Tales of Symphonia, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and all their contents belong to their respective owners.
Prologue: The Great Plateau
Chapter 1
...
...Open your eyes...
Open your eyes...
Open your eyes.
Wake up, Lloyd.
The unfamiliar voice in the teen's mind stirred his sluggish consciousness, and his heavy-lidded eyes cracked open. The gray blur he beheld slowly came into focus, revealing an array of small, blue lights against a darkened ceiling.
Lloyd frowned. It was an interesting sight, but not one he recognized. Where am I? he wondered. He sat up to look around, and he was, to say the least, alarmed by why he found.
He was in a large, shallow, elaborately decorated basin in a dark chamber, clad in nothing but a pair of undershorts and dripping wet from head to toe. A fog or mist obscured the edges of the room, but he could just make out a glowing pedestal shining in the gloom nearby.
"Uh... Hello?" he called out softly. "Colette? Genis? Zelos? Anyone?"
No answer came. The only sounds in that chamber came from him.
This has gotta be a prank of some kind, he decided. Zelos might pull something like this. Let's see, the last time I saw him was...
The thought trailed off as he tried to recall, without success. As a matter of fact, he could not remember seeing any of the others recently. To his dismay, his latest memory was leaving home with Colette to find and destroy the world's Exspheres. That had been some time ago - too long for him to have simply forgotten everything since then.
... Oh, just my luck, he thought, irritated, as he carefully pulled himself out of the basin. Not only do I wake up in a place I don't recognize, again. This time, I forget everything that happened recently. AND I'm practically naked, he added, shivering.
Genis jumped backward when the glowing pedestal suddenly moved at his approach, and he almost slipped on his own wet footprints.
Reflexively, he reached out with his half-elven senses to find out what was causing the motion. If it had surprised him to find that he could not detect any ambient mana when he first woke up, it was only slightly less alarming that there was no mana moving the pedestal, either.
A circular section of the top of the pedestal extended outward a short distance, revealing more glowing blue lights on the sides of it. The sound of a turning millstone filled the chamber as the section rotated a quarter turn. Finally, a rectangular portion of the pedestal flipped over to reveal an orange and blue eye-shaped design. This smallest piece folded toward Genis on a hinge, the orange lights on it slowly blinking at him.
Once he felt sure the whole arrangement had stopped moving, Genis crept forward again for a closer look. The female voice he had heard upon waking up spoke to him again:
That is a Sheikah Slate. Take it. It will help guide you.
Genis looked around, trying in vain to find the source of this voice. He was a thinker; he was not about to just follow the directions of a disembodied stranger when he had no idea where he was or what was going on. Heck, he would have been dubious had it been Zelos, or even Lloyd, who had asked him to take this "Sheikah Slate."
Although... he had looked around the rest of the room, and there did not appear to be anything else he could do.
Hesitantly, the half-elf reached out and took hold of the slate. It offered no resistance as he pulled it from its place.
He turned it over with both hands; the side opposite the colored one turned out to be blank, but after a moment, the same eye shape - all blue this time - appeared on the surface.
"Whoa," he breathed. Is this some kind of magitechnology? But then... why doesn't it have any mana?
Before he could wonder any more about it, the pedestal moved again, reversing its earlier motions, and the stone slab set into the wall behind it was lifted away in pillar-shaped sections. Genis peered through the opening; a dark tunnel loomed up ahead.
"Aw, man," Zelos moaned to himself. "You can't expect the beautiful Zelos Wilder to be seen out in public in this garbage, can you? What the heck happened to my clothes?"
For all his grumbling, however, there was nothing to be done about it. He could pretend to like running around in his boxers, but with no one else around, there would have been little point to it. He grudgingly donned the worn-out clothing; even if it did not fit well, at least it was somewhat comfortable. As a bonus, the pants came with a belt he could hang his slate on.
"Now, then," Zelos mused once he was dressed, "anything else in here? A sword? A shield, maybe?"
He double-checked the open chests and the splintered remains of the barrels he had found in the tunnel. Finding nothing else useful, he continued on to the far end of the tunnel to what recent experience told him was a locked door.
"Well, great," he sighed as he leaned against a nearby glowing pedestal. "Now what?"
A woman's voice spoke, as if in answer:
Hold the Sheikah Slate up to the pedestal. That will show you the way.
Zelos raised one eyebrow and smirked. "Whatever you say, babe," he responded playfully as he retrieved the slate from his belt. Clearly, whoever had brought him here had all the cards. He had little choice but to play along for the time being.
The slate had not yet touched the pedestal's surface when a flash of blue light passed between the two, and the shape of a blue eye appeared on the pedestal. Glowing text appeared below it.
Authenticating...
Sheikah Slate confirmed.
A low rumbling shook the tunnel, and Zelos crouched, alert for danger. Blue lights on the door revealed yet another blue eye, just before the door retreated, section by section, into the surrounding walls to flood the tunnel with what could only be daylight. The Tethe'allan Chosen straightened up again, squinting, with one hand shielding his eyes from the excessive light.
Before his vision could adjust, more voices filled his ears.
"Zelos?"
"Zelos! You're here, too!"
"Are you alright?"
"It seems we're all here, then."
Zelos broke out into a gigantic, silly-looking grin as he realized who all had spoken. "Hunnies!" he cried joyfully, and he stumbled forward blindly into their midst, arms outstretched. He had not gotten far before something suddenly struck him in the face and knocked him flat on his back, dazed. An all-too-familiar silhouette appeared over him.
"Hands to yourself, you idiot!" Sheena yelled at him.
"Aw, but I can't help myself!" Zelos whined, still smiling as he pushed himself up. "You guys are just so-" His eyes adjusted, and his grin faded. "Oh. Miss Jubblies, that outfit does your amazing figure no justice..."
Sheena winded him with a swift kick to the gut for his trouble.
Raine looked around the room again. Not counting the one that apparently led outside, eight tunnels led into the chamber. She herself had emerged from one of them to find Lloyd and Colette already there, wearing clothes much like the ones she had found and bearing identical mysterious Sheikah Slates. Shortly afterward, another tunnel had opened up to admit Genis, followed by Sheena, Regal, and Presea. As Regal had pointed out, Zelos' arrival meant their entire party was accounted for.
"I'll ask again for the latest arrivals," she said diplomatically. "Is everyone all right?"
"I'll be good in just a sec," Zelos wheezed as he fought to get his breath back.
Lloyd rolled his eyes. "Yeah, I think we're fine, Professor." He turned to the redhead and offered him a hand. "I don't guess you know how we got here?"
"Nope, sorry," Zelos answered as he was pulled up to his feet. He looked over the group, noting their similar garb and the slates they all carried. "But if I had to guess," he muttered, "I'd say this is some trick by Cruxis or the Renegades."
Lloyd flinched, horrified. "What? No, that can't be!"
"Zelos," Presea murmured in her soft monotone, "we defeated Cruxis, and their survivors are on Derris-Kharlan. The Renegades were disbanded."
The redhead folded his arms. "I know, I know, but think about it. Our little journey to save the world is the only thing that ever connected all of us."
Genis scratched his head. "Well, that is true, but-"
"And that's not all," Zelos continued, and he retrieved his slate from his belt. "What about these things? Cruxis, the Desians, and the Renegades are the only ones we've met who have tech on this level."
He waited for someone to challenge his logic. To his surprise and satisfaction, nobody did. Lloyd, Colette, and Genis all looked to Raine, silently asking her to reveal the answer to their quandary, but the professor was as much at a loss as they were. Regal, Presea, and Sheena each appeared lost in their own thoughts.
Zelos returned his slate to his belt and rested a hand on his hip, ready to declare the case closed. Before he could speak again, however, the ghostly female voice from before reverberated through his consciousness again:
Heroes of Regeneration, our light has been stolen from us. Now, you are the light that must shine upon Hyrule. Now, go.
"All right, where are you?" Lloyd asked, irritated, as he glanced around the room again, trying to locate the speaker.
"That voice..." Genis pondered. "She called us the Heroes of Regeneration..."
Sheena shrugged. "I kinda doubt Cruxis and the Renegades would be that polite to us."
"Then... who or what is Hyrule?" Presea wondered.
"Maybe it has to do with something that happened after we merged the two worlds," Colette volunteered. "Something during the time we all forgot."
Raine nodded. "That seems to be the most likely answer. I don't think we'll learn anything by talking about it here, though."
"Indeed," Regal agreed; funnily enough, after having met him in Tethe'allan prison garb, the others found his worn shirt and pants looked natural on him. He gestured to the tunnel leading outside. "We should have a look around and see where we stand."
Lloyd nodded. "Yeah, I think we've done all we can in here. Let's go."
The group entered the tunnel, climbing up a flight of steps and helping each other to the top of a wall standing between them and the exit. Soon, the tunnel walls around them opened up and they found themselves outside, standing on a grassy hill. Lloyd trotted out ahead of the group and found himself at the edge of a high cliff. What he saw took his breath away almost as literally as Sheena had done to Zelos a few minutes earlier.
Stretching out from the bottom of the cliff was a beautiful green forest. Beyond, the landscape fell even further to a vast, grassy plain that stretched on further than he could see, with a few low-hanging clouds rolling over it. In the distance was the silhouette of an enormous, magnificent castle. The horizon was ringed by mountains, one of which towered above the others, issuing gray clouds into the air above it.
"Wow," he breathed as the others joined him. "This is..."
"Beautiful," Sheena finished.
"Amazing," Colette murmured.
"Extraordinary," Regal offered.
"Aw, hunnies, you're too ki- OW!"
"Shut up, Zelos!"
Genis found he could not disagree. The view was, indeed, exceptional. Still, he and his friends had literally traveled all over the world and had never encountered anything like what he was seeing. There was also the fact that for all the verdant landscape, there was not a trace of mana to be felt.
"Guys," he half-whispered, "I'm not sure we're still in Aselia."
Author's Notes:
With last month's release of Breath of the Wild, I've found yet another contender for the title of Favorite Game Ever. So what do I do? Combine it with another favorite game, of course!
I'm gonna be honest, I haven't thought much out on this one yet; this is about as far as I've gotten. If you, the readers, like it and want some more, be sure to let me know and I'll see what I can do! :)
That's all I got for now! Burd out.
