.

Ch 03—Ganon and an Unrelated Fanboy (Part III/III)
-:-:-{ Vol 01— The Knightly Way Thoust Finds an Assembly }-:-:-


When Aryll was eight years old, her kid neighbor Joel had dared her to break into a monster crypt. The crypt was tucked behind the forest of mystery on their island back home in a place everyone avoided for fear it was haunted. Joel asked her to bring something back from the crypt as proof she'd gone in (Proof or it didn't happen, as he'd say). Though her feet quaked in fear of the monsters she thought to be spying from the shadows as she stole her way in, the only monsters she did find at the gravesite were the dead skeletons lying in half buried heaps of cold soil. The skulls looked too heavy to carry out, so instead she picked up a rather large and round wild black plant at the site. Fortunately, it was easy to pick.

Unfortunately, the plant turned out to be a large bomb flower. Immediately it triggered as she plucked it off the ground, and as her heart raced to its quickening flash, her furious feet delivered her to the cliffside where she hurled it down into the sea as far as she could. This would've been the end of the matter, if only upon opening her eyes there hadn't been an enormous royal schooner lazing in the water where she'd sent the bomb. She watched, gohma-eyed, as it combusted the ship into splintered halves that sank along with her slackening jaw.

Though the passengers had at the time been frolicking in town over at Gillian's Bar—lucky for her, The Queen of White Wolves as she found out it was called still turned out to have cost more than everything on the island combined.

She knew from the moment the explosion went off she'd be in trouble. Long before the crossed arms and downward stares, the disapproving whispers, deafening scolding and endless grounding, revoked privileges and confiscated wildberry fruit cake, she knew. She remembered very clearly the feeling in the pit of her stomach, like it was her insides blowing up along with the ship.

It was very same feeling she felt now, 'THE SWORD' broken in hand.

Colin and Aryll both stared from it to the Headmaster statue that had suddenly morphed into marble Pinocchio. Like the calm before a storm, a moment of silence dominated the Weapon Hall as what had just happened set into their heads. Then like impending shower water a moment after the knob's been snapped on, came the deluge of panic.

"Ooooooooooooooooooooh!" Though Aryll was the one clutching 'THE SWORD' fragment in shock, it was Colin's groan that rang out across the hall. "I knew this was a bad idea, I knew it! I told you so!"

"I-it's okay," Aryll fidgeted with the splintered half. "W-we can still fix it. Do you have any glue?"

"Glue?!" he cried. "You want to glue 'THE SWORD' back together?!"

"Well do you?!"

"Why would I?! Of course not…wait, actually I might have some."

"Really?!" A pang of excitement colored her features, and then her brows rose. "Wait…seriously? Why do you have glue?"

He shrugged as he fished around in his knapsack. "I wanted to glue some motivational pictures up in my locker."

"Motivational…pictures?"

"Yeah! Wanna see? They're pictures of Li—"

"—just shut up and give me the glue." I had to ask, she thought.

"Uh, you're welcome," he frowned, handing it to her.

She stalked briskly up the steps and stopped before her artistic masterpiece, the new Headmaster Pinocchio, hands on her hips. The broad reach of his robe rolled down before her at thrice her own width, and he glared down from double the height as though foreshadowing his displeasure with her behavior (Aryll could almost swear to the disapproval radiating down from those stony eyes). She grimaced, smacking her hands together in plea with a slight bow of her head. "Forgive me, sir! Allow me, to restore your nose!"

'THE SWORD' which was now better referred to as 'THE NOSE' stuck out several feet above her head like one of those high tree branches that taunted her with its apples out of reach. (It's too bad she didn't have a grappling hook to challenge 'THE NOSE' to tug-o-war.) Not that this was any problem for Aryll, she always got those high apples down one way or another, even if it meant getting a delightful mix of poison ivy, beetles, and bird poop in her hair. It looked like she was just gonna have to buckle up and do the same here. She patted the Headmaster's stone robe. "Please excuse me, sir." Then she stuck the glue in her pocket, gripped the man's arms and leapt, catching her foot on a stone fold in the robe to prop herself up, thus climbing his sculptured form like it were a stone tree.

"W-what do you think you're doing?!" Colin howled up in alarm.

"What'dyou think I'm doing?" There were enough stone crinkles in his robe for her feet to make use of as footholds, and she crawled up like a tree monkey until she sat cross-legged upon his head like a Buddha.

"Are you crazy?!" Colin hollered. "That's the headmaster statue! You can't climb onto his head, you could get cursed for that!"

"If you've got a better idea, then come up here and try it yourself!" she snapped. At this he gulped and hung his head, the coward.

THE NOSE, she realized in relief leaning over to clasp it a foot or so down, wasn't too sharp that her fingers would get sliced off from clutching it (the blade was surprisingly dull in fact), and she sucked in a breath as she twined them around. Colin watched with the nervous twitching of someone waiting for the start of an exam.

She was going to snap his nose clean off. On the count of One Lanayru Sun, Two Eldin Moons, Three Faron Trees! She wrenched at it like she was trying to get one of her neighbor's nutty pet pigs out of the toilet, but THE NOSE wouldn't budge anymore than Zeffa's head from a basin of fish. Was THE NOSE so attached to its newfound status as a part of the headmaster's face? (She had no idea swords could be such status climbers!) Well that was just too bad!

Meantime Colin, the helpful chap, was busy chattering on his fingernails. Aryll glowered down at him. "Are you gonna come up here and help, or just stay down there gawking?"

He trembled like she'd just suggested diving off a cliff. "I…I think it's better I don't touch anything…"

Aryll scowled. Some help he was…guess she was gonna have to do everything herself. Rolling up her sleeves, she whipped her always reliable rubber scrunchie off her wrist, wrapping it around the steel of the blade as a kind of grip. Back home, when the lid on a bottle wouldn't open no matter how she twisted and pried (like it was a conniving little creature bent on thwarting her every effort), she'd employ the help of this magic band to make certain her ten thousand amp pull couldn't help but snap off the lid.

She rolled her clavicles and cracked her knuckles like a seasoned brawler ready for a tournament fight, and the war-cry of a Lynel dislodged from her throat as she concentrated her force into one all-charged yank that lo and behold—snapped THE NOSE clean off—but in the process sent her spinning backwards off the statue and careening along the floor until her head thudded against the back wall.

She lay in a dizzy heap on her back catching her breath and her bearings when Colin called somewhere at her rear, "WATCH OUT ABOVE YOU!" Her eyes snapped open to find twenty feet or so above her head, THE NOSE (well, Ex-Nose now) weighing down the horizontal blue banner, having lodged itself there after she'd lost her grip on it. Peeking through the torn gash, she spied the giant spirit orb that'd been nestling there as it emerged from the banner like the moon during a solar eclipse—except it was about to roll off the banner and eclipse her face. Aryll shrieked and rolled over fifty quadrillion times slower than she would've liked, cringing at the THUDD that hit the floor inches from her ear, and trying not to think about how she'd almost been splattered into a pancaked mural on the floor. The Master Orb, as she dubbed her nefarious assailant, was escaping from her with a posse of smaller spirit orbs that had evidently rolled down from the banner in suite with their leader. Aryll sprang to her feet and stormed after the Master Orb, glowering into its fish-eyed reflection of her. She couldn't believe it… this thing had almost done her in?! "You stupid Orb!" she shouted at it like a parent scolding a preschooler for breaking their favorite vase. "How dare you almost squish me like that! Don't you know an up and coming knight of incredible valor and worth such as myself should never be forced to succumb to such an untimely demise as THAT!" On the word 'That,' she reared her leg back like a catapult and kicked her raging foot straight into the Orb.

To her surprise, either the Orb was ten times lighter than she'd envisioned, or her foot had suddenly gained ten times the strength (or she really did have the super strength of Ganon) because the giant orb rocketed across the room at an exponential of the speed she was expecting, striking through the posse of smaller orbs scattered in front like they were balls in a game of pool—and at once the airborne orbs joined their leader in a chaotic shot straight into the backs of the Headmaster statue and his royal comrades positioned left and right, capsizing them like bowling pins in a perfect strike. In the following five second span before Aryll could get a coherent sound out of her throat, the fallen statues tumbled upon one another down the stepped pedestal, straight into the rows of statues lining the center aisle that ran the length of the hall. Like dominoes, they knocked over one after another and shattered, leaving their crumbled arms to smash to their fate upon the floor along with the weapons they held which, almost suspiciously, also broke. A long and painful instant later, the Weapon Hall had been reduced to nothing but rubble, a mess of marble busts and mangled limbs among shattered weapons after a battlefield fight. The victor of the fight? A highly bewildered Aryll.

Now, Aryll had a decent amount of experience making messes (probably enough experience to be hired for it, in fact). She'd made plenty back home while trying to discover her grandma's secret ingredient in her elixir soup by testing everything edible (and inedible) she could hurl into a flaming pot, resulting in the rainbow-colored combustion of the kitchen. But even that, though she'd been scarred at seeing her grandma's usually gentle face turn into an incarnation of Volvagia for the first time, still couldn't have prepared her for this.

Aryll and Colin stared in silence, slowly taking in the wreckage like ice cold water trickling down their backs.

Colin was the first to crack.

"We're dead. We're dead! I'm dead. Father is going to kill me when he finds out about this…" He clasped his head and tossed it about as though it were caught in a beehive, while Aryll stood beside him like a mute donkey after being kicked down a hill.

"…going to get kicked out before classes even start and get written into Hyrule Historia textbooks as the worst, most pathetic excuse of a student in the history of the kingdom, then become the laughingstock of the land when they start gossiping about it on the streets…"

Aryll shook her head to snap out the delirium before the malarkey he was spewing seeped into her ears and messed up the state of her head any further. At present, the inside of it was already looking about as chaotic as the Weapon Hall itself.

She called to Colin to snap him out of his mania, "Hey. Hello?" But he seemed to have gone deaf.

"…never be able to get a decent job, and then I'll starve living off cleaning toilets at the Stock Pot Inn…"

"…hey, listen to me!"

"…and, and then I'll NEVER GET TO MEET LINK!"

"HEY FANBOY!" she hollered an inch from his ear.

He sprang back with a start. "Will you stop calling me fanboy?! I have a name you know, it's COLIN!"

"Okay Colon—"

"—Colin! Don't downgrade me to a punctuation mark! How would you like to be a couple of dots on a page, like an Ellipsis—"

"—whatever! Save your sobbing for later, we have to do something about this!"

"Do?!" He sounded ready to toss her out a window. "What'dyou wanna do now, spend the next three hours gluing all the statues back together?! No—don't answer that! After what you did just now?! I don't think you should 'DO' anything anymore!"

Aryll cringed, like he'd just told her she smelled like fungal cabbage. "What's that supposed to mean?!"

"What do you think?! Take a GOOD look around! The state of this entire room is thanks to your desperado kick!"

Her foot drilled the floor as her cheeks resisted the urge to flush with shame. "Don't…don't blame me! That crazy orb went flying practically on it's own! I mean, I knew I was exceptionally strong as a knight, but even I didn't think I had that kind of super strength!"

He smacked a hand to his forehead so hard Aryll thought his head would knock off. "Don't you know anything?! Spirit orbs react to emotions when touched! Your angry kick supercharged it!"

Aryll gawked like a newbie realizing the sandwich she'd just bitten in had been stuffed with a dead beetle. "Wha—whaaaaaat?!"

Colin crinkled his brows, staring at her like she was more hopeless than a Goron trying to fly. "Look just forget it. There's nothing we can do now anyhow! Once the assembly ends and classes start, everyone will be in here to see this mess!"

"Well…we have to do something!"

"Yeah!" he grimaced. "The only thing we CAN do at this point—go report it!" He turned to stalk towards the door but Aryll caught his arm.

"Are you crazy?!" she squeezed his wrist. "You want to send us straight to our graves?! They could fry us up like bird thighs and eat us for lunch, or or wring our necks with necklaces made from the bones of stalchildren…I mean who knows what kind of punishment they'll dish at us?! We'll be in SO-O-O much trouble!"

"Correction…" he articulated breaking from her wrist, "…we're ALREADY in trouble!" Aryll winced as his voice echoed throughout the hall. "Everything's broken beyond repair, there's nothing we can do but take what's coming in stride!"

She picked up the rapier from their fight, the last remaining weapon that was still whole. "Not…everything broke, see?"

His glare at her was interrupted by the sound of footsteps outside the door, and both their hearts nearly thumped to the floor.

Colin, the model knight, instinctively leapt behind Aryll. She glanced over her shoulder at him with a snort. "Oh…?" she droned, "What happened to 'we should report this!'" She snickered. "…you're scared of getting caught after all, aren't you?"

"N-no…" he snaked a trembling boot out from behind her. Then the footsteps started back up, and he yelped like a hysterical guay. "…okay fine, yes yes!"

"So then, you don't want to report this, am I right?"

"I…I didn't say that! Just…it'll look so much worse if we're caught in here like this!"

"Uh-huh." Her lip was a tad smug as it coiled.

The footsteps were amplifying outside the door both in volume and frequency.

"Here's an idea," she whispered, "how about we get out of here first, then continue this argument somewhere where we're not liable to a bust-in at any second!"

"They're right outside the door," he breathed. "How exactly do you wanna get out?"

Aryll pointed to a side of the hall that was three-fourths glass going up, with a sunny courtyard waiting on the other side.

"But…" Colin clamored, "…there's no door!"

She picked up a stone foot and hurled it through the glass, bursting a hole open the shape of a jagged pointed star. "There is now."

Colin gaped from the hole to the maverick that had made it.

"What?" she shrugged. "Everything in here's broken anyway like you said."

Behind them, a muffled voiced filtered in from the outer hall. "Did you hear something crash just now?" There was shuffling, and a jiggling of the knob. "…I think it came from the Weapon Hall…"

They didn't hear a word more. Like the model knights they were, a single alarmed look passed between them before they darted through the starry crack like rabbits to the woods before an impending storm.

They didn't look back.

o | O | o

On a fine early morning school day as the birds chirped, two students were making a freak scramble along the outskirts of their new school after fleeing the collapse of their latest locale.

The two scurried as far as their legs could carry, but though the distance between them and the site of the wreckage grew, a cloud of guilt loomed overhead with unfading might as though anchored to them like a balloon. In the hanging silence, their heads filled with opposing thoughts on what their knightly little selves should do faced with this sudden ordeal (for though they were victim to the same cloud, their plans of action couldn't differ more).

"We should go back." Colin broke the silence first. "We should report what happened. That's what model knights would do."

"Uh, hello?!" Aryll caught her breath as she slowed to a tread. "We just got out of there and you want to go back?!"

He frowned. "Yeah? Well what's your brilliant idea?"

She pursed her lip, fiddling with her sideburns. "Well, we could…just go to the assembly and forget that all happened?" Her cheeks puffed with sheepish rouge as a cold drop of sweat trickled down her brow. Sure, it wasn't the most knightly thing to do, but it was better than turning in just to get booted from being a knight in the first place. After all, if the rumors about the severity of the staff turned out to be true, there was a serious chance they'd be expelled—before she'd even made it to her first class no less! She couldn't let that happen. Besides, what was being a knight all about, anyway? Her brother could detonate powder kegs in temples, drop into a ceremonial grounds unannounced from a catapult and steal rupees from anywhere under the sun and still get called the best knight around, this was nothing compared to that!

Colin didn't seem to agree. His jaw shot out as though the bogusness of her idea had exploded an octomine in his mouth. "Y-you can't be serious! H-how could you even suggest such a thing!" His fingers rubbed at the nape of his neck in a nervous twitch. "And besides, even if we wanted to, we still have no idea where the assembly is!"

Aryll planted her hands on her hips. "Not if we ask someone for directions!"

He frowned. "Oh really, and who exactly are we gonna ask?"

She grinned, thrusting her finger at a tree up ahead, where a single boy reclined in a branch like a lazy sloth. "Looks like we finally got a bit of luck, aye?"

Colin glanced towards the tree, and balked like it was infested with redeads. "NO!" He jumped in front of Aryll like an opposing teammate intercepting a goal.

She scowled. "What's your problem!?"

"Don't talk to him!" he hissed. "I know that kid and he's trouble! Trust me, it's better to avoid contact!"

Aryll rolled her eyes. This kid was a real pansy all right. Back home, she ate annoying bullies and all their unoriginal insults for lunch. "Please," she drawled. "I got this. Watch the pro at work. Okay?" She stalked to the base of the tree, cocky hands upon cockier hips. So, a troublemaker huh? No problemo, she knew how to deal with those. You just had to show em who's boss.

To her, curled up in the tree, he looked remarkably like a lazy monkey she'd seen in town, and so she called "HEY MONKEY KID! YEAH YOU UP IN THE TREE! WE NEED DIRECTIONS TO THE AUDITORIUM, PRONTO! CAPICHE?"

Colin smacked his forehead in dramatic fail. He watched as the boy in the tree stirred, tousled brown hair swiveling towards them along with a pair of mischievous green eyes that landed inquisitively down on Aryll, and then familiarly on him. Then came the snigger he knew all too well. "Well if it ain't Colin! That your new girlfriend? She's as butt—ugly as you are!"

Aryll's jaw plummeted as she felt the cockiness at her hips morph into the fury of her fists, throbbing to smash that mad monkey out from his cozy little perch. "WHAT WAS THAT?! YOU—'

"—Shut up Talo!" Colin cut in, catching her arm before she could burn down the tree. "You're a freshman too, why aren't you at the assembly?"

Talo ran his hands through his hair as though it were the fine silk hair of Hyrulian royalty. "Ha ha. Well see, some of us V.I.P.s don't need to go to boring assemblies for the newbs."

"That's moblin crock!" Colin shot from beside Aryll's death glare. "Classes haven't even started and you're already cutting!"

Aryll leaned in. "Real nice friend you've got up there."

"Friend my butt," he whispered. "We were neighbors before we moved here. Remember I said I had a neighbor who'd go stomping around the neighborhood? That was him. He's always had it out for me, he used to stick skullwalltulas in my lunch and stuff."

Aryll crinkled her nose. "Sounds delightful. Reminds me of how my brother used to mix poe souls into my shampoo—do you have any idea what that did to my hair?!" Then she bit her tongue. She'd mentioned him again! She had to stop doing that!

Colin half-shuddered, and half snorted at the image. "Your brother eats brains AND collects poes? Are you sure he's not a minion of Ganon's in disguise?"

Aryll had to bite her tongue to keep from laughing. "He's probably the same breed of monster as the one up in the tree here."

Colin chuckled. "I wouldn't be surprised if Talo was one of Ganon's minions. His monster powers would explain why he hasn't been kicked out yet, considering he's repeating freshmen year and all."
She scoffed. "You mean he's new and already repeating? What a loser."

"Tell me about it. He's lazier than a spoiled cat. I don't know how he even made it into the Academy. I bet you he guessed the answers on the entrance exam, and passed from sheer dumb luck..."

She snorted. "Maybe I shouldn't bother asking him where the auditorium is after all. I'll bet he doesn't even know his way around since he's skipped so many times." They both proceeded to snicker in bucketfuls like miniblins beneath the tree.

"…HEY." Talo drawled down from his perch. "I can hear your idiotic gossip. Of course I know where the auditorium is. I got this whole place memorized."

Aryll whistled. "Oh really? Then where is it? We're listening."

"It's reeeeally hard to get to. You sure you two simpletons can handle remembering all the directions?"

"Just try us!" she retorted. Colin groaned.

"Ooookaaay, if you insist. Now, pay attention closely little cuccos…"

He sat up in the tree with the grin of a cheshire cat as Aryll whipped out a pencil and notepad from her knapsack. Colin whispered in a frown, "You're not seriously going to write down what he says…?" Her wrist answered by scrawling busily to Talo's words as Colin clapped another hand to his forehead.

"So," Talo's acclaimed documentary began, "even you simpletons should be able to see we're just outside the Foreign Cultures wing, which is obvious from the moose on the wall, right there." He pointed through the glass to where a moosehead hung staring out at them. Colin raised a brow at the moose, but Aryll was over questioning the tastes of the Hinox that had built the school, so she merely scribbled on in a thoughtless murmur, "Uh-huh."

"Uh…no." Colin interjected. "How is that obvious at all?"

Talo grinned like a genius before his ungifted peers. "Wow, you guys really don't know anything around here, huh?" He gazed down at Colin like he was dumber than the dirt he stood on. "Haven't you seen Big Bucha? Giant Kikwi? Kinda hard to miss even if you are blind? He's just outside the Foreign Cultures wing." He nodded back to the moosehead. "Big Bucha's just around the corner from that moose, though you can't see it from here."

"Fine, whatever," Colin heaved. "And this is important, why?"

Talo scoffed. "I'm getting to that you dunce. Shut up and listen. Anyway, from Foreign Cultures, you bang a left, then a right at the next hall, then left again, then go straight till you get to the big double doors... "

Colin groaned. He could already tell these directions were going to be unnecessarily winded and long, like the line for getting Croissants from Wheaton & Pita in town at noon.

"…go straight down that way until you hit the end, then you gotta go right again and then straight until you see the library on the left, then keep going that way until you see the giant spiral staircase and then bang a right before you hit the double doors at the end of that hall…"

From his left, Colin heard the sound of Aryll's profuse scribbling on her notepad as their enlightened host blabbered on like a glitched out gossip stone.

"…take the stairs and just outside there, you'll find a huge set of doors leading into a massive room. That's Auditorium C, where they're holding the assembly." He smirked. "Better hurry though, I think they lock you out if you get there too late. Oh, and tardy students have to vacuum the school in a fairy jumpsuit strapped to balloons. "

Colin glared. "You're a big fat liar Talo."

Talo's brows drifted up in lazed amusement. "Am I though?"

"Let's go, Colon." Aryll folded the paper and stashed her pen.

He scowled. "Call me Colon one more time and I'll start calling you Ganon for the rest of the year!" His arms crossed in defiance. "And I am not taking directions from him! I wouldn't follow his lead even if I was starving alone on Eventide island!"

"Oh, so you have a better lead?"

"Are you kidding? A broken compass needle would be more reliable!"

Aryll frowned, eying the moosehead through the glass. It's not like there was anyone else around with directions to give at the moment. Who else was she going to ask, the moose?

Her hand pressed against the seamless glass, and she was struck with the reprise of an earlier problem: where were they going to find a door?! Thanks to the inane school designer that considered cow heads to be more important than emergency exits, re-entry might be an issue.

She spun back towards Talo. "Hey monkey face! One more question. How do we get back inside the school from here?"

Colin rattled at her like she'd put on a pair of headphones in the middle of a lecture. "Did you even hear anything I just said?!"

Talo's snicker wafted down from the tree. "So Colon and his girlfriend Ganon need me to escort them to the door? What to do…what to do…should I help them?"

Colin scowled. "See?" he whispered, "You actually want to trust that thing?"

"Hey!" Talo called back. "Check out the fountain over there!" His lazy index pointed over to a rusty fountain sticking halfway out the wall of the school. Aryll and Colin both grimaced as their eyes fell on the gnarly fountainhead of a horned demon unicorn sticking out the top. The interior decorator of the school, it seemed, never ceased to amaze with his designs (he'd really outdone himself this time—the fountainhead looked like it came straight from Ganon's Jacuzzi.)

Aryll scowled. "What, you want to show me more of this school's ugly decor? I've seen enough of it already, trust me." She vaulted into the dry fountain for a closer look at the demon head, leering down at its ugly green teeth (they looked almost as bad as her brother's did after the carnivorous feast of the century he had on his thirteenth birthday!)

"Twist the horn."

She glanced over at monkey face. "What? …why?"

Talo shrugged. "It opens a secret door back into the academy."

Colin scowled. "As if we'd fall for that!" he leapt in beside Aryll, disregarding the demon's ugly-eyed gaze. "Just ignore him," he whispered. "It's a prank, he pulls this sort of thing all the time."

"It's not a prank, I'm serious," Talo drawled from up in the tree with the mile wide smirk of a toad. "What, you scared?"

"In your dreams," Aryll shot back. Before Colin could choke out the G in Ganon's name, she'd yanked clockwise on the horn.

For a moment, nothing happened. Colin glowered at Talo. "See, I knew this was just a—praaaaaaagggghhhh!" The floor beneath the fountain opened up before he could complete the word, and Aryll and Colin found themselves tumbling into darkness. Talo's haughty laughter echoed out behind them, floating like a specter in the air high above their heads as they fell out of sight.

"Have fun in the twilight realm, losers!"

o | O | o

At first, when the ratcheting twists and turns of being dropped down a shoot in the dark finally stopped (along with Colin's screaming behind her more overdramatically than a stray traveller getting snatched off by a great fairy), Aryll herself wasn't exactly sure where they were. She felt herself bounce against something soft and springy before landing in a heap on the floor, Colin piled beside her in a contortion of limbs over the head, like some experimental avant garde yoga pose inspired by a towel being shot out of a blender. She had to admit she was worried for a moment when she opened her eyes and found herself staring into the face of a giant Kikwi whose long mustache was tangled with her messy wad of hair. Then she realized it was the stuffed mascot—Big Bucha as Talo had called him—that she and Colin had passed in the hall earlier that morning, and that it had likely cushioned their fall. She confirmed this by glancing up in time to catch a trap door in the ceiling close high above their heads.

Despite the manic detour through the slide from hell, it would seem they really were back inside the building. Talo, despite every bit of shade in the crinkle of his grinning lips, hadn't been lying after all.

That meant his directions could be legit.

On the other hand, though Colin staggered to his feet at barely a meter's distance, his brain hadn't quite landed on the same page as hers. He felt with trembling fingers at his face as though afraid it had morphed into a jack-o-lantern. From there, it took him five minutes of seeing cows on the wall before he could be convinced that they hadn't landed in some alternate version of the school in the twilight realm. As Aryll hiked on ahead with Talo's directions, he snapped at her like a wounded dog being lead into an oven after escaping a flood.

She did her best to ignore him, but it was like trying to tune out a yappity yack with no off button. The unwanted conscience trailed like a chained ball at her back, making certain she was drilled through the ears with the nasty echo of her own worst thoughts.

"This is a bad idea you know. Like all your other bad ideas."

"Shut up."

"Last time I said it was a bad idea you ignored me, and we all saw how that turned out."

"Shut up."

"You should rip up those directions, forget the assembly, and report what happened. That's what any respectable knight would do. They'd own up. You would too, if you had any ounce of that in you at all."

"Shut up."

"You snap at me for trying to read a map in Ancient Hylian, but trying to follow Talo's bag-o-lies directions, that's fine! Even though he's probably sending you into the Academy's Catacombs or worse!"

"Stop talking."

"How can you walk away and act like nothing happened back there?! Don't you even care?! No, no you don't! You're not even listening to a word I'm saying!"

That was the last straw. She whirled and spat into his meddling nostrils. "No one's forcing you to stick around! Go on then, go report what happened in the Weapon Hall and sink us both into trouble! You've been nothing but a pain all along, so why not make things worse and get us both kicked to the curb while you're at it!"

He glowered. "Oh, sure, act like everything's my fault! Your thinking's so backwards, I'll bet you haven't even realized yet the one in serious trouble isn't me…it's only gonna be YOU!"

Aryll's mouth stopped like a shut valve. She pivoted on her heel and stalked off without a word. Mother of Din, did he think she was an imbecile? Did he honestly think she wasn't aware of how deep her neck had gone swimming in the muck? No, he had to rub the rock salt into all her open wounds. Why couldn't he take a hint and get lost!

Colin watched as she thundered out of sight down the hall, conflict in his fidgeting boots on whether to follow or to split. He shook his head and let his boots veer him ninety degrees around, striding away down a separate hall in an attempt to ditch. After a pause of (what I suppose was) great deliberation however, he swiveled around and doubled back at twice the pace until he was thumping again at her heels.

When she heard his incessant step behind her once more, she groaned. "Why are you still following me?!"

"Maybe, because I'm worried your bad ideas are gonna get you into more trouble!"

She scoffed. "Worried about me, huh? Could've fooled me! You're just so lost you don't know where you're going!"

He scowled. "Yeah I'm lost! But at least I can admit that! At least I can tell when I'm being stupid!" He strode up and seized her arm, forcing her to look him in the eye. "Why're you so stubborn, huh? You're just gonna make things worse for yourself! It's your lying that sent me on a wild goose chase to the weapon hall, your bad judgement that broke everything in it, and now your complete madness trusting in the directions of someone I can vouch for as a well-known liar! Maybe I'm weird, but you're a total mining facility wreck! Why can't you get a clue?!"

He tensed as he held her arm expecting her inevitable 'shut up' to slam him through the skull, but instead was met with only silence. Her eyes were blank when they met his. Are you done? they said.

Gingerly, he released her arm and stepped back.

"…okay," he murmured, "I'll shut up now."

o | O | o

As Aryll's impeccable sense of navigation winded them through the halls (now that navigator and follower had been switched), Colin shadowed her in silence. He said nothing, not a word, even as Aryll meandered and met the same portraits they'd been passing earlier in deja vu encounters, even as they passed Big Bucha a second time, and the statue of the giant hand a third. It was like having a ghost at her back, and his silence haunted her even more than did his earlier scorn. At her every misstep, Aryll could imagine what he was thinking—Either Talo's directions were a bust, or her own navigational skills were, and her cheeks burned with the cracked pride that spilled the more she stalked around getting absolutely nowhere. Truly, she was an excellent navigator indeed!

Finally, upon passing a certain distinct dragon fountain for what must have been the fifth time (if she'd even been counting right), she whirled on her heel to glare at him—

"…if you've got something to say, then say it!" she spat.

He barely flinched, arms behind his head as though out for a stroll in the park. "I've got nothing to say."

"Like hell you don't! I'm such low grade trash that I'd even get rejected by a dumpster, that's on the tip of your tongue, isn't it?!"

He shrugged again. "Those are your words, not mine,"

"Don't pretend like you're not thinking it! Go on then, laugh! I dare you! Laugh at the pathetic loser!"

Colin's brows only crinkled in concern. "Look…maybe you should sit down for a minute. Get yourself some water from the fountain and cool off, alright?"

Aryll whirled on the marble blue fountain with a snarl, eyes pinning on the grandiose dragon coiled like a misshapen metal spring out the top. The dragon had a glowing orb in its mouth and jeered down at Aryll from its untouchable perch as though in pity at her sorry plight (or at least, that's what Aryll's eyes saw in her current frenzied vision of mind).

"Everyone's always making fun of me!" her index shot out at the dragon head. "Look at him, look! He's making fun of me too! See how he sneers?!"

"Uhm…" Colin murmured, glancing up at the dragonhead with a frown, "…I don't think it's Naydra fault he's got such a scary face…"

She vaulted into the fountain, splashing Colin as her feet dunked the basin coated in rupees (she vaguely wondered what kind of dumb wishes someone'd wasted their green rupees on by tossing in). At the base of the dragon statue, she craned her neck to glare into the eyes of the fiend. "You wanna fight?!" Her restless fingers caught hold of the lowest spike protruding like an icicle from the base of its back, and her soaked feet leapt upon it, proceeding to clamber up the dragon's tubular body by mounting one spike after another like rungs on a ladder.

Colin cringed, feeling a moment of deja vu creep through his spine. "…hang on, I really don't think you should climb…haven't you learned a single thing from what happened earlier?"

Aryll settled on a scaly coil of the body close enough to the dragon's head that she could punch the orb from its jaw. The orb glimmered a lapis blue within its fangs, radiating off the dragon's stone skin with a luster that reflected in Naydra's holier-than-thou eyes. That proud glint percolated beneath Aryll's own skin.

Her mouth triggered open, and Colin looked on in a daze as though he were watching a chair insult a desk. "You're a cocky beast, just like someone else I know, posing there all smug with that blazing orb in your mouth! I wonder how smug you'll look without this prized treasure of yours…"

She reached for the blue orb wedged between the fangs, but just as her arm was outstretched within inches, the orb faded like an illusion, and the dragon's wide-open mouth lunged in, clamping down on her arm. Aryll shrieked as though her hair had caught aflame, and Colin sprang back so far he slipped, and his ear tackled its way into the floor.

"W-what's with this…" she howled. "…crazy statue?! I can't move my arm!" The dragonhead had gone motionless the moment it'd decided on its new favorite chewtoy, and much as Aryll pulled her arm, it could not be budged from the dragon's hold.

Colin's feet splattered as he bounded into the fountain and called from the base. "You okay?! D-does it hurt?"

She whined. "No, but thanks to this hunk of hungry stone, I'm stuck!"

He stared up at her with a kind of exasperation, and her face paled to that of a freezard's. "…what?!" she hooted.

He shook his head. "…I was just thinking, maybe this is karma?"

Aryll bit the inside of her cheek, turning her grimace onto the watchful eyes of her stone captor. Though the glow of the orb was gone, they still gleamed at her with that infuriating supremacy.

She sighed.

"So what now?" She drummed her fingers, glowering into the eyes of the dragon, "You gonna ditch me here? Gonna go make that report after all?"

He leaned against the statue base. "Well I can't exactly report you since I still don't know your name. (And I'm not gonna tell them Ganon destroyed the Weapon Hall.)"

"Huh!" Aryll huffed. "Tough luck!"

Colin sighed. He grabbed hold of the lowest protrusion on the dragon's tubular body and sprang his way up the spikes as she had, until he was seated across from her on an adjacent loop.

"…you know," he tossed his feet over the stone coil to face her, "I've been deliberating this, and I think just maybe…I've figured you out." He leaned towards her, the flicker of a candle's flame in his eye. "…the reason you get so worked up making stubborn, dumb decisions is because you're desperate to prove yourself. You try to act all high and mighty but that's just a front, isn't it? To hide that you're actually…really insecure." He bent his head at her. "Am I right?"

Aryll was silent. When her eyes lifted into view, Colin nearly sprung off his perch at the force of her glare. A blink later found her glare diffused into a vacant sigh however, and she mumbled. "…always getting babied."

"…huh?" Colin blinked. She raised her head.

"I always get treated like I can't handle anything difficult, or remotely challenging myself. It's like I can't get credit for anything, and I'm just so…" she rubbed at the scales on Naydra's head. "…done with it. I have to become the best, to show them just how wrong they are!" Her face blazed like a crepe being flambéd for a moment, but then her shoulders slumped and she placed her chin on the dragon's nostrils. "…that's what I tell myself. But then I make a fool of myself and its back to being made fun of again." She held up Talo's directions for effect, crumpling and tossing them into the fountain below. "Rinse and repeat, it's like I'm cursed or something. Maybe I really am a lost cause, and I'm just in denial."

Colin regarded her like a scholar deliberating a complex poem. "…you're not a lost cause."

She snorted. "Oh yeah? What was it you were calling me earlier? A mining facility wreck?"

"Yeah well, I take back what I took back about you before."

Her brows drifted up. "…huh? Care to repeat that in Hylian?"

He leaned over, rubbing at the stone scales beneath his thumb. "Well you are rough around the edges, and you've got a reckless streak that lands you into trouble, but so what? That doesn't mean you can't shape up. If you've decided in your heart that you're gonna become a great knight, then do it! No one's got any business telling you you can't. It's your will, you determine who you are and what you become."

Aryll stared at him. It was like a chickaloo tree nut had suddenly sprouted a brain so big that it blocked the rain from hitting her face. She cracked a smile. "Hey, you say some pretty good things, sometimes!"

He frowned. "…only sometimes…?"

"….too bad," she sighed. "It's too late to do anything now. Even getting to the assembly is probably out."

Colin knitted his brow. "Yeah, my Dad's probably there right about now, wondering where I am…" he swallowed, fidgeting with a strand of his bangs, "…it probably doesn't help that he's one of the fencing instructors."

"Greeeeat," she droned, "You can tell him later how you were running around with the delinquent who remodeled the Weapon Hall with her magic brand of catastrophic fail."

Colin stared at her a moment like a cracked lantern he'd tossed in the garbage too soon, and he shook his head. "Actually, that wasn't fair, what I said before," he rubbed his neck. "About everything being your fault. It was my fault too. I had a hand in provoking you back there, and I wasn't much of a help either."

Aryll cast her eye at him curiously before deflecting his shake of the head with her own. "…Nope. Everything you said about me was right on the nose. I got defensive 'cause I knew that. It's like you said, I'm the one in deep trouble. The Weapon Hall's gonna get me booted, I just know it."

He lapsed into silence, and a moment passed before he raised his head. "Actually, you know what?" his eyes flickered, "I know I freaked out about it before, but now that the initial shock has worn off, the mess in the weapon hall probably isn't that bad."

"Oh yeah?" she droned with the enthusiasm of someone pretending a piece of stale bread was a fresh slice of cake. "Well unless you're trying to tell me you got psychic abilities that let you rearrange a room just by thinking about it, I'd say you're delusional. Even though it's a nice delusion, so thanks for that."

He shook his head. "No, I'm serious! The statues are one thing, but those weapons broke as soon as they hit the floor! If they broke that easily, their durability must've been terrible to begin with!"

"But you said only the best knights get to use the weapons in there. Wouldn't that make them valuable?"

"Yeah, I don't know." He ran a hand through his hair. "But I do know this. Honesty in a knight is respectable, it's got to count for something! If we're at least up front about it, we'll probably still get in trouble, but we won't get outright booted." He hopped down from Naydra with a splash, extending an arm up towards Aryll. "Let's go right now, and get it over with. I'll go with you and explain too. It'll be fine, you'll see."

Aryll gazed down at him like he'd forgotten his glasses were stuck to his face. "…maybe you forgot this," she droned, "but even if I wanted to, Naydra here isn't interested in letting me even take a dump in a toilet…huh?" She tugged on her arm and it slipped from dragon's mouth like soap. She stared.

Colin whistled. "See that? Even Naydra forgives you! That's got to be a good sign."

Aryll slid her butt off the coil of stone, tumbling into the basin of water below with the elegant splash of a turkey. Her head floundered busily for thirty seconds before her eyes found Colin standing beside her with his hand outstretched.

"Let's go." He spoke with a firm glint in his eye. Above his head, she could see the vision of the orb in Naydra's fangs had appeared there once more.

Aryll bit her lip as the water dripped from her glistening hair, feeling twice as certain she'd slip again after standing back up. "You really think an apology would be enough?"

The corner of his lip tugged up. "How many times have I been wrong today, compared to you?"

She chortled. "Okay okay, fair point we'll go!" Her hand reached for his, but at the last second, he pulled it away.

"—After…" he stared pointedly into her eye, "…you finally tell me your name?"

Aryll huffed. "Fine, fine." She leapt up from the basin, a slow grin seeping over her features like the water dripping down her chin. "Want to hear the full speech or the abridged one?"

"Speech?" he cocked a brow.

Her grin morphed into a radiant beam as she splashed out of the fountain and stomped the water from her feet. She cleared her throat. "Ladies and gentlemen! I introduce to you Hyrule's star upcoming knight! The one, the only, Ar—aagghh!" at the last moment she slipped and collided with the floor, as she'd predicted. Colin was laughing as she staggered up.

"Aragh?" he chortled, sloshing out of the fountain. "Well, I've heard worse names."

Aryll shook her head. What was she thinking?! It was a good thing she HAD slipped because she'd almost let something else slip that was far too important to be said.

She raised her eyes to Colin, took a deep breath, and spoke again.

"Llyra. My name is Llyra."

o | O | o


NEXT :: Chapter 04—The Legend of Llyra (Part I/II)


Author's Note:

Well that concludes what I guess was something of a prologue.

I wondered when I wrote the end of this chapter whether it worked within the scheme of a comedy, but I decided that the character development would be worth including, even if it meant not every scene would be funny. My hope is that it feels natural within the story.

I enjoyed writing the scene with Talo, the little troll. He's not the only one of his type joining campus either, haha.

Also, a thank you to Luck Kazajian and Ri2 who have been reading and reviewing, I really appreciate it. (If there are any lurkers reading, I would love to hear from you too!)

Comments welcome!

/~/ Farosie