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Ch 01—Ganon and an Unrelated Fanboy (Part I/III)
-:-:-{ Vol 01— The Knightly Way Thoust Finds an Assembly }-:-:-
Aryll's scruffy traveler shoes clopped against the floor at a steady charge as she plodded along the hall, hands clutching the straps draped snugly over her shoulders. The racket produced by her soles ricocheted off the halls circa her stride, following like a noisy, unflattering theme song, as if to say that was the perfect musical accompaniment to her madcap moving self, but she didn't care. She knew no one would be paying attention to her anyway, stupid freshman girl with no Hyrule street creds— if they had, she was sure they'd be scared off by that oh-so-charming lynel scowl gracing her features. Too bad she couldn't get respect just by creasing her brows at people. Unlike someone else she knew.
Not that there was anyone around to behold her brash state anyway. It was unholy Hylia early after all and the Academy was predictably empty, with nothing but her solitary step to meet its towering ivory halls and arrays of royal embroidered draperies. The place was, just as she'd heard, monstrous in scope, to such a degree that she was sure she could stack her room ten times upwards before it would reach the immediate ceiling, and then she could bet another fifty times after that up to the Academy roof. And that was just going up; the stretch of never-ending halls after every corner turn was giving her a migraine that made her wonder whether she'd stumbled into some castle type version of the Lost Woods (wouldn't be the first time she'd stumbled into some random dimensional space after all… what could she say? She had an almost impressive knack for getting herself into troublesome spots.) Suffice to say she was half-convinced that whoever built the Academy must've had vision-shrinking goggles stuck to their face when they drew up the plans, well either that or it was built by a Hinox. Still, she wouldn't let herself be daunted by such a thing as mere scope alone. No chance, no way. Not with the image of a certain somebody lapping her in a score of side-hops were she to let herself get knocked down a pace. No, she had a standard to beat after all, which meant nothing was going to intimidate her. Not the pillars towering over her from a height ten times as tall as she'd ever be, not the white marble knight statues poised above her in their immortalized grandeur, nor the aisles of emblazoned noble portraits raining their silent judgements upon her from up and down the hall. She stared back at them as if to burn holes in their judgmental gaze with her eyes.
"What're you looking at?!" she snapped. "I know exactly what I'm doing you know!"
This wasn't a lie. After all, it was upon her foot-stomping insistence (though grandma had to make sure the floor to her room was still intact after the pediatric assault she gave it—wouldn't be the first time the floor to her room fell through after all), she'd managed to make it here today on her own! Sure, she was a teensy half hour behind schedule since she'd gone to the wrong wagon stop and ended up on a guided tour of every quadrant of Castle Town Square, scrunched between all the screaming Funday School kids pulling on her hair until she was convinced she'd go as bald as grandpa Sturgeon (she'd heard he was on staff at the Academy—dear Farore did she hope she didn't have him) but here she was finally, shabby hair still miraculously intact! She proceeded to place her hands on her hips and laugh like she'd bested a horde of Darknuts, as if she were some Legendary Champion with the repute of a Hylian Rockstar. Heck, no pretending about it—she was a Rockstar! Except she was, you know, laughing alone in an empty hallway because she was late to her freshman orientation. The laughter fizzed out like air deflating from a balloon and she slapped a hand to her forehead.
Navigating the school without a map would be easy baked fruit pie…that was what she had decided stubbornly upon passing the hefty stack of Academy maps in the lobby on her way in. She wouldn't need a map. She shouldn't need a map. Yet the portrait of Ganondorf with the lumpy square nose and crooked mouth going halfway off his face looked like he disagreed, smirking down at her with his lopsided grin as she passed him for the third time in the past twenty minutes.
"Shut up!" she called up to him. "You look like an overcooked potato head on fire thanks to whatever blind five year old painted you! What're you gonna do, shoot lasers at me out your one eye?"
He smirked back at her in silence.
"Haha, that's what I thought!" She laughed, then groaned when she realized she was talking to a portrait.
Why the heck was a portrait of Ganondorf even there? It seemed to be centered on a set of double doors (she vaguely wondered how the doors would open with the portrait centered on the doors like that, and then it occurred to her that maybe the doors weren't meant to open.) Her eyes flicked up to catch the five-foot wide sign above the door. MONSTROLOGY it said in bold, you-must-have-exceptional-observation-skills-not-to-notice-this-earlier text. Her brows shot up in a sudden but familiar surge of irrepressible curiosity, and two brisk steps delivered her fingers onto the slick moblin-headed doorknob. It couldn't hurt to take a peek, right? Her hand answered with a twist of the metal knob before her mind could—not that it made a difference, the knob didn't budge. She whined in disappointment. Of course it'd be locked. Half the school was probably still locked up this early. If she wanted to snoop, it'd have be in the midst of hustle and bustle later on.
She leaned in with her eye against the open sliver between the two doors, hoping to catch a glimpse of something on the other side, but it was blacker than her basement had been after that one time those thieving rats stole all the lanterns in the house. Oh well, there was an assembly somewhere in the building calling her name after all.
Ganondorf was giving her the evil eye again with his single eye on sideways, and she glowered with her two eyes at his one. She was convinced that something was off about the painting, but couldn't tell if it was just because his nose had ten nostrils and went up higher than his squiggly bangs of fire hair.
"I don't suppose you have directions to the auditorium to give?" she asked, half expecting a response, and then feeling stupid when she was hit with the poignant kind of silence you get when nobody laughs after a joke.
Admittedly, it was probably true she should've picked up a map. But, she had a perfectly valid reason for opting out, courtesy of her grandmother's habitual dinner advice. Grandma loved to give her favorite two grandkids tidbits of moral advice whenever they'd come sniffing around for their favorite of her scrumptious soups. On one such night leaning over her pot of pleasant pleas for the nose and soul, she'd called out, 'Ary, child, don't ever go around taking things like they're free, dear. Going into people's houses and taking anything lying around is bad, you remember that alright, dear?' Knowing her grandson was in earshot behind her as well (or more accurately, nose range) she'd went on, 'Link, you tell your sister too.'
Link had turned and flashed Aryll a dubious grin. 'That's right Ary, don't do it.'
Aryll had shot back a wolfos glare, and spat a grape seed at him over their grandmother's head, communicating in the kind of way only siblings could understand.
Don't give me advice you don't take yourself!
He'd eyed her back smoothly, maintaining his poker faced smile over an emphatic sip of Lon Lon Milk.
'Now listen here,' grandma chimed with her hands over the pot. 'Remember there was that one hooligan who tried to shoplift in town and everyone started calling him THIEF all the time, who was that again?'
'No idea,' said Link.
I bet it was you, thought Aryll.
'Well, I won't have that happening to any of my grandkids. You understand, dearie?' She was of course, looking at Aryll in that way that irritated her, as if she were the problem child in the family.
'Don't worry grandma, I don't do that sort of thing.' She watched as her emphasis of the word 'I' sailed right over her grandmother's smiling head into her brother's open ear. All it earned her was a low chuckle on his way out the door.
'Bye dear!' Grandma would call after him. 'Make good decisions!'
Make good decisions! Here was a good decision, beat the unholy Hylia out of her brother! What would he have done with the map anyway, probably fold it into an origami loftwing and toss it into a random pot somewhere. It's not like he would've actually used it. Well, if he wouldn't need one, neither would she!
She caught her reflection in the panoramic glass wall between her and an umpteenth courtyard. Then she crossed her arms and flicked her chin up. "You see, brother?" she spoke, addressing her reflection as if it were him. "I, am not like your average freshman, having to rely on an, ahem, stolen map to get around." Her reflection grinned approvingly back at her, until her imagination decided to kick in and replace it with an image of him instead. His image spoke back seemingly outside her control, leaning towards her on the flip side of the glass with a derisive snort.
'Oh you're no average freshman, du—mmy. Even the average ones were smart enough to realize they were supposed to take a map, since they were put out specifically for newbies like you who don't have a clue where they're going. That's obvious to anyone with half a brain. Isn't that why they're at the assembly while you're…out here, talking to an imaginary vision of me in your head?'
"Say that again, you—" she slammed her palms on the glass as the vision flickered away and her irate self returned to stare back once again. "Fine then!" She bellowed as though he could somehow hear anything she was saying. "I'll just go back and get one of those Dindarn maps!"
This was easier said than done however, since she knew trying to retrace her steps to the entrance was more likely to land her in the Academy's dumpster shoot or worse, knowing her. The last time she'd tried retracing her steps through a wax museum of moblins, she'd wound up dunked into a cart of liquid wax in one of the storage rooms. Luckily though, she'd come prepared this time, for she'd brought along a secret weapon meant exactly for a situation like this.
She slung her backpack against the floor and beamed down at the round, fluffy face of her trusty piggy backpack before unzipping the top and fishing her hand around the padded interior. "AH-HA!" she exclaimed, as her fingers closed on something cold, glossy and round. She withdrew her arm and out came a smooth, chestnut ocarina. She grinned and gave it a smug one-handed toss in the air, congratulating herself on having had the foresight to snag this hidden beauty from her brother's stash of abandoned collectibles—abandoned since he now kept a spiffier, newer Ocarina on hand. As if he'd miss this ancient thing. More importantly, a quick song on the Ocarina would summon her trusty friend Zeffa and he'd fly her to wherever she wanted (well, relatively trusty, when he wasn't stalking fish in ponds or giving her neighbor Joel a five hundred foot free-fall drop over death mountain for fun. The last time she'd called for him, he'd dove down halfway to their destination at the ever tantalizing scent of raw fish, dropping her directly in a basin of fresh Hylian Bass at the market. Heck, she'd had to work at that stall for free for a week to pay off the fish!) but other than that, he was no less reliable than her grandma when trying to distinguish Aryll's socks in the laundry from her brother's. Zeffa could easily drop her off back at the Academy entrance so she could pick up one of those lame maps. All she needed to do was get outside.
She searched the panoramic glass wall for a door, and tutted when she didn't see one. It seemed the Hinox who built the place wasn't a fan of fresh air disturbing his academic naptime...or perhaps not, since high up along the glass wall was a row of consecutive open windows. Of course, unless she had a spiffy pair of Rito wings hidden under her piggy backpack somehow, those lofty windows weren't going to do her much good.
She tutted again, moving along the glass extending the length of the hall. How could that ding-dong Hinox have not built a door in all this glass facing the courtyard? She was contemplating this peculiarity, when she was hit by a sudden flash of genius (she did get those now and then). Just earlier when she'd strolled through the entrance to the school looking like a veteran knight who knew what she was doing (and not like some sloppy newbie klutz) a gaudy looking blue diamond crystal had flashed overhead the door just before it opened. (They didn't have motion sensitive doors where she was from, but she had learned that Lanayru tech operated on its own eccentric frequency of Hyrule. Though the motion sensitive doors were less freaky to her than the robot horse her brother had brought home one time.) She was certain one of those gaudy blue diamond switches was hiding somewhere in the hall, and as her eyes scanned along the glass, she found that she was right, and congratulated herself with the victory dance she'd been practicing in front of Zeffa while he'd stalk the pond fish. Then she realized the switch was as impossibly high up as the open windows, sitting just below one of them like the crown jewel in charge of the hall, taunting her from its untouchable perch. She swore to Din.
"Oh screw you school Hinox!" How was anyone supposed to reach the Dindarn switch all the way up there? If she didn't know any better, she'd almost think they didn't want anyone to hit it! Not that she was giving up—oh no, (she wasn't the give up and die type at all) nay she was that quality rare breed of knight that wouldn't stop to think before challenging an unbeatable running man to a race nonstop until she won! Oh yes, that switch didn't stand a chance. Heck, if it was motion sensitive, she wouldn't even have to hit it— just throw something in range. She just needed something small and easy enough to propel. What did she have in her backpack? Some fleet-lotus notebooks from Stockwell's (they were doing an organic notebooks promotion), an empty jar (always handy), a green hat courtesy of her grandma, her telescope of a thousand uses… she glanced at the Ocarina in her hand, small and round like a sturdy oval ball, and glanced up at the switch. Surely it would survive if she threw it, right? After all, one time a real bombchu had zipped off and blown up with it in its mouth, and she'd still found it afterwards laying on the ground good as new without so much as a tooth mark. She figured whatever the heck it was made of could survive a room full of angry Bombarossa. As if it couldn't survive a measly encounter with some gaudy blue switch.
She sucked in a deep breath as if she were some star knight stepping into an arena for a big tournament match, and then patted the Ocarina as if to wish it good luck. "You got this," she whispered. Then she drew her arm back and flung it up as far and high as she could.
It hit the glass barely halfway up the wall from the switch, and then came tumbling down to the floor like a peahat with its propellers chopped off. She scowled, and for an instant as she stepped towards the glass wall and bent down to retrieve it, her imagination projected the image of her brother into the glass again. He stood over her with riddled amusement in his folded arms, and a snicker in his widened cheeks.
"Nobody asked you!" she snapped turning from the wall, tossing the ocarina between her hands as she mused. Her throw was pathetic, but all she needed was a way to propel it upwards with more force. If only she conveniently had something like a supremely powerful home run bat. Oh wait, she thought with a smirk, she had something infinitely better. It was time, she realized, to get THAT out.
She slipped her piggy backpack off again and searched the interior, her face brightening like a pirate retrieving his one true treasure as her hand fell upon its quarry. Here it was: her ultimate weapon. She brushed away the sneeze-inducing dust on the cylindrical brass instrument in her hand, wiping clean the optical lens that flared out on one end. This was her trusty telescope, her ever so reliable partner in arms. Supposedly it was made from a steel as durable as a Dodongo's stomach (or at least that was what the battleship game guy, Salvatore, had told her when he had given it to her as a game prize). Despite its value constantly being questioned by those ignoramuses who couldn't seem to grasp its greatness, she knew its true worth to be greater than even that of Princess Zelda's tiara! After all, those fools didn't know anything about her telescope's thousand uses! Of course she didn't know them all either being as she'd only come up with about seventeen of them so far, but that was besides the point. At present, use number thirteen was a home run bat superior to any you could find across Hyrule. She used to play battleball (a game with a story for another day) with her cousin Sue-Belle using her telescope as a bat, and after sending a few dozen energy balls crashing into grandpa Sturgeon's study from a mile away, she'd decided her telescope's signature smash move had enough force to send a miniblin to its death on the other side of Hyrule.
She clasped both ends and pulled, extending its length to the fullest until it gave that satisfactory snap into place, and she beamed as if the sound of that gave her more peace of mind than hearing the song of healing.
"Batter up!" she exclaimed, tapping the floor twice with her telescope, and leaning in with her foot. She tossed her Ocarina directly up high into the air, and with a cursory glance at the switch, drew her telescope back with both hands, and moved in with her signature patented ultimate telescope smash as the Ocarina raced into range (or the junior, less powerful version of her smash so she didn't break the window). Her eye saw them briefly align, and then—
"—what are you doing?"
She yelped at a sudden voice behind her, and with it a jolt of surprise traveled up her arm like an extra surge of force at the instant her telescope contacted the ocarina, sending the path of her swing a centimeter higher than she'd been aiming and invoking the full force of her telescope smash. This may have not been a big deal were it not that the adjusted angle shot the ocarina straight clean out the open window above the switch like an arrow firing off at breakneck speed, off to satisfy its newly discovered yearnings to explore the far reaches of Hyrule. Farewell thy fools, it would've called out could it speak as it flung out of sight, I'm freeeee!
Aryll's mouth fell open as it was swallowed by the sky, and she shrieked like a mother that had just watched her pet cat bust wings and zoom into a beehive. Who knew where in Hyrule her Ocarina would land?! What if it clucked some poor unsuspecting Hyrulean on the head and they died on the spot?! It could break her Ocarina! I mean sure it could survive an explosion, but a Goron's head for example, she wasn't so sure. And then if her brother found out it was broken, well, that would be a whole separate issue…
She grumbled, pacing back and forth as she muttered about the most logical solution to this unforeseen dilemma under her breath. "…a deformed potato, maybe, full of holes would do it…" came her incoherent mumbling, "…as if he'd notice the difference…"
"As if who'd notice the difference?"
Aryll flinched as that same voice that had startled her earlier came back to startle her again, and she whirled her head around to catch sight of its host. She found, standing barely a few feet from her, a young boy staring wide eyed as though he were witnessing an act straight out of the crazy repertoire of a Gorman Troupe performance.
"YOU!" she snarled. He flinched and yelped like an unlucky deer getting its hair blown back by the roar of a lynel. "YOU made me lose my Ocarina!"
The boy flung his hands up in shield and squeezed his eyes shut as if at the mercy of some deranged warlord. "P-please don't hex me!" His voice quivered like a gong, dissolving Aryll's budding rage into a peevish bemusement. Was that all it took to scare him? What a strange kid.
The boy opened a tentative eye, and taking in her idle albeit vexed stance before him, heaved a sigh of relief, as if deciding she were safe to speak to after all. "S-sorry, it's just I wasn't sure…" he rubbed the nape of his neck as a sheepish grin sprouted up his cheeks. "…you're…not a witch, are you?"
Aryll spat the imaginary milk she'd been drinking into his face. Exactly how delusional was he? How did she even look remotely like a witch? I mean sure, she had dyed her hair black for completely unrelated reasons he didn't need to know about, but that was about as far as any resemblance went. (Not even her grandma's friends whose memories were about as sturdy as a chest sitting on a tree branch would ever mistake her for a witch. A talking doll? Yeah. An oversized bird wearing a wig? Sure. A cosplaying moblin? According to her brother's distorted vision. But a witch? Unlikely.) There was nothing on her particularly witchlike unless telescopes had replaced wands in the witching world. Clearly, the kid was just of the stupider sort. "Really, a witch?" she drawled. "Do you see a pointy hat anywhere?"
The boy pointed to her bag, in which a green pointy hat stuck out of the zipper like a flagrant tongue. Aryll swore to Din under her breath. Why had grandma packed that stupid hat anyhow? "That's not a witch's hat!" She hastened to shove it back into her bag before he could think much about why she had it, but it was too late. The boy stared after it, and Aryll could almost feel the unwanted dots connecting in his head.
"Hey, that hat looks just like the one HE wears!"
She stiffened as if a stag beetle had suddenly crawled into the space between her toes (she'd find those things scuttling around the floor of her brother's room sometimes, and was half convinced he was hiding a nest of them under his bed, along with an entire secret hideout…) Nevertheless, she'd undergone secret training in direct anticipation of this kind of question! Those bothersome tourists in town with noses too big for their heads finally had a use—it was time to put the efforts of her training using their pestering encounters with her to the test!
"Who?" She drawled with her award winning disinterest (though it was a mere parody of her brother's).
"Oh, you know who, I mean THE Link!"
"Yeah, what of it?"
The boy studied her with a quizzical look in his eye, and her face twitched ever so slightly under the scrutiny of his gaze (she was glad for her giant fake coke bottle glasses). A cow head was sticking out of the wall above his head for a reason she didn't question at the time, and she busied herself staring up at it, silently willing it to moo. Where was a good distraction when you needed one?
"Can it be that you…" he started.
Aryll tensed. Please, please don't figure it out. She stared up at the cow head, half wishing it were a deity that could grant her plea to shut him up.
"…are a huge fan of Link, and like to cosplay as him?" he finished, his face lighting up like a child on Christmas Eve.
Aryll's jaw dropped. As she stood there like a statue with a broken mouth hinge, the boy began to hop around like a dog who'd found his lost brethren.
"No!" She shouted a little too loudly in response.
"ME TOO— oh." The excitement died from his face like a deflated balloon.
Aryll stood with an unvoiced groan like a bombfish burrowed in her throat. Oh great, just great! Of course the very first person she'd meet at the Academy would just HAVE to be one of HIS fanboys. She gave him a leery, judgmental look akin to the ones her grandma's friends made at her whenever she'd bolt into the house and slam the door shut to escape another angry beehive. What was this weirdo doing out in the middle of the hall by himself anyway? His startled eyes peered out beneath a head of blond mushroom cut hair, and (in her first good look at him since he'd appeared behind her unannounced) she stared with a judgmental intensity that caused him to glance away in conscious embarrassment. So… this was what her brother's fanboys looked like (she'd half wondered whether they'd be a mob of his look-alike clones, or perhaps a slobbering race of creepy, stalkerlike shadow minions of their own kind) but this was good news, now she could make a mental note of who to avoid later.
"O…kay then," he raked a hand through his hair and emitted an awkward laugh. "So, what's your name then?"
No way I'm telling you. She turned briskly on her heel and strode away down the hall.
"Hey!" he called after her. To her irate dismay, he quickened his step until they were marching in parallel.
Stupid Link Fanboy, she thought. How do I get rid of him?
"Hey come on," he started again, "what's your name?"
"Ganon."
"Ganon?!" he laughed like the goats Aryll had seen chortling at the ugly building shaped like a three-pointed green head in town. "No, for real! What is it?"
"Oh I mean it, I'm Ganon, for real. So for your own good, you might wanna steer clear." She turned and unleashed her impression of a Ganon roar, though it came out sounding more like a bokoblin trying to gurgle with a cold.
He blinked, then cracked another goatlaugh. "Hey, you're funny!"
Her brow twitched. Great, now she was entertaining him. He wasn't supposed to laugh!
"Okay then Ganon," he continued, "where're you headed off to?"
"The toilet."
"The toilet?" He grinned. "You mean Ganon pees? That's news to me."
"Of course he pees. You can't destroy the world if your bladder destroys you first."
His goat laugh sprung forth once again, fertilizing the budding irritation in her veins. "So, where you headed after that?"
Where would her brothers' fanboys absolutely not want to go? Maybe somewhere so boring it could make watching hibernating Gorons sleep curled up into motionless rocks sound exciting. Her brother would rather be forced to wrangle hordes of moblins in a dungeon than have to sit still for five minutes after all. Meaning if his fanboys were anything like him…
"To the library. I want to review the Academy's Governing Nondestructive Assimilation Hylian Relations Policy before starting classes here. It could take a while." There, that should scare him. Her brother would bolt like a deer from having to sit through reading something like that. She inwardly snickered as she saw him gape like she'd grown a second staldra head.
"No way!" he exclaimed. "Y-you actually like to read through school policies…"
Too weird for you? She grinned. You're free to run at anytime…
"…just like me?! I thought I'd be the only one here who did that sort of thing!" He beamed at her and she gaped in protest at the sparkle in his eye as he went on to rant in oblivious glee. "Knowing all the school rules and policies before going to class makes us more prepared as knights, don't you think? Although, I don't remember seeing a policy on Nondestructive Assimilation, and I thought I reviewed them all. I guess I could've missed a few though, I should probably go back and take another look. Besides, I was thinking about rereading the Retroactive Non-Admissible Attendance Policy or the Pocket/Dark World Evacuation Policy again anyway. It's comforting knowing the kind of security measures they've got in place now, especially considering the kind of incidents I heard happened here last year, like the negative energy flood that turned half the school into animals." He turned his wide grin onto her blanched expression. "Hey, which school policy is your favorite?"
It took her a moment to unparalyze herself beneath his beam of incomprehensible giddiness. How the heck was she supposed to answer to any of this gibberish?!
"The one about…Cow Benefits…" she droned glancing back up at the cow head on the wall.
"Oh, you mean Cow Manifestation and Integration Protection Practices?!"
Aryll stared at him. What was with this school?! They even had a policy about cows?! Good Farore.
"Yes…that." She spoke in a flat, deadpan tone.
"That's a great policy!" his elated tone came in stark contrast to hers. "After all, the decision to implement the cow policy in place of the previous bull policy has supposedly prevented further incidents of stampedes from occurring on school grounds! Like there was an incident I read about where the Bull Protection Squad accidentally drove a whole bunch of students wearing capes into the moat…" Aryll had the urge for a moment, glancing past his shoulder, to bolt past and ditch him on the spot. He couldn't catch up to her after all, right? She glanced from his blabbering mouth to his zipped and worn in boots, trying to size him up. There was nothing about him that seemed loose, with laces tied and belts buckled neat and uniform, he seemed pretty well put together. How fast do fanboys run? Could they possibly match her ability to race around a track carrying jars of honey with hordes of bees in tow? (She was a champion at this, according to her grandma when she asked her to gather ingredients for her energizing honey fruit soup.) Then again she figured, rabidly chasing your idol around could make someone unusually and inconveniently fit. She glanced at his shoes and grimaced. It was probably best not to take a chance.
"…and that was a much better alarm system than the bull roar which I read was so loud it caused some visiting Gorons with sensitive hearing to smash the floor—"
"—Look," she cut in finally, "don't you have somewhere to be, or something?"
"Huh?" He blinked, as though noticing some essential part of his brain had tiptoed off as he'd talked. He groaned, slapping a hand to forehead. "Oh…right. Yeah."
A-ha! Aryll thought, a chance to escape! Time to say adios to this wacko policy obsessed fanboy making her tardier to the assembly than she already was. "Right, so get going!" She swiveled on her heel. "Bye!"
"Wait!" he called before she could take a step.
Darn, she thought. He was as persistent as a morth. What now?
"Do you know where the auditorium is? There's an assembly for freshman I gotta head to there."
She grumbled under her breath. Of course he'd be going to the assembly too. Why couldn't he have been going to a fanboy meetup or something?"
"I mean," he went on, "since you're heading to the library, you must know your way around. Could you give me directions?"
If I knew where it was, she thought, I wouldn't be stuck here talking to you, now would I? "Can't you figure it out yourself?" She snapped. "You want to be a knight, don't you? How can you call yourself a knight if you can't even find your own way around?!" Her brow twitched at the recoil of her own words since they applied no lesser so to herself.
He frowned, mulling her words over as his fingers rubbed at the nape of his neck. "Well, I guess when you put it like that…" He started fumbling around in his backpack, and Aryll saw her chance at escape attempt number two. Surely he'd be too distracted to notice her covert movements sneaking off (she was a master of stealth after all. Back home, wriggling through ducts to slip into rooms she wasn't supposed to be in had given her plenty of practice with this sort of thing.) Slowly, she turned her back and crept away from his preoccupied self as he perused the depths of his bag. Her Sheikah style tiptoe got her halfway down the hall before she heard his mutterings behind her again.
"…I guess that map could still be useful after all."
Her ear twitched, and she stopped on its command. Did he say map? (Or was it just the forest fairies playing tricks on her ears?) It couldn't be…he had one of those Dinforsaken maps?
This called for a new plan. It was an irksome plan, but she couldn't let that elusive map get away. Using her ultimate Sheikah skills, her toes crept her back the way she came and pivoted her to face the kid with the sparkling, charming smile of the princess portraits shown off at the dentist. It was flawless! He'd never know she moved.
He frowned, glancing up at her from searching his backpack. "Hey. Weren't you leaving just now?"
Her smile twitched. "Oh no, I was just…heading to the toilet, but I changed my mind. You know, when you think you gotta go, but then you don't? Eheh…anyway…what was that you were saying about a map?"
He stared at her in a kind of puzzlement as his hand continued its search of the bag. "…you know," he spoke with a frown, "I could be imagining things, but I'm kind of getting the feeling that I'm annoying you."
Aryll's brow twitched. "Of course…not." She spoke between a clenched smile. "Why would you say that?"
"Look if you want me to leave, you can just say the word and I'll leave you alone." He turned and began to stride away, one hand still stuffed into the backpack. "Later, Ganon."
Oh Feisty Farore, she thought, staring at his back. She was gonna regret this. "Wait!" she called. "Did I forget to mention…I'm going to the assembly too? How about we head there together." How about you hand over the map, she added in mind with a silent purse of her lip.
He turned and cast her another quizzical look. "What about the library?"
"Nevermind that. I'll read the, um, Governing Nondisclosure Destructive Admissions policy later. So anyway, about this map?"
"I thought you said it was the Governing Nondestructive Assimilation Hylian Relations Policy."
Damn this kid, he had to pay attention to the most inconvenient things. "Yes yes that! But anyway the map, you have a map don't you?!"
"Yeah I have a map," he shrugged. "It's in here somewhere. But why do you care. You've made it pretty clear that you think it's pathetic for a knight not to know their way around. I expect you already know where the assembly is yourself, don't you?"
She cringed like she'd poked herself in the eye. There was no way she was gonna tell this fanboy she was more lost than him and get dragged down to his level. "Of…of course I already know where it is!" she asserted this with a stubborn crossing of arms.
"Great!" he beamed, "So let's forget the map then. You can lead." He moved to zip his backpack shut as Aryll resisted the urge to slam her head into the wall. The map...the map! It had to come forth! (Alternatively, she could steal his backpack and run away, but she figured that was the lesser knightly option of the two.) It was time to pull something out of her magic bottle of tricks.
"Well...if I lead," she spoke feigning nonchalance, "then you'll fail the…the entrance test then."
He stopped. "What entrance test?"
"…Didn't the advisor in the lobby tell you about it when you first picked up the map? Following the map to the assembly is part of a first-day entrance test all freshmen have to take, to prove a bare minimum of navigational skills as a student knight! You have to use the map you pick up in the lobby, and…and I can't help direct you because you can't have help from someone else, or it counts as cheating and you fail!"
Aryll bit the inside of her cheek to keep her snigger in as the boy paled and froze like he'd been hit by ice keese. "What?!" He sputtered, "B-but I didn't see an advisor in the lobby. Actually, I didn't see anyone there at all!"
"Well that's unlucky timing for you if you missed them while they were in the bathroom or something." A shadow crossed Aryll's features, and the boy gulped as she leaned in to whisper, "Want to know what happens if you fail?!"
"Um…you start the term with a bad grade?"
"NO!" she shrieked as he yelped and tumbled back. "You get kicked out of the program, effective immediately!"
The kid looked as if he were choking on a possessed acorn, and Aryll bit her cheek harder to keep from cracking into a laugh. "What?! A-are you sure?! B-but that's so extreme!"
"Well it makes sense to me," she crossed her arms, "clearly they want to make sure their new students can handle something as simple as following a map to an assembly. Otherwise, they're not fit to be knights!"
"W-well, what about you? Don't you have to pass it too?"
"Oh, of course I already aced the test with flying colors earlier this morning, only I had to leave before the assembly started in order to take care of some highly important business for highly important knights, and by complete chance ended up here..." her fingers caressed her hair as she prattled. "Now, it's obvious you can't be as talented a navigator as me, but you still gotta get your map out and—Hey!" She opened one eye to see him disappearing around the corner, eyes focused on a crinkly paper magnetized to his nose. His head popped back from around the corner a moment later to pin Aryll with a queer stare.
"What're you dawdling over there talking to yourself for? You really shouldn't do that sort of thing in public. Are you coming or what?"
Aryll popped a vein and very keenly resisted the urge to snap an insult back. How dare he call her weird! (She was perfectly exceptional!) But this was nothing to lose her composure over. It was a very simple plan according to the voice in her head. He had a map, she'd follow him follow the map, they'd get to the assembly where she'd proceed to impress the heck out of all the head knights there and make her own name, and then she'd never see this dopey fanboy again, the end.
Of course, another voice in her head said that wasn't gonna happen at all, but when did she ever listen to that voice?
o | O | o
NEXT :: Chapter 02—Ganon and an Unrelated Fanboy (Part II/III)
Author's note:
The lack of basic formatting capabilities, indentation, font variants and size on here (even just a sub-header to enlarge a chapter title) is...painful. My guess is it's to prevent the abuse of it, but still painful nonetheless (moving a chapter from Scrivener to here is like moving from a hotel suite to a cardboard box, seriously.) I wish I could do some font shifts for the way certain characters talk, and insert a drawing for a scene every once in a while but alas, here is not the place for that.
That aside, a few notes about this story. I had the idea to write this seven or so years ago (I know, that's quite a ways back) but it ended up sitting in a dusty drawer in my head for a long, loooooong time (like they do). I finally decided to pull the concept back out, dust it off and see what my fingers could spin with it. Here I am setting it out somewhere to be read in hopes it'll make someone laugh and brighten their day. (If anyone's even reading this, 'cause part of me thinks nobody will read this at all. If you are reading, I'd be glad to hear what you think!)
T.I.E. (The Impetuous Escapades) was meant to be purely a Zelda world parody initially, but it's been transforming as I've been working on it to be a little more serious in between the comedy—partly because I've found comedy to be more difficult to maintain in a compelling way (at least to me) than serious plot, which I am more naturally drawn to writing. The story is stuffed to the brim with Zelda references for those paying attention, but should be a fun read whether you catch 'em all or not. There are many, many, many zelda characters from different games featured in this story (even some obscure NPCs from various games) but it will take some time before they are introduced. Link and Zelda are in it, but they've been pushed to background characters for once—I thought it'd be a neat concept to focus on other characters that probably don't get much attention if any at all, plus it's interesting trying to consider how the top two look from the eyes of other NPCs—though L and Z do have more prominent roles later on. The crossover aspect is neat to me, it's fun to think how different characters from different games would interact with one another, write them backstories and flesh them out, figure out who would be friends with who, that sort of thing. For the most part though, it follows the story of three characters (incidentally, each of these three originate from a different game)—it should become clear which three and why these three soon enough.
It's more K+ than T save for an occasional swear and a couple of things, but it's set to T just to be safe. The chapters can run on the long side (7,000-14,000 words shortest to longest) but the chapters arc and cut in specific spots, and usually there are scene breaks to help the pacing...except in the next chapter, (haha) which I do hope you'll enjoy.
/~/ Farosie