UNITING THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH

Chapter 11: A Portrait in Oil

A dark brown Loftwing landed gently upon desert clay. Its rider patted it on the neck and slid off it to investigate a small rusted heap. Gondo knocked on the remains of an ancient robot with his knuckles and with a small tool. He gritted his teeth and grunted as he scraped the rust off the edges of a hatch and pried it open.

"Hmm. Looks promising." the brawny man said to himself, "Not as much sand in this one and the wires still have most of their insulation." He wrapped some leather straps around it, gathered up its hands and bound it up together. He strapped the heap to a leather rig on his Loftwing that he'd created just for this situation, which was a regular one for him.

Gondo had only ever revived one ancient robot; Scrapper, whom he'd let live his life in Faron with a new, self-created directive to care for the Master Sword. The mechanic had worked diligently in attempts to revive more of the lost technology, but it was an uphill climb. After studying areas shifted outside of Time with the Timeshift Stones, he'd been able to figure out how to get some of the old machines up and running in the present age, but hadn't any success, sadly, with the ancient robot civilization.

Scrapper had only needed a quick lubrication of his inner workings and some careful buffing with oil from the flowers that had once grown in this region that had gone extinct long ago – at least before Link had re-discovered the Surface. Now, there was a garden of the flowers, taken outside of Time, living by Hylia's Temple and a garden in the backyard of Gondo's home. Gondo kept and bred the flowers carefully to produce oil even as he used oil from other sources to lubricate both resurrected technology and inventions that he'd devised. The fossil-oil he'd found some wells of proved to be quite effective for many of his inventions, though he did not like the smoke that came off it when it burned.

The old family-robot had been simple to revive once he had the right kind of oil. The ones that Gondo found in the desert were proving to be stubborn. It wasn't the little guys' fault, really, it was the desert itself. LD-301S Scrapper had been kept up on Skyloft, in storage in the family home and shifted between homes, but in as favorable conditions as one could hope for, treated as a beloved antique. He'd broken down and rusted, but he didn't nearly have as many problems as the rusted robots down in the desert did.

The "wild" robots were in a fair state of preservation, given their age, due to the dryness of the desert (Gondo imagined that any robots that had broken down in the Faron area in the last Age would have rusted completely away by now due to the damp forest conditions), but the ravages of being in the open air even in dry conditions were still too much for them. Years of relentless heat had warped some of their parts, allowing sunlight and the occasional rain into gaps and fissures to destroy some of the more sensitive workings inside them. Of course, the grit and sand had gotten inside their workings and damaged them, apparently beyond repair, but Gondo still tried with models he'd found in the least damaged condition.

He'd left many where they stood, having taken a good look at them and seeing them too far gone for him to even begin to work with. He felt inadequate – particularly in regard to the more sensitive parts of them. He felt like he was a standard battle-wound surgeon or potion maker asked to crack open somebody's skull and take a look at their brain. Indeed, he knew that some of the little panels with a forgotten language written in lines, terminals and shimmering bits were, indeed, the brains of the robots. Many robots that he felt too far gone to save, he scavenged from for study. Gondo felt a little ghoulish when he thought about all the dissected "brains" upon one of his work-tables. He looked at them with magnifiers and special glasses, feeling hopeless to understand the lost technology of the gods. He did not think that he could assemble or reassemble a robot's "mind" anymore than he could create or reassemble a human mind. He was a "doctor" who worked with the guts, not the brains, even as he hoped he would find a body or two to resurrect like he had done with his little buddy, Scrapper.

His suspicion was that with most of the broken robots – the minds were intact while the bodies were not, especially since he could hear a subtle electronic hum when he was near them that dissipated upon the wind. Gondo couldn't tell if he was going crazy or if he was really hearing something. The delicate circuitry was busted in most of these models, so he'd heard that hum even with the most rusted and sand-scraped models that by rights shouldn't have had any "brains" left. The concept struck him through with horror and made him want to bring the bots back to life as soon as he could, if at all possible. Then again, he wondered…if any of the poor things had been fully conscious while trapped within their rusting shells, would they come back insane? Gondo was pretty sure he'd be insane after spending a few centuries stuck in the sand – even if he'd managed to spend most of that time in sleep mode. He didn't think Scrapper was conscious during the time he'd spent broken down and even then, he'd come to life mighty surly.

"Hey, girl," Gondo said, patting his bird's neck, "Let's land down there. We haven't seen the kid in a while."

The brown Loftwing circled and descended into the courtyard of the Temple of Time.

"Hey, Groose!" Gondo called, sliding off his steed. "Groose?" He received no response. He hadn't seen the kid's bright red hair upon descent – it's usually how he spotted him. This is the first time Gondo had been scavenging in this area for about a month. He liked paying Groose little random visits when he was around and seeing how his progress on fixing the Gate of Time was coming.

Gondo stared up.

The great gear moved, driven by smaller, black gears that were only halfway visible, suspended in the open air. The Gate of Time was working. It moved in a slow rhythm. Its surface didn't look much different from the last time he'd seen it – a huge clay thing with inscribed archaic symbols, the same color as the sands around it, only now, the cracks in it that had been glittering with little cubes of chronolite were whole and flat, tawny clay without separation.

Picking his jaw up, he stepped toward it. "Groose?" he called into the open air. That's when he felt his booted foot step on something. He looked down to find a large, round quill beneath it – the base of a big Loftwing flight-feather. It had a red and blue tip, was white in the middle and had a black tuft at the base - a feather from Groose's bird. If he hadn't noticed it, he wouldn't have seen the little note beneath it, held to the ground with a rock for a paperweight. Gondo picked it up, read it and scratched his head.

"Outta Time. _ Groose."

"Hmm," Gondo muttered, pocketing the note. He found a couple of small, black Loftwing body-feathers leading something of a trail up to the Gate of Time. Gondo ventured to touch it. His fingers caused a pulse of blue light to flow over the surface of the gear in patterns of lines and squares – not much unlike the etchings on the insides of robots. Gondo pressed, and while the light and patterns pulsed again, the Gate remained solid and his fingers remained in the present era.

Gondo knocked and tapped on the Gate and got the same results. "Maybe only the first user can use it then," he mused, talking to his nearby Loftwing for want of companionship. "Or maybe he did something weird with it and it only let him have a one-way trip. I'll miss him if that's the case. Not a bad kid – turned his life around right…"

Gondo mounted his bird and looked at the spinning Gate as she flapped off the ground. "I guess time will tell if he finds a way back."

"Go on! Get!"

"Waaahahahaha! Screee!"

"You know I ain't afraid of you! Get out of here you laundry-stealing moochers!"

Gondo came home to his place in the desert to find his mother very active in their backyard. The family home was a modest affair – a small house and a workshop both walled with adobe and roofed in corrugated metal (it kept the house cool and Gondo had figured out how to derive solar energy from it). The desert winds were dry, which meant laundry that was hung out between poles in the dusty yard dried very quickly. Even with the washing machine he'd built, keeping clothes clean was quite a chore, especially as they had to ration water out here.

And, of course, there were the local Bokoblins. They really weren't much of a threat. Link had cleared out the truly aggressive ones long ago, and most of them had been creatures of the deep past, anyway. The tribes of the creatures that were left, however, like their more warlike brethren, had a peculiar obsession.

Underpants.

Bokoblins loved undergarments. It seemed to be a driving force of their culture – insofar as monsters could have cultures. They wore tiger-striped and leopard-spotted briefs and loincloths that they spun and wove and dyed themselves. They also liked stealing from the laundry-lines of honest, hardworking Hylians.

This wasn't the first time that Greba had sighted them outside the kitchen or bathroom window trying to take things off the clothesline and had come out to beat them off with a stick. In fact, she kept a sizeable and sturdy rug-beater just for this purpose.

The Goddesses help you if you tried to panty-raid old Greba.

Gondo rushed up to his mother as the raiders ran off, sore and gibbering. "Mother! You aren't hurt, are you?"

"No, no. Nasty things. Oughta get me a sword. One of 'em nicked off with one of my sets of flower-print bloomers!"

Gondo imagined a red Bokoblin running around in his mother's lacy, puffy bloomer-pants trying to threaten their warrior-king Link with a club or a sword. He blinked – then he burst out laughing.

"What are you laughing about?" Greba said, smacking him in the ear, "That's not funny. It's too much trouble to go into town to trade and where else am I going to get another set? Your insistence on living out here for your busted old robots…"

"I got another one to work on. I really think I can bring this one back to life!"

"Eeeh. You could make a fine living closer to the city with your machines, but it's all about the robots with you. They're all busted. Hunks o' junk. The one was just the Goddess' luck."

"I'll be in my workshop if you need me. You take a rest. I'll take care of the red guys if they come back."

"Bunch of brutes! I can handle 'em fine on my own… don't need one of your dangblasted machines for that."

The truth was, despite her grumbling, Gondo's mother actually did like the machines he'd built to help them around the house as well as the things that were helping the people of Hyrule City and the other settlements. He knew that his mother just liked to complain – it was a hobby of hers and who was he to deny an old woman her hobbies?

He had to admit that she had a point about one of her favorite subjects of complaint – the notable lack of grandchildren in her life. Gondo had never had much success with women. He'd always found dating or even asking a lady out on a date awkward. Strangely enough, he wasn't into men, either – it wouldn't have created children, but Greba would have been pretty happy to see him bonded, anyway, just to have an expansion on the family. It had been a minor dream of hers to see her son at his wedding ceremony, engaging in a sealing of something non-mechanical, something of human passion - in nice, white clothes.

Gondo was more or less married to his work. He supposed that he created objects just so that he wouldn't have to create children. He didn't think he'd make a good father. His passions were grease, gears and gauntlets. Greba had remarked once that she wondered if she'd birthed a robot instead of a boy. Maybe one day, Gondo thought, he'd find the "right kind" of woman – one who shared his love of grease and gears – to marry and produce a passel of grandkids for his mother with, but he doubted it. Time was slipping away from him, after all.

He used a hook-staff to slide open the main skylight of his workshop. The desert sun illuminated sparkling legions of dancing dust-motes and glimmered off the edges of metal tools and works in progress. The workshop was larger than the house, with mostly open space. Large rectangular tables, some with tops of metal, some with tops of old, scarred wood stood in the center of it. A device resembling the ancient Beetle that King Link carried rested on one table. Gondo had upgraded Link's device years ago – along with many other things. The Beetle had excited Gondo the most, having only seen something like that in an old book of "fairy tales." It has been relatively easy to figure out how to improve its capabilities. He now wanted to build even better versions of the device and find a way to mass-produce them for the public. Such a useful little go-and-fetcher was tragic to only have a single unit of.

A rusty mining cart was overturned in one corner of the workshop. Gondo couldn't for the life of him figure out how to repair the unit that made it hover along tracks. He was thinking of modifying it by fitting it with grooved wheels and seeing if he could alter the old tracks to accommodate a simpler version of transport. Such things could be most helpful to people in regards to the moving of goods and even of passengers if he could figure out a propulsion system that didn't rely as heavily on the energies of Time… perhaps oil-combustion or steam… or elemental magic…

Another corner of the shop held the first printing-press he'd made. It was a bit clunky and the type had to be set by hand. He'd actually had some help designing that part of it. Wynra had developed some fonts with her unique artistic eye. Karane had developed a few clean, basic fonts of her own for him to forge into type for the press. She'd been very particular about that book on birds she'd been working on. Gondo had improved upon the press' design and a smoother-working press was in use in Hyrule City. It worked well for the Surface, employing simple technology where magic was not needed. – He'd already earned enough rupees for it alone that he did not need to worry about taking care of himself and his mother for the rest of their lives.

Gondo put much of his profit back into new work. He was a creative man, obsessed with the new – and the old – and a person in constant need of projects to work on.

"Muffin? What are you doing here? Shoo! Daddy's gotta work now. Get!"

The small calico cat that had been snoozing comfortably on one of the tables – right atop some of Gondo's drawn diagrams, rose in response to his nudging, arched her little back, yawned, and jumped down off the table. Muffin wandered toward the entrance to the main house. Muffin was not a remlit, the pet commonly kept by the people of the Sky. Remlits remained quite popular even on the Surface, where, in some areas, they took on a fierce nature by night that the remlits of Skyloft no longer were subject to. Muffin was a different species of small feline that were discovered to be quite common Surface animals. Easily tamed, it was as if they knew a bunch of saps who'd give them food and shelter just for being cute right from the start. Gondo wondered if Muffin's kind had been the pets of their ancient Surface-dwelling ancestors. She didn't turn at night, for what it was worth. Her behavior remained steady by day and night. It mostly consisted of napping in places where she ought not to nap.

Muffin had been scratching the bases of the mannequins again. Gondo kept a few simple wooden torsos on poles up around his workspace. They modeled shirts of chainmail and scale-mail. He'd made various improvements to the metals they were crafted from. This was part of his work for the Hyrule Surface Knights as well as the Skyloft Knights. He'd been trying for years to hit upon the right combination of strength and lightness. It was quite a dilemma. In order to be light enough so as not to burden a Loftwing in flight, armor had to be basic – the kind that could withstand blows from small monsters and the typical human fighter.

One shirt of mail was special and not of Gondo's making. It was one of the old Skyloft models and rested upon a painted mannequin with the locations of various bodily organs marked out on it. It was gashed on the right side, the result of one of the strong Surface monsters. It was study-material. The brave kid who'd died in it years ago didn't have a chance. From where the mail and been struck and torn, it was likely that not even the strongest of available potions could have saved him. Vital structures had been damaged and though he'd lived long enough to have last words, he had not suffered long.

Such was the danger on the Surface. Gondo had been given a description of the creature that had made the wound in the chainmail through to fragile flesh. By the mail, itself, he'd calculated the force it had taken to make such a blow as well as the angle at which it had been dealt. It was supernatural – as one might expect of the swordsmanship of an animated skeleton-creature with no muscle or sinew to keep it working, let alone wield its blade. Gondo had developed a simulation apparatus in the form of a metal, mechanical arm, powered by hydraulics, that could mimic such dangerous forces.

He remembered one time that he'd shown King Link and Queen Zelda its workings when they'd come to see him test the armors he'd been developing. As the mechanical arm, armed with a typical broad-bladed sword, slammed into a mannequin and test-shirt - their little boy and screamed and squalled. Gondo had apologized profusely, thinking the child had been frightened by the loud noise. The boy kept grabbing at his side and claimed that he had a stomach-ache. Zelda had to take him outside to throw up. Link said that he was sure his son would get a kick out of all the mechanical stuff. Their little girl certainly did. Gondo had suggested earplugs, for it got "a mite noisy" in the place sometimes.

When mother and son had returned, Gondo continued to feel sorry for failing to warn them adequately, for the kid looked pretty shaken - almost as if his machine had slammed its sword into him.

As it was now, the armors for the Surface Knights could withstand almost any physical force while being light enough to comfortably walk around and fight in. Visiting Skyloft Knights, however, were warned to be as much on their guard as any un-armored civilian.

Gondo had been making swords and shields for the Surface Knights, too – quite a lot of them lately. He'd also been getting orders out of the mining settlements in Eldin of all places. He had no idea there were that many monsters left that needed to be guarded against. That work was all basic smith's-work and he worried about it a little. He liked the idea that his wares were the best around for protecting people from the dangers of both Land and Sky, but he wondered… were Hylia's people on the way to becoming a people of conquest?

He laid his little rusted robot-buddy up on one of the wooden tables and proceeded to crack its hatch open to investigate its innards. He heard his mother come in just as he was scraping at tiny rusted gears with a fine pick-tool. He took a paintbrush dipped in flower-oil and gently brushed various areas, watching some of the rust fall away from the metal. It was miraculous stuff, this oil.

"How long are you gonna be in here?" Greba asked. "Do you want any supper? Getting' to be skin and bones, you are."

"I'll get a sandwich or somethin'. Say, Ma… we might want to go into town pretty soon to get you some new bloomers."

"Why? I've got plenty of underthings, just so long as the red brutes don't come back anytime soon. Too much trouble."

"Well, I think there's something I ought to tell some folk," Gondo answered, not looking up from his work. "You know that brawny red-haired kid who lives out by the temple ruins in the desert?"

"Yeah? What of him? Crazy as you, most like."

"He did it. Er… I think."

"He did what?"

"It, Ma… What he was working on, the Gate of Time."

"Are you trying to give an old woman a heart attack?"

"Not at all. I just dropped down over there today and there was the Gate, spinning and everything. It looked kind of dead…though. I touched it and nothing happened, but I found a note and it looks like wherever he went, he took his Loftwing with him."

"You don't say? Now, don't you get a fool-notion to go on after him."

"I won't, Ma. I'm not even sure what happened, just of the signs I saw. He might be back. He might not have ever left… he could have just flown off to get supplies or something."

"I'm too old for time-travel," Greba grumbled as she left the shop, "Unless it can make these old bones young again."

"Time doesn't mean much in the desert, anyway," Gondo called, looking back toward her silhouette with Muffin at her feet.

He rested one of his large hands upon the prone body of the rusted robot. For just a moment, he was sure that he'd heard and felt it hum.

END CHAPTER 11