Link and the diver walked round yet another corner. Link, who was beginning to sweat and pant more and more, was hoping, praying to every one of the three golden goddesses, that there were no monsters and the bumbling aquanaut had not led him into another dead end. He was beginning to question whether this guy was really trying to help him or if he was deliberately taking him on a wild goose chase to stall him. Maybe he was just feeling a bit seedy. After all, he got random strokes of dizziness and his forehead was beginning to feel like it was on fire.

Luckily, he started to cool down once he realised that the diver was not pulling a fast one. They finally stumbled upon a dead end with no monsters. Not only that, but the far wall had a pool ladder which went all the way up to a small alcove. It had round, metal stiles and white, thick rungs made of plastic.

"Here we are! The swimming pool, and by extension, my boss!" announced the diver. "Go up there if you want, and do what you need to do up there, whatever it is. I, on the other hand, can't go up there. If Clayton finds out I was cooperating with you, he'll mutantify me for sure!"

"He'll what?"

"He'll make a mutant out of me with that… that serum! That stuff is dangerous, I keep telling him, but all he sees is rewards, food, money and free stuff!"

Link wanted to react shocked, but what came out instead was a sick whine. "He's… I met him in the Ice Cavern! If Morpha manages to get to that serum, there'll be blood in the water! You go back to your post and I'll deal with the guy up there, all right?"

"Yeah, I understand. Make sure to warn him about Morpha because, if you're lucky, he'll be in a listening mood. If not… just do what you need to do to make him listen to you."

With that, the diver turned and sloped off back through the maze, leaving Link to face the ladder. He could do this kind of thing any day. He could do it with ease even as a child. However, it was going to be much harder after falling ill.


The ladder had to at least have about five dozen rungs. Just looking at where it went made Link feel physically sick, as did the poisonous breath from the crawling mutants. His left eye twitched from tiredness and his stomach felt like there was a storm going on inside.

"Link, you're definitely ill." Navi told him, "You need to take a break here, otherwise… who knows what could happen in there? You might pass out and then Morpha can do whatever it wants!"

"I can't stop now! Morpha is dangerous! It was probably what froze over Zora's Domain and if I let it hang around like this, the entire world will probably just turn into a giant snowball! I need to go up there and thrash it into froth before it freezes us all!" Link argued. He let out a burp of sour air before gripping at the thick rungs. He would have killed for a potion of some kind, but he had lent his bottle to Sheik so he could take some blue fire to King Zora.

The rungs were wet and slippery, as were the stiles, so Link began to think that this whole maze had been flooded at one point. How much water must that have needed? There must have been a worldwide water shortage until it went back outside somehow! Link's heart almost exploded a few times when he slipped from several dozen yards off the ground on both the wet rungs and the stiles and he almost chucked up at least three times but the terror of climbing this ladder was taking his mind off it pretty well. It was almost a shame when he got to the top because that meant he felt like hot rubbish again. A set of French doors allowed Link to see into the next room, the swimming pool.

It was really quite impressive. The water was so clear, Link couldn't even tell there was any in the first place. The floor of the pool was cyan, giving the illusion that the water was that colour as well. The walls were made of grey stone and the ceiling was red. A plastic desk faced the wall and a sturdy man sat with his sweaty back facing the French doors. Clayton.

TSSSSSSSSSSCCCCCCCCCCTH!

Link ran the Master Sword through the glass of the French doors with great force, bisecting them so he could neatly slide under them. The man on the desk turned around. He was the same man who Link had met in the Ice Caverns, only this time he was dressed in a tropical shirt, a pair of shorts and some flippers. To say his new look was rather silly was an understatement. He could have dressed as a clown and he would have looked like he was wearing a hockey mask and wielding a chainsaw by comparison. In fact, it looked like he was on holiday because he had a carved, wooden cup on his table with a little umbrella in it.

"You could have just knocked, you know!" the man mockingly complained, "And you're as white as a sheet, mate! You look like you've just seen a ghost!"

"I will see a ghost in a minute if you don't listen to me! That blob of flesh that was swimming about in the pool is Morpha and it is incredibly dangerous!"

"What? Pfft! It's probably just a chunk of meat that someone dropped in the pool years ago! Nothing to get worked up over!"

"No, seriously! It attacked us earlier on by bending the water into shapes! That thing will be the end of you if you're near water!"

"Water?" Clayton laughed uproariously, "Where in this room is there water? Point out one body of water in this dry-as-a-bone swimming pool… oh, right, yeah. Well, if you're serious, I have just the solution!" With that, he picked up his tiki cup and tilted it forwards to show Link the frothing, steaming liquid inside. "I have the rest of my serum in here! If that ugly sack of cells shows up here again, I'll drink it, get muscles on my muscles and-"

"Wait!" Link drew his new crossbow from his back and aimed it at Clayton's cup, ready to shoot it out of his hands. "Don't you know what that stuff does? You made it yourself! Whoever takes it transforms into a brainless monster!"

"Well, it's probably too late in that case!" whispered Navi to Link, who made the crossbow click.

Suddenly, Link heard the sound of water going down a drain. It came out of the fountain near the foreman's desk. Another tube of water was rising from the pump and was slowly straying closer to the honcho. "Hey! Behind you! There it is!"

The man scoffed in incredulity, just as the diver before him had done. "How am I meant to trust you when you're waving that thing at me? There's nothing behind me, is there?"

"No, it's after your serum!" Link shouted across the pool, "Drop it on the floor now!"

But it was too late. The tentacle clapped Clayton on the back of the head, wobbling his flesh like jelly and launching him to the side. "AAARGH!" he bellowed in a rather high pitched voice. Link watched in horror as the serum flew up and into the air, its cup spinning in circles like a propeller, red liquid spilling like wine and disappearing into the swimming pool. It spread like fresh blood, and the shark was lurking nearby. It was a large, red blob, about the size and shape of a football, surrounded by a light blue, round casing. Link and Navi were helpless to do anything about it as it swam around the red serum, absorbing it into itself as if it were its own blood.

Waves raved on the swimming pool's surface like a mosh pit. The nucleus inside of it rose and stretched erratically as the poison soaked into its membrane, infecting it, numbing its mind, powering it up.

The next event happened very slowly and creepily. First, four tubes of water rose from the pool, snapping physics completely in half.

Next, the tentacles transferred pints and pints of water into a big bubble, which the tentacles all connected to. Two red eyes peered out at Link, flashing like headlights. The whole thing looked like a great big jellyfish.

The Massive, Mindless Microbe of Monstrous Moisture.

MORPHA.


"Now look what you've done!" Link shouted over at Clayton, who didn't seem to be too effected at his mishap.

"Don't worry!" he shouted over the top of Morpha's gurgling water. "If that serum really does make people mindless, Morpha here will be as dumb as a stone statue!" The jellyfish turned towards him and narrowed its flashing eyes. "N-n-not that I mean anything by that!" Morpha wasn't buying it. It raised one of its whip-like tendrils out of the water and thrashed it hard into Clayton's side, flinging him sideways.

CRASH!

That was the last Link saw of him. The man was defenestrated, thrown out of the wall-sized window on the side. "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGH!" Triangles of broken glass poured all over the place.

Link was about to run and look out to see where he landed, but he had bigger problems. The monster's nucleus shifted into one of its lower tentacles, which rested itself on the pool's edge to try and ensnare Link. He stumbled away from it, feeling his illness creeping back to haunt him. "Navi!" he slurred, getting worse, "What am I meant to do? What's its weakness?"

"Its nucleus! Shoot its nucleus or something! It's in that tentacle there!"

"Great idea! My crossbow!"

Link pulled his crossbow off his back and pulled the trigger, getting thrown back as the harpoon that was loaded on it cut through the air like a ship through water. It sank into the tentacle, ripping through the water skin but completely bypassing the nucleus. Link groaned in frustration and tiredness before reaching behind himself to get another harpoon…

He felt nothing.

"That diver wasted all the harpoons on me!" Link hissed to Navi through gritted teeth. He chucked the crossbow into the water in frustration.

"Your Hookshot?" Navi recommended as Link dodged a swipe from one of Morpha's thinner tendrils. He followed through, heaving the machine out of his bag and pulling its lever, letting the hook fly into the arm and pull out Morpha from the inside. It sank into its membrane and then the nucleus itself, yanking it clean out of the tentacle and resulting in the hapless monster flopping on the floor like a fish that had been freshly caught.

Before it could escape, Link raised his foot and stomped it into the granite paving as hard as he could. Water flew everywhere. It was like he had just stepped on a high pressure water balloon. The monster emitted not a sound of defeat, nor even pain. It just lay there, flat as a pancake, with the imprint of a boot pressed into the top of it.

POP!

Link was about to call it a day and ram the Master Sword down the cell and finish it off, but, just as quickly as it had compressed, Morpha reinflated completely and caught Link off guard. He was so ill and light headed that he didn't stomp it or stab it again. He just watched in confusion and dizziness as it dropped back into the pool, letting it take control of its jellyfish shape once more.

"Watch out!"

Link looked up just in time to see a thin tendril whip him into the air violently, constricting his waist like a snake. He struggled to escape, but he was feeling sick as it was and the monster squeezing his stomach like a tube of toothpaste wasn't working. He fought to keep his lunch down.

"Link!" Navi slammed her little body against the tubes, flashing like a disco ball. Her partner tried to free himself but Morpha kept its squeeze on him, almost compressing him inside out. "Let him go, you blasted blob of blood!"

Morpha wasn't going to follow any orders, especially while it was infected with the mutant serum. It hurled Link across the room, where he smashed out the full-length window and almost fell into the subterranean river below, but his quick reactions and the Hookshot allowed him to grapple to a large, metal tap that was feeding water into a tub. He hung above the crashing river below from the Hookshot, picking broken glass from his tunic and arms, fighting to keep from passing out. Instead, he retracted the chain and pulled himself back up into the swimming room.

Morpha awaited him. While Link had been hanging about, the monster had managed to create a current in the water to drag the empty crossbow from underwater and into one of its watery tendrils and it had loaded it with a straight line of water.

"This thing can use weapons?" Link stepped back in surprise, almost toppling right out the window again. "I thought that serum made it braindead!"

Morpha used its arms to squeeze the trigger and a blast of air fired the water bullet, peppering the window behind Link like a hole punch on paper. Being able to control water, Morpha had countless shots. All it had to do was transfer some of its arm into the ammo slit and just draw a tiny bit more from the pool to replace the losses. It fired that crossbow like it was a machine gun, making rather incomprehensible bullet hole drawings on the wall..

BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!

More bullets of water pierced the tiled walls. Morpha was firing at a rate of knots and Link couldn't find any opening to stop running so he could fight back. In the end, he found the time and space to dive into the same tub he had used to save himself from falling. He heard Morpha's bullets thudding against the wall on the other side and then he saw it sneaking its crossbow over the top of the bath's wall to shoot him from above. He was able to dodge the painful rain just in the nick of time.

He dived out of the tub and rolled behind one of the diving boards, hoping that he was crouched just low enough so that Morpha could not shoot him over the top of it.

"How am I meant to kill that nucleus? It's too durable!"

"I don't know, Link. Take a look at it."

Link peeked up as slowly as possible so that Morpha couldn't William Tell his hat off his head or worse. He looked for any signs of change in its erratic movements, and it just seemed to have gotten more and more bouncy. The surface of the water it was using jiggled like jelly. Its crossbow was jolting left and right and its eyes were constantly flashing. Link took a look at the nucleus on the inside. It was flashing red, purple, green, yellow and blue and growing and shrinking furiously.

"I think the serum is beginning to wear off!" Navi said. She flashed red. "This is it, Link! Now is the time to use the Hookshot and finish this thing off!"

And so, Link leaped out from behind his cover and into the sight of Morpha's crossbow, Hookshot in hand. The spike reached in and skewered the red nucleus, heaving it straight from its jellyfish and right towards Link, who was letting the wash of tiredness from illness overtake him as he knew he had won. With one sweep of the Master Sword, he launched Morpha straight back towards its jellyfish monster. Even though the jellyfish was just water that had been fashioned into that shape, the intervertebral armour seemed to panic and it turned to escape, but Morpha, who was now glowing blue, slammed into it at full force.

The two of them smashed into the wall of the swimming pool and flattened as if they had just been run over by a tank. That was when the water seemed to turned corrosive. Morpha melted into a red, blood-like liquid while the water sizzled like eggs in a pan, staining the wall with a pretty pattern of a jellyfish. When not one trace of Morpha was visible, the congregation of water shattered and splattered to the floor in all directions, soaking Link.

All right, no more explosions! I'm fed up of getting my clothes cleaned every time a boss goes boom and blows up in my face! I got a lucky break with Phantom Ganon, but Volvagia left weird patterns in my eyes for weeks after she took a dip in the sun! So Morpha, do not explode!

Link took one look at Navi, white as a sheet. "I thought there was going to be a big-"

BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM!

One more blast of water painted the entire room, washing Link to the floor and... giving my local launderette at least three more rounds of business. You know, when I said "don't explode", I didn't mean "substitute the fire with water"!

Link, on the other hand, quite liked it. He was hot, bothered and frazzled, so he welcomed all the water he could get. It may have been a little powerful, but that was a very minor drawback. It relaxed him to the point where he willingly lay down at the side of the pool, Navi deliberately not interfering, and fell asleep right then and there. The nice, refreshing scent of the pool drifted him off and curled the sides of his mouth up into a smile.

A smile of relaxation and a knowing smile that he would wake up in the Chamber of Sages and see his fiancée once more.


Quote of the Day:


"This life is like a swimming pool. You dive into the water, but you can't see how deep it is."