI, YOU UP THERE??” I yelled up there.

    “YEAH?” She called back.

    “GET DOWN HERE, WE NEED YOU!!” That was all I had to say to see my friend, the little blue light she was, zip down into the hole and toward where we were.

    “What’s the trouble?!” She asked as she zipped around our heads. I slid Bennet’s hands so that their stumps touched his arm. “What happened?! OH GOD, HIS HANDS- GICK!” I grabbed her gently but quickly before shaking her over top of Bennet’s hands like a salt shaker. And just like what happened on the subway, the dust that fell off of Navi’s wings managed to heal Bennet’s hands. I don’t know how - you’d think severed limbs would be the extent of the pixie dust - but it did!

    “For the love of-” Navi squeezed out of my grip the moment I was done. “If you need me to dust someone, just TELL me! JEEZ!”

    “Right! Sorry, sorry,” I said with a nervous smile as I felt the master sword go limp in my hand. I let go as it disappeared in a flash of light, my cousin returning to her original form. She stood still and shook for a moment.

    “God… I know blood and stuff is par for the course with being a sword, but… EUGH!”

    “Best to get used to it now,” was all I said to my cousin as I noticed something in the middle of the drum. As was customary for these boss fights, a heart container had dropped from where Bongo Bongo once hung over us from two nooses.

    “Hey, which one of you wants it this time?” I asked, looking back at Fiona and Vin. They both paused for a moment, looked at each other, looked back at the heart container, and then Vin crossed his arms.

    “You can take it, Fiona,” he said. “I think I’ll be fine.”

    “Oh, okay!” She floated over and grabbed it as Vinny looked at her with a surprised expression. It was like he expected her to be altruistic and insist he take it, but she… didn’t. Which was kinda funny, but I didn’t have the time to laugh.

I draped one of Bennet’s arms over my shoulder so I could carry him. The guy was knocked out cold still. That and I didn’t know if it was bad for him to not be wearing a glass eye for too long.

    “So, how are we getting out??” Vinny asked. “I don’t think I can do my wind thing all the way up there.” I paused for a moment, taking out my hookshot again and aiming it. I fired. It did that grappling hook thing where it peaked, fell slack, and then embedded itself in the wood floor of the shop above. It was just barely long enough to reach the edge of the hole.

I looked at Fiona and Vinny with a smirk. “Just hold on tight.”

Chapter Text

It took only a few minutes once we made it back into the store for Bennet to wake back up. We had him seated on the beanbag chair near all the books, wrapped in one of Bennet’s collectible Dungeons and Dragons blankets with the cover of the first edition rulebook printed on it. He was also there with the only glass eye of his I could find at the store: the customized sharingan eye he wore to work that one time over the summer. So there was my boss, frazzled, sitting on the bean bag chair after I tried my best to explain to him what had happened and what was going on.

“So… let me get this straight…” He took a long sip from the cup of water we’d gotten him. “The refurbished switch you bought through the store was magic. It caused New York City to merge with Hyrule when you tried to play it, you and your friends are turning into Zelda characters, you need to find the four champions in order to set things right, and you lied about being a die-hard Zelda fan-” He took a deep breath in the middle of that. “-and you ended up having to help ME after I got possessed and turned into Bongo Bongo from Ocarina of Time while you were trying to find a copy of the Hyrule Historia to study with?”

I just nodded my head. He seemed to have gotten it about right. Bennet just leaned over, face turned to the ground while he held his cup of water in front of him.

“Oi vey, what did I get roped up in…” He looked back up and let out a big sigh.

“I know, it was all confusing to me too,” Coach McKay said, trying to relate to Bennet. “Although to be fair, there’s not many other logical ways to explain it all.”

“Well, I’m glad you all are okay at least,” he said. “If there really are monsters and stuff everywhere, you know?” He thumbed toward the book shelf. “I’ve got five copies of the Historia on stock last I checked. So long as you don’t leave the store with them, you guys are free to study here. Got enough nerdy pillows and blankets for you guys to sleep here, too.” He chuckled. “Not like I’m gonna be getting many customers any time soon anyways.”

“God, thanks Bennet!” I said.

“Well hey, it’s the least I can do after you… I’m sorry, saved me from being possessed by a shadow monster.” He chuckled to himself. I was in the middle of grabbing the other four copies off the bookshelf when he added something.

“HOWEVER! I’m not letting you kids sleep over unless you call your folks and let them know, first.”

A few of us exchanged looks. That… that was something we hadn’t even thought about. Once you get caught up in a big adventure and are trying to save the world and all that, you don’t really think about letting your parents know where you are.

“Well, Link’s mom is out of-”

“Yeah, I know your kids’ situation,” Bennet said, cutting off Fiona. “Link’s mom is out of town and you’re in charge, I was more so talking about the rest of you guys.”

The rest of the group was dreading these calls for their own reasons. Garrett was the first one to call his folks. He mumbled something under his breath about getting it over with before he put the phone to his ear and got an answer.

“GARRETT! Garrett, sweetie, oh thank goodness, are you alright?!” His mother sounded  hysteric. I was surprised to hear it in the first place. But that seemed to be a trend over the course of the day. My hearing had gotten a little more acute, and I could only assume it's because of the hylian ears.

“I’m fine, mum, I’m fine!” Garrett assured her. “A-A lot has happened, but I’m unharmed!”

“Oh thank god, we were so worried after you went to go visit your friends. Have you seen the news??”

“With all the monsters running around the City?”

“Yes! They’re in Queens, too, can you believe it!”

“You haven’t seen any around home, have you??”

“No, thank goodness! Some bats flew back up early for the summer and have been roosting around the house, but they all look so wrong.”

“D-Did they have weird eyes??”

“I didn’t get a good look at them, but it looked like they were missing one.”

“Don’t go outside then! Those might be monsters!”

“Blimey then! Alright, I’ll stay inside until they buzz off.”

“Good, good…” Garrett paused for a moment, fiddling with the strings of his jacket hood. “Listen, mum, is it alright if I sleep over with friends tonight? We’re somewhere safe, I promise, but I don’t think I’ll be able to make a safe drive home tonight.”

“Well, which friends are you staying with, dear?”

Garrett paused for a moment. “Just the boys! Vincent and Link.”

“Oh! I see, I see! You know how I feel with Vincent, but I know Lincoln will keep you two from doing anything reckless.”

I chuckled internally when I heard that. It would take more than two hands to count all the times it was Garrett stopping me and Vinny from doing something dumb.

“But sweetie, what’s going on exactly?” Mrs. Embers asked from the other end of the line. “Did you ever find out what happened to your hair??”

“Yes and no,” Garrett replied. “It’s a lot to explain, mum, and we’re trying to put the pieces together tonight. I’ll call you tomorrow once we’ve figured it all out and explain it to you then, okay?”

“That’s all fine with me, dearie. Just please be safe.”

“I will, mum. I love you.” And with that, Garrett hung up. He let out a sigh. “Alright, that went better than I thought!”

“Alright, who’s calling next?” I asked.

“I already let my dad know,” Mike said. “Texted him and stuff. It says he read it.”

“Well, I guess that counts,” I said with a shrug. I didn’t get a chance to ask the question again before I heard Vinny on the phone.

“Hello?” went to someone on the other end of the line.

“Dad! Hi!” Vinny seemed much more enthusiastic than the rest of us. “I need to ask you something.”

“Vincent! Where have you been??”

“I’ve been out with Garrett, I’m fine!” He assured him. “Listen, is it cool if I sleepover with him tonight??”

The rest of the conversation was one I couldn’t understand. The thing about Vinny was that his folks were Italian, and thus they spoke the language. And he did too. Yeah, for the rest of the phone conversation, he and his dad were speaking in fluent Italian to each other. I had no clue what most of it was, but I could make out a few words. Namely the word “Stunatu”. He’s taught it to me before, it’s slang for being stupid or something. My assumption was that Vinny was saying “I’m not stupid” or something like that, because lord knows he wouldn’t have the balls to call his dad stupid.

Finally, their conversation came to an end with Vinny saying, “Ti voglio bene, papa!” He hung up after that. “Alright, my dad says it’s fine as long as I’m being safe and I stay with you guys.” I gave a thumbs up to him.

Miranda went next, calling her folks on their home phone. She had her cellphone on her, but she had to hold it with both hands since it was nearly as tall as her face.

“Miranda, is that you, honey?” I heard a woman ask from the other end in a thick northern Jersey accent.

“Yeah ma, it’s me!” Miranda said happily.

“Is everything alright, dear? You and your friends staying safe?”

“Yeah. We fought some monsters and rescued the football coach from a giant red panda in Central Park. And I punched a zombie in the face!”

“With your real hands or the ponytail one?”

“The ponytail. My hands are too small to punch something with.”

“Rightly fair, rightly fair. And you’re staying safe, right? You haven’t tried to bite anything, have you?”

“Only one thing, but it was clean!”

“Oooookay dear. Did you call me just to tell me about your combat exploits, honey bear?”

“Well, no, um… is it cool if I stay somewhere else for the night? We had to stop by somewhere to get something reeeeeally important to what we’re doing, but we don’t know if it’ll be safe enough to drive back to Forest Hills.”

“Of course, honey! Lots of things are happening right now. Your dad and I figured it’s much bigger than you suddenly waking up the same height you were at 3 years old. As long as you're with friends and you’re being safe, we’re alright with it.”

“Okay, thank you mom. I’ll call you in the morning. Love you!”

Miranda hung up with a soft smile on her face. Overall, Miranda was fine to sleep over at the Dragon’s Lair.

Then there was Navi, who had to borrow Zelda’s phone to call her parents. She was so small she had to use her whole hand to press the buttons on the screen.

“Hello?” A woman on the other line asked. “Zelda, is that you??”

“No, Maa, it’s me,” she replied.

“NAVI!” The sudden shouting of her dad caused her to flutter back from the screen in surprise. “Navi, is that you?! Are you okay?! Something happened at the school and-”

“Yeah, I’m fine, don’t worry!” She assured them. “Zelda and I got out of the school safely with a couple of other kids!”

“Good, good, we were worried SICK about the whole thing!”

“I know, I know, I should’ve called you and mom earlier. Listen, I don’t know if we’ll be able to get back to the neighborhood safely, is it alright if I sleep over somewhere else for the night?”

“Is Zelda with you?”

“Yep!”

“Then it’s alright with us.”

I saw a soft smile on Navi’s face, like she was glad that they trusted her enough so long as she was with someone.

“Thanks, you guys. I’ll call you tomorrow morning,” she said. “Main aapase bahut pyaar karti hoon(I love you very much)!”

After she got a little “I love you” back, she hung up.

“Alright! That’s all settled!” She fluttered up and out of the way so Zelda could take her phone back.

“Mama! It’s me! It’s Simon!”

We turned to see Simon hadn’t wasted any time hoping on his phone and calling his folks.

“Oh, liefje!” his mom said on the other end. “Are you safe, Simon?! Your father and I have been trying to get a hold of you all day!”

“I know, I’m sorry, I’m so so sorry, but I’m safe! I’m with Mina’s friends!”

“Oh, Mina! Did you hear-”

“Someone took her, yes, but that’s why I’m out with her friends! We’re going to try and rescue her!”

There was a pause on the other end. Simon’s smile faltered for a moment. “Mama? Ben je daar??”

“Ja, sorry, I’m here,” his mother said, pausing for a few moments after word. “Well… you’re a stubborn boy. You’ll probably run off to try and find your sister whether I say yes or no. I suppose if you’re going to do something reckless, best to do it with friends who can help you out of trouble!” She chuckled nervously. “Just please be safe, liefje! You’re just a boy!”

“I’ll be alright, Mama. I promise!” He said with a smile. “And if I get hurt while I’m gone, feel free to ground me.” That seemed to get a hearty chuckle out of Mrs. Van Der Zee on the other end.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, half giggling. “And when you get home, don’t comment on your father’s looks.”

“What- why? Did something happen?!” He looked around the store before cupping his hand around his mouth and whispering, “ Did father change appearances too ??”

“ ‘Too??’ ”

“Some of Mina’s friends have funny ears,” he explained. “And one of them turned purple. I think maybe something like that happened to Mina as well!”

“Well… if that’s how you want to put it, yes, your father’s appearance changed. You know how he is about his looks.”

“Of course, of course… I’ll call you tomorrow, Mama.”

“Alright, liefje, just be safe. Don’t leave your friends. They’ll help keep you safe. I love you, liefje!”

“I love you too, Mama.” Simon then hung up his phone. “Phew. That could’ve gone worse.”

“Is your mom alright?” My little sister asked, getting up off where she was sitting on the bean bag chair next to Bennet.

“Yes, she’s fine. She was just worried,” Simon explained to her. “The way mothers are, you know.”

“Alright, I think that’s everyone!” Zelda said excitedly. “Let’s break out some snacks and start reading some-”

“Hold on, Masters, you didn’t call your folks yet,” Mike blurted out. The look on Zelda’s face said it all. Like the face of someone who very much didn’t want to call her parents. Bennet looked at her with a raised eyebrow from his seat.

“Should I leave the room for this?” he asked.

“Probably,” was all Zelda said back. That’s all Bennet needed to hear to take his cup of water and blanket up into the cosplay loft with him. Coach McKay, who had been quiet for most of this, decided he should do the same, lumbering up the stairs and into the loft behind Bennet.

Zelda let out a sigh, “Alright, let’s get this over with.” She pulled out her phone. “Listen. You guys have to be as quiet as possible until my dad hangs up. I’m only here with Link and Navi. Got it?”

Everyone in the room nodded their heads. Miranda, Vinny and Garrett ducked behind one of the aisles(I think the trading cards) while Mike just sat quietly by the front counter where he’d been loitering the whole time. Simon sat down on the bean bag with Ariel while Fiona simply stayed where she was, silent as a mouse.

I knew what Zelda’s living situation was like. Her mom and dad were amicably divorced, and she switched houses every couple of weeks. Right now she’s at her dad’s house in Brooklyn(he lived close enough to Queens that she could still go to the same school), so naturally she had to call her dad. And he was fine, I guess. He picked up the phone the way I expected…

“Zelda Gormlaith Masters, where have you been?!”

“I’m fine, dad. I’m somewhere safe.”

“Where?! Who are you with?”

“I’m with Navi and Link in Queens, I’m fine! But I’m going to have to stay the night with them since there’s all the monsters and stuff around. Is that okay?”

“Why didn’t you come home earlier??”

“I couldn’t! The school got overrun with monsters and Link’s house was the only place I could quickly evacuate to since he’s within walking distance. And it hasn’t calmed down at all since, so I haven't been able to catch a bus or anything. It’s not safe enough to get home, so the best course of action is to stay with my friends at Link’s house. Taking all that into consideration, is that okay?”

There was a pause on the other end. It wasn’t the same kind of pause that Simon’s mother had taken. Hers was the kind of pause where it feels like they’re worried and don’t know what to say. This was the kind of pause where you have to sit all tensed up because you don’t know if they’re going to talk reasonably or just absolutely explode. Then Zelda’s dad let out an aggravated sigh.

“Fine, fine. Navi’s a good kid, I trust her, so it’s fine with me,” he said.

I let out a sigh of relief from where I was at the other end of the room. Up until then, I’d been partly thankful I could hear what was going on on both ends of these calls, in case anything happened.

Mr. Masters said something that made me take all those feelings back.

“Keep the Matheson kid at arms length though, sweetie.”

“Of course, dad.”

“Good. I don’t trust his kind to behave around you.”

I wouldn’t have been surprised if the sound of shattering glass had played in Zelda’s head right then and there, because she ended the conversation super quickly. “Right, of course. Bye dad!”

Her dad was in the middle of saying “bye” when she hung up. Zelda looked back at me, and I think she knew. She knew that I heard. And she looked like she wanted to shrivel up into a ball and die right there.

“Please tell me that gas bag didn’t just say that,” Navi said, sounding like she was a hair away from flying all the way to Brooklyn and trying to clobber Mr. Masters. “God, so he’s fine with me being your friend, but the moment you make friends with a kid who doesn’t believe Jesus was all that-”

“Navi, quit it,” Zelda said firmly. “My dad didn’t mean it like that. He just meant… you know, teen boys and stuff.”

“Wait, I… what just happened??” Mike asked, looking like we were all speaking Chinese.

“It’s nothing,” I assured, setting out the copies of the Hyrule Historia onto the D&D table. “Let’s spend less time talking and more time studying.”

Everyone was quick to join up around the table, grabbing a copy to share and going through them like we were studying for an upcoming math test together. We’d barely been able to find seats and split the copies between us(there were only 5 books and 9 of us, so we decided people would have to share) when Bennet came down from the loft with something.

“Alright! I found some snacks for you guys,” He said, walking over with a stack of bowls as well as a few bags of things. “Oh, and I found these for you, Lincoln.” He tossed me one of the bags and I was able to catch it with both hands. I pumped a fist in the air. Salt and vinegar chips. “Yeah, I’ve also got some cheetos and lays, just be careful not to eat too mu- whoa… ” 

Bennet paused when his eyes landed on the kid closest to him. The closest kid being Garrett, who had barely gotten a hand underneath the cover of the Historia to open it when he turned toward Bennet with a confused look on his face.

Bennet’s eyes darted around for a minute before he nervously chuckled, “Uh… alright there, Debbie Diamonds.”

I didn’t see what was so hilarious about it, but the out-of-nowhere nickname made Vinny  giggle. The only thing it did for Garrett was leave him befuddled.

“W-Wha- Debbie Diamonds??” Garrett seemed distressed as well as confused. “What’s that supposed to mean?!”

“No, it’s-” Bennet snorted in an attempt to hold in a laugh. “Just go to page 14 in there I think, you’ll see.” I’d never seen Garrett flip through a book faster in his life. Vinny scooted his chair closer so he could look over Garrett’s shoulder. And once he actually reached the page, the two paused for a moment. I didn’t know Garrett could get any paler, and I’m glad Vinny didn’t have a drink on him because with how hard he’d burst out laughing, he no doubt would’ve spit all over the table.

“I called it! You look like Lady Gaga!” Vinny called out in between laughter.  “He’s even got the same hair as you!”

“No the hell he does NOT!” He says as he stands up. “His hair is an asymmetric cut, and the shorter side seems to be pulled toward the back.” He put his hand on his chest. “Mine, on the other hand, is an undercut.”

“Yeah and it’s still an asymmetric cut, dingus,” Miranda blurted out as she joined them. “You could’ve looked worse, though. That concept art-”

“Yes, I know. Could you IMAGINE me with horns??”

“Don’t think you’d look too bad with them,” Miranda told him, lightly punching his shoulder the way friends do when they’re joking around. “Now look for me next!”

“Hey, hold on! I was here first!” went Vin. “Let’s look for me first!” Pretty soon, their little group began going through the Historia as if they were skimming for old pictures of themselves in a yearbook.

Zelda, Navi and I, on the other hand, were trying to go about this more thoroughly. We were trying to treat this like a genuine study session, although that meant two different things for us. For Zelda and Navi, that meant taking notes on anything they deemed important. Zelda’s copy of the Historia was filled with all kinds of post-it notes in the first 2 minutes of studying. Meanwhile, I decided to go about this with my usual method of studying: casually reading the textbook.

“Link, ain’t you gonna take notes??” Navi asked, fluttering over to me as I got to the pages about Zelda. Or… Zelda from a specific game, anyways. The one they released right before Breath of the Wild.

“It’s hard for me to figure out what’s note-taking worthy, Nav,” I told her, not taking my eyes off the page. “You know this.”

“Right, right, fair.” She fluttered back toward Zelda so they could continue their thing. The whole time I’d been mindlessly eating the salt and vinegar chips Bennet had given me. The bright side of having your favorite food be one of the more polarizing ones is there’s a 50/50 chance you’ll get them all to yourself. And lucky for me, nearly everyone in my friend group thought Salt and Vinegar chips were the devil. Me having the chips to myself led to me discovering something, though.

It was a simple realization. My nose had stopped hurting. Even when you reset a broken nose, it still hurts for a long time afterwards. I was expecting to head to bed with a sore nose, and yet here I was, feeling like I’d never hit my face on something in the first place. I looked between myself and a Salt and Vinegar chip in my hand before getting an idea.

“Hey, Zed?” I said. Zelda looked up to me questioningly. “Don’t freak out.”

I grabbed the edge of the table with both hands and slammed my face into it.

Immediately, I earned a shocked gasp from Zelda. Everyone else at the table looked up and over with wide eyes, like they’d witnessed me kill a man or something.

“Lincoln Matheson!” Navi scolded. “What are you doing?!”

“Sh sh sh, I have a hypothesis…” I pulled my face up, my nose once again bleeding. The first thing I did afterward? Eat a salt and vinegar chip. It didn’t quite look like how I thought it would. The vague sparkles that cropped up out of the corner of my eye startled me, but they disappeared fairly quickly. And just like that, my nose was no longer bleeding.

“Oooooh…” Navi fluttered closer to my face. “Weird… food gives you bishie sparkles now??”

“That’s not… no.” I pulled out another chip and ate it. “I think food can heal us now. Like in Skyrim.”

“Link, don’t even THINK about trying to go fight the next big boss with your backpack full of cheese wheels,” Miranda said with a giggle.

“No but seriously,” my cousin chimed in. “Don’t stop being careful just because your crime-against-humanity food can heal your nose.”

“Alright, alright, I won’t!” I leaned back in my seat and went back to my reading of the Hyrule Historia.

The earlier pages didn’t seem to have a whole lot in terms of lore. Most of it was concept art and design fun facts. I flipped to the next pages and ended up taken aback a bit. There I saw it: the character that was a spitting image of my cousin as she was under all this magic nonsense. Just as we’d been told, Fiona was a parallel to a sword spirit. But what intrigued me was something easy to miss.

“Hey, Fiona, come over here!” I said.

Fiona had gone over by the books with Ariel and Simon, looking at the copy of the Historia they were reading on the beanbag chair, before she floated over to me. “What’s up?”

“Check it! These design notes say you’ve got arms after all,” I informed her. She didn’t even look at where I was pointing on the page before looking at me with the most disgruntled look she could muster.

“Link, that’s ridiculous,” she said, waving her cloak arms around in a gestural manner. “I’ve been stuck like this all day! If I had arms, I definitely would’ve noticed them by-” And just like that, the irony caught up with her. Her gesturing had been so particularly violent with that one swoop of her arm that she managed to flip her cloak… right off of her hands. Her hands that, like in the design notes in the Hyrule Historia, had been connected to the underside of the cloak with a gold band. She looked at it like she was looking at a person with three heads.

She paused for a moment, and then let out a strained sigh. “Well… at least now I know.” One little swoop of her arm and she was able to flip it back over her hand. I tried to hide the wry smile on my face by pretending I was deeply invested in the concept art of the Eldin Volcano.

My attention went back for Garrett, Vinny and Miranda for a moment as they were all gathered in their own seats around their copy of the book, flipping through it like a yearbook and trying to look for anyone that looked like them. I had opted to read through the whole book and simply keep an eye open for anyone that looked like any of us, but whatever works I suppose. Based on their ramblings, they’d gotten past all the extensive Skyward Sword concept art at the start of the book and were making their way through the extensive timeline.

“What if they don’t look exactly like us?” Vinny said.

“I dunno, just look for a name!” Miranda suggested. “Garrett’s name was kinda close.”

“Ah yes, because Garrett totally looks like…” Garrett paused for a moment. “How do you even pronounce the guy’s name? Gar-ah… Geer-”

“Ghirahim,” Bennet said from behind them.

“That’s it!” Garrett continued on flipping through pages.

“Hey wait, stop!” Vin called out. He stuck his hand in the book to make extra sure the page wasn’t flipped.

“Jesus, Vin, you don’t have to shove your fingers in it,” Garratt grumbled as he stopped his page turning. He set it down on the table, allowing the shorter of the two to get a good look. Miranda was floating and peeking over his shoulder as he read what was there. The text was accompanied by a picture of a vaguely childlike figure, dressed in purple and red, with long hair and pointed ears. 

“Dang, the only thing you’re missing are the emo bangs,” Miranda quipped.

“Yeah, and the cool outfit,” Vinny grumbled. “The cape and stuff looks WAAAY cooler than a snow suit.” He slumped in his seat with a perturbed huff. But then he got a look on his face. A look that anyone who knew Vinny knew was a bad look. It was a look that meant he had an idea, and it was either going to be mediocre at best or absolutely awful.

“You know what? I’ve got magic. I’ll just magic my clothes to look like that!” he resolved. We watched Vinny stand up on his chair and smirk as he waved his hands around. “Alright! Gonna make myself look the way I really should!” A puff of black smoke obscured Vin’s form for a moment. We were expecting to see Vinny standing on the chair in his new threads, but instead the smoke cleared to reveal… nothing. Vin just disappeared into thin air, and we all started freaking out for a second.

“VIN?!” Garrett looked around wildly, even peeking under the table and then over top of it again. “Oh my god, he vaporized!!”

“Calm down, dude, he’s not dead,” Miranda scoffed. “Dude’s probably around here somewhere-”

“I found him!” Ariel called out. I looked over to see my little sister scoop up something off the ground a little ways away from the table, walking over triumphantly and showing us. “He’s right here!”

The room fell silent. I didn’t know what to say, really. Vinny had changed his appearance, alright. Just… not into whatever outfit his parallel was wearing in the book. If I hadn’t glanced into the book a second time, I would’ve assumed I was looking at a mouse. But no. As it turns out, Vaati - Vincent’s parallel - was born a minish.

“Wait, wha- AAAH! WHAT HAPPENED?!?” Vinny jumped to his feet as he twirled around in Ariel’s hands and looked at himself.

“What the FRICK!?” He said, aggravated.

“Calm down, Vin,” I said. “That’s probably normal. The book says your parallel looked like that before he got magic.”

“This isn’t what I meant by ‘what I’m supposed to look like’ though!!” he growled.

“Well I think you look adorable,” Miranda said with a smile.

“DON’T CALL ME ADORABLE!!”

“Calm down, Vin,” Garrett said with a huff. “Just do that believing thing again. That should fix it, right?”

Vinny stood in Ariel’s hand for a moment, breathing heavily with the angriest little mouse face he could muster. Then he let out a sigh.

“Alright, alright. Put me down on the table.” He was set down on the table. It took all my strength to not coo at the sight of a little mouse-like dude sitting down criss-cross, trying to relax. He sat for a moment, taking in deep breaths, trying to calm himself down, and then… poof!

Another puff of smoke and Vinny was back.

“Alright, never doing that ever again,” he said. He slid off the table and back into his seat. I just chuckled to myself as I went back to skimming through the Historia. There was a lot of interesting stuff detailed in this thing. Like this bit about there being masks that give you different powers. I wondered for a moment if those were among the things planted in New York when I came to page 114.

“Oh hey! M!” I looked over to make sure I had Miranda’s attention. “Think I found you!”

“Oh!” She went flipping through the copy of the Historia that they had. “Which page?!”

“114!”

She went flipping through before stopping on page 114. Miranda read over the page, her one visible eye darted from end to end as she absorbed all the information.

“Huh… Midna’s a nice name.” She looked at Zelda. “Check it! Guess we’re both princesses, then!” She said this with a little giggle at the end before looking at the next page and then gasping. “Aw man! I wish I had a wolf…”

I blinked a couple of times. “I’m sorry, a wolf??”

“Yeah!” She held up her copy to me and pointed to a picture of her parallel on the back of a wolf. “It says here the hero that Midna was helping could turn into one!”

“Oh! Well…” I looked away for a moment. “Kinda glad there’s nothing like that going on  here.” I chuckled nervously, but Miranda just sat back down with a frown on her face.

“The least I could get was the cool hat,” she grumbled.

“Well at least you’ve found something,” Simon said from his seat on the beanbag chair. “I can’t find anyone that looks like me! I’ve been skimming these pictures for a while now!”

“Yeah, but we found me!” Ariel pointed to one of the pictures in the book.

Simon chuckled, “Yes, we did, didn’t we?” My little sister nodded her head vigorously.

“Well it might be good you haven’t found a parallel,” said Bennet. “All these kids have to deal with weird magic and… being short.”

“Well Vinny was always short,” Miranda said with a smirk. Vin just looked back at her with a look that could kill.

“Haha! Well still, everyone over there is dealing with a lot right now,” Bennet says to Simon. “I barely have a parallel and I got possessed and stuff for goodness sake!”

“You’ve got one, too??” Mike asked.

Bennet shrugged at him, “I think I’ve figured it out, but I’ll tell you all later.” He took a sip of his water in a smug manner. Then something seemed to click in Mike’s head.

“Hey wait, has anyone found anyone that looks like me??” he asked. Everyone had the sense to pretend not to hear him, but Simon looked up with nervous eyes before flipping back through the Historia.

“Well, I did… I did see someone-” he started.

“Let me see!” Mike demanded.

“Well hold on! There’s not a lot of information on him!” He said as he finally stopped on one of the earlier pages.

“Well let me see!” Mike didn’t wait for a response and simply yanked the book out of Simon’s hands.

“Hey! That’s not nice!” Ariel scolded, her cheeks all puffed up and angry.

Mike took one look at the page Simon had stopped on and raised an eyebrow. He looked like he just saw a two page spread illustration of roadkill. I couldn’t see the page he was looking at, but having skimmed the whole book, I knew which character he was staring at all befuddled: Link’s rival from Skyward sword. A side character by the name of Groose(which might I add is one of the funniest names I think I’ve seen out of the whole cast, great work Nintendo).

“Well… uh… at least he’s jacked?” Mike said, trying to be optimistic. I saw Bennet approach from the checkout counter, looking like he was about to give him a pep talk.

“Don’t feel too bad, dude,” he said. “The guy also built a railway with a catapult cart on top of it. Dude was integral to one of the hardest boss fights in the game, so it’s a more than viable parallel.”

Coach McKay had made a comment after that. Something about calling it a perfect parallel for Mike? But the mention of boss fights got my brain back on track. We’d spent so much time studying things, that I forgot about the quest at hand.

“Right! Boss fights!” I closed the book and set it down. “There’s still three more places we need to go to save the other Champions!”

“Oh, you’re right!” Zelda gently slid her stuff aside.  “Where else is there to go?”

“Coney Island, Latourette Park, and the Empire State Building,” I reminded her. “We gotta figure out where it would be best to go next.” As a couple of the others gathered closer to the table and took seats, Zelda thought of something, like a light switch had been flipped.

“Has anyone tried… calling the other champions??” she asked.

I blinked at her. “... Like on their phones?”

“Tried it.” Mike said bluntly. “Three times, in fact. All three times it went straight to voicemail.”

“The same thing happened when I tried to call Mina earlier today,” Simon added. “Either their phones are dead or perhaps Ganondorf destroyed them all together.”

“Well what about the third one?” asked Garrett, his head resting on his hand.

“The third one’s Reily Valenti if I remember right,” went Miranda. “I don’t think anyone here has his number.” She chuckled to herself before looking up at me. Her chuckling stopped when she saw me going through my phone. It clicked pretty quickly. “Oh my god, you have his number??”

“I saved it in my contacts a long time ago!” I explained. “Back during midterms! Mr. Doirich partnered us up for a group project, and we haven’t talked since.”

I heard a “snrk” from Navi as she fluttered onto my shoulder to get a better look.

“What, did he make you do all the work or something?” she asked.

“The opposite,” I explained as I finally found his name in my list. “Dude wouldn’t let me even touch the project! Something about how he needed it to be ‘the best it could be’ or whatever.” I was honestly dreading having to call him, but any help to get through this was good help. I was just about to hit the call button… when I started receiving a call.

From the Empire State Building.

I blinked a couple of times at my screen, super confused as I stared blankly. So many questions were going through my head. Did Reily find a way to contact the outside world while kidnapped? And how did he know to contact a kid he worked with once ?

“Wait, Link, what if it’s a trap?” My cousin said as she looked at my phone. 

I let out a sigh. “Well, just everyone be quiet and I’ll do the talking.” Everyone around me nodded, and I took a moment to psyche myself up. I put it on speaker, and then… I accepted the call.

“Hello-”

“FINALLY!!” I was startled by the loudness of it. It seemed everyone else was, too. “God, Matheson, do you not have your ringer on or something you twit??”

“Wha- Reily??” I asked.

“Yes it’s Reily! Who else would it be?!”

“I don’t know, I usually don’t get calls from the Empire State Building! Are you okay?!”

“Yes, of course, I’m completely fine, I’ve sprouted feathers and started getting the urge to use my teeth to preen said feathers, and… OH YEAH! And I’m being held captive on the 85th floor , but other than that I’m fine!”

I heard an aggravated sigh from him on the other end. “Ganondorf jammed the signals all around the building, but I finally figured out how to configure something to break through it.”

“Hold on, how did you know to call me??”

“Oh, it’s easy really! The office I’m stuck in has these old cordless phones, and you can easily-”

“No, I mean how did you know to contact ME?! There’s a million other people you could’ve called!”

“Do you think Ganondorf wouldn’t have spoken about his troubles to the one person who can’t run off and tell someone? He dropped your name a thousand times just earlier today.”

“I see… well, stay where you are and stay safe, we’ll try to come and save you as-”

“We??”

“Right, right, uh-”

“Hello Reily,” went Zelda over my shoulder. “Link’s with friends.”

“Is that Masters from the old archery team?!”

“Yeah, Zelda! Do you know each other??” I asked.

“Yeah, I was on the boy’s team before the program got cut,” he explained.

“Oh, that’s cool… WAIT! Important stuff at hand! Right” I let out a deep breath. “Just stay safe and we’ll come and save you as soon as we can-”

“NO! Don’t do that,” he commanded. “Qadir, McKay and Van Der Zee are being held captive too, aren’t they??”

I paused for a moment. “How did you know that?”

“Ganondorf moved a bunch of his notes and crap into the same floor of the Empire State Building,” he explained. “Thinks if he jams the signals, I won’t be able to leak any of it anyways, but he underestimates the kind of crap I get up to when I’m bored.”

“Are you saying you have access to all of his plans ??” I was more in disbelief if anything at this revelation.

“That’s one way to put it, yeah,” he said.

I let out a triumphant laugh. “Hell yeah! We’ve got a guy in the chair!” I said to the others. “If you know all that, you should know where we should head first! We already rescued McKay from Central Park.”

“Well that’s good! You got the worst one out of the way.”

A shiver went down my spine. “I see… uh, well, do you think we should go for Uma or Mina’s rescue next?”

“Uhhh based on what I’ve read? I’d go with Van Der Zee.”

I heard Simon let out a little “Yes!” from where he was on the beanbag chair.

“Ganondorf did something screwy to the entirety of Staten Island,” Reily informed us. “If you go to Coney Island, at least you’ll still know how to navigate the borough.”

I looked up to see Zelda was writing this down, having already pulled out a pencil and a piece of notebook paper she’d procured originally for note-taking.

“The Trial itself is actually off the coast,” he continued. “So you’re going to have to find a boat somewhere around Coney Island. Lots of people rent stuff, though, so that shouldn’t be a problem if you know where to look.”

“God damnit,” Mike grumbled from where he was a little ways away. I saw a look on his face again, just like the one he gave me before we’d gone to the Subway to catch the train to Central Park. The look where he so desperately wants to win an argument, but just pouts instead because he can’t think of anything good to say that would sway it in his favor. I just ignored him this time around.

“Will do,” I said. “Thanks for the info! Do you know anything about the Trial itself??”

“Not really,” he admitted. “Ganondorf got rid of a bunch of the Trial plans themselves. I think once he got them all set up, he burnt the notes or something? Either way, I gotta go before he catches me.”

“Understood! Stay safe!”

“I’ll try.”

And just like that, my one contact with the Champion in the Empire State Building was severed. I let out a sigh.

“Alright, I think that settles it,” I said. “We’ll head to the Trial of Water first thing tomorrow and come up with a game plan.”

“Righteo!” went Bennet as he made his way over. “First thing’s first, though…” He swiftly threw something at my face, succeeding and draping a blanket over my head while a pillow followed behind it, slamming into my face. “You kids need to tuck in for the night.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice!” Zelda said as she pulled the blanket and pillow off my head. She went to find a place somewhere close by to tuck in while everyone else went to grab their nerdy pillows and blankets, trying to find their own places to sleep.

“You two, Coach!” Bennet said as he eyed Darius by the display window.

“Not yet,” he said. “I’m going to keep watch tonight. Just in case that jerkwad comes back. He broke into your store once, and he’s fully capable of doing it again.”

Bennet didn’t seem to want to argue. Then again, I wouldn’t want to argue with a former Marine made of rocks, so I get it. Bennet instead went upstairs to head to bed himself.

Everyone found a place to tuck in for the night. Some were fine with sleeping on the floor. Others slept in more creative places, with Miranda sleeping in a comic book drawer she’d pulled out halfway while Navi had found one of those plush dice holders and decided to repurpose it as a sleeping bag. I was about to lay down and shut my eyes when I felt someone tap my shoulder.

I looked over groggily. “Hmm?”

“Link, I don’t wanna sleep,” Ariel said to me from her spot on the beanbag. “What if the monsters come back?”

“We’ll be alright,” I tried assuring her. “Mr. McKay is watching the door, and it’s not like we’re sleeping outside after all.” I chuckled lightly, but my little sister still looked… scared. Scared and unsure. I could tell this right away.

“Ariel, don’t worry about it,” my cousin chimed in. “Just get some sleep, okay?”

I got up from where I’d attempted to lay down and sleep and made my way toward the stairs to the cosplay loft, getting a confused look from my cousin and my little sister.

“Link, where are you going?” went Ariel.

“Hey Bennet?” I asked, cresting the top of the staircase and seeing my boss just as he was about to lay down. “You got any of that uh…” it took me a moment to remember the name for it. “Embroidery floss up here?”

“Yeah, there’s a drawer in the sewing desk,” he said, pointing a thumb to the desk with the sewing machine on top of it. “Second one down.” I walked over and pulled the drawer open, immediately being greeted with a few bundles of embroidery floss, all neatly wrapped up around wooden rods to keep them from bunching up during use. I eyeballed about a meter of the red one and snipped it off, heading back down the stairs with it.

“Ariel, hold out your left hand for me real quick,” I said. My little sister sat up on the beanbag chair before holding her hands in front of her. She was doing that thing some people do to tell their left from right, sticking up her pointer finger and thumb. After a moment, she held out her left hand to me. I took the embroidery thread and started wrapping it around her head, mumbling prayers under my breath as I went along, tying knot after knot.

“Doesn’t mom have to do this?” Ariel asked.

“I’m sure a big brother will do just fine,” I said to her with a smile. “Now be quiet while I’m praying.” Ariel just nodded her head and kept quiet. One knot after the other, saying a few words for each, before I had three knots on each side. I united the two ends of the bracelet by tying a final, 7th knot with a bow.

“There!” I pulled my hands away so my sister could admire the handiwork. “As long as you keep this bracelet on, it’ll keep the monsters away from you!”

My little sister nodded excitedly. “Okay! Thank you, Link!” She immediately fell back onto the beanbag like a weighted ragdoll, pulling a blanket over herself. My cousin layed down with her, draping her own cloaked hands around the two of them before dozing off. I layed down as well, taking a spot on the floor right beside the chair since there wasn’t any more room.

With a squid shaped pillow beneath my head and the same first edition D&D handbook blanket we’d given to Bennet earlier that night draped over me, I finally let myself rest for the first time in what felt like forever.

Chapter Text

It was early the next morning when Bennet had woken up. It wasn’t because he was a particularly early riser(The Dragon’s Lair opened at (9:00am, so he never really woke up any earlier than 8:00). It wasn’t because he felt like waking up earlier than usual. It was because he could hear someone rummaging around in the loft.

Looking up from where he’d been zipped up into a sleeping bag, he just barely caught someone sneaking back down the stairs. To his relief, it was one of the kids from Link’s friend group. And he knew which kid it was. He couldn’t gauge what exactly they were doing, but he figured if they were going to use his stuff to do it, he might as well follow after them and provide adult supervision.

Bennet slumped down the stairs tiredly and tried his best to keep his footfalls light so as to not wake the other kids. They all seemed to be sleeping soundly still, and even Darius was slumped over in his chair by the display windows. Even while keeping watch, it seemed he couldn’t deny getting some rest as well. How anyone could sleep comfortably like that was a mystery to Bennet, but that’s not what he was downstairs for.

“ C’mon you little- ack !”

He could hear someone whisper-yelling from the hybrid break room and back room, and figured that’s where the kid went. Bennet gently opened the door so as to not disturb anyone, and was greeted with a sight he wasn’t expecting.

He remembered this kid - Mike, was it? The one with the bright red hair. He didn’t know a whole lot about him, just that he’d tagged along with Lincoln and the others. But now he knew one more thing about the kid: he had an affinity for building things.

What he saw when he opened that door was Michael, sitting on the breakroom table, with a dust mask over his face. The kind you wear in a woodshop, or when you’re painting with those paints that stink up the whole room. He was there with a mat made up of cut open/unfolded plastic shopping bags underneath all the materials he’d brought down and laid out on the table. Stuff like paracord, EVA foam, one of his hair dryers he used for said EVA foam, some aluminum kick plates, and contact glue. Boy, did he take a LOT of Bennet’s contact glue. He wasn’t sure what he was putting together, but the shape of it seemed familiar. He became more interested when he noticed some of the stuff that for sure didn’t come from the loft. Stuff he was sure came from the crates he’d found delivered to the shop the morning before.

Michael had found a fire arrow, and had the head of it broken off and tied to a mechanism he was putting together. This intrigued Bennet enough for him to finally make his presence known.

“A bit early for tinkering, ain’t it?” he asked.

“I’ll be fine. I got enough sleep,” Michael said, half annoyed. He didn’t flinch, nor did he even look back at the door when Bennet had indirectly addressed him. He was too focused on his work. Bennet shuffled over, taking a seat in a chair nearby.

“Eh, even kids that need to save the world need sleep,” he said, looking around at the materials Mike had laid out. He also paid attention to what exactly the kid was doing. He had a tube, one made from a plastic rain pipe. That surprised Bennet. He had a piece of pipe up in the loft, but it was part of a failed stilt build that he’d thrown aside in the closet. Michael would’ve had to have nearly taken the whole thing apart just to get those two halves of pipe, and even then he’d still have to put them back together somehow. And he did!

“Impressive doohickey you’re putting together there,” Bennet complimented.

“Don’t patronize me,” Michael huffed. “Haven’t even gotten the barrel lined yet. It’s just a tube with a hole in it.”

“Hey now, I mean it!” Bennet picked up the mechanism made from the head of the fire arrow. It was a little crank-like thing, with the arrow head tied to the end with kevlar. “It takes a lot of work to get this all together.”

“Yeah, sure, if you’re smart enough to do it,” Mike huffed.

That made Bennet pause, putting the mechanism down. “You’re saying that like you ain’t.”

“Yeah, if you could see my STEM grade you’d know,” he huffed. “Just throw me in the damn ocean, why dontcha, teach, because I’m swimming in nothing but Cs…” He started hammering a piece of aluminum sheet metal, trying to get it to curve.

“Ah. Public school.” Bennet said it was a subtle hint of venom in his voice. “I wouldn’t let your grades keep you down about that, Mike.”

“Well why shouldn’t I??” Mike grumbled back. “Grades are all that matters. You need good ones to get into college, and I need good ones to do that AND keep my spot on the football team.” He angrily slid the bent piece of sheet metal into the rain pipe, examining how it lined up with the curvature of the chamber inside. “No good grades means no team. And no team means no scholarship money. And no scholarship money means no college.” Mike let out an aggravated sigh as he retrieved the sheet from the tube, coating one side with contact glue before sliding it back in. Bennet figured out pretty quickly that he was trying to make a lining for the thing.

“And now that I’m in this group where everyone’s got their own talents and powers and crap,” Mike vented. “I feel even more worthless.”

“Now what makes you say that?”

“Well, I ain’t got no talents of magic or crap! All I’ve got is muscles and subpar STEM grades…” He pulled out a screw driver and stuck it in a hole that had previously been home to the screw keeping the pipe in place on the stils. He was attempting to drill it through the aluminum lining.

“I wouldn’t call it subpar,” Bennet said. “Just because you’re not doing great in the class doesn’t mean you don’t have skills.”

“Sure, like you would know,” he huffed. “You run a nerd store that sells board games and comic books.”

The surface level observation made Bennet chuckle. “Yeah, and I run a side business where I build people things for a living. I had to learn that somewhere.” He pointed to something hanging up on the wall in the breakroom. It was hard to notice at first glance, being half hidden behind a tall filing cabinet with some abandoned looking stacks of stuff on top, but it was there. Hanging on the wall was a framed diploma. One from some big name technological school, with the name Bennet Zukowski printed across it in big letters.

“And I got into that with a GED and some community college courses,” he said.

Mike’s eyes flew open. “What??”

“Yeah!” Bennet chuckled to himself. “I didn’t do so hot myself in school. Pretty sure I had ADHD or something. Never got diagnosed for it. But after I flunked out, I got my GED and got in.”

“Damn…” Mike looked solemnly at the tabletop. “Wish I could do that.”

“Well, still try to keep your grades decent, kid,” Bennet suggested. “That football thing seems important to ya. The GED’s just there in case it all goes to hell.”

“Well… thanks. I’ll keep it in mind…” He took the little mechanism with the arrow head on it and latched it onto the side of the tube, looking at it with squinted eyes.

“So what’s with the big gun then?” Bennet asked, having figured it out by now.

“Actually, it’s a shoulder cannon,” Mike corrected him. “I made myself a slingshot, but I've barely been able to use it. Everything was either too big or too quick. Figured something with a little more firepower would do the trick!”

Bennet sat in thought for a moment, his chin cupped in one hand. He was eyeing Mike as the kid held the tube on his shoulder, pulled a little trigger, and the mechanism with the arrow head swung forward and plunged into a hole on the top of the tube. Ah! It was the cock of the gun. That makes sense. Bennet admired the kid’s enginuity, but…

“Impressive!” he said. “But it seems like it’ll be a bit big to carry around, won’t it?”

“Well, I was gonna field strip it before we head out,” Mike explained. “It’ll make it easier to carry in a backpack, and-”

“That’s not what I meant.” Bennet shuffled away to look for something. “Stuff like that is bulky and hard to maneuver with. You said you have a slingshot, yeah?”

“Well, yeah, but we’re going up against monsters and stuff,” he said. “Slingshot’s not gonna do much.”

“Not with that attitude it won’t.” Mike sat flabbergasted as Bennet plopped something down in front of him on the table. It was… a lot of stuff. Sugar, stump destroyer, olive oil, more contact glue, a bottle of hot sauce, and water balloons. Lots and lots of water balloons.

“Ever thought about making custom projectiles?”

We woke up around 8:00 in the morning. Breakfast consisted of more snack food(it was fruit snacks this time, so we weren’t eating cheetos for breakfast but it still wasn’t the healthiest thing) and water bottles Bennet kept in the fridge so that we’d have cold water on shift. We’d started our day the way a lot of nerds probably do: with the top of the D&D table taken off and the little pit in the middle of battle maps being used to map out our next battle.

There wasn’t much to go over, though. We knew that Mina was being held somewhere in Coney Island. Or… near Coney Island? I realized we didn’t know exactly where it was, but it was going to be somewhere around there. And Bennet seemed to know already that we’d be dealing with what was basically a real life water level…

“Alrighty!” We all looked up as we saw Bennet bring over a laundry basket full of stuff. Clothes and jewelry and all sorts of similar garbage. “If you’re going to be going to the Trial of Water, you’re gonna need some stuff to help you breathe in the water.” He set it down on the table, probably for us to take or fish through to see what we wanted.

“Or I can just NOT go in the water,” Vinny interjected. “That’s an option too!”

Garrett let out an aggravated sigh. “Oh c’mon Vin, we-”

“No no, I second that,” Miranda said, cutting Garrett off. “We’ll need someone on land to keep a lookout and stuff, you know?”

Garrett couldn’t help but pause and nod his head. “I suppose, yeah.”

I barely caught a glimpse of Miranda giving Vin a knowing look before winking at him. 

Bennet quickly gained my attention again.  “Right, well! Here’s all the stuff I could find that I figured would be useful. Just… don’t test anything here, okay?”

I pushed my laughable excuse of a breakfast out of the way as I reached over into the laundry basket.

“Alright! Well, let’s divvy up the spoils then!” I said. “Figure out who wants to use what!” I began laying out all the stuff in the laundry basket onto the table. Like I said, lots of clothes and jewelry, and we were all going through them like adults scrutinizing discount clothes in a thrift store.

“Dibs on this one!” Miranda blurted as she grabbed a ring off the table. It was your standard gold-band ring, with a trio of sapphires embedded into it. Miranda slid it on like a bracelet, and it was a perfect fit for her little gremlin hands.

“I’ll take this one,” went Garrett as he picked up one of the clothes. It looked like the Goron tunic we’d found in central park, but blue this time, with the same sequin-like gleam to it.  He didn’t put it on right away, instead deciding to fold it up and stuff it into his hoodie pocket(it was one of those BIG front oriented hoodie pockets, so it fit with enough finagling).

We divided up everything else without much trouble. There were various scales made to be worn around the wrist, and Mike took one of the fancier ones and secured it to his. The rest of them I pushed into my bag so we could keep them for emergencies. Zelda and I had found two full outfits in the basket, and each took one set. That left one thing. Something that left Fiona looking confused as she gently pulled it up and out of the basket.

“What’s… this supposed to be??” She asked, holding it up with both hands. It looked like a slip, or perhaps a tube skirt? Except there was no opening on the bottom. Bennet chuckled a bit and made it clear to us what it was.

“Ah yes, Oracle of Ages,” he began. “... that would be the mermaid suit.”

Pretty much everyone looked at it with the same expression: one of confusion, befuddlement, and a little bit of “Hell no”. Bennet could see this as well, and let out a sigh.

“Just hold onto it, will ya?” he said. “You never know if you might need an emergency underwater item.”

“Fine, fine, we’ll take it,” I grumbled. Fiona handed me the suit and I folded it up before stuffing it into my backpack. “But seriously dude, thank you for all the stuff. It’s a big help!”

“Don’t thank me for doing my job, kiddo!” He said happily. “I’m simply doing my job as my parallel.”

“Oh, right… you were gonna tell us who it was?” Mike asked gruffly. Bennet simply smirked at the jock, standing up on the checkout counter all dramatically.

“Based on the items I’ve been bestowed and my status as a business owner,” he began. “I’ve been led to believe that I’m only THE most beloved of shopkeepers, the most recurring of NPCs…” He did a little bit of jazz hands as he looked at us.

“The one and only, BEEDLE!”

 Bennet looked very excited to come to this conclusion. I remembered spotting the character in question in the historia. Briefly, though. He was on one page, and I only really remembered him because I thought it was funny that he had a bicycle-powered helicopter house.

“Right, we’re all parallels of people, ain’t we?” Coach McKay chimed in from his spot by the display window. He turned to me. “And you said something last night about me being a Champion or something??”

“Yeah, that’s what we were told,” I explained. “I think you were uhhh Daruk! Specifically.”

“Ah, that makes sense,” Bennet said with a chuckle. “Big tough goron-” He leaned over to Darius. “-those are these rock people in the games that are resistant to fire.”

“HA! Isn’t that fitting,” Coach laughed heartily. “And I assume I’m important in this whole thing?”

“Yeah, you and a couple of other guys are integral to setting things right,” I explained.

“Alrighty then!” He groaned the way middle aged people do when they get up out of their seat and stand up. “In that case, I think I’ll be staying here this time around I think. If I’m that important, it's best I stay out of harm's way.”

“But Coach, you should go!” Mike pleaded. “What if we need your magical shield or whatever??”

“Listen, you kids did just fine breaking into Central Park all by yourselves to save me,” he said, putting a hand on Mike’s shoulder like a supportive dad. “I’m sure you’ll be fine going to save Mina.”

Mike looked conflicted. He looked like one of those kids that wanted to accept the compliment, but also felt like they weren’t deserving of it. He ended up just nodding his head to McKay before turning to the group.

Those of us who hadn’t donned our water gear decided to wait until we’d actually gotten to the water to do so, but we hadn’t even made it to the door when Bennet pointed something out.

“Right, I’ve been meaning to ask, what’s up with your arm, dude?” Bennet pointed to my right arm. The one Zelda had wrapped in gauze after the fight in Central Park.

I glanced down at it for a moment before going, “Right, right!” and unwrapped it. “Central Park got gnarly quick. Almost got my arm mummified to the point that it could fall off. But something happened with Audrie - she took control of my switch-”

“Right right, I remember you mentioning her. The Sheikah Slate thing, right?”

“Yeah, that,” I said. Bennet didn’t need to explain that one to me. The Sheikah Slate was the thing from Breath of the Wild. You get it right at the start, before you even exit the shrine you wake up in. I knew what it was, just not what it did.

“Well, whatever she did, she fixed it,” I said, holding up my arm. “But I don’t have time to mourn my switch right now, we’ve got- GAH!” The moment I looked away from Bennet and back at my arm, I was alarmed to see that the technological veins running across my knuckles and skin were glowing. And then the skin started glowing from the fingers and spreading up toward the shoulder.

“WHAT’S IT DOING?!” My cousin called out frantically.

“I DON’T KNOW!” I shook it around, like it was on fire and I was trying to put it out. I should’ve figured it wouldn’t do anything. Except it did something . Just not what I wanted it to do. Just like when I’d first gotten this arm, strings of blue magic suddenly started to fall away from the skin, like someone was unweaving an invisible sweater. The only difference between now and when it happened to the switch was that the weave then began to swirl around the entirety of me. That lasted for about 2 seconds before I was suddenly thrust off the ground and toward the ceiling. That’s when everything went dark. Not in an “oh god I’m dead” way though, but more in a “who turned out the lights” way.

Just like that, everything around me was dark. I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t even breathe, I realized, at least, not easily. But I could hear the muffled voices of everyone else, sounding like they were far off somewhere…

“Oh my god, Link!!” Zelda cried out.

“What the hell did he do?!” Went Fiona.

My little sister chimed in next with an oddly adorable, “He went upsies!”

“Someone help me get his legs!” Zelda ordered. I felt something grab my legs as I was suddenly yanked on. But to no avail.

“Oh come on you weasley wimps, let me!” I heard Miranda grumble out before a much bigger hand grabbed onto both of my legs and then pulled. And like that, I fell. I was pulled down and back into the Dragon’s Lair, landing flat on my butt.

“Agh! What was that?!” I strained myself to stand after that. Garrett just pointed at me like it was the funniest thing he’s ever seen.

“Haha! YES! I’m not the only one with weird magic!” he cried out. “Now YOU’VE got stuff to get used to, too!”

That made my eyes blow wide open. “I’m sorry, magic!?”

“Your glowing arm sent you right up into the ceiling!” Zelda informed me, pointing upward for emphasis. I looked up at where she was pointing. Knowing where things on the floor above were, she was pointing right at where one of the walls would’ve been upstairs. “You looked like Jumanji!”

That just confused me even more. “Huh??”

“Your legs were sticking out of the ceiling like the quicksand scene,” Miranda explained, miming two legs kicking with her fingers. “I had to pull you out like a root vegetable!”

“Okay so wait wait wait…” I paused for a moment as I cupped my face with my hands. “So you’re saying my funky new arm… just yeeted me into the ceiling, and I just phased right through it ?!” Everyone just looked at each other before I got a few affirming nods from some of them.

“That’s the jist of it,” went Bennet. “I don’t think I’ve EVER seen anything like that in the games, though.” He chuckled to himself as he looked at the ceiling. “I dunno, I guess each Link has his gimmick. Maybe yours is noclipping or something.”

“Right, well I’m opting to not use my ‘gimmick’ any time soon,” I said. I took a roll of bandages from a first aid kit that Simon was packing together, using it to wrap up my hand again. “The last thing I need is to be on the Coney Island boardwalk and accidentally phase through the floor into the ocean.”

I walked back to the table to grab my backpack, putting the last of my stuff inside before my own words sank in. Coney Island. The Ocean. Right .

“Shoot guys… we’re gonna need a boat,” I said in realization.

“Already thought of that!” went Navi as she fluttered over to take a seat on my shoulder. I raised an eyebrow at her.

“Wait, so are you saying it’s a bad idea??” I asked as I went toward the front door of the store.

“No, I’m saying I texted my dad about it this morning,” she explained. “And one of his friends still owes him a favor for something.”

We took our leave at this point, with me leading the group as I snuck out the front door. We were going slow, making sure to look around and make sure the coast was clear before walking out.

“Which friend?” I asked. Navi looked back up at me with a knowing smile, crossing her arms.

“The only sober guy my dad trusts enough to rent a fishing boat from…”

The good news about the trip over to Coney Island is that I got to update the Sheikah Slate with a map of the borough of Brooklyn. The bad news was that my suspicions were confirmed. The quest marker on our map for the Trial of Water showed us where Mina was being held captive, and it was somewhere far offshore from Coney Island. Without a doubt, we needed a boat. And that’s how the 10 of us ended up breaking into a gated community.

As it turned out, that’s where Navi’s dad’s friend had his business set up. It was a boathouse right inside the fence around Seagate, a gated community on the edge of Brooklyn, somewhere east of Coney Island. At first, we were worried about having to sneak in and find a way past the main entrance and its gate attendants. That is, until Navi told us the way her dad once snuck her in when she was little. After all, the fence wasn’t entirely well kept.

Somewhere where the land met the sand, the fence wasn’t in as great of shape. It was shorter than the fence everywhere else, and just the right height for us all to hop it like a group of delinquent kids trying to break into a junkyard, or perhaps get our baseball back from some old man’s killer dog. Either way, it didn’t take long at all to get past the barrier around Seagate and make it onto its surprisingly deserted beach. Brooklyn had been one of the neighborhoods to be warned about the monsters and given stay-at-home orders, so that didn’t surprise us. We didn’t have to worry about the implications for long. We stumbled upon the boathouse just that quickly.

It was an average-sized place, built upon posts that went into the water and sand. You could tell which part was the indoor boat dock and which part was where people were actually supposed to live and sleep in. I would’ve compared it to a famous boatman character’s house from a certain Steven Spielberg movie, but Miranda beat me to it.

“Woof… you sure we didn’t walk all the way to Martha’s Vineyard?” Miranda asked jokingly.

“Who’s Martha and what’s a vineyard?” Ariel asked.

“Well, a vineyard is where they grow a bunch of grapes,” Simon explained to her.

“But Martha’s Vineyard is a town on this island in Massachusetts,” Miranda continued. “My parents and I went with my aunt, uncle and some of my cousins when I was in middle school.” She looked at Ariel with a mischievous smirk. “They filmed a spooky movie there about a scary SHARK!” She grabbed my little sister by the shoulders and shook her. I smirked my own smirk when Ariel didn’t scream, but instead giggled, earning a confused look from Miranda.

“Sharks aren’t scary!” she retorted with a laugh. “I like sharks!”

Simon kneeled down to look her in the eyes with a smile. “Even the really spooky sharks with the big noses and teeth?” he asked, curling his fingers like claws to frighten her. That just made her giggle even more.

“Yeah! Those ones are super cool!” she said.

“Oh really?” He side eyed her with a smile on his face. The smile faded into a vaguely confused look when Ariel replied to him by simply… giving him a boop on the nose before running off. “Hey, no fair, schatje!” He went after her as I went toward the front door to investigate the boathouse itself. It was decorated the way you’d expect a tourist-y, New England rental boat house to be decorated, complete with a sign made from a barnacle-covered wood plank hanging over the door, reading “Mercay Boathouse.”

The only problem was that the front door had another sign on it: one that read “Closed.”

“Oh, what??” Navi fluttered off my shoulder to investigate. “That can’t be right. He’s usually open at 6:00 AM on Saturdays!”

“Well what time is it??” Vinny asked as Navi fluttered around to investigate the rest of the front porch/facade of the boathouse.

I pulled out my phone. “It’s 9:14… the boathouse should’ve opened 3 hours ago.” I jiggled the door handle. Yep, locked.

“He’s probably hungover or something,” Navi reasoned.

“I thought you said he was sober…” I asked.

“Ok, he was… IS the most sober.”

“Why don’t you try doing your arm thing through the door?” Mike proposed.

“Absolutely not,” I said firmly. “I don’t even know how it works! The last thing I need is to get stuck in the door.”

“AHA!” I looked down as Navi let out a triumphant little yell. She’d found a pair of boots. They were probably the most fancy, costume-y, “I paid $700 to a cosplay artist to make these for my Pirate101 character costume” looking sailor’s boots I’d ever seen, to the point that I thought it was part of the decoration. Up until I watched Navi push one of the boots until it fell over. This was where I noticed something: the heels on the boots were different heights. It was subtle, but it was there.

“Come on, it’s gotta be somewheeeeere GOT IT!” Navi pushed in on the bottom of the heel until it clicked. She shuffled her hand around until the bottom of the heel slid out, revealing a secret compartment.

And in that compartment was a spare house key.

“That’s a bit convoluted, ain’t it?” I watched as Navi lifted up the house key with all her might. It was nearly the size of her whole torso.

“Yeah, but he’s always been a bit convoluted like that,” she explained. She plopped the key down in Zelda’s hand, allowing my friend to walk over and unlock the door. It wouldn’t be a creepy boat house if the door didn’t creak open inwards after we opened it.

The first floor of the boathouse looked exactly like we expected it, and yet not at all like he thought at the same time. There was a dock inside, with a line of duffy boats sitting in the water tied to the docks. Each of them was ready to head out for a party or a nice ride at a moment’s notice. The dock itself was wide enough to attach to the wall of the house facing the beach, and allowed for the setup of a little waiting room. It was like an office you could walk into to fill out the paperwork for a boat rental. Right beside the desk where I assumed the owner of the boathouse would sign papers and such, there was a staircase up to another floor.

“Mr. Beckett, are you in here??” Navi blurted out. I watched my friend flutter around briefly, looking around the boathouse. For a moment, it seemed to be entirely deserted. “Liam?!” She called out another name to see if that would get any reaction.  That ended up breaking the eerie silence, with the breaking of the wood and the subtle sounds of sea water being interrupted by…

“I’m not here!”

We’d heard it from up the stairs. Navi sat back on my shoulder with her cheeks all puffed up, like an angry Tinkerbell.

“I know that’s you, Mr. Beckett!” She called back.

“N-No, it’s not! This… this is one of those security doorbells, yes!” He called back to us. Despite the fact that that would mean his doorbell is inside his house, we let him continue talking. “You’re all trespassing! S-So please leave before I call the- AHH!”

And just when we thought it couldn’t get more ridiculous, someone tripped at the top of the staircase and fell down like a ragdoll. We all flinched back and away, but the dude still ended up falling right at my feet. The man I saw was middle aged, probably in his late 30s, with a mustache and chin hair that made him look like he was trying to disguise himself as Inigo Montoya. The only problem was the polo shirt and hawaiian-printed board shorts did NOT help with that image. He looked like he was content to spend the day chilling in his house, but now that he’d fallen down the stairs, he was stuck being confrontational.

I think the both of us were just startled and confused, but soon the stranger shot back to his feet, his hands flying over his ears.

“Who are you!?” He asked frantically and angrily. “How did you get into-” He suddenly paused, his eyes landing on Navi as she waved to him from my shoulder.

“Hi Mr. Beckett,” she greeted nervously. “You good?”

The man we now knew as Mr. Beckett sputtered for a moment. “Wait a second! Ain’t you Dinesh’s kid? What’re you doing here?! Who are these kids!? Why do you look like Tinkerbell?!?”

“Speak for yourself! You look like you tried to dye your hair green without bleaching it first!” Navi blurted back at him.

“It’s not like I CHOSE to wake up like this!” he said angrily. “I look like a damn CHRISTMAS ELF!” He paused for a moment as he took his hands off his head and took the time to look at the rest of us. His ears were pointed. And I think it finally hit him that ours were as well. “I… uh… huh.”

“There’s a lot to explain, Mr. Beckett-”

“You can call me Liam, Navi,” Mr. Beckett interjected. “I’ve known your family for too long to just be another ‘Mister’ or whatever.”

“Right right, uh, Liam, there’s a lot to explain,” she continued. “But we really need to take a boat into the water off Coney Island.” Liam looked at her like she’d just asked him to help her hide a body.

“Absolutely not!” He said as he made his way back up the stairs. “We’re closed. Please go somewhere else.”

“What?? Liaaaaaam c’mon!” Navi fluttered up the stairs after him. There wasn’t much else to do in this situation, so I followed her. Zelda and Fiona followed up the stairs as well, my cousin in particular opting to float up the stairs with her regular arms crossed.

“C’mon, Liam! We’re old pals, right?” Navi asked as I crested the stairs.

“God, I need a drink...” Liam replied dryly. The floor above the rental boat area was what I assumed it was: a regular little room where one could live and sleep in. It looked like the inside of those cheap camping trailers, with nothing but a twin bed in a cubby in the wall, a table that folded out in the corner beside a bench seat, a camping stove-looking kitchen opposite the table, and a window with the blinds closed. There was also a small bookshelf below said window, decorated with all sorts of boring adult books(things like almanacs and pictures of lighthouses and all that).

“Liaaaam…” Navi whined as she fluttered over to Liam. Liam was in the middle of digging through his fridge for something. I assume a corona or something, but he instead pulled out and took a swig of a bottle of milk. “We’re old pals, right? Right? How’s Jolene been?”

“We divorced.”

I’d like to imagine if there were background music playing, it would’ve come to a screeching halt at that moment.

“Oh… uh…” Navi nervously hovered for a moment. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” he assured. “It’s all in the past. And she tried to sue me for Alimony,  but I got out of that by ratting out her weed farm to the court, so she’s got more than enough money in pot crop to live off of, so I won in the end.” He pointed a thumb at himself with a triumphant smile on his face.

“W-Well, hey!” She fluttered onto his shoulder. “What better time for a boat ride fitting a mid-life crisis than right after a heated divorce?”

“Absolutely not!” Liam waved his hand around to shoo Navi off of him, like he was swatting a fly and not his best friend’s kid.

“Hey!” Navi puffed up her cheeks as Liam walked over to the window with his cup of tea.

“Listen, Navi, on any other day, I’d be happy to take you and your friends fishing,” he told her. “But I don’t want to go ANYWHERE near the ocean right now. Not with THAT out there!” On cue, he pulled the blinds open. What he revealed was a beautiful view of the ocean, showing off a wide open area where you could no doubt see all sorts of cargo ships and ferries sailing around.

And smack dab in the middle of it was a ship. One that I thought was just any old commercial fishing boat at first glance, but then I noticed the big chunks of open hull and missing panels on the outside of the boat. This was very obviously a shipwreck, yet it was floating in the water like it was casually anchored there.

“It’s a bad omen when ghost ships show up,” Liam told us. “I don’t want to go sailing with THAT out there!”

I looked at that boat out the window, and decided to check something. I opened the switch, I looked at the map and… yep. The quest marker was smack dab on top of that boat. I let out a defeated sigh.

“You don’t understand, Mr. Beckett,” I said. “Our friend is stranded on that boat! We need something to sail us out there so we can rescue her!”

Navi fluttered in front of Liam’s nose. “Besides! You owe my dad for what happened in Coney Island Creek!”

“Listen, we do NOT talk about what happened in the creek!” Liam scolded her, wagging his finger at her. “I’m thankful Dinesh helped me out, but this is the one exception to the favor I promised him.” He took another swing of his milk. “The last thing I need right now while Brooklyn is overrun with pigs and lizards and bats… is to get cursed by some ghost ship off Coney Island!”

This whole time, I was so caught up in the conversation between Navi and Liam that I hadn’t noticed what Zelda was doing. She’d been boredly looking around the room, looking at where Liam lived to see if she could find some hints or other such ideas of what to do here. We needed a boat, and the one guy that could get us a boat for the day without it costing us our entire college funds was refusing to go near the water in any kind of water vehicle. But Zelda had spotted some things that I had failed to see. Lots of frame newspaper clippings. A couple of them had been downstairs, and she found a third one up in Liam’s house loft. All three were front page covers, and all three were some other story about wildly popular fishing tours and boat tours and summertime fun.

And all of them featured Captain Liam Beckett, front and center.

“Mr. Beckett, do you like fame?” Zelda asked.

Liam let out a little “Hm?” While he was in the middle of taking another swig of milk. He finished what he was doing before answering. “Well, in a congratulatory, front page of the paper kind of way, I guess.” I set the bottle down onto the bookshelf. “What’re you going on about?”

“Well, as Link so graciously mentioned, we have a friend stuck on that ghost ship,” she reminded him. “And we need someone to sail us out there.”

“I’ve told you before-”

“We could take a dinghy the rest of the way there!”

“We’d still be getting pretty close-”

“No, but think about this Liam!” Zelda interrupted him. “Even with as little as that, imagine what people will think! Captain Liam Beckett, Mercay Boat Rentals guy, helping a group of underdogs rescue their friend and save the day during the Tolkeining!”

I cringed internally at her use of that stupid name. Unfortunately, I knew that that was the name the media went with, and the name for the events that everyone in New York was familiar with, and I knew that that’s the most likely term for Liam to understand. And he seemed to.

You could pinpoint the exact moment the gears began turning in Liam’s head. He cupped his chin. He thought about it. Then he looked at Zelda with a smirk. She was looking back at him all smug with a similar body posture to her.

“You know you want to,” Zelda said smugly.

“Alright! I’ll get you kids a boat,” he agreed. We all cried out triumphantly before he held up a finger. “On ONE condition!” The triumph died quickly with that interjection. Although, our worries were soon quelled once he actually told us the condition: “I’ll be the one captaining the ship! I’m not letting some teens wreck one of my nice boats.”

He picked up his bottle of milk before walking toward the stairs. He made a gesture with his hand to get us to follow, and we did so.

“How’d you know to do that??” I whispered to Zelda as we made our way over.

“Have you seen him?” Zelda asked. “Hyrule Historia, the era of the great sea. Dude’s a near exact copy of Captain Linebeck.”

“Ah…” I didn’t think to ask for any more clarification as we continued to follow Liam. I suppose if this were any other day, I would’ve been excited. There’s just something about the prospect of going out on a boat with a sea captain for just some cool sight-seeing and adventuring.

And then we saw what the others were busy doing downstairs.

Liam took a stop at the bottom of the stairs, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if a record scratch had played. We saw Vinny, Miranda and Mike, frozen where they were on the dock. They’d been in the middle of untying one of the Duffy boats in an attempt to make off with it should negotiations not go well. I looked over to see that Ariel, Simon and Garrett had vacated the dock and were standing awkwardly by the little office area.

“We had nothing to do with that, it was Mike’s idea!” Garrett snitched, pointing to the others. Vinny stuck his tongue out back at Garrett in response. Liam didn’t react angrily. Not even disappointedly. He just looked… unimpressed?

“Oy vey…” He took another swig of milk. “Firstly, that’s definitely NOT the right way to untie that.” He walked over and had Miranda give the tie back before tying the boat back to the dock. “And secondly, that’s a terrible boat to pick for where you’re going.” He stood back up. “These are Duffy boats. They’re for leisure rides and bachelorette parties.”

He turned to the office desk, opening up one of the locked drawers, and then pulled out a ring of keys. One that was accompanied by a keychain of a white whale.

“You kids best come with me.”

Chapter Text

The way rental boat services work, you expect most of the boats to be roughly the same. For Mercay Boathouse, I had naturally assumed the neat rows of Duffy boats lined up by the dock was all Mr. Beckett had to offer. So you can imagine my surprise when we eventually sailed out onto the open ocean off of Coney Island beach in a Pershing 82, with the words “Ocean King” plastered on the side in big swirly letters, like the calligraphy you’d spot in a Pirate’s of the Caribbean set piece.

For context, Pershing is a company that makes yachts. Not just any yachts, but those big ones with bedrooms and kitchens on them, like having a modern designer house on a speedboat. The last time I’d been on a boat this nice was when one of my uncles on my dad’s side got married when I was 15. He rented out one of those multi-floored party boats for the whole thing, and we spent the night out in the New York harbor. Lots of bright lights, loud music, and lots and lots of horderves. There were no horderves on this boat, though. Just a lot of snack foods that we’d brought along from the Dragon’s Lair.

In the heat of the moment, I never thought a boat this big could go this fast. It was like riding a house at 45 miles per hour. For the most part, a lot of us were enjoying the experience of riding a yacht. My sister and Simon were out on the desk, with Ariel running around and looking over the railing while Simon was doing his best to keep her from falling off the boat. Of course, with some people enjoying the ocean, others… were not.

“Vinny, the water’s super pretty!!” Ariel said, running back to the main cabin with a big giddy smile on her face. "It’s all swishy and blue, and it looks like a picture book!”

“Cool, cool, I’ll take your word for it,” Vinny grumbled on the couch. He had his back to the walls of the cabin and his face turned down toward the ground and away from any windows that might give him a clear view out into the sea. So while Ariel and Simon were playing around outside and looking at the ocean, the rest of us were inside the cabin. Liam was seated in the front of the cabin in a nice leather chair, piloting the boat from the comfiest looking boat helm I’ve ever seen, with all sorts of dashboard equipment spread out around him in one big interface. His outfit hadn’t changed all that much, except for the sun visor he’d thrown on before setting sail.

“Well you see, Navi,” he said to Navi, who had taken a seat on the very top edge of the boat’s dashboard. “Back in 2011, your dad and I went out deep sea fishing over the summer for one weekend. The fish were getting sparse, so we wandered over to Long Island to see if we could find something there. Few hours later, and BAM!” He slammed a hand on the top of the dash for emphasis. “I’d snagged an Atlantic Blue Marlin so big it barely fit on the boat! And when we went back to shore to sell the damn thing, we were rich!”

“Isn’t it illegal to sell Marlin in New York?”

“Well I know there’s a bunch of laws about it now , but it was perfectly legal back then! Besides, your dad and I split the funds 50/50, so it’s all good on his end.” Navi just nodded her head at Mr. Beckett. “And it was with those Marlin funds that I was able to save up for the glorious Ocean King a few years later. Never had a better boat to fish with in my life.”

I’d only overheard the conversation about where the money for the boat came from thanks to the Hylian ears. I’d been too busy with other things to actively listen in. It should've been obvious, but for the most part, I was with the rest of the kids around a table, seated on couches and with a map laid out on the table. We were trying to figure out how to go about approaching the shipwreck and rescuing Mina.

“Alright, so does anyone know if there’s any, like… laws about this??” Fiona asked.

I looked at my cousin with a raised eyebrow. “Laws??”

“I dunno, like is there a distance we gotta keep from the boat for safety purposes? So there’s no crashing or anything??”

“Hold on, lemme check-” Miranda turned and pulled herself up and over the back of the couch to look at the helm. “HEY BECKETT!! ANY MINIMUM DISTANCE WE GOTTA KEEP WITH THE BOAT?!”

“Not really??” He said back to us. “It’s like cars, really. Just don’t run anyone off the road. Or… out of the water?? I’m staying half a mile off from that shipwreck, though!”

Miranda turned back to us. “He says he’s gonna keep a half a mile away from it once we get there.”

“Alright, got it,” I said with a nod. “And there’s a dinghy stored in the back of this thing, so we can head the rest of the way like Zelda suggested back at the boathouse. I’ll obviously be going since I’ve probably gotta be there. I think we can fit two other people on the boat. Not including Mina when we find her.”

“I’ll tag along,” Zelda volunteered. “I crammed a lot last night when we were studying the Hyrule Historia. I think I'll be of some help.”

I nodded my head before looking around. Eventually my eyes landed on my cousin. She looked at me for a moment before sputtering.

“Wha- Fine! I’ll go,” she grumbled. “I kinda HAVE to since I don’t think a baseball bat or meter stick is gonna work on the shipwreck.”

“Works for me,” I said dryly. “How about the rest of you guys?”

“I’d love to join you,” Mike said sarcastically. “But I’d rather stay here in case something attacks the boat.”

“Why? This thing doesn’t have cannons or anything,” my cousin informed him, crossing her arms. “You gonna throw a pillow at a sea monster?”

“Don’t talk about sea monsters please,” Vinny whined from the couch.

“Well no, but I’ve been working on something,” he said to us cryptically. “I figured I could get it finished while we’re out here on the boat.”

“Yeah, and I dunno if I’d be much help out on the water,” Navi said to us, having fluttered over to the back of one of the helm seats. “Dunno what exactly saltwater does to these wings.”

“Well that’s fine, Nav!” I replied. “You can stay on the boat and help people out here!”

“Yeah, like I’ll be,” Garrett interjected. “Well, I’ll be helping Vinny at least. Don’t think he’s doing well.”

“Yeah no DER, sherlock !” Vin blurted out angrily.

“Totally fair,” was all I said, not wanting to crack open that particular can of worms just yet. “How about you, M?”

“Hmmm…” she looked behind her at the deck outside. “Oh, I dunno, probably-” Her ponytail hand shot out behind her and grabbed onto something. Or, someone I’d soon realize as I heard those characteristic scream-giggles little kids let out when they’re surprised and having fun. She pulled Simon and Ariel back inside. “I think I’ll stay and babysit these two.”

She set them both down on the outside deck again. “If anything happens, you two, just holler and I’ll come floating!”

“Okay!” went Ariel as she ran off again. Simon went after her to keep an eye on her, and Miranda rolled her eyes with a smile on her face. 

“Alright!” I stood up from where I was. “I think that settles that. Not much else to do but prepare for when we get to the boat.”

“There’s a couple of bathrooms downstairs!” Liam informed us loudly over the sound of the wake. “You kids can change into wetsuits and what have you down there.”

“Hold on, not yet!” Mike pleaded. “Let me finish what I’m doing down there first!” And before I could ask for clarification, he ran down below deck.

“N-No fair! I need to relax somewhere!” Vinny called out, quickly shooting up from his spot on the couch and toward the stairs downward. The whole time he was looking down at the ground to avoid seeing the water.

Once he was below deck, Garrett let out a sigh. “I should probably go with him, shouldn’t I?” He sat there for a few moments before he got up and went after the two of them. We let them go off, staying above deck with our maps and equipment and such in order to figure out what to bring, what to wear, and how best to invade the shipwreck and get Mina back.

Garrett had been emotionally exhausted this past day and a half. The fact that it had only been a day and a half is what threw him off the most. They’d been through enough stuff to take up almost all of their spring break, yet it wasn’t even Monday yet. That day on the boat was technically their first day of spring break, and they were going to spend it sailing out to a terrifying shipwreck trying to save another kid.

One thing Garrett could appreciate was the number of beds on this yacht. He’d looked at a little cross section map left somewhere in the main cabin out of sheer boredom and discovered this without having to go exploring. There were four bedrooms in total, two of them being rather small, but the first one you stumbled into coming down the stairs to the lower deck was one of the ones with the queen-sized bed. He was prepared to get down there and just lay down on it and nap until they got to the ghost ship. But he couldn’t. Not only was Vinny already taking up half the bed, but Mike was down there making a ruckus on the bedside table.

“What’re you doing, mate?” he asked as he trudged down the remaining steps. Mike was pulling thing after thing out of his bag. Garrett wasn’t too much of a mechanical guy, having taken the STEM class for the math side of it. That and to have a solid science class on his record. A lot of the bits and bobs Michael had laid out on the table he didn’t even recognize.

“Your mom,” Mike replied sarcastically as he screwed one thing onto another.

“Oh shut it,” Garrett grumbled, sitting at the foot of the bed. “What’re you doing?”

“I dunno, something,” Mike said back to him. “Just putting together a thing I made back at the nerd store. I had to field strip it to carry it easier.”

“I’ll just pretend I know what that means.”

“Oh for god’s sake, do you know nothing about guns?”

“I don’t exactly own any, so no.”

“Field stripping’s when you take it apart to clean it and crap. I did it with this thing so I could fit it in my backpack. That and… so it wouldn’t go off in my bag.”

“Honestly, fair. I wouldn’t want anything blowing up on my back, either.” Garrett got up and decided he might as well change his jackets out. Swap out his maroon one for the blue one that was supposed to let him breathe underwater.

“It’s not that I’m scared of it blowing up!” Mike clarified angrily, twisting around in his seat to properly glare daggers back at Garrett. “It’s so I can actually-” He paused for a moment. A moment was all it took before Garrett realized what he was doing, and he quickly threw on his blue jacket with a nervous grimace plastered on his face. It was too late, though. Mike had seen it. He thought they were cuts or scrapes from the subway. Maybe that toothy monster with all the hands had grabbed his arms and messed him up a bit. It took until Garrett had already caught him staring and threw on the blue jacket that it hit Mike like a ton of bricks. Stretch marks.

“Quit staring!” Garrett blurted out, aggravated.

“Dude, are you alright??” Mike asked, not sure what else to really say about that.

“I’m fine!” Garrett turned away from Mike’s gaze. “T-They’re perfectly normal! A lot of people have them. Ain’t my fault I look like this!” Mike just let Garrett keep talking. Let him keep being defensive. Let him keep trying to explain himself. Either way, he was going to think the same.

On one hand, that comment in Central Park about having to wear long sleeves and pants in June had a proper explanation now. He’d worried for the longest time that the kid was talking about self harm scars or something like that. But being self conscious about stretch marks was nothing to sneeze at, either. But Garrett just kept going on and on about the whole thing. It could’ve been Mike being ignorant, or it could’ve been something else. Probably something else.

“Would you shut up already, Embers?” he ordered dryly. “Everything’s gotta be about how you hate your looks or whatever.”

Garrett looked flabbergasted, sputtering for a moment. He looked as if he were on the verge of chewing out Mike with the fury of a thousand suns when…

“Garrett, calm down dude, he- WHOA okay!” Vinny turned himself over on the bed to look away as Mike simply looked back at Garrett and pulled his hoodie up and off of him. Garrett didn’t get much time to be more angry at him, the anger leaving his face as he blinked confusedly at him. With the hoodie off, Mike had free reign to pull down the collar of his shirt. 

“You act like you’re the only kid at school with tiger stripes,” he grunted. And just as he implied, there they were, stretching from his pec up to his shoulder. “Put too much effort into getting ready for football tryouts as a Freshman and wasn’t smart about preventing them or whatever.” He pulled his shirt back up before putting his hoodie back on. “If I made fun of you, it wasn’t because of your stretch marks, you wet noodle.”

“Right, of course,” Garrett snarked. “Of all the comments about being too tall, too skinny, looking like a rubber chicken, and all the different iterations of making fun of the way I talk, at least you had the decency to leave alone the stretchmarks you knew nothing about.”

Every single thing he brought up had made Mike look more and more uncomfortable. And good, thought Garrett. He deserved it. Even if there was a slim chance he was actually sorry, that didn’t make up for it.

Mike, on the other hand, so desperately wanted to say something. He didn’t have the guts, though. The guts to open up like Garrett did in the park with barely any prompting. The guts to relate to him about how people used to make fun of him. It wasn’t his fault. He knew what was going on in classes. It wasn’t his fault that the tests were confusing. It wasn’t his fault that he kept forgetting when there was homework. He always tried his hardest, and he still barely scooted by with Bs and Cs. Other kids didn’t care, though. They just saw a dumb football jock trying to “pretend” to be smart. Mike wished he had the guts to do any of that. Even if he could magically muster them up in that moment, he didn’t have the time to.

Not before they felt the boat rumble.

It had been very sudden, but you could tell when everyone felt it. My little sister stumbled a bit as she was running around the edge of the deck. Simon qas quick to pick her up and away from the edge of the boat, while Miranda picked up the both of them with her hair and pulled them closer to the main cabin. The rest of us at the table took a moment to freeze, some of us grabbing the couches and table to steady ourselves.

“Whoa there, kids!” Liam pushed one of the levers to slow the boat down. The splish-splashing of the waves slowly quieted and calmed down until the Ocean King came to a complete stop. Right as that all happened, we heard rapid footsteps up the stairs.

“What’s happening??” Garrett asked, startled.

“Did we hit something??” Mike asked right after him.

“Please tell me we decided to turn around…” Vinny grumbled.

“We dunno!” Zelda informed them. “It’s like some kind of earthquake in the ocean.”

“Or big ripples from something,” Fiona inferred. We all stayed frozen and quiet after that. I got up with Zelda and slowly made my way toward the edge of the boat, looking down into the water. We weren’t sure if the big ripples we were seeing were from the wake of the boat or from something else. Scanning the underneath of the surface didn’t help, either. We were so far out that anything with enough smarts to stay deep down would’ve been perfectly hidden. The partly cloudy weather didn’t help, either. We could’ve used a little sun to see things better. Now all you could really make out in the blueness of the ocean were our own reflections.

We stayed silent for what felt like a straight 2 minutes as we tried to figure out where the rumble came from. Simon swallowed hard as he inched toward the edge of the boat again.

“M-Maybe it was just the boat engine?” he proposed.

BAM!

The boat rumbled again, but a bigger one this time. One that was accompanied by something reaching up and grabbing the boat. A chorus of screams erupted from us, the shrillest of them coming from the helm of the boat.

“HOLY CHRISTMAS!” Liam grabbed Navi before ducking down behind the helm as something slammed through the front windshield of the boat and on top of the dashboard. It was a tentacle, one that seemed very pissed and very cranky as it latched onto and pulled hard on whatever it could get its slimy appendage on.

Unfortunately, it ended up being the steering wheel.

“CRAP!” Liam shot back up to assess the damage, but not before the boat was rocked once more. We backed away from the edge of the boat, leaning against the outside walls of the main cabin as we finally saw the creature emerge from the water. What we saw was a giant squid, one with plenty of long tentacles trying to grip the boat as it stared us down with multiple bright yellow eyes, all set in its face in uneven ways. It looked less like a real animal and more like a child’s art project with googly eyes stuck on all haphazard with no regard for symmetry. With the mantle sticking up tall out of the water like an ornately carved wood pillar, this looked like the perfect medieval art piece come to life. And it was unfortunately our problem at the moment.

“What the hell is that thing?!” Mike screamed out. I didn’t respond, fumbling with the Sheikah Slate as I tried to hold up the reticle and line it up with the creature’s face before it got any ideas. The system was able to recognize it.

“It’s a Big Octo!” I yelled back. “That’s literally what the system says it's called!”

“But it’s een INKTVIS!” Simon complained.

“We don’t have time to question the validity of Hyrule’s Marine Biologists, Simon!” I put the switch away as the Octo tried to slam a tentacle down on top of us. We all ducked out of the way as it tried to wrap around the railing on the side of the boat and pull. We already knew it was trying to capsize us, but seeing it in the middle of doing so was still nerve wracking. 

“Kids, cover your ears!” Captain Beckett shouted. We all did so, but I was too caught up in looking to see what exactly Liam was doing to do so in time.

BLAM!

Liam had grabbed a shotgun from somewhere on the boat and shot the tentacle on the railing. The Big Octo let out a squid monster-y cry as it reeled the limb back into the water.

“Where’d you get the gun?!” Navi called out wildly as she fluttered beside Beckett’s shoulder.

“Your dad and I go fishing in international waters all the time, kid!” he explained. “It’d be asinine to NOT have a gun on the boat!”

“Wherever he got it, it worked!” I shouted back. The Octo had indeed retreated a little bit, but only a little bit. It seemed Captain Beckett knew this as well.

“Navi! You know where the fishing equipment is, right?” He asked as he turned to make his way back into the cabin.

“Yeah!”

“GOOD! Go lead the kids to them! Looks like we’re gonna be fighting this thing!” He went to run back inside the cabin.

“Wait, where are you going?!” Mike called out.

“To the helm!” he said. “I’m going to try and get the boat started back up so we can lose this thing!”

That seemed to satisfy Navi. She fluttered back toward the rest of us before grabbing onto the tip of my ear and pulling. “C’mon!!”

“Hey, hey, you don’t need to do that!” I blurted back before she let go. I followed after her as Zelda and Miranda joined us.

Navi looked back at me before stopping in front of a closet. “Consider it me getting even for you guys grabbing me like a salt shaker… twice!” She grabbed onto the handle of the closet and pulled it open, revealing a bunch of fishing rods. Just fishing rods, with a shelf above them stacked high with tackle boxes. The lot of us looked at it confused.

“Oop! Wrong closet!” Navi shut it before zipping over to the closet right next to it, swinging that one open. “Bingo!” The whole thing was full of spearfishing equipment, complete with extra spears. I didn’t have to wait for any instructions from Navi, simply reaching in and grabbing one of the spare spears before turning to head back to the edge of the boat. I returned to see Simon against the outside wall of the cabin, my sister beside him with a startled expression on her face, like her mind was going a mile a minute.

“Simon, take Ariel down below deck and stay there with her!” I ordered. “It’s too dangerous up here!”

I didn’t hear Simon’s annoyed grumble over the sound of the Octo splashing again. “Alright!” he replied. He took Ariel by the hand and led her into the cabin.

“Be careful!!” I heard my little sister tell me before she and Simon disappeared below deck.

“Shoot shoot shoot, I gotta help!” Mike dashed after them, and I didn’t find out why right then and there. Then again, the situation was pretty tense. Didn’t blame Mike for not having the time to explain what he was going to do while there was a giant squid monster to worry about. Garrett ducking below deck with him did kind of confuse me, but I didn’t have time to focus on that.

Another tentacle from the Octo latched onto the railing of the boat, reeling and pulling. And the three of us were quick to rush it, spears raised high and ready to stab.

“Crap crap crap crap CRAP! That crap bastard!”

Liam had been trying to get the boat moving for 30 seconds too long, and soon came to a harrowing and angering realization. That being that the Octo broke the throttle and steering when it grabbed onto the dashboard. Even if they had the time to, he wasn’t even sure where to begin with trying to fix a broken steering wheel or throttle of all things. Luckily for him, he didn’t need to fix it. He knew his ship top to bottom, knew where any possible back-up plans were located. There was just one problem: their subpar defenses.

He’d sent the kids to grab spearfishing equipment to use as weapons to fend off the giant squid, but those would only do so much. That thing was easily the size of a humpback whale - Liam had seen one before up close, so he’d know more than anyone - and the stabbing was only going to hold it off for so long before it stopped getting scared away and started getting pissed. The shotgun had made some effort, but he couldn’t stay to shoot at it if he wanted to get the boat out of there. He’d have to find another kid to help out, and out of the 10 that had gathered on the boat, his eyes landed on the only one not doing anything to help…

“Hey, kid!”

Vinny looked up at Liam from where he was on the couch, trying to keep his head down and looking away from the water. He saw Liam approach.

“You got a firearm permit?” he asked frantically as he went to hit a switch on the wall.

“K-Kinda??” Vinny answered sheepishly as a ladder swung down from the ceiling of the boat, like those foldable steps you can pull down from a house’s attic. “My dad has a rifle permit and took me with him when he went deer hunting once.”

“Close enough!” Liam blurted.

Before Vinny knew it, he’d been thrown the shotgun, catching it in his hands with wide eyes and a “GUH!”

“Calm down, it’s not loaded!” Liam informed him. He tossed him something else: a box of bullets. “Just load it and go help your friends out there!” He began to ascend the stairs. “I can’t keep shooting from where I gotta go, so I need one of you kids to do it!”

“Whu- I can’t fight that thing!” He looked at him like a scared little kid, sputtering and stammering to think of a way out of this. Fighting that monster meant getting closer to the edge of the boat, which meant having to look at the ocean, which meant more bad times and flashing back to when he threw up on the party boat during Winter Formal. “Why can’t Miranda do it? She looks like she knows how to use a gun!”

“I don’t trust a person with that small of hands to operate this thing,” he answered bluntly.  Vinny couldn’t really argue with that. Miranda did have smaller hands now. And small hands weren’t the best for safely operating shotguns.

Vinny just let out an anxious sigh. “Okay, okay, fine!”

“You can do it, kid!” Liam said as he ascended the top of the stairs.

The very tip top of the Ocean King consisted of another deck. One that sat on the roof of the main cabin, where people were free to sit and relax on a big folding lounge sofa and a few other seats. One such seat was right in front of where a windshield was, folded down for aerodynamics sake. But with a flick of a switch, Liam could make it unfold and rise up out of the roof to shield himself from the wind. And with it rose… a second helm.

It was meant for leisure, for speeding along and having fun with it. It wasn’t supposed to be for any real navigation, seeing as it had less tools for such a task than the main helm down below did. But in this situation, it would do just fine.

He just had to wait for the kids to make him an opening. To injure the squid enough for it to back off. Then they could be out of there.

Who would’ve thought that simply poking a squid with some sharp sticks wouldn’t do much in the way of fighting it? Violently stabbing and slashing at it with our spears was doing less to get it to back off and doing more to piss it off. But in a situation like this, there wasn’t much else we could really do. We’d spot a tentacle reaching up to grab the boat. We’d stab said tentacle until we’d hurt the Octo enough to have it reel its hand back. Even when we’d gotten this routine down to a fine art, we still never managed to keep its slimy appendages completely away from the boat. There was always at least one tentacle still hanging onto the railing for dear life, like one rose up and latched on the moment we’d gotten another to let go.

“Crap nuggets!” Miranda tried to stick her spear in it again, pulling it out as it reeled its tentacle back. “This isn’t working!”

“No duh!” I responded, frustrated. At this point, I was just doing my best to avoid it’s appendages as it tried foregoing sinking the ship just went and decided to try slamming its tentacles on top of me to take me out first. “It’s gotta have a weakness or something !”

“I think I remember reading about these things while we were cramming!” Zelda interjected. She pointed at its big ugly squid face as she got close enough to me to yell it to me. “If I remember correctly, you have to hit it in the eyes with a boomerang!”

“Oh, well good thing that’s the ONE THING we didn’t bring with us!” I blurted out angrily.

“WILL A GUN WORK?!”

We turned just in time to see Vinny running out, looking less purple than before and more like the shade of a blank sheet of printer paper. He came charging onto the deck, Captain Beckett’s shotgun in hand, as he aimed it at the squid. You could tell he wasn’t having fun, and that he was straining to keep his eyes up and away from the water and trained on the Octo’s face and only the Octo’s face.

BLAM!

He fired right into its eye, specifically the one smack dab in the center of what could’ve been its forehead if you compared its face to that of a human’s.  The Big Octo let out a shrill cry unlike any I’d heard in the past few minutes as we’d been trying to fight it, reeling back enough that it completely let go of the boat for a few moments. A few moments was all it took.

“Hold onto something, kids!” Liam called out from above us. We barely had time to latch onto the railing as the boat suddenly picked up speed again and went off. We slipped back inside as fast as we could so we could escape the assailing winds outside. Thanks to this, I was able to snag front row seats to the partly damaged helm in the main cabin. The steering wheel and throttle might’ve been busted, but there was one thing on the dash that still worked: it’s rearview camera. Navi watched from there, as did I, and the other turned to look behind us at the back of the boat after a few moments to see it for themself.

The Octo had made an attempt to pull itself back together and continue its assault, but thanks to the boat speeding away, we only had to watch as it thrashed around in the water in an attempt to keep above the surface. And just like that, we lost it in the wake of the boat’s escape, the white foam and big ripples pushing it back and away as we made our escape.

“HAHA! Take that, you slimy brute!” Liam shouted triumphantly above deck. We all just had to take a moment to sit for a moment, watching as the giant squid disappeared behind us in the wake of the boat. We weren’t sure if it was dead or if it was diving underwater to retreat. But none of us cared in the moment. We were just glad to be rid of the assumed miniboss and back on our way to the main objective.

“Holy cow! I actually got it!” Vinny said triumphantly as a smile appeared on his face. It was short lived once he remembered he was on deck and in view of the ocean, and he swiftly retreated back inside.

“Guys, the octopus monster is gone!” I shouted below deck. “You guys can come back up now!”

“DANG IT!” I heard heavy footfalls as Mike came stomping back up the stairs. “Fricking pussy of a monster. Didn’t even have enough time to finish putting together my new thing to use on the octopus!”

“It’s een inktvis!” Simon told him angrily as he came up the stairs. “I don’t know the English name, but it’s got a pointy head and two longer arms than the octopus. It’s een inktvis!”

“Do you mean a squid??” Ariel asked.

“Yes! That’s it! Thank you, schatje.” He ruffled my sister's hair before he trudged over to the couch and sat down, his arms crossed. “I barely got a look at it before you guys made me go downstairs, so it could’ve very well been an octopus.”

We heard Liam say a swear from the helm up top. “Shoot! Hold onto something, kids!”

We didn’t have time to figure out what he meant before the boat abruptly slowed down.  A few of us were able to reactively grab onto something to keep us from falling over. Others couldn’t. The image of Vinny falling over and tumbling into a table leg like a toppled teddy bear is forever ingrained in my brain. I had half a mind to yell back up at Captain Beckett to ask what the hell he was doing… but then I looked outside.

It was right there. In Liam’s fast-paced escape from the Octo, he’d almost crashed into the ghost ship. I couldn’t help but wander toward the edge of the boat and look at it as Liam turned the boat around to get some distance between us and the shipwreck. It looked even freakier in person. I couldn’t quite pin where I was getting this innate fear of the ship, but soon it hit me. I think I was 4 or 5 years old, and little kids get into a lot of weird, niche interests at those ages. Sometimes it's dinosaurs, or disney movies, or smoke detectors(Yes, I knew a kid like this in kindergarten. No I don’t know what ever happened to them). For me, it was this shipwreck in the Solomon Islands called the World Discoverer.

It was this cruise ship that hit an uncharted reef and started sinking, but miraculously, everyone was able to evacuate. The downside is the boat was grounded on the edge of a bay, and it’s been stuck there ever since. I’d look for all sorts of pictures of the thing when I was little, looking at all the weird pictures of this rusted and abandoned boat lying on its side in these islands northwest of Australia. Although, looking back at those pictures gave me some grim feeling in my stomach. It wasn’t really something I could pin down. But this was worse. After all, the World Discoverer was above the water sitting in a bay where there were no waves to splash against it. What we were looking at was a boat that had been sitting at the bottom of the ocean for lord knows how long, with all the ocean currents and storms and such assailing it as it sat there. The World Discoverer was one thing, but seeing this thing sitting there with its rusted shell and broken hull was a whole other thing entirely.

“Link, we should get ready to head out there!” Zelda said to me.

“Right, right!” I pulled away from the edge of the boat to head downstairs with her. First things first, donning our armor. Putting on the set of zora armor in the bathroom had me wondering if this was how it was when people put on those chainmail wetsuits to go shark diving with. The tightness of a regular wetsuit with the clinking and clanking of metal like chainmail. By the time I was done, I felt like I was wearing a whole new layer of skin. I felt jealous of Fiona. All she had to do was slide one of those scale charms onto her wrist, while Zelda and I were putting on a whole new set of armor over our clothes. But it went by quickly, and before we knew it, we were back on deck.

“Alright, get a load of THIS!” Liam said this - as well as pressed a button somewhere - with all the hype of pulling a cloth off of a brand new ferrari. With that little button push, the stern of the boat began to open up a bit. It was slow. But it was something at least? And soon, the top of it came up enough to reveal a compartment on the boat. One that stored a little dinghy with its own motor.

Captain Beckett helped us slide the thing down the ramp that had unfolded and pulled it into the water. He was keeping his hands on it the whole time as we did our best to quickly but carefully get in.

“Alright, we all know what we’re doing?” I asked as Zelda, Fiona and Navi took their seats in the boat.

“Yep! Provide backup for you while you try to find Mina,” Navi answered. I gave a nod.

“Right…” I turned around to see Zelda beginning to fiddle with the engine. 

“Now how do you…?” She trailed off as her fingers wandered around a bit.

“Put the throttle into idle first,” Liam said to her. “Then you just-”

“It’s like a lawnmower, Zed, just pull that chord,” Navi instructed, interrupting Beckett.

“I was about to tell her that!” He said, miffed.

“Well we don’t have time for you to take your sweet time telling her,” Navi retorted. “Make sure it's in idle before you switch into forward, reverse or neutral, every time.”

“Got it!” Zelda did as Navi instructed, putting the boat into idle, then neutral, then she pulled the cord. And just like that, we heard the engine rumble to life.

“Alright, off you go!” Liam shoved the boat away from the stern and out into the water, and soon Zelda had the boat revving forward and through the water. We were on toward the shipwreck, through uneasy waters and toward where there surely were dangers.

We were on our way to the Trial of Water, and on our way to rescue Mina Van Der Zee.

Chapter Text

It didn’t take long at all to finally arrive at the shipwreck. Part of me wanted to keep my distance from it for as long as possible, but I knew we’d eventually have to get right up close and personal to it. I feel like we still circled it one too many times. Seeing those same gaping holes in its sides and the same big chunks of missing hull filled me with an inane sense of dread that I couldn’t explain. I suppose it was the same kind of dread one feels looking at pictures of broken down disney animatronics or those photos of liminal spaces. You know the ones: the pictures of abandoned malls and hotels and public pools that feel super familiar, yet you’ve never been to these places ever your life. The kind of places that should have people milling about, but are completely deserted. Just throw some rust and barnacles all over one of those pictures, and it was basically the same as looking at the resurfaced boat in front of us. 

“I can’t find a ladder anywhere,” Zelda said as we circled the boat for the fifth time. “Big boats like these usually have rungs built into the side of them, don’t they?”

“If this one does, I haven’t noticed it,” I replied. “This whole place gives me the creeps.”

“No kidding,” Fiona responded. “Have you ever seen those pictures of the Titanic? Where it’s all pitch black dark except for the submarine light and-”

“Yeah yeah, I’ve seen them,” I told her. “The whole wreck looks like those super dirty fish tanks with the algae hanging off in strings.”

“Yeah… gross.” Fiona sat a little further into her seat. 

By this point, Zelda decided to bring the dinghy to a stop, right beside the wall of the boat. We were close enough that we could touch it, but not so close that the boat was rubbing against it.

“Uhhh Zed, what’re you doing??” I looked back at her questioningly.

“Mina’s in the boat somewhere, right?” she asked. I hesitantly nodded my head as she looked up at me. “Realistically, they’d be holding her below deck. It might be a good idea to-”

“No way, nuh uh!” I knew where she was going with it, and I wasn’t down for any of that.

“Link, you’re never going to learn to get control of your arm if you refuse to use it!” she retorted. “Besides, it’ll be way easier in the long run if you can find Mina right now. Maybe she knows how to get into wherever she’s being held.”

I paused for a moment, trying to formulate the words right in my head. Trying to think of some excuse to get out of this one. But nope. Zelda, like almost all the times she’d thought up plans, had made a very good point. I let out a defeated sigh as I pulled my hoodie off and began to unwrap the bandages I’d wrapped up my right arm with.

“Fine, fine! I’ll try and figure out how I did it,” I said as I held up my hand. “But if I phase through the boat and fall in the water, Zed, I’m dragging you off the dinghy with me.

“Fair enough.”

I held up my hand and examined it, turning it over to try and figure out just how exactly I was supposed to get it to work. I shook it out. I wiggled my fingers. Nothing.

“Maybe it’s a reflexive thing,” I inferred. “If I push hard enough on the boat, it should work.”

“Or it could be the whole ‘believing in yourself’ thing Vinny’s coined,” Navi proposed. 

“True, true…” I thought for a moment, before taking a deep breath. “I’ll try both!” And so that’s what I did. I put my right hand against the cold walls of the trawler and held my breath as I pushed. I tried to focus hard on it. To think about passing through the solid metal wall of this shipwreck like gas through a vent. I was nothing. I was a ghost. I was no obstacle to this wall.

And then I fell through. Not entirely, mind you, but enough that my face made it all the way through the wall and got stuck. Unlike last time, I got through far enough that I could breath once I came out the other end. My face was sticking out of the wall, like a poorly mounted taxidermy head, and the sight was… partly what I was expecting, and partly not what I was expecting.

What I saw was a large empty compartment, no doubt where the fish and other such cargo would’ve been kept. Now all it housed were a few empty boxes and a thin layer of water along the floor. The water didn’t surprise me, what with this being a half-sunken ship and all that. What surprised me was who I found running around in this room through the thin layer of water. 

There was a young woman in the room. One who I’d spotted while she was in the middle of running up to a door and trying to slam a piece of rotten, water damaged wood into the handle, only for it to break apart on impact. I sat in the wall watching her try another couple of times, even resorting to picking up a lacrosse stick on the floor and trying to use that to leverage the door open. She’d stopped once she realized it wasn’t going to work, and I saw her stand for a moment before wobbling to the ground and laying on her side. 

She was strange looking to say the least, but that wasn’t saying much considering what was happening to everyone else. She was dressed in baggy sweatpants - the kind you wear when you’re feeling awful about yourself and want to hide your form as much as possible - and a tie-front shirt to try and cover up, both soaked with seawater. All worn in an attempt to hide the scales. Her skin was covered in them, bright red and white tessellations of gleaming colors that covered her entire form, including her head that ended in a fish tail instead of hair.

I’d never met this person before, yet I felt for her as she laid on the ground in defeat and tried to keep herself from crying. It was too the point that I so desperately wanted to comfort her.  To step all the way through the wall and give her a hug and tell her it’d be okay.

And then she realized I was there.

You know those pictures of raccoons and deer and dogs where it looks like their eyes are glowing? Because the light from the flash reflects off the backs of their eyes or something. When this young lady suddenly sat up and turned to look right at me, it was at just the right angle that her eyes flashed gold for a moment. It startled me enough that I pulled back and out of the boat, falling backwards into the dinghy.

“Link!” Zelda helped me back up. “Did you see something??”

“Yeah…” I huffed for a moment. “There’s a girl in there… I think? She looked like she was locked up in the ship, too.”

“Well stick your head back in!” She told me, gently grabbing my shoulders. “If she’s stuck on the boat, too, maybe she can give us some insider info on how to navigate this thing!”

“Alright, alright! You don’t have to manhandle me!” I took my hands and put them on the sides of the boat, pushing myself back through the metal and to the other side.

And right up to the face of the zora woman.

“LINK!?” She grabbed my right hand and pulled me through.

“GAH!” I felt something grab my legs from the other side. I could only assume Zelda and perhaps Fiona too were trying to keep me from falling in. Now I was just halfway through the wall, stuck in this room up to my waist.

"Link, it IS you!!” The zora blurted out excitedly. “I didn’t think anyone was going to come for me, but YOU did!” The fish tail on her head wagged up and down happily as she practically beamed with happiness. All the while, I was still very lost.

“I’m confused, who are you??” I asked.

The smile didn’t falter when she answered, “It’s me! It’s Mina Van Der Zee!”

It took me a moment. I know this whole thing was making a lot of us look wildly different, but even then there should’ve been something to hint at it being her. Garrett still had his beauty mark under his left eye, and Miranda still had all her piercings and undercut. That’s when I saw it. The right side of her neck had a patch of darker red scales - darker than the red covering the rest of her - and was almost the exact same shape as something Mina had in the exact same spot on her neck: a port-wine stain birthmark.

“Oh! It IS you!” I called out. Mina giggled once I’d finally come to this realization, and I just sat for a moment looking. “Sorry, you looked a little different. Did you cut your hair or something?” I was trying to lighten up the situation, but the comment on her looks seemed to make her smile falter. My smile faded as well.  “Sorry, too soon?”

“No, no, I just…” She put her hands on a pair of fins that were hanging off either side of her head like hair fringe and just pushed her palms into her face. “I look like een koi vis…” She looked down and away from me, like this was the worst thing I could’ve ever pointed out.

“Hey hey hey, don’t cry!” I said in an attempt to comfort her “You’re a very pretty, er… een koi vis??” My confusion seemed to make her laugh, which did something to break up her sadness in the moment.

“Dankeje, Link,” she said to me. “I’ve been stuck here since last night, and it’s been getting to me, I think.”

“Well don’t worry, we’re gonna bust you out of here!”

“We??”

“Yeah! I’m here with some friends to rescue you! A-And Simon’s here, too!”

Mina’s face went white. “Simon? He’s just a kid, what’s Simon doing here??”

“He wanted to come along, and I don’t think anyone was gonna be able to stop him,” I said with a nervous chuckle. “But it’s fine! We’re going to get you out of here!”

“You’ll need to find a way in, then!” she said as she looked around the room. “There’s only one door, so the way in should be easy to find. But I’m not even sure where you’d even start…”

“I’m sure I’ll find a way!” I said, putting my right hand on her cheek. “We’re going to get you out of here, and you’ll be back on the mainland and be able to get somewhere dry and warm in no time!”

Mina just looked at me in slight surprise and slight disbelief. It was like a part of her was worried I was just trying to say the right things to calm her down. But soon she gave me a small smile as she put her hand on the one I had resting on her cheek.

“Alright,” she said. “I’ll stay put for now. I believe in you!”

I smiled that smile people make when they receive validation, or perhaps just praise in general. The smile faded when something started happening with my hand. The veins running through it like wires were glowing.

“GUH!” I took my hand off of Mina’s face and shook it out. “What on earth??”

“What’s wrong with your arm??”

“It’s been like this for a bit,” I explained. “It’s how I was able to get through the wall!”

“Oh, yeah, I was going to ask about that.”

“Yeah but I dunno what it’s doing right now!”

“Oh hemeltje, did I do this? I think maybe when I touched your hand-”

“Maybe, but don’t sweat it! You didn’t know!” And just as quickly as it lit up, the veins in my arm went dark again. We both sat still for a moment, waiting to see if anything else happened, but nothing did. Then Mina looked at me.

“You should go,” she said. “All that ruckus might’ve gotten something’s attention!”

My eyes shot wide open as she went to try and push me back out the wall. “Wait wait wait, gotten what’s attention??”

“That man with Mr. Doirich’s face, he put some creatures on the boat!” she explained. “Lizards and plants and such, but they can’t swim!”

“Oh, well that makes me feel better.”

“Just please leave,” she begged me. “I don’t want you getting hurt before you can try to get to me.”

“Alright, I’ll do that!” I started pulling myself out of the wall. “Stay safe, Mina.”

“I will!!” She waved to me as I was finally pulled back and out of the wall.

I fell back into the dinghy with an “Oof!”

“Link, are you okay??” Navi fluttered around my face like the most worried of bumble bees. “What happened?? What did you see?!?”

“It was Mina!” I said as I sat up. The girls all looked at me with eyes wide. “She’s in there, and she’s alive! But she’s stuck.”

“That seems too easy,” Fiona says. “Like, she’s just in there and you found her like that ??”

“Just because I found her doesn’t mean I know how to get to her,” I replied. “I still don’t know how to get to the room.”

“Can’t you just try pulling her out through the wall?” Zelda proposed.

I shook my head so hard my bangs seemed to dance. “No way! I’m not risking that! What if she gets stuck in the wall and suffocates?? Or sliced in half!? Not doing it.”

“That’s… fair.” Zelda cringed at the fact that she hadn’t thought of that before I brought it up. “But that doesn’t matter! We have to get on the deck of the boat then!”

“Right! Let’s circle around again!” I suggested. “There’s gotta be a ladder around here somewhere!”

“I dunno, we’ve already circled this thing twice,” Fiona pointed out as Zelda started the engine back up. “How could we have missed it??”
    “You never know!” Said Zelda. “Shadows and such can affect how things are perceived. Plus, a lot of this thing is covered in barnacles and seaweed. I wouldn’t be surprised if the ladder is obscured by all that junk as well.”

The latter theory presented by Zelda ended up being right. We circled around the boat one more time, and we ended up finding the ladder alongside the boat, situated in a little indent in the outside walls of the hull. Zelda had gotten the appearance of the thing down, right to the barnacles and dried up seaweed coating its surface. Zelda stopped me from reaching for it, grabbing onto one of the rungs herself and moving her hands around. It took me a moment to realize she was trying to see if her hand would slip or not because of the seaweed.

“Okay, I think we’ll be able to hold on well enough,” she told me. She stepped out of the way to allow me up first. “Just climb slowly.” And so I did. I wasn’t sure how the new hand would handle in terms of grip and traction, and my fears were confirmed when the rung under my right hand felt slicker than it did in my left. I let go and sat back in the boat.

“Could one of you guys get something out of my bag?” I asked.

“Sure, sure!” My cousin unzipped the bag on my back and sifted around. “What do you need?”

“First aid kit,” I said dryly. She eventually found it and pulled it out. She handed it to me as I cracked it open, retrieving the gauze and tying up my hand once more.

“What if you need to use your cool ghosting powers??” Navi asked me.

“I’ll take being able to grip things over that any day,” I said as I tied it off. “Alright, let’s get going.” I went back to climbing the ladder, letting out a sigh of relief as I could get a better grip on the metal this time around. Zelda was about to follow behind me when she had a thought.

“Wait! I should probably stay here in the boat,” she said. “If we both go up, it might drift away while we’re trying to find Mina!”

“Crap, you’re right,” I grumbled.

“Wait, I can just stay!” Fiona offered. “I don’t mind!”

“I know you won’t, but Navi and I know how to work the boat.”

“Plus I kinda need my SWORD, Fiona!” I blurted back at her. She looked at me with half puffed cheeks, like she wanted to scream about it all. In the moment, I didn’t think about how I was reducing her to just… a weapon meant for me to fight monsters with, but you don’t really think about stuff like that when there’s people to save.  She just let out an aggravated sigh.

“Fine, I’m going, I’m going…” She got up like she was going to climb up the ladder with me, but I held up my hands to stop her.

“Whoa, hold on, maybe you could… turn into a sword first??” I proposed.

“Wouldn’t that just make it more difficult to climb the ladder?” she asked right back.

“Well can you like… turn into a sword with a scabbard or something? Or try to at least??”

“I mean, yeah, I can try?? But no promises, dude.”

    Fiona took a second to sit and relax, letting out a deep sigh as she started saying things under her breath. It was like those kids before math tests that quietly pray for the first time since they were 6 because they think it’ll help them out regardless of the theoretical selfishness of the intention. Lord knows I wouldn’t bother at that point, because praying to God like that is just asking for him to mess with you. But before we knew it, a flash of light emanated from my cousin. I instinctively reached out my hands to catch her, and instead caught… a sword in a scabbard! A very ornate and fancy scabbard, might I add. The sword itself was now adorned with the zora scale Fiona had around her wrist, now hanging off the pommel like a tassel. 

    <<Be careful!>> Fiona scolded me telepathically.

    “I know, I know!” I said.

    “Who’re you talking too??” Navi asked as I strapped the sword onto my back.

    I looked back at her with an eyebrow raised. “Can… you guys not hear Fiona??”

    “Oh, I can,” Zelda told me. 

    “Wait, so it’s just me??” Navi asked us both incredulously.

    “Looks like it, Nav.” I shrugged my shoulders.

    “Dang…” She fluttered and landed on Zelda’s shoulder as I finally got the strap secured.

    “Alright… wish me luck, girls!” I said as I grabbed the ladder rungs.

    <<Don’t die!>> My cousin said as I started climbing. She sounded half genuine and half sarcastic, like she wanted her true feelings on the matter to come across as a joke to make it all less awkward and terrifying. Was it awkward? Not really. Was it still terrifying? A bit.

    No matter what anyone could say to calm my nerves, I was still scaling a half submerged shipwreck, on my way to fight off more monsters and try to save a friend.

    “Buuuuuh…” Ariel was laying face down on one of the couches on the boat. “I’m booooredUH!”

    “Stay strong, kiddo,” Miranda said as she browsed the magazines in the cabin. “Your big bro’s doing world-saving work. Maybe you can watch out the window.”

    “The boat’s too far! You can’t see anything on it,” she continued to complain.

    “Well, you don’t see me complaining about Liam only having sport fishing magazines!” Miranda said this with her head turned up toward the helm up top, very obviously trying to talk loud enough for Captain Beckett to hear. Though no one could see it, the unamused frown on his face coupled with his furrowed eyebrows made it look as if someone had farted in his general direction.

    Simon had been trying to keep a lid on things. Trying to act mature and adult by pretending he was fine sitting around and not doing anything. But seeing Miranda’s thinly veiled boredom and dissatisfaction with the available entertainment made him feel the least bit better about it. But what was there really to do? The other guys were below deck working on something with Mike. Mr. Beckett was watching the helm up on the roof. They were in the main cabin trying to find any magazine that wasn’t about Mahi Mahi or the best angling techniques to catch big fish or whatever. He wasn’t entirely sure what angling was.

    Then Simon got an idea.

    “... Bennet made us bring that suit, didn’t he?” he asked.

Miranda looked up over the edge of her magazine and right at him.    “What suit?”

“The mermaid one!” he replied. He turned to Ariel. “What little girl wouldn’t want to swim around like a real mermaid!?”

The little gasp that came from Ariel felt loud enough for Link to hear over on the shipwreck. “Yes! Yes!! Let’s do it!”

“Whoa whoa whoa, you’re not going swimming right now!” Miranda scolded them. The two younger members of the gang looked between each other with nervous looks. “... not without me there to make sure nothing eats ya.” That was all the approval the two needed to run to find the appropriate attire to wear.

Ariel hadn’t had the insight to bring a swimsuit that fit her. She figured, well, she had a camisole underneath the sweater. That would be fine! But Simon wasn’t so content to go swimming in his clothes. Lucky for him, it appeared Captain Beckett kept wetsuits alongside the spearfishing equipment. Although with most wetsuits, they weren’t the most flexible of garments. You either find one in your size or you don’t. But to Simon’s surprise, he found one! It was a summer one(one of the ones with the shorter sleeves/legs for when the water’s warm), but he found one that just barely fit him. He figured the cool little blue accents around the neck band and the ends of the sleeves and pants was enough to convince him to brave the cooler waters of the Atlantic ocean in late March.

Ariel was already at the stern of the boat slipping on the baggy garment that was the mermaid suit. Simon had second thoughts about offering to have her wear that and go swimming. After all, if it was too baggy, it could make the poor kid swim all awkward in the water and she could get stuck in a little pickle. Simon wouldn’t have to worry, though. Like the magical thing that it was, the mermaid suit shrunk to fit around Ariel’s legs with a little supernatural shimmer of light from the scales. The little blonde let out a small gasp as she raised the tail up and then down, getting a feel for it. The light in her eyes could rival a child on christmas.

“This is so cool!” She wagged it up and down happily as Simon and Miranda joined her.

“Yes, it looks just as fun as it would be in the water,” Miranda said jokingly as she took a seat in the hand at the end of her ponytail(she came to find that it made a pretty decent chair). Ariel couldn’t help but giggle.

“Alright, alright!” She took a deep breath and let it out. “Alright! Here we go!” She psyched herself up for a moment before closing her eyes, taking a deep breath, and letting herself slide off the stern and into the water.

It was like every little girl’s dream come true. Most little kids who grow up on disney movies and fairytales, even the most minimal of exposure to such things, at some point think of what it would be like to be a mermaid. And here Ariel was, living up to her namesake and swimming in circles and figure-8s in the water like the happiest little guppy. Miranda couldn’t help but sit and smile. Simon was content to do the same, but he’d wanted to swim with her. Just in case something happened and he’d have to grab her.

“Don’t have too much fun!” he said with a giggle as he went to slide face-first into the sea. He barely got a single hand in when he drew himself away from the water like he’d touched a hot pan. That might as well have been what happened. For whatever reason, the saltwater seemed to burn his skin, causing him to panic and flinch backwards.

“O-On second thought, I think I’ll stay dry for now!” he said loudly. “Miranda, you’re watching her, yes?”

“Yeah?” She looked at him with a raised eyebrow.

“Good! Cool! I’m going inside!” And inside he went.

Miranda was left on the stern to watch Ariel swim around like a baby dolphin, confused about what she just saw Simon doing before shrugging it off. Meanwhile, Simon was inside, inspecting his hand to make sure he was alright. The skin hadn’t been burned, and that was enough for Simon to figure it was fine. He’d just stay out of the water, then. He didn’t realize just how slick the skin was.

    When I crested the top of the ladder, I came to find that the deck of the trawler was in the same condition as the rest of the boat. It was coated in dried up algae, seagrass that had gone flaccid out of the water, and lots of big patches of barnacles that made me glad that I was wearing shoes. The last thing I needed was to try to rescue my friend with cut up feet.

    <<So, where to first?>> Fiona asked as I pulled out my switch. I was thinking of trying to cheat the system. You know, pull up the map to see if the quest marker locked onto a specific location so I could just fiddle around until I found a way in. But like all things in this game called life, it’s rarely ever that easy. All that came up when I tried to access the map was blue static. Not the same kind of static you might see on your TV screen, but more like blue overlaid on a very cartoony rendition of liquid metal running through a vat. It was the same sort of static I’d seen on the regular map, in the spaces where I hadn’t collected the data for the other boroughs of New York City. Stepping foot onto the boat meant there was a whole other map with new data that I’d have to find somewhere on deck.

    “First thing’s first, we gotta find a map,” I said as I slid the slate back into the switch case and began investigating the area. “Logically speaking, it’ll probably be wherever the captain’s quarter is.”

    <<But this is a shipwreck or something, how do we even know it has the same floor plan as a typical ship?>> she asked. <<... even if this WAS a typical ship, where even ARE the captain’s quarters on a fishing trawler??>>

    “Well I dunno! Wherever it usually is??” I looked around at the only two big structures on deck that could even remotely have an interior to them. “There’s like 2 buildings on the deck, it’s gotta be one of them!”

    <<We can’t just go poking around here, it’s super dangerous!>> Fiona badgered as I made my way toward the small of the two buildings on deck. <<Maybe you should try calling Reily again! Maybe he’s got a floorplan of the place!>>

    “No chance,” I replied dryly. “My phone’s at 30%, and I’m not wasting battery phoning a friend for something I can figure out myself.” I put a hand on the door handle and proceeded to swing it open. In my misplaced bout of confidence, I was expecting to find the big captain’s quarters, or perhaps a navigation brig full of equipment. Instead I came face to face with the galley of the boat, with a pair of lizalfos crouched around a gas stove trying their best to perfectly spit-roast what was by now a veeeery overcooked mackerel.

    I didn’t have to think twice before slamming the door back shut.

“On second thought, it might be worth it to phone him after all!” I said with a nervous smile.

    I couldn’t even see Fiona’s face, yet I knew she was looking at me with the utmost disappointment in her eyes.

    The next 5 or so minutes were spent getting in touch with Reily, explaining to him that we’d made it to the Trial of Water, and didn’t know where to go now that we were actually on the shipwreck. He seemed surprised we even made it into the boat, what with the big octopus guarding the water around it, but we did, and that’s what matters. Now we just needed to know what the heck to do now that we were actually on the boat.

    “Well, first thing’s first, the boat you’re on is this old fishing trawler that sank in the bay called the Coelacanth,” he informed us.

    “Oh, I think I read about that one!” I said. “It nearly got run over by an oil tanker, didn’t it?”

    “Yeah, the tanker tore a massive hole through the side of it,” he replied. “Most of the crew was still able to evacuate, though.”

    “Most??”

    “The death toll isn’t important, Matheson. What IS important is you getting to the navigation bridge near the front of the boat.”

    “Okay well what constitutes the front of the boat??”

    “Just… look for the taller of the two structures on deck,” he explained in simpler terms. “The bridge is in there and you can get a map.” I did as he said, going for the structure I hadn’t tried yet and finding that the door was completely unlocked. I opened it up to find what I’d hoped to find earlier: a big room full of navigation equipment and a dashboard the size of a bar at a reasonably crowded pub.

The entirety of said dashboard was covered in malice.

<<AH! It’s the stuff that ate your arm!!>> Fiona cried out in my head.

“Uh, Reily, the whole dashboard is covered in malice,” I informed him.

“It’s covered in what ??”

I let out a sigh. “Evil magic goop that Ganondorf controls.”

“Right right right,” He paused for a moment as I heard the shuffling of papers on the other end. “I’m not sure if there’s a real way to get rid of it, but I’ve noticed it sometimes has eyes in it. Maybe try shooting those if it has any?”

I scanned the mass of pulsating tar in front of me for any such thing. It didn’t take long. The bright golden eye that was blinking down at me from the ceiling stuck out of the inky darkness of the rest of its form like a sore thumb.

“Found it.” I pulled out my hookshot and fired it at the eye. I reacted the way an eye should, flinching as the sharp end of the hookshot hit its pupil and twitching as it closed in on itself. And then… poof! The malice disappeared, evaporating into the salty sea air in the blink of an eye(pun very much intended). All that was left was a navigation bridge dashboard. One with no clear place to put the slate.

“Just tap the slate wherever on the dash,” Reily told me, before I could even ask the question. Well, if wherever would work, I guess it didn’t matter where I really tapped it. I touched the back of the switch to the big screen that served as the boat’s GPS or whatever it is they use to navigate fishing boats, and that’s all it took for the screen to light up. It reopened the map application, and I watched as something slowly faded into view on the screen full of liquid metal static. The map of the boat looked fairly different from what I was used to seeing. Everything else was topographical maps. Meanwhile, this one was a cross section of the Coelacanth, one that you could twist and turn around like a 3D model to get a look at every possible angle of the boat. As confusing as it was, it DID show me just how many rooms below deck I’d have to go through before making it to where Mina was being held.

“Van Der Zee’s in the fish hold from the looks of it,” Reily said from the other end of the line, unprompted. “There should be a hatch on the deck that opens up directly into it.”

“Yeah, I think I see it, but I doubt we’re getting it open,” I said dryly as I looked out the window of the navigation bridge. I definitely saw a large space on the ground that could’ve housed the hatch to the fish hold… except it was completely covered in barnacles. “But it’s fine! It says there’s another door that leads below deck, but we’re gonna have to go through a few other rooms to get there.”

“Damn… just keep your guard up,” he recommended. “Might be some dangerous stuff down there.”

<<Uh, Doi…>>

“Alright, anything else I should know?” I asked, ignoring my cousin’s comment that only I could hear. “How often can I call you?”

“Not sure,” he said bluntly. “Ganondorf seems to come in and out at random intervals. He spends at least 2 hours every day I’ve been here laying on the couch and just… thinking. Hard to gauge when he’s going to show up to do that.”

“Wait, then how am I supposed to know when it’s safe to get a hold of you??”

“You act like I’m dumb enough to keep the ringer on in a hostage situation, Matheson. Call me whenever you need. If I don’t pick up, then you know not to call back for at least 2 hours.”

“Got it. Thanks dude. Stay safe!” I hung up and tucked my phone away.

<<Alright so what now?>> Fiona asked as I left the navigation bridge.

“There’s a door near the back of the trawler,” I told her. “Right behind the navigation deck it looks like. It should lead right into the below deck area- AHA!”

I abruptly stopped and pointed. Right there was another hatch in the deck, this one not covered in barnacles that crusted it shut, and ready for any adventurous dude to boldly enter it. “Just like that map said!” I walked over proudly before reaching down to pull the hatch open.

It wouldn’t budge.

“What the-??” I pulled hard, putting my back into it and trying to use both hands to tug it open. My hand ended up slipping and I fell back on my tailbone. “Dang! It won’t open!”

<<It might be locked then!>> Fiona proposed. <<If I recall correctly, a lot of Zelda dungeons require you to find small keys to open some of the doors.>>

“Alright, where does one find one of these small keys then?” I asked as I stood up and dusted myself off.

<<They’re usually in chests. That and in rooms with monsters in them.>> I stood there for a moment with a disappointed look on my face. I knew where I had to go, and I wished for a moment there was a camera for me to look into like I was a star on The Office.

That’s how I ended up blowing up the inside of the galley with one of the bombs Audrie used in Central Park.

The two lizalfos in there were taken out just like that, and the door was blown open. I just waltzed in like I owned the place.

<<Well that was easy,>> Fiona said, surprised. <<That’s the stuff Audrie used to clear the gate by Central Park, ain’t it?>>

“Yeah,” I replied as I investigated the galley. “If she’s not here to teach me everything, I might as well figure out how to do it myself.” The lizards had left it a mess, with all sorts of rotten and waterlogged food left scattered around, like they’d genuinely tried to use salt water soaked limes and oranges to make food from. Made me wish they’d stopped at the burnt mackerel. Although that did lead to me spotting something shoved into the garbage disposal.

<<We should use those more often!>> Fiona said as I investigated. Yep, something was stuck into the garbage disposal of the sink.

I grabbed onto the end of it and started pulling as I replied, “Let’s not. Setting off bombs in New York City is the last thing we wanna do.”

<<Ah… right…>> she laughed nervously. <<I’d rather us not get Homeland Security called on us, yeah.>>

“Good!” I let out a grunt of effort as I finally dislodged whatever it was from the garbage disposal. “Glad you agree.” I turned the thing over in my hand to inspect it, looking on in surprise when I realized what exactly the lizards had tried to shove down there: a quiver full of arrows. “Huh… If this is here, there’s gotta be a bow, too, right?” I went looking around and investigated the place.

<<You sure you wanna go searching around for one in here?>> said Fiona. <<All the rotten food and stuff->>

“I’m not that squeamish, dude,” I replied bluntly as I went opening cabinets and drawers. “I’m more worried about YOU being squeamish.”

<<What do you mean?>>

“Well, you know, you’re a sword,” I quickly clarified. “I’m probably going to use you to defend myself. Oh, SCORE!” I’d found something in the defunct fridge of the galley, pulling out a bow that was covered in dried algae. I went to chip some of it off, only for the entire outer layer to come off in a bunch of sheets. And just like that, it was like the bow was brand new.

<<Oh, cool! You found the bow! Continue please, though!>>

“Right right, sorry!” I tucked the bow around one arm before finding a chest underneath the sink. “You’re probably going to be my first line of defense, so are you cool if I use you to fight stuff and possibly get bloody?”

<<Fine! Sure! Whatever!>> She huffed. <<Just clean the sword off before I change back, alright?>>

“Of course!” I flipped the unlocked chest open and retrieved a small silver key from inside. It looked like the kind of thing a kindergartener would draw when asked to draw a key: with the circular head and the three points on the end and all that. I tucked it away before making my way out of the galley and back to the hatch in front of the navigation bridge.

<<Alright, you ready, Hero man?>> My cousin asked as I unlocked the hatch.

I took a deep breath in as I threw the doors open. “Ready as I’ll ever be.” And just like that, I hopped right in.

    I landed inside of what must’ve been the sleeping quarters. I would’ve assumed that’s what it was, but there were no beds. There were shelves for beds, but no mattresses or pillows or any of that. There was also a thin layer of seawater on the ground, as well as a hole in the floor that gave a good glimpse down into the bilge and even further down through that into the deep ocean below. For that moment, I think I knew how Vinny was feeling on the boat.

    I took a wide step around it, keeping my eyes on the hole before continuing on my way toward the other end of the room. I didn’t get far before I figured out what else in the room was setting off my fight or flight.

    Just before I could make it to the midway point between the hatch I entered through and the door at the opposite wall covered in barnacles, I heard something on the ceiling. The sound was not unlike someone loudly cracking their knuckles, mixxed with the sound you get when shaking around a bag of scrabble tiles. Something came down and lowered itself from the ceiling, and I soon realized what it was: it was those same plants from the school. The ones who dragged Uma away by her ankle. I didn’t have to pull out the switch this time. I remembered fully well what these things were based on the Historia. Deku babas .

    “Well, at least it's not blood,” I said as I drew forth the master sword. The deku baba seemed to react almost immediately upon seeing the sheen of the blade, lurching forward from where it was anchored in the ceiling and trying to snap its jaws at me. I was barely able to jump back and avoid it, nearly falling over onto my butt before I leapt forward and tried to cut it open.

    Thunk!

    The blade just hit the side of the baba’s head uselessly as it made a noise like trying to punch the side of a particularly sturdy cardboard box. It didn’t have eyes or anything, yet I could still tell it was giving me the smuggest smile a plant could give. It snapped back at me a second time, this time causing me to duck. I ended up ducking so hard I fell onto the ground like a ragdoll. I had to crabwalk backwards to avoid the next two attempts on my life from the plant on the ceiling.

    “That's not right!” I blurted out, crawling back and out of range. “You’re supposed to cut them open! That’s how you beat them!”

    <<Well, um, uhhh. UHHH->> Fiona just kept stammering in my head as we looked at the plant in front of us. I didn’t want to think about how I was now spotting two other anchor points in the ceiling that looked very similar to the one anchoring the current situation into the ceiling. <<Its stem looks soft! Try cutting it off! Like you’re decapitating it!>

    “That’s both a very fitting and very terrifying analogy, but we’ve got no other ideas!” I leapt up before slashing behind the baba’s head before it could make another attempt on me. It fell away from the ceiling, plopping to the ground with a wet noise and a thunk. I didn’t have time to really look at its limp form before another two plants fell down from their anchor points on the ceiling. Whether it was a proximity thing or because they wanted revenge for their fallen brethren, I wasn’t scared. I knew how to fight them now, and did so. SLASH! One down. SLICE! Two down. And just like that, they were all vanquished and left laying on the floor.

    “Haha! YES!” I sheathed the master sword, confident that I was finished with them. “Piece of cake!”

    <<Dang, that… seemed too easy…>> I couldn’t see her, but the tone in which she said that made me feel like she had her arms crossed and her chin cupped in one hand.

    “Well yeah, I don’t think the very first room in the dungeon’s gonna be very hard.”

    <<But this isn’t the first room in the dungeon.>> My cousin tried to drive home.
    “Well still, they’re PLANTS!” I reiterated. “We’ll be fine.”

    In the next moment, the silence in the room was broken by another noise. Something that sounded wet. Not the kind of wet when you’re walking through water, but the kind of wet when someone claws its way out of a still living creature. I couldn’t help but slowly turn back around like a character in a horror film as I looked to see where the noise was coming from. It was, in fact, coming from the severed heads of the deku babas. More vines and limbs were bursting from the stumps of their stems, slamming down onto the ground and lifting them up. More limbs broke through their plant skins, rising up above their heads to become eye stalks. All three heads  were now standing on their own stalk-like feet, with their stalk-like eyes, and they were staring straight at us.

    My cousin and I screamed in unison before making a break for the other end of the room.

    <<No! Other way! There’s only one door and we entered through it!!>>
    “God damnit, I think this is one of THOSE rooms in the dungeon!” I said as I pulled the bow off of where it was slung over my arm.

    <<What do you mean one of those ?!>> she asked frantically as I tucked two arrows from my quiver into my mouth, loading a third one into the bow. I don’t know how I knew to do it. Zelda was the one who was on the archery team, not me. It was like an instinct taking over as I loaded the bow and aimed for the deku baba closest to us.

    “One of the ones where you have to kill all the monsters to get out!” I let loose the arrow into the first deku baba, aiming for the inside of its half opened mouth. It stuck in the back of its throat, causing it to let out a gurgly cry of alarm as it fell back and against the ground. I pulled another arrow from my mouth, loaded, and fired. That one hit as well. I went to fire the third one, hearing nothing but the panicked screams of my cousin as the baba got close enough to leap up and try to clamp its jaws around my face. 

I fired and hit it right as it was midway through its jump, causing it to fly back and fall into the hole in the floor of the ship. I waited a moment to make sure it didn’t come back up. It didn’t.

<<God, next time just run out of the room, dude,>> Fiona said, half miffed. <<We could’ve gotten eaten!>>

I half ignored her as I heard a crackling and shattering noise, looking to see the barnacles falling away from the wall like they were all dying at the same time, shattering against the ground like dropped water glasses. It all fell away to reveal the wall behind it. A wall with a door in the middle of it, with a circular handle to turn and open.

“But we didn’t!” I told her. “And now the door’s open!” I went and turned the handle in the middle, allowing it to swing inwards towards me before I could step into the next room over. We were soon to discover that the next room over was the engine room.

    The Coelacanth’s time on the seafloor was not kind to the engine room. I was used to the sight of barnacles and dried seaweed everywhere, but this was a whole new thing. Even if someone wanted to salvage the machinery in the shipwreck, they’d have to get through the layers and layers of deep sea corals that had grown all over the pipes and dials and engines in the room. It was like looking at one of those blobby sandcastles little kids make from wet sand. Well, a sandcastle that could also cut your hand open if you tried climbing on it and slipped. 

    <<It doesn’t look like there’s anything in here,>> Fiona said as I drew the master sword.

    “Yeah, but I don’t trust this place anymore,” I said as I inched around the engine and made my way to the other end of the room.

    <<Right, because you trusted the giant floating shipwreck to be safe to traverse,>> she retorted sarcastically. I rolled my eyes at the girl that wasn’t there as I snuck around the engine. And there it was! Another door with another circulatory turning handle in the middle of it.

    “Well! Looks like this one won’t be nearly as infuri-AHHH!”

    I’d barely come within three feet of the door before something grabbed me around the waist. Both of us were screaming in unison again as something tossed the both of us across the room and back toward where we’d entered. I just had to take a moment, laying in the water on the floor of the boat, before gently getting myself back up.

    “Hoookay… guess it’s gonna be even MORE infuriating,” I grumbled as I sat up. I looked over an annoyed frown as I gazed upon the culprit responsible for me getting yeeted into the wall.

    It was a hand. Not like the hands we saw on the subway, mind you, but a giant hand that looked to be made from water with bright yellow fingertips. It was standing, half bent, swaying slowly in anticipation. It was like it knew we were going to try and get back up and fight it. Unfortunately it was right. Just like with plenty of other guys in games, my first instinct was to try and kill it.

I drew the sword from its sheath before running over to try and cut it down like I had the plants in the room before. And for a hand with nowhere to run, it sure was good at dodging. It swayed to one side, then the other, then back as I tried in three different ways to try and cut it from its anchorpoint. But the third time seemed to be the charm, as that’s when it finally got the jump on me again, grabbing me around the waist and throwing me back against the wall.

I was face down in the water this time, just taking a moment to recuperate. I had the sword held at my side, and I kept a tight grip on it as I pushed myself up off the floor.

“Alright, I see how it is,” I said, keeping myself facing away from the hand before sheathing my sword.

<<I don’t think using an up-close attack will work,>> Fiona declared.

“Yeah, no duh.” I huffed as I stood up. “I suppose it’ll just take ONE OF THESE!!” I whipped around with my bow in hand and fired an arrow at it.

The smug look on my face died a quick death when the hand caught my arrow.

And then snapped it in half.

“... I guess that won’t work, either,” I figured. I put the bow away before pulling the slate back out.

<<Oh, good idea! You can blow it up instead!>> Fiona said in my ear.

“No way!” I replied. “I’m not taking a chance with explosives. What if it throws it back?!”

<<Oh jeez, you’re right.>> The sword went quiet for a moment. <<Well there’s gotta be something else in that tab you could use!>>

“I dunno, the bombs are the only things here I can really get a hang of,” I told her as I flipped through each ot eh runes. “There's a uhhhh magnet? I don’t wanna try bonking it with something heavy, though.”

<<Yeah it could throw it back at you.>>

“Yeah, you get it!” I flipped through a couple more. “There’s the camera reticle thing… the map… oh, maybe I can try THIS ONE!” I pointed the slate at the hand like a TV remote, pressing a button on screen and watching as the dexihand suddenly flashed with a golden light and then… froze. The both of us weren’t sure what had happened. Not until we heard the slate start dinging. Fiona put the pieces together before I could…

<<Timer! It’s a timer!! RUN!!>> My cousin yelled at me as I let out a startled sound and booked it for the door. Each moment the dinging got faster and faster, right up until I’d reached the door and gotten it open. The dinging stopped, and then I heard the sound the wind makes when you wave your hand through it super quickly. I practically leapt through that door, turning and slamming it shut behind me. I tried to ignore the crunch of fingers as I did so, turning the handle to seal it shut. I stood there, still as a statue, putting my full weight against the door to be extra sure it stayed shut and the hand didn’t try to wrench it open and get to us. After a few moments of silence, I let out a sigh of relief as I slumped to my knees.

“Thank god, we did it…” I said with a tired smile.

“LINK!” Someone ran over and grabbed me around the torso, lifting me up and into a tight hug. “Oh, Lincoln, I knew you could do it!!” I’d been spun around in the air like a top, and it took me another moment to realize who it was. 

“M-MINA!!” I called out her name as she finally set me down. “We found you!”

She looked at me confused. “We??”

“Right, uh-” I held up the sword. “You know my cousin Fiona, right?”

“She got turned into a sword??”

“Well she can turn herself into a sword, but same difference.”

“Well, that doesn’t matter!” Mina took my hands in hers. “You made it!”

“Yeah! I did!” I agreed triumphantly. My cheeks hurt from how much I was smiling. How happy I was to have been able to get through the dungeon all by myself. And yet… “It was super easy! Almost… too easy.” The both of us paused. The more we thought about it, the more our triumphant smiles faded into worried looks.

Then it happened. 

It was very sudden. It started with a noise, accompanied by a rumbling in the metal beneath our feet. The noise itself was like the creaking of hinges, mixed with the sound of metal scraping against metal. There was a third layer to it, and I wanted to believe with all my heart that it wasn’t what it sounded like. It sounded like a roar, the deep and guttural kind. We spent a moment standing there like deer in headlights as the noises played out and echoed through the entire trawler. I was only brought out of it when I felt something cold and wet start to rise above my ankles. The two of us looked down. The water level was rising. The boat was capsizing.

“Kak!! The boat’s sinking!” Mina called out.

“ Then we better run !” I took a hold of her hand as she grabbed her lacrosse stick last minute and we ran out the room together. I don’t know if it was a combination of the rising water and us being so fast and desperate to get out, but the monsters seemed to ignore us this time around. Maybe they were freaking out just as much as we were. We pushed through one door, running through the engine room, then we pushed open the next door, arriving in the sleeping quarters as we felt the ground begin to tilt underneath us. All I was waiting for was the boat to split in half as it sank for it to be a one-to-one Titanic-esque experience.

“Link! Link, where are you!?” I heard Zelda calling out from outside as I threw open the hatch. I helped Mina up and out first before she grabbed my hand and pulled me up after her. We ran toward the edge of the boat to try and find the ladder, but by then the boat had tilted too much. We both stopped and grabbed the railing. I looked down to see what Zelda’s fussing was all about.

The capsizing of the boat was causing the water to toss and turn the dinghy, and Zelda’s only chance at keeping her and Navi from flipping over into the water was to steer the tiny vessel and drive it away from the trawler.

“Link, hurry!” Navi called out from the boat.

“We’ll have to jump!” Mina declared as she gripped the railing tighter.

“Jump!?” I looked at her with wide eyes, holding onto the railing for dear life. “Are you crazy!?!”

<<She most definitely is! That’s at LEAST 50 feet down into the Atlantic ocean!!>>

“There’s no other way to get off the boat fast enough!” Mina told me. “Just trust me, Lincoln!”

I tried to find some excuse to not jump. Maybe if we shimmied down the side of the boat fast enough and carefully enough, we could make it to the ladder built into the side of the hull and climb down safely. But with the angle the boat was at, the rungs would be too steep and angle to climb. I just took a deep breath and let it out.

“Alright, on three then!” I said. “One-

“THREE!” Mina suddenly grabbed a hold of my right hand, causing me to cry out in alarm as she tore me off the deck of the Coelacanth and pulled me behind her through the air and down into the water below. It was like hitting the surface of a plate of jello. It felt like I shouldn’t have been able to so seamlessly pass through the surface the way I did, yet it somehow also made complete sense. Mina and I came back up to the surface before taking my hand again.

“C’mon! Let’s go!” She pulled me along, but this time I was able to keep up with her. We swam long toward the dinghy like our lives depended on it, which for all we knew, it did. Zelda was there to help us up onto the boat, first Mina, then me.

“Mina??” Navi looked at her with wide eyes.

“Yes, Miss Chandra! Glad you recognized me,” she said with a joking smile.

“Why does she look like that??” Zelda asked me as I finally found my seat in the boat. “Barely any of us ended up that-”

“No time!” I blurted out. “We have to get back to the Ocean King, NOW!”

“Yes, please, let’s do that!” Mina said in agreement.

“Jeez, okay! The sooner we get away from the mini Titanic scene here, the better!” Zelda turned the motor on before turning it to sail us right on out of there. There were plenty of things we were leaving behind. The shipwreck, the monsters on board it, the eerie mood that plagued that whole experience.

The only thing we couldn’t leave behind was the shadow looming in the water. It was determined to follow us as we high-tailed it out of there.

Chapter Text

It had been a bit since Ariel and Simon had gone back inside to find something else to pass the time with. While Ariel had changed out of the mermaid suit for obvious reasons, Simon opted to remain in the wetsuit he found. But whether or not Ariel was still dressed and ready for swimming was not important. What was important was that she’d found something in one of the drawers around the main cabin that she could pass the time with. It was a telescope. Specifically one of those nice brass ones made in the modern day that you could use by hand. Ariel was having a blast just using it to look at all the faraway things around the boat that she could. Things like the Coney Island Pier, with its big ferris wheel and other assortment of rides. The giant pier right beside it, where people could do all sorts of stuff, like fishing or hanging out to look at the water. The Coelacanth that was now sinking… wait a minute.

Ariel saw that and panicked for a moment, waving the telescope around to try and spot anything else. Something other than the ship to show that everyone was okay. Then she spotted it: the dinghy from the Ocean King, with three kids sitting on it.

“It’s them!!” She called out, getting the attention of everyone else in the main cabin. “They’re coming back!! And they’ve got a fish lady with them!!”

“A what now??” Miranda went as she stopped beside Ariel.

“Fish lady??” Simon was just as confused. Ariel nodded her head until her pigtails danced.

“Yeah! Look!” She passed the telescope over to Simon as the others came to join them. Simon wasn’t skeptical per-say, but just very curious and confused as to what a “fish lady” being with the others could mean. He looked through to see pretty much the same sight as Ariel: the scouting group on the Ocean King’s dinghy, sailing back to the boat at a very high speed, as if running from something. And there indeed was what one would call a “fish lady” on the boat with them. Simon only remained confused for a brief moment. A brief moment was all it took for him to notice the patch of maroon scales on the stranger’s neck. A patch of scales in the same shape as his sister’s birthmark.

Simon’s hands fell away from his face as he called out, “IT’S MINA!! IT’S HER, IT’S MY SISTER!!!” Ariel took back the telescope as Simon stared off the side of the boat in shock. Everyone else was looking wildly as well, and it didn’t take long for the hubbub to catch the attention of the small group of friends on the dinghy.

    “MINAAAA!!!”

    The shouting from the boat caught our attention. Mina’s more so than everyone else as she looked up toward the Ocean King. I figured her wide eyes were from the realization that we’d somehow hijacked a luxury yacht to sail out here, but I quickly realized it was because of who she spotted on the deck, waving to her wildly.

    “SIMON!!” She looked ecstatic and relieved at the same time, the tail on the back of her head flapping up and down happily. It was a heartwarming moment after everything that happened on the Coelacanth.

    Then we felt the water rumble.

    It was small at first, to the point that we thought it was just the wake of the dinghy. But then the waters roughed up so much that Zelda was struggling to keep the boat from toppling over, as well as keeping us on track. 

    “Oh god, what now?!” She called out as she looked behind us.

    “I knew it!” Navi cried out. “I knew that couldn’t have been it! Something followed us from the boat and it’s going to eat us!!”

    I looked to my fairy friend, “Nothing’s going to eat us, Nav, quit being paranoid!”

    That’s when it decided to rise up out of the water to prove me wrong. It was a bit terrifying to watch, as it rose up slowly enough that at one point we could clearly see it even though a blanket of ocean was still covering its head, like a glove of seawater.  Once it actually breached the surface, the color drained from my face while Navi just started screaming, jittering around like a png in a video being shaken around for comedic effect.

    Mina just looked at this thing with widened eyes and a gaping mouth. “No no no no, that can’t be him!”

    “Be who!?” I asked, in the middle of pulling out my slate. I held up the reticle just as I got an answer from her:

    “My axolotl, Georgie! Papa took me to pick him out on my 10th birthday!”

    The Sheikah Slate identified it as otherwise.

    “You must’ve been keeping it in a MONSTER of a tank then!!” I quipped back, trying to find some way to lighten up the situation despite it all.

    “This isn’t a time for jokes!” Zelda shouted back at me. “We’re getting chased by ANOTHER sea monster in a MUCH SMALLER boat!! If that thing swallows us, we’re all dead!!”

    “Don’t say that!” I blurted back. “It’s not going to swallow us, and I’m going to make sure of it!”

    “How?!”

I didn’t have an answer for her right away. I was trying to think of what to do, of how I could get us out of there. Then I remembered something I saw on the boat. Something I saw while flipping through the tools and runes on the Sheikah Slate. I quickly flipped back through them and… Cryonis. A rune that can freeze the surface of water and even create pillars of ice to use as stepping stones.

“Zelda, try and keep that thing from catching up,” I said as I started searching around the dinghy for something.

“I-I’ll try!” she said as I finally found it: a first aid kit. I pulled it out and retrieved a few things from it. Namely a bandaid and a roll of medical tape. Lots of experimenting was done in the next few moments as I tapped the bandaid on the screen to mimic the touch of a finger, holding the slate over the water to see if it would work. And just like magic, I watched as the water beneath us started to freeze. It looked like those primitive drawing programs that color in large pixels instead of anything cleaner or more uniform. The slate was simply making large pixels of frozen water, thick enough for someone to walk on.

Or skate on.

“Okay, here’s the plan!” I say as I grab my backpack and pull my skateboard out for the first time since Friday morning. “I’m going to lead that thing away from you guys, and you will sail back to the Ocean King and get to safety, got it?”

“But what’ll happen to you!?” Navi asked frantically. I pulled the mask of my zora armor up over my mouth and nose after finally finishing taping the sheikah slate to the front of my skateboard. The reticle was pointed down below it, so it could still freeze the water.

“Whatever happens, Mina will be safe, at least!” I stood up near the edge of the dinghy.

<<Wait, hold up, Link, what’re you->> Before Fiona could finish her question, I leapt out onto the water.

<<LINK!!>>

I jumped out over the ocean, skateboard under me as I set my plan into motion. I’m sure everyone on the boat had a heart attack seeing what I was doing, but I’m also sure their fears were quelled when I didn’t land in the ocean and dive under. Instead, a pathway of ice suddenly formed beneath the wheels of my board, and I had a perfectly good, solid ground to skate on. It wasn’t impossible to skate on ice, but I’d have to be careful about steering.  I figured the ocean was vast enough that I wouldn’t have to worry about any sharp turns. Besides, I didn’t need to turn. I just needed to lead Gyorg away. And lead it away I did.

The eyes of malice on Gyorg’s face quickly turned their attention from the boat toward me, the pupils dilated and its focus changing. The salamander dove to the side and away from the girls, diving under the water before coming back up again to try and pursue me across the ocean. The ice over top of the water was managing to keep it a good distance away, but it would melt a few moments after I passed over it. At most, Gyorg was keeping a 10 foot distance between its maw and myself.

<<Oh god oh god oh god, when I told you to use the runes more, I didn’t mean this!!>> My cousin scolded me.

“We’ll be fine!” I assured her. “If this one’s the boss monster, that means I can defeat it!”

With how much of a distance it was keeping from me, I knew what I’d have to do, and what I’d have to use. I didn’t bother to pull out my sword again. Instead, I unhooked the bow I found on the Coelacanth and prepared it to fire.

    Despite it all, Zelda had made it back to the stern of the Ocean King. Liam was already there, having opened the stern so they could dock as quickly as possible, with him there to help. They were able to quickly depart the dinghy while Liam and the others offered their help to get them up and out.

    “Are you kids okay?!” He asked as Navi fluttered off of Zelda’s shoulder and onto his. She sounded like she’d been running around for 10 minutes straight with the way she was breathing.

    “We’re fine! But Link’s still out there!” She pointed back towards the water.

    “Link’s got a plan!” Zelda said. She was busy helping Mina up and out of the boat. “Our priority right now is to keep the boat AWAY from that thing!”

    “He’s in danger,” Mina breathed to herself. “Good god, Link’s in danger because of me!”

    “No he’s not, calm down,” Zelda put her hands on Mina’s shoulders. “You need to lay down. You’ve been stuck on a shipwreck for who knows how long!”

    “Mina!! Are you alright!?”

    The voice made the young zora perk up as she looked over and toward where the stairs from the stern led up to the main cabin. Someone was rushing over much faster than everyone else on deck. He practically pushed his way out onto the stern, his movements making it look like he was trying to squeeze himself through a dog door. Mina didn’t care about the recklessness, though. She just had to see the boy’s face for hers to light up.

    “Simon!” She ran over and was pulled into a warm embrace. It was something she dearly missed after being stuck on that old fishing trawler for a day and a half.

    “Are you alright?! Did anyone hurt you?!”

“No no, I’m fine!” she assured him. “What happened to your face??” Mina traced the freshly healed wound on Simon’s cheek.

“Oh, it’s a cool new battle scar!” he said, as if that was the most normal thing in the world. “Why do you look like een koi vis??” He asked it so quickly afterwards and with little to no prompting. Mina could help but giggle. Yep! That was her little brother alright.

    “I don’t know,” she answered. “I took a shower this morning before school and came out looking like this!”

    “How strange!” went Simon. “It seemed everyone else just woke up looking strange.” He gestured to the other kids on the boat, with their elf ears and colorful hair and smaller statures(in Navi and Miranda’s case at least. From what he knew, Vinny was always short). He got so caught up in the whole thing, wondering why his sister had to shower for her appearance to shift, that he’d forgotten about something.

    “Wait, hold on! We can talk about this later!” He looked around wildly. “Where’s Link!?”

    The girls didn’t have time to answer before they heard a pained roar from across the water. A roar that definitely didn’t come from anything native to the waters around Coney Island, or New York as a whole for that matter. Everyone was quick to run up the stairs of the stern.

    “Hey, slow down! One at a time!” Liam frantically ordered. “Be careful or you might slip and fall off!!” None of the kids really heeded his words, though. They were too busy trying to get onto the main deck, most if not all of them now gripping the railing to look out onto the water. It was their first time seeing the beast that the group on the dinghy had already encountered, and seeing Link scooting right beside it through the water, being so much smaller than that thing, made their blood run cold.

    “Oh my god, is he insane?!” Garrett blurted out.

    “What the hell’s going on up here?!” Mike called out as he ascended the stairs from below deck to see what the fuss was.

    “There’s another seamonster and Link’s trying to fight it by himself!” Miranda informed him.

Mike’s eyes blew wide open as he speedwalked the rest of the way to the railing to get a good look. “What is he, stupid?! He’s gonna get himself killed!” 

“I’m sure he knows what he’s doing,” Zelda said with a less-than optimistic look on her face. “Fiona’s with him, at least!”

“A sword won’t help much if he falls in the water with it!” Navi blurted out.

“He’s not even using it!” Ariel pointed out, one eye shut as she looked through her little telescope again. “He’s got a bow now!”

“What??” Zelda held out a hand to politely ask for the telescope. Ariel passed it to her. Zelda held it up to her eye as she readjusted it to get a good look at Link. And sure enough, Zelda saw her friend of who knows how many years, skateboarding on ice-covered water, a bow in his hands and some arrows gripped between his teeth as he kept firing shots at the monster in the water. Zelda pulled the telescope down away from her face as she passed it back to Ariel.

“Where did he get a bow?” She asked aloud. “Using a bow is my thing!”

“Anything is anyone’s thing if they need to do it to fight something,” Miranda said dryly. “That’s just how it’s gotta be until this is all done and over with. And he seems to be using it just fine!”

“Yeah! Look!” Ariel passed the telescope back to Zelda, who looked through it again. She kept looking through it for a long while after that, watching. Link was all by himself out there, doing his best to fight a giant salamander trying its best to send him to the bottom of New York harbor. Despite it all, despite him being saddled with a situation where he had to use something he’d never used in his entire life, Zelda watched as her friend flawlessly loaded, aimed and fired that bow and arrow over and over, landing shot after shot on the salamander in the water. She’d remembered all the stuff she’d read about the night before. All the stories and lore that went into this game, into the character her best friend was supposedly a real life parallel of. And for that moment, she wondered if perhaps this was that parallel making itself known in the real world. If perhaps this was destined instincts kicking in as Link held that bow in his hands and assailed the monster in the water.

If perhaps this was just another Link making himself known.

Around the fifth arrow that landed in Gyorg’s skin, the salamander wasn’t going to take it anymore. The kids on the boat watched as the monster dove under the water, wildly trying to retreat into the depths and away from Link’s arrow fire. For a moment, the kid’s were glad. It was retreating! Link had done it! But the feeling of triumph was short-lived as they saw something. It was something that Mina had remembered the moment Gyorg had dove under the water: axolotls were not graceful swimmers in the slightest. They were actually very sporadic.

As it dove under, its tail thrashed from side to side as it slipped underneath the surface of the ocean. It thrashed enough that it went crashing into the water beside Link, shattered the ice on the surface of the water and sending the blond flying through the air. The screams that came from the deck of the ocean king were deafening.

Link finally came down, smacking against the surface of the water face first, like the world’s most botched attempt at a belly flop. His skateboard with the slate taped to it fell some ways away, and lucky for them it was staying buoyant on the surface of the water. The only problem was Link. He was at least 20 yards away from the boat, and he wasn’t moving. Simon was the first to realize it.

“O mijn God, he’s unconscious!” He blurted out. The others quickly went into a panic, trying to figure out what to do.

“We have to help him!” Went Navi. “Miranda, can you-?”

“My hair can’t reach that far!!” She shrieked. “Mina, can’t you swim to him!?”

“There’s a sea monster in the water, what if it eats me?!” She frantically explained.

“Oh damn, you’re right…” Miranda’s eyes darted around. “Well, he’s got the magic armor on, so at least he won’t drown.”

“But he could still get eaten!” Simon called out. No one had bothered to notice the younger of the Van Der Zee siblings head inside the main cabin and grab something. And now there he was, quickly making his way across the deck as he strapped a fishing spear to his back with the rubber lead meant to make it easy to retrieve in the water once it was fired from the gun. The kids were confused, but then Mina’s eyes blew wide open.

“Simon, no! Are you krankzinnig?! You could get killed!!” She grabbed onto Simon’s wrist with a pleading look on her face. She knew her brother too well. He was a kind and helpful soul, but he was also stubborn. There was no doubt the reason he’d tagged along with everyone else to save her despite his age: they simply couldn’t convince him to stay home.

“I may be,” he replied to her. “And I’m sorry.” He gently pulled his hand from her grip as he got close to the railing. “But I’m not going to stand by the side and be a burden to you all any longer!” Everything happened so fast in the next few moments. He’d grabbed the scale hanging from Mike’s wrist. He’d put a foot up onto the railing. And before Mike could even yell at him for stealing his underwater breathing tool, Simon had leapt off the edge of the boat and dove into the water.

The moment the seawater touched his skin, it felt like fire. He stifled a cry as he came back up to the surface and shifted into a freestyle stroke. It was the fastest swimming style he knew of, and he needed to swim fast to get to Link before anything happened. To everyone’s surprise, Simon’s included, he started gliding through the water like a knife through butter.

“Yeah! Go Simon go! Swim team! SWIM TEAM!” Ariel was shouting it with the same cadence as someone shouting “sled gang” in a mall. It seemed to only motivate the younger teen as he seemed to swim faster through the water. The others on the deck were just shocked. Shocked that Simon had actually jumped into the ocean to save Link, and shocked that he was cutting though the water as fast as he was. Mina had the most interesting expression on her face. It was like a mix of being completely caught off guard and not surprised at all that he was doing this. Everyone was holding their breath as it all went down, until finally… finally… Simon made it to where Link was in the water.

“Yes! YES!!” Ariel was still cheering Simon on as he went and hoisted Link up out of the water, holding him with his head and torso slumped over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. By all means, he could’ve gone back to the boat right then and there. But Link wasn’t the only thing Simon needed to grab from the water. He made his way through the ocean, doing his best to swim quickly with Link’s limp body in one arm, trying to get to where Link’s skateboard was floating in the water. That slate was important. It had all that quest stuff on it, after all, and it was the only thing helping them get anywhere in this god forsaken city. He was barely able to grab the board and hold it underneath the same hand holding Link onto his shoulder when he felt the water rumble.

Simon froze up, still treading water, but now looking wildly at the surface of the water. It looked like they were in a giant water cup, and something in the distance was making it ripple. It didn’t take long at all to figure out why. Something behind Simon and Link suddenly burst up from below the water. He wound’t have been surprised if a bomb went off behind them, with how the surface of the ocean seemed to explode up and out, scattering splashes of water over top of them. Simon didn’t want to turn around. He didn’t even need to. He could very well hear the shrieking and panicked screaming from everyone on the Ocean King…

“OH GOD, IT’S BACK!!” went Zelda.

“WHAT IS THAT THING?!” asked Mina.

“NOT AGAIN!!” cried out Garrett.

“GOOD GOD, IT’S THE SQUID AGAIN!” Miranda yelled, annoyed.

All it took was the word “squid” for Simon to start swimming. “No no no no no no-”

The octo… good god, the big octo. They didn’t kill it. It was back.

And Simon was in the water with it.

    “SIMON!!” It was all Mina could think to call out as she watched her little brother struggle in the ocean to outswim the whirlpool the giant squid-like monster was stirring up in the water. Simon was determined. He had to get back to the boat. They were counting on him. LINK was counting on him. But it wasn’t easy when you only had one arm to paddle with, and the water was stinging your skin like fire.

    All of a sudden, the current in the water around him shifted. For a split second, Simon thought that maybe the whirlpool had ceased. That was until he felt something pulling him back. Not in the way something does when it grabs you by the ankles and drags you away, but in the same way when you’re out swimming by the beach and get caught in a riptide. For the first time since Simon was aware of the Big Octo’s presence, he turned around. The realization of what was going on hit him like a truck.

    The Big Octo had gotten impatient, and forwent the whirlpool to try and suck him up into its mouth.

    Simon had never paddled so fast in his life, but even his top speed wasn’t enough to outswim the current. Everyone on the Ocean King watched in horror as Simon and Link were swallowed by the squid-like beast.

Panic ensued. The teens weren’t sure what to do. Mina especially was freaking out, because for all she knew, her brother was just eaten alive by a sea monster.

“Someone get the gun!!” Miranda called out. “Shoot its eyes! Maybe we can get it to spit them out!!” The boat suddenly shook as history repeated itself and the octo began to grab onto the Ocean King.

“We’ve got more important things to worry about!” Garrett blurted out. “It’s trying to capsize the boat again!!”

“We can DO BOTH!” Mike suddenly drew his slingshot from his backpack, loading a water balloon into it before firing at one of the octo’s eyes. The balloon exploded onto the surface of its face, and everyone else around Mike on the boat was just confused. Up until the octo cried out in pain and let go of the boat, retreating a little ways into the water. Then the smell hit them.

“Wait a tick…” Vinny could smell it, even from where he was in the doorway, halfway toward trying to get toward the side of the boat with the shotgun in order to help. He took a moment to sniff the air before the realization hit him. “Is that-??”

“Tapatio, baby!” Mike said triumphantly. “I know from experience, the stuff makes your eyes feel like they’re on fire!”

Vinny’s eyebrows flew up. “Experience??”

“Cinco de Mayo accident. Don’t ask.”

“Well it looks like it’s working!” Mina said. In the heat of the whole hot sauce attack confusion, she’d managed to sneak back inside and grab her own weapon of choice: a spear gun.

“Wha- MINA!” Navi called out to her in surprise and shock. “WHERE’D YOU GET THE GUN?!”

“Found it!” she answered bluntly. “It’s not going to spit them out if we stop with hot sauce!” She took aim and fired the gun. Navi had been worried, not knowing how a spear gun would function out of the water. But to her relief, she saw that she’d removed the rubber band from the gun before firing it. Lord knows what would’ve happened if she didn’t. Most likely, the spear would’ve just slingshotted back and into her head instead of sailing right into the eye of the big octo like it did just then. The monster let out another of its squid-like cries as it flailed from the injury.

Mina’s gusto was all it took to rally the others on the boat into attacking, and rally Liam into running up to the helm up top to wait for an opening to make an escape.

    The inside of the creature was dark. It was damp. It was cold. Simon barely had time to react before he did the only thing he could think to do, digging his feet and free hand into the sides of the fleshy cavity he was sinking down through in order to stop himself and buy some time. Even with him not being able to see anything, he could figure out that he and Link were in this thing’s throat.

    Simon didn’t know what to do. For a moment, he was freaking out. For a moment, he felt like he couldn’t breath, like he was going to start shaking so hard he’d shake right out of his own body. It didn’t help that his muscles were still burning from the sea water, and his bones still aching from when he was trying to swim against the current. He had no reason to assume they felt like this for any other reason. He was just trying to steady his breathing, to calm down, to think.

Surely there was a way out of here. A way to get him and Link out of this creature and avoid becoming fish food. A way to avoid dying in the worst way possible. A way to save the both of them and be useful to the group for the first time this whole adventure. He took a moment to stop and think about things other than what was going on. Stuff to help him calm down. His sister was safe on the boat. So was Link’s little sister, and all his other friends. They were safe on the boat, and he and Link weren’t inside of some otherworldly monster. It was just a big squid. A big squid… A BIG SQUID!

Simon’s eyes flew open at this realization. That’s right! This thing was just a big squid! And if there’s one thing he knew about squids, it was something he remembered reading on a sign when his parents took him and Mina to the New York Aquarium. It was in the invertebrates exhibit. The one with all the crabs and cephalopods. It was just one of those fun fact signs, with the silly information to get kids interested in marine biology. But his recollection of this certain one couldn’t have come at a better time.

He used his free hand to grab the spear off of his back before drawing it back and stabbing the walls of the octo’s throat with it. He pulled it back out, then stabbed it again. Over and over, with all his might, he was shoving the sharp end of the spear through the walls of this thing’s esophagus as hard as he could. All because he’d remembered that one little factoid about squid anatomy:

That their brains were shaped like donuts, and their esophagus ran through the middle of it.

Surely, if he stabbed hard enough, fast enough, and enough times, he’d surely be able to hit its brain. Even if it didn’t hurt it, maybe he could tickle the part of its brain that could make it spit them back out, like poking the wrong part of someone’s brain makes them throw up. He just kept at it, using one arm to hold onto Link and his stuff and using the other to relentlessly stab at the sides of the Octo’s throat, knowing at some point he’d eventually hit the sweet spot. Even if it did nothing, even if it made his muscles hurt even more than they already were, even if he couldn’t see anything through all the adrenaline and pain. He had to at least try.

Then he felt the muscles of the throat spasm underneath his feet. Underneath where he was latching onto the sides of the walls of its throat. One more should do it, he thought. He drove the end of the spear one last time through the sides of the beast’s esophagus. There was an ungodly noise, and Simon drew the spear back and away from the wall quickly as he suddenly felt the flesh around him spasm so hard he was forced up and out. Simon knew this could only mean one thing, and he held onto Link like a human shield as they were finally spat back out. The two of them skipped across the surface of the water before finally falling in, a long way off from where everyone else on the Ocean King could see them.

No longer would they have to worry about the big octo. Though Simon wasn’t there to see it happen, everyone else on the boat looked on in shock and pleasant surprise as the monster reeled back and in on itself before it collapsed into the water, sinking as its whole body bruised and turned to black smoke. Just like that, their combined efforts from the inside and out managed to vanquish the monster.

Despite it all, despite everything he’d been through and how exhausting it must’ve been, Simon didn’t feel tired. He didn’t even feel winded. He felt like he was just getting started, and he was determined to finish this as he swam back up to the surface, drinking in the salty sea air like wine as he breached the surface.

There were monsters in the sea, and he was ready for them.

    “Link!! LINK!! ARE YOU ALRIGHT!?”

    The shouting combined with someone shaking me wildly by my shoulders was enough to rouse me awake. The only issue was I came face-to-face with someone I very much didn’t recognize, flinching backwards in the water to the point that I now had 3 feet between the both of us.

    “W-Wha- Who are you?!” I asked. “What happened!?”

    “It’s Simon, of course!” he said. Simon went on to explain in fine detail what had happened while I was out, the words spilling out of him like a waterfall as he recounted the whole thing. “We all watched you from the Ocean King! Fighting the giant salamander! But when you shot at it the fifth time around, it dove under so violently it knocked you off your skateboard!” He smacked a hand on the surface of the water for emphasis. “You hit the water so hard it knocked you clean unconscious! I tried to dive in and save you, but then the Big Octo came back up!!” 

    “Oh god…”

    “I know!” He went on again. “I was able to grab you and your slate, but it swallowed us up with the seawater! But I got us out! Oh, by the way, here’s your- !!!”

The look on his face said it all as he went to pass the Sheikah Slate back to me, jumping in his place in the water when he saw his hand. Luckily I’d grabbed my stuff before he leapt back and away, suddenly caught off guard by his own appearance.

He looked at both of his hands as he turned them over in front of him, then touched them to his face. Then his head, following the shape of it as his hands went back behind his head and felt the appendage now attached to the back of it. I was expecting him to freak out, perhaps scream. Something similar to how I imagine someone like Garrett or Navi reacted when they woke up the morning before. But instead of any of that, I watched as Simon instead just… smiled. It was a giddy, happy little smile, but the rows of sharp teeth that now lined his mouth only made him look even more intimidating. 

“Simon, what happened??” I asked once again. I think it was then he realized what I meant by that. He just let out a triumphant little laugh.

“HAHA! YES! I KNEW IT!” He threw his hands up in the air, the appendage on the back of his head wagging back and forth. “I HAVE POWERS, TOO!!”

Simon was now in the same situation as Mina: he’d become a Zora.

    <<Oh my god, he’s a fish, too,>> Fiona said dryly. The first thing she bothered to comment on the whole time, and it was that.

“Oh, I should’ve seen this! Mina’s all fishy, too! And now I’M fishy!!” He felt around his head again, examining every facet of his new face with his hands. The scales on his skin, the shark-like tail on the back of his head that hadn’t stopped wagging for a minute straight now, and the fins hanging around the sides of his face like hair. His hand stopped on the one resting against the left side of his face.

    “Oh!” He excitedly looked at me as he swimmed closer. “Link! Look! I’ve got a cool battle scar, now!!” He was wildly pointing with both hands at his left fin. The scar he’d gotten from the Chuchu fight was now located on the fin hanging beside his face. I didn’t have the energy to really respond. I was just stunned about the thing as a whole, and just nodded my head a little bit.

    “N-Nice.” I gave a thumbs up as Simon paid no mind to my demeanor and instead decided to paddle around in the water.

“Mijn God, this is… this is GREAT!” He fell backward into the water with a splash as he dove under before coming back up again, swimming around in a figure eight. I couldn’t help but be reminded of those videos of dolphins swimming back and forth across aquarium exhibits just for the hell of it. “Oh, I wonder how fast I can go like this! Maybe even as fast as the Ocean King!!”

He came to a stop a few feet in front of me before swimming right up to me. I didn’t feel the need to move back, because by his reaction alone I knew full well it really was just Simon. He rose up out of the water, and that’s when I realized just why he was getting so close.

“... Oh my god, I’m taller than you!!” he declared.

“Understatement of the century!” I blurted back, putting my hands on the sides of his face, pushing in his cheeks like an overly affectionate auntie at a family reunion. “Your head’s the size of my god damn torso! You’re HUGE!”

The giddy little smile returned to Simon’s face. “Hehe… sweet!”

We were interrupted by a roar in the water. I couldn’t tell what was going on, but Simon was quick to leap back and out of my grasp.

“ACK! No more time to gawk, we need to GO!” He cried out.

“Wait, wha- HEY!” I could barely get out a question of any sort before Simon dove under the water before swinging around behind and then coming up from under me.  I suddenly found myself grabbing onto the tail on the back of Simon’s head and hooking my legs around his chest to keep from falling off. All as he started swimming away from something . That something soon made itself known as it came up out of the water and started pursuing us. The salamander came back up from its momentary sulk under the water, and now it was coming up after us.

“Shoot shoot SHOOT!” I was panicking as I pulled my bow and arrows out again, ready to continue firing, but I couldn’t quite get a good angle to hit its sides like before. 

“Haha! Amazing!” Simon was swimming along with me on his back. He forwent the usual freestyle stroke I was used to seeing fast swimmers employ and was instead dolphin kicking like his life depended on it, his whole body moving in waves. “I’m unstoppable in the water!!” He leapt up before diving down under the water and then coming back up, with no warning to me as he did so. I ended up having to spit out seawater that I’d almost accidentally swallowed.

“Careful with the diving, I’m trying to aim here!” I said.

“Right! Sorry! Got a bit excited is all!” He kept swimming along, going at speeds I didn’t even think possible for something other than a barracuda, an orca or an actual boat. It was both mesmerizing and a bit daunting. Especially when I realized that he somehow managed to keep at the exact same speed as Gyorg as he pursued us from behind.

“I don’t think this thing is letting up!” I said.

“That’s not good! This is as fast as I can go I think!” he replied anxiously. I saw his expression go from worry to determination in a split second, his eyebrows furrowing together. That was all the warning I got before he suddenly swerved to the right. I had to lean down close to his back and grab onto what would’ve been the dorsal fin of the shark tail on his head to keep from falling off into the ocean. I knew immediately what he was trying to do. He was quite literally trying to shake the sea monster off his tail.

“Right, so, uh, did I miss something while I was out?” I asked as I held myself close to Simon’s back. He kept swerving one way then the other to try and shake Gyorg off his tail. “Like, you were apparently a parallel this whole time??”

“Right! Um… I don’t know what happened, either!” He admitted. He leapt out of the water to try and get some distance before landing back in the water, trying his best to keep me above the water before returning to his previous position.  “But this didn’t happen until I jumped into the water to help you! The seawater was burning like fire, so my assumption is that it didn’t manifest until I went swimming!”

“Very weird… but interesting!” I kept holding on until I was sure Simon was done swerving. To our collective frustration, it had done little to shake off Gyorg. “God, does this thing ever get tired?!”

“Dunno… I think some marine predators can swim for miles before they get tired!” Simon reasoned.

“Right, but Simon, it’s an axolotl!” I replied. “Not an orca or something!”

“LINK!!”

I looked up and over at whoever had called for me, seeing that we were coming back into view of the Ocean King. The whole group was gathered on the railing of the boat, looking on in aw. Zelda was waving to get my attention, while Ariel was looking at us through a telescope.

“See, he’s right there!” I heard my little sister say. “He’s swimming SUPER fast!”

“Hold on a second!” Mina politely took the telescope from Ariel before looking through it herself. “He’s not swimming, something’s carrying him! Or…” She paused for a moment before looking through the telescope again. I couldn’t imagine what she’d seen, but I could infer based on her facial expression and the identifying scar on Simon’s fin. “It’s Simon! Simon’s carrying him!!”

“How is he carrying him, they’re like the same height!” Mike blurted out.

“Not everyone that’s shorter than you is the same height!” Vinny scoffed.

“PLEASE STOP ARGUING AND BRACE YOURSELVES!!” I shouted to them. That seemed to break up the arguing, as well as draw everyone’s attention to the situation at hand. Namely the giant salamander chasing after the two of us. There was a lot of panicking from the boat, and it was mostly incoherent. That or I probably decided to stop listening. Either could’ve been true. But in that moment, it finally figured out what I needed to do. The malice! It had eyes! Reily said that was its weak spot! And knowing Zelda, I should’ve figured that you always go for the eyes. And with Gyorg right behind us, this would be a cake walk.

“Simon, try and keep steady!” I said.

“I’ll try!” He kept swimming along as I pulled out my bow again, clutching one arrow in my teeth while loading another into the bow. I aimed, and then let it fly. Bullseye! I managed to land a hit on its right eye, causing it to shut as Gyorg let out a cry of pain. It let up for a moment as Simon sped off, still going at top speed.

“Whoa, wait wait wait, I didn’t get the left eye!!” I said.

“I didn’t slow down!” He said back.

“Yeah, but HE did!” I pointed toward the salamander.

“Well how was I supposed to know!?”

“Just loop back around and I’ll get the other eye.”

“Got it!”

I held onto his head tail tight as he looped back around. Gyorg was still trying to recover from my first hit when I loaded my bow and let off the next shot. That one landed as well, sticking in Gyorg’s left eye. I was expecting the Malice to bubble away like on the Coelacanth, or maybe drip off into the water like back at the Trial of Fire. Neither of those happened. Instead, Gyorg turned its head down toward the water and dove under once again. Just as it did before.

“Oh no he’s not, we have to follow it!” Simon declared. “You ready, Link?”

I pulled the mask of my suit up over my nose and mouth. “Ready! But do you know how to breathe underwater or GAH!!”

I didn’t get an answer before he dove under. I was scared for a moment. Scared that maybe there'd be something down there we didn’t want to fight or see. But instead, we saw what any outsider expected to see. The giant salamander was simply swimming around the way you’d expect an axolotl to: maneuvering from side to side, its movements sporadic and the least bit graceful.

“Haha! This’ll be easy!” I said, not stopping to think about how I was able to talk fairly clearly under the water. Magic is magic, after all.

“If we can find whatever eye is left, that is,” said Simon. “You got both of them. I dunno where another one could-” He stopped as the salamander turned to us suddenly before spitting something out of its mouth. Then another. And another. All of them were little strands of deep red malice. Each little strand wiggled through the water, forming individual little salamander-shaped larval monsters that all made a break for us. 

“Oh good god.” I pulled the master sword from its scabbard. “Simon! Evasive maneuvers!”

“You act like I know what that mEANS!!” His tone trailed off as the mini monsters suddenly got a little too close, causing Simon to reel back and start swimming away, zig-zagging through the water while I was on his back. I did the best I could, swinging my sword about to slash at the pursuing little enemies. It wasn’t as easy in the water, but I somehow managed. I don’t know if that was magic, or just protagonist powers, but I was managing to cut down creature after creature, making extra sure I got all of them.

    “I think I got them all!” I said. “You see any other eyes yet??”

    “Sorry, I was a little busy trying to outswim the swarm of hellspawn salamander fish things!” Simon retorted.

    “Right, right… sorry…” the moment of calm was interrupted by a sudden current pulling us in somewhere. We hadn’t even seen what it was before Simon quickly swam in the opposite direction, letting out a startled scream as he did his best to outswim the current. All I could do was grab onto the handlebars connected to Simon’s forehead and hold on for dear life as he swam at top speed to keep from getting sucked up by Gyorg. For all its worth, we managed. Simon kept his speed up in order to stop from getting pulled in by the current, and I kept a vice-like grip on his hammerhead shark protrusions on his forehead. It was like trying to keep a grip on a motorcycle while someone’s trying to pull you off of it by your ankles. But in the midst of this all, I’d made the mistake of turning back to look at the monster’s open maw. And there I saw it:

    A third eye, sticking out of a glob of Malice caught in the back of Gyorg’s throat.

    “Oh, you’ve got to be KIDDING ME!!” I blurted it out right as Gyorg shut its mouth and started swimming around. I don’t know if it was just moving sporadically or actually trying to do something to us, but it at least kept its distance long enough for me to try and formulate a plan with Simon.

    “Alright, new plan!” I did this as I pulled my switch out of its case. Despite us being underwater - and salt water no less - it still turned on and worked like normal. “That thing’s third eyeball is in the back of its throat.”

    “It is!?” Simon’s eyes flew wide open.

    “Don’t worry, we’re not swimming in after it!” I clarified quickly. “I wouldn’t put you through that! And a bow and arrow don’t work well underwater, so we’ll have to try something else.” I pointed over at Gyorg. “Knowing how games like this go, I think we should try tricking it into sucking up a bomb.”

    “Where are we going to get a bomb underwater!?” He asked this as I was flipping through tabs on the slate, finally getting to the right place and clicking the screen. Just like that,  the reticle on the back produced a rounded bomb in a blast of blue light.

Simon just paused for a moment, looking over his shoulder and back at me with surprise. “Ah… well… I guess from there then!”

    The panic had died down on the boat by this time. The kids were spending less time screaming, and more time watching the water intently as they tried to spot wherever Link and Simon had disappeared under the water with the salamander. Trying to do so was like trying to keep your eye on a gnat buzzing around the room. You’d catch a glimpse of them, then they’d move in just the right way for you to lose track of them, then you’d catch them again. It was something similar. You’d spot the shadows underneath the water, then they’d disappear in the regular mottling of shades of blue that one was used to seeing on the ocean’s surface.

    Most of them were looking the same way most people would: with just their eyes. Others weren’t looking, like Vinny, who’d rather not try and look down into the one thing that terrified him so. And then there was Ariel, figuring the best way to get a closer look at where her brother was so far under the water was to look with the telescope. After all, it should produce the same effect when pointed at the water, right?

    “I can’t stand it, I’m going in!” Mina blurted out, gripping the railing as she went to hoist herself up.

    “NO!!” Zelda and Miranda had called it out in unison as they both went and grabbed her by her shoulders, pulling her back.

    “We just got you back, Mina!” Zelda pleaded. “We’re not letting you get eaten!”

    “Simon and Link will be fine!” Miranda tried to assure her. “They can both breathe underwater!”

    “I know, but I can’t just…” Mina looked genuinely worried as she continued. “George is a pancake of a salamander! He could still eat them!”

    “Pancake??” Zelda was confused.

    “A stupid-brain. A little idiot,” she clarified. “He once accidentally ate a piece of gravel and I had to take him to the vet for it.” Mina had been saying all this to get across that she was worried that George could still eat Simon and Lincoln, just by sheer dumb luck if not actual hunting strategy. But Mina mentioning George ingesting things made Zelda realize something. Something that caused her calm demeanor to break down.

    “Oh god, wait, Gyorg, I knew I saw that name before!!” Zelda let go of Mina and grabbed at her hair anxiously. “It’s that big fish thing from Majora’s mask! They need bombs to vanquish that thing! WE DIDN’T BRING BOMBS!!”

    “Bombs??” It seemed the word had gotten Mike’s attention from where he was at the railing, staring down into the water like he was watching a koi pond.

    “Yes, bombs!” Zelda repeated. “The fish sucks up stuff and they have to throw a bomb into its mouth!”

    “Oh, that’s how axolotls eat!” Mina reaffirmed. “They suck things in through their mouths!”

    “And the only way to fight Gyorg is to get it to suck up explosives!” Zelda said once more.

    “So, just to be clear,” Michael said, clasping his hands together in front of his face. “They need to make it swallow an explosive, and so long as it can blow up in the water, it’s fine?”

    “... yes?” Zelda wasn’t sure where he was going with this. Then Mike sprinted away.

    “GIMME 2 SECONDS!” he shouted back, quickly descending the stairs toward the lower cabin of the boat. Zelda just waits on deck with the other two girls, dumbfounded. Then Mike came back up, walking with the footfalls of a world war II soldier.

    “Introducing…” He stood in plain view of everyone else, one hand grasping a cluster of bottle rockets tucked away in his belt, and the other holding a gigantic tube on his shoulder like a bazooka. A bazooka made of plastic, sheet metal, and a single fire arrow kept on with kevlar thread.

    “... The Groosenator: NEW YORK STYLE!!”

    “Goss, are those bloody bottle rockets?!” Garrett asked, definitely worried for his safety as he started subtly shimmying away from where the bazooka was pointing.

    “Those are DEFINITELY illegal!!” Liam yelled down from the top deck. “You’re lucky we’re close to international waters, kid!”

    “It’s not like they’re mine! I’m not THAT dumb!” Mike said in his defense. “I found them at the nerd store!” He took a handful of five or six and shoved them into the tube, letting them slide into the back. “And lucky for us, they stay burning under the water!”

    “Yeah, but do you have anything to breathe underwater with??” That question from Zelda made Mike freeze up. The only thing that could make it more perfect would’ve been the sound of breaking glass, or perhaps a record scratch. For a whole minute, he forgot what had happened before Simon had leapt into the water.

    “Shoot, the Van Der Zee kid stole my scale!” he blurted out. Then he took a moment to look at the water. “... even if I could breathe underwater, I probably wouldn’t be fast enough to catch up to that thing.”

    “Yeah, you’d need your own pair of fins,” Mina said. “Like me or Simon!”

    “Oh! I got an idea!” Ariel went running off before anyone could ask for clarification. She came back up from the stern with something clasped between her hands, balled up in a clump. “You can use THIS!”

    Mike’s smile died a quick death when Ariel unfolded the thing in her hands.

    It was the mermaid suit.

    Mike didn’t have much of a choice in that situation. All he could do was look at Ariel’s offering and let out an exasperated sigh. Of course it would come to this…

    “Alright, get ready!” I shouted. Simon gave me a look of determination as he turned away from Gyorg and started swimming. The plan was very simple. Simon would swim opposite of the current, I’d hold on tight to his back as usual, but this time, I’d let go of the bomb and let it go off in Gyorg’s mouth. It was going to be fine. Theoretically, it was going to go off without a hitch. The issue came when the salamander actually started trying to suck us up into its maw. I had one hand on Simon, the other holding the bomb. And the moment I let it go to allow Gyorg to swallow it, I could feel the unmistakable feeling of my fingers slipping. 

    <<Link Link LINK!! Keep your grip!!>> Fiona cried out from the sword.

    “I’m trying, I’M TRYING!!” I tried to readjust my grip, but it was scarcely working. I felt like a character in those cartoons where they’re vicariously hanging from a ledge. Where one finger after another loses its grip before they fall off. It was a lot less funny and a lot more terrifying when I was the one vicarious hanging off of something.

    “ACK! No no no no no-” I tried my best to stay latched on, but to no avail. Eventually, the worst happened: my hand slipped off. I was pulled into the current, tumbling through the water closer to the maw of the sea monster. And the worst became even worse when I felt one of the salamander’s teeth catch on my headpiece. 

    With the fabric caught on its teeth, the headpiece and mask attached to it came right off.

    My mind began racing in the moments afterwards. I was tumbling through the water, not knowing which way was up or down, and now I couldn’t breathe. I had barely managed to get a breath in before the headpiece came off, but that wouldn’t last long. Not at all. I hadn’t realized anything else was happening. 

I hadn’t seen it at the time. To be fair, you don’t notice a whole lot of little things when you’re about to get eaten by a giant predatory sea creature. But all while I was tumbling through the water, the veins in my right arm were starting to glow. It was like the adrenaline coursing through me was powering it up to do something, and right as Gyorg’s teeth closed around me, in the frantic tumbling through the water, I accidentally smacked myself in the face with my right hand.

    “AGH! LINK!!” Simon was mortified. It all happened so quickly. One moment his friend was hanging onto him for dear life, and the next he was swallowed whole by a terrifying sea monster. Simon wasn’t sure what to do in his panic, but he had to do something . As the salamander turned the other way, Simon looked at it with furrowed brow and gritted teeth as he followed at top speed.

Cutting through the water, he felt like he was soaring. Like a falcon flying at top speed to hunt down its prey, or perhaps even Superman going as quickly as possible to save someone from the top of a building. He wasn’t lying up on the surface of the ocean. He did feel unstoppable in the water.

He had to figure out how to get Link out, and the only thing he could think of was the method he used to get them out of the Big Octo. As he sailed through the water and found himself over the head of Gyrog, he pulled his spear out from behind his back and dove down. He’d have to be careful. Even with two of its eyes taken out, its head was still dripping with Malice. He swam down, planting his feet on the skin closest to his head that wasn’t covered in the evil stuff. He used his free hand to grip one of the frilly appendages on the side of its head like a tree branch, and then used his other to do what he did while stuck in the Octo: he stabbed at its brain.

He wasn’t sure if the sporadicness of it was out of rage, frustration, or maybe just desperation by virtue of “if I do this enough times I’ll surely succeed”, but either way the stuff between him and the mind of this creature was surprisingly soft. Amphibious creatures didn’t have the sturdiest skin, after all. He was glad this wasn’t one of those armored fish. Or a turtle.

All the while, over and over, Simon was apologizing to the creature. Perhaps because he didn’t wish to harm it in such a vile way. Or perhaps because this was his sister’s pet axolotl who didn’t choose to be turned into a giant terrifying sea monster and was just trying to survive for all it knew. George didn’t deserve this. He was just a simple little wiggle worm that just wanted to spend his days floating around in the water eating worms without a thought behind his eyes. Despite all the apprehension, Simon once again succeeded in getting another sea monster to spit up its food.

Gyorg suddenly retched, and then spat out something. Something Simon wasn’t expecting. Something blue .

    Just as quickly as I went in, I was suddenly spat back out. Whether it was the force of destiny desperately trying to keep me alive just a little longer, or sheer dumb luck, it took me a moment to recouperate once I was out. Everything hurt, everything was sore, and my head especially felt like it was being assailed by the world’s worst migraine. Lucky for me, the salamander was in the process of swimming off again to recuperate as well.

    “LINK!”

    I looked over to see Simon zipping over to me like a barracuda on the hunt.

    “LINK! Are you alri-?!” There was a pause. For a single solitary moment in the chaos that was this underwater fight, it was dead silent. Simon’s eyes were darting all over my form, like he was trying to comprehend whether or not it was really me standing in front of him in the water. Then he smiled that giddy smile.

    “O mijn god, you look so COOL!” He put his hands on the sides of my face.

    “Wha- Simon, slow down, what’re you talking about?!” It was when I went to take his hands off of my face that I saw it. Maybe the first thing I should’ve seen was the glowing veins in my right arm, and how the circular piece on the back of my hand was glowing a deep blue, displaying a symbol containing three crescents joined together in the middle by their curves. But it's hard to notice one little spot of deep blue when that same color covers the rest of your hand, too. To put it simply, the hands I held out in front of me weren’t mind. I realized fairly quickly that they were instead the hands of a zora.

    “What the hell??” I just kept repeating that to myself over and over as my hands fiddled with my face, traversing up and down, feeling my forehead and the back of my head and the fins that now replaced my hair and ears. “What happened?! Did I do something with my arm!?” I held up my right arm. “ Did you do this ?” I asked it in an accusatory whisper. I hadn’t even made the connection yet between what happened then and what happened when Mina had touched my hand on the Coelacanth.

    “We’ve no time to gawk!” Simon blurted at me, grabbing my wrists with his much stronger hands. “There’s a monster to fight!” And as if on cue, we heard a rumble in the water, something like the rumble a whale makes when it’s trying to echolocate, or just communicate to other whales with its whale song. It was a rumble that came from a certain giant salamander now making a beeline for our location.

    “SCATTER!”

    The moment I called it out, we both darted in opposite directions. As the salamander dived toward where we once were. I felt like a paper airplane being thrown across the room by a skilled hand, gliding through the water with the utmost grace. Or, as much grace as I can imagine those salmon that swim upstream during the summer might have. It might’ve been me not being an experienced swimmer, or me being scared out of my mind of the salamander, or just scared out of my mind in general, but I wasn’t as graceful as I wish I could’ve been. I wonder if, like babies learning to walk, this was how baby dolphins fared when they learned to swim for the first time.

Personally, I was doing some ungodly combination of butterfly, dolphin, and dog paddling to swim off and keep out of the salamander’s way. I’m so glad Simon was turned the other way during all this. I don’t think I would’ve been able to live it down. I could’ve put up with it, though. I was aerodynamic enough in the water that it didn’t matter how awkward my swimming was, I was still about to evade Gyorg. I could still breathe underwater and stay down there. And I still had my sword on me, so if I needed to, I could defend myself. 

We’d spent that past minute or so zigging and zagging out of the way of Gyorg, avoiding teeth and malice and even more of those awful little swimming larva. I didn’t have to be the only one fighting them off this time, as Simon seemed to finally remember that he had a weapon on him too, joining me in spearing and slicing open the little swimming nightmares. It shouldn’t have felt much different from when I was riding on Simon’s back and doing the same, but it was so much more exhilarating when I was the one doing the swimming, able to carry myself through the ocean water all by myself. There’s something about being able to zip through the water, sword in hand and monstrous marine animals ready to be fought. There was only one issue, and I didn’t realize it until a little more time had passed in our fight with the giant salamander.

Picture this: you're me, sitting in the middle of the open ocean in the body of a merman that wasn’t designed quite right, but by all means was capable of swimming around by itself. You’ve just cut down the last of the little monstrous axolotl fish creatures meant to distract you, and sit in the way as you hear the salamander you’re battling with roar like an angry whale and make a beeline toward you. You’re confident. You know its weakness. You reach down to grab your Sheikah Slate to summon a bomb to toss into its mouth…

And the Slate is gone.

I tell you, if it had sunk in any later than it did, there’s no way I would’ve been able to swoop up and over Gyorg’s head fast enough to get out of its way. I was once again panicking, and I was thankful I had a way to breath so I could hyperventilate properly.

“The Slate!! I can’t find the Slate!!” I blurted out into the water. Simon swam back over to me, swimming right past as I zoomed alongside him through the ocean. You could tell he was trying to make sure Gyorg couldn’t catch up, but also was trying to let up so he didn’t leave me behind.

“I thought you had it on you!!” Simon said back to me.

“I thought I did, too!! But it’s not attached to my belt!”

Simon paused for a moment before his eyes wandered down my form for a moment. “To be quite frank, there’s no belt for it to attach to.” It took a second for it to sink in, and before I could even say anything, Simon added, “ Yeah, you’re in your boxers, Lincoln. ”

The color couldn’t have drained more from my face.

“Uh- I- Wait a sec!” I held my arms out in front of me, trying to get a good look at my right hand while still remaining aerodynamic. And just as I’d assumed, the veins in my arms were still alight, still the same deep ocean blue like the zora symbol on the back of my hand. “This thing made me change forms! Maybe when it did, my clothes and my slate got stuck in my human form!”

“Hylian!” Simon corrected me.

“Right, Hylian!” I looked at my right arm with squinted eyes before I started shaking it around. I guess I was thinking about how that’s how I got it to do its thing back in the Dragon’s Lair, so naturally that’s how I could get it to work here. When that didn’t do anything, I started trying to tap it to my face over and over. I’d smacked my face when I fell into Gyorg’s mouth, so maybe that did it. Still nothing. I hadn’t realized that Simon was looking over at me as we swam, and had noticed something that I didn’t.

“Hou vol!” He took my right hand in his as he kept swimming along, now pulling me behind him. “The little circle on your hand! It kind of looks like a dial on a radio!” And without waiting for me to add anything, he pinched the dial with his thumb and index before turning it. And to my dismay, it turned. He clicked it from my pinkie finger where the little pointer was and turned it toward the thumb. It was then that I noticed the ring around my thumb knuckle had a symbol as well: one of the Hylian royal crest. 

“Wait a second, hold on!” I pleaded as Simon held up my right hand. “That thing took my cowl off! I won’t be able to breathe!”

“Then take a deep breath, first!!” he suggested. I took a second to think it over before deciding to do just that, taking a deep breath. The moment he saw my cheeks puff up, Simon smacked my own hand into my face. Poof!

In another flash of light, that feeling came back. The feeling of not being able to breathe. Or more accurately, the feeling of having very limited time to breathe. Just as we had theorized, flashing back to Hylian form meant the return of my outfit from earlier, as well as the return of the Sheikah Slate.

I wasted no time, grabbing the slate in one hand while grabbing onto Simon with the other. He went swimming off like a torpedo as I flipped through tabs on the slate to get to the remote bombs. I felt like I was fighting against an imaginary clock, but lucky for me, I was a stubborn bastard. The moment I was able to get the bomb spawned in, I tried to remain as still as possible so as to not use any extra air. And then, right on cue, Gyorg appeared.

I let go out of the bomb the moment it showed up behind us. Just as I’d predicted, it began trying to suck us up into its maw. Simon was able to swim fast enough to compete with the current, and I was able to set off the bomb the moment it made it into Gyorg’s mouth. Now, you think this would be the smart move, right? Wrong .

Blast radius is a jerk sometimes.

When the bomb went off, it sent a shockwave through the water that knocked Simon off balance, as well as shook me around a bit. It shook me enough that my fingers on the Sheikah Slate slipped.

As Simon’s momentum caused him to swim off and away, I instinctively went to yell out “NO!” This seemed to be a mistake, as I ended up using up the air I had left and choked on the seawater. I was lucky that Simon heard this, immediately turning around to take my right hand and turn the dial, going through all the motions to get me back to the other form. That breath of water felt amazing, but I didn’t have time to savor it.

“The Slate!!” I shouted. I didn’t wait for Simon to respond before zipping away through the water. I’d spent enough time watching the way he moved to figure out how best to move in this strange new body. With both legs close together, kicking in unison, arms held back and against my body with the fins along the edge sticking outward, I cut through the water as graceful as a bird. I tried to be as fast as one, too, as I darted toward where the Slate was in the water, hand outstretched so I could grab a hold of it. That didn’t happen.

“WATCH OUT!!” Simon cried it out before he suddenly dove down from above, grabbing me around the waist and pushing me further down into the water. I was ready to scream at him, angrily ask him what he was doing, something! But I couldn’t before a shadow suddenly passed overhead. 

The Gyorg had shown up behind me, and would’ve most definitely eaten me if Simon hadn’t body slammed me into the water. It swam by overhead, and instead of eating me, it swallowed something else: my nintendo switch.

“CRAP!” It was the only thing I could think to call out as I put my hands on my head in dismay.

“Verdomd!! The bombs!!” He didn’t stay frozen for long, grabbing my wrist and dragging me along as he went to swim away. I was able to get up to speed fast enough that he didn’t have to hold my hand anymore.

“And we can’t get it out of its mouth, that’d be suicide!” I said, frustrated.

“Maybe you can throw your sword at the eye in its mouth?” Simon proposed.

<<NO!!”
    My cousin and I said this in unison, though Simon would’ve only heard me. “I’m NOT throwing my cousin into the mouth of a giant sea monster!”

“Well how else are we going to fight it!?”

“I dunno, maybe by NOT throwing people into its mouth!”

“But she’s a sword!!”

“YEAH SHE’S STILL A PERSON!!”

“ALRIGHT, I’M SORRY BUT LESS ARGUING, MORE SWIMMING, IT’S BACK !!”

I could try and make my own guess before I felt the water pull back on me. Gyorg had snuck up on us again, and was trying to suck us up back into its maw. We did what we’d been doing for this whole fight and were outswimming the current. There was a problem this time, though: we couldn’t swim fast enough.

Slowly and slowly, I realized we were getting pulled closer and closer toward Gyorg’s teeth, slow enough that someone from the outside probably wouldn’t notice until it was too late. The both of us couldn’t help but curse under our breaths, and then freak out, and then try desperately to kick harder no matter how much it hurt to do. It was like going through the five stages of grief in 10 seconds.

“So… this is how we die?” Simon asked aloud.

“NOT ON MY WATCH!!”

What happened next was surreal.

Something had landed in the water nearby before those words echoed through the sea toward us. I couldn’t help but imagine this as some scene from the original Little Mermaid from 1989. A similar form fell into the water, swimming with the gusto of a shark about to secure the best meal of its life. The figure of a mermaid zipped through the water, toward where we were. It was just like in the movie: the bright red flowing hair, the shining green fish tail, and the cool colored top. Nothing could’ve prepared me for how the rest of the body was configured.

What stopped in front of us in the water was my bully and member of my school’s football team, Michael Goss, with a bazooka on one shoulder, wearing the mermaid suit like a badge of honor.

    Mike held the bazooka with both hands as it rested on his shoulder. “NOW BOTH OF YOU DUCK!!”

    We didn’t have to be told twice.

    Simon and I dove down the moment we saw his finger pull the trigger. Watching that mechanism on his shoulder do its thing in the next 3 seconds was definitely a sight to behold. The cock of the gun fell, lit up the ammunition inside, and then it fired. Simon and I watched dumbfounded from below as a cluster of bottle rockets fired through the water, right into Gyorg’s open mouth where they went off in an explosion of colors the way bottle rockets do. Maybe it was just the whole energy of the moment, or maybe it was from my shock at the bottle rockets actually lighting up in the water(I didn’t know at the time that the fuel in bottle rockets made it so they could keep burning underwater), but either was I was completely mesmerized as this whole scene played out in front of me.

    The explosion in its mouth caused Gyorg to reel back like I hadn’t seen him reel back before. Instead of flailing around like I’d expected, it instead did something a bit unprecedented: it ascended to the surface.

    The scene that took place up above was surreal. All the kids knew about what was going on under the water was that Link and possibly Simon were down there, and then Mike had jumped in after them with a mermaid suit and bottle rockets. They had no clue what he was planning on doing, let alone if it would work. And then the amorphous shape they’d been watching under the surface of the ocean rose up and up, becoming more clear until it finally breached the surface.

    It was like watching an angry whale come up for air, but much more terrifying. The malice covering the sea monster's face looked like it was struggling to hang on, dripping off its head and into the water like oil while also leaking from its mouth like blood. Everyone on deck who knew who this poor creature was just looked on in horror. It flailed on the surface of the water, almost like a fish flopping around on a dry dock trying to get back to where it can breathe. Liam was halfway toward turning on the throttle and getting as far as they could from it in case it slammed a limb of some sort down onto the boat. Luckily, that never happened.

Instead, the malice melted to the point that it covered the entirety of the creature, like a mucus membrane made of nightmares. And then… it went limp. The shape of the creature slowly dissolved into nothing, but instead of the malice becoming nothing but smoke over the water, it started to bubble. It bubbled exactly three times, and each time it popped, something was blown towards the Ocean King.

Some of the kids freaked out, diving back into the main cabin thinking it was a last ditch effort to injure them. Instead, however, three of the kids saw something that the others hadn’t noticed.

Miranda held out her hair hand, just barely catching something that would’ve come short of the boat and fallen into the water: a hat. Specifically, the hat that Link had been wearing with the rest of his underwater armor.

Zelda held out her hands as well, catching something she hadn’t been expecting to catch: the Sheikah Slate.

Mina was the third, and caught something she thought was much more important than the other items. It was a little tupperware. The kind of plastic container one might store leftovers in, but Mina consistently used this specific tupperware, with it’s little handle up top, for a much different reason. Inside of it was perfectly mixed brackish water, as well as a very frazzled little axolotl sitting inside with its legs all stuck out and its little black eyes wide.

“Oh George, you poor thing…”

    “... is it dead??” Mike asked, looking up at the surface of the water with a questioning look.

    “I’d hope not!” Simon blurted out. “It wasn’t that poor thing’s fault it was covered in malice!” There was a long moment where Mike didn’t respond, and just looked at Simon with wide eyes.

    “What tHE F-”

    Simon was quick to shove his hands over Mike’s mouth. “Don’t scream, it’s Simon! It’s me! You’re fine!”

    “Yeah but you-? And Matheson-?? Why are you FISH?!”

    “It’s super weird, I know,” I said. “I’ll explain on the boat! We should get back.”

    “Yeah, just don’t go too fast,” Mike warned. “You get this thing called  ‘The Bends’ or something.”

    “I believe it’s called the Benz,” Simon corrected. “You two go ahead of me, though, I’ll catch up!” Before I could ask for clarification, he zipped away through the water. I wasn’t sure if he was looking for something, or perhaps just wanted to stretch his fins for a bit longer before going up on the boat, but he looked like he was born in the ocean the way he moved.

    Mike leaned a little closer to me in the water. “... so, do you and him have eyelids like this, or-??”

    “No clue, let’s get to the boat!” I grabbed Mike by the hand before gently floating up to the surface.

    “Be careful, dude. The Benz!”

    “I know, I know!” I said this as I let him go to turn the dial on my hand. I hated the feeling of it clicking to the thumb. I took a hold of Mike before slowly ascending to the surface once more. And right before we breached, I touched my right hand to my face.

    GASP!

    The feeling of having real air in my lungs was surreal. Mike came up out of the water right behind me, and both of us made our way to the stern of the boat, where the others were already running over to check on us.

    “Link!!” Zelda came running over, with Navi fluttering right behind her as she met me on the steps, giving me a hug. “Good god, don’t ever try to fight someone solo like that again, dude!”

    “Alright, cool cool, glad y’all can tearfully reunite,” Mike said sarcastically as he went to pull himself up onto the stern. “Could you guys move please so I can take this thing off??” We didn’t reply, simply backing away as Mike pulled the mermaid suit off like a big wet sock.  “You should’ve seen what happened down there! I helped take that big monster down with the GNS!”

    “GNS?” I looked at him with a raised eyebrow.

    “Groosenator, New York Style!” He said this like a frat boy trying to hype up something. “Made it myself, and it helped me save you guys down there!”

    “Oh, right, the bottle rockets that are illegal in New York City,” I heard Vinny scoff from where he was in the main cabin, a good, safe distance from the water.”

    “Hey! It’s not like they were MY bottle rockets!” Mike retorted.

    “The bottle rockets aren’t important right now,” went Mina as she came over. “Where’s Simon? Is he alright??”

    I paused for a moment. I wasn’t sure how exactly to explain what had happened. Luckily, I didn’t have to.

    SPLASH!

    “FOUND IT!” We all turned around as a hand came up, a sea soaked skateboard clutched in its bigger than average fingers. Simon’s face came up above the water as well. “I FOUND YOUR BOAR-” There was a pause. Simon went dead silent, sinking back into the water until his eyes were the only thing visible before he sheepishly swam up to the stern. He simply put the board down on the stern before I picked it up. And even then, he just kept sitting in the water looking like he’d been caught doing something wrong.

Everyone was at a loss for words. Everyone except the one thalassophobic guy it seemed.

    “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.” He said it with a chuckle, coupled with the smuggest looking grin I’d ever seen on him.

    Miranda turned to him and lightly punched his shoulder. “Hey! No fair! I was gonna say that!”

Chapter Text

“Alright, you kids ready!?” Liam had called this out from where he was on the top deck.

All of us that were on deck had backed up toward the very edge of the ship’s bow. Those of us that could put weight on the boat, at least. Navi was the exception here. Some of us were standing in the middle of the deck, others were backed up so close to the edge that they were holding onto the railing to keep from falling. We all nodded our heads, some in unison, others a beat or two after the others.

“We’re ready!” Mina called up to him.

Liam gave us a thumbs up before turning toward the stern. “Alright then, Simon! Hop on!”

Very few of us could really see what was happening at the other end of the boat, but I could barely make out the head of our much taller friend as he pulled himself up on the deck of the boat. We all braced ourselves as the boat rocked a little bit backwards. But thanks to Captain Beckett’s planning, all our weight on the bow kept the rocking from being too abrupt. Once Simon was on board, we watched him duck under a doorway and into the main cabin. We were all quick to join him there.

“Simon, mijn god, what happened??” Mina asked, going up to her little brother who was awkwardly bent over in the cabin.

“That’s the funny thing,” he began. “I, um… don’t know.” He nervously chuckled. “But look on the bright side! I’ve got magic like everyone else, so I can fight things just as well as you all can!”

“We could ride into battle on him!” Vinny declared.

“Or we could not, because he’s not a steed animal, he’s our classmate,” Garrett replied through gritted teeth.

“Either way, we’re going to struggle just getting you through our front door,” Mina said with a chuckle. That got a laugh out of Simon as well.

“I’m sure we won’t have to worry about that. This only happened because I was in the water!” Simon started shuffling around the cabin, looking through cupboards and pulling each of them open with his fingertips, doing his best to not break anything. “I’m sure I’ll change back once I’m dry.” It became clear what he was fishing around for in the cabinets once he actually found them: beach towels.

We watched as Simon took one and dried his face off with it. It was one of those beach towels meant to be used to dry your whole body, or hang around your waist to cover up, yet it barely covered 3 quarters of Simon’s head. The imagery made my little sister laugh. The laughter was short lived once Simon dried off his face and pulled the towel off to reveal… nothing. Nothing had changed, especially his appearance.

Simon seemed to stay calm for a moment, but it was the same kind of calm you see on a kid’s face when they find out they can’t have ice cream, and are trying to keep a lid on their emotions in hopes that they can have ice cream later. Simon looked just like that, except the more he tried to scrub his skin to dry himself off, the more the proverbial ice cream was becoming less and less likely to happen.

“Why’s it not doing anything??” he asked himself, rubbing the towel all over himself more frantically. “This isn’t right, I should’ve changed back by now! I should’ve changed back!”

“Simon SIMON! Broertje, calm down!!” Mina ran over and grabbed his hands with her own to try and hold them still. Even with how massive the kid was, and how strong he undoubtedly was, Mina was able to keep his hands still. “I’ve been all dry for a while now and I still look like a fish. That’s probably what’s happened to you. But you’ll be fine!”

“Yeah, look on the bright side!” Vinny interjected. “Now you’ve got cool powers, too. Now you can actually fight stuff with us, so you’re fine!”

“I’m not fine! It’s not fine!” he shouted back, half angry and half scared. “I’ve turned into een haai! I’m a shark on a man’s body!” By this point, it was almost heartbreaking to see. Sure, I saw how everyone else reacted when they had to reveal what had happened to them at the treehouse. But by then they’d all gotten used to their change in looks. This had all just happened to poor Simon, and by the end of his little rant he looked to be on the verge of tears.

“But sharks are cool!”

Simon was taken aback at my sister's words, Ariel having blurted them out in the middle of Simon’s breakdown. He was so dumbfounded by her simple yet heartfelt exclamation that he had to take a moment as Ariel approached him from the other side of the cabin, stopping right in front of him. It was like she was waiting for a reply from him: some words, a gesture, anything. Simon did so by kneeling so he could be even remotely eye level with her.

“You surely don’t mean that, do you?” He seemed genuinely skeptical. Perhaps he thought Ariel was saying that just to cheer him up. But I knew she was genuine. I knew that the moment she looked him in the eyes before raising both her hands up and booping him on the end of his shark nose with open palms.

“Awwww, schatje!” Simon was on the verge of tears again, but happy ones this time. He didn’t hesitate to scoop my little sister up into a hug. Ariel let out one of those iconic child-like scream laughs as he lifted her up off her feet and stood straight up…

“Oof!”

… and immediately hit his head on the ceiling rather hard.

“Whoa, you alright??” I blurted out as he flinched down and away from the top of the cabin.

“Yep. Very fine.” Simon had a free hand on his head, the way people do when they get hurt and don’t know what else to do but hold the site of the hit. “I think I’ll just… stay seated then.” He sat down on the floor, and my sister adjusted herself so she was sitting on his leg. It was kinda funny. It was like a little kid asking Santa for a christmas present, but all they knew about Santa was that he was red.

“Be careful there, mate,” Garrett said, genuinely concerned. He turned to the other kids. “What is he, like, 9 feet?”

“At least, yeah,” Miranda confirmed. “Maybe even 10!”

“Not the time, guys,” Zed said with a furrowed brow. “He’s freaking out about his looks, he doesn’t need you guys guessing how ridiculously tall he is.”

“Broertje, let me see it,” Mina said as she approached. Simon looked confusedly at her. He didn’t really know what “it” was, not until Mina reached over and took his hand off of his head.

A while ago, I took a marine biology class in my sophomore year of high school. I don’t know why. It’s not like I wanted to go to college for anything that would require it, but the point is that I took the class. And in that class, over the course of two days, we watched a documentary and answered questions on a worksheet while watching it. That documentary was Blackfish. You know, the one that told the world how awful Seaworld was and how badly their orcas were suffering in captivity.

One thing I remember was an anecdote about orcas and their dorsal fins. Seaworld employees were told to tell people that quite a large percentage of orcas’ dorsal fins start to droop to one side as they age, when in reality only about 5% of them experience it, and it’s usually because they’re old, sick or injured. When Simon pulled his hand off his head, the shark fin running along the top of his head was drooping, seemingly broken from when he’d hit his head on the ceiling.

“Try not to move,” she said, putting her other hand on the injured fin. Simon flinched back from her touch, but soon stilled himself enough so she could lay her palm on his fin. “I learned how to do… something… while I was trapped on that shipwreck.” In the next moment, we all watched as Mina’s hand suddenly started glowing. A blue light, like sunlight reflecting off of the water, started to encircle her hand and shine over top of Simon’s hurt fin. It took me a moment to realize what was going on, which was really a moment too long. With all the craziness going on, it shouldn’t have surprised me that Mina had learned how to use magic.

“When I was dropped onto the Coelacanth, I was… roughed up, to put it simply,” she told us. “Of all the things that happened to me yesterday morning, this curse afflicting all of us has given me a gift of sorts.” Soon, the light encircling her hand dimmed and disappeared. It did so and revealed just what her gift was. Simon’s fin was no longer drooping, as Mina had magically healed it.

Simon paused for a moment, putting a hand to his head fin, and then chuckled.

“Isn’t that fitting?” he said to her with a smile. “You’re studying for medical school and now you have magical healing powers.”

“Well, it must be fate, then,” she replied with an assured look about herself. “Just like how it’s fate for you to touch your hand to the top of a street lamp.”

That got a pretty hearty chuckle out of Simon. Just a moment ago, he was having a breakdown about everything happening to him. Now here he was, laughing at a joke about his freakish height like it was the most normal thing in the world. I’d been lightly chuckling along too.

Then Simon opened his big mouth.

“Well, perhaps I should just find the dial on my hand and turn it back, huh Link?”

The room went dead silent. The color left my face as everyone on the boat turned to me. And as if it couldn’t get worse, I even saw Liam poke his head out from the stairwell leading up to the second helm.

“I’m sorry, the what in your hand??” Zelda asked as she approached, Navi fluttering close by her head.

“It’s nothing! Really!” I said. But I wasn’t stupid. I explained what had happened, but kept it brief. I held up my right hand. “Mina touched my hand on the boat and it seemed to activate… something.” There was another pause.

Garrett huffed. “Well are you going to tell us what that something is??” He marched over before taking my right hand, turning it over so he could see the back of it. Everyone could see it now, with its glowing veins and the rings around the knuckles of particular interest. I’d already known about the knuckles, but it was everyone else’s first time really noticing them and the symbols now inlaid in them. There were only two as of right now, but they were there, one on the thumb and one on the pinkie.

“Dang, that looks kinda sick,” Vinny said as he approached.

“Yeah, just don’t turn it or anything,” I told him. “I can feel it clicking around in my hand and it feels super wEIRD-” My voice cracked on that last one as Vinny completely ignored my warning and proceeded to turn the dial around in my hand, pointing it away from my thumb and at my pinkie instead. Turning that thing around made it feel like someone was sticking a running power drill in my hand. None of the pain, but all of the feeling of something twisting around under the skin.

I flinched and pulled my hands away from Vinny’s grasp. “Dude, what the hell??”

“You can’t just tell me there’s a twisting thing in your hand and expect me NOT to want to twist it!” Vinny retorted.

“Yeah, but you can maybe restrain yourself for 2-”

“AH!” Garrett let out a surprised scream. “Link, your hand! Turn it over!”

I had been so confused by my friend’s exclamation that I turned my hand over without really thinking. With all the techy looking veins running along my right arm, there was also a ring in the middle of the palm of my hand. I hadn’t known what exactly it was for, but as I saw what turning the dial without smacking my face had done, I soon realized its function.

With the dial turned toward the zora symbol, it caused the ring to project a hologram. A hologram meant to make it look as if there were a physical mask floating in the air above my hand.

A few moments of experimentation led me to discover that the mask didn’t move with my hand, staying where it was in the air. I reached up and grabbed at it, discovering that this was one of those holograms you could interact with, like in a superhero or sci-fi movie. So now, I was holding the holographic mask in my hand as if it were real.

“Oooooh, I was onto something then!” Simon said from where he was sitting. “So THAT’S why smacking your own face did it, then! Because it’s like you’re putting on a mask!”

“Yeah, I guess so,” was all I could say. I didn’t smack my face again, instead turning the dial with my other hand back toward the Hylian symbol, causing the hologram to dissipate. “You know… with all this High Fantasy garbage that has been going on, I feel like the magic arm that lets me shapeshift is where I draw the line.” I chuckled to myself.

“Speaking of high fantasy garbage, ain’t there supposed to be a heart or something that the monster was supposed to drop??” Navi asked, fluttering over toward the window of the cabin.

“Right! The heart container!” I walked over to the window with Navi. “It might still be in the water somewhere.”

“Well let’s go find it then!” Simon said as he stood up. Not all the way, mind you. He was slouching a bit so as to not hit his head again. “Mina, you should come with us!”

“Alright, alright,” Mina obliged. “But only because George isn’t 100x his size and trying to eat us.”

“Liam, you cool if we try and find something in the water for a bit before we leave??” I asked, yelling up the stairwell toward the second helm.

“Yeah, do what you need to do or something,” he said. “I need to get this thing ready to set sail anyways.” Liam peeked out from the top deck. “I’ll need someone up here to help, though. I’ll just uhhhhhh eeny meeny miney you.” Liam pointed his finger toward Vinny, who looked upset that he was picked, but didn’t want to complain. He simply trudged up the stairs as I went to the railing of the boat with Mina and Simon.

“You wanna do the zora thing again?” Simon asked as he looked at me. I had to pause for a moment. Mina came up beside me as I looked to my right hand, turned the dial, and then grasped the hologram in my hand.

“... I guess one more time wouldn’t hurt.”

Vinny was upset. It wasn’t because of anything that had happened. Considering everything that had gone down while they were on the water, they’d gotten out pretty unscathed. Vinny was upset because they’d been on the water, and he had to tag along. They knew how terrified of water he was. He knew they probably didn’t mean to make him face his worst fears like this, and at least Miranda understood that he’d be staying on the boat no matter what, but by god did it suck.

It’s not like he wanted to be this irrationally terrified of water. This was a dire and important situation, and it was better if they all stuck together. Strength in numbers and all that. But he just… he couldn’t help it. He was terrified of the water. It didn’t matter if it was an ocean, a lake, what have you. If he couldn’t see the bottom, he didn’t want to be near it. The Pond back at Central Park had been one thing. A pond can only be so deep. But the ocean was a whole other beast. It was like looking off the observation deck of the Empire State Building with a fear of heights, except you couldn’t see the ground. He didn’t want to think about all the awful things that could be lurking below the surface.

He wasn’t sure where it all even stemmed from. Maybe it was his natural apprehension as a kid to swim out of the shallow end of the public pool when he was little. Or maybe it was because of that one time his dad took him hunting with his uncles at 12, and a giant bass lept out of the water to catch a fly right in front of Vincent, startling the poor kid while he was just trying to look for ducks. Or maybe it was because of that time he accidentally walked in while his dad was watching Jaws, and he ended up watching the whole scene in the estuary where the man got pulled under by a shark that seemed to come up out of nowhere in the opaque ocean water, leaving only a severed leg behind. Actually, it was definitely the jaws one. But that didn’t make his fears any less valid, he thought. He’s not the only one terrified of the ocean and its man-eating inhabitants!

But he didn’t have to worry about that too much, now. It’s not like he was getting in the water. He was just being pulled up to the top deck by Liam to help him with the helm or something. Where he had a perfect view of the ocean. All around them for miles. It could’ve been worse.

“Sit down there, kid,” Liam said, pointing toward the chairs on the deck with one hand while doing something with the helm on the other. Vinny was caught off guard slightly. Didn’t Mr. Beckett need his help or something? But he simply sat down, not wanting to press further.

That was a lie, he needed to know.

“Didn’t you need my help getting the boat ready to sail or something??” he asked.

“Not really,” Beckett admitted. “Just needed an excuse to talk to ya. Vincent, right?”

Vinny internally cringed at the use of his full name, but nodded regardless. “Yeah, that’s the one on the birth certificate,” he joked. Liam chuckled lightly.

“Good, good…” Liam took a moment to collect himself. “I take it you don’t like the ocean very much?”

“Understatement of the century,” Vinny mumbled under his breath. “I’m just scared of deep water is all. If I can’t see the bottom, I get a not-great feeling in my gut.”

Liam nodded his head. “Right, right… I think your little glowing friend mentioned how she got me roped into this, right?”

“Yeah, she explained it before we got to the boathouse,” he said. “Something about you owing her dad a favor.”

“Yeah, that’s it.” Liam paused for a moment, thinking back to when Navi had first brought it up in the boat house. The mere mention of Coney Island Creek gave him such a wave of embarrassment. But now he wondered for a moment… was he ready to say what had happened? With only one kid present, and the one he felt would understand better than the others, he felt he was.

“... Do you know what submechanophobia is, Vinny?”

There was a pause. Vinny wondered for a split second if it was a trick question before he decided to answer honestly and shook his head “no.”

“It’s like thalassophobia in a sense,” Liam began to explain. “Both have something to do with the water. But submechanophobia is the specific fear of submerged machinery.”

“So just like… a fear of machines in water?”

“Something like that.” Liam pulled something out of seemingly nowhere and took a swig from it. It was another bottle of milk. “Seeing things like animatronics, submarines, or… hell, shipwrecks and boat propellers in the ocean makes me feel uneasy. It makes my mind go places I’d rather it not.” He leaned forward on the dashboard. “Like, what would happen if I fell into the water with one of those things? Water’s hard to maneuver in when you’re not made for it like people are. When you need diving fins to get anywhere quickly. Stuff like rusty old boats like the Coelacanth make the unease triple.”

The mentioning of the specific shipwreck made Vincent’s eyes go wide in realization. He couldn’t help but wonder…

“So that whole thing about the wreck of the Coelacanth being a bad omen-?”

“I was bs-ing,” Liam admitted. “I figured you kids would be more likely to leave me be if you thought I was avoiding it because of sailing superstition than an irrational fear.” He sat down in the chair right behind the helm, kicking his feet up as he continued. “Things like that shipwreck, they’re old, decrepit, broken down… you never know if the moment you fall in the water with it, that old thing might by some miracle start up again and suck you into the propeller. You never know if some wayward current will blow you right into its hull to witness things you don’t want to.”

Liam paused again. It was like he had to take endurance breaks in order to get through this explanation. He let out a sigh. “Coney Island Creek is full of wrecked ships and a submarine even. My good pal Dinesh and I go fishing there all the time though. Dinesh is… Navi’s dad by the way.”

“I could guess from the very Indian sounding name,” Vinny joked.

Liam chuckled again, but continued. “Anyways, we were fishing there one time when I lost my footing. Fell off the side of the boat while we were passing by the submarine in the creek. Now, everyone reacts differently when they’re in the water with their worst fear. Some people have the sense to swim away. Other people panic and start flailing wildly. Me… I freeze. My whole body goes rigid and I can’t do anything but sink in the water and stare. Doesn’t help when you’re in a place like the Coney Island Creek, where the water’s deep enough for you to drown in.” He paused again. It was like he was reliving swimming in those god awful waters, and had to come up for air.

“Luckily for me, Dinesh acted quickly. He ran over and fished me out by the back of my shirt. I told him I owed him my life for it.” Liam paused again before a smile broke out on his face. He chuckled heartily one more time. “Didn’t think that would count towards me helping you guys save your friend, yet here we are!”

That whole story couldn’t help but make Vinny think. Nothing about himself, really, but about Liam. It sounded like such a debilitating fear, and yet… he was on a boat. A mechanical thing that was most well known for being constantly submerged in water.

“If you’re so scared of machines in water, then why do you own a boat house?” he asked. “Why go sailing at all??”

“Because I like sailing,” he said. “The feeling I get when I’m out here far outweighs the fear of falling overboard, and I can’t put the things I love to do on hold just because of my irrational fears, kid.”

“Well still!” Vinny had sat up at this point, feeling like he was going to have to put his whole body into explaining his side of things. “What if you fall into the water again? What if you freeze up because you saw something you didn’t like and drown??”

“Because I know that won’t happen,” he replied rather bluntly. He had a feeling that these questions weren’t really for him. He thought maybe, deep down, Vinny was talking to himself. “It’s why I rent out and captain boats for people. Why I’m always fishing with a friend. Fears like ours can make stuff like boatings or… I suppose in your case, helping your friends save the world, pretty difficult. But courage isn’t getting rid of your fears. It’s doing things you want to do in spite of them. And do you know what makes fishing with submechanophobia so much easier?”

Vinny seemed confused by all this, but Liam was able to give him that last little piece of the puzzle. He put one hand on Vinny’s shoulder while subtly gesturing out to the ocean. Vinny didn’t want to look, but figured… just this once. And when he did, he saw something. Something he didn’t think would really factor into the conversation.

It was Link, Simon and Mina, out in the water. And by the looks of it, Simon was the one that had gotten the heart container this time around.

It was then that Liam finally answered the question he’d asked.

“What makes it easier is going out and doing it with friends who will have your back if you happen to fall in.”

By the time we finally got back to shore, I had nearly forgotten that we’d have to take the subway back. Fitting Simon into the car was easier than we thought, but he had to stay sitting the whole ride back. We had bigger things to consider to be honest. Mainly the fact that it took us way too long to get out on that boat and save Mina. By the time we were on our way back, it was already late afternoon. That made us come to some kind of agreement about this whole thing, though: one Trial a day. With how we were all feeling after the Coelacanth, trying to do another trial would’ve been like trying to do two AP tests in one day(which is something you definitely shouldn’t do because it’s not great for your mental state because like c’mon, cramming all that info for one day? Too much for me).

“Hmmm why do your eyebrows look like that?” Ariel asked. She decided to sit right beside Simon in the train car. She was like an emotional support child for the poor dude, which… that’s understandable. My sister’s really good at cheering people up.

“I’m not sure…” Simon put his hands up onto the handlebar-looking things sticking out from the side of his head. “I think it’s like those hammerhead sharks. With their eyes on the sides of their head.”

“But your eyes are right there!” Ariel giggled.

“Well I didn’t say it was completely accurate!” he retorted with a chuckle.

In terms of everyone else, most of them were napping again. It was a long train ride back to Queens, after all. All except Zelda and Mina, who had been talking nearly the whole ride, and Navi, who’d been chilling on my shoulder. By all means, I think the two of us were content to just sit in silence and recuperate after everything that happened…

And then my phone started ringing.

I wasn’t caught off guard per-say, but I did end up more startled than I’d like to admit. My startled state quickly died down when I actually saw who was calling. It was just Bennet. I wondered for a moment why he was calling, but figured it best to spend less time wondering and more time picking up the phone and finding out.

“Link, you there??” he asked from the other end.

“Yeah, I’m here, is something up, Ben??”

“Not really. All’s good over here. How’d Coney Island go?”

“Uhhhh…” I looked up and over at where Simon and my sister were sitting, trying to play a rather boring game of “I Spy” to pass the time. “.... good. It went well! We have Mina in the subway car with us. We were actually on our way back to the Dragon’s Lair.”

“Cool, cool! I was about to suggest you kids come back,” he said.

“Any particular reason?”

“Well first things first, Darius and I were able to get groceries from the Marino’s down the block! The place is still open despite it all. So I can make a proper dinner for you guys when you get back.”

“Do you have the equipment for that??”

“I’ve got a camping stove upstairs, it’ll be fine.” Bennet paused for a moment to chuckle. “Bad news is I think Darius has gone full goron.”

I paused for a moment. “... What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Darius can only stomach literal rocks,” Bennet explained dryly.

I heard Coach McKay chime in from what sounded like a little ways away from Bennet. “If you kids have ever wondered what concrete tastes like… granola.”

I couldn’t help but chuckle. “Anything else you’ve tried, Coach?”

“He got adventurous and took a bite out of a piece of asphalt,” Bennet told me.

My eyes flew open for a moment. “Where’d he get asphalt?!”

“Two of those big pig looking monsters with the babirusa tusks were fighting each other on 47th avenue,” Darius explained. “You get two big creatures like that slamming each other into the ground, they’re gonna end up breaking off chunks or sending them flying.”

“And you just ran up and grabbed a piece??” I asked.

“Not while they were there, of course!” Darius specified. “When we came back out of Marino’s, I grabbed a piece of it before we came back to the shop.”

“Whatever, just get back here as soon as you kids can!” Bennet said, trying to get the conversation back on topic. “I’ve gotten some good insider info on what’s up with Staten Island.” That would’ve been enough to get me dead set on getting back as soon as possible. But he added something else. Something that sealed the deal for me.

“That, and… I think I know what’s up with your arm.”

Getting back to the shop went about as boring-ly as one would assume. We knew the way there, we knew there weren’t any monsters to worry about really, and we now had a 9 foot tall shark man in the group. I’m sure any of the little pig men willing to try and jump us were NOT willing to get decked by a dude with a shark for a head. Coming back to the Dragon’s Lair went about as boring-ly as one would expect.

“Hey, welcome back! Glad you kids are safe, now get inside, quick!” Bennet had ordered us, whispering it like he was trying not to be heard. It caught us off guard that we couldn’t help but quickly shuffle inside in a single-file. I went off to the side toward Bennet as I came in.

“Dude, is everything alright??” I asked. “You don’t have to order us inside like a drill sergeant.”

“Yeah, I’m just getting worried,” he explained. “Monsters are getting bolder and stuff. Think they know I’ve got food or something. They’re like those pigeons all over the city!”

“Yeah. Pigeons that could suplex you and bite your arm off,” I chortled.

“So I guess the subway rats, but big!” Bennet rephrased. The various comparisons managed to make us both laugh. But Bennet soon brought me back to the matter at hand by bringing something up as he looked upon the kids in the store…

“Hey, where’s the dutch kid?” he asked. “Simon?”

“Watch your head, schatje!”

As if one cue, Simon came through the door. Ariel was riding on his head, like she was riding on the back of a leaping fish, and he had to duck very low to get in through the door without her hitting against the top of the doorframe. And once they were inside, with Simon still ducking a bit so neither of them would hit the ceiling, Bennet just stood there and kinda just stared. He did it for long enough that Simon and Ariel had noticed, and were staring back. They were confused, but Bennet was… more confused.

“Oh my god… his name is Simon, of course, I’m an idiot-” Bennet started walking toward the front counter.

This confused me. “Wait, what??”

“Why’re you an idiot, Mr. Zukowski??” Simon seemed supremely confused as well as he kneeled down to let Ariel down off of him. Bennet didn’t reply right away, instead looking through a box of stuff he had underneath the table.

“I’m an idiot because you DID have a parallel and it was RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME!” Bennet shot up with something in his hands. I’d expected him to pull out another book, like the Hyrule Historia, or perhaps even a specific gameplay guide. Instead, he’d decided to cut out the middleman entirely and pulled out his laptop. “You kids have names that are either completely the same or vaguely similar to your parallels. Miranda and Midna, Vinny and Vaati, Ariel and Aryll…” He finally clicked on something and turned the screen around to face them. “And your name is one letter off!”

The picture on the laptop screen was Simon’s spitting image. The same bright red colors, the same shark tailed head, the same hammerhead shark-like handlebars on his brow. The only difference was the attire, with Simon wearing the wetsuit he’d had on since we’d been on the Ocean King and this character wearing lots of jewelry and sashes and even a headpiece with a black feather in it.

And the guy’s name was Sidon.

“I’m a prince!” Simon said excitedly, the fish tail on his head wagging. It seems he’d noticed a tagline on one of the images that labeled Sidon as such. “It’s me! That must be why I couldn’t find anything in the other book! Because he’s from the new game!!”

“You’d think he’d be in a gameplay guide or something,” Zelda said from across the room. I hadn’t noticed until now that she’d been busy gathering up books. Not just the Historia, but also gameplay guides from all the Zelda games she could find on Bennet’s shelf.

“Well they mention him, but there’s no good pictures,” Bennet explained. “Figured looking up the fan wiki page would be a better idea.”

“Think I could borrow it real quick?” Zelda asked.

“Sure!” Bennet reached below the counter and pulled a box out from beneath it. He pulled a copy of the Breath of the Wild strategy guide out and handed it to Zelda. “There’s a bestiary section if you need to skip to there.”

“I dunno, it might be worth it to read the other stuff in there,” she said, adding it to the pile of books in her hand. She started walking toward the D&D table. “Any information I can get to figure out what we’re up against on Staten Island is good information.”

“Wait, Staten-” Mike’s face suddenly lit up as the lightbulb went off in his head. “You mean we’re finally-?!”

Zelda nodded her head at him before Mike could finish. “Reily said to save him last, so looks like we’re saving your girlfriend next.”

“YES!” He cheered. “Oh, finally! God, I hope she’s okay. She’s been stuck on Staten Island for 2 days!”

“Make that 3,” Bennet said. He was in the middle of gathering some things and bringing them over to the D&D table. “You kids are gonna get another good night’s sleep here first so you’re well rested enough for the Trial of Thunder.” He set all the stuff down in front of Zelda: his laptop, some cables, and a memory card fit for any camera. “I flew a drone over it while you guys were out and-”

“Drone?!” Garrett looked up from what he and Vinny were doing near the back of the store. I’d overheard them earlier. Something about Vinny never having played Settlers of Catan and Garrett being determined to fix that. “I thought it was illegal to fly them around the city.”

“New York City is overrun with moblins and lizalfos and you think the police are gonna be wasting time trying to arrest some guy trying to get drone footage?” Bennet waited for Garrett to reply, but he simply couldn’t think of something.

“I wouldn’t put them past it,” Miranda said dryly as she sat on the beanbag, reading an old Midnight Sons comic. “I can totally believe the NYPD would tunnel vision on an illegal drone if they spotted one.”

“Well, they didn’t!” Bennet said as he finished setting up the laptop with the memory card. “And that’s what matters.”

“Well that’s cool and all, but uhh…” I raised my right hand up. “I think you mentioned knowing what’s up with this?” Bennet had to take a moment before it clicked.

“Oh! Right!” He walked back to the front counter and pulled up a couple of the chairs that we had in the shop so we could sit while watching the register. “Take a seat, kiddo. I think you’ll find this interesting.”

“You want me to try and cook something, then?” Darius asked, who’d been content to watch all the explaining and theorizing up until then. “I may not be able to eat it, but I still remember how to cook!”

“Sure, sure, you know where my camping stove is,” Bennet said.

Quite a long time went by after that. Most of us simply did our own thing, not really having anything important to do that night. Coach McKay ended up doing as he’d offered and made something for us to eat. It was nice to have a dinner that wasn't cheetos and salt and vinegar chips. And it seemed food wasn’t the only thing they’d gotten while out trying to get supplies.

“Oh, Navi, I forgot!” Darius went looking for something in one of the paper shopping bags as Navi gave him her attention. She fluttered over curiously.

“Forgot about what??” She landed on the table in front of him.

“When we were on our way to the grocery store, we passed by this toy store…” he pulled a little box of stuff out of the paper bag. “I thought you might want to wear something other than your pajamas.” Navi’s eyes lit up nearly as bright as the rest of her when she saw the box.

“Calico Critters!!” she buzzed closer to it like the happiest little bee. “Oh, Zed, remember when we used to play with these as kids?!”

“Yeah, I remember you’d always play with my little bunny family,” Zelda replied as she was doing her thing with the strategy guides. She seemed to be putting together a string chart of some sort.

“I wasn’t sure which one you’d like, so I got a variety. They were on sale anyways.” Darius chuckled a little. There were at least three little families of calico critters on the table, all with a variety of clothes: dresses, dress shirts, overalls, shorts, little scarves and aprons, and all sorts of other things.

While Navi was trying to make her decision, I was busy being seated at the front register with my right arm laying on top of the counter. The palm of my hand was turned down toward the surface, and Bennet was busy poking and prodding at the wires and veins in my arm with a screwdriver and a pair of pliers. Why wasn’t he just using his hands? Bennet didn’t want to risk pinching the skin should he turn something wrong.

“Yeah, so Simon was the one to figure it out,” I told him, having been recounting what happened off the shore of Coney Island. “The dial right there turns and it allowed me to switch forms like magic!”

“That’s crazy, man!” Bennet pulled the screwdriver away. “It’s surprisingly close to what I found out!” He found out, he’d explained to me, from a book he’d found in the big crate full of zelda items. It was a thick leather bound textbook, with the words on the front cover looking like they were written in gold leaf. Or, whatever you’d call the blue equivalent of gold leaf. It was a tome that was named something like “Ancient Technologies of Hyrule’s Past: A Century of Research by Robbie and Purah''.

“What did it say exactly?” I asked.

“Well, as it turns out, your arm is some ancient bodily enhancement,” he started explaining. “But people in Hyrule aren’t sure if it’s Sheikah technology or something else.”

“Sheikah??”

“Engineer Ninjas,” Zelda said to me bluntly from across the room.

“Oooooh right, those guys!”

“Whatever Lincoln, the origin isn’t important,” Bennet said, continuing. “What’s important is how this thing affects your body. Apparently it’s meant to allow you to manipulate the structure of your own being. You know, like being able to space out your molecules in just the right way so you can phase through solid objects.”

I cringed. The image of me stuck halfway into the ceiling would not leave me alone any time soon.

“But not only that! Seems like your Sheikah Slate, this thing’s got a rune of its own.” He tapped the end of his screwdriver to the top of the dial on my hand. “Masking! You can change the entirety of your form to another race.”

“Yeah, but I had to touch Mina’s hand to get it to work,” I said.

“That’s true!” Mina said. She’d been seated at the D&D table, helping Zelda study all the strategy guides. “I touched his arm and it lit up like Christmas lights!”

“Well, how do we know for sure that’s what caused it?” Bennet asked. “Lotta stuff happened out on the ocean. Lots of stuff could’ve triggered it. We’ve gotta test this out first…”

Bennet’s one good eye wandered around the store for a moment, right before it landed on someone in the Dragon’s Lair that could help test this hypothesis.

“Hey Darius, could you come over here for a second?” Bennet called.

Coach McKay wandered over, leaving Navi to decide on her new clothes by herself. “What do you two need?”

I held my right arm out. “Real quick, can you hold my hand? I’m trying to prove something to Benne- GICK!” I didn’t even get to finish before Darius took my hand in his. He had a very strong handshake, I’ll say that much. I don’t think he really knew how much stronger he was. It took a few moments of him holding my hand in that vice grip, but soon it happened. Just like when Mina did it, the wires and veins in my arm started to light up, like water flowing through a plastic tube. The only difference this time was the lights glowing through my veins weren't blue this time. It was red, like a raging fire. As quickly as it started, it ended with the lights going back up my arm and ending in the knuckle on my ring finger.

The symbol that showed up was different from the one for the Zoras. It looked more like the footprint of a dinosaur, or at the very least a simplified rendition of one. Knowing what I knew, I could guess that it was meant to be the symbol of the gorons.

“Haha, nice! Rock man powers!” I was about to slam a hand to my face to check it out, but it never made it there. All I ended up smacking was Mike’s hand as he put it between my face and my own hand.

“Nice try, Matheson,” he said. “But I’d rather NOT see what a scrawnier Coach McKay looks like… or a buff you for that matter.”

“Plus, we don’t know how tall you’ll be,” Fiona pointed out from where she was reading with Zelda and Mina at the table.

I lowered my hand and turned the dial back to Hylian. “Fine, you buzzkill. But if we get into a situation where I need to be fireproof, you’re seeing a buff me whether you like it or not.”

“Why would you even need to be able to shapeshift like this?” Coach McKay asked. “I mean, on top of everything else. You can phase through walls, you’ve got a glorified tablet that tells you where you need to go, AND a magic evil-killing sword. Where does the shapeshifting come from?”

“Majora’s Mask!” Zelda proclaimed from the other end of the room. I looked over just as she hung up yet another picture in her little string board. Most of her little board was made up of monsters and possible bosses we’d have to deal with on our way to the Trial of Thunder, but she also seemed to have a little section about me. Stuff about the “masking” ability on my arm.

“One of the main mechanics of the game is shapeshifting using magical masks!” Zelda continued. “There’s three main ones, but there’s a fourth one you can get if you manage to complete all the sidequests before the end of the game.”

“Dang, how many of those strategy guides have you read through??” Bennet asked.

“Too many,” Mina replied with a worried look. “She’s only still awake because Fiona and I insisted we do half the reading for her.”

“Which is fine by me!” Zelda added. “The more people we have reading, the more we can try and put together whatever possible monsters could be there at the Trial of Thunder.”

“Now that’s just ridiculous,” I said as I walked over to get a look at their work. “How could you possibly narrow everything down like that??”

“Lincoln, have you seen the drone footage??” Zelda didn’t wait for me to actually respond, instead turning the laptop around so that I could see what Bennet had found. The video that played looked like most amateaur drone footage, with the birdseye view and very little color grading. The kind of stuff that the cameraman didn’t bother to edit before posting. The problem was, if Zelda hadn’t told me this was footage of La Tourette Park, I would’ve thought Bennet somehow flew a drone over the Mojave in the time that we’d been at Coney Island.

The entirety of the park was a desert.

“You can see it, right?” Zelda asked. “With it being a desert, that means there can only be so many monsters. Only stuff that’s fully adapted to that sort of environment should be there.”

“What, so it’s gonna be like Tremors or something??” Mike complained.

“Tremors??” Vinny looked up from the game of Catan he and Garrett had finally gotten started on.

“Old horror movie from the 90s,” Miranda said. “People in the desert fighting a bunch of worms hiding in the sand.”

“They’re called Graboids, excuse you,” Mike scoffed. His demeanor changed as he approached Miranda and muttered, “Where’d you find those, I’ve been looking for that volume!”

“Oh!” Miranda scooted a bit to give Mike room to sit down on the beanbag chair so he could read it with her. “I didn’t know you read Midnight Sons! Or… at all.”

“What, do you think I’m that stupid??”

“Probably.”

“I don’t think there's gonna be graboids, don’t be paranoid!” Bennet reassured us. “But if there’s stuff from Breath of the Wild at play, then I think I know what you guys need for this one.” Bennet proceeded to head into the back room to try and find something. I assumed he was going to grab some stuff from the big crate of Zelda items. Maybe some snow boots but for the sand? Snowboard but for the sand? He ended up coming back with neither, looking like he’d seen a ghost.

“Guys, the god damn crate is gone.”

Panic ensued.

“Wha- how do you lose a crate?!” I blurted out.

“And one THAT BIG??” Navi added, fluttering right next to me. By now she’d picked out her new clothes, and was currently sporting a little dress with a button-up shirt as a jacket.

“Well, no one was here to watch the shop I guess??” Bennet said.

“Yeah, we both went together to the grocery store and just locked the place up,” Darius told us. “No one should’ve been able to get in, and it's not like any of the windows were broken.”

“People have magic, though,” Simon reminded them. “Perhaps they teleported inside? Like Garrett can?”

Bennet looked confused. “Garrett can teleport?”

“Well… yes, but it’s finicky!” Garrett said. “I have to see where I’m going. If they were teleporting like me, they shouldn’t have been able to get in.”

“Well they could look in through the windows,” Vinny said. “Technically that’s seeing where they’re going.”

“Yeah, and that would be a pretty surefire way to get in!” Zelda added.

“But they’re looking at glass, aren’t they?” Mina asked. “Does glass not count?”

“I don’t think so??” Vinny said. “Don’t overthink it, Mina.

“Oh my freaking god.”

We all looked to where a voice came from the top of the stairs leading to the cosplay loft. None of us had noticed Miranda head up the stairs. It took me a moment to remember that that’s where she and Mike had found the tapes for the security cameras yesterday.

“Just looked at the tapes. Someone got into the store,” she said, pulling out her phone. “Three people, in fact.”

“So it was a gang??” Bennet asked.

“One way to put it,” she replied dryly. She walked down the stairs as she flipped through pages on her phone. I was able to spot the specific app she was looking at: Instagram.

“Hate to break it to ya, Mr. Zukowski…” she stopped on a recent post on someone’s profile. A post that wasn’t unlike those shoplifting glorification posts where people show off their steals. The location marker on the post is what threw me off: Carnegie Hall in Manhattan.

Miranda looked up and away from the phone with the most “done with this bs” look she could muster.

“But I have reason to believe that you got robbed by some god damn theater kids.”

The Empire State Building was a citywide icon, but the past couple of nights, it looked more like a piece of symbolism from some nightmare. The outside was criss-crossed with dark red and black, pulsating and gyrating as it dripped down the surface of the building, obscuring windows and creating a thick cloud of smoke around the 85th floor up all the way to the observation deck. The building had been evacuated before all this had happened. People naturally assumed that no one was left.

This was false.

Reily Valenti was a good kid. He was a talented one, too! All the different years where he was accepted into various gifted and extracurricular programs was proof enough of that. He’d worked hard to be the best he could be. And how did the universe reward him for this? By making him wake up the Friday before Spring Break in a body that was only partly his own.

He could’ve gotten used to the ears, and maybe the nose as well. They hadn’t changed too much to be an issue to him. But it was the feathers and the scales that were too much for him to be comfortable with, and that sentiment was quite literal. The feathers hanging from his arms like sleeves iched, especially when they were first coming in as little pinfeathers breaking through the skin. Now they felt uncomfortable in a whole other way, feeling like a curtain made of scratchy sweaters that shuffled around the pit of his elbow. If they weren’t meant to be there, they no doubt would’ve given him a bad rash.

The scales on his legs made anything but pajama pants or shorts uncomfortable to wear, and his socks and shoes didn’t fit right anymore. His feet were callused enough that he didn’t really need shoes, but that didn’t mean he didn’t still feel naked. It was like knowing the ground was clean, but not wanting to lick it anyways because it was still the bare ground.

There were so many things he didn’t like, that he didn’t want to do. Apparently the feathers on his arms could make wings, but he had no clue how he’d go about trying to do that. Not that he’d want to. Reily always had a bit of a fear of heights. He felt safer being up on the observation deck or something, because at least he was on semi-solid ground. But being in the air with nothing under him would’ve been a whole other beast. It seemed the man keeping him captive knew that. The only way out of the building was to fly, and it was the one thing Reily wouldn’t dare try. Reily was lucky, at least. He rarely ever had to see his captor.

Not until the later hours at least.

It was always the same when he returned. He’d walk into the offices on floor 85 where Reily was, he’d seat himself on one of two couches in the room, and then he’d do something Reily never quite understood. The man he figured out was called Ganondorf would inject himself in the leg with something. He’d do it the way people usually do with medications, pinching the skin to stick the needle into the fat layer and the fat layer only. He wasn’t sure why he did this. He theorized that maybe since Ganondorf wasn’t from this world, he was injecting himself with something to keep himself stable in this world. Like those sci-fi movies where people become unstable in other dimensions. That wasn’t the strangest thing Ganondorf did.

He’d also lay down on the couch. He’d close his eyes as if sleeping, and then he’d stay asleep. That was a loosely fitting word, seeing as Reily could once in a while hear the man… speak. He was speaking as if talking to someone. And even though Reily never could hear the other end of the conversation, he could get an idea of what exactly Ganondorf was talking about.

For Ganondorf, what was going on was much more elaborate than what Reily could ever guess.

Mindscapes are very interesting and practical in concept, especially when your mind works the way Ganondorf’s does. It was something of a hivemind. Not in the sense that he was stuck in there with the consciousness of the school teacher he’d taken this body from, but in the sense that it had been that way for nearly 10,000 years. He started as one mind, many many years ago, the mind of a demon king Demise who’d placed a curse on the first hero. A curse that would keep him in a cycle of reincarnation, and forever his hatred would be reborn as a new enemy to challenge the descendants of the goddess and those who would possess the soul of the hero. Ganondorf shared a mind with all those people, all those who are united by their shared hatred for whoever held the other two pieces of the sacred triforce. Thus, trying to get anything done means having to spend an hour before sleep conversing with the others. Figuring out what information they’ve gathered, what they should do next, and how best to go about their goals.

Ganondorf awoke in his own head. The others in the collective were there, too. All were seated calmly in an ornate room. Ganondorf had at first made the mindscape rather barren and plain, not wanting to spend too much energy making the room look lavish. But one of the others there insisted on it. They were not going to be forced to stay in this hivemind if they were all going to reside in such a boring little worldscape. Thus, every time Ganondorf laid down to speak with his other halves, he did so inside a lavish room full of dark hues, like sitting inside a dimly lit cave, while the room was bathed in colors thanks to the artificial moonlight shining through the seven stained glass windows around them. The whole room was circular, like a subterranean ballroom, with several holes in the ceiling letting in blue light from above to create an even more ethereal atmosphere. Though Ganondorf would never admit it, that little freak’s idea of a mindscape look was a pretty good one.

Everyone was seated, calmly, patiently waiting for someone to say something. With how the mindscape worked, people’s consciousness could appear either the same as they do in life, or as abstractions meant to represent the way their own mind works. Ganondorf had chosen to remain looking the way he does in the waking world, but most everyone else decided to change up their looks for the mindscape. One was made of sharp edges and gem cuts, like a human form cut from crystal. Another looked much like a lemur with mange, their limbs looking more like those 2D designs you’d find on native american pottery than proper limbs. Another appeared in cold colors, with a shape similar to that of an ibis, a bird Ganondorf only knew the name of because of some pictures he’d seen of a similar creature called a Bin Chicken. Another simply chose to appear as a creature similar to that of a keese, but with a single crimson eye in the middle of its face instead of a pair of them like bats usually should. None in particular stood out. When your group consists entirely of strange people, everyone starts to look normal.

All except for the seer.

They were a recent addition to the hivemind. Someone who they only assimilated a century or so before trying to escape to this new realm. They’d been a bit of a dramatic sap ever since first showing up here. While everyone else chose appearances based more on aesthetic, the seer wanted to be symbolic. And thus, the seer would appear in the mindscape as a figure made of malice, with glowing pink cracks running up their left cheek before forking and going opposite ways around their eye, of which he had three. One was in the middle of his forehead, glowing brightly in the ethereal room. And along with that, he hung above the others in a big golden birdcage. And he sat upon a little swing hanging from its ceiling, with his left wrist and right ankle chained to weighted orbs that hung out the bars and over the others. Weights that hung in the shape of a sun and moon, illuminating the chamber a little bit more. Curiously, his birdcage was its own little bit of symbolism in the midst of all the Seer’s drama. The bars didn’t meet in the middle, leaving a big gap all around that made it structurally impossible for the cage to hang the way it did. Whether the Seer knew this or not was anyone’s guess. If he did know, he never said a thing.

The seer would usually sit in silence, save for one thing he’d make clear at the beginning of each little mind meeting. And he’d say it again this time…

“I sense that the Blight of Water has been defeated.”

“I should’ve figured,” Ganondorf said, a hand on the side of his head like he was trying to keep a blood vessel from bursting. “They defeated Volvagia much more easily than I’d anticipated.”

“With all due respect, Master, you chose what’s practically a teddy bear to be the dragon’s vessel,” said the geometric one. They glowed a pretty gold and red, like an alexandrite changing colors when you pass it under different lights.

“Well you understand, even then, these children…” Ganondorf growled under his breath. “Hyrule does not exist in this world. It’s merely a made up story to them! Regardless of what vessel Volvagia possessed and modified to its needs, none of these children should’ve known how to fight a dragon.”

“One can be surprised by the determination children can possess,” said the Ibis. She brushes out a wrinkle in her skirt before continuing. “When their friends and family are in danger, especially.”

“You know, we wouldn’t have had to even use the dragon if someone-” The little keese creature eyed Ganondorf. “-had actually held onto the body for long enough to kill the little whelp.”

“Still your tongue, sorcerer,” Ganondorf growled back. “The hero in this world is an adult by this society’s standards. At least I didn’t lose to a child.”

The lemur snorted, to which the eye could only reply by squinting at them.

Ganondorf ignored them and continued. “Whatever the case, now that they’ve dealt with Gyorg as well, we’ll need to up the ante on the next Trials. We’ve bought barely any time, and we’ve yet to even find it.” It was something else that had been rocketed into this world with them. Something Ganon desperately needed. “Need I remind you, if these pathetic little teenagers get to us before we find it, we’re all done for.”

“We know that fully well. And I know full well the frustration of banishment,” grumbled the lemur.

“Well if I might suggest, Lord Ganon,” chimed in the angular one once more. “Maybe you shouldn’t insist on putting the responsibility of killing these children on mindless beasts. I’ve learned it the hard way: if you need something done right, you do it yourself.”

“The creatures are easier,” Ganondorf explained. “They’re malleable, they can shape their form however they please, so it doesn’t matter what body you shove them into. Us, on the other hand, we can only truly function with the right host. With our parallels!”

“Right, which is why you let that little devil child have control for a bit.”

“For intimidation! How was I to know they’d make us eat a stick of glue??”

“To be fair, they did have a pretty good threat afterwards,” the lemur brought up. “‘Next time, it’ll be your bones’! I wouldn’t want someone to eat my bones like a stick of butter either!”

“Either way, compatibility is much more fickle with the likes of us,” Ganondorf continued. “And if you’re suggesting what I believe you’re suggesting, I’ll have to say no. We can’t split this collective no matter what, especially if we wish to have any hope of keeping an anchor on this body. It’s bad enough that that… scholar was able to take control at the Trial of Fire. Who knows what would happen if we split up!”

“Speaking of scholars and splitting up,” went the Ibis as she glanced behind her. “I do believe he’s gone off on his own again…”

She was of course referring to Ganymede.

He’d been trapped in the hell of his own head for 2 days now. Not being able to control your own body was a sensation he wished to rid himself of at the first possible opportunity. But until then, he had to find some way to keep himself sane. Not that there was much to do. He could converse with the others in the collective, but all of them seemed either terrifying or thought of him as nothing but a lowly human they had full permission to take advantage of to further their goals. Luckily for him, there was one creature in here that only checked one of those boxes. One who decided to take a much more humanoid shape in the mindscape. One who was content to hear Ganymede tell him all these amazing stories about earth history and all its gloriously hilarious tales.

And so there Ganymede was, seated near the edge of the stained-glass room, telling the story of some idiotic human named Timothy Dexter to one of the nicer pieces of the collective: a little creature that decided to forgo the abstract forms the other adopted and chose to show up as a small child in white clothes. A small child wearing a mask.

“So, the other rich people in Massachusetts were trying to make Dexter sabotage himself somehow, so they told him to ship warming pans to the Caribbean!” Ganymede had said.

“What’s a warming pan?” said the child, turning their head to the side with a click in their neck. “Do you keep warm with it?”

“That’s exactly it! You’re meant to put hot coals in them and slide them under your bed to keep it warm.”

“Hot coals! Hehe, I see, they wanted him to accidentally set the whole Caribbean on fire!” The child said this excitedly, like he’d find this outcome the funniest thing imaginable.

“Uhhhh, no, not exactly. The Caribbean is very warm all year round, so you don’t need a warming pan over there,” Ganymede explained further. “They were hoping no one would buy them and Dexter would bankrupt himself. But the locals didn’t know what they were supposed to be used for, so they used them as giant soup ladles!” That got a child-like chuckle out of the creature. “And they were in such high demand as soup ladles that Dexter sold all of them!”

The story continued on from there, but it's not as if the others were listening. Ganondorf needed to get onto more pressing matters after all.

“Well, if we need to up the ante without splitting up,” went the eye. “What is it you plan on doing then??”

“My plan was to simply let that beast in Staten Island deal with them,” Ganondorf said. “But no, I'm considering enlisting some… other help. Trusted help.”

“What sort of help?” asked the Ibis.

“The sort of help that you could help me arrange, Ibis,” Ganondorf told her.

“Whatever the case, I don’t believe waiting is all too necessary.” Everyone looked up toward the bird cage as the seer piped up. “I sense the pitiful children are on the move.”

Ganondorf stood up. “Right now??

“Where are they heading, prophecy boy?” asked the angular one.

“A theater in this realm known as Carnegie Hall…” the seer explained. “I believe they’re after some items planted by the goddesses.”

“Perfect!” Ganondorf paced around for a moment. “We’ve established that using beasts may not be the best course of action, but I believe one more wouldn’t hurt. I might have just the perfect candidate to box them into the little theater room.”

Ganondorf looked to the rest of his compatriots, all in the process of getting to their feet(or simply staying where they were in the case of the eye). “Thank you all for taking the time to be civil tonight. None of the yelling and arguing and all that. Now I bid you-”

“HEY WAIT A SEC!”

The collective looked in unison at an angry little child as they stomped toward them. They looked on the verge of throwing a tantrum.

“Oh god, this one,” went the angular one.

“Again with him?” complained the lemur-like one.

“Oh, Majora…” sighed Ibis, a hand on her temple.

“Don’t you DARE end it yet!” Majora cried out angrily, very much frustrated. “Mr. Doirich hasn’t gotten to what happened when Timothy Dexter faked his death!!”

“We’ve established that you two get an hour for stories a night,” Ganondorf said back dryly, like this wasn’t the first time the child had complained. “That’s it.”

The child didn’t respond right away. Instead they started vaguely twitching here and there. Their bones began to make awful clicking noises, much more akin to the movements of a marionette than a person. They floated up into the air high enough that they could lock their dead eyes onto Ganondorf, tilting their head ever so slightly to one side.

“And we all know what happens if the hour ends with an unfinished story, now, don’t we?”

“Good goddesses, Ganon, just let them finish!” said the eye.

“Alright, fine then!” Ganondorf complied. “You can finish your story, but then we’re all sleeping! Got it?”

“Got it!” the child said happily, as if their thinly veiled threat had never even occurred. They landed back on the ground before excitedly running back to where Ganymede lay. Ganondorf felt like another 20 minutes of storytime would be worth it in the long run. It would be better than not sleeping a second night in a row.

“We all know the plan, then?” Ganondorf said, turning to the others. “Ibis is to assist me in enlisting help on Staten Island, we’re to up the ante with the remaining Trials, and I shall be putting a little obstacle in Carnegie hall for the children. Something that will hopefully get the job done.”

There was one thing Ganondorf hadn’t realized. It wasn’t a flaw in his plan, nor anything of that nature or relation. It was something he really only would’ve noticed if his eyes were wide open and searching.

Reily had remained awake, and had spent what precious time he had before bed listening to damn near everything that came out of his captor’s mouth.

Chapter Text

    <<I can’t believe we’re really doing this… couldn’t we wait until the morning to get our stuff back??>> My cousin had been worrying and bothering me about the whole thing the whole time, once again resuming the shape of a sword so she could remain safely strapped to my back.

    “Honest to god, Fiona, I don’t think we could’ve,” I said this as I motioned to where Miranda was sitting a little ways away.

That subway ride was the most tense one I’ve ever been on. A lot of subway rides feel awkward. Sometimes it's because it's all crowded and there’s not enough room to keep personal space between you and other people. Sometimes it's because it’s just a little too empty and you’re in there with only one or two other people. This ride wasn’t tense for either of those reasons. It was tense because Miranda was seated at one end of the car, physically tensed up like she was made up of a million coiled springs ready to burst. I’d never seen her more pissed off in my life. Not all of us were really focused on how absolutely pissed Miranda looked, and that became clear when I heard Mike chuckling at something across the car from me.

“Hey guys, have you seen youtube lately??” he asked.

“We’ve been a bit busy trying to save the world, so no,” I replied dryly. “Why? Did more news stuff happen??”

“Well, yeah, kinda.” He motioned for me to sit beside him. He continued as I made my way over to do so. “Staten Island’s now on lockdown, but there’s also a bunch of videos going around of people just messing with these things.” He pulled up a few videos to show me. And for a moment, I was brought out of the dire-ness of our situation. For a moment, I was reminded about how bonkers the people in my city could be. New York was faced with a city-wide threat stretching across all 5 boroughs, and some people decided, instead of staying indoors, were instead just… going outside to fight monsters.

It was very much reminiscent of the whole “zombie kill of the week” bit from Zombieland. There was one video of a person dropping a flower pot from their fire escape onto the head of a bokoblin right below their 3rd floor window. There was another video of these three guys with bats and other-such improvised weapons, wearing makeshift armor and over protective gear as they went all 2016 “clown hunt” on various monsters. While it was funny to see a bokoblin getting basically curb stomped by some random college-aged Bronx dudes in football armor, the guys were also being idiots. The video ended after they tried to fight a lizalfos(you know, the one that’s much quicker and more agile than the bokoblins are), but ended up running from the thing. Lucky for those idiots, the lizard lost interest in them quickly after that. By far the funniest thing was someone gluing a baseball bat to the ground with contact cement and just videotaping all the creatures that walked by, saw what they assumed was a weapon ready for the taking just laying on the ground, and then struggled for 5 minutes trying to pick it up.

It was all very hilarious, but it was also very human. Just human nature to collectively mess with these innately dangerous creatures that were messing up our lives just because they can. Depending on how you spin it, one could compare it to a protest. A city-wide one at that. The reports and viral videos of people picking fights and messing with all these monsters over the course of the last day and a half were astounding. For a moment, it even took me and a few of the others out of the moment and offered us a bit of a laugh.

Not Miranda though. The situation at hand left her too pissed to laugh. 

“Of course they’d do this, what do I expect from them? The moment the world goes to shit they’re out here trying to HIKE UP MY JEANS! Looking for LOOSE lint !”

No one was brave enough to ask what she was going on about. And it was like this the whole way there. Long after the subway left the Queens and was on its way toward Manhattan. By the time we were a few minutes out from the station, Miranda had calmed down enough that we weren’t afraid to talk to her.

“M, you good?” I asked timidly.

“Just fine,” she assured, sounding calm but still the least bit pissed at the same time. “Just some old friends from school decided to make problems.”

“Wait, so some of your friends stole the crate??” asked Navi.

“Assuming I didn’t misidentify the guys on the tapes, yeah.”

“Dang… of course the goth punk’s friends end up stealing from someone.”

“Me being goth punk has nothing to do with this. It has everything to do with them being mischievous little bastards that are taking advantage of school being out.” She didn’t say anything more, and the conversation quickly died there. We were all still just as confused as we were hearing her frustrated ramblings on the train. 

    “We’ve got worse things to worry about,” went Garrett. He’d gone on his phone, too. This time for the purposes of texting his folks about where he’s been(he’d later tell me that she was startled to hear about the whole fiasco on the Ocean King, but ultimately glad he was safe). However, his mom ended up sending him something. Something he figured was best to show us. It was a link to an official announcement from the NYPD. Garrett read it aloud to us in the car…

    “The New York Police Department is now aware of several New York City citizens experiencing physical changes due to the Tolkeining event,” he read to us. “Features such as unnatural changes in hair or skin coloration, pointed ears, and even more drastic physical changes that do not naturally occur in humans. All citizens experiencing such changes are required to report them to the NYPD for monitoring and record keeping should said physical changes get worse.”

    “That’s a goddamn trap,” Miranda said, pointing a finger at Garrett’s phone.

    “What, them wanting to keep track in case something worse happens to someone?” he asked.

    “Have you ever considered that we also have magic ?” Miranda explained. “And are also much more iconic looking than simply having pointed ears and weird hair?? Plus, we don’t know where Ganondorf has stuck his nose yet. If the police department has its hands in his pockets and we fall for this, that’s a one way ticket to us getting found out and hunted down by the one guy willing to turn us into a headline.”

    I’d always known Miranda to be a bit weary and suspicious of police. I always figured she found cops just scary and intimidating. But the longer I knew her, the more I found out she didn’t like them because she was always scared she’d end up on the bad side of the one person on the force who just happened to like using their position of power to screw over people who can’t do anything to stop them. And with everything going on, with monsters in places we didn’t expect them to be, it made sense to assume Ganondorf was always 5 steps ahead of us. The whole combination of things just made me worry.

    “Okay but… what if someone rats us out to the police??” Vinny asked.

    “Shoot, you have a good point.” I cupped my chin for a moment. “I guess… disguises, guys?”

    “So more hoodies and hats?”

    “Yep.”

    “Well what about M??” Zelda asked as she flipped the hood of her NYU jacket over her head. “Don’t think that the hat and glasses and all that will work in public.”

    “Easy peasy! I’ll just hide in Link’s shadow!” she blurted out. “My parallel can do it, so I probably can, too.”

    “Do you even know how to do that??” I asked.

    “I was able to figure out how to float by myself,” she scoffed. “I’m sure I can figure this out, too. Now stand up, Math Man.” I stood up, despite how much I disliked the nickname, as well as the tone of voice she uttered it in, like she was talking to a little kid. Standing up didn’t do much. All it really did was cause me to cast a bigger shadow than I would’ve if I’d stayed sitting. I stood there incredulously as Miranda rubbed her hands together.

    “Alrighty, time to go stealth mode.”

It took Miranda 15 different tries before she’d finally figured it out. Those tries ranged from tapping her foot really hard on the ground my shadow was cast on to straight up trying to Platform 9¾ the ground. But somehow, someway, she finally managed to figure it out. And right as she did, the subway came to a stop in the station and we made our way to the next stop on our quest.

Carnegie Hall was situated on a street corner, and by all means didn’t really look like a big fancy theater from the outside. It didn’t to me, at least. Me being someone who didn’t frequent this borough enough to get its looks down in my head, it could very well pass as a courthouse or maybe even a very fancy office building of some kind. But what was important was that we all knew it was most definitely a theater, and one of the most famous theaters in the entire City at that. More importantly, it was where our stuff was being held hostage.

Based on what we’d gleaned from papers and online articles in the past couple of days, Carnegie Hall was one of the big places in the City that was closed down because of all the monsters. I guess people didn’t want a bunch of New Yorkers all gathered in the same place where they’d be easy pickings for a bunch of goblins and lizards. Despite that, it didn’t take much to get the door open, with it being both unlocked and partially broken off the hinges. That second bit of information is what made me worry the most.

“Damn, they must be strong,” Vin said.

“Well, there ARE three of them,” Zelda reminded him. “You saw three, right M?”

“Yeah, there’s three of them,” Miranda replied dryly from my shadow. She suddenly popped up from my shadow like a Jack-in-the-Box, since we were indoors and it was safe for her to be out in the open. Then she all of a sudden held up a closed fist at the front of our marching order, like an army sergeant telling their infantry to halt and be quiet. The lot of us stopped. Even Simon, who was in the middle of ducking in through the door, had stopped dead in his tracks at Miranda’s hand signal. For a long while, we were all confused. But as we all went quiet, we could hear it from the recital hall.

Giggling . Giggling… and singing.

The way the voices were bouncing around, it was definitely three different people, but all three of them sounded identical to each other. And these identical voices, I guess, decided the best way to pass the time was to sing out loud in the recital hall to test out the acoustics or something.

“ What a pretty smile! Mrs. Greenville-Heath! Pity they are not! All! Her! Teeth! ”

“ Lord Devire as well! He’s as queer as hell! And bi-sexuelle! Likes! To! Switch! ”

“Hey guys, stop with the subpar singing for a sec and check this one out! It’s got a fish on it!”

Of course, we weren’t sure what it was, but we could take a guess. By now, Miranda had motioned for us to continue walking, but to stay low and stay quiet. Some of us had even opted to sidle against the wall, as if this were a stealth mission. I suppose it kind of was. We were sneaking in somewhere to steal stuff, but it was our stuff that we were stealing back! All the while, the figures kept talking, and the bits of non-singing words that left their mouths clued me into one thing about them: their accents. The three of them were Australian.

“You sure that’s not just a weirdly painted owl or something??”

“I know what a goddamn owl looks like, Niles!”

“Yeah, you bonehead, it’s a fish drawn from the top down, obviously.”

“Alright fine, whatever, then what’s this one then?”

“... Niles, those are snakes.”

“Wha- They are??”

“Are you picture blind or something, dude? Do you need glasses??”

“Niles, bud, you didn’t forget to put in your contacts again, did you?”

“S-Shut up! Enough with the dumb shields. Let’s just put them in a chest or something.”

“Hey dude, don’t sweat it! Do you have any idea how many times I’ve forgotten to take my adderall?”

“Mick, we all take adderall. We’ve all forgotten at least once.”

“An even better analogy, then, thank you, Steve!”

We kept sneaking in as they kept talking about adderall and painted shields or something. Their voices were coming from the main theater of the Hall. The one that the Hall is most famous for, with its plush red seats and sprawling audience seating and balconies. We entered through the main doors, remaining quiet as we did so in case the people speaking weren’t the nicest. And when we walked in, we saw them.

There were three people all right, and all of them were on the stage of the theater. They were there with the stolen crate positioned off to the side of the stage, near the wings that lead toward backstage, and had multiple chests and paints all around them. To anyone who didn’t know, it might’ve just looked like they got some supplies from a local Michael’s and were painting some new prop treasure chests. But I knew full well those treasure chests weren’t props. And the people painting them were… very much strangers to me. I didn’t recognize them whatsoever.

It could’ve been because I genuinely didn’t know them, but it was more so because the curse changed their appearances a LOT by the looks of it. All of them wore the same identical set of Robin Hood and Peter Pan looking outfits, and they looked identical to each other in the sense that they all looked to be made of wood. Their skin was dark and notched like tree bark, and it looked like that all over them. The only thing very NOT wood-like were their eyes: deep black eyes with golden pupils that shone brightly, even in the well lit room. The only thing setting them apart? The masks they were wearing.

One wore a mask that covered their nose and mouth, adorned with a design meant to look like an open mouth with sharp teeth; another wore a mask that covered half their face, like they were on their way to broadway to try out for the latest showing of Phantom of the Opera; and the third had a full face mask, one that looked like those comedy masks that you see paired with tragedy masks when people need to find a way to symbolize theater.

“Is it all just shields and crap in this one??” asked the full face mask.

“Shields and empty bottles and crap, yeah.” replied the mouth mask.

The full face mask grumbled. “Dang! There’s no cool stuff to hide in the Empire State Building then??”

That bit caught me off guard. I so badly wanted to ask, but I didn’t want to give away our position just yet.

“Not true!” said Phantom. “We’ve still got all that other junk from the other box!”

“Oh yeah! We’ll just have to get creative, then.” went the full face mask.

“Yeah, and when has that ever been a problem?” added the mouth mask.

The three of them giggled.

“Alright, help me put some of these in chests, you two!” Went the Phantom.

“Only if we sing something else while we do it.” went the full face mask.

“Like what??”

“Hmmmm…” the full face masked one paused for a moment, cupping their chin in thought. Even if I couldn’t see their face, I could figure they were smiling smugly. “You guys remember that show we saw at the Theater Workshop last summer?” The other two nodded their heads vigorously. “Alright… You do the Hermes part, I’ll be Orpheus.”

“What about me??” asked the Phantom.

“You can do harmonies, duh!”

That seemed to satisfy the Phantom, who ran off while saying, “Hold on, lemme find that damn piano!”

We continued to hide and watch. I was honestly marveling at just how much these three had managed to do in what must’ve been less than a day. I’d been previously caught up in the whole “oh my god they stole our stuff” thing, but now that we’d sat and watched for a little while, we took notice of what I supposed you’d call their “set design.”

Along with the crates of magic items and little wooden chests that were half painted, there were other things hanging from the ceiling and strewn about. Stuff like chairs, music stands, stray sheet music, all of that was strewn about the stage haphazardly. It was less like they’d made it that way and more like someone knocked the papers over and they hadn’t had the chance to clean it up just yet.

Hanging from the ceiling were various lights and glowing baubles glowing with different colors. The most abundant seemed to be gold and purple, like they were trying to throw a Mardi Gras party one month late with one less color. It looked like they’d raided a pottery barn lighting sections and just stuck them in the ceiling like party decorations and called it a day. In the middle of me admiring a particular light that looked like a chandelier made of used wine bottles that they’d hung up above the audience seating, I heard an ungodly scraping noise. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I looked over and saw someone dragging a 3000 lbs metal chair across the stage. Which was… partly true. The kid with the Phantom of the Opera mask had found the piano.

“Alright, ready when you guys are!” went Phantom, cracking their knuckles and getting ready to start playing something.

“Alright Steve, you go!” The full face masked one pointed to the one with the mouth mask. As if on cue, I saw something stir out of the corner of my eye. Miranda had leapt up from my shadow and was now sneaking along through the seats. I wanted to yell at her to get back to where we were all hiding, but couldn’t actually say anything. I was just stuck gesturing wildly while she kept going and ignored me. Her sneaking along, as ironic as it sounds, went along perfectly for the monologue one of the theater kids started with…

“How to get to Hadestown? You have to take the long way down. Through the underground, under cover of night. Laying low, staying out of sight. Ain’t no compass, brother. Ain’t no map. Just a telephone wire and the railroad track. Keep on walking and don’t look back, ‘till you get to the bottom land.”

    All this time, the one with the full face mask was slowly approaching the edge of the stage, getting as close to the seats as possible, before the one with the mouth mask had finished their monologue. That’s when they cupped their hands around their mouth, faced the audience, and sang.

    “WAA-AA-AAAAIT FOR MEEEE!” he sang.

    “I’M COMIIIIING!”

    My heart stopped when I heard Miranda sing a reply to them. The theater kids all stopped in confusion(except for the one at the piano, who continued playing the accompaniment while still being confused). I was expecting them all to just stop what they were doing and immediately get hostile, but instead the one with the full face mask just… continued singing.

    “WAA-AA-AAAAIT!”

    “I’M COMIIING WIIIITH YOU!”

    I watched as Miranda stepped slowly out of the shadows and into the line of sight of the theater kid in question. I couldn’t see their face, but I could tell based on body language alone that they were excited.

    “WAA-AA-AAAAIT FOR MEEEE!”

    “I’M COMIIIING TOO, I’M COMING TOOOO!”

    The theater kid laughed excitedly, leaping down and grabbing Miranda around the waist like he was clutching a teddy bear he’d found after years of searching through the home storage.

    “Oh my god, Randy, I recognize those pipes from anywhere!” They said with a laugh. “You’re okay!!”

    “Yeah, as okay as I’ll ever be!” she said. “Still lost a couple feet.”

    “Well hey! ‘Least ye ain’t bald!” The kid pulled off the mask, revealing that… yep, they were bald. All three of them in fact, as well as having noses that would’ve been at home on Skeletor's face.

    Miranda cleared her throat. “Right, um, hold on a sec guys!” She broke free from the kid’s grasp and floated up a bit. “Alright you guys, it’s alright to come out!”

    “Wha- did you narc on us!?”

    “No, you dummy!” Miranda said to the Phantom. “I just brought some friends from school along!” The lot of us came out from hiding and showed ourselves to the three kids in question. They looked at us with furrowed brows, like little kids pretending a girl has cooties or something.

    “What was that you guys were singing??” Zelda asked. “I didn’t quite recognize it.”

    “Um, it’s OBVIOUSLY a song from the Musical Theater Workshop’s big hit of last summer, ‘Hadestown’, DUH!” went the fully masked one. “Trust me, give it a year or two and it’ll be a HIT on Broadway!”

    “Link, Zelda, and… company.” Miranda addressed us as we all made our way out into the open. She gestured to the theater kids. “These are the Sullivan triplets. They’re in Jazz Band with me.” She pointed to the mouth masked one. “This is Steve, he’s famous in the class for getting in trouble for playing the wrong thing on the drums..”

    “That seems a bit of an overreaction,” I said.

    “Yeah but he played like… that theme on the drums.”

    “Oh.”

    “Yeah, it was really funny.” The one with the mouth mask, Steve, crossed his arms. 

    “And this is Niles,” Miranda continued, gesturing to the one with the Phantom of the Opera mask. “He’s first chair in the trumpet section.”

    “I play a mean flight of the bumblebee!” Niles told us, pantomiming a trumpet with his empty hands.

    “And lastly-” Miranda gestured to the kid in the full face mask. “-This is the ring-leader of the group, Mick.”

    “Yeah. I’M the oldest!” he said.

    “Only by like a minute, dude!” Nile informe him.

    “And only ‘cause the doctor yanked you out first!” added Steve.

    “Still counts!” Mick replied.

“Alright, enough of that!” Miranda said with her arms crossed. “You guys alright? Looks like you got weirdly magiced, too.”

“Yeah, we’re fine!” Mick assured her.

“Could do without being bald,” Steve contradicted.

“I could deal with being bald if I at least knew how this happened!” Niles blurted.

“Oh, right… that.” Miranda paused for a moment as the Sullivan triplets turned their attention to her. “Okay so, to explain… Something funky happened and now real-ass Hyrule has merged with real-ass New York, and some people here are now Zelda characters.” All it took was that magic word - the Z word - to get the three of them all excited.

“I KNEW IT!!” went Mick.

“Wait wha-?”

“You thought WE wouldn’t figure it out, Randy??” Niles asked, cutting Miranda off. “With the moblin napping in the quad at school?”

“Those news stories about people waking up with elf ears and rock skin and fish fins?” Mick asked, hopping up on Niles shoulder for emphasis.

“That one dude on YOUTUBE who hit a LIZALFOS with a TAXI!?” Steve added as he leapt onto Mick’s shoulders, turning the three of them into a tower of little gremlins. Miranda was able to step back far enough that she was out of harm's way when the totem pole fell forward and all the kids fell to the ground. 

“So if it really is Zelda, then where’s Link?” Steve asked.

“Is it a kid at school?!” Niles added.

“That would be me,” I said, nervously raising a hand. I didn’t wish to have the attention of three hyperactive theater children all on me, but that’s what ended up happening anyways. The three pairs of black eyes with their fiery irises staring down at me like I was getting stared down by a trio of owls. Steve was the one to break the silence…

“Ain’t that the Jewish kid from your English class?? He can’t be the hero, his name’s fricking Lincoln.”

“Yeah, and he goes by Link for short, dumb dumb,” Miranda replied.

“Ok but who unironically names their kid after a US President??” asked Steve.

“I know like three different guys named George, dude,” went Niles.

“Doesn’t make their names any less lame.”

“Says the guy named Steve .”

“Shut up you guys,” Mick ordered. The other two shut up almost immediately. “So if he’s Link, and people are actually turning into Zelda characters or whatever…” he paused as he thought about it. You could pinpoint the exact moment it clicked in his head. “Then are you supposed to be Midna?? Like from Twilight Princess!?”

“Oh, I love that game!!” went Steve.

“Can you turn into a shadow??”

“Can you teleport??”

“Can you turn Lincoln into a wolf??”

“Do you have the weird magic hat anywhere??”

“Can you turn into a giant spidery monstrosity?!”

“Hey, whoa whoa, slow down you little spaz-balls,” Vinny said as he approached. I don’t say this often, but it almost looked as if he was trying to mediate the conversation. “Can you cool it with all the interrogation for a second??”

“Yes, there’s more important things at hand here!” Zelda chimed in.

“Like how you got a hold of our stuff in the first place,” Navi said with crossed arms and puffy cheeks.

“Oh, that’s simple, really!” Mick started as Niles went off to grab something. “Started on Friday. We woke up, looked like wooden puppets, stayed home, and before we knew it the world was in chaos and the school was closed down. And the Carnegie Hall concert got canceled!!”

That confused me. “The what?”

“The Jazz Band was gonna play in Carnegie Hall today,” Miranda explained. “Because of all the monsters, Carnegie Hall closing up and the general high fantasy tomfoolery going on, they had to cancel it.”

“And we were going to do all sorts of Frank Sinatra shit!” Steve blurted out. He sounded like he was talking about his own wedding getting canned.

“Well anyways, what better way to vent than going to the school and spray-painting some butts on the lockers?”    Mick continued, chuckling to himself. “But then we saw you guys, and used the context clues like good theory-makers, and figured out what was going on!”

“And before you ask-” went Niles as he came back with what looked to be toast. “We did see you guys almost get murdered by lime jello.”

“But ANYWAYS! Once we figured out that there was some video game fantasy junk at play, we did what any man would do when something crazy happens and they need information.” Mick held up his phone. “We checked social media!”

“Lots of stuff about zoo animals escaping escaping into Central Park-”

“The Empire State Building being evacuated-”

“And Coney Island harbor getting ghost ship sightings.” They said each of those, one after the other, as if rehearsed.

“But the important thing is, we found THESE!” Mick pointed to the crate of Zelda items before taking one of the pieces of toast from Niles. “By the back door of some game store. Decided it’d be fun to take a couple and hide them in Central Park in some chest and stuff.”

“And we’ve kinda just been… doing that.” Niles added. “Figured making a little scavenger hunt would be a better use of our time.”

“Yeah, but then we got bored of taking one thing at a time from the crate, so we just took the whole thing!” Steve explained further.

“So you’re saying you’ve planted these chests everywhere??” I asked.

“Well, not EVERYWHERE just yet!” Mick said. “Just the places you’ve been on the way too.” He took a bite out of the toast.

“Hey hey hey, hold on!” Miranda put a stop to the conversation for a moment to acknowledge something I hadn’t yet: the toast. Mainly the fact that it had butter on it… as well as sprinkles. “What’s with the fairy bread?”

“What else would I be eating it?” Mick asked, as if Miranda were stupid. “Special occasion?”

“Oh really? Like what?” she asked.

“First big successful shoplift!” Mick answered. That didn’t seem to impress Miranda. It just made her look even more disappointed.

“Backup a moment!” Garrett said, raising his hands up a bit for emphasis. “You mean you’ve hidden things in all the different places we’ve been to already??”

“Yep!” Mick affirmed.

“I stuck the goron tunic in a pond!” went Niles.

“And I put some dinky earrings near a bird watching trail.” Steve added.

“Yeah, only because you were chicken.”

“Niles, dude, we both know neither of us would’ve wanted to try and hide any of the stuff anywhere NEAR where that Snow Leopard was hanging.”

“Alright, fair.”

“But that would mean… Did you hide stuff on the shipwreck??” Navi asked. “The one Link and Fiona went on off shore of Coney Island?? How’d you get all the way out there??”

Mick’s only response was to wrack his knuckles against the side of his head, producing that classic hollow wood sound you get when you knock on a coconut.

Steve got caught up on something, though. “Who’s Fiona?”

“Oh, right, right…” I drew the Master Sword from its sheath on my back. “I don’t think you guys can hear her when she talks, but my cousin got roped up into this and-”

“Oh my god, did she get cursed to turn into a sword by Ganon?!” Steve asked.

“What!? No!” went Zelda. “She’s a parallel like the rest of us! She’s a sword spirit.”

“Oooooh I see, I see,” Steve went as he thought aloud. “Fiona… Fi… got it .”

“Well anyways, this is all super interesting and all that,” went Miranda. “But we came here for the crate”

“Yeah, right, we gotta take that,” added Vinny. “We’ve gotta rescue someone in Staten Island, and they’re suuuuuper important to setting everything back to normal, and the stuff we need to do that, is in the box that YOU stole from us.”

“Firstly, we stole it from a comic book store, not you guys,” Mick retorted. “And second…” Mick paused for a long moment, cupping his chin along with the other two triplets. They looked between each other, as if silently consulting each other, before Mick turned back to the rest of us.

“No.”

The answer damn near sent us into a frenzy.

“What do you mean no?!” Miranda shrieked. 

“Three reasons!” Mick said.

“First is, everything’s closed down!” Steve said. “Which means a lot more places to ourselves that we can fool around in!”

“Second is, we’ve got magic now!” Niles said with a giddy little chuckle. “Do you know how cool it is to do REAL magic?? We can do all sorts of cool crap, like disappear into thin air!”

“And third reason is, different appearances!” Mick said. He took a long dramatic pause before straightening himself out of his goblin posture and gesturing to his torso. “Which means none of us need to wear binders.”

“Ah. Of course.” Miranda said it dryly, like this was the most on-brand thing Mick could’ve told her. No one needed an explanation. We all knew what he meant.

“W-Well, my sister is going to medical school!” Simon chimed in, trying to contribute for the first time this whole conversation. “If you help us, I can get her to-”

“Right, right, we’ll be glad to finally have flat chests after another 8 years,” Niles scoffed. “Thanks for the offer, sharkie, but that’s a no-go.”

“Can’t you little wooden gremlins have any compassion??” Mike blurted. “My girlfriend’s stuck on Staten Island, and we need that crap to get to her.”

“Wooden gremlins??” Mick said it with a little scoff, very obviously taken aback by Mike’s words. Curiously enough, he sounded more like he was overplaying his offense rather than genuinely being offended. “Bold words coming from a guy whose hair looks like a Bin Chicken that doesn’t know how to look down.”

The look on Mike’s face brought me back to when I’d talked to him a couple days ago, and confused him so much he couldn’t help but just freeze up as the gears turned in his head.

As if they knew he was going to ask what a “bin chicken” was, Niles just went, “Look it up!” right as Mike opened his mouth to speak.

“Okay, let’s leave the hair jokes out of this,” I said.

<<Link, god, if you’re not going to get to the point, I will!>>

I felt something down my back, like a snake being slid down the back of my shirt. The worst kind of chills went up my spine as I felt the Master sword slide up and out of the scabbard on my back before it flashed and landed in between me and the three skull kids.

“Listen, uh… Sullivans?” my cousin asked.

“Yeah that’s fine.” Went Mick.

“Good, good, listen up, Sullivans.” She crossed her arms, her cloak draping below them. “This whole thing is bigger than you could ever imagine. There is a guy out there after our skins, and will stop at nothing to kill my cousin and his friends if it means getting what he wants. We need to rescue someone in Staten Island in order to get extra help to fight him, and that stuff-” She pointed at the crate. “-is required for us to be able to get to her. So you better hand that over before-”

“Oh calm down you daft cu-” Steve’s mouth was suddenly covered by the hands of his two brothers.

“Dude, no, we can’t say that over here!” Went Niles.

“Oh right, right, that means something totally different here!” Steve pulled Mick and Niles’ hands off his face. “My bad, my bad.”

“Regardless of what you all call friends here!” Mick continued. “We ain’t handing them back over. This big bad of yours has left us well enough alone, so we unfortunately don’t care.”

“Would you care about having hair?” asked Vinny. The lack of a filter with that one seemed to surprise the triplets. We weren’t surprised, though. It was Vinny.

“Not if it looks like yours, mate!” Mick shouted back. The three of them giggled at that. Vinny just stood there in shock as he grabbed a fistfull of his own long, bright purple hair in one hand, not knowing how else to react.

“Enough of the hair slander!” I said, holding out my hands as if preparing to keep them apart from each other. “We need stuff to get across the desert, and you three have the stuff!”

“Well, that’s commonly called ‘bad luck’.” Niles said dryly.

“How do we know you’ll even be able to fight these monsters?” Mick asked. “For all we know, we’re giving you all this cool stuff JUST for you to get murked by a moblin or something!”

“You LITERALLY admitted to watching us fight stuff in Central Park AND Coney Island!” Miranda said angrily to them.

“We admitted to sneaking into Central Park and Coney Island,” Niles specified.

“Yeah, we planted the chests and pissed right off!” Steve added.

“We ain’t drongos, M, we weren’t gonna stick around to wait for the monsters to show up,” Mick told her. “So if you lot could run off and- HEY!”

Mick and the other two had been in the middle of turning around to go back to what they were doing… only to discover Garrett beside the crate, trying to carry a bunch of various items in his hands. Of the ones I could make out, it looks to be some empty bottles, a lantern, two wand-like things, and three shields stacked against each other like dinner plates to hold everything. All was being held with one arm while he was in the middle of using the other to try and stack more things. He’d frozen like a deer in headlights when he was caught, not sure what to do or how best to get out of there.

“So it’s gonna be like that now, ain’t it, you bootleg birthday party magician?” Mick sneered.

“Bootleg bir- what are you going on about??” Garrett seemed confused, although looking back on it I think his confusion was just a facade to keep from breaking down from being called a party magician. Speaking any words to them turned out to be a mistake on his part.

“Oh my god, are you a brit??” Niles asked, which brought a devious little smile to Mick’s face.

“Oh what, is the little demon dork gonna cry?” Mick asked snootily. “You gonna send us to terra nullius for stealing or some crap, colonizer??”

“Hey, hey, enough of that!” I said. “Leave the man’s accent out of this.”

FWOOT!

Steve decided to be a little bit of a wild card at that moment and suddenly leapt up, blowgun in hand, and fired. It caught us all off guard…

Thwap!

… Almost as much as when Garrett had caught the horse tranquilizer in between his index and middle finger. He looked as if he were very angrily clutching a cigarette.

    The three skull kids were standing there in shock more than anything. Not a fearful kind of shock, but an “oh crap I wasn’t expecting that” kind of shock.

    “I don’t appreciate being shot at,” he said with a growl. He dropped the dart on the ground.

    “Steve, what the hell??” Mick blurted out angrily.

    “What made you think shooting the beanpole with a TRANQ was a good idea??” Niles asked.

    “The guy was bloody stealing from us, man, gimme a break!” Steve scoffed.

    “You could’ve waited for us to provide back up, you drongo,” Mick said.

    “Don’t call me a drongo, drongo!” 

    “Knock it off you twits!” Miranda interrupted, using her ponytail hand to break them up. “Can you not argue with each other for five-??”

    Miranda suddenly paused. You know that look that people get? The one where they didn’t notice something until right now, and that particular thing called into question everything they were about to do or say, so they have to figure out what to do with this new information? That was the face Miranda made when she saw something in Garrett’s little pile of stuff he thought would be the most important. She took in a deep breath before letting it out.

    “Garrett… bud… can I see something in your pile real quick?” She looked as if she were about to blow a gasket. Garrett seemed to know this, simply nodding his head wildly, his entire angry demeanor from before gone as Miranda reached her ponytail hand over to pluck something from the pile. The moment she brought it back to where she was with the triplets, she took in another deep breath.

    We all saw it. We all knew .

    “Mick… Steve… Niles…” She pulled Mick in close, grabbing the front of his hoodie with one of her regular hands, while she held the thing she’d found in front of his face like a cat toy being held in front of a guilty kitten. The item in question? It was an instrument. One shaped like an egg with a little spout coming off the top for one to put their mouth on. It was like someone tried to make a flute out of crystal, but they sculpted it wrong.

    “Michelangelo Sullivan,” she growled. “Did you really steal the goddamn Ocarina of Time and intend to keep us from getting it?!”

    The exchange made Zelda’s eyes shoot open.

    “Well no!” Mick insisted. “We were going to put it in a chest somewhere and let you guys find it!”

    “Link literally gets this THROWN to him in the game!” Miranda complained. “Why the hell would you put it in a chest and hide it somewhere when even the developers know how important it is for him to have this thing?!”

    “BECAUSE IT’S MORE FUN!”

    “THE POSSIBLE END OF THE WORLD SHOULDN’T BE FUN, MICK!”

    This had gone on for a while. The whole room was in chaos. Miranda was fighting with the theater kids; Garrett was stuck on the stage trying to sneak away but ultimately being too scared to do so; Mike and Vinny were seated in the audience bent over and looking defeated after being insulted on such a fundamental level; and Zelda, Navi and I were just standing there, witnessing the chaos all around us and trying to put together what was going on and how to mediate it all. The thing we hadn’t noticed was what Simon and Ariel were doing near the back of the theater…

    “What’re they yelling about?” Ariel asked, seated in one of the plush audience seats while Simon was sitting on one of the steps in the aisle.

    “Grown-up things,” Simon told her. Ariel didn’t ask for further clarification, and Simon was fine with that. The two of them were content to watch the other kids handle the situation… up until he felt something. The rest of us hadn’t noticed at the time, getting too caught up in the argument between Miranda the theater kids and how to figure out a compromise, but Simon had felt it. He’d seen it, too. He thought for a moment that maybe Ariel was bouncing her foot and causing the seats to shake ever so slightly, but the 9-year-old was seated perfectly still.

    The ground was rumbling, and everyone else was too busy yelling to notice.

    “Uh, guys?” Simon called out once. None of us responded.

    “Guys??” He called out again, to the same outcome.

    “GUY!?”

    “WHAT?!” We all shouted in unison as we turned, but the miffed expressions of varying degrees all faded away when we, too, felt the ground. The closest I’d gotten to feeling something similar was this one time my parents took me to Central Park. A smaller earthquake happened while I was out on the playground. To a little toddler, something like that makes you feel like the ground is about to fall apart from under you. It’s one of the few things I remember from that age, because it was just THAT terrifying to little Lincoln. The rumbling we felt in Carnegie Hall just then felt exactly like that. Except, we knew it wasn’t an earthquake. The rumble would quiet down, then pick back up again, quiet down, come back again. Almost like it was less of an earthquake and more of an echo of footsteps.

    A loud creaking noise that came from backstage all but confirmed it.

    “Oh god, I think there’s something in the walls!” Niles called out.

    “I knew it! You jinxed us, you idiot!” Steve shouted angrily.

    “I didn’t jinx us! That’s just bad luck!” Mick yelled back.

    “Yeah! Bad luck YOU brought on us!” Steve growled.

    “Shut up, both of you!” Nile ordered.

    CRASH!

    Suddenly, something broke through the wall in the back of the stage. A clawed paw broke through, tearing through the wood and stone making up the walls of the building like cheesecake. Something was trying to break out through the wall and get into the theater, and the skull kids immediately recognized this and acted quickly.

    “GUYS! Go go go go GO!” Mick grabbed the other two and dragged them along before they got the idea and started running on their own toward the crate of zelda items. Garrett, recognizing what they were doing, was quick to dump the stuff he was planning on running off with back into the box before dashing for the edge of the stage. The Sullivans proceeded to put their backs into pushing the crate of zelda items off into the wings of the stage. All in all, the four of them got out of the way right before another clawed paw slammed down onto the stage, hitting so hard that Garrett stumbled off the edge of the stage from the force of it.

    The rest of us were quick to get ready. There was no way out of this one. Even if we made it out of Carnegie Hall, whatever this thing was would no doubt follow us. We all universally made the decision to stay and see what we were up against.

    “Ahh! Monster! Another monster! You have fun with this one, Link!” Fiona leapt back and away from the stage of the hall, backflipping through the air and disappearing in a bright flash of light before landing perfectly into the scabbard on my back, taking the form of a sword once more.

    “Oh god, what is it NOW?!” Zelda cried out as she summoned forth her bow, getting it loaded and ready. We all waited and watched as the two clawed hands now inside the theater pulled the rest of the creature through the hole.

    It started with a head. An angry, hostile, lizard-like head on the end of a long scaly neck, gnashing its teeth and hissing in the same way some crocodiles and alligators do when they’re trying to tell you to piss off. It had whiskers like a catfish and a single curved horn on the top of its head like the moblin we’d encountered at the school. Its eyes were much more natural in their look. They weren’t the same bright orange/yellow that all the eyes of malice were everywhere else, but they were also terrifying in the sense that they were recognizable. They were eyes you could find on regular dangerous reptiles found on earth, Hyrulian magic or not.

I was content to deal with one head, but then there came another. Then another, and then another. Four reptilian heads came spilling out of the hole in the wall like spaghetti noodles out of a pasta maker. The creature had pulled the entirety of itself out of the hole in the wall, its four heads hissing and biting as it examined everyone in the room.

“Oh god, it’s another lizard!!” Mike cried out. He was in the middle of getting up out of his seat(with Vinny rushing to run away as well) when the creature decided to make him even more scared. It did this by exhaling angrily, the way a cartoon bull might before charging. And when it did so, the breathing came prepackaged with little streams of fire. It hit us like a ton of bricks.

“Oh you’ve gotta be kidding-” Vinny got up out of his seat as he went running toward where Garrett had been trying to make his escape. He was quick to grab Garrett’s wrist and drag him along much faster than he would’ve been able to run. “There’s ANOTHER DRAGON?!?!”

“Well, it IS high fantasy,” Garrett reasoned. “There’s got to be at least a few of the- AH!”

One of the dragon’s heads snapped at the two of them, making that harrowing SNAP sound I was used to hearing creatures in old Disney movies make, like Maleficent in “Sleeping Beauty” or Tick-Tock-Croc from “Peter Pan”. Vinny had evaded it by virtue of ducking, as well as already being shorter than most people expect. Garrett had evaded it by virtue of teleporting.

“Wha- Garrett!! Where’d you go this time!?” Vinny asked frantically.

“Uhhh up here!!” Garrett called out. We all looked up to see where Garrett had reappeared: in the balcony seats. The problem was that he couldn’t get down. “I-I don’t know if I can get down safely!”

“Just teleport or something!” Vinny yelled.

“I can’t!!” Garrett shouted back. “What if I teleport too close to the REAL ASS DRAGON?!”

“Just stay up there, Garrett, we’ll find a way to get you down!!” Zelda replied loudly. She let loose an arrow at one of the dragon’s heads. It stuck in its head right at the base of its horn. It didn’t injure it to a debilitating degree, but it was enough that the head was taken aback by it, scratching at the site of the wound with its paw.

“What is that thing!?” Navi shouted near my ear as I drew the master sword.

“I dunno! It’s a dragon!” I blurted back.

“Yeah, but you’ve got that slate thing that gives you their names, right??” she asked.

I paused for a moment. “You’re right, you’re right, I’m an idiot-”

I pulled out the Sheikah Slate as I dove off to the side, avoiding a sudden stream of fire as it tried to roast us all in a line. The others dove off into the seats as I raised a hand up, pointing the reticle of the Sheikah Slate at the beast while staying low to the ground. Just as it had with every other big monster, the picture I’d snapped of it came with a boss title:

    “Gleeok… it’s Gleeok!” Navi blurted out.

    “Bless you.”

    “No, Link, it’s an old Zelda boss!” she informed me. “Like, ‘first game for the NES’ old!” She zipped up into the air and cupped her hands around her mouth. It wasn’t like she needed to. Even as tiny as she was, Navi was still able to get LOUD.

    “GUYS, IT’S AN NES BOSS!” she shouted. “THERE’S NO GIMMICK! JUST KEEP ATTACKING IT!!”

    “Sounds good to me!” Mike shouted back, pulling out his slingshot and firing. One of his little water balloons exploded at Gleeok’s other front foot, causing it to flinch, slip and fall over. It took a moment for me to realize that the balloon had been full of olive oil. In its attempt to catch itself before it fell, one of its heads extended so far up that it broke a hole in the ceiling as it fell. It splintered wood, caused the lights the skull kids had hung up to fall and shatter, and broke open some pipes running through the open space in the ceiling, causing water to burst out and start spraying all over. The dragon angrily sprayed fire up toward the ceiling, like a cat attacking a moving object thinking it to be an enemy, turning the water from the burst pipe to steam.

    <<Link, LINK! Where’s Ariel!?>> Fiona cried out in my head.

    “CRAP!!” I leapt up from where I’d been taking cover, looking frantically all over the theater. Soon I saw her, near the back of the seat, being picked up by a very scared Simon who was no doubt trying to get her to safety. “SIMON, GET ARIEL OUT OF HERE!” I shouted.

    “Duly note!” He turned the other way, only to have someone grab Ariel out of his arms.

    “YOU!” The skull kids had appeared out of goddamn nowhere, and all three were carrying Ariel like the tiniest, most adorable little cheerleader.

“Help them fight that scaly bastard!” Went Mick. “We know the safest places here!” And just like that, they ran off.

“What the- how did they-” I was cut off as a THUD! Echoed Through the theater. 

    Gleeok had tried to stand up again, but the oil was coating its feet, not just the ground. So the dragon struggled any time it tried to return to a standing position.

    “Haha! Lookit the idiot! Can’t stand up!” Mike let loose another water balloon. This one broke on one of the dragon’s heads, its contents spilling over its eyes and causing it to cry out like a gecko being set on fire. I recognized the color and consistency of the stuff, and soon the smell of it tied it all together: tapatio.

    “HAHA! BULLSEYE!” Mike blurted out. He’d gotten so caught up in his triumph that he hadn’t noticed one of Gleeok’s other heads swoop around and flank him from the right.

    “LOOK OUT!!” Simon had been in the same place the Sullivans had left him, terrified and confused about what to do, right up until this moment. Mike didn’t have a chance to get out of the way by the time he’d seen Gleeok open its mouth wide and lit a fire in the back of its throat. The only reason he didn’t get turned into a person-sized pot roast was because of Simon.

    As he threw his hand forward, as if trying to grab Mike and pull him out of the way, the dragon scale he had as well as the thread it was tied around his hand lit up like fairy lights. And in the next moment, a stream of water shot down from the burst pipe like a magical missile, coming between Mike and Gleeok right as the fire would’ve pulled him into its deadly embrace. Mike had been saved by a sudden shield of water, and Simon was left standing there, confused, like a fish that had accidentally hit its face on the side of the aquarium.

    He stood there for a moment before he was able to put the pieces together.

    “Wait…” he looked down at his hands. “Wait wait wait wait wait…” He looked up at the burst pipe in the ceiling before raising both of his hands upward and dragging them down through the air like he was a cat dragging his claws through an invisible curtain. The water from the burst pipe came down in streams, congealing around his hands like gloves as Simon stood there, looking down at his new handiwork with a smile on his face.

    “HAHA! PRACHTIG!! I CAN WATER BEND!!”

    Simon was quick to make use of his new powers, doing what you’d assume someone with water powers would do: throw water at the enemy. Not much to it.

    The lot of us broke out into our own individual fighting strategies and techniques. Zelda and I stuck close together, offering backup to each other while Navi and Fiona provided us with much needed guidance and warnings, like spider-sense but much more vocal and a little more annoying. Most other fights, it was helpful but ultimately unnecessary. But in a fight where the main gimmick of the monster at hand was its multiple heads, an early warning system was more than welcome.

    <<Above you!!>>

    I looked up just in time to see one of Gleeok’s heads coming down on top of me, and was able to leap to the side and out of the way. Gleeok’s jaws clamped around some of the plush chairs instead of me, so it was a win in my book.

    “Thanks!” I said quickly to Fiona as I got up and kept moving. I watch Zelda let loose an arrow at another one of the heads, getting it in between its teeth and hitting its gums, causing it to lurch backwards and shake its head like it was shaking out a hurt hand. We were so busy trying our best to get hit after hit on this thing that we hadn’t even really noticed what everyone else was doing. Most everyone was doing their own thing in an attempt to fight the dragon, and even Miranda was doing her best with what little she had.

    “M, maybe try grabbing one of its heads!” I said to her. “You know, suplex it with your ponytail or something!”

    “Are you NUTS?!” she blurted out. “I’m not putting my hair anywhere NEAR that thing’s mouth! I don’t feel like catching fire today, sir!”

    “Ah. Right .” I went back to what I was doing, trying to get in jab after jab with the master sword while zig-zagging around Gleeok’s teeth and flames. In all our haste to punch and shoot and stab and slice at this monster, we hadn’t noticed just what was being set up on one of the balcony levels over off to the side of the theater.

Not until we heard music.

    It was loud enough that there might as well have been a full orchestra playing on stage, but the actual source of the music was… not that. As dramatic music played us through our attacks and attempts at dodging Gleeok’s teeth and claws, we came to realize that the Sullivan triplets had left their hiding places and in record time set up all the instruments they’d need in order to play the perfect boss music to go along with the terrifying dragon we were facing.

    I couldn’t help but be impressed. Miranda was not.

    “Guys, are you serious??”

    “WHAT?!” Mick seemed offended that Miranda would even THINK about being offended by their music. He didn’t let up, even while arguing. “You guys are fighting a dragon! It needs fitting music!”

    “Can’t you play something more lighthearted or something?!” Miranda blurted back. She let out a little cry of alarm as she made like me and Zelda and dove out of the way of another of Gleeok’s footfalls, like a kid jumping from one bed in the hotel room to another. “Like I dunno, do you guys still know those Seussical songs from Sophomore year?!”

    “You’re fighting a giant fire breathing dragon!” Niles reminded her. “I don’t think good vibes are gonna-”

    “Seussical??” I couldn’t get past that particular name drop. It was one of those things where I felt like I should’ve known what it was, but just couldn’t put my finger on it.

    “Yeah, like the musical?” Niles said to me, their tone shifting into a questioning sort of manner, meant to show just how much disbelief they were feeling.

    “Has he never heard of Seussical??” asked Steve.

    “Oh my god, you’ve never heard of Suessical, you MONSTER!” Mick was so angry he’d thrown his drumsticks down in anger before pulling out his phone. “We’re changing that RIGHT NOW!”

    “Is now really the time?!” I asked, dipping under claws and dodging through aisles to try and avoid each attempt on my life made by the dragon.

    “It’s ALWAYS time for Seussical, Lincoln!” Mick didn’t hesitate to start blasting one of the songs right afterwards. It was confusing at first, but the word choice and the names dropped in the lyrics clued me into what this was. Seussical… like Dr. Seuss. I’m ashamed to admit how much time I spent just thinking about why on earth they’d make a musical based around Dr. Suess books.

I suppose musicals have been weirder in the past, but what is there to work with with Dr. Seuss? Based on the song they were playing I assumed the musical was actually about “Horton Hears a Who”, but then why didn’t they just call it “Horton Hears a Who: The Musical” or something? Were there other Dr. Seuss characters in it? Was it like that “Mickey’s Once Upon a Christmas” movie where it’s three stories in one? And if yes, what other Dr. Seuss books would’ve been included in there?? Personally, The Lorax was one of my favorites as a kid and if they didn’t at least reference it, I was going to be very upset.

The problem was all this thinking and showtune listening was distracting me from the task at hand. Namely, not dying to the giant dragon currently wreaking havoc in Carnegie Hall .

“Guys, I’m sure it’s a great musical, really!” I shouted out, swinging the Master Sword in front of me to try to fend off one of Gleeok’s heads, nicking the end of his pushed-up snout to try and get him to back off. “But I’m trying to fight a crime against nature here!!”

“The real crime against nature is your lack of culture!!” Mick shouted back.

“Mick, I swear to god, just turn off the music!” Miranda blurted.

He did not, and we kept fighting the monster. Somehow, listening to an elephant and a Who talk about having a friend who believes in them seemed to help, however distracting it might’ve been.

Zelda, Miranda and I continued what we were doing, dodging teeth and attacking eyes and noses to try and further this boss fight along. As for where everyone else was doing, I would soon hear it loud and clear.

“Ok, enough of this!!” Vinny threw his hands underneath him to blast wind between him and the floor, flying up and into the balcony of the theater like a ping pong ball being bounced a little too hard in a game of beer pong. He landed right next to a very frightened Garrett, who up until this point had been doing his part by firing knives wherever he could to keep the dragon off of people and further this whole thing along. And now Vin was up in the balcony with him!

“Wha- VIN!” He stopped for a moment before helping Vincent back on his feet.

“What, did you think I was going to leave you up here by yourself??” Vinny was quick to clap his hands together, pulling them back as if trying to get them unstuck from glue. In between his palms was a ball of fire he quickly tossed in the direction of Gleeok, sending it flying and corkscrewing through the air like a baseball. It nailed one of the heads square in the nose, causing it to flinch back as it snorted, like it was trying to get pepper out of its nose.

“Huh. Didn’t think fire would do much to it since…” Garrett vaguely gestured to the dragon. You know, since it’s a dragon and dragon’s do that one thing . “... You know.”

“Well it works, and that’s what matters!” Vin said. The dragon head in question was quick to recuperate, and rear its teeth to try and snap at my two friends in the balcony. There’s no way Vin and Garrett could get out of the way in time… but then Mike decided to do something.

Right as the dragon opened its mouth, Mike fired another one of his hot sauce balloons into its mouth. It burst against Gleeok’s soft palette, causing the overgrown reptile to get a mouthful of tapatio. I couldn’t help but think of those videos of puppies licking lemon slices. The head lurched back and away from the balcony, shaking itself from side to side as it kept licking at the front of its teeth to get the taste off its tongue. This particular head of Gleeok was completely distracted by the spiciness of Mike’s hot sauce balloon.

“HAHA! Idiot!” Mike yelled triumphantly. “That’s a win in my book!”

“Good, now keep scoring wins, Goss!” Garrett shouted below as he snapped his fingers. I was expecting him to make more knives to fire at the dragon, but he did something else I’d completely forgotten he could do: he summoned a black sword out of thin air.

I didn’t have time to remember how he probably figured this out from when he did it by accident in the subway. I was too busy accidentally hearing Navi yell a warning to Zelda.

“WATCH OUT!!”

The moment I turned to see what Navi had been yelling about, it felt like the world was going in slow motion. One of Gleeok’s heads had gotten the jump on Zelda. While she’d been busy watching one of her arrows stick one head’s nose, another had flanked her, mouth wide open and ready to spit fire. There’s no way Zelda could’ve leapt out of the way in time. I could’ve pushed her out of the way, but I would’ve just been burnt to a crisp as well. I had to think quickly, and unfortunately that meant making Mike uncomfortable for a little bit…

“ZELDA!”

It felt like jump cuts. I sprinted over. I turned the dial on my right hand. I leapt in between Zelda and the dragon as I smacked my face with my hand.

FWOOSH!

I had my back turned to my two friends, so I couldn’t see Zelda and Navi’s faces, but I could hear them screaming in horror. For all they knew, I’d just leapt into the literal line of fire to use myself as a meat shield to keep them safe. It soon became clear the opposite had happened, especially once Gleeok’s stream of fire ceased and even the dragon looked on in surprise. I may have used myself as a meat shield, but I believe a better way to phrase it would’ve been “rock shield.”

“You think that’s something?” I jeered at the dragon, cracking my knuckles. “I’m just GETTING STARTED!!”

I had told them to be prepared for Goron mode should I need to be fireproof. And wouldn’t you know it, that’s the one thing that would do me well in a fight with a literal dragon.

    It took Gleeok a moment to recover from the shock, trying to make up for the failed assault by fire and lunging for me with its maw wide open. The pure adrenaline and power I could feel coursing through me gave me the raw unbridled courage to retaliate by grabbing the head by its top and bottom jaw. With one hand around each tooth, I wrestled with it like I was wrestling with a giant snake. Finally, with a catapult of a toss, I threw the head off to the side, causing it to crash into another one of its heads like a pair of clackers. The two heads were left stunned and disoriented.

    “Hell yeah! I feel unstoppable!” I shouted. I absentmindedly reached behind my to grab the Master Sword, but was stopped by a loud nagging voice in my head.

    <<HEY, NO! I absolutely REFUSE to be used as a weapon while you’re like this!!>> shouted a startled Fiona.

    “Wha- Why!?” I pulled the sword off my back and held it up by the straps, looking at her like I was staring a misbehaving kitten in the eyes. “Do you not trust me or something?!”

    <<Yeah, I don’t trust you to NOT accidentally shatter me or something! You just threw a dragon to the side like it was nothing!>>

    “Yeah, that’s a squishy, fleshy dragon, not a magic sword!”

    “Who are you yelling at, Golem of Prague??” Miranda dashed over to my side.

    “Oh, right- Fiona can talk to me with telepathy or something,” I explained. “Zelda can hear her, right?”

    “RIGHT!” Zelda shouted back as she let loose another arrow.

    “Well, just give her to me!” Miranda said. “I can fight with her!”

    <<Fine by me!>>

    “Alright then!” I gently handed the sword to Miranda, watching as she tossed the scabbard and straps aside to simply hold the sword on its own. “Also… golem of Prague??”

    “Well you know! Because you’re Jewish!” She said, “And you’re a rock man like a golem, and they’re Jewish, you know-”

    “Oooooh gotcha, gotcha, clever .”

    <<Enough with the jokes and stuff, there’s a DRAGON!>>

    “OW! JESUS!” Miranda stumbled back a bit, still keeping her grip on the sword. “God, NOW I hear her!! Guess you gotta hold the sword then.”

    “M, WATCH IT!” I lept in between Miranda and another head of Gleeok, not knowing how else to react to this one other than in the most rudimentary way: punching it in the side of its nose.

    “God damn, does this thing have ANY kind of weakness!?” I heard Mike shout from the other end of the theater, firing another hot sauce balloon into its teeth.

    “I dunno!” I shouted back. The head I’d punched decided to try and slither its way along the ground to get the jump on me, rather than trying to attack from above. One thing after another happened. In my panic to get out of the way, I ended up just kinda… jumping. Right up and onto its face. I just panicked more when I realized I was seated right between its eyes. By all kinds of game logic, getting on top of it like this was a sure fire way to get it to flail around and send me flying into a wall, so I did the only thing I could think to do in the moment: I clasped my hands together and brought them down on top of the dragon.

    I didn’t hear a scream, or any kind of pained roar from the monster. I instead heard something worse: a dry crunch . Instead of hearing a thud, or perhaps even a crack of a skull, it crunched as the top of its head broke inward like a piece of old dusty paper mache. It caught me completely off guard, to the point that I couldn’t help but stumble backwards, fall, and roll off of Gleeok’s head before I could catch myself. I got back up as the rest of the head crumbled away, turning to black and purple smoke, dissolving all the way down the neck up till right before the shoulders. I let out a chuckle.

    “That’s right! It doesn’t have a specific weakness!” I shouted to everyone else in the theater. “Just keep attacking it until its heads dissolve!”

    “That’s going to take FOREVER!!” Mike complained.

    “With that attitude, it sure as hell will!!” Vinny shouted at him from the balcony. “Just keep fighting it!!”

    Zelda fired another arrow at one of the three remaining dragon heads, nicking it in the eye. Unlike the last couple of times, all this seemed to do was piss it off. It looked as if my best friend was on a one-way trip to teeth town, but Garrett came in clutch. A flurry of magic knives flew through the air and stuck in the side of the head, right along the brow ridge. This distracted it long enough for Zelda to duck for cover, the dragon instead deciding to scratch at the knives in its head to try and dislodge them. 

One of the heads was distracted. One of the others was not.

“Crap crap crap crap CRAP!!” Garrett was freaking out, swinging his sword back and forth to try and keep the dragon back and away from the two of them. It was like a cat swatting at the face of another cat, but with much more at stake if the target of the swatting wasn’t taking it. And then the funniest thing of the whole fight happened. Funny in the sense that looking back on the whole thing, it makes me go hysterical.

The dragon attempted to snap at the two of them, and they jumped out of the way. The only problem is that Garrett had dodged the teeth a little too well. He had teleported mid-jump, ending up landing in the seats below and crashing into one of the burnt up seats that had since stopped burning.

And thus Vinny was the one left all alone on the balcony.

“G-MAN, ARE YOU KIDDING ME ?!” He shouted at him as he conjured up more fire, throwing them at the dragon like bolts of lightning to try and keep it from getting closer to him. It kept getting closer.

“JUST JUMP!” Garrett shouted back.

“ARE YOU INSANE?!” He asked, looking over the edge of the balcony. “That’s like… at LEAST a 20 foot drop, I’ll break my damn legs!!”

“Just do your believing thing!!” Garrett cried back frantically as Gleeok’s head slithered closer and closer to vinny. “Believe that you can fly or something! Do your wind magic! Maybe all that will catch you and break your fall!!”

Vinny’s mouth opened, and it looked as if he were about to chew out Garrett for trying to tell him how his own magic works, but all that came out was his classic little psychicpebbles scream as he leapt out of the way of one of Gleeok’s heads, narrowly avoiding the lunging maw as he tumbled off the edge of the balcony. One surprising thing after the other seemed to be happening in Carnegie Hall that day, and Vinny added to that list by deciding to believe that he could fly.

And fly he did. FWOOSH!

Vinny was propelled upward before he finally steadied himself out in the air. It took him a moment to realize that there was no wind beneath his feet, and that it wasn’t what was keeping him airborne.

Wings. He had wings. And once he realized this, he looked like he wanted to scream his lungs out.

    “ACK!! THIS ISN'T WHAT I MEANT!!” He shouted.

    “That’s bloody amazing, Vin!” Garrett said back to him. “Probably more reliable than the wind!”

    “I don’t care if it’s more reliable, at least the wind isn’t STUCK TO MY BACK! EEEP!! ” He let out a little squeak of a scream as he dipped through the air and out of the way of one of the Dragon’s heads. He ended up nearly crash landing into the ground, but Garrett was able to catch him.

    “Then just stay on the ground then!” Garrett said. “Can’t you put them away??”

    “Sure I can, but- ACK!” Vinny threw a hand forward, lobbing a ball of fire right into Gleeok’s eye as it tried to get the jump on them. “Maybe we should get somewhere safer first??”

    “Right!” Garrett went running with Vin under his arm like a football as he made a break for a side room of the theater. There were other issues to be dealing with, though. Namely the fact that the head following after Vinny and Garrett figured it best to let them go and go after an easier target.

    That target was Mike and Simon.

    “Crap, uh, fish face!” Mike called out to Simon, who up until this point had been doing his best to put out its streams of fire before they could touch the ground. “Can you juke this thing out or something?!”

    “I can try!” Simon threw a hand up in the air, dragging it back down like he was pulling an imaginary rope. He yanked this imaginary rope so hard that his arms fell behind him. The water from the burst pipe in the ceiling came down in a thick stream, like a river running through the air. It was just wide enough that once it came past Simon, he leapt into it.

    Simon continued on with the water following under him, swimming through the air in much the same way he did back in the ocean around Coney Island. The best way I can describe the look of it would be the way planes look when they leave trails of water vapor behind them. It was like he was painting in the air, and his erratic yet graceful fish-like movements were just enough to keep the dragon distracted. At the same time provided just enough distraction for Mike to land another hit on it. This was a routine the two of them continued doing with these two dragon heads in particular: Simon would juke them out, Mike would fire a balloon full of either tapatio or olive oil at its face, rinse and repeat. 

    Looking back on it, it was a neat little strategy in action to behold, but I also look back on it knowing how terrified Simon must’ve been. One particular moment I remember was one of Gleeok’s heads snapping at the stream, trying to catch Simon as bycatch. Simon was able to evade the teeth by jumping up and into the air like those sharks that leap out of the water in an attempt to catch seals. He’d just barely dodged the dragon's teeth, and in return, Mike nailed the dragon in the eye with more hot sauce.

    “BULLSEYE!” He shouted. He went to reload his slingshot, fumbling through his bag. He paused. He kept fumbling through it more frantically now. That’s when the realization hit him. He jumped out of the way as one of the dragon’s attempted to snap him up in its jaws again as he shouted, “SHOOT! I’M OUT!!”

    “What do you mean you’re out!?” Simon blurted as he kept up his aerial swimming.

    “I only made so many water balloons, I didn’t wanna stuff too many in my bag and risk them popping!”

    “Just use the Groosenator then!”

    “I can’t just use the Groosenator! I field-stripped the damn thing! I’d have to put it back together and that would take WAY too long!!”

    It was at this moment that Garrett and Vincent had returned to the scene of the fight. Vinny had figured out how to get rid of the wings, and both of them looked terrified. Not because of the wings, mind you. Definitely because of everything else. I don’t know what it was, but I think seeing Garrett show up again made some gears start turning in Simon’s head.

    “Wacht even!” Simon said. Even in another language, it seemed people knew that he was like ‘hold up a sec.’ “Can’t you turn into a sword, Embers?!”

    The guys went silent. Garrett in particular looked like he wanted to curl up into a ball and disappear.

    “I’m sorry, he can do what now ??” Mike asked, confused.

    “Yeah, I can do what now?!” Garrett repeated.

    “I read it in that book!” Simon explained. “The one in the game store! Your parallel is a sword like Fiona!”

    “Th-that can’t be right!” Garrett said with a nervous chuckle. “You probably read that one another character nearby mine and got confused, that can’t be true!”

    “Oh, it’s totally true!”

    Garrett let out a short but startled shriek as Niles from the Sullivan triplets suddenly showed up right beside them, holding one of those microwaveable popcorn bags over one of the open flames burning in the back row of seats. It was stuck on the end of one of those adjustable shafts meant to make up the supports of a music stand, so he wasn’t anywhere near the fire.

    “How did you get down here?!” Garret asked frantically.

    “Like hell I’m telling you all of my stage crew secrets!” Niles said back with a giggle. He pulled the popcorn bag back away from the fire and cracked it open. “You’re either stupid of lying. The big twist in Skyward Sword is that Ghirahim is a sword spirit just like Fi.” He took the stick he’d used to roast the popcorn with and poke Garrett in the chest with it. “Which YOU and Fiona are parallels of!”

    “I-I-I can’t shapeshift into a sword!” Garrett blurted back. “That’s crazy! I’ve got too much magic already-!”

    “Muh muh muh magic! Noooo noooo I can’t do magic I prooomiiisseee, even if my parallel is a goddamn demooonnnn nooooo!” Niles had forgone trying to spell it out to Garrett and instead resorted to mocking him. That didn’t surprise me. What surprised me was Garrett actually managing to not start crying in embarrassment as he shouted back a reply.

    “Would you quit it!?” He blurted out. “So what if I can shapeshift into a sword?? I don’t even know how to do that!!”

    “Well, figure it out, quick!!” Mike jumped out of the way as one of the heads got bored of chasing Simon through the air and instead opted to snap at Mike again. The problem was that it wasn’t just focused on Mike, having noticed Garrett and Vinny just standing around. Vinny acted fast, hurling a bolt of fire at its face to keep it away as the two of them started to brainstorm.

    “You were down in the basement when Fiona figured it out,” Garrett said to Vin. “How did she do it!?”

    “Something like the ‘believing in yourself’ thing!” he explained. “Same kinda idea! Just feeling strongly about a thing- EEP!” Vinny used the wind to push the both of them off to the side, shoving them out of the way just in time to dodge another snap of the dragon’s jaws.

    “Ok, strong feelings, what kind of feelings?!” Garrett asked as he helped Vinny back up.

    “I dunno! She was just rambling about keeping Link out of trouble or something?” Vinny explained.

    “Out of trouble…” Garrett paused in thought for a moment as he caught Mike running wildly around the seats, trying to dive and dodge out of the way of the snapping jaws of Gleeok. “Protection!” Garrett called out the word like a eureka. “Swords are a means of protection. SWORDS ARE A MEANS OF PROTECTION!”

    He said this like it was the most revolutionary discovery he’d ever made, running toward where Mike had been fleeing from Gleeok’s gnashing teeth. The next few moments went by quickly, but all that really needs to be said is that Mike had stopped running. Instead, he turned right back around, swinging both arms around as he slashed across the snouts of both dragon heads that he decided to pursue him. He’d done so with his brand new sword.

    This was the bit where I learned two things. The first was that Garrett’s sword form was… interesting. Considering the information given, I was expecting Garrett to turn into a sword very similar to the Master Sword. And I was partly right! It had a similar handle and similar wing motif for the cross guard, but it was also MASSIVE. Whereas the Master Sword was a longsword at most, the one Garrett had transformed into was closer to a claymore or greatsword. You know, the kind of sword that is so big you have to use two hands to wield it. Mike soon figured this out as he attacked the dragon’s heads and then very quickly almost fell over as the sword went THUD on the ground, nearly taking him down with it.

    “Holy crap!” He heaved as he put his other hand around the handle and lifted the greatsword off the ground. The sword looked as if it were forged from obsidian with how dark and shiny it was, and its blade was made to look like thorns. “For a beanpole, you’re god damn HEAVY!” He swung the sword around to get a feel for it, earning a cry from a familiar sounding voice.

    The second thing I learned was that Fiona wasn’t the only person I could still  hear talking while they were in sword form.

    <<Please be gentle with me.>> Garrett pleaded.

    “What, scared for your first time?” Mike asked with a sly smirk.

    <<THAT’S NOT WHAT I MEANT!!>> 

    “Should’ve picked your words more carefully then, Embers!” Mike didn’t wait for a response, instead deciding to go full barbarian mode and swing the sword around like a heavy log at one of those log-throwing games you see at Scottish festivals and fairs. All I could hear from Garrett was a long-sustained scream. It was kinda funny. Mike was making progress, but he also managed to only fight off one of the heads. The other one decided to go for Vinny.

    “Oh shoot oh FU- ACK!” Vinny tripped over a broken chair before getting back up. I noticed him getting ready to try and use magic again. Perhaps he was going to throw another fireball into the dragon’s eye, but then I saw him contemplate something. He paused, and then acted quickly when the dragon breathed out steam through its nostrils and started to open its mouth. I watched as Vinny cupped his hands around his mouth, like he was about to yell at the dragon, and then blow a wide stream of fire toward the dragon and into its mouth. It was like watching a paper lantern combust from the inside out. Just like the head that I’d smack in between the eyes, this once collapsed in on itself like dusty paper, its entire head and neck down to its shoulders dissolving into purple and black smoke that dissipated along the ground.

    “HAH! Hell yeah!!” He shouted triumphantly.

    One thing led to another in the next few moments. Zelda, Miranda and I had been doing our best to chip down the health of one head while Mike suddenly found himself backed into us as he fought the other. We quickly realized that we’d been cornered. Gleeok’s heads were on either side of us, and there was really nowhere to run.

“HOLD ON!” I heard Simon call. “I CAN-” He cut himself off with his own sound of confusion as he threw his hands forward, trying to call forward more water. I could only assume his plan might’ve been to sweep us out of harm's way like pebbles in a stream, but nothing was coming up. It was a fair bit of information to process in the next few moments, but looking up toward the burst pipe was all we needed to do. It wasn’t leaking anymore. The plumbing must’ve had one of those automatic shutoff valves somewhere.

I was fully prepared to grab as many people as I could and shield them from the flames since that sounded like the only thing we could do. But then the Sullivans reminded us that, oh yeah! They were there, too.

“MIRANDA!!”

We all looked up to where the exclamation had come from. Miranda looked to see her idiot friends running on a catwalk to get across the theater. Calling it a catwalk wasn’t accurate, though. Carnegie Hall didn’t HAVE a catwalk. What it was was a wooden beam they’d hung from the ceiling with the same chords all the lights were hung up with. They’d constructed their own catwalk to get from one side of the theater to the other.

“MICK HAD AN IDEA!!” Steve blurted out. “BUT YOU GOTTA DO YOU MIDNA THING!!”

“Wha- What’s that supposed to mean?!” Miranda asked.

“DO THE FAST TRAVEL THING!!” Niles shouted, getting to the point.

“The what?!” Miranda yelled back.

“MIDNA CAN FAST TRAVEL!!” Niles clarified. 

Miranda had to pause for a moment. Keyword, a moment. Gleeok wasn’t going to wait for her to put two and two together, but she did it quick enough to save our skins.

“Right! Fast travel!” without explaining it to any of us, we watched her raise a hand before throwing it at the ground, as if she were trying to throw down a smoke bomb that wasn’t there. Part of me wished Vinny hadn’t figured out that whole “believing in yourself” thing, because Miranda was so caught up in getting this done that she didn’t bother to warn us when we all fell through the floor.

I briefly flashed back to when the floorboard broke under me in the Dragon’s Lair, half expecting us to fall into another boss fight underneath the streets of New York. No such thing happened. In fact, we landed on… more seats. No one landed on their feet, meaning it all took us a moment to recuperate and figure out what had happened. I was one of the first to see as I grabbed the edge of something and pulled myself up.

That’s how I found myself looking over the edge of the balcony, catching the dragon right as its two remaining heads crashed into each other, disorienting and stunning them both. Miranda had fast traveled alright, right out of the way of the heads of Gleeok.

“Alright alright NOW!” Mick called out.

What happened next was like something out of a movie, or perhaps one of those murder mystery shows that takes place in an old victorian mansion. Steve had taken something out of the crate and thrown it up toward the ceiling on Mick’s command. It whirled through the air like an airborne beyblade, hooking around and slicing right through a cluster of chords in the ceiling holding up a particularly big lighting piece in the middle of the ceiling. It was a bunch of artsy lights and glowing baubles all clustered together like a messed up bunch of grapes.

And as the chords snapped, the whole thing came crashing down right on top of Gleeok’s two remaining heads. The whole scene was accompanied by Niles pounding out the piano riff from “Phantom of the Opera” on the piano.

We all felt the ground rumble as Gleeok collapsed onto the ground, going still for a moment. The two heads collapsed in like paper before they dissolved down to the shoulders. Then the body became bruised all over, like watercolor bleeding across paper, before it dissolved as well. And just like that, Gleeok had been defeated.

“HAHA! It ACTUALLY worked!!” Went Mick. The three triplets shot to their feet before joining hands, crouched over like happy little goblins as they sang some made up tune while turning in a circle, like they were playing ring-around-the-rosie. They very much looked very proud of themselves.

“Mijn god, are you guys alright??” Simon asked as he swam up through the air and toward the edge of the balcony.

“Yeah, we’re alright,” Zelda said to him. “We should… probably get down from here.”

“Yeah, just gimme a moment-” I held up my right hand before turning the dial on it. A flash of light and I was no longer a living boulder.

“Oh thank god,” Mike sighed in relief. “Seeing you all jacked like that was WEIRD.”

“I wasn’t even really jacked!” I said as Simon made a little slide out of water for us to get down to the ground on. “I was just kinda… strong fat? Would that be the term??”

“Yeah that sounds about right,” went Miranda. We safely made our way down, some of us opting to utilize Simon’s water bending to get down, and others opting to go through the horror of falling through the floor again with Miranda.

“Oi, blondie!” The moment I touched down, I turned to see one of the Sullivans(Steve I think), not on stage, but near the back of the theater with someone riding on his shoulders. “You’re lucky we were able to hide her somewhere safe for that whole ordeal!”

“Ariel!” I ran over as she hopped off of his shoulders and ran to me. “Oh my god, are you okay?!”

“I’m fine!” she said. “I’m fine… where’s Garrett?” She asked that after briefly looking over the group as everyone gathered up again. As if on cue, the sword in Mike’s hand flashed with a bright light. The way Mike reacted to it was like a guy reacting to someone flashing their high beams at them from across an intersection, with him covering his eyes with his whole arm before he finally pulled it away.

“I’m right here!” Garrett said, now hanging upside down with his ankle in Mike’s hand. “I’m alright… for the most part.”

“Hey! He’s not a god damn ragdoll, put him down!” Vinny blurted it out angrily.

Mike didn’t reply, simply letting go of Garrett’s ankle and letting him drop with a little “AH!”

“Alright, now then… YOU!” Miranda whipped around to face the stage, where all three of the skull kids were positioned again. None of us had time to question how Steve got back over to the stage that quickly. Miranda had more important things to talk about.

“You experienced that too, right?” she asked them as she started floating over. “Do you see the BREVITY of the situation, guys?? I assume an actual god damn dragon breaking into Carnegie Hall and nearly killing us all in a fiery hell might’ve clued you into just how serious this crap is!” She floated up so close to Mick’s face that she could’ve very well been touching her nose to his. “So, I’ll ask you again: can we have the quest shit back?”

The Sullivans stood for a moment, and without even hesitating or thinking about what to say, Mick spoke.

“Pfft! Well, we WERE going to give them back,” he said, half joking and half trying to play it off like this was their plan all along. “But we basically had to kill that dragon for you guys, so-”

“Guys, if you hand over the stuff we need for Staten Island, I’ll give you each a free commission of whatever you want.”

Miranda’s offer immediately got the attention of all three of them as they leapt in front of her, arms around each other, as they all three got in her face.

“DEAL!!”

Chapter Text

“So… your full name is Michaelangelo?”

Ariel had asked this after getting into a rather interesting conversation with the Sullivan triplets about their names. Mostly stemming from the fact that they weren’t the names on their birth certificates or something like that.

“Yep! Like the guy who painted the Sistine Chapel,” Mick clarified.

“BS!” Niles contradicted, yelling from across the theater. “You named yourself after a ninja turtle!” That got my little sister to break out into a fit of giggles.

“You’re one to talk!” Mick yelled back in response. “Didn’t you name yourself after Tails from Sonic??”

“His name is Miles Prower, and you will treat him with RESPECT!” Niles stomped back over to the crate to continue pulling stuff out.

“What about Steve?” Ariel asked. “Does his name have a funny story, too?”

“Indeed it does!” Steve replied before Mick could get a word in. “You see, it all started in 8th grade theater-”

“Oh right, you named yourself after your own OC,” Mick said with a snicker.

“Let me finish, mate!” Steve’s angry eyes immediately faded away when he looked away from Mick and back to Ariel. “We had to write a short play for a class project! And me and my group mates got this really funny idea for a King Arthur style quest story, but the main guy is just… an office worker. The most milquetoast, white bread guy you can imagine. And we decided to name him Steve! So like, what better name for me to go by than a guy who’s just, like, an average person doing a bunch of fun adventuring stuff?”

 “So, you can just… choose your name?” Ariel asked.

“Sometimes, yeah,” Mick said. “Hell, even if you’re not like us, people pick nicknames for themselves all the time!”

“Yeah! Link calls me Triple A sometimes!”

“Oh, that’s adorable!”

“Yeah, hehe. But I can just… pick my own name then?”

“Bloody oath! Names can be whatever you want them to be, kiddo.”

I wanted for a moment to see what my sister would say. She sat in thought for a moment, chin cupped. She looked as if this was the most important decision she could ever make. Arguably, picking a name was a very important decision. I shouldn’t have expected any less from her when she finally gave her answer.

“Arrietty!” she said happily, swinging her legs a bit over the edge of her seat. “Like from my favorite book!”

Mick chuckled as he ruffled her hair. “Then you can be Arrietty if you want!”

Meanwhile, Niles was still trying to pull stuff from the crate, now off the ground and hanging halfway over the edge of the crate to reach inside it.

“Oh, c’mon, why’s this so- you know what, screw it!” Niles leapt out of the crate and back on his feet before kicking the side of the crate as hard as he could. The entire box tumbled over from the force, falling onto its side as its contents tumbled out onto the stage.

“Alright, ground rules!” Mick said as he joined his brothers at the stage.

“Rule #1!” Went Niles. “You can take all the bottles and crap. Those are fair game.”

“Yeah, you can get a bunch of those at any art store from like 5¢ a piece.” Steve added.

“Rule #2!” Mick continued. “No pushing and shoving. Everyone’s to make a neat line, and we’ll hand you stuff WE think you’ll need as we see fit.”

“And if you’ve got a problem with it, you can shove a stick up your bum!” Steve blurted out. “And Rule #3!”

“Steve, that was it, mate, there aren’t any other rules,” Mick said.

“Not true! I’m making one right now!” He pointed at Miranda and I. “Rule #3 is you guys get first dibs on any magic stuff in the box!”

“Oh, uh, alright,” I said with a half smile.

And then we started with the item distribution. As I had expected, the Sullivans pulled me up to the box first. Literally. Mick took my wrist and dragged me over to the box while Niles was getting something put together. I first thought it to be one of those care packages, like a school bag a mom packs for her kid. I realized what it was when Niles addressed me.

“For you, hero!” He said, a slight mocking tone on the “hero” bit. The other two skull kids giggled. “THIS!” Niles held out something to me. I realized quickly it was a belt pouch. One of those ones you clip to your belt to keep stuff in. “Is an adventure pouch! It can hold up to 500 lbs of stuff, so feel free to stuff any items you find into this thing. We’ve packed it with the stuff you need for Staten Island already, so there’s about 20 pounds of space already taken up.”

“20 lbs??” I took the bag from him and felt it in my hands. It didn’t feel all too heavy. It was like all they’d put in it was a few rocks they’d found on a hiking trail or something. “Sure doesn’t feel like it.”

“Well duh! It’s MAGIC!” Steve explained. “Try and pull something out!”

I took a pause for a moment, looking between the skull kids and the bag before I flipped the flap open. I reached a hand inside, taken aback a bit by the sheer size of the inside of the bag. It was like fishing around in a bottomless pit. I couldn’t imagine how funny it was to watch as I went all the way up to my elbow looking for something to pull out. Then I felt something at the tip of my fingers, gently grabbing it and pulling it out.  I should’ve really paid more attention to the whole “magic” bit, but it still shocked me when I pulled a full shield out of the belt bag. One with a shiny surface and red edges.

    “Dang…”

    “YEAH! It’s bloody crazy!” Went Steve.

“And lemme see this!” Mick snatched something out of my school bag before I could react.

I let out a “HEY!” as Mick pulled my hookshot out of my bag and scuttled off with it. He giggled the whole way before stopping by the crate.

“None of this- none of THIS garbage.” He threw the device into the crate with a flick of the wrist. Mick then held both his hands behind him like a little gentleman, straightening himself out so he wasn’t standing in his goblin posture anymore. “Now then, get a load of THIS!”

And just like magic, he pulled his hands out from behind his back as he pointed another hookshot at me. At least, I thought it was a hookshot. Mick was holding it in the same way, and it was similarly shaped, but the pointy end was shaped more like those crane game claws than an arrow like the hookshot. Mick let out a short chuckle before handing it to me.

“THIS baby is a clawshot!” he explained as I took a hold of one of them to get the feel for it. “It’s like the hookshot, but with a much better grip. And they come in a pair!”

“Yeah but we hid the other one somewhere else,” Steve added.

“Yeah, what Stevie said,” Mick continued. “You get one for right now. The other one we already hid somewhere.”

“Again with the hiding crap!” Miranda groaned. “What, is this a game to you guys?”

“All I’m saying is the goddesses didn’t give everything to Link right at the start of each game, did they?” Mick asked. “They waited for him to do some challenges, fight some monsters and prove himself!”

“Besides, we hid it somewhere in the Empire State Building and we’re not going back over there,” Niles said with a nervous chuckle.

“So yeah, we’ve only got the one for you,” Steve said before gently pushing on my back to get me out of the way. “Now off you go, we gotta-”

    “Hey, hold up!” Miranda blurted out. “Don’t you have something else you need to give to him?”

    “Nah!”

    “Nope!”

    “I don’t rightly know what you’re talking about, M!”

    Miranda kept her eyes on Mick in particular. He had his hands behind his back like a kid trying to hide something from mom and dad. He was trying to play it off like he wasn’t being really suspicious. But Miranda wouldn’t stop staring.

    “Alright, FINE!” Mick groaned, pulling the item out from behind his back. It was the same little instrument Miranda had gotten really pissed about earlier, the Ocarina of Time. “Here! Not like it’ll work, though. We’ve tried!”

    “Yeah, I think he’s gotta learn the songs from someone else first!” Niles explained.

    “Fine by me!” Miranda passed the instrument to me, and I did the only thing I could think to do and put it away in the pouch.

    “Alright, NEXT!” Niles called out like an employee at a deli counter.

    “You don’t have to yell, I’m RIGHT here,” Miranda said as she floated over.

    “Right right right, uhhhhh we don’t have anything for you- NEXT!” Niles said it so quickly that Miranda didn’t even have time to respond. Not before Steve pulled her aside. I hadn’t paid enough attention to the conversation at the time. Perhaps I should’ve. If I did, I would’ve known what was in store for me in the Trial coming up.

    “Guys, what the hell-”

    “Shh!” Steve shushed her. “Here! We didn’t want blondie seeing it. Just be chill about it, alright?” Steve proceeded to sneak Miranda a knife. It was in a sheath, so it wasn’t immediately obvious what it was. Not until Miranda pulled it a little way out of the sheath and caught a glimpse of its blade: one that was pitch black, like it was carved from obsidian, with veins of dull orange coursing through it like the surface of a leaf.

    “You know what to do with that, right?” Steve asked.

    Miranda chuckled slyly. “Of course, you dingus.”

    Back at the crate, Niles continued to pass things to everyone. Anyone big enough to carry a bag ended up getting an adventure pouch of their own: Zelda, Mike, Garrett, Simon. All except for Vinny…

    “Whoa whoa, not you, lilly pilly!” Niles said.

    “What, why?!” He seemed genuinely pissed. “Everyone else got one!”

    “Firstly! Trust me, you’ll be able to get through Staten Island without the stuff they’ve got, you’re fine,” Niles told him.

    “Secondly, we ran out of Adventure Pouches,” Mick admitted.

    All Vinny could do was grumble under his breath. Whether that was because of the pouch or because he was called “lilly pilly” with no hesitation was anyone's guess.

    “Hey, so is anyone gonna take the heart thing this time around??” Navi asked, fluttering right by my shoulder. We looked to see the spot in the audience where Gleeok had fallen. You could tell where exactly that was because of the large area that was made up of nothing but collapsed and broken plush seats. In the middle of it floated another heart container, waiting patiently for one of us to pick it up.

    “I say M gets it!” Steve said, gently nudging Miranda toward the heart.

    “She did save your guys’ butts from a DRAGON!” Mick added.

    “Fine by me!” I said.

    “Alright, if you guys insist on it…” Miranda didn’t even need to move. Her ponytail shot out like one of those sticky hands you can get at arcades, grabbing onto the container before slinging back to her. “Done and done! Are we through with everything here?”

    “One moment!” Niles went digging around in the pile of stuff in the crate. “Arrietty! Come over here for a sec, I’ve got something for you!” Ariel didn’t have to be told twice before she ran over excitedly. “Any little adventurer is going to need the right tools for their adventure.” He pulled something out of the pile, sending things like bottles and rope tumbling. It was a telescope. A bright red one with bronze detailing and a pair of seagulls painted on it.

    “GASP! I love it!!” Ariel took a hold of the telescope as Niles handed it to her. “Thank you thank you THANK YOU!”

    “No problem, kiddo!” Niles ruffled her hair.

    “Alright, if that’s everything, we should head back to the Dragon’s Lair,” Zelda said, strapping her bag to her shoulder. “We need to get a good night’s rest and-”

    “WAIT! Before you go!” Steve called out. We all turned to see the young man holding one hand up with a finger raised in a “one more thing” kind of gesture, with the other hand grasping something. He was holding it like a stress ball, even though the item in his hand very much wasn’t made of the same material. “Blondie, CATCH!”

    Steve threw the thing at me like he was pitching a baseball. It was a miracle I was able to even react fast enough to catch the thing. I could feel it buzzing in my fingers, and opened my hand to see what it was. I was immediately greeted with the sight of a little brass beetle buzzing up into the air in front of me, its mechanical legs tucked underneath it as it hovered.

    <<This little dude is a beetle!>>

    The voice was most definitely Steve’s, but it came out of the little clockwork bug.

    “Like the one from Skyward Sword!” Steve said from the stage. I watched him lean into a mechanical bracelet on his wrist. <<Found it and suited it up so me and the boys could talk through it. Like a bluetooth speaker!>>

    “Oh, neat!” I watched as the beetle buzzed around before taking a seat on Ariel’s head, causing her to giggle. “So are you guys going to give us pointers or something?”

    <<NOPE!>> I heard three different voices giggle from the other end. The fact that Steve was the only one speaking into his own watch clued me into the fact that each Sullivan had their own. <<Just some musical cues to make this whole thing more immersive.>>

<<No fun in fighting a surprise monster with no boss music, right?>> Went Niles from his end.

<<Now skedaddle, you goons!>> Went the beetle as it zipped into the air and buzzed right beside my ear.

“Okay, alright, we’re going!” I said. “Don’t be too hasty about it!”

“Wait, Steve you knucklehead!” Went Mick. He hobbled over like a little goblin, clutching something under his arm as he made his way over to us. “You forgot to give them the thing!” He passed me whatever it was in his arms. It was a leatherbound book. One with a very simple indented design of an apple on the cover.

A cookbook.

    You know those days where you come home from school, or perhaps even a long day at work, and all you really feel like doing is plopping yourself down in a chair and staying there for at least an hour before even thinking of doing anything else? Yeah, that’s what it was like when we finally returned to the Dragon’s Lair.

    “Hey guys! Did you get the stuff back?” Bennet asked as he came to greet us at the door. We didn’t reply right away, with Zelda, Mike and Vinny plopping down on the beanbag chair. Garrett went face down on the carpet while Miranda and I plopped down at the table. Simon walked in, exhausted, and Ariel just happily walked up to Bennet.

    “I got a telescope!” she said.

    “Oh! That’s cool, that’s cool!” Bennet replied.

    “I’ll be in the bathroom,” Simon groaned. And he walked where you’d expect him to go.

    “Jeez, did the theater kids really put up that much of a fight?” Darius asked with a chuckle as I glanced a flash of light behind me. Fiona decided now was a good time to finally go physical after being a sword for quite a while.

    “Nah, it’s not that,” she said. “Because our luck is just THAT bad, a goddamn dragon showed up in the theater.”

    “Damn, which one?” That question from Bennet made my eyes go wide.

    I let out a groan. “Gleeok.”

    “Oh damn. Of all the Zelda dragons, they go for the one with more than one head.” Bennet chuckled.

    “Yeah, just our luck. But hey, we got a cookbook out of it at least,” I said, holding it up for the adults to see. Bennet took it in his hands and looked it over.

    “Please tell me that’s not all you got,” he said.

    “We got shields and rope and crap too,” Mike said, still laying on his back on the beanbag chair while the other kids nearby were still laying down like dead people. “And they gave Simon some clothes that actually fit him, but the shields and rope are the more important thing. They said we’d need them on Staten Island or something?”

    “Yeah, that sounds about right,” Bennet confirmed. He opened up the cookbook. “And this right here could be of some great help, too!”

    We were all jolted into a fight-or-flight state by a scream. Simon’s scream to be specific. The kind of scream a kid lets out when they suddenly notice something and don’t know how to react.

“Simon, are you okay!?” Mina called out as she went to the closed bathroom door. For a moment, I wasn’t sure why he had screamed in the first place. But after thinking about it, I soon had an idea.

“Oh, that’s right,” I got up and turned to the bathroom door. “You’re fine, Simon, Zoras are all smooth down there!”

“What?? No, that’s not why I’m freaking out!” He yelled back at me. “There’s a hand in the toilet!”

Record scratch. Um… what?

“Come again??” I asked.

“You heard me!” Simon shouted. “There’s a hand in the toilet!”

It was intriguing enough for Vinny to sit up from the beanbag chair. “Like, is it a severed hand, or…?”

“No, I don’t think so,” he said.

“It’s not hurting you, is it?!” Mina asked, halfway toward grabbing her lacrosse stick like a spear, ready to smack the crap out of something.

“No, not at all!” Simon assured us. “Just… could one of you come in here for a moment??”’

Most everyone was up on their feet and ready to head inside when Simon had opened the door. Lucky for us, he’d already changed into the clothes that the Sullivans had given him so he wasn’t stuck wearing a torn up wetsuit anymore. Even then, I wondered just how uncomfortable the wetsuit must’ve been for Simon to figure it better to wear an XXL sized pair of elephant patterned pajama pants and a t-shirt that read “Fish Want Me, Women Fear Me”.

“Okay so, is everything alright in here??” Fiona asked, half dumbfounded.

“Oh, sure, sure, everything’s alright,” Simon answered sarcastically. “Come and meet my friend, de toilet handje.” He opened the door all the way and gestured like a butler letting in guests to a fancy party. The only thing we were greeted upon walking inside was… well, you know what we saw. It was a hand, sticking up out of the toilet and feeling around the toilet seat. The lid was pushed back enough to stay up, and with the way the hand was feeling around, it was almost like it was trying to escape. It made me wonder if there was a creature attached to the hand, or if its arm just extended all the way down the pipe and into the sewer.

“Uhhhhh Bennet?” I turned toward where my boss was with Darius by the checkout counter.

“Yeah dude?” Bennet called back.

“There’s uh… there’s an arm coming out of the toilet and none of my store training prepared me for this.”

“... Is it trying to get OUT of the toilet??”

“No, it’s just kinda feeling around for something.”

“Ask if it needs anything. I think I might know what it needs.”

“Um, are you looking for something, hand… ghost… creature?” I asked. Never did I think I’d find myself talking to a toilet monster yet here we are.

“Pa-pa-paper?” We heard something moan from inside the plumbing, like a ghost left wandering an empty house looking for company.

“The hand is talking.” Navi said dryly.

“Okay, I think I know what this is.” Bennet opened up a drawer in the checkout desk, showing off a great view of his junk drawer full of paper clips, post-its, pens and pencils, all sorts of loose change, and various discarded receipts. And out of all of that, he pulled out a clump of ticket-like slips of paper before he passed them to Vinny. “Hand those to Simon, would ya?” Vinny didn’t have to be told twice before he swiftly passed them to me.

I then passed them to Simon. “I think you’re supposed to give these to it?”

Simon didn’t answer, instead swiftly handing the slips to the hand. It gingerly took them from him. They were Pizza Hut coupons.

“Oh, thank you! I’m saved!” And just as quickly as it had shown up, it was gone. The ghostly hand disappeared back into the toilet as if sucked under by a whirlpool. And we were just left to stand there in complete shock. There’s a lot of things we’ve had to deal with over the course of all this: monsters showing up at school, having to control weird magic we’ve been stuck with, some of us drastically changing appearance out of nowhere, and now we couldn’t even use the bathroom in peace. And I guess this last little fiasco with the toilet ghost is what made Simon finally snap…

“That’s it! I’m done!” He walked out of the bathroom and toward where he had his stuff by the beanbag chair. “I thought this would all be rather fun and adventure-y or whatever, but this is too much for me!”

“Simon, what’re you-??”

“Mina, I’m sorry,” he said, cutting his sister off. “I’ve rescued you, so I’ve no more to do here. I was nearly eaten by a giant squid monster, I got turned into a 9 foot tall shark man, and I nearly got turned into smoked salmon by a DRAGON.” He let out an aggravated huff. Finally, he just got to the point. “The first chance I get, I’m going home!”

The store went silent. Lots of us just looked at each other, trying to see if someone had anything to add. Trying to see if someone had anything to say to him, perhaps to reassure him that everything would be fine and he didn’t need to leave just yet. But we couldn’t. Simon was right. Of all the people here, he’d probably been dealing with the most bs out of all of us. Most every one of us was at least an adult, while Simon, no matter how capable he was of fighting, no matter how much of an asset he was in all this… he was still just a kid.

In all our confusion, all our waiting to try and find something to say, Mina had been the one to break the silence.

“Well… I need to bring George back home soon anyways,” she said. She glanced over at her poor little axolotl, who in the chaos of all this had to be housed in a makeshift tank. Keyword “makeshift”, because his set up was just brackish water in one of those plastic storage bins with a flower pot for a cave. It definitely wasn’t meant to be a permanent setup.

“Perhaps when I bring him back home,” Mina continued. “You can go with me and return home with him.”

“And I’ll go with you!” Zelda stepped closer to the siblings from where she’d been standing idley. “I don’t know how safe it would be for you to go walking around now that we’ve rescued you, Mina. I can offer a little extra protection alongside you guys.”

“I’ll go, too!” I blurted out, but I came to a stop mid step when Bennet raised a hand.

“Not so fast, Lincoln,” he said, one hand raised while holding open the cookbook in the other. “There’s something very important I’ll need you and the rest of the kids to do tomorrow before you set out for Staten Island.” He turned the book around for us all to see, his pointer finger resting on one particular image in the middle of the page. It was an illustration of a butterfly one with yellow and green wings. We all looked up at Bennet with raised eyebrows and varying degrees of confusion on our faces.

“You’re joking, right?” asked Mike.

“Nope!” Bennet took the book back. “Considering the next thing you’ll be dealing with is called the Trial of Thunder , we can safely assume there’s lightning involved.”

“What does that have to do with the butterflies??” Vinny asked.

“Can’t you read it?” Miranda asked as she floated up close to the book. “It says you can throw these things into a crockpot with monster bits and it makes a potion or something!”

“A potion that grants resistance to lightning ,” Bennet clarified. “And Link, you said your Slate has a bunch of monster parts stored in it, right?”

“Uh, yeah, it’s been just kinda collecting them while we’ve been fighting stuff,” I said, looking through the tabs on my switch to try and find the inventory window. “Is there any specific ‘monster bits’ we need for it?”

“No, I’m pretty sure you can just throw whatever into the pot with the butterflies,” he said. “Just don’t put any regular food in it with them.”

“Okay, so we can put the bugs and monster parts together, but not actual edible food??” Garrett asked. “How does that work??”

“Also, I’m just gonna bring this up since no one else has,” Navi said, fluttering up off of my shoulder and into the air where the others could see her. “But don’t butterflies in New York hibernate in March? You know, the month it is right now ?”

“First of all, it’s April now,” Fiona pointed out to her. “Second of all, we’ve been fighting bokoblins and dragons using all sorts of weird magic that we’ve developed out of nowhere, and you’re gonna question whether or not butterflies might show up a few months early in July??”

Navi looked as if she wanted to open her mouth to say something, but ultimately couldn’t find the words. She just let out a little “Hmph!” and sat back down on my shoulder.

“The only thing is I don’t wanna have to go back to Central Park,” Fiona grumbled.

“We don’t have to!” I said. I turned to Bennet. “There’s that park a short walk from here, isn’t there?”

Bennet nodded his head. “Yeah, Bowne Park! It’s got enough greenery and stuff to justify butterflies hanging out there.”

“Oh! That’s the one with the big duck pond, right?” Ariel asked excitedly.

“Yep, that’s it!” I answered. “You wanna come with me so you can look at the ducks?”

“AND catch butterflies!” she replied. “I’m not gonna let you have all the fun.”

“Sounds good to me!” I said.

“Alright, let’s hammer out the rest of this tomorrow,” Bennet said, very obviously trying to usher us all off to bed as soon as possible. “It’s getting late, you all just fought a DRAGON for god’s sake, and you’re gonna need all the energy you can get for tomorrow.”

We didn’t need any more convincing. He could’ve just stopped at the bit about the dragon and we all would’ve understood. And just like the night before, we all turned in for the night to try and sleep as well as we could in the comic book shop.

    Bzzt! Bzzt!

The buzz of Zelda’s cell phone slowly drummed her awake. She was barely able to get some shut eye when it happened, and she groggily picked up the device she’d left to charge right next to her as it kept buzzing. Someone was calling her. And unfortunately for her, the caller ID told her exactly who it was.

Phillip Masters. Her dad .

“Ah crap…”

She said it quietly enough that it didn’t wake anyone else in the shop. She knew she’d have to take this. If she didn’t, he’d just keep trying to ring her phone. She shuffled out from under the blanket she’d been curled up in and made her way to the back door of the shop so she could talk somewhere away from everywhere else. The last thing she needed was someone to overhear whatever she was about to talk to her father about this time. Unluckily for her, that didn’t happen. After all, Navi was a fairly light sleeper.

Whether that was her habits keeping true or it was a byproduct of her small size and thus increased anxiety about the world around her, it was what led to her groggily waking up as she heard frantic but careful footsteps heading toward the back door. She lifted her head just enough to spot the source: her best friend, clutching a buzzing phone in her hands. Navi could put two and two together. And knowing Zelda and how tense situations can lead to equally tense conversations with her dad, she figured the best thing to do was to follow.

It wasn’t easy to be sneaky when you glowed as brightly as a lightbulb. Luckily for Navi, her wings were rather quiet when she wasn’t fluttering right beside someone, and she’d figured out how to keep her light dim by controlling her breathing. As long as she kept herself calm, she’d barely be as bright as the reflective markings on a street sign. That was the only way she was able to keep herself hidden enough to sneak out the back door right after Zelda. And she kept herself hidden right by one of the air conditioning boxes on the side of the building, hiding the side opposite of Zelda. It was the perfect place to hear whatever her friend was about to get into…

“Zelda, where are you? I thought you’d be home tonight!” Phillip fretted. Both girls were used to hearing that tone of voice any time Zelda’s father asked about when she’d be coming home from anything . 

“I know, I know, I just…” Zelda twirled her hair nervously around her finger. “I’m staying at Link’s house another night, alright?”

“For what reason??”

“Things are still chaotic, dad, I don’t feel safe enough to-”

“That’s nonsense!” She couldn’t help but imagine her dad waving his hand around like he was shooing away a fly. “It’s much safer now than it was yesterday. People have figured out how these weird critters are going about. If you travel at night, they’ll be asleep!”

“Okay, well, I’ve just also been through a lot today,” Zelda tried to deceive. “I just don’t think I should be making my way over to Brooklyn right now. Besides, haven’t you seen all those viral videos going around? If anything, those short little pig looking ones seem to be more crepuscular.”

“Crepuscu… what??”

“Awake at dawn and dusk,” Zelda clarified. “They’ve still awake right now, and if I wait for them to just fall asleep, then I’LL be tired.”

“Well, personally, I haven’t actually seen any wandering around the neighborhood,” Phillip told her. “So hopefully that makes you feel safer about trying to make the trek over.”

“Even if I did feel comfortable, taking the subway at this time of night would be a nearly 2 hours trip, dad,” she tried to reason with him, looking as if she were about to pull her hair out. “I know you want me home as soon as possible, but I feel like it’d be safer for me to just stay here another night and try to make my way over tomorrow.”

“Sweetie, I love you, but I don’t trust my gut enough to let that slide.” Zelda could hear shuffling from the other end, like he was getting up out of a bed or off a couch. “ I’ll make the drive over to the Matheson house and pick you up from there.”

“No, don’t! I’m not there!”

The other end went silent as it dawned on Zelda what she’d said. Her blood ran cold and her eyes shot open. Perhaps it was the direness of the situation, or her anxiety at his reaction, or perhaps both mixed together in some awful way. Either way, Zelda ended up saying something she’d regret in the moment but come to appreciate saying later on. And for now, she’d just have to run with it.

“What do you mean?” asked her dad.

“I mean, I’m still in Queens!” she said, trying to salvage the situation. “I’m still perfectly safe! I’m just… not at Link’s house.”

“So you’re not with Link?”

“No, I’m with him! Just not at his house.”

“Zelda, you’re not in any danger, are you?”

“No, of course not!”

“Then why are you two not at his house??”

“A lot of crazy stuff has happened, dad, I don’t think you’d understand!”

“Zelda, I’m your father. Don’t you trust me?”

Zelda hated whenever he’d say that. She always felt like she could answer either way. She wanted to trust him. Considering everything that was going on, she felt she could trust her dad to have her best interests at heart. He was just so worried about her returning home because he worried for her safety. Yeah, that was it. Taking that into account… Zelda figured she could tell him.

“Alright, Dad, alright,” she let out a sigh. “This may sound totally crazy, but Link and I… we figured out what’s causing all this.”

“What do you mean by ‘this’?” he asked.

“The whole magic thing! With the monsters and all the magic and all those people that have to get registered with all the first responders for pointed ears and fins and rocks coming out of their shoulders.”

She heard her father sigh on the other end. “Zelda, I love you, but that sounds like nonsense. No one else has figured out what’s going on, how could two teenagers-”

“Dad, just stop for a moment and let me finish explaining,” Zelda pleaded. “Do you remember those games… the ones Ivy from my old Martial Arts class would make jokes about?”

“Yes, the ones she said had your name in them.”

“Well…” she paused as she tried to think of the best way to put it. “God, how do I say this? Look, I don’t know how to put it, but we think this whole magical debacle is related to… that.”

She could almost hear her father’s confused blinking on the other end. “Are you honestly trying to tell me that New York City has turned into a monster-ridden fantasy land because of video games??”

“Yes! Honestly, yes! We’ve been doing some reading, and there’s too many things that line up with what’s happening. All the monsters looking like the moblins and keese, someone we met looks like the fish people from the console games, this dragon we found in Central Park-”

“There’s a dragon in Central Park?!”

“Well, not anymore, we took care of it!” Like that would calm his nerves, Zelda thought. “That’s not the point, though! The point is, my name is Zelda, my best friend’s name is Link, my other best friend’s name is NAVI, all this fits together way too well for it to be just some coincidence, doesn’t it??”

Her father went quiet again. And then he let out a loud sigh, like he was trying to make sure the phone picked it up for Zelda to hear.

“Honey, I think all this madness going on in the world has stressed you out way too much,” he reasoned. “Just let me know where you are and I’ll come and-”

“Dad, no, I’m serious!” Zelda aggressively whispered back, trying to keep her voice down so she didn’t alert anyone in the store. “Link and I have this figured out, he’s the only kid that can stop all this, and I’m not leaving him until we can set this all right!”

“That’s absolutely ridiculous!” her father shot back. “If he thinks he’s the only one who can solve all this, then just let HIM solve it all!

“Oh sure, any excuse for you to get me away from my best friend of 8 years, isn’t that right?”

“I’m not saying that, I’m just saying-”

“Don’t lie to me, dad,” Zelda snapped back, fed up with this whole conversation and just wanting to end it and go back to bed. “We both know what you meant last night when you said you didn’t trust ‘his kind’ to behave around me. If you’re going to keep me away from my Jewish friend, at least be straight with me about it.”

There was silence for a moment. Zelda had been waiting. Waiting for her dad to try and retaliate, scold her, something! But the silence allowed her to do something else: to realize just what she’d said to him. Never had she really spoken back to him like that, and she wanted to get another word in before he decided to make that even more obvious.

“Dad, I love you,” she began, “but I also care about my friend’s wellbeing. I’m not going to leave him without support during all this… craziness! I’m going to stay and help him, however long that’ll take. I’ll be safe, I’ll be fine, and if you love me, you’ll trust me on that.” There was another pause. Zelda waited to see if he would say anything, but the other end of the line was just silent. She let out a sigh. “I love you dad.”

Click .

Zelda hung up soon after, tucking her phone away in her jacket pocket. The moment she turned to head back inside, a blue flash of light suddenly zipped in front of her face.

“Damn, I didn’t think you had it in you, Zed!” Navi blurted out.

“... Navi, how long have you been out here?”

“Long enough,” she said slyly. “God, that whole thing sounded a bit heated.”

“Yeah, just…” Zelda paused as she looked for words to string together. For something to say. But instead, the whole situation suddenly came down on her like a tidal wave. “... god, I can’t believe I just did that. I can’t believe I just did that. ”

“Zed, calm down, you stood up to your dad!” She gave her a little pat on Zelda’s shoulder, still staying airborne. “You did what you had to so he wouldn’t, like… kidnap you.”

“You don’t know my dad,” Zelda said with a nervous chuckle. “He’s probably still going to come looking for me, isn’t he?”

“Oh shoot, you’re right, that’s definitely something your dad would do.” Navi’s look of pride and triumph faded in an instant upon realizing that. Zelda let out an audible sigh, cupping the sides of her face as she tried to think this over.

“Sighhhhhhokayokayokayokay, this is fine…” she took her hands off her face. “Well… my dad doesn’t know about the ears. And he doesn't know the games like I do.” She turned to her fairy friend. “Navi, do you think you could come with me tomorrow when I go to escort the Van Der Zee’s home?”

“Yeah, I was gonna do that anyways, Dingus,” Navi said with a chuckle. “Why?”

“Well, you know stuff about makeup and… hair.” A little grin came to Zelda’s face. The kind that shows up when you remember something funny you heard earlier. “Remember in middle school when you wanted blue streaks and-”

“Listen LISTEN!” Navi was so close to Zelda’s face that she could’ve touched her nose. “All the other kids were doing their hair in fun colors! Ain’t my fault I didn’t know to bleach it first.”

Zelda couldn’t help but laugh at that. “Well, either way, do you… do you think you could help me put together a disguise or something tomorrow?”

“Yeah, I’m down!” Navi fluttered around excitedly. She finally sat back down on Zelda’s shoulder as they began to make their way back inside to head back to bed. “No worries, Zed. We’ve got all the time in the world tomorrow for that!”

    La Tourette Park was one of the park’s situated along the Staten Island Greenbelt. The Greenbelt was one of the only things Uma liked about Staten Island. She always liked hiking. Sure, you could technically hike anywhere in New York City, but aside from the Greenbelt and the Jamaica Bay reserve south of where she lived, she couldn’t think of many other places in the City where you could spot wild birds and frogs living life and not trying to pry open a trash can to get food. There was one cool thing La Tourette Park had over Jamaica Bay, and that was the Heyerdahl ruins.

    She didn’t remember the full story about them. Just that someone a long time ago had started on building a vineyard, but they could only get the foundation and front steps done before the whole construction project was called off. Uma couldn’t help but wonder what could have been, but was also very glad that the project never came to fruition. She couldn’t imagine all these beautiful forests, ponds and rivers as just a wide field of grapes. A whole wide area of wildlife, and someone thought only of how they could use it to make wine.

Uma had spent less time at the Greenbelt, mostly on account of how far away it was from Queens. But as she sat trapped underground, in an old wine cellar she didn’t remember being there under the Heyerdahl ruins, she remembered one of the last times she’d been to the Greenbelt. It was a few months back, when Mike had surprised her with a full three day camping trip for her birthday. It was one of the nicest, most thoughtful things he’d ever done for her, and she’s figured ever since then that she’d save trips to the Greenbelt for special occasions. Mike was always thoughtful like that. That and she appreciated that he was athletic enough to keep up with her during hikes.

But all that was in the past now. She’d been in the Greenbelt for two days now. La Tourette park was nothing more than a desertous wasteland, filled with nothing but wide open areas full of sand and tall rocks. The trees were gone. So were most of the animals. She remembered seeing the lake intact still, but now it was more of an oasis in the vast sea of sand than a place to watch the water for fun. It’s not like she could watch the water anyways. She couldn’t watch anything . The place she was stuck in didn’t have any windows anyways.

The Heyerdahl ruins had gone from a stone foundation and stairs to a much larger thing. A statue of sorts, carved in the likeness of an athletic woman. She’d heard her captors call it a desert colossus, whatever that meant. It was surrounded by some of the same tall rocks that she’d seen scattered around the park like abandoned towers. These ones served as more of a frame for the statue than just scattered decorations for the wide open sandy areas. And beneath this statue that now sat upon the half finished foundation of the ruins, there was a wine cellar.

It was something Uma definitely didn’t remember being there before all this magic stuff had happened, and she couldn’t help but wonder if someone had made this just for her. It not only had weaponry and other such means of martial protection down there, but it also seemed to be built in just the right way to keep her from using any of them to try and break out. She’d tried it all: using the end of a spear to break open the door like a crowbar, trying to cut down the door with a sword(she figured she could do it like Jack Nichelson in The Shining if she swun hard enough), holding up a shield to try and bash the door down with brute strength, and enough other ideas that by the time she’d given up, the inside of the wine cellar doors looked like an enraged lion had tried to claw its way out. Today was her second attempt to try and get the door open and get out, and she still failed.

Lucky for Uma, despite the lack of windows, there were more than enough cracks in the ceiling for her to see the sky. They weren’t big enough for her to get out - and just like with the door, she’d tried plenty of times to try and break them open wide enough to slip through - but they were big enough to let the light in. And the moon was just enough of a sliver for moonlight to come trickling in. Uma always took moments like these to just… sit. Just sit and relax and try to rest and regain her strength. That’s what she was doing then, sitting under the crack in the ceiling, in the pale moonlight, seated on a pillow she’d dragged off of the one bed down there she could find.

It always got cold down there at night. One might chalk that up to the desert functioning like deserts do, getting freezing cold at night, but throwing sand all over the place shouldn’t do that, right? But there was magic at play, too, so La Tourette Park very well could’ve started getting colder at night just because the magic said so. Either way, Uma found herself on this night and the night before cupping her hands together, blowing hot breath on them and rubbing them together to try and keep them warm.

That’s when she felt the room suddenly warm up. A flash of light far off in the room indicated the lighting of an old light fixture left fallen on the ground. It was one of those old metal ones, meant to hold candles instead of lightbulbs. And it’s candles lighting up all by themselves only meant one thing…

“Didn’t I tell you guys to piss off?” Uma asked the room. She heard crackling, like the kind water makes when it freezes and expands. She looked over to see a layer of ice creep over toward her a bit before a small basket slid across its surface, stopping right beside her.

    “Don’t be ridiculous!” an old woman chattered.

    “You would be of no use to Ganondorf if you were left to languish down here!” another added. Uma had pulled open the basket to find that it was full of food. Most of it was raw vegetables and well done meat, stuffed alongside a few large plastic bottles of water. She didn’t waste time taking the bits of cooked meat to have for a late dinner.

    Uma had met both of these women yesterday, and the fact that they sounded like they were everywhere in the room at once was telling. She wasn’t sure who they were, but she knew what they were. They were people from somewhere else, and they were made of the same stuff that had taken over the AP History teacher. But why had no bodies, instead deciding to linger about the wine cellar as a pair of spirits. Invisible apparitions if you will, ones that had nothing better to do than nag at her and make sure she wasn’t “misbehaving”.

    “I’m not keeping myself fed to please Ganon-dork or whatever his name is,” she scoffed. “Whether Mike comes for me or not, I’m only eating so I can outrun whatever’s out there when I break out of here.”

    FWOOSH!

    Uma had been about to bite down on the meat when it suddenly caught fire in her hands. She let out a cry of alarm and stamped it out with her foot while the disembodied old crones laughed hysterically.

    “Oh, you must still believe that boy is coming to save you!” one of them chuckled.

    “Oh, little Ganny told us all about him! The stupid little coward boy!” the other added.

    “He’s a mean little boy, too, isn’t he?”

    “Oh, yes! He steals school work from some other boys, doesn’t he?”

    “Yes yes, to copy off of for his own homework!”

    “Yes, what kind of boyfriend would do that?”

    He was still doing that? Uma had talked plenty of times with him about that. Telling him to just suck it up and ask them for help instead of stealing worksheets from them. How could he keep doing that when he knew how much she didn’t like him doing it?

    No! She had to put those thoughts aside for a moment. She knew what these two women were trying to do, and it made her angry inside. That anger startled to crackle inside her as she got up to pace and tried to calm down, but to no avail. It was one thing one of the women said that made her burst:

    “With everything going on, I’d wager to guess he’s forgotten about you.”

    Uma turned on her heel and yelled an infuriated “SHUT UP!” at no one. Thunder roared in the sky as a streak of lightning shot down through the crack in the ceiling, striking the ground right beside where she had once been sitting. The strike shook the room like an earthquake, but Uma didn’t falter.

    “Goodness, what a sensitive you lady,” one of the crones scoffed under her breath.

    “Shut your mouth! Both of you!” Uma growled at them. “I know Mike better than the two of you. You haven’t even been in this world for 2 days! I don’t care if you’re magic or whatever, I know MY boyfriend best, and I know he’ll stop at nothing to find me.”

    Uma was quick to pick up the basket of food and walk away, going back to the little bed set up on what used to be a shelf full of wine bottles. She started to pull herself under the covers while the two women simply… laughed again. Those awful, cackling laughs.

    “Of course, of course,” went one of them. “The nice old ladies who were kind enough to bring you food every day so far know NOTHING!”

    “You know, the other guardians aren’t bringing their captives food,” the other added. “They’re making your PE teacher eat rocks!”

    “So really, we have no obligation to give you food down here. Not even a bed to sleep on. And yet we do! Doesn’t that say something?”

    “When your captors care more for you than that so-called boyfriend of yours?”

    “Right now he’s taken 2 days to come to your rescue. Soon it’ll be 3, then 4, then 5, maybe even a week!”

    “But he probably has more important things to worry about, don’t you think? Things that are more important than you, little lady.”

    Uma didn’t say anything, trying to ignore their words. She didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of a reaction. Instead she just laid there, their jeering and chattering fading into white noise as she tried to go to sleep. Things were hectic, but she knew Mike didn’t forget about her. He’d never forget about her, right? She was just stuck in the middle of a desert is all. He just needed some more time to get there.

    He had all the time in the world.

    Sunday morning started with the group splitting up to go their separate ways. They’d made a plan in the shop right before, figuring out where to go and what to gather before they make the trek out to the Trial of Thunder. The Mathesons - Link, Fiona and Ariel - had decided to head to Bowne Park to look for butterflies and flowers. Garrett, Miranda, Vinny and Mike were all heading together to some baseball field a ways away from the park. Mike had proposed that idea after finding some online news article about a bunch of wild mushrooms suddenly springing up in the field. Bennet had recognized them, so that was probably a good sign, right? Either way, both groups had taken pictures of plenty of pages from the bookbook to make sure they could identify anything they came across.

    That just left Zelda, Navi and the Van Der Zees. Darius was going with them as well, just to make sure they were all safe. If there was anything a couple of kids who were suddenly much more clumsy on land could use, it was the man made of rocks with the strength to bench press a school bus. But on their way out, they encountered a problem…

    “DON’T GO!” Simon was suddenly hugged around the legs, looking down to see a very upset little Ariel clutching the fabric of his sweatpants as she tried to hang on as tight as possible. Ariel was worried if she let go, he might disappear. “Please don’t go, Simon!”

    “Schatje, don’t cry,” Simon kneeled down to meet her gaze, although he didn’t quite get there. He got down on his hands and knees, which made the teary eye little girl giggle, even for a moment. “I’m not going to be far. I’ll just be back at my house over by the beach. I promise I’ll make it up to you by… well, I’ll bring you anything you want next time I see you?”

    “Like a little shark?” she asked.

    “Yes, sure! We’ll go with a little toy shark then.” He said with a chuckle.

    That was the last little conversation they had before he said his goodbyes and the group went off toward the Van Der Zee house.

To be extra safe, they all agree it would be best to take the subway to the Van Der Zees. Not because it was particularly unsafe to walk, but because the Van Der Zee house was in Howard Beach, which was a three hour walk from the Dragon’s Lair.

    Sitting on the train as it went on its way toward Howard Beach… wasn’t tense, per say, but there was some kind of feeling hanging in the air. Call it what you wish, but Mina and Simon felt the best word to describe it was anxiety. Anxious at what their parents would do, what they’d say. Would they even recognize them when they showed up? That’s when Mina realized, right, they don’t know they’re showing up! Mina was quick to resolve this.

    “Simon, do you have a phone on you?” she asked.

    Simon shook his head with a frown.

    “I have mine!” Darius said. He passed it over to Mina as she went straight for the keypad and started dialing. Even though she never physically hesitated, never slowed down or stalled in typing in the number, Simon still knew his sister well enough to know that she was stressed and nervous. He put a hand around her shoulder to comfort her as he heard the phone pick up on the other end.

    “Hello, Mr. McKay? Is something wrong?”

    Hearing her mother’s voice nearly brought tears to Mina’s eyes. “Mama, it’s me. It’s Mina.”

    “OH! MINA! MIJN VISJE, IT’S YOU!!” Their mother sounded absolutely ecstatic. Who wouldn’t be in her situation?

    “Mina? IS MINA ON THE PHONE?!” Their father piped up on the other end, too.

    “It’s her, Diederick!” went their Mother. “She’s alright!”

    “Yes, it’s me, and I’m safe!” she said happily. “But, how did you know?”

    There was a pause on the other end. “Know what, liefje?” asked their mother.

    “You called me en visje.”

    “Yes, like your birthmark, silly. It’s shaped a little like one of those rounded goldfish.”

    “Right, right, um-”

    “Mom, it’s me, Simon!” He butted into the conversation, noticing how uncomfortable Mina was becoming.

    “Hallo, Simon! We’re glad you’re both safe!” their mother said happily.

    “Yes, we’re glad you’re safe as well!” Simon replied. “Listen, we’re coming home right now, but we… well… we both don’t look like ourselves right now, but please don’t be alarmed.”

    “Oh, of course not, you two!” Their mother assured them. “Why would I be scared of my own children?”

    “It’s not like you could turn out looking worse than me, after all,” went their father. He gave a hearty laugh afterwards, which only served to confuse the two kids on the subway. Then it clicked in Simon’s head.

    “Oooh, right! That’s right!” He turned to his sister. “Papa’s appearance changed, too! Mom told me!”

    “It did??” Mina looked back at the phone as if looking at a person. “Well, we’ll just have to see when we get there, then.”

    Simon chuckled. “Indeed we shall!” Simon couldn’t stop wondering about it, though. Surely their dad didn’t end up taller than him, right? Simon was well over 8 feet tall, so if dad was taller… that would be an issue. He didn’t have much more time to wonder before they all felt it: the characteristic g-force pulling back on them as the subway slowed and came to a stop in the station.

    Simon and Mina were that much closer to home.

    Howard Beach was a neighborhood right by the water. After all, having “beach” in the name would connote such a thing. Lots of homes by the water, and there was even a bit of an inlet right beside the freeway(the one that eventually turned into a bridge to cross over Jamaica Bay). For that reason, a lot of homes along the water also had their own boats. From big yachts to little duffy boats, most everyone had something there. Granted, he never saw anything quite as big and fancy as Mr. Beckett’s boat back in Coney Island, but these ones were nothing to sneeze at, either. The Van Der Zee house was one such house by the water.

    Simon knew it well. It’s the closest house to the water, right where 95th street conjoined with 165th avenue. Him and Mina had plenty of memories crossing the street there to get to the little pathway leading down toward the sand. It was a nice place to swim and have fun in the sun. But they didn’t have time to go down to the beach and go swimming. Mina needed to go home, and the little axolotl she had inside his little carrying case - a little tupperware-like container that Mina would bring George to the vet in - was proof enough of that.

    “Would you like us to go up there with you?” Zelda asked Mina as she came to the sidewalk in front of the house. Mina didn’t reply, simply nodding her head. Zelda took her arm as they both walked up, with Coach McKay lumbering behind them for extra support. They were all making their way up to the front door. All except…

    “Whoa, hey hey hey, guys stop for a sec-” Navi fluttered up from Zelda’s jacket hood, buzzing through the air before flitting over to where a certain someone was in the middle of sitting down in front of the garage door. “Simon, bud, what’re you doing? Don’t you wanna say hi to your folks?”

    “I do, I do, I just… want to ease them into all this ,” he gestured to himself. “Just so they don’t freak out.”

    “Simon, you heard them over the phone, too,” Mina said with a half smile. “I’m sure they’ll be fine.”

    “Easy for you to say.” he playfully scoffed. “You didn’t turn into a 9 foot tall shark man!”

    “You’re… right .” She stopped talking right there.

    “Let’s just knock on the door then and wait to see what happens,” Navi suggested as she fluttered back over.

Darius was about to knock, but Mina raised her hand to stop him from doing so. “Please, let me…”

Everyone obliged her. Mina wrapped her knuckles on the door four or five times before she waited. Every second she stood in front of that closed door felt like an eternity. She wasn’t sure what she was anticipating, but it didn’t feel good. Her anxiety soon melted away when the front door finally opened, slowly and carefully as an older woman peaked through the crack between the door and its frame.

“Hallo?”

Mina couldn’t help but look tearfully on as her mother fully opened the door, looking upon the group on her doorstep in shock. Darius was the first to speak.

“Adrie, I know it’s a lot to take in,” he started, “and there’s a lot to explain, but the important bit is-”

“MINA!” Adrie didn’t wait for Darius to finish, simply throwing her arms around Mina. “Oh, mijn visje, I’m so glad you’re safe!” Mina was stuck standing there, half in shock from just how much her mother was joyfully sobbing over her shoulder.

Mina hugged her back gently. “I’m glad to be home, mama.”

“Do you need a moment with her, Mrs. Van Der Zee?” Zelda asked, trying her best to be polite. She didn’t wish to awkwardly stand near what was no doubt a very tearful reunion.

“No, you’re alright, dear,” Adrie assured, wiping her eyes with one hand. “But, wait…” She looked around at the others for a moment. “Wasn’t Simon with you?”

Mina looked as if she were right about to explain where he was before Simon blurted out, “I’m here, mama!”

Simon suddenly stepped out from where he’d been hiding by the garage door. He was so tall that he had to duck to fit under the awning above the porch. The expression on Adrie’s face wasn’t the same one she’d had before, when she’d first seen Mina. She had a hand over her mouth, less in an overly shocked way like some people do, and more in a calm and somber “oh goodness” kind of way. Everyone was silent for a moment as Simon stood there, hunched over under the awning, looking like he’d made a grave mistake stepping into her sight. Adrie simply reached a hand out to touch his face. And he felt… smooth. Smoother than she would’ve guessed.

“Oh Simon, Mina…” Adrie took a pause before a little chuckle escaped her and she smiled. “Did I ever tell you two that red is one of my favorite colors?”

There was something about their mother’s characteristic corny yet heartfelt comment that made all their nervousness and anxiety melt away in an instant. Darius, Zelda and Navi simply stood back and watched as Simon and Mina each laughed a little.

“That’s not right,” Simon said, half laughing and half talking. “Your favorite color is blue.”

“I said one of my favorites,” she clarified. “Can’t your mother have more than one color she likes?” She chuckled with them as she pulled the two in for a little handhold. “Oh, but you two, you’re both pretty little fish, just like your father.”

The siblings smiled at their mother’s reassuring compliment… until those last few words sunk in. “Just like father??” 

    The siblings didn’t get an answer from their mother. She was right about to explain when they heard a creaking. Simon knew what that was. One of the windows overlooking the lawn had squeaky hinges that their father always procrastinated on getting fixed up. And Simon looked over at that same window just in time to watch it open before a rather large fish-like hand stuck out and waved to them.

    “Hallo, you two!”

    That’s when it hit them.

    “Oh! Hello, pa!” Simon waved excitedly, not really taking into account the whole “waving out the window” thing, despite the door being right there.

    Darius was the one to bring it up. “Is Diederick-”

    “He’s a fish too, yes,” Adrie confirmed.

    “Zora!” Simon corrected. “Lincoln figured out what the fish people are called. They’re zoras!”

    “Well, then yes, that’s what I am right now!” Diederick said from inside. “And from the looks of it, I’ve gotten taller just like Simon.”

    “So tall that yooooou’re stuck in the house?” Mina asked, an eyebrow raised.

    Diedrick let out a hearty chuckle. It was the same chuckle that they were used to hearing after he’d made or heard a particularly hilarious joke. And then he sulked a bit in the window.

    “ Yes .”

    To say that Diederick Van Der Zee had gotten taller as a result of the Tolkeining phenomenon was a gross understatement.

    He wasn’t sure how it happened, really. Perhaps it was better that no one knew how it happened. All anyone needed to know is that he was lucky to have a roof tall enough to accommodate him, a table cloth to tie around his waist, and enough pillows to make a little pile on the floor for him to sit on since he didn’t trust himself to sit on the couch.

    The others were seated on the sofa(aside from Mina, who had gone up stairs to her room to get George acclimated in his tank again), and Adrie had insisted on getting them something to eat. She hadn’t been sure when the last time was that they had all eaten something proper, after all! Darius had to politely decline and try to scoot around the fact that he could really only stomach actual rocks, Simon had been content to just have cheese and jam on toast, and Zelda insisted on at least helping her with her own food. And so there they were, all gathered on the couch as Simon explained just what they had been up to in the last couple of days…

    “And that’s when Link bravely split off from the rest of the group so that Mina, Zelda and Navi could make it back to the safety of the boat,” he told them. “But soon, Link was knocked unconscious!”

    “Goodness gracious!” Adrie covered her mouth.

    “And that’s when I leapt in!” he made a motion in his hands like someone diving into the water like a dolphin. “I grabbed onto him, and tried to swim us both back to the boat, and that’s when it appeared! A massive squid, with a current that could swallow a dinghy whole! And it nearly swallowed Link and I before I felled it with my spear!”

    “Where did you get a spear??” Diederick asked, slightly concerned.

    “From the fishing boat! He had a few extras for his spearfishing guns,” Simon explained.

    “And after you defeat it, that’s when…” Zelda trailed off, vaguely gesturing to Simon’s whole self. Mina had come back down the stairs just in time for this part.

    “Right, yeah,” he said, a little less enthusiastic and a little more nervously. “I got my magic… kinda… just like the others!” His smile faded into a scared frown as he played with the ends of the fins framing his face. “And that’s when I found out I was going to be stuck looking like this until all this stuff gets fixed. I think Mina felt the same, too.”

    “No no, it’s alright,” Mina assured as she sat on the other side of their mother. “I’ve already gotten used to all this.”

    “Just a moment ago, you were worried how mama would react to seeing you all fishy!” Simon contradicted.

    “Well, so were you!” Mina shot back.

    “Calm down a moment, both of you,” Adrie scolded them.

The two of them shut their mouths at their mother’s words. Adrie was not the kind of woman to sound angry very often, but when she did, the ground would shake. It was like releasing a kraken, or some other similarly dangerous legendary creature. Foolishly, Mina and Simon worried that they might be in trouble. The room was silent for a moment before she let out an audible sigh.

    “Simon, Mina, my snoepje,” she began softly. “Come here.” She pulled the two of them in for a hug. It was a bit difficult with how much taller Simon was, but she was able to at least pull his head into the embrace. “Let me tell you both something: Your father and I couldn’t care less about what you two look like, or what all this magical nonsense could’ve done to you. We still love you both with all our heart. Even if you got turned into scary monsters or stinky little skunks!” He ruffled the top of Mina’s head (there wasn’t any hair to ruffle, but the thought was there) for emphasis. “We both would still love both of you, our little visje.”

    “Besides, if either of us had a problem with you being fish people, I’m sure your mother would’ve gone to stay at the neighbors house until this all blew over.” Diederick chuckled at his own joke.

    “Oh, none of that!” She lightly smacked his arm the way people do when they’re playfully mad at someone.

    “I’m glad, mama. Thank you.” Mina got up off of the sofa. “Simon told you all what’s going on, yeah?”

    “In great detail,” said their father.

    “Well, then you must know that I… I can’t stay.” Mina’s fears were confirmed when she saw the shocked and terrified faces on both of her parents.

    “Mina, visje, you can’t leave just yet!” Adrie went.

    “Yes, there’s still all those monsters outside!” Diederick added.

    “I know I know, but there’s something big going on here, and I’m integral to it all,” she tried to explain.

    “That’s right!” Zelda stood up to stand beside Mina. “We know who’s causing all this, and Mina’s one of the few people we need to help defeat them and set things right!”

    “Besides, she’ll be at the Comic Book store down the street from Marino’s with me,” Darius informed them. “Perhaps a former marine protecting your daughter would quell your fears?”

    “We know, we know, it’s just-”

    “She was already kidnapped once!” Diederick brought up, cutting off his wife while she was trying to find the words to say. “We’re just worried, if you do know who took you before, and that they’re still out there, how do you know they won’t come back for you?”

    “That’s why I can’t stay here!” Mina told them. “If he comes back for me, this is the first place he’ll look, and I don’t want to put you all in danger!”

    “Just because he’ll look here first doesn’t mean he’ll stop here,” Adrie said. “Besides, what if-”

    “I’ll go with her!” Simon had piped up suddenly, trying to find a way to end the conversation before it became heated. His answer had resulted in almost everyone in the room looking at him in shock. Less so Diederick and Adrie, and more so the others. They knew what he had been complaining about just the morning before. What was he doing??

    “But Simon,  I thought you wanted to stay here,” said Mina.

    “I did, but…” Simon rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m willing to stay with you guys if it means Mina can help them save the world!”

    “It’s hardly a worldwide issue, Simon,” went Zelda, trying to reassure him that he didn’t have to go. “We’ve only got New York going all crazy.”

    “For now, yeah!” He turned to the others. “I’m bigger and stronger now, though! So I can protect Mina until everything goes back to normal and we can come back home!”

    Diederick and Adrie were silent. Simon knew the looks on their faces. Those were the looks his parents usually had when they were intently thinking about something. They looked very somber and worried… up until he noticed a grin wobble onto his mothers face before she let out a quiet laugh.

    “He really is your son, isn’t he, Diederick?” Adrie turned to her husband, who had started to turn pink in the cheeks.

    “And yours as well!” he chuckled back. “We were both just as stubborn as kids!”

    “Well… I suppose you two can go,” said Adrie. “But just hold on a moment before you go running off!” Before anyone could ask, she went bolting off toward another room, leaving everyone in the living room to wait.

    “Well…” Diederick was trying to find something to talk about in the meantime. “How about you, Darius, anything happen to you during all this?”

    “Not much, really,” he said. “I just… got a little stronger I suppose.”

    “And his skin is as hard as rocks now,” Navi added.

    “Yeah, what the little lady said,” Darius confirmed.

    “Well, just count your blessings and be glad you could leave the house.” Diederick shuffled in place to get more comfortable.

    “I’m sure you’ll find something to do during all this,” Darius assured. “Look on the bright side: I doubt any of those monsters would wanna show up with a giant burly fish man in the house.”

    That got a hearty laugh out of Diederick. It was the same laugh Simon and Mina were used to, but much louder, resonating like whalesong.

“I suppose you’re right!”

    By the time they’d left the Van Der Zee house, they’d left with more stuff than they’d arrived with. Adrie had INSISTED she give them what the two siblings could only describe as care packages. They were two backpacks, packed full of stuff that their mother figured they would need out on the town: metal water bottles full of fresh water(in case they were in danger of drying up as fish people), a packed lunch bag with three ziplock baggies with tostis inside(toasted sandwiches with ham and cheese inside), dental hygiene affects(for their big teeth of course!), and the cornerstone of any parent wanting their kid to be safe in a dangerous city, pepper spray .

    As they walked the long walk back to the subway station, Zelda couldn’t help but think about the whole thing. Simon and Mina’s parents… they were so kind and understanding. It brought her back to her situation again for a moment. On the train there, she and Navi had been looking for stores in Howard Beach to find what they were looking for. And as they walked along, Zelda was reminded of one of the stores they’d found.

“Excuse me, Mr. McKay?” She quietly got the PE Teacher’s attention.

He turned to her with a, “Hm?”

“Is it alright if we stop there for a moment?” Zelda pointed over at a store not too far off from them beside the sidewalk. It wasn’t anything fancy, having the same architecture as most “for lease” buildings Darius had seen dotting Queens in his lifetime. This one looked like your regular clearance rack clothing store at a first glance, but then he saw the sign above the front entrance: The Thrift Bazaar.

“Sure, I’m sure the others won’t mind,” he said. He turned to the Van Der Zees. “Would you both be alright stopping by the thrift store?” The two of them nodded. “Alright, there you go! Let’s go thrifting, kids!”

The group was quick to make their way over, partly because they were admittedly in a hurry, and partly because they wanted to make sure it wasn’t closed before they wasted too much time. To their surprise, the store was open: the lights were on, the sign was turned to “open”, and there was even someone sitting behind the counter. There were plenty of reasons why it should NOT have been open, but they figured the shop was already open on Sundays normally and the monsters weren't a big enough threat to warrant closing.

Darius was the one to open the door, being slightly surprised to hear one of those digital doorbells that he was used to hearing at gas station convenience stores and Walmarts. Alongside the bell, he was greeted by the bored young lady at the counter.

“Hello, welcome to the Thrift Bazaar or… whatever,” she said flatly, leaning on one hand. “Feel free to come to the front if you have questions about anything.”

The young woman working the checkout counter looked like a very bored Cinderella, like the Disney one, with the longer blonde hair and the short but neatly cut bangs. The only real thing that threw off the comparison was her beauty mark and her tired eyes. Perhaps she was just Cinderella but before she went to the ball, what with the bandana around her head tying the whole scullery maid look together. Zelda settled on a pretty good image for her: Cinderella in between chores, sitting by the windowsill, bored out of her mind while thinking of what her life could be if she weren’t stuck with her step mother and step sisters. The only thing that ruined the image was her pigtails and her pointed ears, just like Zelda and Link.

    “Navi, come help me find clothes,” Zelda whispered.

    “KK!”

    Soon the two of them were off toward the back of the store, where all the clothing racks and other such things were displayed. The other three simply waited by the front door. Simon had been distracted by a glass cabinet full of all sorts of little trinkets: old toys for 50¢ a piece, garden gnomes(they were so obviously in Queens), a tea set made to look like corn, and all sorts of other plates and little garden decorations. Darius opted to pass the time reading a magazine by the checkout while Mina decided to strike up a conversation with the checkout lady.

    “How has your day been so far?” she asked.

    “Boring,” she replied monotonously. “Until you guys showed up, really. I’ve heard about some people around here turning into fish people, but I haven’t met any of them yet.

    “Oh, I’m sorry it’s been boring… why are they making you work during all this??”

    “Well, I tried to get out of it! But apparently “pointed ears” doesn’t count for sick days. They just said to wear a hat or something so I can cover them if someone not affected comes into the store.”

    “Whyyyy would you need to cover them like that?”

    “I dunno, something about making them uncomfortable?”

    “I don’t see why that would make someone uncomfortable. Of all things, there’s people out there turning into living rocks and fish with legs.”

    “Listen, you’re free to take it up with my boss if you’d like. Any excuse to stop wearing this old bandana on my head like a milkmaid.”

    “Excuse me, how much for this?” Simon gently set down something he’d found in the cabinet of trinkets. It was a beanie baby. Specifically, a little shark.

    “Uhhh,” Beatrice looked at the cabinet for a moment. “What’s everything else priced at in that cabinet? 50¢? Let’s go with 50¢.”

    Simon was satisfied. While everyone was doing what they were doing up in the front, Zelda and Navi were searching for their own things in the back.

    “Zed, look at this one!” Navi said as Zelda went looking through some nearby beauty products. Lucky for her, she was able to find what she was looking for: a box of hair dye. “This one here kinda looks like ‘princess with a dark side’.” Navi grabbed the sleeve of a black lace top that would have been at home on a goth girl, pulling it little ways to the side so Zelda could see. She let out a little GASP when she spotted something else, pulling on the sleeve of another piece of clothing to show off a shirt absolutely covered in purple sequins. “And this one over here says ‘I’m a disco freak! … with a dark side .’”

    “Those are all really lovely, Nav, but not those,” Zelda said, tucking the hair dye box under one arm. “My dad’s going to be expecting me to wear something nice or something purple.”

    “You do always wear purple,” Navi agreed.

    “Yeah, so that unfortunately means…” She paused for a moment before pulling a canvas backpack off the hook. “Ooo, this is a nice bag.”

    “Zed, you were saying?”

    “Right, sorry…” Zelda set the bag back on the hook and opened the main flap before pulling her NYU jacket off. “It means I’ll have to stop wearing this.” She folded up the jacket before putting it into the bag.

    “It’s early April in New York City, Zed, you’re gonna need a jacket!” Navi blurted out.

    “I know I know, just… gimme a moment-” Zelda went walking off, looking for clothes in the place Navi wasn’t expecting: the rack with all the denim and grunge clothes on it.

    Considering this wasn’t her usual choice of fashion, Navi was surprised at how quickly she put together a pretty decent outfit: denim jacket, a plain old long sleeve t-shirt, denim cut-off shorts with the frayed ends, a belt with a brass buckle, black fingerless gloves, a skater beanie that would’ve been at home in Lincoln’s wardrobe, and a pair of workout pants. All of them were some shade of desaturated blue. The more surprising bit was right when Zelda was about to head up to the front to purchase all this. She stopped for a moment, grabbing a cloth face mask and a matching scarf off of a hook on the wall, and then walked up to the front with Navi fluttering beside her.

    “Excuse me, Mina.” Zelda closed in on the checkout counter as Mina shuffled out of the way. She put everything down on the counter.

    “Just those for you?” asked Beatrice as she went looking for tags on them.

Zelda nodded her head with a little, “Mm hmm!”

Beatrice’s boredom and general slowness about everything melted in an instant as she started putting down prices in her rudimentary cash register. It looked more at home beside those old computers from the 90s. The ones shaped like cubes with the clickity-clackity keyboards. In a little under 15 seconds, Beatrice was done.

“That’ll be $20 for everything,” she announced. “Will you be paying cash or card?”

“Cash.” Zelda was quick to pay for it all, putting it all in her new backpack. Zelda picked it all up before looking back at the extra little items being sold around the cash register. She pointed toward some rolls of ribbons. “How much are those?”

“50¢ a roll.”

Zelda grabbed three of them and passed Beatrice a dollar and 2 quarters.

“Is there a bathroom in he-”

“Down the hallway on the left,” Beatrice said, cutting Zelda off as she pointed toward a hallway near the back of the store. “If you hit a painting of pigeons in hats you’ve gone too far.” Zelda nodded her head once before heading in the direction of the hallway.

Navi lagged behind for a moment, but only to say to the others, “We won’t be long, guys!”

    “Hey so… just so you guys know, we do close at 2:00 on Sundays,” Beatrice informed them, checking her swatch on her wrist. “Your friend’s either taking the longest piss in existence or you guys should go check on her.”

    “I’m sure she’s alright,” Mina said.

    “Miss, with all due respect, she’s been in there long enough for me to watch ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’ and STILL have more time to wait,” she said dryly.

    And right on cue, the door to the bathroom opened.

    All four people near the front of the store turned to see if Zelda would emerge. She did, but she also didn’t.

    She walked out of the bathroom wearing everything she’d purchased a few hours before. She also walked out with her hair all done up, lightened to an almost golden color while tied back behind her in a long braid that hung over her shoulder. The cloth mask covered her mouth and nose, and whatever hair that spilled out from under her beanie was either done up along the sides of her face with the ribbons she bought at the front counter or pulled in front to cover the left side of her face. Zelda has expected to emerge to a store full of surprised people. Full was an overstatement, but saying that they were surprised was not.

    “Haha! You look badass!” Simon blurted out.

    “Alright, that’s gotta be one of the more interesting things I’ve seen all week,” Beatrice admitted.

    “Yeah, I just… thought it might be a good idea to switch things up a bit until this is all over,” Zelda said with a nervous chuckle.

    “Can’t wait to see Lincoln react to all that,” Mina said with a wry smile.

    “Well, I’m sure Zed can explain it to him just fine, right Zed?” Navi asked knowingly. Zelda just nodded her head as she walked back toward the front to rejoin the others. That’s when she thought of something. What was that thing Miranda’s friends back at the theater said? It was something about names.

    “You know, maybe until this all blows over, I should go by a different name!” Zelda suggested. “With the police trying to keep a register of people with different looks and all that so if anything happens, it doesn’t go on my record or anything stupid like that.”

    “Weird fear, but alright,” Darius obliged. “What name were you thinking?”

    And that’s when Zelda remembered. Names could be what you want them to be. Whatever felt right to you. Whatever you felt expressed yourself the best. Zelda couldn’t think of a better name to go by while trying to evade authority while trying to defeat Ganondorf.

    “... call me Sheik.”

Chapter Text

Bowne park. AKA, the place Bennet once held a store picnic at to celebrate the launch day of some game, I don’t remember. That was the one time I had ever been to the park. Even as a kid, my dad always opted to take me to Forest park right by our neighborhood, and mom continued to opt to do that with Ariel and I. I did remember one thing, though: my dad used to come here to fish, and I was banking on the park still allowing people to fish in its giant lake full of bass and turtles.

We’d gone for the sole purpose of going to catch butterflies to brew potions with, but I’d looked at the cookbook pages enough to see that there were some other things we could gather as well. Bennet seemed to know this as well. Before we left, he’d sent me off with as much stuff as my poor school bag could carry: bug nets, bottles, scans of the cookbook pages of importance, and a steel pot(something similar in shape to a wok). Whether or not there would be anywhere to set up a fire to cook something was yet to be gleaned, but we’d find out soon enough. Equipment wasn’t the only thing Bennet had sent us over with. He’d also found some stuff that might be of use in the cooking endeavors.

He’d told me about it earlier. When he’d stopped by Marino’s the day before, he’d tried to grab whatever fruit or vegetables he figured would be of use to us. Stuff that looked similar enough to in-game ingredients to count. The most important find - and the one he’d packed with me - were some dragon fruits. They had been on sale for a ridiculous discount because the skin was too thick on them. “Thick enough to be considered insulted,” Bennet had told me.

Then there was also the issue of fish. Bennet had reasoned with me and Fiona on that one. If monsters and stuff from Hyrule were showing up here, the wildlife might, too. Thus he found it reasonable to believe that some bass and trout from Hyrule might be in the pond at Bowne Park. In which case we should be free to kill it. They’re not technically native, and he was betting on their being a notice from the police about invasive fish that give people enhanced strength akin to steroids. So he said we should try to identify any fish they see, and make sure they’re not from New York before they try and fish any out of the pong.

We arrived at Bowne park after a bit of a walk. It wasn’t long enough that we all regretted not taking a subway or car, but it was long enough that I arrived there with Ariel seated on my shoulders in a piggy-back ride. The moment we arrived, I opted to look for some place to set up a fire. Someplace wide open, where there wasn’t any grass or trees close enough by to catch fire. I thought about doing it on the walkways(they were concrete), but also didn’t want to block the footpath of anyone visiting the park. The moment I thought of that, I also came to think about how the park was… very deserted that day.

“Huh… there’s no one here,” I observed.

“Well, I’d imagine not a lot of people are looking to take a stroll in the park while there’s monsters running around,” Fiona reasoned.

“SHHH wait!” Ariel shoved a finger over my mouth as she leaned so far over my head that her other hand was in my eye with how she was keeping her balance.

“Ack! Ariel-”

“SHH!” She shut me up before I could even finish. The moment we all went quiet, that’s when we heard it.

The park wasn’t deserted, but there were only a few other people there.

“There’s someone at the playground!” Ariel said.

“Someone like a monster or someone like a regular person?” I asked

“Regular person!” she replied. “The monsters don’t really talk.”

I pulled a pair of beanies out of my pocket, handing one to Ariel and putting the other over my head and tucking my ears away. We’d gone over this ever since Mike found out about the whole registry thing: any time there’s other people around, we put on the beanies.

Now you might be wondering, “What about Fiona?” Well, Fiona’s bright idea before leaving the store was to don sunglasses, a cloth face mask, and Bennet’s old cal poly jacket with the hood pulled up over her head. I feel like if we had a polaroid of the three of us at that moment and you showed it to someone with no context, they’d think Fiona was some local early 2000s rapper, like the ones that try to imitate Eminem.

We kept walking along, slowly but leisurely, like we were taking a general walk in the park. Like a “don’t mind us, we’re just taking a stroll, we’re not trying to catch fish and butterflies” kinda way. The talking Ariel had heard earlier became very clear very quick as we approached the playground at this particular park. There was a family there: a mom, dad and two kids. They were both boys by the looks of it, and they were playing on the swings while the two parents sat nearby.

Also they were all zoras.

My first thought is that they were just a family of four trying to take their kids to the park while it was safe so they could have some semblance of normalcy in all this. But the gears started turning in Ariel’s head after she overheard a conversation between the family members.

“Dad! Do you think I could swing all the way around the top of the bar like a rollercoaster?” asked the younger of the two.

“You could, but then you’d get stuck on top of the swings,” replied the dad. “And then we’d have to call the fire department to help you get down.”

“Oh, okay!”

“Waaaait a second!” Ariel started squirming on my shoulders, and I immediately recognized she was trying to get down so I kneeled. She hopped off my shoulders before she got closer to the swings. “Tucker?!”

That caused the younger of the two zoras to pause, stopping his swinging to look over at us. “Ariel?!”

“Yeah, it’s me!” Before I knew it, my little sister was bolting over to the swings while the little zora in his frog raincoat and boots was squirming to get off the swings.

He fell over trying to hop off the seat a little too enthusiastically, getting right back up immediately before saying, “I’m okay!” and continuing to run over. Fiona and I just stood aside as the two kids came together in a hug, giggling like maniacs.

“I didn’t see you on Friday!” she said. “We were gonna watch Arrietty! Were you sick?”

“Kinda…” Tucker pulled off the hood of his raincoat. He looked much more like Mina than Simon in terms of zora-ness. His little fins and head-tail were shorter, though. “Me and Mom, Dad and Keyan woke up like this! Dad freaked out.”

“He said the word he said when the dryer broke,” Keyan added from a little ways away.

“I did say that, didn’t I…” went the dad, rubbing the back of his head nervously. I’d met these kids and their parents before, way back at a back to school night thing at Ariel’s school. Franklin MacNamara, who at the moment was stuck being a zora with a pointed nose and black scales, was the dad currently being called out for swearing.

“Well, to be fair, so did you, Tucker,” went his wife, Mei, the greenish-blue scales above her eyes raising like eyebrows.

“Yeah! Because I can stay under water at the pool for as long as I want!” Tucker replied.

“Luckyyyyy,” my sister frowned. 

“Well hey, look on the bright side!” Tucker started, immediately trying to cheer her up. “At least you… have hair!”

That seemed to make them both start giggling again. Then Ariel took Tucker’s hand excitedly, the way kids do when they want to urgently show their friend a cool bug they found on the playground.

“I was gonna go catch butterflies to help out Link,” she told him, the mention of me causing me to flinch. I played it off like it was fine. “Wanna come?”

“YEAH!” Tucker replied excitedly. He turned over toward his mom, who was still seated on a bench nearby. “Mom, can I go play with Ariel?”

“Of course!” she said as they approached me. I passed them two bug nets. “Just don’t wander off too far, you two!”

“Okay!” And just like that, the both of them went running off toward the more forest parts of the park a little ways away. Lucky for us, we could still see them through the trees and across the pond. The park wasn’t that big.

“So Lincoln, what brings you guys over here?”

I turned to see Franklin addressing me and Fiona from the bench he was seated on.He patted the spot next to him, inviting us over to sit. And really, what else were we supposed to do? NOT sit with them? If we’d just kept walking to go look for butterflies it would’ve been super awkward. I sat down beside Mr. MacNamara, while Fiona opted to stay standing right beside us. There really was only room for three.

“Well, you know, I just figured I was gonna let all this magic garbage stop me from taking my little sister to the park,” I said with a smile. “How are you guys doing during all this, by the way?”

“Great… well, better than a couple days ago,” Franklin began. “We just woke up feeling dried out and realized we’d all turned into… these .” He gestured to himself and his wife. “The kid’s didn’t mind, really. Tucker really likes swimming. But Mei and I, well… we’re trying our best to get through it.”

“We’re doing better than Friday,” Mei said with a chuckle. “I had to call the kids out of school sick, Franklin had to figure out how to call off work for the day-”

“I wasn’t sure being turned into a fish man counted for sick leave,” Frank joked.

“-and then we had to figure out… everything else.”

“I’m kinda glad this is all public at least,” Franklin mused. “Less people to be freaked out if we need to run to the store, more people going out trying to keep people safe from goblins and… weird cyclops bat things.”

“Oh god, I hate those things, they were all over the Dunkin’ Donuts, the poor people,” Mei added with a frown.

“But, you know… we’re doing our best, just like everyone else.” He leaned forward, his head resting in his hand as he went back to making sure Keyan didn’t flip himself out of his swing.

“Makes me wonder, with all the monsters out, what’re you guys doing at the playground?” I asked.

“Well what’re you kids doing at the playground?”

“I asked you first, Mr. MacNamara.”

Franklin tried to stare me down, like he was doing his best to give me that one look dad’s give where they need you to talk while you still have time. But eventually, he relinquished.

“Well, what else?” he asked. “Figured we could take the kids out to do something fun that’s close to home while all this stuff is going on. They need some semblance of normalcy during all this. Plus, I promised them if they went with us to sit through all that stuff at the police station, we’d take them to the park for a couple of hours beforehand.”

That last sentence gave me pause. I could see it on my cousin’s face, too, even if 90% of it was obscured by articles of clothing. “The police station?”

“Yeah, you know, because of that thing they’re doing,” he said. “Where if you’re face is weird, they know what happened. It’s so they can keep track of everyone who’s… you know.” Frank gestured to himself, Mei, Keyan, everyone there who was obviously inhuman looking. “It’s like getting passport pictures taken from what I’ve heard, and they seem to have it streamlined enough that it’s fairly quick.”

“Right, right,” I said quietly. “The whole thing just seems kinda sketchy to me, you know?”

“You and me both, kid,” Frank said with a short chuckle. “I know a lot of folks that’re trying to skip out on it. Not like I’m going to snitch on anyone who doesn’t or anything, but-”

“Oh, thank GOD!” my cousin blurted out. That garnered our attention as she pulled off all her extra clothes: the sweatshirt, the mask, the sunglasses, all of it. “I felt so ridiculous wearing this thing.” And pretty soon, the MacNamaras were left staring at my very obviously blue cousin with wide eyes and raised brows.

Frank was the first to speak. “Wha- alright, that’s a new one.” He chuckled nervously, in the way people do when they need to take a moment to process what they’re seeing. “I’ve seen people with pointed ears, I’ve seen people looking like us-” he gestured to himself and his wife. “- and my neighbor’s a living boulder for goodness sake, but I’ve seen nothing like that.”

“Oh yeah, Fiona’s made of metal and stuff now for whatever reason,” I said. I gently knocked a fist on her shoulders, producing a similar bang to if I’d done it to one of those big steel beams.

It made her flinch. “Ach! Link!”

“See?” I said. “Metal.”

“Dang…” Frank was still seated, just looking over my cousin in confusion and shock. “I’m not going to hound you about it or anything, but maybe you should get her registered then.”

I blinked. “Why do you think that?”

“Well, it’s just that…” Frank paused for a moment, taking a deep breath as he tried to formulate his words. “Back when the whole police announcement first came out, I thought about it for a bit. There’s a lot of stuff people still don’t know, and with there being monsters in New York and all that… What would happen if me or Mei got hurt? What if the kids got hurt? Would anyone know who we were? Who to contact? Who to tell? It’s like uhhhhh…” he cupped hier chin as he thought for a moment. Then he turned to Mei. “Oh darn it, honey, what was that movie you and Mary watched a little while back? With the wolves?”

Mei looked at him with squinted eyes as she thought for a moment before the lightbulb went on. “Do you mean Wolf Children?”

Frank snapped his fingers. “That’s it!”

“Oh! I think I’ve seen that one,” I said.

“Yeah, same here,” added Fiona. “One of my friends got me to watch it with her.”

“Yeah, it’s the one where a lady falls in love with a man who can turn into a wolf,” he said. It had been a while since I’d seen the movie, so you can imagine the look on my face when he reminded me of a central thing from the plot that happened near the beginning of the movie: “And he ends up dying as a wolf very suddenly, so the first responders who find him thinks he’s just a regular dead animal and chuck him in the back of a garbage truck.”

My heart sank. He didn’t even have to continue for me to know where he was going with this. But he did.

“This poor woman had to watch her husband get thrown into the trash and she couldn’t do anything to stop them. I mean, how do you tell someone that the dead wolf they just found off the side of the road is your husband?” Frank looked like he was on the verge of tears, but he soldiered on. “So… what happens if we don’t get our pictures taken? What happens if the first responders don’t know that this whole… magical debacle made us look like fish? I don’t think I could forgive myself if something happened to any of us and no one could identify us.”

I hate to say it, but even with everything going on, and us not knowing who was working with Ganondorf and who wasn’t… Frank made me think twice about it all. I didn’t want to get mine taken, but I couldn’t help but think of my other friends. Vinny, Miranda, and Simon and Mina especially. I didn’t want to think about what I would do if something happened to Mina right after we’d finally saved her. My thoughts were interrupted by a splash.

“Oh god, one of them didn’t fall in, did they?!” I whipped around toward the pond, hoping my sister and her friend were still on land looking for butterflies.

“What, no,” went Mei. “It was just the fish in the pond.”

I got up and squinted at the water in confusion. I only had to scrutinize it for a moment before I saw movement right beneath the surface. I knew there were fish in the pond, but these weren’t native fish.

“I’m surprised you didn’t know there were fish,” Franklin said. “I used to catch and release them with my buddies on my days off.”

“Oh, my dad used to do that, too!” Fiona added. “He used to go with my uncle Caleb a long while ago.”

They kept talking about fishing and all that as I did my own thing, going into my phone to look at the pictures I’d taken of Bennet’s cookbook. Lucky for me, it had full illustrations of fish: trout, bass, carp, all in bright colors you wouldn’t find on any freshwater fish in New York’s wild areas. The fish I was now spotting whole swaths of in the Bowne Park Pond were Hyrulian fish.

“Hey, Fiona!” I called my cousin. She turned away from where she was talking with the MacNamaras. “The pond’s full of non native fish.” I said this as I retrieved my bow out of my backpack, loading an arrow into it. “Care to relive your childhood for a sec?”

    Of course the bokoblins set up a camp at a baseball field.

    Mike thought for sure there’d be no monsters here. It was a baseball field. It was just dirt and half-watered grass. There was no way there was anything of value there. And yet here they were, taking out a whole camp as best they could. Wind, fire, fists, knives, and tapatio, all went swinging and flying as they took out each bokoblin, one by one.

    “Take this one, G!” Vinny called out, swiping a hand to knock the last bokoblin over with the wind. Vincent ducked out of the way just as Garrett flashed into the air in a whirl of diamonds and magic, falling down on top of the monster and bringing his saber down into its chest. It was the most awesome thing Garrett had ever done, and it was partly ruined when the bokoblin turned to mist underneath him, causing him to stumble and fall down.

    “Nice one, Embers!” Miranda said, picking him up by the hood of his jacket before setting him back on his feet.

    “Guys, check it, there’s a campfire here!” Vinny pointed over to a little area in the middle of the bokoblin camp. One that had been set up with a cooking pot on top. “We don’t even have to set up a cooking pot or anything!”

    “Oh, cool, guess we didn’t need all the cooking stuff after all,” Mike huffed.

    “Enough complaining, dude,” Miranda said. “Let’s look for mushrooms or whatever you said was growing here.”

    “And I’ll watch the fire!” Vinny added.

    Miranda, Garrett, and Michael were off. It was true what Mike had read. The more grassy areas of the baseball field were indeed infested with mushrooms. At the base of every tree, around all the bushes, in clusters out in open fields, and in all sorts of shapes and colors too. All three looked very much like maidens going out to pick flowers, holding picnic baskets - which they weren’t, Bennet had snagged some of those plastic shopping baskets from Marino’s that some people carried instead of taking a cart - over their arms as they plucked mushrooms and tucked them away inside.

    “Whoahoho, check this one out!” Miranda spun around, clutching in her ponytail hand a cluster of flowers. Not mushrooms, but flowers. Little purple ones, growing in a forked stem with a bundle of densely packed purple petals, creating a tough little ball of fibers.

    “We’re looking for mushrooms, not those,” Mike scoffed.

    “YOU might be looking for mushrooms,” Miranda said as she put the flowers away into her basket, which was full of both flowers and mushrooms. “I, on the other hand, am looking for whatever I can recognize from the attack and defense part of the cookbook.”

    “What, like stuff that can increase your strength??” Mike asked.

    “Yeah, exactly! Both your strength when trying to fight stuff AND your durability when taking hits. Of all the things we can find in these fields, I feel like those two effects would serve us best.” She set her basket down for a moment as she went through the basket with her little hands to sort everything into their own little corners: armoranths, thistles, razorshrooms and ironshrooms. “Plus, my mom taught me how to make these kickass vegan meatballs out of mushrooms, so I can make some of those.”

    “Does it have to be a specific kind of mushroom for that to work?” Garrett asked.

    “I don’t think so!” Miranda replied. “It just has to be minced up nice and small.”

    “Dang! Maybe we should get more of those durability mushrooms or whatever,” Mike said. “It might keep me from getting super rocked by the recoil from the Groosenator!”

    “Yeah, you get it!” Miranda chuckled.

    “Yeah, plus I found these ones!” Garrett stood up and held an orange mushroom in his hands. “I think this is one of those stamina ones. The ones that increase your stamina, I mean. Maybe this could help, too!”

    “Hell yeah! Make em burly AND less likely to get exhausted!” Miranda continued to pick through the brush, looking for more flowers and mushrooms to add to her ever growing bundles in her basket. Garrett, on the other hand, was on the lookout for more of those orange and green ones. They seemed fairly useful! Mike, however, couldn’t focus on mushrooms anymore. The playful banter and all that brought his mind back to an awkward place. A place he knew was going to eat him alive if he didn’t suck it up and say something…

    “Hey, you guys are cool with… people who are weird, right?”

    “No.” Miranda had said it almost immediately after, and there was a long pause as Mike looked at her incredulously. “Dude, of course we are, have you SEEN the two of us??

    “Right, right, sorry!” Mike took another moment to collect himself. “Alright, well, um… listen. I’ve been trying to keep a lid on it, but I gotta tell someone .”

    Miranda and Garrett leaned in slightly. No doubt they would’ve stood at 45 degree angles if humanly possible without falling over. They wait patiently for Michael to get on with it, to spill the beans, to just spit it out! And then…

    “The truth is, I’m… I’m a nerd .”

He turned away and whispered that last part. He was treating this all like it was some big, shocking reveal. He acted afterwards as if it were the most embarrassing thing in the world to admit, like entrusting your friends with the knowledge that you one time peed yourself in public.

    Miranda and Garrett looked at each other with confused expressions, and Mike just stood there waiting. Waiting for a reaction, a few words, something. And then… he heard them start giggling to each other. Suffice it to say, this took him completely off guard.

    “Wha- HEY! Don’t laugh about my vulnerability, you jerks!” Mike growled.

    “Nah nah, it’s not that, dude,” Miranda said as she finally calmed herself down enough to talk. “It’s just… did you think we didn’t know??”

    Mike froze up. “Well-”

    “You’re in a STEM glass with me!” Garrett reminded him.

    “Well yeah, but-”

    “And you built a shoulder cannon out of bits and bobs like it was nothing.

    “Well, when you figure out how guns work-”

    “And you read Midnight Sons with me in the comic store, dude!” Miranda added. “Even without the smart stuff, that’s textbook nerd behavior!”

    “It’s called an interest, McKnight,” Mike grumbled.

    “Yeah! An interest that is commonly associated with being a NERD!” She’d floated up and grabbed onto Mike’s shoulder when she shouted that last word, wanting to really hammer it home that he hadn’t been subtle at all. “Seriously, though, don’t sweat it, dude!” Miranda patted a hand on his shoulder. “What, did you think you were coming out of the closet with this or something? You don’t have to be embarrassed.”

    “And in case you haven’t noticed,” Garrett interjected. “Most everyone in this god forsaken gang of adventuring teens is a nerd to SOME degree.”

    “Yeah, and just because you’re some buff football jock doesn’t mean that’s all you gotta be!” Miranda added. “You’re allowed to be smart, too, ya know.”

    “Easier said than done,” Mike scoffed. “I’ve never felt real smart.” There was a pause. Miranda and Garrett both had that same look of caught off guard confusion on their faces, unsure what to say next. Unlike most situations, Garrett decided to be the one to address this further.

    “Well, I feel like this is going to get a loaded answer from you, but what makes you say that?” He tucked his basket into the crook of his elbow as he waited for a reply. Luckily, Mike was quick to do so.

    “It’s something the Dragon’s Lair guy… BENNET! It’s something he mentioned!” Mike began. “He said he had ADHD or something and had to get a GED to get into college.”

    “Aaaare you saying you think you have ADHD?” Miranda asked, an eyebrow raised.

    “I mean, MAYBE!” Mike turned dramatically. “I looked it up a bit after he talked about it, and a lot of the symptoms lined up!

    “Like what, getting easily distracted?” 

    “Well not just that! Fidgeting with your hands, constantly switching tasks when you’re bored, impulsive thinking-”

    “Now that just sounds like most teen guys in general,” Garrett interjected.

    “-forgetting things easily,” Mike continued. “And not to mention kids with ADHD always having trouble with standardized tests and homework and crap. No matter how hard I study I can never retain information and just keep getting distract- yo what’s that?”

    Very suddenly, Mike was done talking and off wandering.

    “Wha- hey, Mike!” Miranda went off after him, leaving a confused and pensive Garrett behind for a moment as he thought.

    “ Wait, is that why he’s always stealing my STEM homework? ” he mumbled to himself. Garrett’s neck snapped up to look at Mike as he kept wandering further into the brush. “Mike, is that why you’re always stealing my STEM homework?!” He started off after the two of them. Garrett wanted to find answers, but he didn’t exactly get the correct ones.

    For you see, Mike had spotted a flower off in the grass. It was a very big one, with a cluster of leaves and stems near the ground splitting off into three and ending with big puff balls of pink petals. It looked like someone had taken one of those exfoliating loofahs and glued it to the end of a plant stalk before sticking it in the dirt. Mike couldn’t help just stare at it.

    “Huh… what do you suppose this one is?” Mike asked as Miranda finally caught up to him.

    “I dunno…” Miranda scratched her head for a moment, both with her regular hand and the one on the end of her ponytail. “I don’t think I saw any pictures that looked like that.”

    “Whatever, I’ll just pick it just in case.” Mike wrapped a hand around the stalk and pulled. It didn’t snap off like most flowers usually would, which led a now slightly miffed Mike to grab the stem with both hands and pull harder. That seemed to work, as the dirt around the roots of the flower crumbled under his feet and fell away as he pulled, slowly but surely, until he was able to yank it out so hard that he fell backwards onto the ground, flinging dirt and grass everywhere.

    “Whoa! Is he alright?!” Garrett called from a little ways away.

    “Yeah, he just yanked on something in the ground too hard,” Miranda replied.

    Mike sat back up in the next moment with a groan. He was expecting what any reasonable kid would expect: to be holding a big flower in his hands. This was precisely why he was so surprised to see a massive heart-shaped bulb of… something attached where the roots of the flower should’ve been.

    “Yo guys, check this weird thing out.” Mike held the plant out for the other two to see clearly. Garrett stared with his head tilted like a confused puppy. It took Miranda a moment. But once she realized what it was Mike was holding, a loud GASP escaped her like steam leaking from a pipe.

    “Mike, holy crap! You found a hearty radish!!” She floated over to his shoulder, leaning over it excitedly as Mike held the dirt-covered root vegetable closer to his face.

    Mike blinked. “A what?”

    “A hearty radish!” Miranda repeated. “It does some CRAZY over-healing crap if you cook it. They’re super rare in the game, dude, how did you just… FIND one??”

    “I dunno, you were picking flowers, I saw a flower, I figured I should pick it!” he explained. 

    “Well whatever!” Garrett finally made it over to where the other two were. “If you found one, we should try and find more of them before we get back to the fire with Vin.”

    “Forget the fire,” Miranda said. “If we don’t find any more, let’s wait until we meet back up with the others. That way if this is the only one we find, we can just combine spoils with the Mathesons.”

    Garrett wagged a finger in the way people do when someone makes a good observation. “Ooooh good point, good point.”

    “Well don’t just stand there!” Mike got back up before shoving the large radish into his basket. “Let’s keep looking!”

    “Are you SURE there are butterflies around her? We haven’t found even a single one!”

    Tucker was very upset. Not upset in the sense that he was very close to throwing a temper tantrum, but upset in the sense that he was very close to being very sad that he couldn’t have spent his time doing something more fulfilling. Like going down the slide for a bit, or actually trying to see if he could swing up onto the top bar of the swings.

    “My brother said there was!” Ariel told him, her butterfly net resting over her shoulder like a hobo sac.

    “Well maybe he’s wrong,” Tucker proposed. “It’s probably too cold out for them.”

    “Well that can’t be right! Maybe we just haven’t looked in the right places.” Ariel stopped beside a tree so Tucker could catch up a bit. He was slower to walk, what with his little fish legs. Ariel didn’t mind being a little slower if it meant he could keep up, though.

    “Well, I usually see butterflies hanging out in mom’s garden when it’s warmer out,” Tucker says. “But she’s got a bunch of flowers and stuff there, too.”

    “Well then, we just need to find some flowers then!” Ariel figured. She started off again, walking more slowly this time so Tucker could keep up. “If we find flowers, then we should find some butterflies!”

    “Okay!!” Tucker hurried along beside her. “But it’s still too cold out for there to be any-”

    “BUTTERFLY!”

    Ariel had said it so suddenly that it nearly scared Tucker into falling over. The two kids froze up as Ariel pointed a little ways in front of them. And just as she had blurted out, there was a butterfly right there, resting on the side of a tree. It wasn’t like any of the butterflies they were used to seeing around spring time, with its green and yellow patterning on its wings and the little bits that hung off the bottom like those swallowtail butterflies they’d seen in a book at least once before. Ariel’s eyes were wide, and sparkling with anticipation.

She was quick to take out her net before sneaking close to the tree, kneeled low like a cat, before she slammed the net down over top of it. “GOTCHA!” 

    “Haha, nice!” Tucker ran on over. “Do you have anything to put it in?”

    “Yeah!” Ariel replied. “Open my backpack real quick!”

    Tucker was quick to do so, unzipping the dog paw print covered backpack to find inside a little bug cage. It was the kind with the mesh walls and the door kept on with one little screw so it could swivel open and closed like a pinwheel. Tucker pulled it out and zipped the backpack back up before holding it beside the net.

    Ariel prepared herself. “Okay, one… two… THREE!” The two kids slammed the net and the open end of the bug cage together, making it so the only way for the butterfly to go was from one net into the other. Tucker was quick to shut the door once that was done.

    “Haha! We did it!” Tucker held up the bug cage triumphantly like a trophy.

    “Yeah!” Ariel swung the net back over her shoulder as Tucker lowered the bug cage enough for them to get a look at their catch.

    “Huh! It kinda looks like the ones Keyan’s always looking for in his new game,” Tucker observed as sat on the floor of the cage, gently opening and closing its wings as it relaxed a bit. He looked back at Ariel. “He got it earlier this month. It’s that new Zelda one!

    “Oh! Link just got that one, too,” Ariel replied as they continued on, looking for butterflies. “I think it’s what made all this weird stuff start happening.”

    “Was his game magic or something?”

    “I think so. Keyan and your mom and dad all look like the fish guys in the game I think. You too.”

    “Oh. Yeah, alright.”

    “AH! Another one!” Ariel went sprinting off after yet another butterfly, chasing it down through the air as Tucker panicked and ran off to try and keep up.

    “Don’t catch it!” he said. “See where it’s heading!”

    “Way ahead of ya!” Ariel held her net back and over her shoulder as they continued to pursue this one little butterfly, watching it sway back and forth in the air like a piece of paper being blown about in the wind. All the while, the two of them giggled wildly as they tried to keep up. They forgot for a moment what was happening in the world. Tucker had even forgotten for a moment what had happened to him and his family. For a moment in all this madness, the two of them were free to just chase after a pretty butterfly as two little kids in the park.

    Finally, they figured out where the little fluttery thing was headed. The two of them slowed to a walk before stopping right beside a tree, watching as the green and yellow thing landed on… a flower! One that was bent a bit with its petals facing towards the ground, its flowers hanging like a string of bells. They hung in such a way that the butterfly had to climb upside down to drink the nectar from them.

    “It’s so pretty!” Ariel said. She turned and looked around. It wasn’t just the one plant the butterfly had landed on. There seemed to be a whole BUNCH of flowers around this part of the park. “I didn’t know those lilies could be blue!”

    “I don’t think they can be,” mused Tucker as she decided to get up close. He watched her swing the net down and over the butterfly. “I don’t think they can grow in the wintertime either.”

    “It’s April now, though!” Ariel told him.

    “But it’s still cold out.”

    “Yeah, well they don’t seem to mind!” She pointed toward the butterfly in her net, as well as the couple of others Tucker had now noticed.

    “There’s more of them!” he blurted out. With all the flowers around, there was more than enough landing space and nectar to go around. They were growing in the grass, in the bare dirt, out of trees, everywhere.

    “Let’s try and catch some!” Ariel said, turning back toward Tucker as he shoved some twigs and leaves into their little bug cage(he thought the butterfly would like something to crawl around on.) “C’mon, you big slowpoke!”

    “Alright, I’m coming!” He took off with her, bug cage in hand as Ariel went around the whole flower patch. It was a fun next few minutes for the two of them. They’d gotten this whole butterfly catching thing down to a science. Ariel would catch them, Tucker would quickly open the bug box up, and Ariel would quickly put the net to the door so the butterfly could fly inside. One after the other, yellow and green after yellow and green.

    “Oh, look at that one!” Tucker pointed to another butterfly. This one was a light blue inside of green or yellow.

    “Hehe, that one’s the same color as you,” Ariel pointed out.

    “Hey, you’re right!” Tucker giggled while she caught this one in her net as well, putting it in the bug cage with the others. “That looks like enough. The bug cage is getting a little cramped.”

    “Okay, but… I wanna pick some of these flowers, too,” Ariel declared.

    Tucker tilted his head to the side as he watched her pluck some of the blue lilies out of the ground. “Why? They’re just flowers I think.”

    “No, my brother said these are different,” Ariel replied. She’d already gotten a handful of blue flowers and stuffed them away in her bag. Now she was picking a few of the purple ones out of the side of a tree trunk. “He said you can eat these ones!”

    “Are you suuuure?” He walked over and took a look at the flowers sticking out of her backpack. “My mom said these blue ones are poisonous.”

    “I think I’m sure, yeah.” Ariel put the violets into her bag alongside the blue lilies. “My mom told me once that kidney beans are poisonous, too!”

    “Eugh! Kidney beans!”

    “My mom makes soup with them sometimes. She says as long as you boil them first, you can eat them. I think it's the same with these flowers.”

    “Hmmmm… okay, I guess that makes sense.”

    Ariel didn’t respond to that one. She was too busy groaning in effort as she tried to yank another flower from the ground. This one seemed to have a thicker stem than the others, with a cluster of several yellow blossoms climbing up the end of the stalk. Tucker didn’t need to be asked, walking over and grabbing the stem and helping her pull. Crunch! The dirt gave way and they were able to tear the plant out of the ground.

    “It’s a yucca plant!” Tucker announced excitedly. Ariel was too busy cleaning the dirt off of its roots and putting it away to pay much attention. “My grandma has one of those in her house back in Texas. They get SUPER big! I think hers are red, though.”

    “GASP!”

    Tucker froze in his tracks, thinking for a moment Ariel had spotted something dangerous. He was ready to grab her hand and run away, but when he went to look at what she’d spotted, he spotted no monster or threat nearby. After all, that wasn’t what had surprised Ariel so much.

    It was another flower. One that was shrouded partly in the shadows of the trees nearby, and thus was glowing.

    “That one’s super pretty!” She blurted out. She ran closer to where it was, with Tucker just barely keeping up. The flower was growing out the top of a rock, through the cracks in its surface. “It looks like one of those pink lilies! Those are my mom’s favorites.”

    Tucker wasn’t really sure what to say here. Should he agree? Call it pretty as well? Mention how weird it was that it was growing out of a rock? He didn’t get to say any of that before Ariel took a deep breath.

    “I’m going to pick it,” she said, “and give it to my big cousin!”

    “Hold on! I can’t climb up that!” Tucker pleaded. “I’ve got little fish legs! I might slip!”

    “Well don’t worry then!” Went Ariel. She grabbed onto the side of the rock as she scraped a foot against it to find a foothold. She was determined to make it up the edge of this rock, one way or another. “I can get it!”

    Shick!

    It had been a while, and this had been my 4th or 5th arrow I’d let loose into the water, spearing yet another fish.

    “Haha! Bullseye!” I reached into the pond and pulled a freshly speared trout out by the shaft of the arrow lodge in it. Luckily for me, the MacNamaras weren’t watching all this. They’d instead opted to take Keyan to another end of the playground to play on some slides instead of the swings that were in full view of what we were doing. Or more accurately, what I was doing.

    “You’re sure we’re allowed to take fish from the pond?” Fiona asked me, her arms crossed as she sat close by on a bench. “I’m pretty sure they’re put there for regular catch and release.”

    “Well yeah, but that’s native fish,” I explained to her. I held up the noticeably bright yellow and green fish stuck on the end of my arrow. “I don’t think this looks very native. Do you?”

That seemed to get a lighthearted albeit nervous chuckle out of my cousin. “I guess it doesn’t!”

    “Well then that settles that!” I held up the sheikah slate, pointing the reticle to the fish and pressing a button on the screen. Just like with the weapons I’d logged onto its system, it zapped the little fish into its inventory. “See? Not so bad!”

    “Yeah, I guess if they’re not supposed to be there, it’s fine,” Fiona said, putting a hand to the side of her face. “It’d be like if someone dumped a bunch of goldfish into the pond.”

    “Goldfish?”

    “Yeah, because they make like rabbits and they’re SUPER invasive.”

    “Oh, right!” I held up my bow and aimed for a bass swimming close to the edge of the pond. “I think I’ve heard about that. There was some pond in Delaware with so many that the dude had to spend almost $300,000 to get them all pulled out.” Shick! Another fish speared.

    I pulled out another fish, this one being much larger and more finicky. The fish flopped while stuck on the arrow, causing me to reel back a bit to avoid getting slapped in the face by a tail fin. I logged it into the slate before reloading the bow with another arrow. Everything was going well. Up until I dared to try and take aim at another fish. That was when my cousin spotted something and sucked in air through her teeth.

    “Link!” She ended up shoving my shoulder in an attempt to get my attention, causing me to let the arrow loose into the bank of the pond.

    “Ack! Fiona, what the hell??”

    “Put your stuff away and act natural!”

    Before I could ask for clarification, she disappeared into a flash of light, and I felt something strap itself to my back and add weight as the master sword appeared. I was left to just look around and try and see what had scared my cousin so thoroughly. That was when I spotted it: pulling into a spot along the sidewalk, its engine shutting off with a little “WOOP!”, a police cruiser parked next to Bowne Park as an officer stepped out. The speed at which I’d thrown my beanie back over my ears would’ve rivaled a track runner.

    I had seen most of the cops in the neighborhood, and I knew enough to figure out how to deal with any should they show up. So you can imagine my slight fear when I realized that this cop wasn’t from Queens. Lucky for me, he stopped to talk with the MacNamaras first.

    “Morning officer!” went Franklin. “Is there a problem?”

    “No no, nothing like that,” the cop assured. “Just figured I’d stop by on my way to a call to make sure everything’s alright over here.”

    “Well we’re all good here, Officer,” Franklin assured.

“You and your wife and kid get registered already?”

“We were just on our way to. Just decided to stop and let the little ones have some fun at the park.”

“I see! Well don’t take too long, then.”

That was when the conversation ended and the officer decided to approach me next. I stood still, kept it cool, tried to make it look like I was just a regular teen hanging out and totally wasn’t up to something, no siree. It didn’t help that this guy looked like a disney villain. Well actually… that might not be the best analogy.

So picture this instead: a man dressed in full NYPD attire - with the button up shirt and the utility belt and badge and everything - that looked like what would’ve happened if Tim Burton directed the Harry Potter films and made Severus Snape the token Johnny Depp character, going a step further to get his directorial vision across to the viewer by having Christopher Loydd dub over the footage. He addressed me in said jarring voice while still making his way over to me.

“Hello there! Not causing any trouble, are ya?” He asked with a chuckle.

“Nope! No trouble here, officer…” I trailed off for a moment, trying to see if I could spot a name anywhere on his person.

“Delphi!” He said. “Officer Alistair Delphi, Manhattan NYPD, and you?”

“Lincoln! Just Lincoln is fine,” I replied.

“Oh… Manhattan?” I realized. “What’re you doing all the way over here then?”

“It’s rather dumb, actually, I wouldn’t want to bore you with the details.”

“Can’t be any more boring than my day so far,” I assured.

“Well if you insist, Precinct 109 is undermanned right now, so I offered to come out and check up on some non-emergency call about those bat monster things nesting in some poor old lady’s apple tree.”

“Oh, bummer, dude.”

“Yep. BIG bummer.” He chuckled awkwardly, obviously trying to steer the conversation somewhere else. “I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but um…” He pointed over at my back. “What’s with the sword?” It took me a moment before I remembered, right! The Master Sword!

“Oh! This?” I pointed a thumb over my shoulder, gesturing to the blade. “It’s a replica my uncle gave me. He bought it as a gun show in Syracuse a year or so back. Figured with all the monsters and stuff, a sword would be a good go-to weapon of self defense.

“Alright, alright…” I could tell, even with the explanation he was skeptical. “Usually I’d give you a lecture about the laws with carrying concealed blades in the City, but these are unprecedented times. Just don’t go carrying that thing around when this is all over, alright?”

“Will do, sir!” I gave a thumbs up for emphasis.

Officer Delphi simply nodded his head with a smile, turning the other way and heading back to his car. I stood there waving as he went, waiting until he got back in his cruiser and drove off. In that moment, I felt the scabbard on my back grow lighter and my anger grow threefold.

“Fiona, what the hell was that?!” I turned around to see my cousin standing there with her arms crossed. “Why did you puch me, I was about to nail a hearty bass!”

“Do you think the cop would’ve cared?” she asked. “You’re not allowed to keep the fish you fish over here!”

“Fiona, we just went over this, they’re not even native fish! And he wouldn’t have cared! He didn’t even care that iI had a real sword with me just now!”

“Well I don’t want you making a habit of it, Lincoln! How do I know you won’t keep pulling this crap when this is all over?”

“Because I WON’T! How was I supposed to know you’d still be such a rules stickler while everything is in chaos and there’s MONSTERS running around!?”

The two of us were reaching our boiling point at that moment. And it all blew over as we shouted at each other in unison.

“WHY DO YOU HATE ME?!”

The silence afterwards was deafening.

The two of us couldn’t help but look at each other. Eyes wide, lips quivering, faces pale, trying to figure out what to say. Trying to figure out how to remedy the situation. But you can’t exactly come back from a big reveal like this. It didn’t help that we could just barely make out Franklin and Mei MacNamara seated at the edge of the playground, trying to pretend like they weren’t watching but very clearly were watching whatever drama was about to unfold.

“I… I don’t hate you, I just-”

“No, I don’t either,” I said, cutting her off. “Dislike a lot, maybe, but not hate.” That seemed to get a chuckle out of her. A nervous one, but a chuckle nonetheless.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that either, I just…” she held her hands up, like she was about to make a gesture of some kind to get her point across, but they just sat there in the air before she let out a sigh. “I just always get scared around cops is all.”

That last bit gave me pause for a moment. Even knowing all the horrors I knew about security and surveillance and all that in the US, it still somehow managed to catch me off guard. 

“Wait, is that why you’re so scared of breaking rules? And why you’re always nagging me and Ariel about the rules?” I asked. “Because you’re scared of the cops?”

“More just… authority and getting in trouble,” she said, immediately wincing afterwards. “I know, I know, it’s stupid-”.

“Fiona, it’s fine,” I assured her. “Most people are afraid of all that, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Except it is!” She blurted back. “I shouldn’t be scared of them! There’s other things that deserve to be feared WAY more than the fuzz! Like sharks or tornadoes or-”

My cousin was cut off by a choir of screaming. High pitched, little kid screaming. We both turned toward the source of it once it hit us that it was two kids screaming. One of them I definitely recognized, and considering Fiona called it out at the same time as me, it seemed she did too:

“ARIEL!”

I didn’t bother to wait for my cousin to go sword mode, grabbing the left joycon off of my switch and getting out my trusty old bat since I was definitely going to need it. We didn’t have a chance to go running to look for them before the kids came bursting out of the more forested area of the park and running as fast as their little legs could go.

“Oh god, what’re they running from?!” Fiona asked. I was about to try and guess, but I didn’t get a chance to before I heard chittering in the belt pouch on my hip. All it took was me opening the flap to see that it was the little mechanical beetle that the Sullivans had given me. The one they said was only there to play fitting music. To my horror, the little beetle wasn’t chittering. It was playing music. Boss music .

CRASH!

We looked up and away from the beetle as something crashed through the trees, splintering their bark and knocking them over and to the sides. Some crashed into the dirt, others into the pond. All to clear the way for a creature I wasn’t expecting to find in the park. Of all the things we’d have to be careful of, I didn’t think big rock monsters would be one of them.

It looked like a pile of stones a kid tried to stack together to make a little tower with how its limbs and stuff were cobbled together. I wouldn’t have been surprised if a light breeze could’ve knocked its legs off. I didn’t have time to make any quips about it before I realized that it was after the kids.

“Ariel, Tucker, get out of there!!” I shouted.

SLAM!

The rock monster threw forward one of its arms, launching it at my sister and her friend. They were quick enough that it missed them, but it ended up hitting the ground right behind them, launching both Ariel and Tucker into the air screaming. Big brother instincts kicked in and I sprinted over, leaping through the air and catching the two of them before they hit the ground.

“Oh my god, oh my god-” My cousin was freaking out. “Uh- get the kids somewhere safe!” She ordered me as she tapped off the ground and started levitating. “I’ll get it off their trail!”

Before I could object, I watched as Fiona went figure skating through the air, zipping past the stone monster and back toward where it had come. The rock monster caught sight of her and mindlessly lumbered after her like an ogre. I took the opportunity to make a break for the playground.

“Oh my god, Tucker!” Mei had called out, nearly on the verge of tears as I set the kids down on the ground.

I looked at my sister. “Ariel, go hide with Tucker’s family.”

“Uh-huh!” She ran off as I looked at the MacNamaras.

“You guys stay here in the playground,” I ordered. “Take cover under the play structure or something.”

“What about you and your cousin?!” Tucker asked frantically, looking between me and the scene over by the pond.

“We’ll be fine, don’t you worry.” I gave him a pat on the head.

“Yeah, he’ll beat it up!” Ariel blurted.

“What she said.” I chuckled. I didn’t wait for anyone to say anything, instead opting to run off back toward the scene of the action to give Fiona a hand. The Sullivans’ little beetle was off my shoulder, buzzing around in the air as it kept playing its hyped up music. 

Making a mad dash through the grass and dirt, I came closer and closer to the scene of my cousin gliding out of the way of attack after attack, with each thrown rock breezing right past her head as she kept it up. I was ready to get my bat ready and go in on the offensive… until I realized I didn’t actually know how to fight this thing.

Naturally, that meant I had to take a moment to snap a picture of the rock monster on the Sheikah Slate to see what information it held. The problem was that it gave it enough time to spot me before I could read anything. Uh oh.

CRASH!

I quickly jumped and rolled out of the way of its other rock arm as it lobbed it toward me, the projectile crashing into the dirt and shattering where I once stood. Lucky for me, the stone monster had run out of arms.

“Quick, while it’s rearming itself!” Fiona shouted as she glided over. “What’s it’s weakness!?”

“It says it’s called a- really, ‘re-arming’ itself?? ”

“C’mon, that was a good one!”

“Alright, well, it says it’s called a Stone Talus. You can’t kill it by attacking its skin.”

“I’d think so! It’s a ROCK!”

“But look at it’s back!”

I pointed up at the monster as it pulled its shoulder from the ground pulling a brand new arm out of the dirt. When it leaned over for the other arm, that’s when Fiona saw it: a pillar of rock, probably half my height, jutting out the top of its head.

“Oh!” She squinted at it. “It kinda looks like those ore rocks. The ones you break open to get gemstones or find veins of gold and silver.”

“Yep! That’s the weak point!” I put the Sheikah Slate away right as the Talus’s attention came back to us. “FALL BACK!”

We both literally jumped back and away from each other as it threw its rock arms at us like canonballs. Once the way was clear, I looked to my cousin. “Fiona! CATCH!” I tossed my joycon to her, and she caught it in his hand as it flashed into a metal chair leg instead of a baseball bat.

“What am I supposed to do with this?!” she asked, holding it up.

“I dunno, you’re the one who’s supposed to be in charge!” I replied as I stepped away from her, watching as the Talus kept turning to keep its (figurative) eyes on me. “You’ll figure it out!”

“In charge of making sure you and Ariel are safe while Aunt Marion is out of town,” she said. “Not in charge of FIGHTING THE BIG ROCK MONSTER!”

“CLOSE ENOUGH!” I leaped away to the side as the Talus slammed an arm down over top of me, trying to crush me instead of bludgeon me with thrown rocks this time. My cousin stood there floating for a moment, trying to figure out what to do during all this as she watched me jump this way and that, trying to keep from getting all my ribs cracked at the same time like a pile of wood planks at a karate showcase.

Fiona looked at the chair leg, looked at the Talus, and then did something I wasn’t expecting: she threw it.

I’m not talking an average throw like any other desperate person trying to fight something. She threw that metal chair leg with damn near pinpoint accuracy as it flew forward, hitting the black pillar of rock like a spear. It was at this point we realized the Talus could feel pain, as it flinched back and flailed its arms a bit the moment the chair leg stuck itself in its head rock. And then it fell forward, its face slamming down into the grass and dirt. I didn’t need Fiona to yell at me for me to realize what to do here. I grabbed onto the top of its head and held on for dear life as the Talus shook. It stood back up, bringing me with it.

“Don’t fall!” Fiona yelled up at me as she glided back and away from the Talus.

“Oh, yeah, no, I was going to hurl myself off of this rock the moment it stood up straight!” I snarked back, grabbing onto the chair leg and yanking it out. The hole it left in the rock wasn’t a big one, but any adult who’s worked in construction will tell you that it just takes a few more well placed hits to get a hole like that to make cracks in everything around it.

I shoved the chair leg back into the black rock, cracking and chipping at it to try and further this all along. The talus moving underneath my feet seemed to stop and swivel at every hit, trying to figure out how to make it stop. I hadn’t even gotten a good solid crack to form before the talus finally got wise to what I was doing. I felt the rock underneath me move again, but not in a manageable swivel this time. It flung itself forward and slammed its face into the ground, the force of it throwing me off its head and into the dirt. I was barely able to sit back up when I saw the Talus getting ready to toss its arm at me.

Leave it to the lumbering rock monster to get a little bit faster when you least expect it.

Everything seemed to stop and slow down for a moment as I tried to figure out what to do. There’s no way I could roll out of the way in time. Even if I got up and jumped right at that moment, it’d still hit me square in the chest. I’ll admit, I panicked for a split second before trying something out in an act of desperation: I pulled my glove off of my hand and pressed down on the dial on the back of my hand. I got up right as my arm lit up blue and the light from the wires started to swirl around like loose thread in the air, encircling me as I made a mad dash.

CRASH!

I didn’t run fast enough. But lucky for me, and to my shock, the hurtling rock projectile passed through me like a cloud of smoke.

    I landed back on the grass, my feet sliding a bit under me along the dirt, but I was able to keep my balance.

My cousin was just looking with wide eyes. “Link?!”

“Yeah yeah, I know, ‘I’m going ghost’ or whatever joke you’re about to make,” I snarked as I pulled the chair leg back out.

“No no, not that, you can phase through the rock??”

“Well duh! It’s a monster, but it’s still a- EEP!” I hit the dial on my hand again as another rock was thrown at me, phasing through it yet again. “As I was saying, it’s still a rock!”

“Hold on a sec, just-” She took a quick breath. “Do what I tell you to!”

Before I could question her, Fiona lept at me, her body flashing with white light before I snatched her out of the air as the Master Sword.

“Alright, now what?!” I asked, looking over at the Talus took its sweet time slamming one side and then the other into the ground to get its arms back.

<<Okay okay, when it gets back up, I want you to phase right through its face and swing the sword.>>

“WHA- just, through its body?!”

<<You had NO qualms about going through its arms!>>

“BECAUSE THE ARMS WEREN’T ATTACHED TO IT!” I lept to the side and out of the way as the Talus threw another rock at me. I kept running a circle around it as it threw its other arm at me.

<<Listen to me!>> Fiona groaned. <<If you leap through that thing’s torso at the right angle, you’ll come out right underneath where its little rock pillar weak spot is!”

“So lemme get this straight,” I said. “You want me to rocket through that thing and try to shatter its weak point from the base up??

<<Do you have a problem with that plan?>>

“Nah, it sounds like a freaking awesome plan if it works, let’s do it!”

Tucker had never seen something so epic in his life. Ariel had, sure. She’d seen the sea monster(both of them), the dragon, and now she was watching her brother and cousin face down a rock monster that had shown up out of nowhere! It was really cool. Keyan was holed up with them, the three of them hiding underneath the play structure like a trio of rabbits in a burrow, peeking out to watch the fox face down with the badger.

“You kids alright down there?” Mei asked them. She and Franklin couldn’t fit under the play structure with the kids. Even if they weren’t super tall fish people it would be a stretch. Instead, they were simply hiding underneath a staircase leading up to the slide, right beside where the kids were.

“We’re alright, mom,” Keyan assured in his hushed, shy little voice.

“Alright,” Mei said. “If you kids get too scared and you want to go somewhere else, don’t be afraid to let us know.”

“I don’t think we’ll need to evacuate or anything, hun,” went Franklin.

“But what if that thing comes back over here??” Mei worried.

“Well, I… I’m sure the kids got it.”

CRASH!

A rock landed by the pond where the kids had been fishing moments before. The Talus had returned, but was still a far ways off from the playground, over at the other side of the pond. The water underneath its projectile’s impact splashed up like the finale of a seaworld show, showering the pathways and benches in pond water.

“GET DOWN!” Franklin took his wife’s shoulder and pulled her to the ground. The kids got the idea, ducking low to the ground to mimic the adults. They all watched from a lower vantage point, seeing one of the Matheson kids return with the rock to try and finish the job.

<<ACK! Shoot, the kids!!>>

“And the MacNamaras!” I said to my cousin. I looked back at the talus as it readied its remaining arm. “It’s now or never!”

<<THEN DO IT ALREADY!>>

My grip on the sword tightened. I looked and waited, watching as the Talus reeled its hand back to slam it down. Go time.

I pushed the dial on my right hand down into the skin, my arm lit up like a star, and I jumped up and forward as the blue light encircled me like a web of magic. I held the Master Sword in front of me and off I went.

The feeling was… strange. It wasn’t quite like when I’d passed through the ceiling of the Dragon’s Lair, or when I’d stuck my face through the side of the Coelacanth. It was different when passing through something that was technically alive. You could hear the magic running through it, the beating of its stone heart, the malice pulsing through its metaphorical veins.

And before I knew it, I was out on top. CRASH!

Bits of black rock and rubble exploded around me as I came out the other side, the black pillar of jagged rock on the Talus’s back shattering as the Master sword sliced up and through it.

I wasn’t able to stick the landing, and I ended up stumbling and falling into the grass. I turned onto my back to watch as the Talus flailed, just as it always did when its weak spot was attacked. But this time, its little rocky legs buckled underneath it as well. Just like that, the stacked up little pile of rocks was suddenly hit by the wayward breeze that would send it tumbling over. The Stone Talus fell to the ground in a heap of big rubble and out of place boulders, its surface creaking and cracking before it finally went POOF!

    <<Haha!>> My cousin laughed at it from the safety of her sword form. <<Take that, you big boulder brain!>>

    “Ow!” I flinched back as something hard fell from the sky and conked me on the head. It fell to the ground with a muffled thud. Followed by a lot more muffled thuds. I looked down, my free hand on my head, to see what it was that fell down from the sky. My eyes went wide.

    “Holy crap, gemstones!” I reached down and picked up probably one of the biggest rubies I’d ever seen. “This thing’s bigger than my fist!”

    <<That’s not saying much,>> Fiona joked as she flashed out of my hand, resuming her humanoid form. “Looks like that thing dropped a few of them.”

    “Yeah, look at these!” I picked up an armful of shiny and no-doubt valuable rocks, all glistening in the sun. “I could pay for my college with these!”

    “Or driving lessons,” Fiona snarked.

    “Oh shut up,” I huffed. I slid my backpack off as I went to put away all the fancy rocks and gems into it.

    “Hey, when you’re done with that,” Fiona said as she looked across the pond. “Maaaybe we should make sure they’re not traumatized or anything-”

    SPLASH!

    “GAH!” Fiona fell back and onto the grass as someone sprung up out of the pond. To my shock, I saw Franklin there, taking in a big breath of air as he pulled himself up out of the water. Funnily enough, Mei was right behind him… running along the grass with the kids like a regular person.

    “Oh my god, are you kids okay??” He asked. We both nodded our heads as Mei and the others finally caught up.

    “Frank, goodness, why didn’t you just walk??” she asked, setting Ariel and Tucker down in the grass.

    “Well, I’m a fish! There’s water! I might as well do what fish do best, right?”

    “Oh my god…”

    “Well, we’re fine,” I assured them, zipping up my backpack full of rocks and standing up. “The rock monster’s gone, so it should all be fine now.”

    “Yeah, haha. No doubt thanks to that nifty little arm there,” Frank joked, pointing toward my right arm. The color drained from my face as I reflexively hid it behind my back. This just made him chuckle.

    “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna snitch on you,” he assured. “I can see why you didn’t want to get registered. It just looks…”

    “Bad?”

    “No, not bad, just VERY magic looking.”

    “Yeah, I guess that’s one way to phrase it,” I said as I held it up in front of me. The lights in the skin and veins had died down by this point, now just pulsing dimly to show proof of its work that day.

    “You know, I’d say maybe go out of your way to not get registered.”

“Franklin!”

“What?? Look at that thing,” Franklin said to his wife. I wasn’t paying much attention to their conversation, simply thinking that it might be time to head back to the home base. “I couldn’t imagine what the fuzz would do if they found out about that.”

Chapter Text

Though my little sister wasn’t keen on bidding farewell to her school friend she’d missed so dearly, we were quick to leave the park with our catch as soon as we could. Now we knew that any inconspicuous rock could be some big screw-you monster waiting to crush our bones to make its bread and I wasn’t really into that. It made me glad that the Dragon’s Lair was just a quick walk away from the park.

The bell above the door rang to signal our entrance. Even with the sign in the window being flipped to “We’re closed”, Bennet had left the door unlocked for us. One thing I hadn’t expected to see was Darius and Mina back at the store before us. Howard Beach was further from the store than the park was! Had we seriously taken that long? I didn’t have much time to really think about all that, though. Not before a few things happened, one after the other.

“Welcome back, you guys!” Bennet greeted while he was in the middle of setting something up on the check-out counter. “Had a good time?”

“For the most part,” I said with a nervous smile. “A Stone Talus showed up out of nowhere.”

“Oh, yeesh!”

“Yeah, I know, I know.”

“But Link shattered it like glass!” Ariel said. “So it’s all good now!” She was suddenly cut off as someone shoved something in her face. I barely got a chance to see what it was before everything unfolded. It was a little stuffed shark. Ariel paused for a moment, took a second, and then everything clicked together just like that. She let out a gasp as she looked up to see who exactly was holding the toy out to her.

“Hallo again, schatje!”

“SIMON!” Ariel was quick to hug his leg in the way little kids do as they both broke out into a joint giggle fit. “I thought you were going home!”

“Well, I was,” he said with shrugged shoulders. “Buuuut my older sister needed someone to keep an eye on her for a bit.” My sister giggled again, and they continued to sit and talk as something else was brought to my attention. Namely, a new person in the room. Long blonde hair tied back in a braid, a face mostly concealed by bangs and a mask, and an outfit that wouldn’t look out of place at some alt punk rally.

“Yo Nav,” I whispered to Navi, who’d been aimlessly buzzing around the room. “Who’s the new guy?” She looked at me as if I had asked her what color the sky was.

“That’s your best friend, dingus,” she said with her arms crossed.

“Oh… huh… hey Zed!” I said awkwardly. “What’s with the new getup? It looks neat!”

“Thanks so much!” she said. “I just felt like there needed to be a change. Plus I was in those other ones through all sorts of monster fights with no shower for at least 2 days, so I needed clean clothes anyways.”

“Ah, right, right.”

“Also, um…” she paused for a moment before chuckling. “This is gonna sound stupid, but could you guys call me Sheik maybe? Just until all this magic stuff dies down.”

“Not stupid at all!” I said. “Welcome to the team, Sheik.”

You couldn’t see her mouth, but you could tell from her eyes that she was smiling all giddy.

“Alright, Mathesons, get over here.” Bennet called for me and Fiona while the others went to do their own thing. We made our way over to the front counter as he kept trying to set up his little cooking station.

“Alright then, if you could get out what you guys caught, that’d be great,” he said. I pulled out the Sheikah Slate to see what I’d store in the inventory. “We have a lot of stuff to make. Shock resistance is most important, but even more important than that is heat resistance since the park’s a sandy desert now. Plus some cold resistance for night time since deserts actually get super cold at-”

“Wait wait wait wait,” I paused what I was doing and looked up at him. “Night time?”

“Yeah! I doubt you guys are gonna get all the way across the park and back in one go,”  he explained. “Not unless you physically and mentally exhaust yourselves, of course.”

I opened my mouth to say something before Fiona butted in with, “We’re not doing that.” I closed my mouth after that.

“Alright, whatever,” I huffed. “But we’re gonna need, like… a tent or something then.”

“Maybe Bennet has one?” Fiona guessed.

“Nah man,” went Bennet immediately after. “I don’t have everything you guys need. What am I, a video game shopkeeper?”

“Alright alright, fair.” I pulled out my phone and opened up the group chat. “Does anyone know a place where we can get a tent real quick?”

I ended up getting a choir of not reallys and nos as I typed something up in the group chat. Of course no one here would know a place.

I was hoping the kids who hadn’t gotten back yet would know a place.

-

    “And voila!” Miranda lifted something up out of the cooking pot with a ladle the bokoblins left behind. “Vegan mushroom meatballs! And high defense mushroom meatballs, too!” She’d been content to wait until they got back to the Dragon’s Lair and cook all their stuff there, but she couldn’t wait to show off a bit to the boys. Thus, vegan mushroom meatballs.

    “I could make a meatball sub out of those,” Vinny said with a gasp. “Could you imagine? Going in to fight some big bad monster and you wolf down a whole meatball sub and become invincible?”

    “I… don’t think that’s how the flowers work,” Mike said dryly.

    “Oh, hey guys, group chat!” Garrett fished his phone out of his hoodie pocket to take a look. Miranda packed away the meatballs in a metal tin while Garrett read over whatever was new. He took a breath in through his gritted teeth. “Hey, Lincoln said we might need camping equipment over in Staten Island. Do you know anywhere nearby we could find some?”

    “Nah, I’m not much of an outdoorsy guy, sorry,” Vinny apologized.

    “I mean, there’s a Dick’s Sporting Goods a little ways away, but it’s too far out of the way for it to be convenient,” Miranda huffed.

    Mike didn’t have to think for too long before he remembered which neighborhood of Queens they were in. “I might know!”

    Vinny blinked at him. “Wait wait wait, you? Would know where we can find camping equipment ??”

    “What, do you think my whole life is just football and taking pot shots at you and Embers?” he asked grumpily. He didn’t wait for a response before he started walking off. “C’mon! Just follow me.”

    It wasn’t like the others had any other ideas, so they decided to follow. Mike ended up taking them into the neighborhood to the east of Flushing Fields. It was a quick walk, but with how eerily barren the streets were, it felt more like a mile-long hike. Eventually, they came to a stop at a house. There was nothing special about it. It was your typical house in Queens: narrow with two stories, stairs leading up to the front porch, a small lawn with garden gnomes in it. By all means it was just like every other house.

    And soon the four of them found themselves on the front porch, with Michael knocking on the door to try and get an answer. Garrett put a message in the group chat warning the others that Mike might know a place. He’d keep them updated, though. With how whoever lived in the house was ignoring them, this would probably take a bit.

    “Collin, you jerkwad, I know you’re there, dude,” Mike said through the door. “It’s Mike!” There was more silence on the other end. Mike groaned. “You know I can hear you playing Smash 4 in there, right?”

    That didn’t get a response in the traditional sense. All it got was the sound of footsteps and rattling metal as someone came over and opened the door a crack, the little door chain growing tawt as the person inside didn’t want to open it just yet. He just looked outside with one judgemental eye. Or maybe he was bored, it was hard to tell. This must’ve been Collin.

    “... damn dude, since when did you dye your hair?” he asked.

    “It’s not dye,” Mike explained. “It’s because of the whole-”

    “The Tolkeining crap?”

    “Yeah, the Tolkeining crap.” Mike sighed heavily. “There’s way too much to explain, but do you still have all that camping crap from when we all went to Shenandoah last summer??”

    “Well duh, I can’t exactly return all that.”

    “Can we borrow it?”

    “WE?!”

    There was a pause. The door opened just the least bit more so Collin could get a better look at the porch and who was on it. He saw the other three there, consisting of… what was that, an alien? Next to two kids he most definitely recognized.

    “Ain’t those the kids you steal homework from?” he asked.

    “Dude, can we borrow the crap or not?” Mike windged.

    “Alright, alright, hold your horses man, lemme go find it.”

    The door was shut once again. Mike thought for sure it would open back up all the way and they would be invited inside… but it didn’t. Collin had left them there to go fiddling around for the camping equipment, as if being out in the open on someone’s porch was a good idea while there were goblins and lizards and evil bats roaming around.

    “Collin, what the hell’s wrong with you??” went someone from inside.

    “What- WHAT??” Collin replied.

    “You can’t just leave them on the porch, something could murk them out there!” There were heavy footfalls as someone approached the front door. The door chain was jangled and unhooked before the front door came swinging back open again. “Sorry about that, dude.”

    “Steve??” Mike seemed taken aback by the sudden appearance of yet another kid he knew. This kid was very tall, perhaps even rivaling Garrett in “being tall for a teen boy”, with a blonde bowl-cut framing the top of his head.

“What’re you doing over here??” Mike asked.

    “You think some big pigs would stop us from doing Smash Bros Sunday?”

    “YES!” Miranda blurted out.

    “Well obviously it didn’t,” Mike said dryly as he walked inside. The others followed behind him, either sheepishly or cautiously.

    “Sooooo how do you know each other?” Garrett asked, trying to break up the awkwardness.

    “Football team!” Steve said excitedly.

    “Oh, cool!” Garrett leaned against a nearby bookshelf, trying his best not to knock it over. “Are you both uhh defensive? Offense? I don’t really watch american football, so I don’t-”

    “Nah, they didn’t make the cut for that!” Mike said with a laugh. He patted Steve on the shoulder. “Steve and Collin are the waterboys.”

    “Bro, don’t tell them that!” Collin complained from down the hall. He entered the main room with a large plastic storage tub in his hands. Collin was a little shorter than average, with short black hair and swept back bangs. Him and Steve looked like polar opposites physically when they were next to each other, with only one thing making them similar in the slightest: their pointed ears.

    “Hey, it’s nothing to be ashamed of, dude!” Steve reassured him. “Guys like Mike can’t run if they’re dehydrated! We’re pretty much the backbone of the team!”

    “Sure, because Mike doesn’t know his way around a water cooler, Steven,” Collin scoffed while Mike went through the tub. Miranda, Garrett and Vincent were surprised at the sheer variety of things in the bin: sleeping bags, outdoor pillows, a folding table, and even one of those solar powered camping lanterns.

    “Do you still have the Ozark too, Collin?” Mike asked as he looked up from everything.

    “Wha- the ozark tent??” Collin sputtered. “I mean… I’ll go grab it, but what the hell, man??”

    “What on EARTH do you need a 12 person tent for, Goss?!” Steve asked, flabbergasted for the first time this whole conversation.

    Mike paused for a moment, one friend fishing a big log-sized tent bag out of a hallway cabinet while his other friend was waiting at the edge of his seat for an answer. Mike looked between his friends, the others from the adventuring group… and then sighed.

    “Alright, it’s a lot to explain,” he began. “But the gist of it is… well… Uma’s stuck on Staten Island and we’re on a rescue mission to save her.”

    Both Collin and Steve looked more shocked than they’d ever been in their life. More shocked than that one time they witnessed Mike run a full field touchdown with a twisted ankle(boy did McKay give him an earful for not even trying to call timeout the moment he hurt his ankle).

    “Wha- What’s Uma doing there?!” Steve asked. “I thought Staten Island was full of sand or something!”

    “Yeah, and Uma’s being held captive right in the middle of all that sand,” Mike told him.

    “You’re talking about it like she got kidnapped or something,” Collin snarked as he passed the tent bag to Mike.

    “She did!” Miranda informed them.

    “HUH!?” Steve and Collin exclaimed in unison. Mike just took a pause and groaned. Leave it to everyone else in the group to overcomplicate this all. There was no way he was leaving that house without telling Steve and Collin everything.

    “Oh god, alright, sit down guys,” Mike said. The two of them sat down on the sofa while Mike pulled up a chair from the nearby dining table, turning it around so he could sit. “Let me explain what’s been going on and where I’ve been.”

    Before Mike could even begin, Garrett figured it best to send something in the group chat: “We got the stuff. Might take us a bit to get back.”

    The fact that it took the others nearly an hour after telling us they’d found camping stuff was surprising, but also not really. We didn’t know how far out of the way the camping equipment was anyways. Coach McKay was just about to get his things together so he could go search for them when Mike and the others lumbered through the door.

    “Ahhh, finally.” Mike dropped his little basket onto the front counter before nearly collapsing onto the beanbag chair. Ariel was right beside it, in the middle of looking for a book to read, and just looked at Mike with her head tilted to one side.

    “Are you okay?” she asked.

    “Yep. Perfectly fine,” Mike assured.

    “Well I’m glad you kids are safe!” Said Darius. “What took you all so long?”

    “One of Mike’s friends lived by the baseball field,” Garrett explained. “We were going to borrow the stuff and split, but then Miranda made them ask what was going on.” He slowly turned to Miranda as he added this.

    “Well hey, it ain’t my fault!” she retorted. “One of them asked if Uma was kidnapped, and I just answered honestly!”

    “He didn’t ask, he GUESSED.” Garrett fumed.

    “Enough of that, you guys,” I said. “You got mushrooms and stuff, right?”

    “Yep!” Vinny confirmed. “Miranda already made meatballs before we got back.” I looked up at her, to which she just shrugged.

    “We had a cooking pot, we had mushrooms. Perfect stuff to make vegan meatballs with!”

    “Well whatever,” said Bennet as he extended a hand. Miranda and Garrett passed him their baskets of stuff. “Do you know what most of these do?”

    “Well yeah, I know the gray mushrooms and the purple flowers up your defense,” Miranda said.

    “Alright good, good, that’s something,” Bennet said as he began sifting through the spoils. He was sorting them by type it seemed. “Let me go over some of the others real quick.” I was surprised by just how many different kinds of mushrooms there could be in one place. Bennet raised a couple of them in his hands, with a cluster of white ones with a gradient of blue on the cap in one hand, and a cluster of yellow mushrooms in the other.

    “So THESE ones-” Bennet held up the white and blue ones. “-are called Silent Shrooms. You cook these together and they can make you stealthier. Not sure how that translates in real life, but in the game they just make it so you make less noise.”

    “So you cook them and eat them and you can hide more easily?” Sheik asked.

    “Yep!” Bennet set them down in a basket. “And these ones right here are the ones we need most!” He held up the yellow ones. “You cook these together and it’ll give you resistance to electric shock.”

    “Damn. How does that work?” Vinny asked. “Does it like… insulate your blood or something?”

    “I don’t think so. Electricity harms people because it affects your muscles,” Bennet explained. “Like making your heart stop or skip a beat or something. So it probably does something to insulate your muscles , not your blood.”

    “Ahhhhh gotcha.” Vinny sat down at the DnD table.

    “Alright then,” he put the zapshrooms away. “There’s a couple of others here, but the gist is that these ones-” he held up a cluster of mushrooms that looked similar to the zapshrooms, but they were blue instead of yellow. “-are chillshrooms, and they help keep you cold during the day. Definitely gonna need that in the desert. And these ones-” He pulled out yet another similarly shaped cluster of mushrooms, these ones a bright orange-red instead of yellow or blue. “Are sun shrooms! These ones keep you warm at night if you don’t have appropriate clothes.”

    “Alright, so the blue and orange ones are top priority in terms of cooking,” I said.

    “Yeah, unless there’s something else you guys have,” Bennet replied.

    “OH! RIGHT!” Mike shot to his feet, like he’d never been exhausted in the first place, and marched over to the checkout counter where everything was spread out. He gently pushed the mushrooms out of the way a bit to clear space. “I almost forgot!”

    THUNK!

    The store was dead silent as Mike slammed down this absolutely MASSIVE vegetable, still with the flower, stems and leaves attached. Most of us were stuck looking on in shock at the thing. I feel like Bennet was wishing he had a pair of glasses to pull off his face all dramatic a la Jurassic Park. Then again knowing Bennet, he probably would’ve done the same with his glass eye, but I doubt he wanted to freak out everyone in the store.

    “Holy CRAP, a hearty radish??” He picked it up by the stem with one hand while using the other to examine the vegetable itself. “And you just found it in the field?”

    “Yeah, he just spotted the flower and ripped it out of the dirt,” Garrett explained.

    “What’s it supposed to do?” Navi asked, fluttering right beside my face as I leaned on the edge of the counter.

    “Not sure about in real life, but I have a theory,” Bennet began. “So, some of you kids took those heart container things, right?”

    “Yeah,” I replied.

    “Ok so,” Bennet clapped his hands together. “Based on what you all have told me, those seem to give you guys something I like to call ‘shonen powers’.”

    “Like the anime genre??” Miranda asked.

    “Yeah, exactly!” Bennet continued. “Guys get thrown around and smashed through walls, and they come out with barely a scratch. Based on the crap you guys say you’ve been through, I have reason to assume that’s what the heart container does for you all.”

    “Interesting…” Sheik cupped her chin. “So I CAN punch a brick wall and not get hurt!”

    “Maybe don’t test that, Sheik,”  I told her.

    “Point is, I think all the ‘hearty’ stuff does the same for you guys when cooked,” Bennet explained. “Anyone without a heart container can take a couple of hits all shonen protagonist style before it wears off.” Garrett, Vinny and Mike all seemed vastly intrigued by this prospect.

    “What other stuff is considered ‘hearty’ then?” Simon asked. “Is it just radishes?”

    “Nah, quite a few things count,” Bennet said as he held out a hand to run down the list while counting on his fingers. “Blue snails, durians, blue and orange bass, truffles-”

    “Bass! That’s right, I’ve got fish for you!” I pulled out the sheikah slate. I was about to swipe into the inventory and pull out the fish before Bennet stopped me.

    “Wait a tick, Lincoln.” He told me. “Let me at least set up a stove first!” We watched as he walked into the back. We were expecting him to come back with something and set it up on the checkout counter, but then we heard the click of a lighter as he used his foot to push the door back open. “Well come on in then, don’t just stand and wait.”

    We walked in to see Bennet, having just freshly lit a little camping stove on one of the tables. He had a little wok set up on top of it, with just enough space for I’d say about five of the fish.

    “Alright, get the fish out now,” he said, pointing a thumb at the empty space on the table next to the wok. There was a slab of wood - a cutting board of sorts - set up there to put things down on. “Let’s start with the heat resistance stuff.”

    “Uhhh are you sure about that?” I asked.

    “Yeah, just put the fish on the cutting board.”

    “Alright, if you say so.” I hit the button in the inventory for the chillfin trout, and one bright blue flash later and the Sheikah Slate had spit out 8 of them onto the cutting board. Bennet had to pause for a moment.

    “Damn, where’d you get all those??” he asked.

    “You’d be surprised how big the Bowne Park pond is, my guy.”

    “Alright, fair, um…” He paused for a moment as he laid out the chillshrooms. We all watched as Bennet quite literally meal-prepped all these.

    “Well, good news is we don’t need to make these for all of you guys,” he said. “If any of you would like, you could just wear desert appropriate clothes.”

    That made me pause. “... define ‘desert appropriate’ real quick.”

    “Hold on a sec-” He walked out of the room, fishing for something underneath the checkout counter before pulling out the “Breath of the Wild” game strategy guide. He joined back up with us while flipping through the pages. He stopped on a little section detailing all the armor you could get in this game. And let me tell you, there was a LOT. From thematic little regional outfits to cold resistance to stealth to defensive to even a whole armor set made of rubber. He pointed a finger to one specific picture of one of the heat resistant armor sets. It looked pretty cool and all that, but I couldn’t get over one thing…

    “Oh, so just… don’t wear a shirt??” I asked.

    “I mean, I guess?” Bennet closed the book and set it down on the table. “But wear sunscreen, though.”

    “No Bennet, I quite enjoy being in pain whenever I move, DUH I’m gonna wear sunscreen!”

    “I’m fine with going without a shirt,” Mike said with his arms crossed.

    “Alright, let’s get this out of the way then,” went Bennet. “Everyone in favor of going shirtless, raise your hand.”

    Only five of us raised our hands out of the group of 10: Me, Mike, Simon, Navi(She argued that she could just hide in the shade of someone’s hoodie or hat or something, which seemed to qualify), and Vinny. Everyone else kept their hands down, either for comfort or convenience.

    “Alright, duly noted!” Bennet said, counting off the people with their hands lowered. “Alright so that’s five of you guys, so I’ll just need to make five of these to keep you guys cool during the day and-”

    “Six!”

    We looked to the doorway leading into the room. There stood Mina, having returned from the bathroom in an entirely new set of clothes. It took me a moment to put all the pieces together, but that last little piece slid into place when I realized she was wearing desert-appropriate attire: a tank top, shorts, hiking boots, and a warm jacket tied around her waist for later.

    “I thought you were staying here,” Simon said.

    “Not anymore!” She picked up her lacrosse stick and tied it to her back with a rope. “I’m joining you all on Staten Island, whether you like it or not.” She walked in before patting Simon’s forehead crest. “It’s the least I can do since Simon stayed here so I could save the world.” On one hand, I was worried about how that would go. They were both fish people, and we were heading to the desert. But I didn’t worry too much. They were both strong people. They’d figure it out.

    “Alright, 6 meals it is then!” went Bennet. He picked up two of the trout and three mushrooms before looking at the wok. “Let’s get CRACKING!” And before any of us could realize what he was doing, he dumped all five things in his arms straight into the wok. No prepping, no dicing, no even any seasoning, none of that. Just straight into the wok. We all were taken aback. Sheik more than anyone.

    “WAIT, NO, you can’t just do that!” She cried out. But before she could go over every little detail like I knew she would, we all stopped as the fish and mushrooms didn’t do what they should do in a warm wok ready for cooking. They didn’t sit at the bottom to sizzle and wait for a spoon to push them around or anything. Instead, we watched the fish and mushrooms bounce around the pot, like bits of oil popping and leaping around the pan while being boiled.

    “Oh, here it comes!” Bennet said excitedly. “HERE IT COMES!”

    We all flinched back and away from the wok as it suddenly leapt up off of the stove a few inches, the fish and mushrooms launching up into the air above it before falling back down into the pot in a puff of white steam. It had startled us all to say the least. But on the bright side, it smelled amazing. My boss looked at us all smug as he took her oven mitted hands and tilted the wok so he could scoop up what was now a beautifully cooked mushroom and fish meat minced, showing it to us in the ladle, and then dumping it in a tupperware he had on the table.

    “See? Freshly made fish and mushroom, uh…” He looked at the minced fish and mushrooms. “What would you call this, actually?”

    “Um… a saute I think?” Sheik guessed.

    “Yeah, let’s go with that.” Bennett scooped the rest into the tupperware. “Tada! Chilly sauteed fish and mushrooms!” He passed the big tupperware over to me. “With all that, you guys should be good to go for at LEAST two days.”

    “Nice! Thanks so much, boss.” I opened up the adventure pouch to put it away when Mina stopped me.

    “Let’s split those up into tins first,” she recommended. I nodded my head, putting the tupperware back out as we both went to another table in the break room to divy up the food into the little tins Mina had in her bag. All the while everyone else was working on making everything else over back by the wok.

    “Now then, what else did you guys get?” he asked broadly.

    Thud! My little sister slammed down her little bug cage. “Butterflies!”

    And indeed, she had caught plenty. A little cloud of yellow and green fluttered around inside the wood and mesh cage, either trying to find a creative way to spend their time in there or just trying to get out.

    “Oh! Huh. that’s… that’s way more than I thought you’d find,” Bennet admitted. He brought the cage over by the wok. “Alright, cooking these up is going to be a little different.” He turned to me. “Link?”

    “Yeah?” I looked up as Mina snapped a lid over the last tupperware and tucked it in her bag.

    “You got any uhhh monster parts on you?” he asked. “Like in your slate’s inventory?”

    “Uh, yeah, a couple,” I replied. I pulled out the Slate and navigated to the inventory tab while Bennet explained what he was up to.

    “So, for the butterflies, you can cook those to make potions instead of meals,” he said. “Same as with stuff like fireflies, crickets, beetles, frogs and lizards. But you can’t cook them with regular food. You have to cook them with monster parts.” He looked at me. “Can I borrow the switch real quick?”

    “Sure sure!” I passed the slate over. The first thing Bennet did was swipe through the inventory like swiping through a twitter feed.

“Alright, so these butterflies right here provide shock resistance,” he explained. Then he stopped and tapped the screen, holding his hand in front of the slate’s reticle right after. That’s when the switch spat out… something. “And this-” he held up a handful of some kind of green goop that had materialized in his hand. It had the consistency of jello that hadn’t been made right, or perhaps those DIY slime things you can make to entertain your kids. Navi and Fiona in particular looked at it like they were looking at a big pile of mold.

“This right here is chuchu jelly,” he explained. He handed the slate back to me before using the newly freed hand to go through a drawer in the checkout counter. “And do you wanna see something fun you can do with it?” Unable to react in time to stop him, we watched him pull a stun gun out of the junk drawer and stuck the metal nubs into the goop and gave it a shock. We all freaked out a bit, as the goop looked as if it was about to burst… but it didn’t. Instead, it just looked like one of those balloons you blow up before letting the air out of, blowing up a bit before reducing back to its original size as it went from green to a bright yellow, starting to spark a bit like a fork stuck in an electrical outlet.

“Chu chu jelly is one of the most versatile monster parts,” Bennet told us, dumping the goop into the wok. “You can change the properties of it fairly easily if need be, and depending on the potion, it can help enhance the effects.” Bennet then opened up the bug cage just enough to grab four of the butterflies. At this, my cousin turned to Ariel.

“Sweetie, you can look away if you want,” she said.

“I don’t mind,” Ariel replied. “I’ve seen momma cook those whole fish they sell at the grocery store.”

Fiona blinked. “Really now?”

“Yeah! The ones that look like this!” My little sister, still standing, flopped her torso to one side and went “Bleh!” as she did her best impression of a dead seafood market fish. I had been fully expecting it. My cousin, now looking slightly put off, had not. Other than that, she seemed fine.

Our attention was drawn back to the wok as we saw another puff of white steam. The smell that hit our nose wasn’t the same as the one from the fish and mushrooms, but instead it smelt like honey and burnt plastic.

“Alright, who was the kid with the empty bottles?” Bennet asked. Garrett simply walked over while opening his bag, pulling out a few of the empty bottles he’d gotten from the Sullivans. He passed one to Bennet, who then uncorked it and put the bottle to the lip of the wok as he tilted it over. The freshly cooked potion had the consistency of honey, trickling off the edge of the lid and into the bottle. It was actually pretty satisfying to watch. Bennet soon tilted the wok back before corking the bottle, moving onto the next, and then the next. All in all, the concoction ended up filling three bottles.

“And there we go!” Bennet corked the final bottle before tilting the now empty wok back. “Those are my two main tutorials for Breath of the Wild style cooking. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.”

“Oh, cool!” Ariel swiped the fourth bottle off of the desk and did what a lot of young kids might do in an act of impulsiveness: she drank it.

“Who, Arrietty! Not yet!” I went to pull the bottle away from her, but I didn’t need to. She stopped drinking it and hiccupped, a visible jolt of electricity running through her hair and causing her ponytails and loose hairs to stand on end.

    “Whoa… hehe. It tastes like a spork.” She looked up at Bennet as she passed the bottle back to him. “What happens if you put the butterflies with regular food?”

I snickered. “You get Fiona’s cooking.”

“Wha- heeeey, it’s not THAT bad,” my cousin said with crossed arms.

“Well hey, this might be nice for you then, kiddo,” said Bennet. “Just gotta throw some stuff in a pot and it’ll make food. No worrying about attending the bowl or overcooking things or any of that.”

“I suppose you’re right,” she said. She looked down at the wok for a moment. Then to the fish. Then a lightbulb seemed to go off in her head. “Can I try one then?”

“Oh! Sure, I don’t see why not,” he said.

“Cool cool!” Fiona took the switch for a moment. “Sorry Lincoln, borrowing this- are there any allergies I should know about?”

Garrett raised his hand. “I’m allergic to tree nuts, but that’s it.”

“ Of course you are, ” I heard Mike mumble under his breath. If anyone else heard it, they didn’t say anything.

“Alright, cool!” She said, skimming through everything. “I don’t think there’s anything like that.”

“Well there’s these things called chickaloo tree nuts,” Bennet contradicted. “But I don’t think you kids have found anything like that.”

“Well, good thing I’m not using it anyways!” She clicked something on the screen, causing three fish to materialize and plop down on top of the cutting board. They were a darker teal, with bright orange fins and open mouths. Hearty bass. She grouped them up with the giant radish Mike had found in the field. This caused an alarmed expression to cross Mike’s face, but it faded quickly when Fiona didn’t immediately toss everything in.

“And we need ooooone more thing to give this an extra umph.” It felt like I had been watching my cousin scroll through the inventory for forever after she said that. And then she stopped with a little “AHA!” One little tap on the screen and the 5th ingredient was acquired: a rock.

I had my mouth half open, trying to find the words, but only being able to really get out “Uhhhh, Fiona?”

“It’s rock salt!” she said. “Just trust me on this!” She picked up all five of the things before confidently tossing them into the wok. It did just what we had grown used to seeing it do. The fish and radish and rock bounced around in the pot, sliding this way and that, and then POOF!

“Haha! I did it!” She picked it up out of the wok triumphantly, with no regard for how ridiculously hot that thing still must’ve been. Then again, she was made of metal, so I don’t think the heat bothered her all that much. In her hand was three whole steamed fish, now with bits of radish and salt to accentuate the taste. “Vin, Mike, Garrett, you’ll just have to watch for the bones it all.” she started wrapping them in tinfoil.

“Here, I can keep those in my bag,” Sheik offered, pulling her backpack off her shoulders.

“And let’s keep the potions in the adventure pouches,” I said, already starting to open mine up. “Just so there’s no risk of them breaking in the bags.”

“Not mine, though!” Mike said quickly. “I’ve got too much stuff in the bag already.”

“Well, I’d say this went very well!” Bennet said with a smile. “So as long as you kids have a camping stove or something, you guys should be able to make potions and food all by yourselves while you’re out!”

“I’m gonna make the most badass BLT with this thing!” Vinny said, full of determination. He was quick to take control of the stove to try and do so, with the others gathering around to make sure he didn’t accidentally set something on fire. I, on the other hand, decided to pull Mina and Sheik aside for a moment. We were going to head off to Staten Island any minute now, and we needed a plan.

“So Mina, are you sure you’ll be fine coming with us?” I asked.

“Of course!” She said, “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Well, you know, since we’re going to a desert and you’re…” I didn’t know how exactly to phrase it, but Mina understood.

    “Oh! Right, right…” she paused for a moment, drawing her lips into a thin line as she looked around. “Well, Simon and I can just eat the fish and mushrooms that keep you cool! That’ll keep us from drying out! And we’ll bring some more water bottles to drink.”

    “Alright then,” I said. “I’ll bring some extra too, just in case.” I got up to grab the Sheikah Slate, going to pull up the map to see if the quest log tab had any information we could use. “Let’s figure out which train gets us close to the park then.”

    “Slow your horses, dude,” Bennet approached me with a raised eyebrow. “You sure you were born in New york?”

    “Wha- yeah!” I said, confused and ever so slightly offended. “I was born here!”

    “Cool, cool,” Bennet nodded his head. “Then you’d know that Staten Island isn’t connected to the subway, right?”

    There was a pause from me. Vinny burst out laughing from over by the wok, so much so that I was convinced he was going to fall over.

    “Alpha nerd’s right,” Mike confirmed. “You gotta take a ferry to get to Staten Island, dingus.”

    “Is the ferry even running right now?” Mina asked. “With everything that’s going on?”

    “Well if it isn’t, we could always swim to Staten Island,” Simon proposed.

    “Correction: you two can swim,” Fiona corrected, pointing at the Van Der Zees. “And maybe Link too if he’s up for it.”

    “Right, right…” Simon bowed his head a bit as he cupped his chin in thought.

    “Well how about this!” I held up a hand to get everyone’s attention. “Since Simon obviously wants an excuse to go swimming again-”

    “That is true.”

    “-Then we’ll do it like this.” I pointed at the people over by the stove. “Sheik, Ariel, Mike, Garrett and Vinny will ride the ferry… if you’re cool with that, Vin.”

    “Yep! Fine! I’m fine with that,” he said with a strained smile. “As long as you guys don’t let me fall overboard or anything.”

    “Well of course not,” Sheik said, sounding offended that he’d even imply that she’d let that happen. 

    “Cool cool!” I looked at the other two over there. “Navi’s going to hide in Sheik’s scarf on the Ferry, too. And Miranda’s going to hide in someone’s shadow.” I looked at my cousin. “Fiona’s going sword more and I’ll wear her on my back. Then Simon, Mina and I will swim alongside the ferry. It’ll be fun, plus it’ll probably get the two fish people here hydrated before we hit the desert.” I took one last look around the room at everyone as they started gathering their things.

    “Everyone good with that?”

    The ferry between Staten Island and Brooklyn ran every 15-20 minutes, and the group was lucky enough to only have 6 minutes left in their journey. The ferry itself was oddly deserted. Most everyone just chalked that up to the chaos in the City, and people not really wanting to go out and visit Staten Island with all that going on. The scarcity of any other people didn’t stop them from wearing hats and glasses to hide their changes. It was a little easier for Michael and Garrett, who both had newly acquired beanies pulled over their hair and ear, with everything all tucked away and hidden. Mike went a step further, wearing a pair of sunglasses to hide his change in eye color(they’d been a lighter yellow ever since Friday morning). It wasn’t as easy for Vinny. He ended up having to go back to wearing his full snowsuit attire, with the hat, scarf, long sweater and pants, boots, the whole thing.

    Sheik wasn’t trying to hide anything. With her whole getup and the lightened hair, the pointed ears would only make her look less like herself. That’s what she wanted. She was happy that no one made her explain this. They just figured she looked different enough that no one would know she was Zelda Masters anyways. She wished she could exist on that boat on the way to Staten Island, being as happy as everyone else was. Especially the zoras in the water. Watching the Link and the Van Der Zees swim along with the wake like a happy pod of dolphins made her wish she could join them. Someone let her do something fun during all this. She’d give anything to go swimming or surfing with someone during all this chaos.

    Or perhaps even just the least bit of happiness she could see on Ariel’s face down beside her. The little girl had been gripping the railing and looking down at her brother and his friends in the water the whole trip there, watching them surge through the ocean and leap up and down all alongside the ferry. She was entirely enraptured by it all, and Sheik wished she could have the interest that Ariel did to be as entertained by it.

    Garrett and Vinny weren’t by the water. Even with the pep talk Vinny was given back at Coney Island, he still didn’t feel comfortable being right beside it. He’d done his best, keeping his distance while simply looking at it. As long as he knew he wasn’t in danger of falling into it at any time, he could appreciate the water. Tolerate it, even. But he couldn’t get too close to it just yet. As such, he and Garrett sat together in a row of seats on the ferry. Mike was soon to rejoin them with a sandwich in his hand.

    “Huh. Didn’t know the ferry had a snack bar,” Vinny said.

    Mike sat back down with them as he swallowed. “Yeah, they’ve got all sorts of stuff over there. Popcorn and pretzels and sandwiches and all that.”

    “Oh, neat.” Vinny got up out of his seat and started walking toward the snack bar. Just to check it out.

    “Hey, you guys think you’re actually ready for this?” Garrett glanced down at the ground, seeing his shadow looking back up at him with worried eyes. Of the three of them, Miranda figured it best to hide in Garrett’s shadow. Vinny and Ariel didn’t have enough space, Sheik seemed like she wanted some alone time, and she wouldn’t be caught dead in Mike’s. “I mean, going out into the wilderness and all.”

    “What’s that supposed to mean?” Garrett asked with a raised eyebrow. “You think we can’t handle it?”

    “I mean, I haven’t known you guys for that long,” she confessed. “I grew up in the backwoods of New Jersey. I know my way around stuff like the Green Belt.”

    “What, do you think all I know about is football and guns?? What do I look like, a Texan?” Mike scoffed. “My girlfriend is a sucker for the outdoors. We go hiking around this park by her house all the time. Kissenna or something. And I once took her on a weekend camping trip in the Green belt for her birthday. So trust me, I KNOW how to camp. And ain’t no sand gonna change that.”

    “Holy crap, HEY, GUYS! LOOK!”

    Their eyes darted over to where Sheik and Ariel were at the edge of the boat. Navi was fluttering around Sheik’s shoulders like a frantic little ball of glowing lint, trying to get everyone’s attention.

    “Jesus, Nav, keep your voice down!” Vinny blurted out as he returned from the snack bar. Everyone joined them at the railing.

    “No, but I have a good reason to yell, LOOK!” Navi pointed a singular tiny hand out over the railing. Everyone’s eyes fixed onto the subject of Navi’s pointing. Even Miranda did her best to crane her neck in just the right way to look out through the railing from where she was hidden in Garrett’s shadow.

It took them a moment, with all the early April fog rolling over the ocean obscuring the view of Staten Island up until the very end of the Ferry ride, but the sight was a bit harrowing to say the least. They’d remembered the drone footage Bennet had gotten of the island. La Tourette park had become a desert. As far as they knew, that’s all they had to worry about. But it wasn’t that La Tourette park had become a desert.

The whole borough was one.

Chapter Text

The first thing we did once we got to Staten Island was… well, first things first we had to get up out of the water. The ferry dock was too high up for us to get out by ourselves, so the rest of the gang had to get out one of the ropes the Sullivans gave us and hoist us out of the water like three very bulky anchors. The second thing we did? Question what the hell had happened.

“I don’t get it!” I stood up and turned the dial on my hand, tapping a hand to my face to switch back to my regular self. “The park was the only thing supposed to be covered in sand!”

“Well I guess this makes a little more sense,” said Sheik as we all walked out and away from the ferry station. “It’d be fairly difficult to keep a desert contained to just one small area without a wall of some sort. The Sahara desert is in danger of expanding after all, and there’s no wall there.”

“Plus, this is a magic desert,” my little sister pointed out as-a-matter-of-factly.

“Well whatever the case, let’s try and find someone who knows what’s going on,” Miranda suggested from Garrett’s shadow. “There’s gotta be SOMEONE here.”

So that was the first thing we did. We climbed over the sand dune that the ferry’s bus station and parking lot was completely buried under, climbing down the other side to get to a small shopping center beside the ferry. And to our dismay, pretty much every store there was entirely closed up, either intentionally or because there was too much sand blocking the doors to get them open. We went knocking on doors, seeing if perhaps someone was inside, but no dice. I heard Vinny let out an aggravated huff.

“Oh, c’mon!” he growled. “The mom and pop shop-ass Deli at the end of my street can stay open during a god damn thunderstorm, but Staten Island closes because of some sand?”

“Was it a magical thunderstorm though, Vin?” Garrett asked monotonously.

“Why does that matter?” Vin said back. “It was just as sudden!”

“God, alright, calm down you guys,” Miranda grumbled.

“Maybe we should try calling someone,” Mina suggested. “A police number. Something! That should get us someone who knows what to do.”

<<Ah yes,>> went Fiona. <<I wonder who you could call that might know a few insider things about all the crap that’s going on, Lincoln.>> She said it all smug, in just the way I hate for her to say it. But it made me pause. I put a palm to my forehead. Idiot .

We walked back over to the sand dune engulfing the bus stop in order to sit for a sec and figure things out. Well, the others were sitting for a second. I was going to figure things out the only way I could think: calling our little birdy.

The phone rang once, twice, three times, and then click!

“Link?” Reily sounded quiet and stressed, but I paid no mind to it.

“Yeah, it’s me,” I said. “We got to Staten Island.”

“Oh!” I heard him suck air in through his teeth on the other end. “I see…”

“Yeah, we were gonna have to get this one done eventually, dude,” I said as I paced the dune a bit. “But like… when you said it was super different, I didn’t expect it to be a god damn DESERT!” I let out a startled sound as one of my feet slipped out from under me because of the sand. I was able to catch myself, though.

“Well, yeah, duh! Qadir’s the Gerudo champion or something, and they live in the desert, so it makes sense!” Reily retorted. “Listen, most of the major landmarks and stuff aren’t covered up. My suggestion is you guys take the Staten Island Railway over to the Old Town Station and then go from there.”

“Why that station specifically?”

“Because the other stations are out of commission from the sand.”

“Ah. I seeeee.”

“From there, just… look for any non-native wildlife.”

“Non-native wildlife??”

“I dunno! Ganondorf’s notes said something about seals? Just look for them when you get there.”

I was about to press further, to try and see if I could get any other information, but I couldn’t before I heard the phone click on the other end. And just like that, he was gone. I let out a sigh before turning back to everyone else. Most everyone was seated in the sand dune, doing their own thing. Mike in particular was literally kicking rocks, watching them tumble down the side of the dune.

“Hey Mike?” I called, getting his attention, mid-rock kick. “You’ve been here before, right? Do you know how to use the railway?”

“Yes and yes,” He said. He motioned for everyone to follow him as he descended the side of the dune I was standing on. “Next best thing with no subway!”

The train ride was boring. What is there to talk about? The miles and miles of nothing but sand that we could see out the windows? I’m not going to bore people with 4 paragraphs of nothing but desert talk. Not until we got to the station at least.

Getting off the train, we were greeted with- take a guess actually. Do you know what we saw, dear reader? What new sights we saw at the Old Town station? Don’t read ahead and cheat, go ahead and take a guess… You got it? Do you have your guess? You won’t believe what we saw.

That’s right, more sand .

Old Town Station was raised up above a road, and it was really telling how much sand there was when there was a perfect little slope of a dune to get down to the ground with. But other than that, it was pretty much nothing else. Most of the houses were half submerged in sand, looking like those towns in Canada during a particularly bad winter. We were barely off the train when Mike brought up something I was about to investigate myself.

“So, what was it that Reily said?” he asked. “You said he said something about weird animals or… something?”

I looked down at the Sheikah Slate’s map, trying to see if it picked up anything. I’d remembered to try and find some place at the ferry station to update the map, so lucky for me I had something to reference off of. The problem was that it was just… more sand. But that’s not why I had the Sheikah Slate open. I opened up the camera reticle, remembering how it could identify animals and monsters if you held it up to them. So that’s what I was doing: trying to see if I could spot something with the power of technology.

“Reily just said to keep an eye out for seals,” I told him. “So yeah, just… look for seals.”

“We’re so far inland,” Sheik pointed out, all while my little sister was boredly picking up big chunks of sand that didn’t quite get grinded down into powder and tossing them down the dune, trying to see if they’d skip across it like water. “Why would there be seals here?”

“Well there’s that lake in Russia with seals in it,” Garrett said. “Plus we’ve found weirder things in weirder places.”

“But in the desert??” Sheik asked.

“I dunno! Maybe they’re desert seals!”

“I dunno if you know, but seals are all flippers, dude. If there were seals here, we’d see them flopping around somewhere!”

THUD!

A horrified gasp escaped my sister right after another rock she’d thrown hit something just underneath the sand. Ariel covered her mouth with both her hands as whatever it was raised its head above the sand, shaking out its fur while climbing up onto the surface and rubbing its head on the ground, like a wet dog trying to dry off its face on the carpet. Nearly all of us were left starting with wide eyes when we realized what it was. Suffice to say, we figured out where desert seals would be: not on the surface of the sand, but underneath it.

    “They’re swimming in the sand!” Vin observed.

    “Like a Graboid!” Mike added.

    “Not even close,” Vin frowned.

    The two of them jumped when more noises came from the sand. To be fair, most of us flinched at the noise, turning to see another of the seals pop up out of the sand. Then another. And another! Pretty soon, it became clear that there was a whole pod of weird desert seals at the bottom of the dune, and all of them were getting up from whatever nap they were taking and scooting around in the sand to look for something to eat.

    “Check this out!” I held up the switch so see if maybe the compendium reticle would pick up something. Indeed it did! Apparently these things were called Sand Seals. Very creative there, Hyrule scientists. “It says they’re called Sand Seals.”

    “But they look like walruses,” Sheik pointed out.

    “Good, I wasn’t the only one who noticed,” Mina said.

    “Oh goodness, it’s the Big Octo all over again,” Miranda groaned. “What’s with Hyrule and naming marine-looking animals the wrong thing??”

    “We can argue about proper terminology later,” I said. “Apparently the Gerudo domesticated these things for transport, like horses!”

    “I swear, if we have to do it like one of those bull-riding things at country fairs, I’m gonna lose it,” Mike groaned.

    “Also, if they’re domesticated, why’re they just… running around in the wild?” Vin asked.

    “Well I dunno, Vin,” Navi said sarcastically. “Come to think of it, I can’t say I’ve ever seen a dog or cat just casually walking around outside with no sign of ownership just living on the streets.”

    “You coulda just reminded me about stray dogs, Nav, jesus,” Vin groaned.

    “Yeah, but those are dogs and cats and such!” Garrett pointed out. “Not seals!”

    “One of my cousins moved to Florida for college, and he can literally walk outside and find invasive iguanas that were established there by pet owners releasing them into the wild,” Mina said.

    “Oh yeah! Cousin Johan!” Simon turned to Ariel. “He once showed me and Mina a picture of himself next to a wild lizard as big as his whole arm!”

    My little sister was completely enamored. “Whoa…”

    “Alright fine, I suppose it makes sense that they’d still be technically domesticated,” Garrett obliged. “But that doesn’t help us figure out how exactly we’re supposed to use them as transportation.”

    “Oh yeah, you’re right.” I cupped my chin in thought. I didn’t get a chance to think too much about it, though. While we were busy talking about invasive lizards and stray dogs and all that, Sheik was busy studying the seals. Watching how they moved and existed in sand. Most of them were just sitting still. Others were sitting and scratching their ears(or wherever their ears were) with their tail fins. Sheik had spotted one rolled over on its back trying to scratch it on the sand, like how a dog might try to scratch its back on the carpet. This was the seal she decided to test something on.

    Sheik crouched low to the ground, sneaking up to the seal as quietly as she could manage, even going on all fours to try and eliminate as much sound being made from heavy footfalls. One of her hands was a closed fist, with the fingers curled around a rope she was in the process of retrieving from her adventure pouch: the same rope the Sullivans gave each of us. It was when the seal flipped itself back over to sit on its stomach, when she was within a couple feet of it, that she shot to her feet and threw forward the rope.

    The end of it flew through the air like magic, zig zagging before latching onto the seal’s back. Like magic, the rope harnessed itself around the seal’s torso, startling it into taking off. And that was the part where we became aware of what Sheik was doing. It wasn’t easy to ignore her surprised cry as she was yanked off her feet by the startled seal.

    “SHEIK!” I called out.

    “Oh my god!!” went Navi.

    “Good god!!” Garrett cried out. “Someone help her!”

    “No, it’s fine!” Sheik shouted back, her eyes half shut to keep the sand out of them. She flipped herself onto her back as the seal kept dragging her. “I’ve got this!”

    Sheik did it so quickly. She reached into her adventure pouch to pull out one last thing: the shield the Sullivans gave her. She was quick to take the arm straps and tighten them around both of her feet. She looked back at us one last time with a smug face before she reeled about and flipped herself back upright. The shield was facing down into the sand, allowing her to surf with it like a skateboard.

    “Haha! It works!” She called out triumphantly. She tied the other end of the rope around her waist, keeping one hand on the slack while waving the other at us as she swam with the seal in circles. “C’mon, you guys, get on with it! I can’t stop this guy or else he might swim off.”

    “Oh! Uhhh, alright, let’s go!” I rallied on the others as they pulled out their ropes and shields and went to follow in Sheik’s footsteps. I watched Miranda hop out of Garrett’s shadow and into my backpack, riding inside it like a baby in a scarf around their mom’s back.

    “Hey, would ya lookit that!” she said happily. “Perfect fit!”

    <<Cool cool!>> said Fiona. Both of us were able to hear it, with Miranda having her hand on the scabbard strapped to my back. “I think I’ll stay a sword for right now.”

    “You afraid you’re gonna lose your balance or something?” I asked.

    <<It’s not that!>> she assured me. <<I used to figure skate and stuff, but I’m not used to balancing on skateboards and stuff like you are.>>

    “Alright, fair enough.” I walked on to go and net myself a seal, all while everyone else had already grabbed theres. Mike had snagged one in the only way I’d expect him to: by charging it like a linebacker and throwing his rope to it like a lasso. I think the funnier exchange I saw was Vinny handing off his rope and shield to Mina for her to use before deciding he wanted to try and do the same as Miranda by riding with someone else. There was just one problem, though…

    “Vinny, get off of me!” Garrett ordered him.

    “C’mon! I’ll just ride behind you like we’re on a bike together or something,” Vin told him. “It’ll be like I’m not even there!”

    “Not even there my butt! You’ll make us too heavy to shield surf!”

    “I probably weigh more than you do, dude!”

    “Precisely my point!”

    “Just let me ride with you, man!”

    “Can’t you just fly or something?” Garrett asked with full earnestness. “Like back at Carnegie Hall? There’s plenty more room around here to practice, and most of the buildings are half submerged by sand, so it’s not like you’ll crash into anything.”

    “I’m not risking landing on hot, coarse sand, but thanks for the suggestion,” Vin snarked back.

    “Well whatever you’re doing, hurry up!” Simon yelled. He’d propped Ariel up on his head so she could have a place to hang on. “We’ve gotta get somewhere before the sun sets!”

    “Well, then you guys go!” Vinny shouted, gesturing with his hands as if to say shoo . “I’ll catch up!”

    “You sure, Vin?” I asked while crouching behind a seal that had fallen dead asleep. “Don’t wanna leave you alone if you chicken out.”

    “I’M NOT GONNA CHICKEN OUT, DUDE!” Vin had yelled it so loud that he startled the seal awake. I had no choice but to quickly throw my rope forward to grab it. And off I went. Almost all of us had now leashed a seal and were on our way across the sand. All that was left was Vinny, standing in the sand behind us and getting further and further away as he hesitated.

    I knew the way this dude was. He was a bold guy. He tried to be tough as nails in order to keep people from making fun of him or thinking less of him. But even Vin had his fears. Up until now, I just thought it was water. Now it was flying. Then again, flying in an airplane is way different from flying unprotected by yourself with wings on your back. People weren’t meant to be birds after all(or I guess bats in Vin’s case). Regardless, I watched in worry as I surfed away, wanting to at least see if Vin would make any attempt to catch up.

    I watched him pull his snowsuit jacket off to cool off in the waning desert heat. He took a deep breath in, let it out, and then I watched him jump. He leapt as high into the air as he could, trying to get as airborne as possible before he actually went flying.

    Fwoosh!

    Just like back at Carnegie Hall, the leathery wings unfurled from his back like sails, catching him in the air as he soared off.

    “Haha! I’m doing it!” he said triumphantly. “Suck it!” He threw his hands back behind him in the way he does when bending the wind, giving himself a bit of an updraft. The air blew past him and caught underneath his wings, allowing him a big boost forward so he could catch up to the rest of us. It was like watching a bird leisurely flying before the harsh winds of some oncoming storm gave it a boost forward. Although I suppose in this case, the boost wanted and the bird was ready for it.

    “Check it, G!” He shouted down at Garrett as he crested him overhead. “I’m doing it!”

    Garrett let out a surprised laugh. “Blimey!”

    “Alright, that’s everyone!” I lashed the rope, causing my seal to pick up speed through the sand. I surfed up through the group until I was beside Mike near the front. “Mike, you know your way around here! Where should we head to?”

    Mike looked around with a hand over his head to keep the sun out. I’m not sure what he was looking for. It was all just sand for miles!

    “Chapin Woods shouldn’t be far from here,” he said, using his other hand to pull out his phone. He opened up his maps app. “And it’s got water and stuff, too! But with all the sand, that might not be the case.”

    “Whatever works!” I replied. “If it's closer to La Tourette, we’ll stop around there for the night.”

    “It’s just northeast of La Tourette!” Mike told me. “So it’s close enough!”

    “Then that’s settled!” I surfed alongside Mike as we continued along the sand.

Surfing and soaring, we continued on through the sandy wasteland that was once Staten Island, trying to find our way around half submerged houses and dead shrubbery, bobbing and weaving through it all while riding behind our seals(or flying, but mostly surfing behind seals). Up until Mike pointed over somewhere and motioned for us to slow down.

For the first time in a while since we’d arrived here, we came upon a cluster of rocks situated in the sand, like the desert couldn’t fill up Staten Island quite enough to cover them up. One of the rocks looked big and wide enough to set up camp on. Big enough for a tent, a campfire, and a place for us to sit. Along with the rocks, there were a few dead trees scattered around. They looked as if all the water had been sucked out of them.

“Yep, I was right,” Mike said as he slowed his seal to a stop, looking down at the map on his phone. “Chapin woods is… not a ‘woods’ anymore.” He flinched backwards as his rope unlatched from the seal, allowing it to dive back under the sand and swim away. The same happened with most everyone else, our seals making a mad dash away the moment they could. Mine did it so quickly that I was knocked over by the force, bringing Miranda and Fiona down with me. I fell face down into the sand like a little kid tripping over their own foot in the playground sandbox.

“Ack! Link!” Mina looked over at me with worried eyes.

“Damn, I thought you skateboarded,” Miranda joked as she got up and out of my backpack. “What’re you doing falling off your shield?”

I lifted my head off the ground, my hair and face full of sand. I let out a little “Bleh” before rubbing my face off.

“I’m fine,” I said as I sat up. “The seal just caught me off guard.” a flash of light came from the scabbard on my back, catching both me and Miranda off guard as my cousin materialized in humanoid shape again.

“Well, at least he fell on sand,” she joked. “Could’ve tripped and fell on the rocks.”

“I mean, you’re not wrong,” I admitted. I looked at the scene around us. Most everyone’s seals hadn’t straight up ditched us. Most of them had congregated somewhere over the dune. I wasn’t paying much attention, instead deciding to join up with the others and figure out where to set up the ten and camping stuff for the night.

    Ariel was bored. Almost every other place they’d gone was at least interesting: Central Park, the game store, Mr. Beckett’s boat by Coney Island, even the big fancy theater was fun to look around in. But this was just sand! Nothing but sand. What was there to look at in a desert? Dead trees, rocks, more sand. She briefly contemplated trying to count the sand. Not that she could really tell where each grain was with how fine the sand was, but she thought about it. At least the seals were interesting.

She briefly wondered how they could swim through the sand. It was much different from water, after all. Maybe that’s what all their fur was for. She was subconsciously staring at the herd of sand seals, all situated a little ways away from where her brother and his friends were trying to set up camp for the night. They were eating something. Some kind of fruit that was growing off the branches of a cactus. How silly! Ariel couldn’t help but get up and walk over the top of the nearby dune to see what they were eating.

She ended up discovering something far more interesting.

Lots of flowers, in scattered clusters. Most of them were pretty dead by the looks of it. They looked just like the dead trees, looking like they had all the water sucked out of them. It was rather sad. The flowers weren’t the most interesting thing, though. She followed the clusters as they went in a line, and ended up spotting something just down the dune.

“Hey guys!” She yelled, turning back to the others. “I found something!”

    “Huh?” I looked up and away from the work-in-progress camp set up as I heard my sister call out to us. “What did you find!?”

    “I dunno! Some kind of cactus I think!” she replied.

    I shouldn’t have been surprised, really. Cactuses in the desert? Yeah, and you can find forks in the silverware drawer, what about it? But my sister pointing this out to us made me realize that I hadn’t actually spotted any cactuses the whole time we’d been in that desert. I ran over to meet up with her at the edge of the dune to see what exactly she was looking at.

    Coming to the edge of the dune our rock was situated on, we ended up finding something I wasn’t expecting. Clusters of dead flowers and shrubs, all scattered around the sand like someone just took a bag of seeds and threw them across the ground and called it a day. More interesting were the deep divots in the sand that looked almost like those canals kids will dig in the sand at the beach to try and make a moat around their sand castle. The difference being that there was no water in sight for these canals to carry.

    “Look at all those plants,” I muttered aloud. Ariel and I made our way down the dune as other people followed.

    “Hey- HEY! Ain’t anyone gonna help me with the tent?!” Mike blurted out.

    “Fascinating,” Sheik said beside me, cupping her chin and ignoring Mike’s outburst. “So that means the sand here is fertile enough to support plant life, but how?”

    “Guys, look!” Miranda pointed her ponytail hand over our shoulders, pointing in front of us. Past all the dead flowers and shrubs, and past all the canals in the sand. Suffice to say, I soon found out what my sister meant when she said she’d found a cactus.

    Over by where all the sand seals were gathered, there was a cactus, and a rather big one at that. It looked like someone took a big aloe plant and drew all its limbs together in the middle to create an enclosed bulb. The ends of the limbs curled near the top, making it look like a giant clove of garlic with a split top.

    Mina was the first to fully approach it, climbing up what looked to be a staircase made from a big cluster of bright orange mushrooms. The steps they created looked rather sturdy all things considered, and held her weight as she walked all the way up before stopping beside the front of it. She paused, tilting her head in confusion, and then pressed the side of her head to the side of the cactus. After a few moments, a look of shock hit her face.

    “I think there’s something inside it!” she informed us. I didn’t even have time to respond before we heard it.

    “Hello?” A fluttering and whimsical voice called out, sounding like the soft and sweet voice an opera singer would speak in when trying to be gentle. “Is someone out there??”

    “The cactus is talking,” Ariel said monotonously, not because it was boring, but because I think she just didn’t know what to say to that.

    “Uh, we’re here to help!” I called back. “Who put you in there??”

    “Oh, children…” she sounded as if she were on the verge of tears upon hearing our voices. “Sweet children. Please listen to my story…”

    This was going to be interesting. Most people were setting the campsite setup aside for a moment so we could walk over and investigate the cactus. All of us were equally invested in finding out what was going on.

    “This place…” the voice began. “Well, this whole park was once a beautiful place.”

    “Duh,” Mike grunted under his breath.

    “And this cactus, a beautiful spring,” the voice continued. “But then the sands came, and no one came to help me. As such, the power that this phenomenon has given me… has abandoned me.”

    The look on Mina’s face when she turned back to me said it all: she sympathized with whoever this poor cactus lady was, and wanted to help them.

    The voice continued, “I’m nearly powerless now. So I beg your help. I need to be whole again.”

    Mina flinched back as a hand stuck out of the space between two folded limbs of the cactus, bapping her in the face and causing the voice to blurt out an apology. Mina took a few steps back and away as I did the opposite, walking up the stairs to join her.

    “All I ask is for my favorite meal, the one thing I’ve been deprived of while stuck in here…” The voice trailed off, leaving me with just enough time to worry. What was this mysterious voice going to ask for? I worried for what felt like forever that they were going to ask for something egregiously hard to find. Perhaps even something from Hyrule that might be a very popular and common dish, but very hard to make in the real world. Maybe it’d be something we didn’t even know how to make, who knows!

So it filled me with instant relief when the voice finally finished with “... a bacon egg and cheese.”

Vinny blurted out an “OH THANK GOD!” behind me. I turned just in time to see him go for Sheik’s backpack. He didn’t even ask, really. I just watched my Italian-American friend latch onto Sheik’s backpack like a little gremlin as he reached for the zipper, only for Sheik to fling him off.

“Hey, at least wait for me to take it off!” she shouted at him. She took her backpack off and set it down before turning back to the cactus. “I know EXACTLY what this is. We’re camping here.”

“Well I’d HOPE we’re camping here!” Mike blurted back. “I already set up the damn tent!”

    “Wha- we’re camping by the talking cactus of unknown motives??” Garrett asked frantically.

    “Trust me on this one,” Sheik replied. “We have nothing to worry about.”

    “Uhhhh we’ll get you that bacon egg and cheese in a moment, ma’am!” I shouted to the cactus.

    “Oh, thank you, sweet boy!” the voice replied kindly.

    We all went back to the big flat rock in the sand where Mike had the tent all set up already. Now we just needed to set up the camping stove, light it up, and get the cooking pot all set up and ready. I had barely made it back onto the rock before Vinny held up a hand to stop me.

    “Hold on a sec, hero boy!” His other arm was full, carrying not only eggs and bacon, but also cheese, one of those salt rocks we’d gotten from the Stone Talus, and a bundle of wheat stalks. “You wait down by the cactus. I’ll pass you the sandwich.”

    “Uhh, okay?” I backed up a bit. “Why though??”

“I need my space, dude!” he said as-a-matter-of-factly as he walked over to the wok. “A proper bacon egg and cheese requires concentration, dude.”

“It’s just bacon, egg and cheese in a sandwich bun, dude.”

“It’s New York style, though! You gotta get it right!”

“You act like no one else has that crap,” Miranda snarked.

“It’s different over here, alright?” Vinny didn’t argue any further, instead opting to toss everything in his hands into the wok. I didn’t get a chance to see all this, having already walked back over to the cactus when I saw the puff of white steam from the cooking pot up on the rock. Vin’s little sounds of triumph was all I needed to hear.

“Haha! YES! Perfect!” He picked up his concoction: a fairly regular looking bacon egg and cheese. It looked almost too perfect for having come straight out of a wok, but it was magic so I didn’t question it.

“Dang, it just… it just spat that out, huh?” I asked as he approached me, coming down the sand dune before coming to the base of the stairs leading up to the cactus.

“Yep!” He passed the sandwich to me. “And it’s a MAGIC New York style bacon egg and cheese, so it’s probably super tasty!”

“Damn dude, stop hyping it up when I can’t eat it-” I was cut off as I turned around. Before I could even fully turn and face the cactus, I felt something violently grab the sandwich out of my hands. It retreated back inside the cactus with its spoils in tow.

“Thank you. You’re all too kind,” the voice said sweetly. It was followed by sounds I could only describe as ravenous. Whoever was in there was absolutely tearing into that bacon egg and cheese, like they hadn’t eaten since Purim. They probably weren’t in there for quite that long, but definitely a couple of days at least.

Before I could ask to see if whoever it was was alright in there, Garrett pointed something out: “Uh, Lincoln, the cactus is smoking.”

“Huh?” I could get a response before I was suddenly hit by a big gust of… something! Purple smoke billowed out from the cactus, knocking me over and down the staircase of mushrooms before I hit the sand. The smoke rolled across the ground before dissipating as the cactus fully opened up, the unfurled limbs lying lazily along the ground all around.

“Link, are you alright??” Mina blurted, sliding down the dune to get to me as I sat back up. Fiona glidded behind her as she followed.

“Jeez, dude, you good??” Fiona asked worryingly.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” I assured. “Just got caught off guard is all.

“Haha! I knew it! Look at that!” Sheik pointed behind me back toward the cactus.

“Whooooa, it looks like a mermaid lagoon!” Ariel blurted out.

That was all it took for me to turn back around. Ariel’s description of it had been fairly accurate. The inside of the cactus looked nothing like its outer layer, with even the shape of it betraying its outward appearance. The limbs of the cactus unfurled to look more like flower petals than branches of aloe, with all sorts of gilded and glittering detailing to really cement the look of it. There were more mushrooms dotting the inside of the petals, each a beautiful pastel blue or pink or purple. The staircase itself began to change colors, one by one, going from orange to those same beautiful pastels. All the while, the sound of bubbles clued me into something I hadn’t noticed until I climbed back up the colorful staircase and looked inside the flower.

The inside had water in it. And I’ll tell you something, me and Fiona once went to Yellowstone with my uncle Levi (her dad) and his whole family, and I knew full well what a geyser looked like when it was about to blow.

I could feel my hair stand on end as I turned and went to run. “Crap crap crap crap CRAP!”

I didn’t make it.

    I didn’t even make it to the bottom of the very short mushroom staircase before something erupted from the pits of that spring in the middle of the flower, water rushing up and out with them and right on top of me. I ended up soaked head to toe in cold water, like some unlucky seaworld guest who didn’t know they were sitting in the splash zone. Everyone else was far enough away that they remained dry.

    The water from the inside of the cactus began to flow from the sides, coming down like waterfalls, or perhaps water flowing over the edges of a bathtub when you first step into it. The canals dug into the sand were no longer dry, as the water began to flow freely through them like a river being replenished during a rainstorm. The flowers and shrubs revitalized, brought back to life as if their lives were being played in reverse. The whole thing was capped off by little pinpoints of pink light suddenly fluttering up from the newly revived plant life, hovering around the scenevery as everyone just stood in shock and watched.

They were also able to see just who had risen up from the depth of the cactus.

    She was like the harsh sunbeams of the desert followed by its soft rays of moonlight: rising up with overwhelming gusto before calming down just enough for one to appreciate her beauty. The jewels hanging from her neck, wrists, waist and ears glittered under the light of the sunset, and her portly self settled into the water of the spring as she rested her arms on the front of the basin, right by the top of the stairs. Her hair was like clouds, all swirled and curled and hanging over the side of her head in waves, with even more jewels adorning it to really draw your eye to it. Her face, despite having just come up and out of a pool of water, sporting nothing short of the most flawless pink eyeliner one could witness.

    I was wholly unaware of what we’d gotten ourselves into.

    “Oh, I’m so sorry, dear!” I felt a big yet comforting hand pat my head before gently brushing my hair out of my face and back into place. I felt like a little wet kitten getting wrapped up in a towel by some good samaritan that took pity on me. “I suppose I was just so glad to be free that I just jumped right out! Hehe!”

    I wrung out my hoodie while my little sister just approached the cactus with wide eyes and an open mouth. “Are you an angel?”

    That caught the woman off guard. “Oh, goodness. How sweet!”

    “Close!” said Sheik as she snagged the Sheikah Slate off my hip.

    I whipped around to face her. “Wha- hey!”

    “She’s actually uhhhhh…” she trailed off for a moment as she went through the tabs on the Slate, eventually switching to the compendium reticle and pointing it to the fountain. “... A Great Fairy!”

    “Oh, is that so?” The woman giggled to herself as she reclined back into the pool. “How fun!”

    I noticed Simon peeking over the edge of the flower, like a kid trying to peek over the edge of a table. He was just tall enough to do so.

    “You think it’s alright if I hop in this?” he asked, pointing to the pool of water.

    “You wanna hop into the weird bubbling fairy water??” Mike asked, his face twisted into a grimace.

    “How rude!” The fairy crossed her arms. “Are you implying that it’s dirty or something?”

    “It’s the opposite, dude,” Sheik said, leaning close to Mike so he could hear. “I read about these back at the Dragon’s Lair. Great Fairy Fountains actually soothe pain and heal wounds.”

Ariel gasped. “ Like in Tangled. ”

“Something like that, yeah,” Sheik reaffirmed. “They’re quite possibly the CLEANEST thing in Hyrule you could take a dip in.” She passed my switch back to me, and I clipped it back to my waist as Sheik caught a glimpse of not just Simon, but now MINA going over to the spring. “PLUS! The Van Der Zees are zoras. Fish people! I don’t think they can be out of water for too long.”

“Alright, fine, whatever,” Mike grumbled. “But I’M not bathing in that crap.

Simon chortled. “Are you like this when going to the hotel jacuzzi, too?”

“Simon,” Mike began, deadly serious. “Tell me honestly that you’ve EVER gotten into a hotel jacuzzi and not felt gross. Bonus points if a stranger or two were already in there.”

“Why are you bringing jacuzzis into this??” Miranda asked with an eyebrow raised.

“Simon started it!” Mike blamed.

“Just shush up, you pancakes,” Mina blurted. “Mike can stay out of the fairy spring if he has such a big problem with it. And that’s that.” Mina turned her face away before walking right up the stairs and stepping into the fountain with the grace of someone stepping into a pool knowing they’re the best looking swimmer there. The basin was big enough that Mina could only be seen from the eyes up when she touched the bottom. You can guess how well Simon fits in the spring. Surprisingly enough, there was still enough room so that the Van Der Zees weren’t all crammed in there with the fairy: all three had more than enough space between each other.

“This is GREAT!” my little sister said, running around the little creeks in the sand as pink points of light fluttered around. Navi was the one to realize what they were.

“Oh my god, more fairies!” She fluttered away from my shoulder and zipped around trying to make friends with whoever she could find. I didn’t get an update on that just yet, instead being distracted by my sister’s giggling. The little pink fairies that were fluttering around decided that Ariel was the most interesting thing there, with one of them even taking the opportunity to sit on her head. It was adorable.

“Damn, lookit all this!” Miranda walked around all the canals, picking flowers and examining plants. “More flowers to cook… carrots! They’ve got carrots here!”

“Yeah, no kidding!” Vinny let out a sound of effort as he yanked a carrot out of the sand, looking at it with wide eyes. Then he paused for a moment before his eyes seemed to get wider. “Look, there’s god damn WHEAT in here!!”

“More of it??” Garrett asked. Vinny was trying to yank on the wheat to get it out of the ground, to which Garrett replied by snapping his fingers, grabbing a black saber sword out of the air, and gently slicing off the wheat for Vin.

“Ach! Thanks, man.” Vinny tucked it under his arm before his eyes went wide again. “Dude! Sugarcane!”

“Sugarcane?!” Miranda floated over with her flowers and carrots tucked under her arm. “They’ve got sugarcane here??”

“Yeah!” he pointed to where it was, growing right alongside the canals of fairy fountain water. “It’s even growing in the sand like in minecraft!”

    “Sugar- WAIT A MOMENT!” We all looked over as Mina pulled herself up out of the fairy fountain, climbing back down the stairs and going toward where camp was set up on the rock. She was quick and methodically, definitely on a mission.

    “Mina, wat ben je aan het doen(what are you doing)?” Simon asked as he laid on the edge of the fountain. Mina went straight to her backpack, opening it up where she’s left it beside our tent, pulling something out of the care package her mom had sent her back out with: an ice cold bottle of milk.

    “If there’s sugar here,” she said. “I can make poffertjes!”

Officer Alistair Delphi now knew what a keese was, and he didn’t quite like them. He already wasn’t a fan of normal bats. He didn’t quite like their weird little hand wings. But big, monster bats with cyclopian eyes that traveled in swarms and would readily attack people? No thanks. Alistair was lucky all it really took was a well placed blunt-force hit to take them out, but there were so many of them in that damn tree. Delphi had finally pulled back up to his precinct, parking and heading inside to try and finish up whatever work he could finish so he could just go home. With everything going on, he knew full well that was wishful thinking.

This whole “Tolkeining” thing had caused so many problems for them. Registering people with physical abnormalities, answering more calls for feral pig men and one-eyed bats then robberies and the like, Staten Island was covered in sand and some of the houses and buildings were half submerged in it(they’d sent first responders to the borough a while ago, and so far no one was harmed during the whole thing: just shaken up by the sudden desertification), and the Bronx had gotten worse than it usually was somehow. The precincts over there had their hands full the past few days with all sorts of crazy monster calls. And that wasn’t even scratching the surface of the garbage that Alistair’s precinct had to put up with.

After all, just because they weren’t civilians didn’t mean they weren’t also affected by the weird physical abnormalities thing…

“Welcome back, Delphi,” went Alistair’s higher up with a smile. He was seated behind his desk, doing something on his computer. Something involving spreadsheets and reports. “You look like hell.”

“Yeah I just got back, Sarge,” Alistair joked back. Alistair glanced over the front desk to look at where the Sergeant was sitting. “Are those pillows?”

“Yeah, Sylvia got them for me!” Sylvia was the Sergeant’s wife. “She felt bad I was sitting on books and stuff because of all this nonsense.”

Sergeant Daz Baumgartner, to say the least, was not enjoying the Tolkeining. It might’ve been because of the monsters making even the most mundane parts of regular living hard, the increase in calls meaning they’d have to drive out and fight actual fantasy creatures to do their jobs, or even because of the whole physical anomalies thing. Alistair, seeing the pile of pillows his Sergeant had to sit on just to be tall enough to reach his keyboard, figured it was the latter. They’d since registered plenty of people who looked the way Daz did, but that didn’t make Alistair’s now wooden, leaf-wearing police superior any less funny looking.

    “Well that was thoughtful of her,” Alistair said.

    “Very much so!” Daz said as he tip-tapped something onto his work document. Alistair figured the conversation was over, and was about to walk over to where the lockers were, but Sergeant Baumgartner stopped him. “Not just yet, Delphi! You and Holloway have a new assignment.”

    “Wha- for tonight?!” he asked with wide eyes as Daz hopped up onto his desk to look for something.

    “Well technically no…” Daz waddled around, eyes darting around the mess on his table, before finally seeing it in a pile of papers. “But!” He grabbed a manilla folder stuffed in the middle of the pile and yanked it out. “It’s a missing persons case, and the man who filed it seemed very distraught, so while you technically can wait until tomorrow, time is of the essence with this crap.”

    “Right, Sarge. Sorry Sarge.” Alistair took the folder he was handed. “Where’s Valerie?”

    “Where else?” Daz chuckled. “In her cubicle, waiting for something to do.”

    “Right, of course…”

    Alistair figured that was the end of it, walking into a room full of desks and computers. It was a room that looked more at home in an office building than a police precinct, but even the police needed a more relaxed environment to do the less adventurous work in. And it was there that he found Officer Valerie Holloway, his partner in most every case he’d been assigned. Valerie was a younger recruit, having just graduated from the police academy late the previous year before joining the NYPD. He wasn’t sure why they always had her working with him. Perhaps they thought Alistair’s laidback personality and understanding of their line of work would help to get her adjusted to all this. And Lucky for Valerie, she was physically unaffected by this whole Tolkeining phenomenon. Her bright red hair was natural.

    “Holloway. Over here.” Alistair said it sternly as Valerie sat up in her chair before scooting it over. It was one of those wheeled chairs, so it was fairly easy for her to roll her way over to Alistair’s desk.

    “How was the job in Queens?” she asked, talking in the fast and energetic way Alistair was used to her talking.

    “It sucked.” Alistair pulled his NYPD beanie off his head, brushing out his messed up hair and revealing the fact that he hadn’t gotten out of the Tolkeining unscathed. He’d been tempted to try and cut the ends of his ears off when he found them all pointed on Friday morning, but decided against it. “Did you know…” he set the beanie down on his desk. “... those Keese have jaws like staplers?”

    “That’s very terrifying, and I’m electing not to ask for more information.” She stopped her chair right beside his desk, waiting as Alistair sat down. He plopped down the manila folder on his desk before pulling something out of his desk drawer: aspirin.

    “Woof. Are you still getting those migraines, sir?” Valerie asked as Alistair took one of the tablets, taking a drink of water from a nearby bottle right after.

    “Yeah, they’ve been getting worse since Friday night,” he explained, putting the medicine away in the drawer. “I’ve gotten these awful nightmares, too.”

    That caught Valerie off guard. “Nightmares?”

    “Yeah, just… lots of weird and surreal imagery,” he explained, holding his temple with one hand. “Lots of red and black in swirls, pigs, wolves, and flowers for some reason?” He let out an aggravated sigh. “I’ll tell you about it later. Did anything interesting happen while I was out?”

    “Plenty!” Valerie began as Alistair held up the manila folder. “Heard the Van Der Zees called one of the Queens precincts. They found their kid.”

    “Did they, now??”

    “Yeah, she just… found her way back home!” Valerie continued as Alistair took a moment to pause.

    “Speaking of missing persons cases, any update on the ones that’re actually our problem?” Alistair asked.

    “Not really!” Valerie replied bluntly. “Bo Yates is still unaccounted for.”

    Alistair took a drink of water. “Well he’s been unaccounted for since Thursday, hasn’t he?”

    “Yeah! His foster mom thinks he might be in Central Park, but it's too dangerous to search right now.” Valerie leaned her head on her hand, her elbow propped on the desk.

    “Huh.” Alistair paused for a moment. “I thought Daz was supposed to get reinforcements to help with that.”

    “Well, he WAS!” Valerie said, leaning back in her chair rather violently for emphasis. “But there were sightings of some kind of big monster over there, so they’ve been stalling.”

    “Can’t be any worse than the garbage we had to deal with back at Columbia University.”

    “Oh no, it’s worse. You can’t even get into the northern end of the park. We watched Carl walk right in before he walked right back out.”

    “Walked back out?”

    “Yeah! Well, it’s not like he turned around and walked out or anything,” Valerie clarified. “It was like he walked in, and then reemerged from an entirely different part of the forest!”

    “Weird… you filed a report about that yet?”

    “It was the first thing I did when I got back.”

    “Good good.” Alistair sipped his drink again. “What about the situation at Columbia University?”

    “It’s almost fully taken care of,” she informed him. “Got most of those small orcs cleared out.”

    “What about the kids?”

    “Most of the students were already out for spring break. Everyone who was left we were able to evacuate or get to safer buildings on the campus… most of them, at least.

    Alistair raised an eyebrow. “Most of them?

    “The only ones we weren’t able to evacuate were…” Val took a pause before letting out an exasperated sigh. “It was a frat house. They were determined to stay put and Daz just told us to leave them and we could come back for them later.”

    “Wait wait wait…” Alistair looked at her before pointing a finger. “Which frat was it?”

    The question seemed to catch Valerie off guard, and she had to think for a moment. “Oh god, I don’t remember… it ended with Kappa, I remember that!”

    “Chi Gamma Kappa, I remember them,” Alistair answered for her. “This happened a long while ago, I think a month before you joined the precinct? Got a call that the kids were stealing food from the dining hall to bypass their meal plans or something.”

    “So they’ve already got a record?”

    “Weeeell not really.” Alistair smiled a nervous smile. “We let them off with a warning.”

    “Really?? Why though??” she asked, dumbfounded.

    “Because of how they were stealing,” he explained. “The frat’s made up of art and engineering kids. They built this ginormous automated pulley system out of bits and bobs so they could send food from the dining hall across the street from them in a bucket! It was like something out of one of them survival games.” He went to pick the folder back up off the desk. “We decided to just let them have it. Guess it’s good we did. If any of those idiot frat boys are going to survive staying there, it’s them.”

Once he’d finished with that, he opened up the folder Daz had given them, holding it up so the both of them could see. Just as the Sergeant said when he passed it to him, it was a missing person’s case.

    “Damn, another one??” Officer Holloway asked. They’d been getting quite a few of these.

    “Yeah, I suppose there’s been a bit of an influx in these recently,” Alistair said with a nervous smile.

    “$10 says they’re just not registered yet.”

    A snort came out of Alistair as he tried to hold back an impulsive laugh. “Wha- really, Val??”

    “What?! It already happened that one time.”

    “Carl wasn’t a missing persons case, Val. We just didn’t recognize when he came to clock in because he’d been turned into a living rock.”

    “Whatever, can we just look at the file now?”

    “Yeah yeah, let’s get this over with.” Alistair pulled some of the papers in the folder out of the way so they could find a picture or a name, whichever was first. The name came first.

    “Gormla… gorm-layth? Is that how you say that?” Val asked.

    “Well it’s gaelic from the looks of it, so it’s not phonetic,” Alistair replied. Leave it to Valerie to get caught up on middle names and pronunciations. The missing person in question was a young lady by the name of Zelda Gormlaith Masters. “Masters, where have I heard that before??” he paused for a moment to think before spotting the name of the man who filed the report. The realization hit him and he snapped his fingers. “Masters of Wall Street!”

    “Masters of What??”

    “It’s a Wealth Management company in Brooklyn!” Alistair said. “They advise people on how to invest in the stock market and all that. The CEO’s name is Phillip Masters.”

    “Huh, that’s why I didn’t recognize it.” Valerie giggled. “I don’t invest in stocks.”

    PFFFT!

    Very suddenly, Alistair spit up the water he was trying to drink as he read over something in the folder.

    “Al?!” Valerie seemed both surprised and concerned. “Did you not know that?? I didn’t think I gave off the energy of someone who bought stocks in-”

    “No, no, not that, something in the report!” He looked back at the files in the folder. Phillip Masters had left information about who his daughter was last seen with. That being a young man around her age by the name of Lincoln Matheson. That… that couldn’t be him. That couldn’t be the same kid. He kept reading. 5’8”... short blonde hair… blue eyes… good god, it was him. It was the same kid he’d seen in Bowne Park earlier that day.

    And now he didn’t know where the kid was.

Chapter Text

“So what is it you’re making again?” Vin asked, sitting right beside the cooking pot. He’d pulled up a little rock to sit on while Mina was busy prepping her ingredients on the foldable table Mike had brought along.

“Poffertjes!” she replied excitedly.

“They’re great!” Simon added. “They’re just like little pancakes, but shaped like cream puffs!”

“Yeah, Mrs. Van Der Zee used to make them all the time,” I said as I joined in the conversation, taking a seat on a nearby rock. “You remember? When I used to come over to your house when I was little!”

“Oh, I remember!” Mina giggled to herself, a hand over her mouth. “You were always trying to take as many as you could when my mom wasn’t looking.”

“Yeah, and then try to hide the evidence in my mouth,” I snorted.

“Yes, and then you’d end up looking like a little chipmunk!” Mina could help but break out into lighthearted laughter. It was a laugh that I missed. I missed that as well as those memories of us as kids. Being 7 was a fun time.

“I didn’t know you guys knew each other, that’s fun,” Miranda commented light heartedly.

“Well yeah!” I turned to her. “We have PE together, so it’s kinda-”

“No no, I meant like, for THAT long,” she clarified. “Since you guys were kids and all that.”

“Oh, yeah, we went to the same elementary school,” Mina explained. “We’ve known each other since we were six.”

“Weird. I don’t think I’ve ever really seen you guys hanging out or anything.” Miranda’s words seemed to stir something in Mina. Something that made her smile fade from her face.

“Haha, yeah, weird ain’t it??” I said, making a slicing motion with my hand in front of my neck, directing the gesture right at Miranda. She seemed to get it, because she immediately shut up, but even then it was too late for that. Mina got up.

“I should probably get back to the poffertjes then!” she said. “I still need eggs.”

“Oh! I brought some!” went Sheik, unzipping her backpack. I just stayed where I was, watching the girls exchange ingredients while Miranda looked at me with the most apologetic look I’d ever seen her muster.

“Oof, that looked… really awkward,” Fiona cringed from behind me. All I could think of was to put a hand to my face, wanting to smack myself for what just happened.

Idiot .

There was a bit of a quiet moment once Mina walked off to finish cooking. The awkwardness of it all allowed Garrett to sneak away from the group. He had something to say, and he’d rather say it where the others probably couldn’t hear him. He found Mike seated beside the canals of the fairy fountain, picking a carrot up out of the sand(how they were growing in desert sand was anyone’s guess but that wasn’t important). Garrett decided to take a seat beside him and start up a conversation before Mike could leave.

“Hey, so…” he got comfortable in the sand beside him. “You mentioned at the baseball field something about homework-”

“Ah crap, man, just forget all that please,” Mike pleaded, his mood immediately souring upon remembering all that. It wasn’t that he was mad that Garrett brought it up. He just felt embarrassed. Garrett could almost sense a feeling of vulnerability from the man. “I got super carried away with my dumb feelings and-”

“No no, stop that. Stop. Right now.” He kept adding on each word in affirmation any time Mike looked like he was going to try and shoot some reply back at him. Once Garrett was sure Mike was going to stay quiet, he continued. “You let me vent at Central Park, and you didn’t say a single thing about it! I’ve dumped all my awkward baggage on you. It’s only fair if you do the same.”

Garrett leaned back a bit where he was sitting, his arms and legs crossed as he patiently waited. After a few moments he raised an eyebrow at Mike, as if asking him to get on with it. The large of the two had to pause for a moment. Then he sighed.

“Alright, fine, FINE, I’ll talk!” He said it as if he were being interrogated by the world’s palest policeman. “It’s just… STEM class, right?”

“I’ve heard of it, yeah,” Garrett said jokingly.

“Yeah well, I just… I struggle in it,” Mike admitted. “More than I’d like to admit. I understand it all, I like STEM! I want to be good at it SO BAD! But I can’t get anything right! And when I think I’ve got it, the worksheet comes back to me with a big fat C or D on it. I just… It makes me feel DUMB!”

“And you steal my homework because you don’t understand the information??”

“Yeah, let’s go with that.”

“Go with tha- Mike, is there another reason here?”

“No… yes… god damn it, Embers. I was just embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed about what??”

“Embarrassed to ask for help, alright?!”

There was a pause for a moment, and Mike cooled down a bit. He had to compose himself before he could continue.

“Sorry, I just… you know those kids that go through all of elementary and middle school, and everyone tells them how smart they are and how they’re going to make it big or whatever?” he asked, crossing his arms as if trying to hide himself. “... that was me. Went from being just another generic, starry-eyed nerd to being a dumbass the moment I went from 8th to 9th. I guess that's another reason I got into football. No one has the guts to make fun of the dumb jock to his face when he can fold you like origami, right? Or look like it, at least.”

Mike leaned further into his sleeves, only his eyes and nose visible above his crossed arms. He supposed he knew how Mike must’ve felt hearing him angrily vent in Central Park about his own insecurities.

“And you feel better trying to do it by yourself,” Garrett guessed, “because you think asking for help means admitting you don’t know what you’re doing?”

Mike didn’t respond audibly, but Garrett could see a faint nod of his head.

“Mike, you know that’s fine, right?” Garrett said to him. “People need tutors for things all the time. For goodness sake, Lincoln and Navi met because she tutors him for basic algebra!”

Mike couldn’t help but giggle. The irony of a kid named “Matheson” being bad at math…

“And he’s the kid who’s supposed to save the bloody world!” Garrett emphasized. “And by virtue of having a passing grade in STEM, technically that means you know more than he does.”

A snort escaped Mike. “Alright, that’s kinda funny.”

“See?? It’s not as bad as you think!”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right…” Mike paused for a moment again, the smile fading once more. “... you know, I know you already know this by now, but I’m sorry for all the out of pocket crap I called you and the purple kid. About your heights and crap and just… all that petty garbage. I guess it made me feel better about my own insecurities to call out your guys’, too.”

This time it was Garrett’s turn to take a pause. He’d never stopped to think about it like that. He probably should’ve seen that coming. Most every show you see with a bully making fun of someone else always chalks it up to very real issues of low self esteem or bad home lives or whatever else would cause someone to lash out. Garrett wasn’t sure what exactly to say.

The pale demon just sat there for a moment, politely crossing his hands over one another in his lap before simply replying, “Apology accepted.”

That was enough for Mike. Even if he didn’t show it, what with the saddened frown on his face and all, he was glad to get even just that. Another moment of awkward silence was cut short as Mike shrugged his shoulders and added something else to the conversation.

“You know… maybe when this is all over, you think we could all just like… study or something?” Mike asked, gesturing to himself, Garrett, and Vinny over by the cooking pot.

Garrett shrugged his shoulders back. “I’m sure if you can keep the beanpole comments on the down-low, we can make it happen.” They couldn’t get any further in their planning. Not before they saw the cooking pot poof with white smoke.

The poffertjes were done.

    “Oh, come over here, schatje, you’ll love these!” Simon picked up my little sister and brought her over to the cooking pot, where Mina was busy telling people things most chefs tell people before they grab food: don’t take too many, be careful because they’re hot, all of that. Luckily, the neat little magically-cooked pile in the wok seemed to be big enough for everyone to get quite a few of the puffs.

    Most of us had forgotten to grab plates or napkins before coming to get our share, so I witnessed a lot of people using rather creative methods to carry theirs back to where they were sitting. Sheik had opted to use her scarf, whereas kids like Mike were bold enough to stuff their puffs in their big puffy hoodie pockets. Navi had taken a single one with her, and it looked almost like she was carrying a thanksgiving turkey all by herself, but she somehow managed up until she could pop a squat on Sheik’s shoulder. I, on the other hand, ended up looking into the wok and giving into my old habits from when I was 6: I grabbed a handful of them until I had to keep my fist tightly closed for fear of them spilling out onto the ground. Now to find a place to sit, preferably away from the Van Der Zees so I wouldn’t have to endure all that awkwardness-

    “Link! Over here!” My sister called my name, and I wasn’t going to ignore her, so I obliged. I turned and made my way over to where she had decided to sit. Unluckily for me, she was seated right beside Simon. And they were seated right beside Mina. And the only place to sit was right beside her.

    Peachy .

    I didn’t even hazard an awkward wave, opting to sit down right beside her and eat. I don’t know if Mina could tell that I was uncomfortable, or the sight of me shoving pancake puffs into my mouth to avoid conversation reminded her of past memories, but she struck up a conversation again.

    “Haha. You look just like when we were kids,” she joked. “Like a little chipmunk.”

    I had to take a moment to swallow before I could reply, “Yeah, I guess so. Less of a little chipmunk, and more just a… sweaty, awkward one.”

    At the very least, that seemed to get her to laugh again. I laughed along with her, if only to keep up the good feeling. But it didn’t feel right. Pleasantries wouldn’t get rid of the open wound Miranda had accidentally torn open once again. It wasn’t just on Mina’s end, but mine as well. I figured the best thing to do was get started on patching it up on my end.

    “Mina… be honest with me,” I said. She paused for a moment, looking at me with her mouth pressed into a thin line, like she was trying to hold back her own words and wait for mine. “I just wanna know if I did anything wrong when we were kids and that’s why you haven’t really, you know, been hanging around all that much.” A sudden emotional jab in the gut hit me as I thought of something, my eyes threatening to water. “I dunno, maybe it was because of like… when we were in 4th grade and-”

    “No! No no, goodness no!” she immediately denied. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Lincoln. And DEFINITELY not that! You couldn’t control what happened or how you felt then.” I just nodded my head as she continued. “I just…” She paused before tucking a leg up close, resting her chin on her knee. “... I guess I just forgot to savor what we had. My parents found out I wanted to be a doctor and they went crazy trying to sign me up for all sorts of summer and after school things to go to. To prepare, you know? And I was just… I was so excited to get all that started that I forgot to put in the effort to stay friends.”

    She chuckled to herself before finally looking back at me. “I supposed I thought you’d still be waiting when I wasn’t busy anymore. But after that, I was always busy.”

    I nodded my head along. I knew that wasn’t it. After all, friendships take two people to make it work.

“Well, I supposed I thought I didn’t have to do anything either,” I admitted. “Because I figured you’d get back eventually.”

Mina nodded her head. “I’m sorry if I ever was a bad friend.

I nodded my head back. “I am too.”

There was another pause. Things were still between the two of us. With everyone else trying to have a good time and wind down at the end of the day, it was even more obvious. I didn’t want to end this on such a sad note. So I didn’t.

“I always missed hanging out at your place,” I said. “You remember when your dad would make those meatball sandwiches for lunch and then we could go play on the beach right outside your window-”

“Yes, of course!” she giggled, a hand over her mouth to hide it. “You were always such a reckless kid. You went stomping around the rocks and got pinched on the foot by a giant crab.”

“Oh yeah! And it broke the skin, too!” I recalled.

“You’re lucky I thought to bring bandaids, you know.” She giggled to herself again, but the smile soon became solemn. “I miss all that.”

“... you miss when I got pinched on the foot?”

“Goodness, no! I miss just… us being able to have fun.” She looked at the ground, her hands placed on the rock on either side of her, as if she were about to hop off the rock and leave. “I haven’t even thought about going swimming since I’ve been preparing for medical school.”

“Well how about this?” I said. “When all this craziness is over, and we can go back to normal, let’s both make an effort. It doesn’t have to be much. We can just make sure to say hello every day to each other at school. And maybe by the time we graduate, we can be ready to take another little day trip to the beach by your house. How does that sound?”

I hadn’t realized until then that Mina was looking at me with surprised eyes, a flush in her face spreading all the way to the tips of her fins. It didn’t take long to figure out why. I had wanted to make sure she didn’t walk off before I could get my piece in. So I did the only thing I could think to do: I put my hand on top of hers.

    I was quick to pull my hand away, but Mina didn’t comment on it. She just was sitting there in shock… and then laughed a genuine laugh.

    “I’d like that, yeah!” she agreed. “Just a hello every day.”

    “Easy enough!” I chuckled.

    “Hey Link, you nerd!” I heard Sheik call from the tent. “You better get your butt to bed soon before I take the last sleeping bag!”

    “Oh no you don’t!” I shot to my feet with a playful smile on my face. I turned back to Mina. “You’re going to sleep in the fountain then?”

    “Mm-hmm!” She nodded her head as she got up, brushing herself off. “It should be natural. Or… natural for whatever me and Simon are stuck as.”

    “Zoras!” Simon shouted to her.

    “Yes, that!” she said. She turned back to me. “Well… sleep well, hero.”

    I gave a little bit of a goodbye wave as she hopped off the rock and made her way to the fountain. I was soon pulled away to the tent by my little sister, who was giggling the whole way. I was still able to catch one last little conversation before I went off to bed.

    “Are you doing alright, dear?” the Great Fairy asked as Mina stepped into the pool. Mina leaned on the edge of it, her arms crossed, like a little mermaid looking longingly at the shoreline.

    “I’m fine, no worries,” she assured. “I guess I’m just… thinking about how Link and I can rekindle our friendship once this is all over.”

    The fairy gave her a warm smile, giving her a soft pat on the head. “Well, I’m sure whatever you settle on, you two will have a grand ole time.”

    Ganondorf was not having a grand ole time. It was one thing to worry about not finding it yet, but now he was just pissed. All because the Seer had to open his big mouth that night and tell him what he’d already assumed:

    “Gleeok was slain.”

    And now, the demon king was just pacing around the shared mindscape, his shoes making a clinking noise on the ground, not unlike when someone taps a metal spoon to a wine bottle. That was two dragons now - TWO - that these children were able to defeat. This world didn’t even HAVE real dragons! They were just stories to these people! Even if people in Hyrule most likely never got to see one, they at least knew they existed. And these children were taking down creatures that, for all they knew, were from stories! This was bad.

    “Well, since I’m already upset,” growled Ganondorf. “Is there anything else I should be made aware of?”

    The seer took a pause, trying to figure out how to put this lightly. “They’ve awakened one of the Great Fairies.”

    Based on Ganondorf’s reaction - his whole body jolting before going rigid, his flared up eyebrows, his hair standing up like an angry cat - he didn’t put it lightly enough.

    “What the- They have those here?!?” he blurted out questioningly. Everyone else in the room was just as flabbergasted.

    “Of course they’d have fairies here!” Ibis snorted, dumbfounded that Ganondorf would even be confused about it. “After all, I’m here!”

    “Because you’re a piece of the Calamity,” Ganondorf retorted with angry eyes. “Not because the goddesses thought to include FAIRIES in this whole thing!” 

    “Well of course they would, Ganondorf! It seems the hero is always accompanied by them in one way or another, whether we like it or not.” Ibis sat back in her seat, like a bored queen overlooking the most pathetic of court jesters the kingdom could hire her. In this case, the jester in question had frazzled red hair and shiny armor instead of bells and baubles.

    “Do you at least know where they are, Seer?” Ganondorf asked, one eye squeezed shut in anger while he left the other open, as if expecting whatever answer the Seer gave to try and strangle him the moment it left his mouth.

    The Seer paused for a moment, his three eyes flying wide open and the slits in the middle pressing into thin lines. He was concentrating… and then he had it.

    “They’re on Staten Island.”

    “Already?!” asked the little keese-like creature in the collective. He’d been hanging upside down, gripping the moon-shaped light hanging from the Seer’s birdcage with their little bat paws. “We need to put something in the desert!” He fluttered down to join the others, staying hovering in the air. “Some kind of monster to throw them off!”

    “Of course! I’m not an idiot,” Ganondorf growled. He started pacing again, his chin cupped as he tried to clear his mind of all his worries and think. “But what? We can’t mess this up again…” He looked to the rest of the collective that had gathered. “Anyone have any ideas?”

    The lemur was the first to speak, holding its 2-dimensional arm up as if to wait to be called on. It didn’t wait to be called on.

    “A fossil perhaps?” he said in that excited but shrill voice of his. “The one I’ve got THRIVES in sand!”

    “Can’t!” Ganondorf replied sternly. “Staten Island’s fossils aren’t the right kind! All they have are seashells and isopods. Stallord would need something much bigger than what the borough has to offer.” The answer made the Lemur purse his lips in disappointment, leaning back in his seat and crossing his arms like a pouting child.

    “Perhaps you could send a molduga after them, Lord Ganon,” the Seer suggested. He didn’t even get a chance to give his reasoning before Ganondorf shot it down.

    “Too obvious,” the Demon King said. “The story they’re from in this world debuted only a few weeks ago! They’ll surely know how to deal with one.” If the Seer was unhappy with this response, he didn’t make it known.

    “Perhaps a scorpion!” The angular one recommended, standing up all straight and proper. He did that when he was particularly excited or happy with himself. “That’s what I did with the sky child back in-”

    “A great recommendation, Ghirahim,” Ganondorf replied. “But I don’t believe Staten Island HAS scorpions.”

    “Oh… I see…” the angular one felt a bit disappointed at that revelation.

    “OOO! OOO! I’ve got it!!” The others looked just in time to see the moon child come bounding over happily, a hand raised high and waving around to try and get the attention of the others. “I’ve got these two giant centipedes we could send after them and-”

    “Do you not remember how easily they defeated your other blight, Moon Child?” Ghirahim interrupted, venom dripping from his tongue. The Moon Child wouldn’t have been surprised if that literally happened. This one did have a snake’s tongue based on what they remembered. “I doubt our Master would wish to try your beasts a second time.”

    The words very much upset the Moon child. The good thing about them wearing that mask of theirs was that the angular one couldn’t see the incredulous grin on their face when they raised a hand up and twisted it around, as if twisting an invisible door knob in some unseen ceiling.

    As if following the motion of his hand, ghirahim’s face turned around backwards like an owl’s, getting stuck 180 degrees in the wrong direction.

    Ghirahim was upset to say the least.

    Majora couldn’t help but laugh their little socks off at the sight of Ghirahim screaming all panicked, trying to force their head back the right way.

    “Majora, don’t throw a tantrum.” Ibis scolded softly. She eyed the demon lord as he started to gently click his head back the right way. “Ghirahim may be a blunt little fool, but he’s right. We’ll need to try something else this time.”

    Majora sighed, twisting their hand back the other way. Ghirahim’s head followed suit, twisting back into its original position.

    “Don’t… don’t you EVER do that again!” Ghirahim ordered. Majora just giggled at his reaction. The whole conversation was thrown off course a bit, and all because the little keese creature, the eye, heard something near the edge of the room.

    “What was that, scholar?” His one eye turned to look near the edge of the mindscape. Over by one of the stained-glass windows, Ganymede was standing alone. He never liked it when all these creatures in his head decided to converse like this, pretending he wasn’t there while they schemed all the ways they could think of to kill the school children he knew and cared about. At least by the window, he could pretend to be gazing out at something. All one could see out these windows was an endless sea of swirling colors.

    Ganymede was prepared to tell the eye that he hadn’t said anything. That it was nothing, and they should go back to talking. But he was feeling bold tonight.

    “I was just saying how funny it is,” he began, turning toward the others and crossing his arms. “That you’re all debating how to kill a bunch of teenagers for the third time this week like it’s somehow rocket science.” He leaned back against the window with a confident smile on his face. “It makes me proud… knowing how strong Link must be to keep an entire council of fantasy villains tripping over their own feet trying to defeat him.”

    Ganymede let out a surprised noise as he was suddenly cut off, not by one of the villains speaking up, but by one of them trying to silence him. The eye had gotten fed up fairly quickly with his words. He had a tendency to get rather peeved when people called into question his abilities. But having this little mortal man who thought he knew more than he did, telling him he was weaker than some earthly CHILD?? It was enough for the eye to suddenly shift forms, enlarging into something monstrous in the blink of an eye before it grabbed Ganymede around the throat with a long limb that ended in three claws. It was like an arcade crane game had decided it wanted to kill.

    “VAATI!” Ganondorf called out angrily and sternly, like he was scolding a child for hitting a baseball through the neighbor’s window. “CALM YOURSELF!” Vaati’s one giant eye flicked back to glance at Ganondorf out of the corner of it. “Do not be so careless as to let a few hurtful words spurn you like a petty child.”

    Vaati’ one eye closed itself a bit, the way an eye does when someone looks too fed up to care. He was quick to drop Ganymede the moment after, his form shifting once again back into the shape of the little keese-like creature before returning to the collective. He hung himself down from the moon-shaped light once more.

    “Well, in my opinion,” went Vaati, crossing his little bat wings like arms. “The human needed to be put in his place.

    “Je-hahahaha…”

    A low laugh came from the other end of the mindscape. It was a low, gravely laugh, one that the rest of the calamity immediately recognized. They all groaned inwardly. They didn’t even have to look to know who that was and where they were.

    There was a saltwater pool at the edge of the mindscape. It was deeper than it was wide, looking like a bottomless pit lined with sea rocks and coral and weeds. It had all sorts of fish and eels swimming between the rocks, disappearing in one hole before reappearing out of another. It went so deep that the edges of the hole faded into darkness the further down it went.

    And in this hole dwelled another piece of the calamity.

    To be frank, the other pieces of the collective didn't much care for him. It wasn’t because he did things below their standards. He’d done things most everyone else in the collective had done at some point in their attempts to defeat the hero. He was just… unsettling. It wasn’t the same kind of unsettling energy that someone like Majora gave off. Majora was unsettling because they chose to take the shape of a giddy little child and acted much like one, despite doing some of the most unhinged of things on a whim. The first night they interrupted the story the scholar was telling Majora in favor of sleep, Majora threw a tantrum so violent that they had to stay up all night quelling them.

It was an awful night terror of a tantrum: darkness, surreal imagery, spectral goats and fish and centipedes, and so much more. Ganondorf wishes Majora would just break something during their tantrums, like a normal brat. Instead they threw their tantrums via psychological torture. The man in the pool wasn’t unsettling like Majora. Whereas Majora carried themself like a child given the powers of a god at their fingertips, the man in the pool carried himself like a calm but elderly sea captain. Not a kind one, but a grizzled and creepy one, with the missing teeth and the stink of seaweed stuck to their clothes while their breath stunk of a smoking pipe that hadn’t been cleaned properly since the 1910s. The shape he’d chosen to take in the mindscape fit the vibe very well.

For the most part, he looked much like a normal human man, with the same arrangement of limbs and proportion of the body. At least, he looked like it. One couldn’t truly tell with the big sailor’s coat buttoned tightly in the front, the ends of the coat hanging around his waist in shreds like the sails of a sunken ship. He wore a hat upon his head, with the ends curled up and around his head like a pair of twisted horns. Combined with his upturned coat collar, his outfit shaded his face so perfectly that all one could see was a big golden eye in the shadows.

“Perhaps I could make a suggestion,” he rasped with a smile, lifting himself up out of the pool. He put both hands on the side of the pool, gripping the edge as if about to hoist himself out.

“You have something of yours to offer up for the desert then, phantom?” Ganondorf asked, raising an eyebrow at the man in the pool.

Instead of hoisting himself up and out, the rest of the Calamity watched as the darkened color of his fingertips leaked back over his hand and wrist, like ink bleeding across paper, up into his sleeves. His wrist cracked and bent in ways the bones underneath certainly shouldn’t, the limb extending and pushing his body up and out of the pool, like a car jack lifting up the underbelly of a car for a mechanic to slip underneath. Both of his arms extended like this, lifting him up before placing him down on the floor right outside the pool.

    “Something great indeed,” the Phantom replied, his arms wriggling and they pulled themselves back into place, as if he were simply sliding them on like jacket sleeves. “A creature from my era.”

    The Lemur, with his hands still crossed in brooding, looked up at the phantom. “I don’t believe the Era of the Great Sea is a great place to pull monsters from to populate a desert , phantom.”

    “Except in this case, it’s not of the sea,” The phantom specified. “It’s a creature from the Temple of the Wind.”

    That seemed to catch the attention of the others. No one said anything else, so the phantom sea captain took this as his cue to continue.

    “You see, I have a creature, fairly similar to Majora’s.”

    “In what way?” Majora asked angrily, crossing their arms and squinting their eyes. The eyes on the mask squinted as well, catching the others off guard and making a few uneasy of the sight.

    “Well, like Twinmold,” the Phantom explained. “It’s a wormlike creature. One with a spiny outer skin…” His eye flicked over to look at the Lemur. “... And sharp pinchers on the front.” His eye suddenly snapped shut before a toothy maw reopened in its place, snapping at the Lemur for emphasis. He startled the pale creature so badly that he fell backwards and out his seat. The Ibis seemed to find this hilarious.

    The Phantom’s mouth shut before his one eye reopened in its place. “This creature can even fly as well as dig, just like yours, Majora.”

    “Well mine can fly better!”

    “I never said it couldn’t,” the phantom assured. “It’s also big enough to swallow these pitiful children in one bite!” He snapped his teeth once again at the others for emphasis. He let out his gravely laugh when he saw the Lemur flinch once again.

    “And the best part?” he stood there as the blackness on his fingertips spread up his arm again. The limb crackled and creaked as it grew kinks and wiggled out of his sleeve and extended back toward his saltwater pool. It was like watching a slimy, wet snake make its way across the ground, with the phantom’s awful hand on the end looking into the pool with its unblinking eye set into the back of its hand. It reached into the pool like an eel, bringing something back up with it: a porgy.

    The phantom drew his limb back into his sleeve, grabbing onto the fish firmly as if trying to squish it without killing it. He held it out in front of the others, presenting the fish to them, waiting until they were all looking and paying attention. And that’s when the fish… dissolved. It turned to a fine dust in his hand, but they soon realized that dust wasn’t the right word for it.

    “My beast doesn’t need a creature for it to embody in this realm,” he said. “All it needs… is sand…”

    Ariel awoke early the next morning. She wasn’t one to usually wake up as early as she did. She knew of some kids in her class who would purposefully wake up at around 6:00 in the morning so they could watch cartoons before school. Ariel couldn’t dream of being able to wake up that early. One thing she did seem to do from time to time was wake up randomly early in the morning, and then promptly find herself unable to go back to sleep. Ariel was upset at this, and decided the best thing to do was leave the tent and hang out outside while she waited for everyone else to wake up.

She was sneaky, so when she crawled over everyone laying side by side in sleeping bags and blanket burritos, she did so very carefully and gingerly. The desert was showered in the light of an early morning sunrise. With no trees full of leaves, the light didn’t dapple across the ground like Ariel was so used to seeing at home. Instead the sand was overlaid in a soft gradient of beautiful gold and orange sunbeams. It was pretty, but it wasn’t what caught Ariel’s attention in the end.

She might have woken up early, but someone else was up earlier.

“I dunno why I’m feeling all weird uh… I don’t think we ever caught your name, Miss…”

“Tera, dear. My name is Tera.”

Ariel was quick to duck behind a rock and hide, barely peeking an eye out so she could still see. The Fairy Fountain was opened up, and the Great Fairy - Miss Tera, Ariel would not to herself - was leaning on her crossed arms at the edge of the pool. Sitting upon the mushrooms leading up to the front of the fountain was a very anxious and dejected Sheik, looking like they were about to unload something very sad.

“Right, Tera, well…” Sheik took a moment to collect her words. “I guess all this is just making me feel… weird. The moment I find myself out of the grasp of my dad and have some time to be myself around friends, we end up going on some grand adventure and having fun.” She sighed to herself, looking down at her gloved hand while clenching and unclenching her fingers. “And the moment his judging gaze is off of me, I end up dressing like some department store ninja.” She leaned forward with her knees tucked up against her chest. “Barely any of my outfit matches each other, and I’m sure plenty of girls at the school would have a fit if they saw it, and yet… I like it.”

Sheik wasn’t sure what she was expecting. Perhaps a pitiful look from the fairy, or maybe for her to say a few words about how she should’ve tried to put together an outfit that looked better together. But Tera did none of that. Sheik saw a different look on the fairy’s face: one of understanding and sympathy.

“I think I know that feeling too well,” she said with saddened eyes. “I always dressed in pretty ribbons and bright makeup and clothes when I was your age. And I’d get made fun of. People always told me I looked ridiculous with how I put it together. Other people called me a slut for wanting to dress the way I did. All the words they said hurt, but deep down, I tried not to care.” She gave Sheik a soft pat on the shoulder, minding the height difference so she wouldn’t accidentally knock the poor girl over. “Because it wasn’t my job to make everyone else happy. It’s only my job to make myself happy.”

“I wish it were that easy,” Sheik said, gently taking Tera’s hand and lifting it off her shoulder, as if removing a piece of wet paper that had fallen onto her jacket. “God knows if I came home like this, my dad would say I look like some ‘punk anarchist degenerate’ or something.”

Ariel wasn’t sure what an anarchist was, and she couldn’t wonder for long before she felt something in her hair. That’s when she discovered that the little pink fairies that had been fluttering around had started to gather around her, with some even trying to sit on her head. Ariel was doing her best to stay hidden while also waving her hand around to shoo them away, muttering under her breath for them to go away.

“Well… think of it like this,” Tera said to Sheik. “I thought long and hard about this last night. Your little blonde friend said all this is happening because of some magical thing out there deciding to turn the world into another, didn’t he?” Sheik nodded her head, unsure where Tera was going with this. “Well, how reaffirming is it, that I’ve been shamed my whole life for wanting to dress effeminately… and then I’m magically assigned to play the most graceful and illustrious role this fantasy adventure could offer?” She turned fully toward Sheik before gently raising a finger and giving her a loving little boop on the nose. “Perhaps it’s saying something about you when it compels you to play the role of a… how did you put it…  a ‘department store ninja’?”

Sheik couldn’t help but giggle quietly at the reuse of the term. Her giggling stopped when she noticed Tera wasn’t looking at her anymore. She was looking past her, toward one of the rocks nearby. A rock that had a very suspicious swarm of pink fairies fluttering about it.

“I know you’re here, little Arrietty,” Tera said kindly. “There’s no need to hide, child.”

    Sheik looked over in time to see the edge of little Ariel Matheson’s face as she meekly emerged from behind the rock. The fairies were still swarming about her, with one sitting on top of her head. Tera made a little clicking noise with her tongue, causing the fairies to suddenly disperse into the plants and flowers all around and leave Ariel alone.

    “How long were you listening to that?” Sheik asked, half-worried.

    “Just a little bit,” Ariel admitted. “But I won’t tell anyone!”

A chuckle escaped Tera, sounding all fluttery and soft, like the beating of a bird’s wings. She just smiled down at her and said, “Oh, you won’t have to worry about that. I don’t quite mind it!” Tera lightly patted Sheik on the head. “You’ll have to see with Sheik first, though.”

Sheik had a nervous look on her face. Even with only her eyes showing, Ariel could tell this.

“I won’t tell anyone!” Ariel said to Sheik. She held up her hand, her littlest finger extended. “Pinky swear!”

Sheik felt good about that. Kids had a tendency to treat pinky swears like blood oaths. So, she looped her pinky around Ariel’s with a smile on her face.

“It’s a pinky swear, then,” she declared.

That left a smile on both their faces. The smiles all faded quickly when it happened. They could all feel it. The sand didn’t feel right. Sheik recalled the feeling, and immediately recognized it from when they were on the Ocean King off of Coney Island.

The ground was shaking again, and they again couldn’t find the cause of it.

“Hmmm?” A very tired Simon raised his head up from the fountain as he went to hoist himself up and out. “What is that?”

“Can’t be anything good!” Mina said right after, leaping up and out of the fountain frantically. She followed after her little brother as they both went to join Sheik and Ariel. Ariel had inched close to Sheik to feel safer, but then she saw… something. It was very far away, but just odd enough for her to grab her little telescope and gaze through it at the horizon.

“Do you see anything, schatje?” Simon asked, kneeling down to look wherever Ariel was looking.

“Kinda!” She said, “It looks like some kind of sandstorm. No, wait…” She squinted an eye through the lens. “It’s too small to be a sandstorm. Well, SOMETHING is blowing the wind around faaaaar away from here.”

“Oh goodness gracious,” Tera said, looking worried for the first time all morning as all the little fluttering fairies started to zip away toward the inside of the fountain. “Something’s coming this way.”

    We’d all felt the rumbling. For almost all of us, it startled us awake as if our mom had grabbed our shoulder and shaken us. It sent us into fight or flight, getting up and running out the front of the tent with all sorts of weapons drawn.

    “Is it the damn Octopus?!” Vinny shouted angrily, his hands on fire already. “Did it come back for thirds?!”

    “It’s an octopus, Vin!” Garrett reassured him. “It can’t survive in the sand!”

    “Well there were SEALS here, there could very well be-”

    “Wait, what-” I looked over toward the fairy fountain as I heard the fairy mention something. Sheik, my sister, and the Van Der Zees were gathered around the fountain, waiting with bated breath as my little sister looked through her telescope. All while I’d barely heard the fairy say something about how something was coming.

    “Excuse me, wait!” Navi called out. She zipped away as I slid down the side of the rock, watching as the fairy retreated into her fountain, the petals pulling back up to close up the fountain and shield the great fairy, as well as all the smaller pink fairies, inside. It closed just in time for Navi to harmlessly crash into the side of the cactus, stabilizing herself in time so that she didn’t fall into the sand. “WHAT’S coming?? What’s out there?!”

    “I’m not sure, but you children best prepare for combat!” the fairy said loudly from inside.

    “Crap crap crap CRAP!” Sheik kept saying it over and over as she quickly flashed her bow into her hands. Everyone else went into a panic, pulling their weapons either out of the magic aether or out of their adventure packs. Fiona was quick to glide her way over to me before flashing brightly and reappearing strapped to my back as a sword and scabbard.

    “God, I KNEW Ganondorf was gonna pull this crap!” Mike said as he retrieved a rope from his adventure pack. “Glad I got the Groosenator rebuilt last night!”

    “Well where is it?!” asked Miranda as she slipped into my half-open backpack.

    “In the adventure pouch, duh!” Mike replied, “Gotta use the rest of that space for something !”

    I didn’t listen much to the rest of their conversation. My attention was instead drawn to a familiar click-clacking in my adventure pouch. A click clacking that served to warn me the last time something awful happened all of a sudden. It made me realize that we were screwed.

    The beetle didn’t even wait for me to open the pouch, instead crawling out by itself before fluttering into the air. And thus it began, starting with the cloud of sand on the horizon getting closer to us and more music playing from the beetle. Boss music. Boss music with a very strange sound laced throughout it:

    Ch-k-ch-k-ch-k-ch-k-ch-k-ch-k-ch-k-ch-k-

    “ROPE A SEAL!” I shouted to the others, fetching my own rope from my bag. “Something bad’s about to happen and we’ll have to get moving if we’re gonna fight it!”

    “Plus, let’s get it away from the fairy!” Sheik shouted.

    “And the expensive camping stuff that I’m borrowing from a friend!” Mike added, sounding more worried than the rest of us who’d spoken up about the plan to surf away.

    No one needed to be told twice. Everyone was quick to run down the side of the rocks and dunes we were camped out upon, quickling throwing their ropes forward and toward whatever seal they could find nearby, not even waiting to sneak up on them like Sheik had done the previous day. 

    “C’mon, hurry, hurry!” I heard Garrett calling out right as he and Vinny took off. Vin had decided to forgo roping a seal once more, instead soaring overhead on leathery wings.

    <<Get a move on, Lincoln!>> Fiona called out.

“I’d listen to the sword here, man!” Miranda added as she stared behind us.

    Right when I threw my rope forward, nudging my seal to dash away and get a head start, that’s when it made its appearance.

    The crashing of the sand behind us was near deafening. That combined with the sight of this creature leaping over our heads was enough to make the rest of the world seem to fall into stunned silence. What had leapt above us was a worm-like beast, with barbs and foldable bony shingles all along its body, like its body was perfectly designed to stay hooked into whatever burrows it might find itself slipping down. Its jaw opening sideways like mandibles. Its ornate and curled crests on its head were accompanied by a pair of slitted green eyes, flanked by a pair of false eyes made up of pigment in this skin. It was like those animals with markings on the backs of their heads to ward off predators. More likely, they were on this thing to make sure the prey wouldn’t fight it back.

I was quick to pull on my rope and get the seal to turn and pull me out of the way, the creature landing back in the sand right where I  had once been. It didn’t stay in the sand, though. We all could watch as it rose up out of the sand before diving back under, like those videos of dolphins leaping up and down through the ocean in play. We knew full well this thing wasn’t playing, though.

“What the HELL is that thing!?” Miranda called out frantically.

<<It looks like a viper kinda,>> Fiona observed. <<But like, a viper that god didn’t put together quite right.>>

While Miranda and Fiona were theorizing, I was busy tying my seal rope around my waist so I could unhook the Sheikah Slate from my waist. It wasn’t easy. I had to keep my balance on the shield while a seal pulled me along at the speed of sound, but eventually, I was able to line up the slate just enough to snap a picture of the creature to get the compendium to recognize it.

“Link, what is it?!” Sheik asked from a little ways away in the sand. I looked down at the picture on my slate, then at the description, then back up at Sheik.

“10 bucks says this was one of your guesses!” I said, before finally revealing the name of the creature to the group:

    “I KNEW IT!” Mike called out as he looked over his shoulder at it. “It’s a goddamn GRABOID!”

    “The Graboids stayed under the sand, Mike!” Garrett said to him frantically, using his free hand to keep his hair out of his face. “UNDER!!”

    “That woulda been worse!” Vinny yelled down at him from above.

    “Keep doing circles around the camp!” I called out to everyone else as I hooked the Sheikah Slate to my waist. “Let’s try not to get lost while that thing’s going after us!”

    “Good plan!” Mina agreed.

“GAH! Garrett let out his usual high-pitched and panicked scream as Molgera emerged from the sand again, this time right beside him. He was barely able to steer his seal out of the way so him and his seal could escape it. Garrett sealed the deal by instinctively snapping his fingers at it. A little knife appeared out of thin air, zipping through the air like the world’s deadliest paper airplane before landing in Molgera’s eye. The creature let out its shrill clickety-clackety scream as it dove under the sand again to escape them.

“How are we supposed to fight that thing?!” Sheik cried out, eyes darting around as she prepared for Molgera to rise up from the sand again.

“Dunno!” Navi replied. She’d opted to stay seated inside Sheik’s scarf, just so she wouldn’t have to worry about flying at the speed of light to try and keep up with everyone. “But its outer layer is DEFINITELY too hard for a blade or arrow or something. The whole thing looks like a dang pinecone!”

“Maybe there’s a chink in the armor or something,” I mused to myself.

“Didn’t look like it!” Miranda said. “That thing’s barbs looked pretty tightly knit together.”

<<She’s right!>> Fiona stated, suddenly sounding more monotonous and robotic than I was used to. I started pulling my bow and arrows out of my adventure pouch as she continued. <<The spines along its body serve as armor, as well as a means to stay put in burrows should something try to pull it out. You’ll have to go for the eyes and mouth where the flesh is soft.>> There was a short pause before Fiona spoke again. <GuuUH! HOW do I know that?!>>

“No clue, but keep it up!” I said, loading an arrow into my bow. I flicked the rope tied to the seal, causing the creature to leap forward and dash through the sand, catching up to the front of the group and bobbing and weaving through everyone else. “Do what we usually do, guys!” I aimed my bow and arrows toward Molgera, waiting as the creature rose up and out of the sand again. “GO FOR THE EYES!”

I let loose my arrow, watching as it soared through the air and stuck right above Molgera’s eye, sticking in the skin like a splinter.

“Alright, shooting it it is then!” Mike declared, tying the rope on his seal to the belt loops in his pants before reaching into his adventure pouch. I watched as he pulled the entirety of the fully-assembled Groosenator out, like Mary Poppins pulling a lamp out of her travel bag, and firing the loaded thing at Molgera. All this happened in under the course of a few seconds, and the bottle rockets struck along the edge of Molgera’s jaw, right near where the soft flesh met the hard outer skin. This seemed to knock Molgera off balance, causing it to crash a bit in the sand and fall behind the rest of us. It recovered fast enough to catched up with the back of the ground, allowing those of us in the front to look back at its wide open maw.

A perfect opportunity to get some shots in on it.

If we’d gone to Staten Island first to try before we’d figured all this out, I’d imagine the fight with Molgera would’ve been a hell of a lot more chaotic. A lot more use of the wind, more rock throwing and sand kicking than anything, and only a handful of us having any actual weapons to use against the monster at hand. But this wasn’t the beginning of our adventure. We’d faced countless foes before now, and Molgera was just another name to add to the list. Once we all knew what to do, we were like a well oiled machine in that desert.

As everyone prepared, Simon opted to instead speed off ahead of everyone else and the monster.

“What’re you doing?? Go back!” My sister said loudly.

“I can’t!” Simon replied. “I don’t have any projectiles and there’s no water for me to bend out here! The only way to keep you safe is to keep our distance.”

“Okay…” Ariel said that like he was telling her they couldn’t go to the park, not that they couldn’t fight the giant ugly worm monster hunting us down across the greenbelt. They didn’t fight, but the rest of us sure as well did.

It was one after the other. Vinny threw a ball of fire at its eyes, then Garrett snapped his fingers and called forth a ring of knives that hovered in the air around him and followed behind like a pack of drones trying to keep up with him. He sent each one flying toward where Molgera’s eyes were, one knife after the other. Mike was still reloading the Groosenator as Sheik pulled back the drawstring of her bow of light and sent an arrow flying where the others had neglected to aim: inside Molgera’s mouth.

I think she had been hoping to hit the back of the monster’s throat, but it didn’t make it that far. Instead, she struck the beast’s tongue, causing it to reel back like the injuries to the eyes hadn’t made it reel back before. Sheik looked with eyes wide with shock, and then she pumped her fist in the air.

“Bingo! Weak point!” she called out. “The tongue is the money spot, guys! Aim for its mouth!”

“Way ahead of you!” I said as I tucked the bow away and unhooked the Sheikah Slate again. “Mina!” My fish friend looked back over at me as I drove my seal closer to her, making sure I wasn’t too close. I didn’t want our seals to crash into each other. “Get ready to do some lacrosse stuff!”

She nodded to me firmly, pulling her lacrosse stick out from where it had been tucked against her back. I tapped a button on the Slate’s screen, watching as a blue orb materialized from the lasers fired up by the slate’s reticle. The age-old solution to most Zelda fights people are too fed up to take their time with: a bomb.

“I think I know what you’re planning!” Mina said. “So throw it here!” I held up a finger, telling her to wait a moment. A moment was all it took for Molgera’s bony face to crest the surface of the sand.

“NOW!” I tossed the bomb to her like a baseball, and she was quick to catch it with her lacrosse stick before whirling her arm around to throw the bomb right into Molgera’s open mouth.

BLAM!

You could see the blue smoke of the bomb’s detonation steam out of Molgera’s mouth, like a dog biting down on a taught bag of flour, and the beast reeled back like it did before when Sheik shot its mouth. It dove under the sand again in retreat.

“Haha! YES!” I called out.

“Keep your guard up, everyone!” went Sheik. “It didn’t dissolve into smoke! It’s probably still under there!”

I saw Mike give the ground a disappointed stare. “Well it’s a big WUSS of a monster if that’s all it takes to send it running!!”

Every time I look back, I think about how Mike just had to open his big mouth.

From far behind us, we watched as Molgera leapt up from the sand like a flare fired into the sky. We waited for him to come back down… and he didn’t. That horror struck all of us, and we couldn’t help but freak out and encourage our seals to swim faster. Molgera was no longer leaping through the sand like a dolphin does at sea, and had now decided the best course of action was to fly over our heads like an east asian dragon.

Nobody liked that.

“Bob and weave!” Simon shouted back at us from way up ahead, trying to keep himself and my sister out of harm's way. “Surf in a zig-zag! Whatever it takes to throw it off!!”

“We’ll try!” Sheik shouted back. She flicked the rope in her hands to lash at the seal’s back, getting it to pick up the pace while she tugged the rope too and fro to make the creature swim in a zig zag. Most everyone else followed her lead, being sure not to zig-zag right into someone.

“Link, let’s go at it again!” Mina said, getting her lacrosse stick ready. “I think I can hit it from down here!!”

“Alright then, get ready!” I clicked the button on the slate, materializing another remote bomb into my hands before looking back at Molgera to wait for an opening.

I spotted something much worse.

“SHIT!” Miranda cursed.

<<NO NO NO, NOT LIKE THIS!!>> Fiona panicked.

“MINA, SLOW DOWN!!” I called out frantically, pulling back on my own seal’s rope to do the same. Mina and I were just ever so slightly… not fast enough.

CRASH!

Molgera came barreling down towards the ground, mouth wide open as it dug into the sand and swallowed up both our seals with it. They went down so quickly that Molgera dragged out ropes down with them. It was a violent enough tug that the ropes we’d tied to ourselves came loose, but it also caused both of us to go flying through the air. We both let out pretty audible screams. Well, all four of us. My cousin and Miranda also let out their own panicked shrieks as we went flying. Miranda was the only one able to collect herself enough to do something.

“Brace yourself, Lincoln!!” I felt the coarse but soft texture of hair suddenly envelope me before we hit the ground, and the three of us went tumbling across the sand in a makeshift shield made from Miranda’s ponytail. We were totally fine. But my fears still got the better of me, especially when I heard Mina scream in agony after she landed in the sand some ways away. I was able to peel away one of Miranda’s hair fingers so I could get a good look.

There Mina lay in the sand, clutching her leg and screaming as she tried to move. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what had happened, especially after she’d hit the ground so hard. She must’ve not landed properly, and broke her leg.

“MINA!” I heard Sheik call out.

“YOU GUYS KEEP GOING!” I said, breaking free of Miranda’s hand. “I’VE GOT HER!!” I went running toward her, immediately slipping on the sand and falling on my hands and knees before I got back up. Miranda was on the ground, having been flung from my backpack, and was in the process of getting back up and returning to my side. I was too busy trying to get to Mina to notice when Miranda found something in the sand. Something that fell from her person. Something the Sullivans gave her: The barbed damascus steel knife with the orange veins in it.

She also noticed the big bulging of sand moving rapidly toward our location.

“Link LINCOLN!” She went running toward me as fast as she could on her little gremlin legs, latching onto my backpack with her hair to pull herself back inside. “You’re not going to get to her in time!!”

“I can try!!” I yelled back, still a ways off but closing in on her quickly.

“Even if you can, you can’t outrun that thing and carry her at the same time!”

“I can sure-as-hell try, M!!” I was frantic at this point. My legs started to hurt from how much I was pushing it.

“Well, I can help you try harder!” Miranda said from my backpack. “But it’ll hurt!”

“Alright! Fine! Just do what you- ACK!”

I let out an alarmed cry of pain as I felt her jab something into my shoulder. Not like a little pinprick or anything. Miranda had straight up stabbed me.

I tried my best to keep running, despite the literal stabbing pain in my shoulder, but I couldn’t ignore it any longer. Not when I saw the weapon out of the corner of my eye dissipate into black flecks of darkness. The flecks shot through the air like arrows, seeping right into the veins in my arm. I kept up running as my entire right arm jolted and went rigid, like I’d been hit with an invisible taser, and I watched as the veins in my arm turned a color I’d never seen before: a bright orange. It wasn’t quite bright enough to compare to fire like the red that shows up when I switch to goron mode. It was a softer orange, like candlelight. Or perhaps, I’d soon realize, like the sun at twilight.

“Fiona, get on me!” Miranda called out. I felt the weight on my back lift away as my cousin shifted from my back onto Miranda’s, the straps wrapping around her. It was like Miranda knew what was about to happen.

And that’s when it started.

I kept running, and my adrenaline blinded me to most of the awful things going on with my body, but I could still tell and feel that something was happening. Bones and muscles grinded, shifted, stretched under my skin, getting pulled like taffy or rearranged like pieces of a puzzle. My skin prickled with an itch that spread up from my right arm over the rest of me as fur sprouted in light and dark colors. My already pointed ears shifted to the top of my head as my whole face elongated and my teeth extended into sharpened canines, threatening to slice up the inside of my mouth if I bit down wrong. My spine bent and compressed in such a way that I was forced onto all fours as I kept going. I hadn’t even put together what had happened. Not until I felt Miranda grab onto my much longer hair with her little gremlin hands.

“Haha! YES!” she shouted excitedly. “You’re HUGE, dude! Keep running!!”

It hit me all at once. I was able to outrun Molgera, but I was also a wolf.

    It was… surreal to say the least. The sand under my feet didn’t feel hot, and the thick coat of fur didn’t suffocate me in a blanket of heat. I didn’t spend any more time trying to figure out how any of that was possible. There was a task at hand. I held my head low to the ground as I came close enough to Mina to grab her. I grabbed her by the back of her shirt with my teeth, lifting her up off the ground and taking her with me. I didn’t slow down or stop for any of it, running off and keeping my pace up to outrun Molgera.

    I hadn’t really thought about how Mina would react. Not before I heard her panicking in my teeth.

    “WHOA, DUDE! You can’t just GRAB her like that!” Miranda scolded me. Her ponytail gently grabbed Mina from out of my teeth, pulling her up and onto my back and holding her down so she wouldn’t fall off.

    Mina looked up and around with frantic eyes. “AH! Wh-what’s going on?! Miranda??”

    “That’s me, yep!” Miranda said all cheeky.

    “Where did the dog come from!?”

    “Firstly, he’s a wolf,” she corrected, looking at Mina with disappointed eyes. They faded quickly back into her excited smile before she continued. “And secondly, check the front legs, girl!”   

There was a pause as Mina leaned over the edge a bit, glancing at my right front limb. The one covered in the same little bits and bobs of technological veins and wires.

Mina’s eyes flew open. “LINK?!”

I tried to give a noise of affirmation, but all I could get out was a loud but gravely bark. Found out the hard way that I couldn’t talk like this.

“O mijn God…”

“Mina!” Miranda pointed a finger at her. “You can heal things with magic, yeah?”

“Yeah, I can!”

“Good! Heal yourself, then!” Miranda ordered. “We’ll keep you out of reach of the sand worm!” Miranda kept her grip on my hair while using her ponytail to keep Mina from falling off my back. Mina just nodded her head in response, holding a hand over her injured leg as blue light encircled her hands and obscured a small area of skin. She kept at it for a long while. All while I ran fast enough that I ended up catching up with everyone else, bobbing and weaving between one person and then the next, getting all sorts of reactions. This was where I realized that I didn’t just look like a wolf. I could hear so much more now.

Even far off comments about “Oh god a giant wolf!” from Garrett, mixed in with startled exclamations about “It looks like one of the things from Game of Thrones!” from Mike.

All of this was overshadowed when I ran close to Sheik and heard a low rumble in the ground. It wasn’t a rumble I was used to hearing, like the one we heard on Coney Island or the one we heard back at camp as Molgera approached us. It was a different kind of grumble that got really loud really fast. But not fast enough that I wasn’t able to figure out what it was.

I tried to warn Miranda and Mina, as well as Sheik, but all that came out was a loud bark as I fell back. It was loud enough that Sheik was startled into flicking the rope, lashing at her seal and getting it to dash forward. It was just quick enough of a reaction that she was able to get out of the way as Molgera reappeared. He shot up out of the sand like a missile, flying through the air with its mandible-like mouth wide open as he flew. The others watched as he zigged and zagged, preparing and tossing projectiles up at it while I did my best to duck and dodge out of the way of any wayward attacks. I had to leap up to miss a stray fireball that Vinny had miscalculated, coming back to the sand roughly and causing Miranda and Mina to bounce a bit in their seats.

“Miranda, hurry!” Mina said. “Get some bombs from Lincoln! You can throw one into that thing’s mouth!”

All Miranda had to do was look toward my hip to see that she couldn’t do that. “He doesn’t have the slate!”

Mina looked shocked. “Wha- Did it fall off?!”

“It must have disappeared or something when he turned into a wolf!” Miranda surmised. “We’ll have to figure out another way to fight Molgera.”

I didn’t need to figure one out, of course. I just had to wait and listen. I waited and watched as Molgera dove back into the sand again to retreat. I waited until I could hear that low rumble in the sand again. The low rumbling noise that no one else could hear. And then… I skidded to a stop in the sand.

“Wha- LINK!” Miranda scolded, holding onto my hair still as I looked around, ears flicking about to listen. “Just because you’re a wolf doesn’t mean you’re as dumb as one! Keep running!” I didn’t. Miranda’s cheeks puffed up in frustration, but Mina stopped her from doing anything by pointing something out.

“I think he’s looking for something,” she said. “Like one of those hunting dogs!”

And then I heard it. Instincts seemed to kick in as I honed in on the sound, bounding forward through the sand without warning as the girls on my back let out startled cries. Miranda did her best to hang onto me and Mina, looking at me with a miffed expression.

“Link, you couldn’t have barked or something to warn us?!” she exclaimed. I didn’t pay much attention to her words. I had something I needed to do, and quickly. I kept running, bounding through the desert and across the sand like a frantic little rabbit running from something. I wasn’t running from anything, however. As far as I was concerned, something should’ve been running from me.

Then the louder rumble came. The one that the others were used to hearing. The one that they knew for sure signaled that Molgera was ready to rise back up out of the sand for another round. I was running right over to it.

Miranda looked frantic. “Link! Link! Maybe turn or something?! LINK!!” Miranda braced herself as she covered her head with one hand, held onto my hair with the other, and used a third to keep a hold of Mina as she, too, braced for something to happen. I got ready for it, my muscles winding up in coils like springs before I bounded forward a longer distance than I’d ever jumped before. I did so right as Molgera came up out of the sand right under me. The kicked up sand obscured most of what happened, the only hint at what I had accomplished being the rip and tear that echoed through the air, a wet and gruesome noise for any poor passerby to hear.

I went the rest of the way through the air before landing safely outside the sand cloud. As for Molgera, he flew up as usual, rising up into the sky, screaming, while a waterfall of viscera fell from its mandibles. Blood and malice dripped into the sand and evaporated in the heat, all while Molgera writhed in the air. The creature suddenly stopped screaming as its whole body went rigid in the air, its hardened outer shell hardening even more, like a bug going through its screwed up death molt. And then it dissolved. Not in the way we were used to, though.

“INCOMING!!” Vinny called out as he dove back to the ground for cover. Molgera dissolved, alright. But he dissolved into a big cloud of sand, which came down on us like a bad prank involving a flour sack. Miranda covered all our faces with her hair hand now that Mina had recuperated enough to hold on  by herself. Everyone covered their faces with their arms, but it wasn’t warranted. Vinny had enough forethought to throw his hands up, causing the wind to shift upwards and blow the sand cloud off and away from the group.

It took a moment for the sand to clear entirely. And once it did, everyone was able to see clear as day who took down Molgera and how.

I let out a “BLEH!” as I spat something out. Onto the sand. It was Molgera’s severed tongue, which lay limp on the ground before the blood and malice stopped flowing and it dissolved into sand in front of us.

“Mina, you goo?” Miranda asked as she helped the zora down to the ground. I sat down on the ground and panted from the exertion, causing surprised noises to leave the girls as Mina stumbled to the ground. “Yo, watch it, Wolfie!”

“For the most part,” she said. She stumbled a bit on her leg as she held onto my fur for support. “Could use a bit more time to heal the rest of it.” She paused for a moment, as did Miranda and I, looking up as something gently floated down from the sky.

“That works too!” Mina said, reaching out and grabbing it. It disappeared as she grabbed it, like a little kid trying to snatch a bubble out of the air, and soon her leg was healed enough for her to stop leaning on me. “Is Link alright? He’s panting.”

“All wolves do that when they’re tired,” Miranda explained. “He’ll be fine.

“MINA! MIRANDA!!”

We all looked over as Simon waved his hand around wildly. Him and the others were surfing back over through the sand, but the kids at the front pulled their seals to a stop.

“EEP! Een Kardoeshond!” Simon stopped a few feet away, holding Ariel steady on his head with his hands.

“Man, I was right, it IS as big as the things on Game of Thrones,” I heard Mike observe once more. I was just sitting there, panting, trying to recuperate after running across the desert and taking down a giant worm monster, and here everyone was, absolutely terrified of me.

All except for Sheik.

Sheik was the first one to approach, leaving her seal to sit in the sand as she walked over. I paused for a moment, looking up at her as she stopped right in front of where I was sitting. She had that look in her eyes only for a moment, but a moment was all it took for me to notice. It wasn’t shock, nor fear, but recognition. Recognition… and sympathy.

A moment was all it took for me to notice this, and moment was all it took for her to collect herself before gently putting her right hand on my forehead. 

    There was a pause. A moment of silence as we all let it sink in. I gently pushed my face into her hand, causing her to giggle.

    “Alright, alright bud. I know it’s you.” she said with a laugh afterwards. I pulled away at her request.

    “Alright, cut the sappy crap and step back!” Miranda ordered. Everyone kept their distance as she pulled Fiona out of the scabbard.

    <<Wait hold up, what’re you doing?!>> Fiona asked, all panicked.

    “Don’t worry, trust me on this,” she reassured. She turned the sword around in her hand and was about to touch the pommel to my side, but was stopped in her tracks by a noise. A loud and shrill beeping noise. I lifted up my right paw to see what it was. The sound was coming from the dial on my hand, with the outer ring of wires lit up all red and a flashing symbol in the middle of a triangle with an exclamation point in its center. I was taken aback a bit. This was ancient Hyrulian technology, and yet it was displaying a warning symbol I’d seen on almost every earthly piece of computer tech I’d ever seen.

    And then I changed back.

    It was sudden, and there was no adrenaline rush to help me ignore the discomfort as my whole body suddenly shifted again, the flecks of Twilight shooting up through my arm and toward my head before finally, finally , I was on all fours as myself again. But something was lodged in my throat.

    I wretched suddenly, feeling a scratching in the back of my throat before I finally coughed it up into the sand. The last of the twilight flecks fell from my mouth and rejoined with the thing that had been stuck inside me. It was the knife. The same one Miranda had jammed into my shoulder before I’d shot off running.

    “... that works too!” Miranda picked it up with the very tips of her fingers, gently shaking the spit off of it. “I think I’ll just… hold onto this.” She held up the steel knife to show the others. “I guess Wolf Link is more intense than all the other stuff on your arm.”

    “Probably because it’s not built into it,” Mina guessed.

    “Yeah, it must be like those phone apps that drain your battery more,” Sheik added.

    “Well for now, it’s a useful thing for emergencies only,” I said, shaking out my right arm. “Great, my arm’s all pins and needles.”

    “At least it’s not broken,” Mina joked. That didn’t make me laugh. All it did was bring me back to the issue at hand.

    “Right, um… Mina, are you sure you’re alright?” I asked, glancing down at her leg. “We can’t afford to let you get hurt like that again.”

    “It was just a freak accident!” she assured me. “Besides, I got that heart thingumabob! Those help you take hits better!” She held up her arms like a boxer waiting to make their first move to emphasize her point.

    “Well… that makes me feel better about it at least?” I said with a nervous smile.

    “We can talk about this later,” Sheik said. “We should get back to the campsite to make sure Tera’s okay.”

    “Tera?”

    “The Great Fairy.”

    “Oooooh I see, I see.”

    “Yeah!” Mike agreed. “That and make sure that graboid thing didn’t tear up any of our camping stuff.”

    We paid no mind to Mike’s one-track worry and went on our way back to where we’d set up camp. Lucky for Mike, none of our stuff was broken or destroyed or any of that. The most that had happened was one of the stakes keeping the tent tied to the ground had come undone. Whether that was caused by Molgera stirring up the sand or from just bad knot tying was anyone’s guess. We didn’t have time to deal with it. Well, “we” excluding Mike, because he was quick to head over and get everything packed up so we could get to the Trial as soon as possible. Sheik, on the other hand, was more occupied with going to make sure Tera was alright.

    “Miss Fairy!” My sister called out, getting up and off of Simon’s head and running over to the cactus. “Are you alright??”

    We could see Tera gently part the branches of the cactus, a single eye looking around as she looked to see whether the coast was clear or not.

“I’m quite alright, Arrietty!” she assured her. The petals of the fountain unfolded once more, the water flowing again as all the pink fluttering pixies dispersed out to the flowers and plants.

“Thank goodness…” Sheik sighed as she sat down and pulled something out of her backpack: food. “The sun’s starting to beat down a bit, guys. Lunch?”

“Gladly…” Garrett said as he popped a squat nearby her. Everyone who needed to sit down to partake in the minced fish and mushrooms that had been stored in tupper wares for everyone. Meanwhile, I was busy pulling off my jacket to cool off a bit, stuffing it into my adventure pouch for extra safe keeping. That didn’t seem to be quite enough, so the shirt went as well.

“Make sure to put on sunscreen, you guys!” Mina said with a chuckle.

“No yeah, I’d definitely like to see what a purple guy looks like all sunburnt,” Vinny snarked. He stuck a tongue out at her while he pulled a bottle of spray sunscreen out of his jacket.

“Well, you all can’t just leave yet!” Tera said. “I feel like I should reward you.”

“For doing our job?” I asked, having just finished spraying myself down.

“For saving me from that creature!” Tera answered excitedly. “I don’t know if I ever would’ve left my fountain again with that thing around!”

“Well it’s no problem, ma’am!” I slid down the edge of the rock and approached the flower. “Just another little thing to do while we try to fix all this mess.” That seemed to make Tera giggle.

“But seriously! You deserve a little something for your good deeds!” She held up a finger as if to say “one moment” before she dove into the water of the fountain and went looking for something. You couldn’t hear what she was saying, but you could tell she was saying something while under the water. The bubbles and muffled words clued us into that. She spent about 30 seconds looking around.

“Really, it’s alright,” Sheik assured her. “We don’t need-”

“AHA!” Tera shot up from the water, and now it was Sheik’s turn to get drenched in fairy water. I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. Sheik looked back at me with her soaked denim jacket and hair with furrowed brows.

“Oh yeah, hardy-har, laugh it up, Lincoln,” she huffed.

“Oh! Terrible sorry, dear!” Tera said as she leaned down close to the ground. “But I found it!!” She held out her hands to me and Sheik, showing us what exactly it was.

It was a flower. A flower with an almost perfect ring of white petals and a long stem that curved this way and that from where it sprouted up from the little shining rock that its roots were wrapped around. The most eye-catching thing about it was the white, grape-like fruit growing up and down each side of it. There were at least 15 of them, with the ones near the flower being the biggest.

“It’s… very pretty!” Sheik said as she took it in her hands. The rock resting in her palms glittered like stained glass as she wobbled it around in her hands to get a comfortable grip on it. I unhooked the Sheikah Slate from my hip, holding it up to see what exactly the thing was.

“It’s a very useful little thing!” Tera said. “It keeps the monsters away from the spring, so I’m sure it’ll be of use to you dears.”

BEEP BEEP BEEP

“WHOA, HEY!!” I tightened my grip on the Sheikah Slate as it locked onto the plant with the compendium reticle.

“Whoa, is something wrong with the slate?!” Fiona asked as she glided over to investigate.

“No no, nothing like that…” I looked to the compendium tab to make sure the little system freak out had a good reason. I read what it said aloud to everyone who was listening…

“Blossom of Light: These flowers only grow in areas with high concentrations of magic. They’re renowned for their magical capabilities, and the fruit growing from the stem can absorb dark magic. The fruit has been nicknamed Tears of Light by its discoverers, but is more famously known by another name…”

Sheik and Fiona looked at me in anticipation.

“What name?” Sheik asked, impatiently. “Does it not say??”

“Nah, it does, I just wanted to be dramatic,” I said with a giggle. I turned the Slate around so Sheik could see the picture I’d taken. The fruit growing from the plant indeed went by another name, and Sheik seemed to know full well what that name meant for us when she looked at the Slate with wide eyes:

Moon Pearls.

Chapter Text

“Incredible!”

Despite what had happened a while before, we soon realized that we’d still need a way to run across the desert to the Trial of Thunder. As such, I was once more obligated to wolf out once more and carry Miranda and Mina across the sand while everyone else surfed on their seals. Mina was in the middle of looking through the compendium entry on Moon Pearls, with Miranda seated beside her and Sheik surfing alongside us.

“Tera basically gave us the ultimate weapon against Ganondorf’s magic,” Mina told us. “It says here that Moon Pearls can stave off curses when touched to the skin.”

“Yeah, and it says they can ward off magic when surrounded by it, right?” Miranda asked.

“Yeah! It’s like a good luck charm that actually works!” Mina giggled.

“That’s one way to put it,” Sheik said. “I remember reading about Moon Pearls. One of the games has you going into another world full of dark magic. Link needs a Moon Pearl so he can keep his human shape.”

“What does he get turned into exactly?” Miranda asked with a raised eyebrow.

Sheik looked like she was smiling a big stupid smile under her mask. “A rabbit!”

There was a snort from Miranda, her cheeks puffing up, and then she let out a hearty laugh, clutching her stomach and nearly falling onto her back.

“It’s not that funny,” Sheik said, rolling her eyes.

“Besides! I think Lincoln would make an adorable rabbit,” Mina added as Miranda finally collected herself enough to sit up.

“Right, of course, yeah,” Miranda said, wiping her face with her hand. “Too bad all he can turn into is a giant wolf that can give us a lift across a vast and dangerous desert.”

The smirk she had from her witty comeback all but died when she and Mina heard a loud “BEEP BEEP BEEP”. We all knew what it was.

“Oh shoot, brace yourself, Mina!” Miranda took her ponytail hand and used it to wrap both herself and Mina in a mini forcefield of hair, all while my form gave out from under them. I tripped over my own feet and stumbled into the sand, rolling head then back then heals like a cartoon character about to get rolled into a snowball, before I finally fell flat on my butt and stopped. I had to take a moment to lay there.

“Yep. That hurt. Ow.” I let out a particularly violent cough as the knife fell from my mouth once again. I was able to catch it myself this time. I slowly sat back up as Miranda and Mina recuperated as well. Everyone else in the group fell back, their seals slowing to a stop around us so we could have time to catch up. I heard a click nearby.

“Nice!” Vinny landed in the sand nearby, his wings folding up into his back and disappearing, as if he’d tucked them under the skin. He held up his phone in his hand. “So it looks like you can stay like that for about a minute and a half!”

“And about 20 minutes to recuperate I’ll say,” I groaned, getting to my feet.

“Based on observation?” Vin asked.

“Based on me not wanting to experience all that garbage for another 20 minutes, at LEAST,” I replied back, dryly. I let out a surprised noise as something leapt into my backpack.

“Well, guess we’re walking on human legs now!” Miranda chuckled as she got comfortable in my backpack again.

“Hopefully it’s not too far,” Mina said with a nervous look on her face.

“We’re here!!” Mike yelled back to us over his shoulder. He turned back to look in front of him, only to freeze up. He looked ahead… then down at his phone where he’d been checking his GPS, then back up ahead of him again. “That can’t be right.”

“What’s the matter?” Asked Garrett as he walked to join him, with Vinny trailing not too far behind.

“Well, it says we’re in the middle of the park, but…” he looked up ahead of him again. “I don’t remember THIS being at the Heyerdahl ruins.”

He was evidently referring to the giant wall of rocks and mountainous formations that now sat atop where the ruins of an unfinished vineyard once sat, all jutting up out of the sand to frame a large statue of a woman. She was carved to be sitting with her legs crossed underneath her, her hands resting on both knees with the palms turned toward the sky. She looked like those old Buddah statues you see in zen gardens and such, sitting serenely no matter where they’re placed.

    “Well… perhaps it's here because of magic,” Mina inferred.

    “Just like how the wreck of the Coelacanth was floating above water!” Simon added.

    “Either way, this is the place,” I said. I had taken a moment to double check, just to make sure we were in the right place. Sure enough, both Miranda and I could see on the Sheikah Slate’s quest tab that the marker sat right atop where this giant statue in the desert was. “The quest marker thing is right on top of it.”

    “Good, good…” Mike let out a little phew, being the first to take the first step toward this brand new dungeon with its big fancy and foreboding statue. What was held inside? We were soon to find out that it was more than his girlfriend.

    “Hey, Embers?” Mike turned to the taller teen walking alongside him toward the statue.

    Garrett Turned back with a “Hmm?” His expression changed to a rather surprised one rather quickly when he noticed Mike looking… anxious. It wasn’t the first time on this journey that he’d looked that way. There were plenty of uncomfortable or anxiety-inducing situations they’d gotten into during all this. But Mike’s expression changed in a moment when he chuckled to himself.

    “Do you think once we’re done with all this Staten Island crap,” he said, “You think Uma could join us for that STEM study thing once we rescue her? She was always interested in all the junk I get up to.”

    “Well, I don’t see why not,” Garrett surmised, his hands in his jacket pocket as they walked. He chuckled to himself. “I always wondered why she went for a bloke like you, actually. She doesn’t seem the kind to put up with…” He trailed off as he realized just what he was saying. His face went from lighthearted to anxious in an instant, but before he could clarify anything, Mike raised a hand to stop him mid-gesture.

    “Put up with me being a jackass?” he asked, a chuckle following. “I think I can take a guess.” He gently took Garrett by the front of his jacket, dragging him off to the side and away from everyone else in the group. Mike waited until they were at least 15 feet away from the rest of the gang before letting go of him.

    “Alright, maybe don’t grab me like that again??” Garrett asked, readjusting his jacket. “Felt like a locker was going to materialize out of the sand and you were going to slam me into it.”

    “Right, right, sorry-” He cleared his throat. “ANYWAYS, the conversation at hand.” He fiddled with his fingers nervously as they kept walking. “So remember when… wait, you weren’t there for that.”

    “For what?”

    “When we were in the school trying to get Matheson’s SD card or whatever. We were in different groups I think.” He shook his head. “Anyways, the other girls were talking about fighting guys with their high heels, and it reminded me of this one time Uma nearly killed a guy with one of her high heels because the guy kept harassing her…” He paused for a moment before letting out a sigh. “The guy was her ex.”

    Mike wasn’t aware Garrett’s face could get paler at this point. “Oh…” Garrett was already putting the pieces together, but Mike decided he should explain it without leaving the guy to try and figure it all out himself from one statement.

    “Yeah, they got together when Uma and I were friends in uhhhh…” he paused for a moment, counting fingers on his hands for a moment before he finally continued with, “8th grade, that was it.”

“How long were they together?” Garrett asked.

“At least until 10th grade I think. But it didn’t take that long for him to start doing crap.”

“Define ‘crap’, Goss.”

“You know… awful crap! I know what he was doing looking back, but it took me a week or so to figure it out. Calling her “too emotional”, saying that he did so much for her and couldn’t she just do some favors for him, making blatant jokes about her in public while everyone else could hear… just awful crap!” Just talking about it seemed to get Mike all angry. “He even tried to isolate her from everyone. Trying to bring people down in her eyes, make him look like he was the best person there was and she didn’t need to be friends with anyone else. Apparently he was telling her how I was too into football and raising my grades or something? Trying to make it seem like that’s ALL I did or some crap, and that I didn’t give a crap about her. Uma almost fell for it, but not before I shut that shit down.”

“So he was manipulative is what you’re saying?”

“Textbook definition.” Mike grumbled under his breath, not really saying anything else, just making pissed-off noise. “Uma broke it off and I decided it might be nice to take her to the movies the next day. You know, take her to do something nice after leaving that human garbage can. She’d been wanting to see that Cinderella remake with the real people in it.”

“The live action one?”

“Yeah, she was really excited about it. You know, girls and… disney movies and all that. Turns out, her ex was going to the movies, too. He caught us as we walked out, and the dude absolutely went OFF on us. Second most pissed-off person I’ve ever seen in my life. Wasn’t quite as terrifying as this one lady in front of me in Dunkin’s that got upset that they were out of jelly donuts. Didn’t know a middle-aged woman could scream that loud.”

“Goss, the movies?”

“RIGHT right, sorry.” Mike shook his head as if shaking something out of his hair. “So yeah, her ex! He saw us, got very angry and loud, and I tried to step in between him and Uma, and then BAM!” Mike hit the inside of his palm with a closed fist for emphasis. “Dude clocked me in the face so hard I got a black eye. And THAT’S when Uma pulled off one of her shoes and nearly beat him to death with a high heel.”

There was a long pause after that. It was on purpose in Mike’s case, wanting to let Garrett process all of that. And there was just… so much. He never would’ve guessed that… It just didn’t… he never would’ve expected it to be Uma . He always saw her as the “strong, independent woman” type. The one that could make it all on her own and all that. And she went from one bully to a… slightly less dangerous bully. It was almost like Mike could hear his thoughts, because he spoke up again.

“I know I’ve got my problems,” he said. “But I keep them out of my relationship with Uma. Don’t go thinking because I always tried to steal from you and shorty that I was doing other kinds of crap to her. I’m doing my damn best to be a good and loving boyfriend.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Not like the last guy made that much of a challenge or anything, but it's easy for jocks and even some nerds to be assholes.” He let out a sigh. “And after all she’s been through?”

They’d finally reached the statue at this point. Link and some of the girls were already walking up to take a look at an entrance underneath the platform of stone the colossus was sitting atop, all while Mike was trying to finish up their conversation before they finally took the leap of faith and entered the Trial. Mike looked over at Garrett, his face suddenly dead serious. Garrett wasn’t aware his face could get any more serious than it had already been.

Mike said his last piece, quiet and serious, as if he were a doctor giving out his diagnosis to a patient. “I wouldn’t be caught dead treating her anything like how he did.”

    “This must be the door then,” I said, feeling the weight on my back grow lighter as the master sword flashed into another form.

    “I mean, I don’t see any other way in,” said Fiona. She spent a moment looking around the front of the statue, as well as the rocks and spires surrounding it. There wasn’t any other way inside.

    “HRRRK!” We looked back at the door to see Simon had already beat us to trying to get it open, and was doing his best to pry a giant slab off of the front of the door. It was laying against the doors of the dungeon, and evidently was so heavy that even the 9 foot tall wall of lean muscle that was Simon Van Der Zee couldn’t get it open.

    “It won’t budge!” Simon told us, still trying his best to pull the slab on.

    “Try pulling harder!” Ariel suggested.

    “I am!!” Simon finally let go with a huff, trying to catch his breath while shaking out his hands. I couldn’t imagine how hard his fingers must’ve hurt. “I don’t think the doors behind it are locked, but this thing sure as heck will keep us out.”

    This all seemed fishy to me. Surely there was a way around this if Simon couldn’t pull the slab off the door. I decided to take a look at it myself, silently walking up to the door with Fiona gliding after me, like one of those MMOs with the little pets that can float along with you wherever you go. There had to be something here. Something none of us had noticed yet.

    “Just looks like a slab to me,” went Miranda from my backpack. Everyone else was busy looking at it, but I came to realize something we hadn’t tried. I turned the back of my hand to the giant slab before tapping my knuckles on it. My eyes went wide when the realization hit: it was metal!

    “Metal,” I said. “It’s metal!”

“Okaaaay, and sand is made of rocks?” Miranda snarked.

“No no, hold on a sec!” I reached down and unhooked the sheikah slate from my hip and opened it up. Then I paused and turned to everyone else. “Hey guys, back up a bit, would ya?”

“What for?” Sheik asked.

“Just please get everyone to back up,” I pleaded. “I’m about to do something drastic and I don’t want anyone to get hurt.”

“Will do, Mr. Hero!” Sheik slid off back down the dune to herd the rest of the gang away from the colossus. And that’s when I finally found it: a magnet rune.

“The magnet!” Fiona exclaimed.

“Yeah, I almost forgot I had this!” I clicked the button on the tab, immediately getting a prompt on the screen as the reticle opened up: Point toward target .

“You sure it’s going to be powerful enough to pick that up??” Miranda asked. I didn’t answer, simply pointing the reticle of the switch toward the slab in front of the door and pressing the screen.

FLASH!

It was like I had taken a picture with the brightest flash ever. A stream of magic shot out from the switch like lightning, touching down in the middle of the slab. The entire thing lit up in a golden sheen. I paused for a moment before experimentally lifting the slate up a bit. I never thought I’d be so excited and relieved to hear the sound of metal scraping on stone.

“It works!” I laughed to myself as a wide smile spread across Miranda’s face. “IT WORKS!!” My arms shot up over my head in triumph, and I hadn’t realized just what I’d done until the stream of magic coming off the switch suddenly disappeared, snapping like a thread as we both looked up and saw the metal slab, flung up in the air and turning over on itself like a propellor before it started falling back down.

“Crap crap crap CRAP!” I was quick to dash up the dune while Miranda dove into my backpack and covered her head with her hands. I had to leap out of the way in order to get us to safety, and I fell face first into the sand as the big slab of metal slammed down into the sand a few feet behind us.

There were a slew of reactions from the others. The first thing I heard was Vinny bursting out laughing at the whole thing.

The next was Garrett running over and going, “OH MY GOD, ARE YOU TWO OKAY?!”

“Yep. We’re fine,” I groaned out, getting my hands under me so I could get myself back up.

“Wise guy here didn’t shut the tablet off before throwing his arms around,” Miranda said, exposing me right off the bat.

“Well, at least he told me to get everyone to back up before he did that,” Sheik said with a chuckle. She extended a hand to help me up, and I gladly took it. “Leave it to you to nearly get yourself crushed under a door blockade.”

“He’s taken a bite out of a deodorant stick before, so I wouldn’t put it past him,” Miranda chuckled.

“ON A DARE!” I told her.

“For 10 dollars!” Vinny added, correcting me.

“Yeah, 10 of your dollars, Vin,” I snarked.

“You still did it!”

“You think I was going to pass up 10 smackeroos??”

“Would you two quit it??” Fiona got in between the two of us. “We’re not here to discuss whether or not Lincoln is stupid for biting a stick of deodorant for 10 dollars, alright?” She put her hands on the backs of our heads, turning us both to face the rocks and the statue. It was there we saw everyone else, already making their way over to the door of the Trial.

It was positioned like a regular door, along the wall sitting upright, but the way they were designed and set into the wall made them look like the doors of a cellar. To be honest, that’s probably what it was. Based on what Mike had told us about Heyerdahl, this place would most definitely have a cellar if anything.

“We should make a plan of attack before we go in,” Mina proposed.

“Good idea! You all go in then!” Simon declared. He scooped up Ariel - who was about to walk over to the door and try to pull it open when she was suddenly lifted off her feet nearly 7 feet - before sitting himself down with his legs crossed on a nearby rock. “ I will stay here with schatje.”

“Awwww, c’mon! I wanna help!!” Ariel complained. Simon replied by simply bapping her on the nose. I assume he was trying to do what Ariel did on the Ocean King when she reassured him by giving him a boop on the nose, but with how tall he was the palm of his hand was big enough that it booped her nose… as well as the rest of her face.

“You can help by staying out here with me where it’s safe!” Simon said.

“Well, what about you?” She asked, pulling his hand off her face. “Don’t you wanna help them fight??”

“Well we can’t just leave you outside alone,” he said. “Plus… I’m a fish in a desert. I don’t think I wanna try fighting whatever’s in there.”

“Oh yeah. No water.” She looked around, then at the door, then she shrugged her shoulders. “I think the doors will be open, so we can just watch!”

Simon looked up at me. I looked back at him. We didn’t say anything, but we both knew based on just our expressions alone that we were thinking the same thing: “Yeah that wouldn’t be a good idea either.”

But this whole thing did remind me of something else we should take into account. “Mina! Right!” I turned to her as she stood patiently with the others. “You can stay out here too if you’d like.”

“Of course,” she said, holding her hands up to frame her face in the same way a cute fashion idol might. “And I’ll let you all do all the big hero stuff while I’m sitting here waiting for you to get back like a safe little princess.” Her expression went from pure sickly sweet sanguine-ness to disappointed and done with our bs in less than a moment. “I’m going in with you guys whether you like it or not.”

“Wha- are you sure??” Fiona asked, hovering by her side with worry on her face.

“Of course I am!” Mina replied.

“But what about your leg??” I asked, pointing toward the offending limb.

Mina replied by balancing on said leg before spinning herself around like a ballerina doing a pirouette. She slowed herself down and stopped before planting her other foot back in the sand.

“I’ll be fine!” she emphasized. “That building isn’t big enough for something like that giant zakwurm to be inside, so I’ll be fine!”

“Well if you’re so sure, then here!” Simon got up and uncinched the dragon scale hanging around his wrist, passing it to Mina. “It’ll be dangerous, so take this.”

Mina looked at it, head tilted slightly. She was looking at it with a mix of awe at how pretty it looked and confusion as to how this was supposed to help her.

Simon seemed to recognize this, and added, “You can bend water while wearing it, so take it with you!”

“What- like in Avatar??” she asked, now even more confused.

“Yeah, exactly!” He said excitedly, pushing the dragon scale toward her. “So if it turns out there’s water down there, you can fight with it!”

“Well alright, if you say so,” she said with a smile and a chuckle. She took the dragon scale in her hand, cinching it tightly around her right hand. She wasn’t the only one prepping for the coming battle.

Mike took his Groosenator and stuffed it into the open top of his adventure pouch. The fact that he could fit that thing through the opening always baffled me. In return, he reached in and pulled out something else: his slingshot. I supposed it was better for whatever closed quarters we’d be in down there.

“Alright, phew, let’s try this,” I heard Garrett mumble to himself, psyching himself up to try something as he held his hand out in front of him, ready to snap his fingers. He took in a deep breath before he finally did it.

Snap! FLASH!

In a flash of red and gold, a long black sword suddenly materialized into the air. It rested there for a moment or two before Garrett scrambled to catch it as it fell. He managed to grab the handle just in time, holding it up in front of him with a nervous smile.

“Alright, okay,” he said anxiously. “I got this!”

“Your powers are getting pretty terrifying, you know,” Mike commented as he took out all his water balloons and tucked them into his belt so they could be there at the ready. “First the knives, now full-on swords??”

“Well hey, at least he can’t set things on FIRE, Michael,” Vinny said with a chuckle, holding up a hand. The tips of his fingers were on fire, looking something like the ends of a bunch of barbeque lighters. Mike just looked at it with wide eyes and pursed lips before deciding to shut up.

“Alright, is everyone ready?” I asked, pulling out my shield and holding a hand out. Fiona glided over before she flashed into the form of the Master sword. Everyone around either nodded or gave verbal affirmation.

“Let’s head down then, gang!” Navi said excitedly before pushing on the door to get it open. Sheik was quick to join her, getting the door open and allowing us to enter.

The doors were wooden and medieval, and they creaked like the doors of a haunted mansion when Sheik pushed them open. The rest of us slowly but surely walked in behind her and Navi, looking around and turning our backs to each other’s backs, like a group of people sneaking through a zombie-infested mall or something with all their weapons pointed outward toward the danger.

Suffice to say, the below ground room didn’t look the way we thought it would.

It was wide open, with no support beams or anything to break up just how open the whole room was. There were beams at the four corners of the floor, and Mina sighed a sigh of relief when it became clear that this place was much too small for something as big as Molgera to be hiding down here. The size of the room wasn’t what caught us off guard. It was something that Fiona pointed out.

<<Link, look!>> She didn’t need to physically gesture for me to figure she meant for me to look straight ahead of us. <<Is that a fence or something?>>

“Dunno…” I walked close as all the others followed, keeping our guard up the whole way across. The platform was roughly about 75 feet wide, possibly more, and it was square so it was 75 feet long as well. The floor was made up of stone bricks and tiles, all kept together with what looked to be hard-baked clay. Not the kind of clay fired in a kiln, but clay that was baked with an open flame instead. As I made it to the end of the platform, I came to realize that Fiona’s observation wasn’t too far off. The edge of the platform had some kind of fence lining the entire edge. Or, I thought it was a fence. Navi was the one to figure it out.

“Wait a sec…” she grabbed a piece of the lattice and pulled. To my surprise, it pulled, like she was tugging on a pair of leggings that needed fixing. When she let it go, the whole thing wobbled back and forth. “Not a fence… it’s a tennis net!”

    “A tennis net??” Miranda asked as she climbed out of my bag, her ponytail already balled up in a fist, ready at any moment for a fight.

    “Yeah!” Navi reaffirmed. “This whole platform must be some giant tennis court or something!”

    “Yeah, let’s go with that,” I said as I looked over the edge of the net. We had one half of the court to stand on. The other half wasn’t there. The other side of the net was simply a dip black abyss, waiting for some stray tennis ball or child to fall over the edge and into the darkness. Nothing fell in, but something certainly came out of it.

    FWOOSH!

I let out an alarmed cry as I fell back and away from the net. I felt Mina catch me before I could hit the ground, and we all watched in abject horror as black and red smoke shot up out of the abyss like a bird. Two streams of it, to be exact. They were circling each other like the two halves of a DNA strand before each bit flew away from each other and stuck to the opposite walls, taking the shape of someone - or something - crawling along the old wood, stone and dirt. All the while, we could hear the combined hysterical cackles of two old women.

“Would you look at that!” one of the crone’s cackled. “The little hero is finally here!”

“Took you long enough, blondie!” snarked the other.

I didn’t even get a chance to respond before Mike pushed past me to get to the front of the platform. “Where is she?!”

“Ooo, touchy touchy!” One of them laughed at Mike’s, the smoke creeping across the left wall as it inched slightly towards him in the air. “This one’s got a fire in him! No wonder she likes him!”

“You always appreciated men with a fire in them,” the other snorted.

“Uhhhh guys??” Garrett whined as he looked to the wall on the right and then back at us. We hadn’t noticed until then, having been too distracted by the laughing clouds of malice. There was ice creeping across the wall, and the closer someone was to the wall, the more steam came out of their mouth as they breathed.

“Chill out, young man!” chastised the cloud of malice closest to the ice. You could almost make out the shape of a pair of judging eyes in the smoke, squinting down at Garrett and accentuating the crows feet. The smoke seemed to look over at the other cloud. “That’s how they say it here, isn’t it?”

“You probably messed it up, you old bag,” went the other crone dryly.

“Don’t call me old! I’m the younger one!”

“We’re the same age, you old bat!”

“We’re not having this argument again. We’ve got work to do!”

“Of course, of course!”

The two clouds of smoke turned away from us, seeming to stare back down into the abyss as each one crawled back along the wall so they were across the net from us. They latched onto the wall in front of us before looking straight down into the pit.

“Gerudo Champion!” They called out in unison. “Make yourself known, and introduce yourself to these outrageous fellows!”

That was when we heard something beneath the platform: the sound of running footfalls, then a leap across walls, and then someone jumped up out of the abyss. All of us leapt back away as the new figure landed on the platform, right in front of the net. We all froze and watched as this figure pulled itself up and stood up straight in front of us. Her feet were positioned below her in a battle stance, and she was dressed to the nines in what I could only describe as Amazonian armor, but Amazonian armor that was made in the eastern mediterranean before being shipped to Lesbos. We all recognized her, but Mike was the first to make it known.

“UMA!! BABE!!” He looked the most relieved and happy that I’d ever seen him this whole adventure. He started to approach her. “YOU’RE OKA-” Mike was stopped as Uma suddenly unsheathed the curved sword on her hip, pointing it at Mike in such a way that if he’d kept walking, she would’ve pierced his throat.

“I- Uma, babe?” He looked at her, confused, sweat beading on his forehead. “It’s me. It’s Mike! Michael! Mikey?”

“It seems she’s gotten tired of waiting for you to come for her,” One of the crones said. We couldn’t see it, but I could practically hear the grin on that old woman’s face. “She’s veeeery angry with you, young man.”

“And it seems she’s so angry,” the other Crone added, “That she only listens to us now!”

A conjoined cacophony of witchly cackles echoed through the room, like the inside of the clocktower when it rings at the hour. Mike seemed to get angrier and angrier as the laughter went on.

“You BASTARDS!” His insult only seemed to draw more laughter out of them.

“Save your anger, bird boy!” scolded one of the old women. “That’s not all we have planned!”

“After all,” went the other crone as streams of blue magic and malice lifted out of the two clouds, like steam rising off their backs. “Our baby boy Ganondorf wants us to make sure to stop this whole adventure right here, right NOW!”

We took steps back as the malice from both sides of the room steamed away, streaming to the space above the deep dark pit on the other side of the net. They circled each other, looking almost like a pair of birds flying in a circle together, until the two streams crossed. The big boss appeared piece by piece over the course of a few moments. 

The blue magic seemed to work like threads, stitching this malice-made form together like some awful goopy ragdoll. First came the arms. A pair of hands shot out, gripping the left wall and pulling the whole mass to one side. Then… another pair of hands shot out, gripping the opposite wall to try and pull the mass the opposite way, eventually allowing the forming monster to settle in the center of the space. The rest of it erupted out of a floating waist made of stone and wires that I realized fairly quickly had an uncanny resemblance to the Sheikah Slate. Up front this waist erupted a torso. Two of them, actually. They were conjoined at the small of the back, with each pair of shoulders left free to move. Their faces looked exactly how I expected them to look: the two faces of a pair of old witches, who’s only goal was to give all 8 of us premature obituaries. There was a piece of them that looked really cool, but I was too terrified to really comment on it. The one difference between the two crones was the way their ponytails ended: one in roaring flames, the other in crystals of steaming ice.

“THAT’S new!” Navi called out loudly, very much trying to keep a lid on it.

“No SHIT, Nav!” Vinny growled, clapping his hands together before throwing them down at each side, his balled up fists now blazing with arcane fire.

<<Oh god oh god- wait LINK, THE DOOR!>> Fiona called it out loudly in my head, and I couldn’t help but turn to look at the door we’d come through. The moment my eyes landed on it, I was made aware of where the ice on the wall had been creeping towards. I looked just in time to see jagged crystals and spires of ice fire out from the wall, sticking in the ground and blocking the door. Our only way in and out was blocked off, just like that.

That wasn’t the last of the ice. Suddenly, it shot up in a row, one jagged spire after the other, all forming flat protrusions of ice that shot straight up out of the ground. I leapt back from the edge of the platform as the ice created a border on both sides. The spires of ice shot up just in time to catch my still startled expression, almost like a mirror.

“Ice! Lots of ice!” Mina called out.

“Yeah, they can control ice, fish face!” Mike snarled as he pulled his slingshot out, loading up a balloon to ready himself. I tried my best to ignore the chittering of the beetle as it crawled out of my pouch to play more boss music. One with a lot of piano, cymbals, and… was that an oboe? It sure sounded like one.

All while this was going on, I held the Sheikah Slate up in front of me to get a look at what we were dealing with. All while the trio in front of us said some words of intimidation:

“I’ll burn you kids down to your bones!” yelled the crone on the right, who I’d come to find out was named Koume.

“And I’ll freeze you all to your souls!” yelled the crone on the left, who I’d come to find out was named Kotake.

“And I’ll be sure to shock you till your heart stops!” Uma growled, pulling her sword back toward her and holding it to her side while holding a shield forward toward us. We knew her as the Gerudo Champion, and we now knew what to call the two old witches:

Soon we were thrust into a fight, all kickstarted when Uma dashed forward, sword drawn. She leapt up into the air, blade raised overhead, aiming to bring it down on top of me and slice me in half. I drew the Master sword and quickly swung it out in front of me to knock her sword back. It all happened so fast, one slash after another. If I hadn’t known better, I would’ve guessed she’d known how to use a sword her whole life.

I was able to push back against her right as she tried to land a blow again, buying me enough time to leap away and leave her open. That’s when Garrett made an attempt, leaping back to get a safe distance before snapping and pointing to her. A swarm of knives appeared out of the aether and soared towards Uma like a cloud of angry hornets. She was quick to whip around and throw her shield arm up to knock them out of the air.

“Watch where you throw those, you numbnuts!” Mike scolded. “That’s my girlfriend in there!”

Uma then knocked Mike over like a sack of potatoes by bashing his chest with her shield. Everything happened so fast in the moment, but I was quick to realize that Mina had figured something out. Namely, with the help of the dragon scale, the magical ice lining the walls could be melted.

“I’m sorry, Uma!”

That was the only warning Mina gave as she swam through the air, water carrying her through the air while streaming behind her like the vapor trails of an airplane, and then made an attack on Uma. She took her lacrosse stick, planting the butt-end of it into the ground as she swung around and kicked Uma in the face, sending her stumbling back. Uma let out an aggravated grunt, holding her sword out as she got ready to fight back.

We all collectively decided to stand back and away from the two of them as Uma and Mina physically let loose on each other. Sword blows and streams of water and all sorts of moves I didn’t think possible with nothing but a lacrosse stick, but the more I watched, the more I was impressed with both girls’ fighting ability. Uma would swing, Mina would block the blow with the long end of the stick. Then Mina would throw a hand forward to make water shoot up into Uma’s face to throw her off. It was a back and forth, with all sorts of different combinations of attacks. Swords and sticks and water, one after the other.

It was when Mina decided to use her water bending to swoop up and around the room that we encountered a problem

CRASH!

Mina let out a cry of alarm as she tried to leap from the floating stream of water, but to no avail. Her legs from the knee down ended up stuck as Twinrova hurled a ball of magic toward her. It had hit the water, turning the entire thing into a giant, suspended arm of ice, and its hands of cold unfeeling crystal had a death grip on Mina.

“Godverdomme!!” Mina pulled her hand up to try and melt it, but nothing happened. She then resorted to trying to shatter the ice around her legs with the butt end of her lacrosse stick. Similar results. “HELP!”

“I GOTCHA!” Miranda’s ponytail reeled back, winding up before punching the base of the arm of ice. Nothing happened. “... I DON’T GOTCHA!”

<<Link!>> Fiona yelled. <<The hammer from Central Park! It’s magic, ain’t it??>>

“Yeah, it is!” I was quick to sheath the master sword, reach into my adventure pouch, and then pull out the Megaton hammer. I was right about to run over and swing it toward the ice when Navi and Fiona alerted all of us:

“DUCK!!>>

Twinrova had gone and thrown another ball of magic at us. This one, however, was on fire.

All of us dropped to the floor, recreating an earthquake drill as we fell to our knees and covered our heads with our hands. Mike had even gone as far as to knock Uma to the ground with him, using his arm to push down on the back of her shoulders to get her to drop. I glanced up to see the fire bouncing around the air above us, hitting one spire of ice before reflecting off and into another. It was like one of those cartoon shootouts, where someone fires a gun and the bullet comically ricochettes around the room before it finally hits something. The fireball ended up reflecting right back at Twinrova, and the two halves of the torso dove away from the middle of the space. The fireball blew past them and collided harmlessly into the wall behind them and went POOF!

“God damn, they’ve got ice AND fire?!” Mike shouted, dumbfounded. “What in the- ACK!” As it turned out, the moment the danger was gone, Uma decided to get right back to it. She grabbed Mike around the neck with her whole arm, much like a chokehold, but used the leverage of her rolling over on the ground to fling Mike over her like a pillow and send him flying toward the edge of the platform.

“CAVOLO!” Vinny shot up and was quick to throw a hand out, swiping it to the side as if opening an invisible sliding-glass door. Mike suddenly tumbled through the air sideways, rolling over an invisible pathway made of nothing but Vinny’s own wind magic before landing back on the platform.

On my end, I didn’t waste any time, quickly taking the hammer and slamming it down on the ice while Twinrova was getting ready to attack again. Cracks all spider-webbed up the frozen arm of water before the ice around Mina’s legs finally gave way and allowed her to fall free. Miranda caught her before she hit the ground, gently setting her down as I ran to meet her.

“You okay??” I asked her. Mina nodded to me.

“GUYS, WATCH IT!” Sheik was quick to leap in front of Mina and I as she let loose an arrow of light. I hadn’t noticed until right then that Twinrova had taken advantage of me helping Mina to throw another magical projectile of ice.

The arrow hit the ball of ice head on, scattering into the air on impact as it sent the ice flying right back at Twinrova. However, Sheik had mistakenly hit it at an angle, meaning the ice didn’t go flying back into the wall like the projectile before.

It flew right into Koume’s face.

“ACK!” she let out the kind of paint grunt you’d expect an old lady to let out, though it sounded less like she’d just gotten a face full of ice and more like she’d stubbed her toe really hard on a table leg. “Watch where you’re throwing that magic, you old bat!”

“Don’t call me old!” Kotake growled back.

“That’s it!” Navi said. 

Sheik looked toward the rest of us. “They’re opposites! You can knock the magic back at them!!”

“Of course!” I had put the hammer away by this point, and pulled out the master sword in its place.

<<So… you knock the ice at the fire one and the fire one at the ice one? Sounds easy enough!>> Fiona said with a nervous chuckle.

“GUH!” I turned and held up the master sword to block another swing from Uma.

“Yeah, it would probably be easier with Uma trying to kill us!” I shouted, knocking Uma away to try and create distance.

“Easy fix!” Garrett didn’t elaborate before he suddenly put one of his hands up and shoved it forward, like he was pushing an invisible box. A wall suddenly materialized out of nowhere as it slid across the platform, pushing both me and Mina back and away toward where Sheik, Miranda and Navi were on one side of the platform. Garrett threw up his other hand out to his side, calling up another wall. In less than 5 seconds, Garrett, Mike, Vinny and Uma were all confined to one side of the platform, with the walls keeping Uma from the rest of us.

Twinrova, as implied by their cackling, saw this as Garrett just locking the three of them up with Uma.

“Oh, what a smart boy!” went Koume.

“Or perhaps a stupid one,” added Kotake. “It’ll take more than three little whelps to fight our little Iron Knuckle!”

“AND!” Koume’s neck snapped around so she could look at me and the girls with a devilish grin. “It’ll take more than four of you to fight US !”

“It’s five!” I shouted back.

“Oh, same difference!” Kotake grunted, balling a hand up as blue steam and magic leaked from between her fingers, like she was clutching a handful of colored sand.. “Let’s show them, Koume!”

Kotake wound her arm back behind them before throwing it forward, hurling another ball of magical ice toward us. I dunno what it was. Perhaps it was all my past experiences of playing dodgeball in PE that made it possible, but I was able to duck and dodge with everyone else as the ice flew past me, ricocheting off of all the ice and crystals around us. I felt like a character in a cheesy action flick, reacting as quickly as I could to get out of the way of the projectile while everyone else pretty much did the same.

“Lemme try something!” Mina called this out as she lunged toward the projectile, using her momentum to swing her lacrosse stick out. The pocket was just big enough to catch the ice as it swung around, and Mina did one last spin for momentum before swinging the stick down to send the ball of ice flying right back at them, hitting Koume in the face. The crone let out an angry growl.

“Why you little-!!” She didn’t even do anything to help us anticipate the attack, going straight into throwing her arm forward and sending a ball of fire right towards Mina. It was flying through the air much faster than we thought it would, which made it even more astounding when the reaction time and instincts suddenly kicked in and I leapt in, swatting the master sword at the fire and sending it back and away from Mina. Twinrova had caught on by now, though.

Their whole combined person spun like a top in midair, allowing Koume to swing back around and hit the fire back to me. That was when Sheik stepped in again, letting loose another arrow to knock it back.

“OH! Link! Link!” Miranda shouted to me. “Pass me your joy con, QUICK!”

I didn’t have time to question her. Koume and Kotake were already in the process of winding up to swing the fireball back at us, so I unhooked the joy con from the slate and threw it to her. She managed to catch it, hitting one of the buttons on the d-pad as she threw out a quip in the meantime.

“Hey batter batter hey batter batter-” And right as the ball of fire was hurled back toward us, she finally reached the weapon she was looking for: my baseball bat. “-SWING!” She swung the bat around so hard it spun her in a bit of a circle, but the force of her attack knocked the ball of fire right back at Twinrova. Even better, she managed to hit Kotake right in the eye, causing the one half of the monster to reel back.

“AHH! HOW RUDE!” She rubbed her face, as if she’d gotten pepper in her eye, and then glared back at Miranda. “You snarky little IMP!”

“Try THIS ONE then! NOW, SISTER!!” Koume commanded her sister to hurl another projectile toward us. I was thinking faster this time. And smarter.

“I’ll try it, alright!” I made a gesture like I was going to pull the master sword in front of me and swing again… and then pulled out the Sheikah Slate. I quickly held up the reticle toward the ice projectile and poof . One click of cryonis and the thing crumbled in midair.

Seeing the dumbfounded expression on their faces was priceless.

    “I… well that’s just unfair!” cried out the sisters.

    “Jokes on you, boy!” Koume held out a cupped palm, conjuring up another ball of flames. “That just means we’ll only use FIRE!” She threw it toward us, and we were back on the defensive.

Garrett was scared. He was terrified. Absolutely startled. They were stuck in a room with a brainwashed young lady who would gladly cut them to ribbons, and Garrett couldn’t even do anything to help. Anything except keep the others away from the scene of the fight. The downside is that he couldn’t help the other two that were actually fighting, and that was making Vincent a bit annoyed.

“GARRETT!!” Vinny called out to him, throwing a hand down to conjure a gust of wind to knock Uma’s sword away from him. “Get your ass over here and HELP US!”

“I can’t!” Garrett cried back. A stray fireball on the other side ricocheted off the shield, causing Garrett to flinch. He clenched one hand like a fist to try and magically reinforce it. “I need to hold up the walls! They’re too big for me to stop concentrating on them!”

“Plus, I don’t want his weird flying devil knives hurting her!” Mike added.

“SHE’S TRYING! TO FLAY US!” Vinny roared back.

ZZZZ!

Mike looked over just in time to see Uma leap toward him, sword raised high in an attempt to bring it down on top of him. Mike was able to dive out of the way. He did so just in time to look back as Uma’s blade touched down on the stone bricks making up the floor. All him and the other boys could do was stare in horror when the blade then emitted lightning. Actual, honest to god electricity, that shot out on all sides like water when you stomp your foot into a rain puddle. Vinny’s look said it all, his thoughts going a million miles a minute as he tried to process it all.

“... and NOW-” he shouted, “-she’s trying to ELECTROCUTE us!!”

Mike responded by reloading his slingshot. Uma didn’t take the missed attack lightly, pulling her blade from the ground before taking another swing. Mike may have never seen a day of close combat like this in his life, but he HAD gotten into plenty of schoolyard fights and played plenty of football as the offense of the team. He knew how to duck and dodge, and that seemed to hold true here. Whether it was some buff jerk throwing hands on the blacktop, that one linebacker that nearly tackled him when they played against a highschool from Brooklyn back in November, or his evidently brainwashed girlfriend brandishing a real sword and shield. It took a while, but finally, Mike found an opening.

He ducked down low, pulled back the drawstring of the slingshot, and fired. SPLAT! Uma reeled back a bit as olive oil splattered all over her blade, nearly coating the whole thing and dripping onto the ground. Vinny was ready to ask why he aimed there of all places(why not aim olive oil at her feet? You know, to make her slip and fall!)... until she tried to empower her sword again.

The blade sparked, sputtering sadly as she tried to electrify it. Vinny couldn’t help but think of that one time his dad’s car stalled in January. They had to get the car jump started by their neighbor because the battery died in the cold. The way the engine sputtered while trying to start sounded very similar to how the sword sounded as Uma tried to get it to light up again.

Mike smiled at his success… until Uma dropped the oiled up sword. She quickly hooked her shield behind her back, and then pulled something out from behind her back with both hands. The boys watched in abject horror as Uma brandished and electrified the Gerudo spear she had tied to her back, ready to fight as if she hadn’t been set back in the first place.

“YOU’VE GOTTA BE KIDDING!” Mike grunted. Uma didn’t waste time, stabbing at the ground as Mike leapt back and away, trying to keep his distance. Now she had an electrified weapon AND more reach.

Joy.

    Things got intense fairly quickly. We knock one attack back, only to get it thrown right back at us. Less and less of the stuff we were throwing back was actually hitting, and more of them were being caught by Twinrova and thrown back at us like the world’s most dangerous game of catch. Fire and ice and ice and fire, all making us look like we were juggling sideways.

“Maybe I should try just shooting them!” Sheik proposed, letting loose an arrow to knock one of the projectiles back. “Just fire an arrow straight at them!”

“I don’t think you’ll have TIME!” Miranda yelled out that last word as she knocked a projectile back with her bat. “The fire and ice and stuff is flying at us too fast!”

“Yeah, this isn’t working as well as it was!” I agreed. I knocked another projectile back with the master sword before I realized something. This wasn’t working, and I soon got an idea to fix it.

    “Mina! Miranda! Ready up!” I took the master sword and held it out to the side.

    <<Wait, Link, what’re you- WHOA WHOA WHOA AHHH!!>>

    I did the one thing I could think to do in order to execute my plan and spun the master sword around in a circle. I knocked the fire and the ice away at the same time, but not back a Twinrova. Instead they were reflected behind me toward Mina and Miranda. Miranda wound up her arm before swinging her bat, knocking the fire back at the big boss. At the same time,  Mina caught the ice in her lacrosse stick before whirling the stick around and throwing the ice back at them, too. All so we could throw both projectiles at them at the same time.

    Koume and Kotake were hit at the same time, Koume getting an eyeful of ice and Kotake getting a fireball to the face. Both of them let out groans of pain as they staggered in the air, even resorting to gripping the walls of the room to keep themselves stable.

    “He’s getting too smart,” Koume growled.

    “I know what we need to do,” Kotake cackled.

    Before we could react, or even think about what she meant by that, Twinrova turned so that the front of Kotake’s front was facing the platform. She then grabbed the edge of the floor, digging her malice-covered nails into the stone. Ice shot up in a line from where she embedded her fingers, shards coming up in squiggly and erratic trails. I realized too little too late what they two were doing. After all, the line of ice was swerving to and fro in just the right way to keep the others out of reach of me.

    And that’s when the floor split.

    The ice expanded in such a way that the bricks fell away from each other where the ice sprouted up from, splitting the floor into three separate platforms: One with Sheik, Navi, Miranda and Mina, one with the boys and Uma, and one with me and Fiona all alone.

    “Not so smart now, are you, hero!?” Koume cackled as she wound her arm back. She threw another ball of fire, one that I had no choice but to quickly hit back. Then Kotake hurled a chunk of magic ice at me, and I had to knock that back as well. We were quickly back to the world’s most dangerous display of sideways juggling, and I had no one else to help me.

    <<Crap crap CRAP of course this happens,>> Fiona panicked. <<You know what, we’re fine, we’ll be fine, we’ll->>

    “Fiona, PLEASE stop talking!” I blurted out as I knocked more projectiles back. “We’ll definitely not be fine if you keep distracting me!”

    “You’ll be dead either way!” Twinrova cackled.

    I wasn’t ready to take their words to heart. Not just yet.

    Twinrova was getting the upper hand.

    Anyone could notice that, especially now that the floor was split into 3 and Lincoln was isolated in the middle with no help but his own sword. The boys saw it, as did the girls, and they couldn’t do much to help. 

Garrett was still busy holding up the barrier when someone was knocked into him. He fell over, his concentration broken, and the diamond-patterned barrier protecting the four of them from Twinrova dropped like a broken curtain. They looked back just in time as Mike was knocked to the ground as well.

Mike was terrified to say the least. He was even more terrified when Uma put a knee on his chest. HARD. It was there with the intent to keep him in place, and that became obvious when Uma raised her spear high above her head. And considering where she was holding it… uh oh. Mike squeezed his eyes shut, accepting that this was it. This was where the love of his life brought a blade down through his neck and decapitated him in the blink of an eye. No one was close enough to help him, and he couldn’t even duck and dodge. Football never prepared him for this.

Uma cried out, bringing her blade down… and then nothing. The blade definitely struck something, but it wasn’t Mike. He opened one eye, and then the other. That’s when he saw it: the blade, stuck in between the bricks in the ground right next to his face. Uma had missed! She was right in front of him and she missed! He was right about to open his mouth and ask what had happened, or perhaps even through a half-hearted insult at her, but then Uma leaned down so close that he could feel her breath on his face.

“Stay dead.” she said it quietly but affirmatively, like an army general giving stealthy instructions to a soldier. With one solid yank, she withdrew the spear from the ground. And then she just… ran off.

Michael did stay laying on the ground, not out of obedience, but shock. Shock at what had happened. And perhaps shock at what was about to happen.

    “HAHA!” Koume cackled as she and her sister held onto their projectiles for long enough to see the state of me. I wiped a hand across my forehead to get the sweat off my face. “Getting tired, are you, boy?!”

    “Well then, let’s get this over with, shall we!?” Kotake cackled afterwards, raising her clenched fist above her head.

    That’s when it happened.

    I was barely able to catch Uma out of the corner of my eye when she suddenly leapt up and off the platform she was on, pushing herself off the opposite wall and sending herself toward where Twinrova was floating in the air. It was like everything was happening in slow motion. Uma fell through the air, a spear raised over her head with lightning arcing off of the metal. Twinrova turned to look at her, their faces a combination of befuddlement and anger. And I was left standing there and watching as Uma let out a battle cry, bringing her spear down right where Twinrova’s torsos conjoined.

    With how lightning forms, it was surreal to watch as Uma stabbed down into the malice, lightning erupting from the wound like Uma was hammering Zues’s forehead to release Athena. It came out of nowhere, and it left me and the others in the room stunned.

Twinrova cried out in agony, with Kotake gripping the wall for support while Koume reached behind her and grabbed Uma like a gnat on a table, throwing her back to the platform angrily. Uma was quick to take her spear and stab it into the stone, slowing herself down as she landed safely on the stone beside me. I was just left standing in shock at it all.

“What was THAT, Iron Knuckle?!” Koume growled.

“That was unlike you!” Kotake added, ice crackling from her fingertips across the bricks.

“It wasn’t, actually,” Uma scoffed back. Everyone watched as she stood up straight, her spear still lodged in the ground as she looked Twinrova dead in the eyes and removed her helm. “You’re just surprised that your bare bones, double digit IQ idea of manipulation didn’t work on someone like me: someone fresh out of an abusive relationship that knows EXACTLY what that shit looks like!”

Uma grabbed me by my wrist and added, “and now she’s going to take your asses DOWN!” And before I could ask what she was doing, I was tugged off my feet as Uma used her spear as a pole to leverage herself around in a circle, dragging me along like an olympic hammer throw.

“Go for the conjunction, Matheson!”

And then she let go.

I didn’t have time to scream. I didn’t even have time to think. I knew something needed to be done, and I wasn’t sure the master sword would be quite enough to bring down these two crones. Then I noticed which wrist Uma had grabbed as a desert gold ran up and down the wires in my right arm. Up and down, up and down, and I didn’t hesitate to smack a hand to my face once it was finished flashing. With a loud cry of battle, I took the master sword with both hands and drove it down under me into the malice connecting Koume and Kotake. Lightning crackled and flashed, striking everywhere around the wound like it was the world’s most magically corrupted lightning rod, with malice spewing up like a high pressure water hose, and I couldn’t help but think of how much it looked like blood. Koume and Kotake cried out like some Disney villain getting done in by the main hero, which I couldn’t help but think was a great comparison as lightning streaked all over them like Ursula in the ending of The Little Mermaid. Both crones were trying to grip the walls of the room to stay afloat in the air, but to no avail.

<<Link, JUMP!>> Fiona called it out to me so suddenly that I couldn’t help but heed her words immediately. I pulled the sword out and jumped back onto the platform with Uma, watching as Twinrova writhed in the air, grabbing at the walls to try and keep themselves up, but ultimately still falling.

Up until Koume lunged forward and grabbed the edges of the platform, absentmindedly pushing the pieces back together and knocking everyone over with the force.

“It’ll take more than THAT to down us, hero boy!” She roared.

“Well how would THIS do, then!?” Mike yelled out as he pulled something out of his adventure pouch.

“ACK! Duck!” I grabbed Uma by the shoulder and pulled her to the ground with me as Mike pulled out the Groosenator and fired. A cluster of bottle rockets went flying overhead, aimed directly at Koume’s forehead. I couldn’t help but catch a glimpse of something on the ends of the rockets lighting up bright yellow: the heads of shock arrows! The bottle rockets hit smack dab in the middle of Koume’s face, dealing an electrified explosion that knocked her back so hard that she and Kotake hit the wall behind them.

They cried out in agony, their bodies starting to drip and melt into formless malice as they tried to claw their way back up onto the platform but to no avail. And just like that, Twinrova’s form melted and dripped off the stone, falling down into the pit below like the world’s most vicious and brutal waterfall.

“Shoot, that was… god…” Uma stood back up as I did the same, stumbling a bit. “Lincoln, are you al-?”

There was a pause. Nearly everyone was silent, me included. I didn’t have a chance to actually get a look at myself until then, so I took a moment to look down at my right arm. Another mask earned, this one being stored on the middle knuckle while sporting a symbol I couldn’t help but interpret as a creature with ringed eyes staring back at the viewer. All displayed in a desert gold type of color, more similar to the shade of sand than metal. That wasn’t the least of it.

“Whoa, Link…” Sheik approached from a break in the spire, and I soon learned where said break came from when I saw Mina punching the ice with her right hand, hitting hard enough to make a hole in it for them to walk through. Sheik just looked at me and chuckled. “Well, never thought you’d look nice with red hair and earrings.”

That made me give a half smile. A half smile which quickly died when Sheik added, “Or all those… uh…”

“It’s alright, Sheik,” Miranda said with a wry smile. “You can say girl’s clothes, it’s fine.”

    “Wha- HUH?!” He was left looking over the rest of my new garb, not even paying attention to the electricity chaining through my hair, like I was still charged and ready to dish out lightning.

    “If it helps, I think the earrings suit you!” Mina complimented.

    “Agreed,” went Sheik.

    “Cool cool, yeah, let’s talk about all that later then-” I turned the dial on my right hand before smacking it to my face again, switching back to Hylian mode as quickly as I could. I felt a weight on my back lift as Fiona flashed into her human form.

    “Awww c’mon,  Link! You looked cute in all that!” she said with a chuckle.

    “Sure, sure, whatever you say!” I replied dryly.

    “Whoa whoa whoa, back up!” we all turned upon realizing… right, Uma. She was pointing a finger at Fiona. “How’d she do that?” She then pointed at me. “How’d you change your look like that?? What the hell happened while I was kidnapped?!”

    “Too much…” I said with a nervous look on my face and a sigh.

    “UMAAAA!!” We looked just in time to see Mike, crying like a little baby as he ran over and gave his girlfriend the biggest bear hug I’d ever seen him give. His face was all covered in tears and snot as he warbled out all sorts of stuff about how he was glad she was safe, and that she’s so amazing and how her fighting was top notch and-

    Mike was shut up by a kiss on the cheek from Uma. “And I’m just happy to see you again, Mikey.” She chuckled. “I can’t believe you came all the way across the city to find me!”

    Mike sniffled, wiping his face with his arm before he replied, “Well, duh! What, did you think a little sand was gonna stop me from rescuing you?”

    CRASH!

    We all turned to see a hand punch through the ice blocking the door. Uma grabbed her spear and held it up, but Mike was quick to calm her down as Simon and Ariel poked their heads in.

    “You did it!” Ariel said.

    “Yes, it only took a few tries.” He said it in that  way people do when it most certainly took way more than “a few” tries. He spotted us and waved. “Hallo, you guys! Did it go well?”

    “Who the hell is that?” Uma asked, dumbfounded.

    “It’s… Simon Van Der Zee?” went Garrett while he was in the middle of stretching his wrists.

    “Wha- the little Dutch kid??” Uma’s eyes flew wide open. “Okay, everyone stop for a moment. Back up.” She looked over at Mike with her eyebrows furrowed. “Just… tell me everything that went down after we tried to escape the school please.

    “Ohohoho, bad idea,” Mike chuckled. He took Uma’s hand as we started making our way out of the chamber. “Buckle up, babe, because there’s a LOT!”

Chapter Text

“Michael, catch!” Mina whirled around in a circle, swinging her lacrosse stick and using it to toss something at Mike. Mike, the star sportsball player he was, expertly caught it in his hands. It was the heart container from Twinrova, which soon puffed into magic and disappeared in his hands.

Mike smiled, “Haha! Nice!”

We’d already gotten outside by then, and proceeded to walk our way back to where we’d set up camp. At least three of us didn’t have shields to surf with, and I didn’t fancy making all this even more confusing by going wolf mode to transport Mina and Miranda. Speaking of Uma being confused, guess what we spent our walk back doing?

“Okay so let me see if I’ve got this…” Uma said as she walked alongside her boyfriend. “So everything is like this because of… a video game?”

“I  mean… yeah, it sounds stupid,” Mike admitted, rubbing the back of his head. “But like, you’ve played it, haven’t you??”

“I mean, one of my old friends had a gamecube,” she said. “He used to play the really bright cartoony one all the time.”

“Wind Waker!” Miranda blurted out, halfway sticking out of my backpack. “That was probably Wind Waker.”

“Ah, gotcha.” Uma turned back to Michael. “But yeah, I know about one of the games. Still don’t see how that could have anything to do with all this garbage.”

“It sounds weird out loud, but there’s more to it!” I told her. “More to explain and all that!”

“We don’t need to explain too much I don’t think,” Mina assured her. “All that matters is a man with Mr. Doirich’s face is making everything all weird and WE-” Mina gestured around to all of us. “-need to stop it.”

That seemed to make Uma even more confused. It wasn’t for the reason I thought, though.

“A guy with Mr. Doirich’s- Mina, that IS Mr. Doirich.”

Mina looked as if she’d been told her mother had passed away. “What?”

“It’s not him, though!” I informed her. “Not his mind or whatever anyways. Someone’s possessing him.”

“What, like in The Exorcist??” She asked, looking incredulous.

“Uhhhh something like that,” I admitted.

“Ganon’s using his body like a puppet,” Sheik explained, doing a better job than I ever could. “And we need all the help we can get to defeat him.”

Uma was confused again, but also mortified as a thought came to her. “Are you saying that, like, we’ll have to kill Mr. Doirich or something??”

“NO!”

I didn’t realize how loud I had said it until everyone’s eyes all snapped toward me. Some people were surprised, others worried, but most were just confused. It gave me a sudden case of really bad anxiety, and I was quick to rephrase my response.

“I mean, we’re not killing him!” I said. “Just… I dunno, exorcizing him? Just making whatever’s making him evil… leave.”

“Oh! We’re here!” Mike exclaimed. As he’d said, we were back at our old campsite.

As well as the fairy fountain.

“So, what’re we doing here again?” Uma asked.

“We’re heading back to the train station after this,” Simon told her. “We just wanted to take a dip in the fairy fountain before heading back to base!”

Uma raised an eyebrow. “The what ?”

“The fairy fountain!” Ariel loudly replied to her. “Miss Tera lives there. She’s HUGE and really pretty!”

“Oh yeah, you think all that stuff at Heyerdahl was weird?” Mike leaned in close to whisper to her. “We found a real ass fairy on our way over.”

“Wow. The one time Staten Island actually changes things up a bit, and I’m too busy being kidnapped to enjoy it,” she chuckled to herself.

We approached the old campsite and subsequently the fairy fountain. The cactus was unfolded into its much more appealing and gilded flower petals, with all the pastel mushrooms and lively flowers sprouting up every which way.

“Miss Tera!” Sheik called out. “Could we beseech you for some-”

SPLASH!

Sheik didn’t even get a chance to finish before Tera shot up out of the water, splashing water everywhere. Luckily, we were far enough away that we weren’t in the splash zone.

“Ahh! Welcome back, sweet children!” she greeted gleefully, settling back into the pool and leaning on the edge of it, her arms crossed beneath her on the ledge. Her eyes landed on Uma a little ways off and they widened in surprise. “Oh! I see you were successful in your endeavors then!”

“Yep!”  Mike said happily. “Girlfriend, rescued !”

“Yeah, what he said,” Uma added. “Are you Tera, then?”

“The one and only!” she answered cheerfully.

“Tera, we have to leave soon,” Sheik informed the fairy. “Could we maybe use your spring one last time to sooth our injuries before we head out.”

“Well of course!” Tera assured. “It’s not like I need it or anything.” She chuckled warmly to herself. We took that as our cue to approach.

We didn’t bathe in the fountain. Frankly, I don’t think we had time. Instead we all opted to cup our hands in the various streams and waterfalls that fell around the spring and splash the water on our wounds. All except for me.

“Lincoln, c’mon! We got some water of life or whatever here!” Vinny said as he splashed his face with water.

“Nah, I’m good.” I said this as I sat and pulled out my still yet-to-be finished bag of Salt and Vinegar chips. Downing one managed to heal the scrapes and bruises from the last fight almost immediately.

“I’ll never understand how you can stomach those things,” Vin groaned.

“Don’t bag on me for my tastes, dude,” I grumbled back at him.

“Well, I tried them that one time, remember? Of all the people here, I’m the most qualified to call them GROSS!”

“Listen, I didn’t make fun of you putting hot sauce on a twinkie, so can you please just-”

Bzzt! Bzzt!

My phone buzzing in my pocket drew me out of the conversation. I stopped eating and pulled it out with my free hand to check the caller idea. I nearly fell off of the rock I was sitting on when I saw that it was from the Empire State Building again.

“It’s Reily!” I called out. The others looked over in intrigue, while Uma was confused again.

“Reily Valenti’s roped up in this, too??” she asked.

“Yeah babe, you weren’t the only one who got kidnapped,” Mike told her. I didn’t even hesitate to tape the button on scream to answer the call, putting the phone up to my ear with a smile on my face.

“Reily!” I started off strong. “We just rescued Uma Qadir, so we’ll be there as fast as we-”

“Oh, DID you, now?”

My breath caught in my throat when I heard the voice on the other end. It wasn’t Reily. I never heard him on the other end for that whole call. Save for sounds that I could only assume were due to him being choked out.

“I knew you kids were breezing through all this far too easily,” he growled. “And now I know that a little birdy has been telling you all the solutions to my dungeon puzzles… haven’t you, Reily ?” He said his name so angrily, and I was unfortunate enough to hear the faint sound of a tightening grip and a kid struggling to breathe.

“Stop it, don’t hurt him!” I shouted back.

“No no, I won’t. I’m not stupid .” He grunted. “But what I WILL do is keep him here and make extra sure that your next adventure will be… oh, what did the scholar call them? AH, YES! A closed-book test. It’ll be one of those, so to speak. We all know you high school seniors love to take those, don’t you?” He said that so smugly, I could practically hear his mouth curl into an evil grin on the other end.

Sheik leaned in close to where the phone was pressed to my ear. “What are you playing at, Ganondorf?”

“I’m playing at nothing!” he said, half-offended. “I just figured I’d give you brats a courtesy call before I entirely reconstruct the Trial of the Sky. None of the information Mr. Valenti will have about it will be of any use to you now.” He could’ve stopped there. Rebuilding an entire dungeon from scratch would’ve been enough to make the whole ordeal hell. But then he added something more to it.

“And, because I think this will make it EXTRA fun…” Ganondorf seemed to lean closer to the phone before continuing. “I’ll be giving you children 3 hours to scale this building and find Mr. Valenti. I was going to go for 3 days, but that felt a bit too generous.”

“Three hours??” Garrett, evidently, had heard. “It’ll take at least one of those hours to get there!”

“And it took us at least a day to get to Uma!” Mike added.

“And what happens if we run out of time?” Sheik asked, still leaning in close to the phone. No sound came from the other end, but I could still see Ganondorf’s wicked smile clear in my head.

“Then I believe you’ll remain one Champion short… permanently .”

Click.

We all were silent for a moment before people either panicked or tried to think of what to do.

“Shoot, okay, um-” Navi fluttered around nervously. “We won’t have time to get to the Dragon’s Lair at this rate to recoup!”

“Forget recouping, at the very least we’ll need to drop Uma off there,” added Fiona.

“Whoa whoa whoa, who said I was staying at the game store while you all go off to the Empire State building??” Uma asked, arms crossed.

“I know who!” went Mike. “The guy who kidnapped you, and most definitely would try to do it again if you’re just out in the open.”

Uma gestured to Mina, “Well SHE got kidnapped too, and she’s running around with you guys!”

Mike paused. “... alright, fair.”

“We’ll still need to drop off the camping stuff at the store,” I said. “Plus it might be more convenient to take a car this time instead of the subway, and they’re both back in Queens.”

“How long does it take to get from the store to the Empire State Building by car?” Vinny asked. “Isn’t it, like, an hour away anyways?!” 

“Oh crap, he’s right,” Miranda frowned. “It’d take more than an hour to get a car.”

“It would take LONGER for us to walk through Jersey City to get there,” Navi told them.

“Well, it’s usually an hour because of traffic, isn’t it?” Simon asked, leaning down to talk. “I don’t know if so many people are out driving. What’s the estimate right now?”

“20 minutes!” Mike didn’t even wait for Simon to suggest it. He’d already been poking through his phone to check his maps app. “And we can fit more people in my truck. Y’all can ride in the truck bed. I doubt the cops will care.”

“Perfect!” I said.

“Not perfect,” said my cousin. “It’ll still take us 45 minutes at least to get there. We’d still take an hour to get to the Empire State Building.”

“Crap…” I put a hand on my forehead as I tried to think of what to do. That’s when Sheik, being her smart self, thought of something.

“... didn’t Audrie say the Slate had fast travel?” She pointed to the device attached to my hip still. “If that’s right, we can teleport straight to Broadway Junction, walk to the store, and then take the truck!”

“Oh, you’re right!” I unhooked the Slate from my hip before opening up the map, sliding around and zooming in until I found Broadway Junction. And just as she’d said, there it was: a bright blue, diamond-shaped marker, right above where Broadway Junction was in Queens.

“Alright, uhh I’m not sure how this is going to work,” I admitted, my finger hovering over the marker. “So everyone hold onto me!”

Fiona was the first to do something, disappearing in a flash of light and reappearing as a sword strapped to my back. Everyone else put their hand somewhere on me to hang on, most notably Simon putting one hand on the top of my hand and Ariel, being Ariel, sat down in the sand and wrapped her arms around my leg with a giggle. Everyone else had grabbed onto my arms and shoulders, and Navi had gently grabbed my ear while sitting in my hair.

“Alright, get ready guys!” I tapped the marker on the screen, causing the Slate to light up like a Christmas tree. “This might… feel weird.”

Reily was upset. Upset in the way kids are when they think they’re for sure going to die soon. He had good reason to believe that, sitting tied to a spinning office chair with so much malice that it was comparable to those college pranks where someone gets duct-taped to a chair. His wrists burned from the stuff. It was like acid as with so many other people. Ganondorf didn’t need the whelp screaming while he kept him up there. Instead he kept it subtle, like a moderate sunburn. Meanwhile, Ganondorf was just… standing there. He wasn’t asleep. He wasn’t even relaxed, with a hand gripping the front of Reily’s shirt like a vice. But he knew the look on Ganondorf’s face. The rest of his body was like a bunch of coiled up springs ready to burst, but his face was entirely relaxed. He was doing it again. The thinking.

When Ganondorf materialized into his mindscape, he was upset. More upset than he’d been when those kids bested the Trial of Fire. More upset when those children bested the Trial of Water. More upset when those brats bested Gleeok in a cramped theater hall. They’d thrown so much at them this time around, and STILL they made it through to the other side. He didn’t even have to look up at the bird cage before he raised a hand.

“Not. A. Word. Seer .” Each of those words forced their way through gritted teeth. “I already know… what you’re about to tell me, so just be quiet for once in your life.”

The Seer had never seen him so angry before. Sure, the Seer had been there to see the Calamity’s true form, torn away from Ganondorf’s mortal form and left to fester as an embodiment of hatred and evil, but beastly anger was a whole other thing. Human anger was something that did and always would terrify the Seer even more. So there he was, just looking with wide eyes and opting to stay curled up with his knees tucked into his chest on his little perch in the birdcage.

“Ibis!” Ganondorf called out her name loudly, turning to where she stood at some far end of the room. She was off doing something or other, probably sitting quietly and reading a book she’d brought along into the mindscape(it would be a rather boring book, seeing as anything brought into the mindscape would need to be thought up, meaning Ibis would already know how this book would end).

“What are you in need of, Lord Ganon?” She asked dryly, closing her book with one hand.

“Do you know where the Moon Child is?” he asked.

Ibis sighed dramatically, “Where else? With the Phantom.” She pointed over to the corner of the room, still holding her closed book in her hand.

Ganondorf let out a strained sigh. Of course that’s where the child was. They’d gotten bored of everyone else in the hivemind, all save for the scholar, but he was off somewhere else. The Moon Child decided to wait for him, and passed the time by sitting at the edge of the Phantom’s pool, their legs crossed, looking into the water curiously. As Ganon came closer, he quickly noticed the Phantom floating in the middle of the pool. Its face turned to the child as their god awful teeth, all jagged and uneven like the maw of an angler fish, dug into the carcass of an eel from the saltwater pool. To Ganon’s dismay, the Phantom was the first to notice him.

“Ahoy there, Ganon!” he said with a chuckle, his teeth still dripping in raw vicera. “Care for some eel?”

“I’d rather not,” he groaned back.

“Oh, c’mon, mate! It’s mindscape food, it’s not-”

“I’m not here to consume your deep sea vermin , Bellum.” He said it with such pent up anger that, for once in Bellum’s life, he felt a bit intimidated. The Phantom sunk into the pool until only his one big eye was peeking up above the surface. Then, Ganon turned to the Moon Child.

“What was that for, Ganondork?” Majora stood up angrily, their body and limbs all straightened out in anger. “Bellum was about to show me how to catch an eel with my teeth!”

“You don’t have teeth, Majora,” Ganon said dryly. For emphasis, he gently took the top of Majora’s mask and pulled it off their face. Except there wasn’t one underneath it: just a smooth front, with nothing but a mess of brown hair and pointed ears to imply a head. “Or much of anything there.” Ganon let go of the Mask and it returned to the child’s face, like a magnet to metal.

The eyes on the mask lit up with anger as the child readjusted it to sit comfortably on their face again. “Don’t even FREAKING do that ever again, I’ll kill you!”

“Save your bloodlust for more deserving targets,” said Ganon. “The Trial of the Sky must be reconstructed in about…” Ganon took a moment to think. How long did it take to get to the Empire State Building from Staten Island? It must’ve been a while, right? Although with the panic from the children on the phone, they no doubt assumed the 3 hours included the time it took to actually get to the Empire State Building, so they’d no doubt try to be there quickly. Best be safe with it. “... let’s say about 30 minutes.”

“You’d need at LEAST 3 days for something like that!” Majora snarked with a giggle. “What makes you think you can get it done that quick?”

“Because, little imp, I’m enlisting you to come up with the new floorplan.”

There was a pause from the child. There was very little in the world that could surprise the little devil child, but Ganon offering to let them be the ringleader for the Trial of the Sky seemed to do the trick. Though they had no mouth, the eyes on their mask looked as if they were smiling widely.

“YES! Yes yes yes!” They shouted triumphantly, floating around in the air happily.

“What, why do THEY get the reins??” the eye complained, hanging from the moon-shaped lantern hanging from the Seer’s birdcage.

“Ohohoho I've got so many ideas!” Majora continued, ignoring Vaati’s complaints. “Hallways with floors that twist onto the ceiling, exploding mice, birds with human FACES on them to REALLY freak them out-”

Ganon raised up his hand to quiet them. “Slow down, child. You’ll have to execute your plans outside of here if you wish to partake.”

“... what’s that supposed to mean??” Majora seemed befuddled and a bit miffed.

“It means,” Ganondorf said, “That you’ll have to split off from the Calamity and find a host.” He might as well have told Majora that they could never play games ever again.

“Oh C’MON!” they shouted angrily. “That’s not fair!!”

“Oh for goodness sake, it’s as fair as fair gets around here!” Ghirahim chastised. He’d been leaning against the wall, arms crossed as his crystalline body seemed to glow with annoyance. “My Master is essentially allowing you free reign if you simply leave his head! No one else is getting such an opportunity!”

“I don’t LIKE being without a host!” Majora went on, not seeming to even take Ghirahim’s words into account. “I feel all weird… and-and-and GOOPY-!”

“Now hang on for a moment, Child, and think…” Bellum gripped the edge of the pool, his hands doing that awful thing they would do where they stretched out like crooked taffy, lifting him up out of the pool like a car jack before lowering him down enough to land on his feet.

“Out of all of us,” Bellum began. “You’re the one who’s most malleable. It truly doesn’t matter who you find. You can latch onto most anyone. The rest of us are either stubborn or need to find our absolute perfect match to gain a body in this world.” Bellum leaned down, making sure they were on eye level with little Majora before they finished talking. “Therefore, you’re the perfect little freak to go set up this Trial.”

Majora could help but giggle. “Heheha! You’re right!” They turned around, crossing their arms triumphantly. I am perfect!”

“Huh? What’s going on here?” Ganymede had returned from what he was doing. He’d spent so long preparing another story for Majora while doing his best to try and get the hang of the mindscape enough to even materialize his own visual aids. He felt a little less scared in the mindscape with that novelty pointing stick made to look like it had a little gloved hand on the end of it(he kept one in his class room back in Queens, and he considered it the best $1 he ever spent). 

He never got to entertain Majora with his planned retelling of when Alexander the Great took his battalion of elephants through the Alps. He didn’t even get a reply from any of the other pieces of the Calamity. Not before the whole mindscape shook. Things went blurry, the colors were melding into one another, and all anyone could hear was the echoing laughter of the Moon Child as they made their break for.

In the waking world, it was very sudden. Ganondorf’s eyes suddenly shot open, and Reily was startled awake as Ganondorf’s grip released from the front of his shirt. He watched the burly man fall to the floor sputtering, like he was choking on his spit. Reily had never quite seen someone react as violently to choking on their spit as Ganondorf did. Once the man had managed to crawl his way over to a grate in the floor - the ventilation no doubt - Reily came to the horrible realization that it wasn’t spit Ganondorf was choking on.

He wasn’t choking. He was retching .

Ganondorf didn’t throw up. Instead, Reily watched in horror as some kind of viscous goop dripped from his mouth, then nose, then eyes and ears as well. It looked like honey with the color of red wine, or perhaps just his very diseased blood. The poor teen couldn’t help but even notice how the liquid seemed to be alive. It looked like it was trying to claw its way out of him with how it spewed forth, dripping off of Ganondorf and into the grate before the burly man was finally allowed to rest. The last of it had escaped through his eyes.

“Ugh! AGH! Majora!” He called out the name angrily, and it was a name Reily often overheard while Ganondorf was talking in his sleep. This time, he was actually able to hear a response to the name: a giggle. A giddy, childish giggle that echoed through the vents and seemed loud enough to reach the entirety of the building end to end. Reily couldn’t do anything. He felt like he couldn’t even scream about it. Even if he could’ve been heard from the lobby, it’s not like Link and his friends were there. The one thing that made him terrified for their safety was something Ganymede had said.

Ganondorf grunted, clutching the wall for support as his eyes returned to their previous state.

“Are you mental?!” Ganymede asked frantically, his eyebrows bent up in slopes to reflect his worry. “They’ll kill them!!”

There was a pause as Ganymede’s whole body shivered, and the evil look in his eyes returned. Ganondorf didn’t have much to say to his better half. All he could think to so was address Ganymede’s claim about Majora:

“... That’s the idea, Scholar.”

    Free free free… free as a bird .

    Majora still felt gross. They didn’t quite care for how they felt like a melted block of cheese when they didn’t have a puppet. Unfortunately, it was the only way they could move around like this. Majora could become solid, they supposed, but then they’d be stuck in one place. The little demon could sacrifice their own comfort for a few minutes if it meant being able to walk on their own once they found someone. Lucky for them, sound seemed to travel up the vents rather easily.

    “Alrighty! Just gotta hide the last of these here and then we’re done!”

    Majora stopped in their tracks, leaning out over the edge of a ledge in the vents to listen. Whoever it was that was talking, it sounded like it was coming from a looooong way down. Somewhere far down the vents. Perhaps even the first floor of the tower they were in! They knew these things usually spanned for a while, but looking off the edge surprised them a bit. It looked like it spanned on for miles! It was like they were jumping off of the moon and falling towards earth if they leapt down.

    So of course they did.

    Majora drizzled their way down the vent, like honey drizzling off of the wand(if honey could ever spoil and appear rotten, that is), landing in a part of the vent that turned like an elbow. They had to crawl a ways through it still to get to the vent, even arcing themselves up and over another hole in the bottom where the vent dipped down deeper into the building. Majora could only assume there was a basement down there or something, like a secret dungeon! Majora was able to climb over it by slinking along the ceiling of the ventilation shaft, like a snail crawling along a wall. They didn’t get a chance to actually get to the grate at the end of the shaft before they heard more talking.

    “Correction: One thing left!” went one of the creatures.

    “Righo, righto… where should we put it then?” asked another.

“Well, it’s supposed to be hard to get in the game!”

“Yeah, but I don’t think Mr. President’s got enough side quests done to justify something like in the game.” (Mr. President was a nickname they’d given Lincoln, not that Majora knew that.)

“Well there’s gotta be something we can do to make it hard to find,” a third one added.

The three of them went quiet for a moment, and then started giggling to each other. Majora liked giggling! They wanted to be in on the giggling! They started crawling toward the grate before they realized what they were giggling about.

“Here, let’s make it fun and put it in the vent, then!” One of them said. Majora flinched, like a plate of jello being shook, and stuck themself to the ceiling of the vent as the grate was pulled open like a mail flap and something shoved inside. The person on the other end made sure to push it pretty far into the vent. Majora stayed stuck to the ceiling and simply squinted their eyes at the object.

It was that . That thing from Termina. Majora always hated that thing, even in its dormant state. One could argue this was a replica of some kind. Majora was aware that most of the things from their world were simply stories and playthings in this realm, but they knew this was the real thing. They could feel it. It was a magica radiance only rivaled by their own. Majora wanted nothing to do with the awful thing, slinking down toward the grate and kicking behind it. They sent the thing over the edge of the nearby shaft, and Majora silently laughed as they heard it cling and clang around as it fell down and down and down.

Now then, they thought, who was it that was wandering around in the building? Majora peeked through the grate with their golden malice eyes, and immediately spotted three people. Three people who made Majora nearly jump for joy right then and there. It was them! Their old puppet!! They didn’t remember there being three puppets last time, but they most definitely were his old puppet!! What luck! What a frabjous day for the little demon! They surely thought they’d be stuck with some simpleton they didn’t know, but now they had a familiar face to latch onto.

But which to choose? Majora wasn’t good with decisions like these. They didn’t want to pick the wrong puppet and end up regretting it down the line. So Majora waited. They wouldn’t latch onto one just yet. They decided instead to sneak out of the vent while the three weren’t looking, slinking along the walls in the shadows and trying to figure out the best way to latch on should they finally come to a decision.

“Man, Majora’a Mask always freaked me out, mate,” went Niles, a chill going up his spine.

“Are you kidding??” Steve seemed offended. “You could handle Twilight Princess and not Majora’s Mask??”

“Twilight Princess isn’t NEARLY as creepy, Steve!”

“Now you’re just being crazy! Do you not remember that cut scene where they explained the interlopers??”

“You’re just easily scared, I think.”

“You can just put up with it because you think Twilight Princess is the best game in the series.”

“Because it is!! Lemme guess, you’re favorite is-”

“Ocarina of Time, yeah! It was the first 3D Zelda and it’s one of the best!!”

“You’re both wrong!” The two shut up as Mick butted into the conversation. He seemed rather fed up with the petty conversation, deciding to end it right then and there. “Obviously, Majora’s Mask is the best 3D Zelda!”

Bingo .

Majora smiled internally as they kept crawling on the walls. As they decided to use some picture frames as support in the shadows, they had a long think about it. Majora couldn’t just latch onto the kid. They needed a smarter way to do it. They needed to trick the kid into letting them possess him. But how…?

Majora was so deep in thought that they didn’t even notice it at first. The picture they were crawling over suddenly crooked to the side a bit as they moved, causing them to jostle. Majora looked down at their platform angrily, but the anger faded when they saw what picture was displayed there.

It was an Employee of the Month picture, for some time called January. They weren’t sure what a January was, but the name definitely caught them off guard. The name with the face in the photo gave them a rather great idea.

The malice slinked its way out the front door of the lobby while the kids were distracted still by their game talk. Majora didn’t care to hear how it ended.

“Nah man, are you kidding? Twilight Princess is the best one!” Niles argued.

“Oh yeah, sure, the game that tried SO HARD to emulate the beautiful dark tone that Majora’s Mask didn’t have to try to have!” Mick snarked.

“Does Majora’s Mask have MIDNA, mate?” Niles asked. “I didn’t think so!”

“I have a feeling you’re only using Midna as a talking point because of Randy,” Steve said with a giggle.

“Dude! Midna was cool, even before Randy, like… became her? I guess?” Niles wasn’t sure what to call all that.

“Well, do either of your games have a Zora princess fiance?” Steve asked. The two of them paused at that one.

Niles in particular was baffled. “Aaaand that’s a talking point because…?”

Suddenly, there was a knock on the front door of the lobby.

Mick was the first to react to the noise. “Hush up ya knobs and scatter!”

The Sullivans did just that, running off and hiding inside the nearby first floor coffee shop, crowding around the inside of the closed door as they hid in the shadows and looked back out at whoever it was. They were like a pile of kittens trying to keep warm while also keeping an eye out for danger. The knocking on the door was followed by someone gently pushing open the revolving door to get in.

What walked in was an older man. He looked fairly average, with neatly combed brown hair and pale skin and smile lines so visible it was almost like he hadn’t frowned a day in his life. He appeared to be a postman, one looking around the empty building all confused.

“Hello?” he called out, looking around. The Sullivans were wondering what he was looking for. What mail was so important that this postman needed to deliver it during all this? Niles was trying to think of possible explanations, while Steve so desperately wanted to make an “Amazon 1 day delivery” joke but figured it best to wait until after the postman had left the building.

“Suppose they’ve all got the day off or something,” the postman surmised, shrugging his shoulders as he shuffled up toward the front desk of the lobby. He gently laid the package in his hands on the desk before turning back around to leave. “Well, so long as I get this uhhhh…” The postman looked down at some paper in his hand. A delivery slip perhaps? “... What is this, a desk decoration? Eh, it’s here. I’m still getting paid for it.” And with that, the postman walked right back out the front of the lobby, disappearing out the revolving door.

Though the Sullivans never saw it, the postman only walked a few feet - just far enough that he was out of view of the windows - and stopped to listen. He leaned against the wall of the building and waited.

He waited, and waited, and didn’t have to wait all too long before he heard the one of the kids inside go “Let’s see what’s inside it!” before coming out of their hiding place.

They scurried up toward the front desk of the lobby, unaware of just what was in store. Majora had thought, looking at that employee of the month picture, how fitting would it be to steal the face of Happy Maksimov to deliver these children their doom.

“Let’s see what’s inside it!” Mick said, standing over the desk and looking at the box.

“We can’t open the mail, mate!” Steve scolded.

“Eh. It’s fine!” Mick assured him. “No one’s here to pick it up anyways!” What a shame the Skull Kids didn’t notice the malice that quickly slithered its way back into the lobby and up through the underside of the cardboard box.

Mick pulled a little switchblade out of seemingly nowhere before using it to cut open the tape on the box and open it up. When the postman described it as a desk decoration, they weren’t expecting much. Perhaps something like a cup for pens, or a corkboard, or even one of those little mini drawer cabinets for paper clips or thumbtacks. When they tore it open and tossed the bubble wrap aside, they came to discover that it wasn’t any of that.

What they found inside the box was a mask. A mask that all three of them knew very, very well. There was a bout of silence between the three of them. They weren’t sure what exactly to do. Actually, they knew exactly what to do.

“BAGS THAT!”

They said it in near unison, but Mick had said it first.

“ACK! Dang it!” Steve groaned.

“HAHA! Yes, it’s mine!” Mick retrieved the mask out of the box, pulling the bubble wrap off of it and carelessly tossing that aside.

“Mick, that’s freaky!” Niles said. “Put it back!”

“Mate, relax!” Mick replied, holding up the mask to try and find the face strap. “It’s not like it’s one of the real Zelda things. It came through the post for god’s sake.” Mick paused for a moment. “... and it doesn’t even have a face strap.”

“I mean, Mick’s kinda right,” Steve agreed. “It’s not like a pack of freaky little monsters planted it here.” That seemed to get a chuckle out of Mick, but the look on Niles’ face hadn’t changed. He was still very wary.

Niles decided to try looking elsewhere. Anywhere that wasn’t at the thing’s eyes was good enough for him. The rest of the colors on that thing made his eyes hurt anyways. What else was there even to look at in the Lobby? The marble tiles on the wall were nice. When he was a kid, they used to be made of plastic. Something about trying to make them more modern or something. People seemed glad when they went back to the marble walls. The painting on the ceiling was also nice. That one was redone around the same time as the marble walls. It was all a bunch of stars and planets painted in an art deco style, looking like those old medieval star charts. They were even done with gold leaf! It was really pretty.

Niles didn’t get much of a chance to appreciate either before noticing the bubble wrap that Mick had discarded on the ground. He hadn’t noticed it until now, but it’s possible it didn’t even look like that when they first opened the box, but the edges of the bubble wrap appear black. Niles thought it was dirty until he realized it looked almost like slime on the edges as well. It looked a lot like the inside of a plastic bag of cilantro after you leave it in the fridge past its expiration date. It was like the plastic was rotting in front of him.

“AAAGGHHHH!!” Mick cried out and snapped Niles’ attention back to him. “GET IT OFF!!”

“Mick MICK!” Niles ran over to hlp, but didn’t even get a chance to touch the mask before Mick’s screams devolved into hysterical laughter.

“Calm down, Niles, I’m teasing!” Mick chuckled.

Niles just frowned and shoved Mick angrily. “Ah, pull your head in, Mick, that’s not funny!”

“Yeeeah, that’s pushing it, mate,” Steve agreed.

“How’s that pushing it?!” Mick asked, but by that point Niles wasn’t paying any attention. He was back to looking at that bubble wrap. Or more accurately, where the bubble wrap used to be. By the time he looked back, it was gone.

“Hey, guys, the bubble wrap’s missing,” Niles said, pointing at where it used to be sitting as he turned back to his brothers. Mick and Steve turned their heads to the side as they looked. Indeed, the bubble wrap was gone.

“Huh… that’s weird,” was all Mick could think to say.

“More than weird!” Niles said, now trying to look around for it, going as far as to go behind the desk and look under it. “Last I saw it, it looked like it was melting- EEK!” When Niles had stood back up, he got a face full of Mick, the mask on in full view.

“HAHA you’re FACE!” Mick chuckled. He walked around on the top of the desk, knees bent and back slouched like a little gremlin child. “Oh boo-hoo! Why the sad face, Niles? You scared or something, big boy!”

“Mick, stop mucking around!” Niles replied angrily as his brother finally got off the desk.