Three

('Attack of The Fangirl')

Davin Sunrider, Dark Side Comedian, had finally decided he did not like living in Hyrule. Truthfully, he thought, he wouldn't have minded it so much if he was living with Gorons or Zora or even Kokiri, but he was currently residing in Hyrule Castle, which was occupied by the Dark Lord Ganondorf.

Ganondorf, being a Dark Lord, was predictably not the best employer. For one, his work insurance plan was awful, he had no retirement packages, and he also had the annoying habit of jumping out and scaring Davin whenever possible. Davin thought this was odd behavior for a grown man who also happened to be busy ruling a country he'd just finished conquering, but he couldn't really summon the courage to bring it up. Ganondorf was really tall.

Walking through the corridors of Hyrule Castle, past suits of armor and tapestries, Davin drummed the fingers of his left hand against the sword Ganondorf had given him shortly after his arrival here, humming a tune to himself. He did have one bright spot in his days here; Ganondorf usually told him to go keep the captive Princess Zelda company for a few hours a day and tell her jokes. The Dark Lord seemed to feel a bit sorry for the princess, which Davin thought somewhat odd, considering the rest of the King of Evil's, well... evil, personality, but again, he wasn't going to bring it up.

Zelda actually liked Davin's jokes, for one, and secondly, most importantly, she had not once, not even one time greeted him by leaping from behind the door of her chamber and waving a freaking huge sword at him. That in itself made Davin prefer her company to her captor's.

"YAAAAAAHHHHH!"

"Holy freaking crap, what the hell is... Oh, it's you."

Ganondorf slowly lowered his freaking huge sword and regarded Davin with an amused look, chuckling to himself in his deep voice. "Got you again!"

Davin held a hand over his wildly beating heart. "Yeah... yeah, you got me. Good job, uh, sir." He looked closer at his employer. "Are you wearing my glasses?"

Ganondorf nodded. "The process by which they turn dark under sunlight intrigues me. I am studying them until I can replicate it for myself."

He looked very strange wearing Davin's rectangular glasses, since they weren't quite big enough for his head. And plus, they didn't really go with his armor. And on top of that, Davin was pretty sure they weren't his prescription, either; he was going to get a headache if he kept them on too long.

Wait, what did he care? Ganondorf was a jerk; let him get a headache.

Davin frowned. "So that's where they went. I thought I'd put them down someplace different than usual last night."

Ganondorf plucked the glasses from his head and tossed them at Davin. "I have completed my studies, by the way. I was waiting here to return them to you."

"And scare the hell out of me."

"That too. You are quite amusing when you're frightened."

Davin scowled as he fumbled with his glasses, making sure nothing was broken. "So happy I can be of service." He flicked a glance up at the Dark Lord, who had started to frown. "Er, Dread Lord."

Ganondorf leaned his freaking huge sword against the wall and adjusted one of the plates on his armor. "Tell me another joking story about the King of Hyrule," he commanded.

Davin put his glasses back on, satisfied they hadn't been adversely affected, and thought for a moment about what joke he could convert. He decided on another of his father's jokes, since Ganondorf seemed to like those. Davin secretly did, too, but he pretended not to.

"The King of Hyrule was taking another break from his kingly duties, and was walking through the forest, whistling to himself. He spied a pond in the midst of the forest, and decided to go over and look at it for a minute, since he saw the ripples caused by fish, and thought he might try and catch one."

Ganondorf nodded. "I'm told the King used to spend more time fishing than he did doing anything useful."

Davin also nodded, not sure this was true, but continued. "As he was leaning over the pond to look, the King's wallet fell out of his coat and into the water. He reached after it to grab it, but a fish seized the wallet in his mouth and furiously swam off with it! The King despaired, but even as he watched, another, larger fish ate the first fish and swam back toward him. The fish paused beneath the King, looking up at him for a moment with big fish eyes."

A hint of a smile had quirked one corner of the Dark Lord's mouth. Encouraged, Davin put even more overdramatic emphasis on the rest of the joke.

"Finally, the fish opened its mouth and spat the wallet out of the water, where it hit the King right in the face!" Ganondorf laughed at this, but Davin wasn't done. "The King picked up his dripping wallet and asked a passing peasant, who the pond happened to belong to, 'What sort of fish are these?' The peasant, whose name was Dennis, replied, 'They're carp, m'lord.' "

Davin paused for emphasis, building up the comedic tension.

"The King suddenly smiled and said, 'Hey, carp-to-carp walleting!' "

Ganondorf frowned at him for a moment as he pondered the punchline. "Carp," he said slowly, as if somewhat confused. He looked down at the floor. Finally, he laughed his loud, disturbing Dark Lord laugh. "I get it!" he said between chuckles. He scuffed the carpet on the floor with one huge boot. "Wall-to-wall carpeting! Another excellent play on words, Sunrider!"

Davin had been somewhat nervous there for a moment; that one was kind of hard to get. Plus, it was, if possible, an even more atrocious pun than the last one he'd told the Dark Lord.

He smiled nervously. "I'm, uh, glad you liked it. Sir."

Ganondorf loomed over him. Not really on purpose; Ganondorf tended to loom all the time, since he was so massively tall and broad-shouldered. The somewhat evil grin he perpetually wore also helped with the looming; the Dark Lord seemed eternally on the edge of breaking out into sinister laughter and commenting on how foolish his enemies were.

"That fool Hero nearly got himself killed again this morning," Ganondorf said, chuckling sinisterly. "I'm not sure what he was supposed to be doing, but he kept jumping off of a cliff and catching himself at the last second. He did that for two entire hours!"

Davin's brows drew together in puzzlement; the version of Link who was supposed to be saving this Hyrule was unfortunately a rather dim young man. He reminded Davin more of Stupid Link from Seldavia's parody stories than anything else, and that worried him. Why couldn't this be 'Twilight Princess' Hyrule? Midna would know what to do.

Then a sudden flash of insight hit Davin like a bolt of lightning, a sensation with which he was not entirely unfamiliar, as that was one of the ways Ganondorf expressed his displeasure at being told a bad joke.

Davin's insight was this: Hyrule was fictional. Therefore, the version of Hyrule in which he had been living for the last several weeks had to be the product of someone's imagination. Since it bore no resemblance to any of the games' storylines, that meant this was a fan-fic. But the question was, whose?

It wasn't his own, that was for sure. He'd be able to deal with a fictional universe formed from his own imagination, but this Hyrule had definitely been thought up by someone else, and he had no idea who.

The young writer shuddered. Please, oh, please, Merciful Nayru, don't let this be a half-baked yaoi story. PLEASE!

Ganondorf narrowed his eyes at Davin. "Something disturbs you, Sunrider. What is it?"

Davin was a bit puzzled as to how to put his predicament into words. How did you explain to a fictional character that he was fictional?

He was saved from having to explain by a sudden alarm bell; a Moblin ran puffing into the hall, heading immediately for the Dark Lord.

"Dark Lord dude!" the ugly, pig-like creature squealed. "The Hero is here! He's been seen in the castle courtyard, fighting the sentries!" The Moblin paused and smirked, a truly hideous expression. "Well, he's trying to, anyway."

Ganondorf smirked himself before his face shifted into a more serious expression. "Send all troops to his location!" he barked. "Alert the Darknuts to meet me in the throne room in ten minutes!" He turned and pointed at Davin. "Sunrider dude, go to Zelda's tower and stay there. If the Hero comes up there, contact me immediately!"

Despite the situation, Davin had to stifle a laugh; his use of 'dude' had spread through almost the entire ranks of the Dark Lord's army, until all of Ganon's minions were calling the Dark Lord and each other 'dude' at least once in every conversation.

As he ran up the winding stone stairs of Princess Zelda's tower, Davin let the laughter out, until it bounced off the stone walls, sounding like an entire audience giggling hysterically.

Princess Zelda heard strange, echoing laughter ascending the stairs of her tower, and grimly stood from her chair. Finally, it was time; Ganondorf had come for her, to make final use of her in his plan, whatever that was.

She wouldn't be going without a fight, though. Zelda planted her feet securely on the stone floor and held her hands together in front of her, charging a magic blast to unleash as soon as the Dark Lord opened the door.

Footsteps approached the door, and it slammed open. Zelda recognized her visitor only too late, after she had already loosed the fateful lightning, and she gasped.

So did Davin; the bolt of magic energy had halted in midair, perhaps a yard away from him. He stared at it; there was something you didn't see every day.

Then, as he moved further into the room, he realized everything was paused; Zelda stood frozen with an expression of horror on her face, not blinking, moving, or even breathing.

"What's going on here?" he wondered aloud.

"You!" an irate female voice snapped, coming from somewhere above him. "You're the one who's been messing up my story!"

Davin froze, looking around for the source of the voice.

"Up here, dimwit!" the voice snapped.

Davin slowly looked up, and then he saw The Fangirl. The Fangirl was, well, a girl, one he had never seen before. She sat in a chair-shaped cloud, floating above the action, and in her lap was a laptop, one which sparkled if you looked at it from the corner of your eye.

Davin frowned; hadn't he once used that description as a joke in a parody of his own?

"This," The Fangirl said, ignoring his puzzlement, "is supposed to be a serious drama in which Ganondorf and Zelda fall in love over the course of his occupation of the castle. You, you interloper you, are screwing it up with all of your stupid jokes!"

Ah, Davin mused silently. A ZelGan story, that's where he was. He could live with that. At least it wasn't a GanLink story. Blargh!

"Well, it's not my fault," Davin said, craning his neck to look up at The Fangirl. "It's not like I wanted to come here. I was just walking through the campus one day, when I saw Ganondorf. I went over to see what was going on-"

"And you got sucked into Hyrule," The Fangirl interrupted irately. "Yes, I know. That was supposed to be my entrance into the story. Didn't you hear me yelling for you to get out of the way?"

Ye Gods! Not only was Davin in someone else's story, he was in a self-insert! How... existential.

"I was supposed to mediate between the two of them and get them together," The Fangirl went on, glaring down at him from her perch atop the floating cloud-chair. "And you ruined it!"

"Hey," said Davin, spreading his hands, "I'd be happy to leave. Just write me out of the story, and I'm gone."

The Fangirl sighed heavily. "It doesn't work that way," she said. "I specifically wrote the trip to Hyrule as one-way, so that the fictional version of me would be able to stay here forever."

"And where is 'here', exactly?" Davin asked. "There's gotta be some way I can get out of here."

"You're in my imagination," The Fangirl said, lowering her cloud-chair until she was nearly level with Davin. "And I think you're stuck here, because my imagination doesn't work on you. I have no idea how to get you out."

Whoa, mused Davin existentially. There's a plot twist.

"Since I'm not fictional," Davin said slowly, "you can't just imagine me out."

"Right," agreed The Fangirl. She held up the laptop. "This isn't an actual laptop; it's the manifestation of my creative will inside my own imagination; I type things in here, and they happen," she gestured at the room around them, "out here. But it doesn't work on you. See?"

She turned so that he could see the screen and typed in, 'The jerk who's ruining my story suddenly disappeared back into wherever he had come from.'

Nothing happened. Not even a flicker or anything; space-time remained stubbornly undisturbed.

"Huh," said Davin. "So, how are we going to fix this?"

The Fangirl shrugged. "If I knew how to get you out of here, I would have done it like three chapters ago."

Davin frowned. "Can't you write in another reality-bending laptop like the one you've got there? Y'know, one that makes things happen for real when you type them in," he added.

"I could..." The Fangirl said thoughtfully, "but what if Ganondorf got ahold of it? I'd have to write it so that anybody could use it, and if he takes it from you, we're all in trouble."

Davin frowned. "I thought Ganondorf was a product of your imagination. How could he do something you don't want him to do?"

The Fangirl gestured irately at the other young writer. "Ever since you showed up, things have been happening that I haven't written. Ganondorf is doing things I never wrote him doing, and so is Zelda. Link, oddly, remains totally under my control."

"Wait, you're making Link an idiot on purpose?" Davin said incredulously.

"Of course," said The Fangirl. "He'd just get in the way of the love story. How else is Zelda supposed to start seeing Ganondorf in a positive light?"

"I don't know," Davin shot back. "Maybe making him... not evil?"

"That goes against his character!" The Fangirl objected.

"Link being an idiot goes against his!" Davin objected right back.

The Fangirl waved one hand dismissively. "Link's personality is mostly dependent on the player or the writer. You're pretty much free to do whatever you want with him."

Davin had to concede that point.

"So," said The Fangirl. "Maybe your non-fictionality is rubbing off on the story; since you're real, you're making the story real just by being here."

Davin tried not to think about that too hard. This was making less sense all the time.

"And that," The Fangirl went on, "is why things are happening by themselves. I have less and less control over the story the longer you're here. Pretty soon, I'll only be able to affect minor stuff."

"So what am I supposed to do?" said Davin.

"Run the story to its end," the Fangirl replied. "Get Ganondorf and Zelda together, so that everybody lives happily ever after. Maybe, once the story ends, you'll go back to the Real World."

"I don't write ZelGan stories!" Davin said, pained. "I don't even read them! What am I supposed to do?"

"Relax, I've done this before," said The Fangirl. "I'll show you what to do. The characters won't be aware of me, since this isn't one of those stupid 'breaking the fourth wall' stories where the characters are aware they're fictional and the author is a part of the story."

Davin was existentially miffed about this; he'd written just such a story once. Or was writing one. Wait, too existential; scratch that last part.

"Okay," said The Fangirl. "I'm going to unpause the story in a minute. Just do what I tell you to do, and we'll both get out of this without screwing up the story too badly."

Davin heaved a deep sigh. Too late.

Author's Note: Major thanks to all the readers and reviewers. It's great to see that most of you are having as much fun with this as I am. This is a nice break from the kind of thing I usually write; very stress-relieving. Davin the Dark Side Comedian will return in 'Love? Blecch!', coming soon.