What I'd first mistaken for a door was in fact just a grate that guarded a chest, which in turn Dark had already raided for a red rupee – and kept. Since I wasn't exactly short of them, I didn't say anything. He hadn't yet handed over the rupees he'd told me he found before I caught up either, but maybe he was just waiting.

The actual route ahead lay, once again, at the foot of the ladder, across the conveyor, and up a slope. Dark leapt down and ran up the slope, I leapt off and glided over instead. It didn't actually make too much difference.

At the top we met a barred door and another conveyor, also shipping odd looking parts along through another electrified barrier. Dark shrugged and left me to go on ahead this time, running up the slope this conveyor had and then tackling a Beamos that had two pedestals instead of one. Slicing each of them away appeared to prevent it from firing its laser at me, so three strikes brought it down and out, leaving the nearby lever on the wall safe to pull.

I heard the bars on the door retract, and I also heard Dark open the door. Little wonder he'd stayed behind this time! When I reached the door I noted that the time line here did not extend into the next room, instead marking the edge between old and new, shining clean and sandy dull. As Dark's portable Timeshift stone was not active, he'd naturally vanished into the technological past state, and left me on my own.

The room itself was on two tiers. The lower one punctuated by square platforms, some higher than others, some with rocks on. More of the puffer-fish monsters Dark had warned me about before were floating through the room.

He'd told me that they exploded when defeated, so rather than use my own bombs – which I could have done too, of course – I started luring them into positions where striking them would clear the rocks instead.

This cleared the way ahead to a ladder on the north side of the room where there was a chest, the kind of chest I usually got dungeon items in. Except it was empty, and a very aged, worn piece of wood left me the message that Dark had it instead.

"I don't suppose you'd care to tell me what you found?" I asked. I suppose really I should have asked if Fi had made it possible for us to talk to each other through the link we had, but I didn't think of that.

"Seems to be a ceramic jar," Dark's voice came back, sounding more like an echo coming back from a long distance. Which I suppose it was, just through time, not space. "Looks like it can spit out a gust of air for as long as you want. Fi thinks it can suck too, but we're not quite sure how yet. You wanna head over to the west side of the room by the way," he told me, his voice growing fainter. "I'm already on my way there."

I followed suit, using another exploding puffer-fish to remove the rocks in the way, and shove a crate down to make for an easier way up to this western ledge. At the top of the ladder were three large piles of dust, and behind them a door. If I'd had this jar that I'm sure Manic will recognise, I could have used that to clear them.

It's hardly the first time I've had to go digging in sandy areas though, so in short order I'd cleared it all out by hand instead. Well, why not? It worked, didn't it? There was the tell-tale puffing sound that told me Dark had used his stone to appear in my time as I finished up, then when I turned to him he pointed this... jar at me and sent a powerful gust of wind at me, sending the dust I'd cleared howling around me.

"Very nice, thank you," I said sourly afterwards. "Did you show up just to do that?"

"Naturally," he smirked. "And to give it to you. There isn't much use for it with all this technology around, the robots and stuff keep it well maintained. Maybe you'll be able to put it to better use if you find out how to suck!" he added jokingly, but with a clear edge in his voice. Dark definitely held something against me.

I didn't even bother to answer that, instead taking the door back to the large room I'd first found his directions in. This time, we were on a higher level looking down on the rest of the room, with a large crate nearby. That in turn was shoved aside to clear the top of the ladder Dark had turned me back from before, thus creating another short-cut.

We both poked around the room a bit looking at both times, and clearing dust with the jar, but there remained nothing we could do just yet – unless he could see something in the past that I couldn't make use of without a Timeshift stone, and he showed no signs of parting company with the one I'd used to make him. As far as I'm aware, he still has it, probably because it's a part of him. Or at least I assume so, it was apparently needed to make him.

So we headed back again, to the metal platform leading in all four cardinal directions.

"There's a switch there," Dark told me, pointing to a dust pile just to our left. "Was gonna trigger it, except that big crate there," he pointed to one half-buried in sand. "Isn't there in this time. And the dust there is thick and heavy enough that it isn't going to shift."

"Why didn't you just dig it up like I did back at the door?"

"Why don't you leave me to do my job my way, and I'll let you do yours your own way?" he retorted and wandered off, muttering to himself. I caught, "I don't know, try to be helpful..." before the echoes made it too indistinct to hear him.

Once the dust had been cleared away, much quicker with the help of the jar, and the crate shoved on to the pressure plate switch, the grate covering the west door retracted. Somehow, by coincidence, and for once I'm fairly certain it really was coincidence, Dark had managed to wander in that direction. Once again, he went on ahead without me.

"I kinda wish he hadn't kept doing that," Knuckles admitted. "But I think it stemmed from my own independence."

"You'd rather they were like my doubles?" Manic asked. "But they were me, and it's a thief thing with me."

"A thief thing?"

"Sure – when you're working together, you trust each other's judgement – at least until the time comes to divvy up the spoils. But since they were all me, that wasn't a problem. We all knew we could trust each other."

"Except for Vaati," Scourge pointed out.

"Vaati's been useful in his own way, don't be so quick to have a go at him. Sure, he was bad, and he doesn't really like it when I make him do stuff for me. He still resents what I done to him after all. But I reckon at least a small bit of me has reached him. Anyway. Tell the story, Knuckles. I wanna see what else happened with you'n Dark."

Once again, the following room was dull and dusty. Square platforms peeked out of the heavy covering of sand on the floor, looking like islands in their sandy sea – a metaphor that would later prove to be very accurate for later on, as it happened. Dark had once again returned to his own time, making it impossible to tell what he was up to without talking to him, but I wasn't all that concerned. He'd shown he could take care of himself too, even if he wasn't the best companion to have around.

I made my way from platform to platform, preferring to jump and glide over the sand than try to run through it now. I also had to avoid another puffer-fish that came close twice, an with two of the platforms having broken off metal spikes on, I also regularly blew them away with the jar. I didn't need it exploding – at least not yet, I reasoned.

A second one tried to harass me as I followed the only path I could to the corner of the room, where after blowing it away again I also blew away all the accumulated dust, uncovering a large Timeshift stone.

As before, the room was transformed completely by this. The broken off metal spikes turned out to be part of a floating platform with red and blue horseshoe-shaped things on the top. Where the sand had been was, once again, a bottomless pit of sand.

Little flying robot things replaced the puffer-fish, I assumed as a flying variant of the Beamos, ancient sentries for security. It was a mine after all, maybe other parts of this past time wanted to steal the produce?

Dark was on one of the magnet platforms, poking at the things on top. It looked like he hadn't figured out how to make it work yet, but I already had an idea, and I wondered if it had occurred to Dark yet. If it had, he was probably already regretting yielding the Gust Jar to me.

The jar didn't have much range to it before its effect petered out, but the sound was more than enough to get Dark's attention. Sending a blast into the top of these platforms carried it easily along its predetermined path, taking me back to the bars that had prevented me from reaching the other side of the room – not that there had been anything of note there in the present. A second gust of wind threatened to make Dark fall off his platform as the wind brought it over to join me. He gave me a hard look at that, but said nothing.

The jar was once again used on a pin-wheel mechanism above a door of bars that raised it, allowing us passage to where another two-tier Beamos awaited. Since the door only locked if I kept the jar's wind trained on it until it fully raised, Dark darted ahead to slay it for me. Interestingly, this Beamos moved about on its own, and not just the rotating in place the previous ones had done. It gave Dark a bit of trouble avoiding it until I sent a Skyward Strike at it to stun it.

While he finished it off, I now went ahead only to meet one of these flying sentries. Fi appeared from my sword and quickly informed me of them.

"This ancient security drone is armed with both a missile attack and flying bombs. Analysis suggests the missiles may be repelled with your shield, while the bombs must be struck in the proper direction, as denoted by the blue lines on them."

"And don't take too long about it either, or they'll blow up in your face," Dark threw down. "We met a couple of them before."

I don't really mention it much, but I almost never bothered to draw my shield unless I had to. I never really found many uses for it I suppose, and I did favour fighting with sword and fist. But I did use it here, guided by Fi's information and Dark's prompting. The single missile the drone fired was repelled simply by bashing it away, which reoriented it on the drone. Once struck, the drone dropped a pair of flying bombs, with lines on them. Striking those lines just once destroyed the bombs, leaving their remains to fall into the pit below, then repelling a second missile sent the drone the same way.

"I'm starting to wonder just what they mined here that needed to be protected so badly," I said aloud. "I've not actually seen any mining inside this facility, just conveyors with parts on them. Whatever it was can't have been important, otherwise it'd still be functioning today."

"Or maybe they just weren't maintained well enough and fell into disrepair," Dark pointed out. "Used up all they could find, so just left all the robots and drones here, and without maintenance, they just stopped working. 'course I have the present-day perspective, to me everything is fine. It's only you they're not working for, but that's not surprising – can't imagine anyone else who'd want to work for you."