The Legend of Zelda, its characters and locations are all property of Nintendo. Any and all OCs and original locations belong to me unless specifically stated to belong to someone else.

The Voice
Chapter 55 - A New Name

Teba kept a careful eye on the still, unconscious form of the Sheik impostor, only taking his gaze off it when Link returned to the main chamber of Naboris, marching straight past them and up to the platform that housed the Beast's...what was it again, mainframe? Something like that. It didn't take a genius to figure out what he was doing up there, but Teba left him to it. At this point, there wasn't much he could do until Link decided he wanted to talk about it.

It wasn't a conversation Teba was looking forward to. He had no idea how he would handle it, or how to comfort Link when Teba himself felt close to breaking down as well. Sheik was gone. The little shit with the loud mouth and a mean streak a mile wide, but also the most loyal, steadfast person Teba had ever met, was gone.

Could he have stopped it, he wondered. Could he have saved Sheik if he hadn't so idiotically failed to take turbulence into account when approaching Naboris? He'd been so focused on getting to Sheik in time he'd pretty much only seen the entrance to Naboris, and nothing else.

Perhaps it wouldn't have made a difference...but his decision to let Link sleep certainly did. He should have gone to Naboris himself right away, done something to get Sheik out of there while Link slumbered.

"—went this way, come on!" an excited voice spoke loudly, echoing in the large chamber as Riju came into view from around the corner, followed closely by Buliara and Ayla, the former looking particularly harried.

"My lady, please slow down, we have no way of knowing what might be lurking in the corners!" she insisted, but the Gerudo Chief turned a deaf ear to her, too busy taking in the massive chamber with wide, amazed eyes.

"Ah, let her have her fun, Slagathor," Ayla said, patting the warrior's bicep as she passed her by. "I'm pretty confident the place's cleared out now. Link didn't say anything, after all."

"Link didn't say much of anything," Buliara commented quietly.

"It's been a long couple of days, he may be t—ah, bird dad, there you are!"

Teba tried to force a smile, aware of how horrifically fake it looked, waving to them. "You're here," he said. "How was the journey?"

"Long and dull," Ayla said, coming to stand next to him, staring down at the impostor. "This it, then?" she asked. "Looks like a Sheikah...you know, except for the eye."

Teba looked back at the creature, trying to look past the haze of utter hatred he felt for the thing to see it for what it was. And Ayla was right. If it hadn't been for the Guardian-like eye in its metallic left socket, currently hidden behind a mechanical iris, and the wires emerging from said socket and disappearing underneath the skin of its face, the creature could easily pass for a perfectly normal Sheikah.

A bit pale, perhaps, but otherwise there wasn't really anything to give it away as something created by Ganon to hunt and kill the Hero of Hyrule and destroy the Sheikah Slate.

"Rescue didn't go well, I take it?" Ayla asked, crouching down next to him, keeping her voice low.

"No," Teba replied, voice thick. "How did you know?"

"Link didn't say anything when we arrived," the captain explained, reaching out to poke the thing's cheek, looking a little surprised to find the skin warm and yielding. "Just threw down the end of the rope and waited until I climbed up before heading back up here. Include the red, puffy eyes and that's pretty much a guarantee that things didn't go according to plan." She glanced around the chamber, noting the brownish stains of dried blood that Link must have left behind the first time. "What happened?" she asked.

"I don't know," Teba said with a sigh. "I messed up our approach, and only Link was able to get inside on the first pass. It took a while to find another vector, and by the time I made my way inside it was...too late. Hit this thing with a shock arrow and it went down like a sack of bricks. Decided to tie it up, just to be sure, and Link...well, I had to keep him focused somehow, but I've run out of things for him to do."

He looked to the platform, spotting the kneeling form of the Hero. He was holding the pieces of the slate again, likely cursing himself (and Teba) for being too late. Teba would gladly take the blame for this, if it meant Link didn't have to shoulder the anger and guilt.

Riju, evidently done with her wonder at the Beast, spotted Link and ran up the stairs, greeting him loudly, and Teba made to stop her, but Ayla's hand on his arm kept him in place.

"I think she can help," Ayla said. "She's suffered losses too."

"Hm."

She cocked her head to the side, looking at him. "And you? How are you holding up?"

He smiled wryly. "Barely. Pretty sure the only thing keeping me together right now is knowing I have to guard this thing...which is hard since the only thing I want to do when I look at it is gouge its eyes out and slit its throat."

Her eyes widened. "Whoa, now I really understand what Link meant by intense."

"It's wearing his face," Teba said, scowling at it. "Sheik's face. It has no right."

"So, this is really what Sheik looks like?" she asked, taking the opportunity to, if not change the subject, then at least steer it towards something more pleasant. "I never had the pleasure of seeing his face, myself."

"More or less," Teba said. "He was more...vibrant, though."

"You mean louder. He was louder."

"That's what I said."

Ayla chuckled. "So, how long did it take you to wrap your head around him? Because I'm not entirely sure I ever did."

"What's there to wrap one's head around?" Teba asked. "He is...was a boy who happened to be trapped in the slate. A voice with a fierce protective streak."

Ayla gave him an unreadable look. "Shit, and here I thought I was unflappable."

"We talked about that, when we first met," Teba said, smiling as he remembered those conversations. They were by far the most entertaining ones he'd had with someone beside Saki, Tulin, and Harth in a long time. "He said I was unflappable. I said it is true, I cannot be flapped."

Ayla groaned. "You're such a dad."

"Mhm," he said, not at all ashamed about it.

"So, how did he worm his way into your heart, then?"

"Well..."

The world didn't feel real. Or, maybe it felt real, but Link didn't feel like he was a part of it anymore. Everything he did, felt, saw, and heard seemed...distant. Like it was miles away, and it was only by sheer rote he even managed to do anything.

Like right now, he was aware of Riju's arms wrapped around his shoulders, of her voice trying to get him to say something, talking about how sorry she was. He was aware of the feeling of sharp metal and glass cutting into the palms of his hands and the tips of his fingers, of small droplets of blood beading over the cuts where they'd bit a little too deep into his skin.

But it was all far away. Like it wasn't really happening, like it was a dream. And he really fucking hoped it was, because that would mean Sheik was all right, and not this broken pile of metal in his hands, and that he hadn't failed and betrayed a person he loved in such a callous way.

Sheik had needed him, and Link had been sleeping. Snoring away the night like his lover hadn't been fighting for his life just a few miles away.

A few minutes earlier...hell, just a single minute earlier, and it would've been okay. Link would have crashed into the thing and knocked it aside, grabbed Sheik and gotten the hell out of there...or he'd just destroy the creature once and for all.

The itch to do so was still in his fingers. The creature was lying right there, mere footsteps away, and Link had a magical Sword that was created just to destroy things like it. He could do it. He knew. All he'd have to do was stand up, turn around, walk to it, and stab it. He'd shove the tip right into its eye and wrench the blade from side to side, destroying its brain or whatever the fuck it had in its skull.

Teba would protest, claim they needed to interrogate it first, but Link would be faster, and would make a good case.

Teba...

Link didn't blame him. He had, at first, during those first few minutes when all he'd experienced was an all-encompassing feeling of hatred for everything and everyone that overwhelmed his thoughts. And when the Rito had said they needed to keep it alive...

But that rage, now only triggered by looking at the creature, had soon gone, and while Link had gathered up his dropped equipment and made sure it was all in good order he had simmered down considerably...but the space occupied by the anger had immediately been replaced by sorrow the likes of which Link couldn't remember having felt, not even upon learning just what had happened to him a hundred years before.

What would he even do now? How could he finish his quest without the slate? Without Sheik there to help him, keep him from making stupid mistakes and panicking?

Oh Hylia, how could he even face Sidon after this? He had promised himself he would return to the Domain with a happy, content Sheik, not the one who'd asked Link to deactivate and destroy the slate just days ago...

A surprisingly bitter thought bubbled up to the surface of the mire his thoughts had become.

Guess you got your wish, Sheik, he thought, and immediately felt guilty, like a wretch.

I'm sorry...

Where...am...I?

Explaining how existence felt for someone like Sheik to an organic being was a difficult challenge. In a way, Sheik was the slate. He felt every bit of it, every circuit, every transistor, every electrical pulse that travelled across it. He was the camera, he was the microphones picking up the sounds of the world around him, he was the sensors picking up forces both visible and invisible that told him everything from the ambient temperature to the relative humidity to the vital signs of people nearby.

He was the operating system, the millions and millions of files, scripts, and programs that made up the Slate's functions and general behaviour.

With the Tower Network, those feelings expanded, but not to the same extent that he felt like he was the Network. If he had to compare it to something, he felt a bit like a tree, with the Network nodes serving as his roots, gathering information and passing it to him like it was water and nourishment.

It still didn't make sense entirely, but it was close enough for him to be satisfied with it. It certainly had served as enough of an explanation the time Link had asked him about it.

However, there was another aspect to it all that he kept hidden from Link and, to be honest, even himself. Describing this not entirely physical but also not entirely mental aspect of his existence had proven a challenge not even he had been able to overcome, so he'd settled for something that approximated a proper metaphor, which he'd shamefully stolen from the Hylian language as it did not exist in the Sheikah tongue.

Specifically, it was taken from Hylian literature, of which there was quite a bit stored in his memory space.

In a story (romance novel, really, but he wasn't willing to admit that), the protagonist had slowly been cut out of the lives of those around her, and as she'd grown more and more detached from them, she'd described herself as a stranger on the outside of a window, looking in on those who had once been her friends.

In a way, Sheik felt the same...only he was stuck on the inside, looking out. With the camera, it became literal, as his way of looking through it was both as streams of pure data...as well as a visual representation of what the camera was seeing. A necessary evil, for the times he was required to reproduce the data on the slate's screen.

And the way it manifested itself to him was like a window in the darkness. A rectangle-shaped piece of glass through which he could see everything the camera saw. Had he a body, he could easily imagine himself being pressed up against it, hands flat against the glass in a desperate attempt to feel something of what was happening outside.

This...felt the same way, only he didn't have a piece of glass in front of him. Instead, there was something that looked vaguely like a corridor, where the walls, floor, and ceiling were made from circuit boards. Not real ones, obviously. A passing glance at them revealed them to serve absolutely no function, the chips mere dummy pieces, with little in the way of transformers or other electrical pieces to carry and direct charges.

The corridor seemed to stretch on for miles ahead, with numbered doors lining both sides. Most were locked, on account of him not having the proper access, while others were open but contained nothing of interest.

Travelling along the corridor was...strange. Like he was floating. He had no body—looking around revealed nothing of the sort, and he wondered if he even had anything that served as a visual representation in this place, or if he was just invisible bytes of data floating around with no apparent goal or purpose.

Whatever Stabby was, it had a strange way of visualising its own mind.

In a way, it almost felt like a prison. Some of the doors had bars, even. Presumably, those were system-critical, and Sheik had no hope of ever getting in there. Not until he'd had a talk with the system administrator, at least.

The question was, where the hell was the admin?

The corridor soon hit an intersection ahead, and at first Sheik believed he was making progress, but there was only more corridor, more doors. Behind some of them, there was unbelievable noise, like that of furniture being dragged back and forth along the floor, another strange representation of data being changed rapidly.

What the hell are you, Stabby, to have such an imagination? Sheik thought.

It didn't make sense. He'd expected automated processes that performed the most basic tasks, such as keeping the body breathing and moving, receiving instructions from a higher authority like Ganon, a continuous set of instructions where the only exit-state was the death of Link and the capture of Sheik.

Instead, it felt like he was inside a mind. Not like his own, but more...basic? Unfinished, perhaps?

This was really starting to piss him off. The only good thing about the situation so far was that his plan had worked—hastily cramming every sliver of data from the slate into Stabby's random access memory and hoping to Din that there was enough space and that he wasn't purged immediately.

It wasn't quite what Urbosa had in mind when she'd asked him the question back in Naboris, but it had certainly given him the mad idea in the first place.

He'd have to thank her, if he made it out of this alive.

Or intact, at least.

Right, well, gotta stay focused, he thought. Stabby's operating centre must be somewhere around here. All I have to do is find it, somehow nab its system permissions, and then...well, it'll be interesting.

That had been the plan at first, but now that he'd seen the extent of Stabby's mind, which he'd assumed at first to be feeble at best, he wasn't so sure. He had no idea what he'd find.

And that was scary as hell.

He drifted through Stabby's mind for what felt like an eternity. Whatever it was running on, it was different from the slate's operating system. Things were arranged differently; memory addresses Sheik knew by heart contained entirely different values than they should have.

It was familiar to the slate's OS, but...felt more efficient, somehow? Likely, it was a newer iteration of the OS, deployed after the slate's last update, but never installed for gods knew what reason.

So not only did Stabby have a gross abundance of system resources compared to Sheik's, but it also had a newer, sleeker, better operating system.

No wonder the battle had been a losing one from the start.

So fucking unfair!

He was so busy cursing his perpetually miserable luck he almost missed a door that looked different. It was glowing, which he'd deduced meant the address was being actively modified, and the door wasn't locked. He opened it with some trepidation and found...not exactly what he was looking for.

It was almost better, in a way.

Well, hello Mister Register, he thought, greedily devouring the data contained within the memory address, along with the location it was passing said data to. The data wasn't particularly useful yet, but the location was what he was interested in, and followed the figurative path.

A library.

Stabby imagined its system register as a fucking library.

Bookcase upon bookcase of dark wood, housing millions of books both new and old, some looking fragile enough to fall apart. Sheik would've guffawed if he'd had a mouth with which to do so. Compared to the tech-like circuit board corridors he'd just come in from, this was almost pathetically mundane. He tried to let the amusement cover up the creeping sense of horror at the back of his thoughts.

Stabby had an imagination. And knew enough about real-life libraries to create a pretty accurate visual representation of one for its system register.

A little on the nose, in Sheik's opinion, but who was he to argue? Besides, the place felt familiar in a way he couldn't quite identify. A sense of serenity and comfort filled him upon seeing the rows.

Stabby also knew it was a dangerous place to keep open, judging by the lock that had been keeping the door shut. Surprisingly, Sheik had just slipped through the damn door...but then, he must have with the others as well, right? How else had found this address in the first place?

Gods, he was feeling so scatter-brained...which made sense, since he had been forced to spread himself across so many unknown memory addresses. Frankly, it was a miracle he was even conscious (for the lack of a better word) right now.

But anyway.

Library.

He still wanted to laugh.

Now, he thought, floating down to the first row of bookcases, reading the titles on their spines, satisfied to find them actually making sense.

So, he thought as he floated along the rows, if the user register is located anywhere close to the same place as mine...

He found it not long after, to his immense satisfaction. The new iteration of the OS wasn't too much of a mess after all, since it the user register was still where it should be.

Stabby evidently considered it a rather important work, given its place on a pedestal in the middle of a row. It was closed, the title embossed in golden letters on the front.

Sudoers

Capitalised, like it was an actual book. Sheik found it immensely adorable, for some reason.

So, how the fuck do I open this? he wondered, floating back and forth in front of the pedestal, which looked pretty frail judging by the cracks in the wood. Honestly, moving around like this made him feel like a ghost, and...

Well, there was a thought.

He kind of was, wasn't he? A ghost in the machine.

So who was to say he couldn't be a poltergeist?

It took some doing, but it worked. Sheik didn't have a lot of access given his lack of privileges, but he also knew enough about the OS to attempt various exploits that he'd learned about during his time in the slate. He was trying them all right now. From a terminal, it would look like rows upon rows of strange letters and symbols scrolling across the screen in nonsensical patterns.

This particular attempt was a series of requests to several thousands of random files, all meant to overwhelm Stabby's processor and cause it to behave strangely, opening and editing files it's not meant to.

Rather elegant, in a way, especially when Sheik finally managed to fool the access control system into letting him open the Sudoers file.

Unlike Stabby's imagination, which chose to visualise this as the pedestal snapping in half, which made the book to fall to the carpeted (carpeted!) floor and open.

So, smart enough to visualise a library, not imaginative enough to visualise my interference as a breeze blowing the book open, Sheik thought. Hmph, someone needs a lesson in theatrics.

Not that he argued with the results. His...eyes? What the hell even was he seeing this weird world with? Argh!

He scanned the pages and found the section he was looking for. To his surprise, there was no root user.

That...made absolutely no sense, but it was just about the biggest gift the idiot who put this system together could give Sheik.

Don't mind if I do, he thought, concentrating and watching as the letters and symbols appeared on the page in elegant, cursive script, written in ink. He added himself to the list and gave his user root privileges. For good measure he found what must have been Stabby's super user and revoked every single privilege, leaving Sheik as the sole user with any sort of permission to modify the system.

He saved his changes, and the book closed by itself with some finality, remaining on the floor.

There was usually something of a cache than ran every few minutes in these systems, and Sheik knew he had to wait until—

WHOA

WAIT...AM I...

YES! ROOT USER!

—it took effect. Sheik took a breath...and realised he could breathe. His head swivelled from side to side as he looked around...and he realised he had a head! He looked down, saw a slim body dressed in a Sheikah uniform, hands wrapped in bandages. Said hands reached up to touch his face, felt the skin wrinkling as the mouth grinned widely.

It had been the first thing he'd thought to do, upon gaining root access. Giving himself something approaching a body—at least a very lifelike simulation of one.

"Brilliant," Sheik said, satisfied to hear his own voice again. Life as a series of bytes was miserable. "Now...where am I?" he said, looking around.

Still in the library—er, the system register. The Sudoers book lay at his feet, and he carefully picked it up, making sure it wasn't damaged.

"Right, better hide you somewhere," he said, walking to a random row of bookcases and climbing one of them, shoving the Sudoers book behind the extremely thick tomes that contained the oldest system diagnostic logs. No one would think to look for the Sudoers file there.

He'd anticipated it would feel strange, having a semi-real body again. And it did, in a way. Moving around felt as natural as he imagined it should have, but he didn't have the same sensations of touch, smell, and taste that a real body would have. Made sense—why waste valuable resources on emulating something for an artificial intelligence to feel?

"But I'm not artificial," Sheik told himself, relieved to actually be able to make some noise in the otherwise complete silence of the library. "I'm real...and Stabby's about to find that out in a very painful way."

He held out a hand, and a book containing the user register flew into his hand, opening up. "Show me where Stabby is," he said, and the pages began turning until it revealed the specific block where the current system administrator was located.

"Stabby, I'm coming for you," Sheik said gleefully, tossing the book aside and running out of the library.

It was almost anticlimactic, in Sheik's opinion, how easy this had been.

He frowned as he looked at the door marked #212, which was the source of all the processes associated with the single administrator aside from Sheik himself. As the root user, Sheik had frozen every single one of those processes, just in case Stabby had laid some sort of trap.

He was anchored firmly in the system now, but he was far from finished just yet. He could feel Ganon's taint in this place, the malice running through Stabby's veins like blood.

Sheik looked forward to purging the calamity from this system.

Realising he was stalling, he braced himself, took a deep breath, and kicked the door open.

What he found inside was not at all what he expected. More automated processes, yes. A shit-ton of malice, yes. Even, perhaps, a mere shell, a skeleton of an attempt at emulating Sheik's mind to power Stabby's thought processes.

That would have been an entertaining sight, and oh so satisfying to take apart.

A kid, though?

Nope, that was the last thing he'd expected.

Much less a kid with his face, chubby cheeks and all, crying in the corner, held in place by a web of Ganon's malice, its mud-like surface bubbling and smoking, giving off noxious fumes that invaded Sheik's virtual lungs, nearly making him gag on the taste it left in his mouth.

Why the fuck had he decided to simulate taste buds?!

Something was floating above the kid, more malice, but shaped like...something. A creature, four-legged, with a pig's snout and massive tusks. It was shrieking and squealing, inches from the kid's face, the tendrils of malice forcing him to look at it.

Definitely the source of the malice in the system, Sheik decided. A connection to Ganon itself, somehow? He quickly located the ports through which it had gained access and took immense pleasure in shutting them off.

The reaction was instant, the pig-like face snapping around to look at Sheik, who gave it a cheerful wave.

"Hey, Ganny," he said, smirking. "How about leaving the kid alone?"

He tried not to notice the look of relief that passed over the kid's—his—face at the interruption. He would have to deal with that later, once he figured out what the hell it was.

Ganon, or the thing that represented it, roared and immediately materialised more of its body, growing larger and more solid until it towered over Sheik, snarling. Its cloven feet thundered across the circuit-board floor as it charged at Sheik, who didn't move until it was mere paces away, at which point he held up a hand...and stopped Ganon in its tracks.

Its confusion gave Sheik a good idea of just how much it understood of the world around it.

"You forgot to set yourself as the root user," he told the purple mud pig. "And leaving him as the only super user has pretty much left you with no way of actually affecting this place." He spat at its feet. "Idiot."

Its roars grew in volume and intensity, and the kid screwed up his face in the corner in pain. In the din of Ganon's roars, however, Sheik soon began hearing words.

JOIN US

FAMILY

POWER

LIFE

They came randomly, and in no discernible order, like Ganon didn't understand how the language worked (or was unable to order its thought correctly), just saying things it thought Sheik would respond to. And...maybe, in the throes of his first awakening in the Shrine, he might have. Family, power, life...those could have been things he'd wanted desperately at several points in his life.

But now, after everything he'd been through, coming from this abomination that had stolen his face and, evidently, something else of his, it only rang hollow and fake.

"I'll pass," he said, glaring up at the pig-faced monster. "I don't really like being impersonated; even less when my lover is almost murdered in the process."

It made sense now, the ruined Shrine in Akkala. Why it had suddenly started giving off a pinging signal, drawing them to it. Ganon had found out about the slate and used its network connection to connect to the Shrine and, during the momentary blackout that occurred when Sheik was placed in the Shrine's pedestal, scanned the slate and, by extension, Sheik.

How that had resulted in Stabby was something he wasn't quite sure of yet, though he had some ideas on how just how incomplete the scan had been, but he'd be damned if it didn't involve the Shrine of Resurrection.

"I think it's time for you to leave," Sheik told the monster, using the same script he always did to remove Ganon's malice from the Divine Beasts, letting it run a purge throughout Stabby's system as well. "Hope you like being burned out!"

Ganon, as it turned out, did not like being burned out judging by the way it screamed and thrashed as a system-wide sweep removed every trace of it from every memory address, culminating with the complete removal of the foreign, injected code in Stabby's user.

The visuals were quite spectacular—Stabby's imagination was vivid. the purple mud caught fire and writhed like oil in water, black smoke rising and dissipating as it burned. Ganon's red, glowing eyes were focused on Sheik the entire time, its ability to communicate proper words long since gone, directing a hatred unlike anything Sheik had ever felt before at him. The fire reached its eyes, and soon engulfed its entire form before gradually dying, leaving no trace of the malice behind.

The boy—Stabby, presumably—was unharmed, curled up in the corner, his face hidden behind his knees, his shoulders shaking with shed tears.

So, not a product of Ganon's malice, then, Sheik thought, feeling quite lost. He'd half-expected the boy—argh, thing—to burn along with Ganon, but it would seem there was no trace whatsoever of the monster in Stabby.

That...complicated things quite a bit.

Wringing his hands uncomfortably, Sheik stepped closer to the boy-thing-whatever, crouching down so their heads were nearly level, as Sheik had seen Link do several times with children back at the Domain. It made them feel a little safer talking to him, apparently.

"Hey," he said, a little harshly given how the boy curled up on himself even tighter. Clearing his throat, he made his voice a little gentler. "Hey, it's okay...Ganon's gone now. He can't...he won't hurt you again."

That was how you spoke to kids, right? If this even was a kid. It certainly looked like one. Sheik wondered if he'd ever worn the miniature version of the Sheikah uniform his little clone here was wearing back when he was alive, or if this was just how Stabby considered itself—a tiny version of the real thing.

Sheik was starting to give himself a headache with this.

The boy's head lifted a little, and a pair of red eyes looked up at him fearfully, wet with tears. His mouth was moving, but no sound came out.

"I'm Sheik," he said, trying to sound as soothing as possible. "What's your name?"

He couldn't keep calling this thing Stabby. It just seemed...mean.

"Sh-Sh-Sheik," the boy eventually managed to stammer as he somehow managed to cram himself even tighter into the corner.

Well, that's going to be confusing, Sheik thought, looking at his tiny doppelgänger with absolutely no idea of what to do with it. Guess I'll keep calling you Stabby for now.

His plan was to purge Stabby from the system entirely, along with Ganon, but seeing as the entity in front of him wasn't infected by the malice at all, it didn't feel...right. Not until Sheik could figure out exactly what it was, at least.

"I'm not going to hurt you," he said. "I'm...do you know who I am?"

Stabby (Din above, he should find a better nickname) nodded shakily. "S-Sorry..." he whispered.

Well, then. Good actor or not, Sheik was pretty damn sure anything in league with or created by Ganon was incapable of even understanding apologising as a concept, much less doing it.

"Right...well, apology accepted," Sheik replied, not really sure what the boy was apologising for. He hoped it was for stabbing Link.

Fuck, this was awkward.

"Look," he eventually said, catching the boy's attention again, "I have no idea what to do right now. I don't know who or what you are. I...want to do a scan of you. Is that all right?"

Never mind the fact that, as root user, Sheik could do whatever he pleased. He could easily do a million scans and then some of Stabby, but something was keeping him from doing so without asking permission first. Like it was the decent thing to do.

Which was interesting because Sheik had coasted through life so far with no decency whatsoever. He'd left that to Link.

Stabby looked nervous, but eventually nodded. "Will it h-hurt?" he asked.

"Hurt?" Sheik asked. "No, it's just a scan, why would it—"

"Not th-that," Stabby stammered, and it reminded Sheik of Link.

Damn it, he told himself. Stop humanising the enemy!

"Then what?"

"Wh-When you d-delete me..."

Sheik felt dizzy for a moment, and had to sit down on the floor, crossing his legs. "Who says I'm going to delete you?" he asked.

Well, I was up until I found you, he thought, careful not to voice it out loud.

"M-Master Ganon—"Stabby began to say, and Sheik felt an overwhelming need to stamp that out right away.

"First of all, do not call that piece of shit 'master'," he said firmly, making sure the boy was listening. "You do not have to obey it any longer. And second, it was lying to you. Like I said, I don't know what you are; I intend to find out. That will require a scan, which won't be painful at all. And even if I were going to delete you, it still wouldn't be painful."

That had the opposite effect of what Sheik was going for. Stabby's eyes widened with fear, and he ducked behind his knees again, shaking.

Sheik felt a strong urge to mimic Link's habit of knocking his forehead into things when he was frustrated.

Usually with Sheik.

"Okay, okay, I'm sorry," he said. "Look, I won't delete you, I promise."

Meaning I have no idea what to do with you if you turn out to be dangerous, he thought.

Relegating Stabby to an isolated partition might be a solution, but that was about the same thing as throwing a child into a dungeon...and as few principles as Sheik had, he found not wanting to do that to be one of them.

Who knew?

"Y-You promise?" Stabby asked.

"I promise," Sheik repeated firmly. "Can I scan you now?"

Stabby nodded, and Sheik reached out to touch his forehead. A jolt went through him as he scanned and analysed every bit of data he found within Stabby's user—scripts, files, programs, algorithms, behavioural modules, databases; everything.

What he found made him gasp in both horror and wonder.

There was the scan Ganon had made of the slate in Akkala. It was only a partial one, due to how short the blackout had been, but there was definitely enough of Sheik's patterns of thought in there to serve as a foundation for whatever horrible thing Ganon had had in mind.

But a base wasn't enough for an autonomous intelligence that would follow orders, but also act independently in order to engage in problem solving. It required something else, something that would allow the intelligence to actually learn from its mistakes, and the environment around it, through trial and error.

Ganon hadn't the faintest fucking idea on how to do that, so it had simply thrown whatever it could find into the mix, mixing and matching pieces of code in the computer equivalent of throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck. Chief among these were a series of learning algorithms left over from the time Sheik had been put in the slate in the first place.

It shouldn't have worked, but evidently the Shrine of Resurrection had its own ideas and worked its magic.

By complete accident, Ganon had created a real artificial intelligence. Its construction was haphazard and sheer chaos, but it was working. Stabby was, truly, the first and only of its kind.

Sheik fought the urge to laugh hysterically. If only the bastards who'd put him in the slate knew that the embodiment of all evil would, by pure chance, succeed where they had failed miserably.

Sure, even now, at the very bottom of the entity that was Stabby, there were little pieces of Sheik. From what he could see, however, they were only there to make sure things worked, keeping the engine running so to speak. Everything else was Stabby slowly learning and growing, proceeding at a low pace because of the sheer hodgepodge of code that was teaching him.

From what Sheik was able to analyse, Stabby was, essentially, the equivalent of an eight-year-old. One trained to hunt and kill.

So not too different from a regular Sheikah child, from what Sheik understood of his own time.

He leaned back on his haunches, watching Stabby—Din above, he couldn't keep calling him Stabby!—for a while, trying to figure out what the hell to do with him.

"Are you g-going to delete me n-now?" Stabby asked. Sheik wondered if the stutter was because of a faulty language module or a result of trauma caused by being under Ganon's control.

"No," Sheik said, truly meaning it. "You are...unique. Deleting you would be murder."

"But I...I tried t-to kill th-the Hero," Stabby said, almost sounding outraged at the thought. "I k-killed you!"

Sheik nodded slowly. "You did, but was that because you wanted to...or because you were forced to? From where I was looking, you didn't exactly seem to be all that much in control, you know?"

Stabby looked at his hands. "I w-was in c-control...b-but..."

"Ganon told you to do it, or he'd kill you, right?" Sheik suggested. "Or someone else would, like me."

A frightened nod was all he got as a reply.

So, under duress, Sheik thought. Kid was frightened for his life, so of course he did as he was told. Anyone would.

Eugh, if only Link were here. He'd know how to handle this. Easy forgiveness and the like were really more his area of expertise than Sheik's, whose preferred activities were yelling at and insulting people.

Didn't feel right to do that to a kid, especially one that was based on Sheik himself.

Well, technically, he would be yelling at himself, which was also something he did on a regular basis.

What has my life come to, he wondered. Why me?

He looked around the room that was, essentially, Stabby's home within the body Ganon had created for him. It was bare, looking identical to the circuit-board decorated hallways outside. The only place that'd had any personality was the registry. Presumably, Stabby must have figuratively spent a lot of time in there if he'd decided to personalise it to such a degree.

There were a lot of things to figure out about Stabby, but Sheik doubted he had the time for it. Not right now, at least, with Link coming to rescue him.

Gods, this would be hard to explain.

He stood up, looking down at Stabby, still cowering in the corner. Seeing it pissed him off, and he wished he could call Ganon back and burn it out all over again, extending the process to make it as agonising as possible.

Speaking of...

He used his access to shore up Stabby's body's defences, making sure there was nowhere for Ganon to ever find its way back inside. It was surprisingly easy, given the resources this body had to offer.

"Okay," he said, leaning down and looking into Stabby's eyes. "This has been a very long day for me...and I'm sure it's been for you too." He held out a hand and winced when Stabby flinched away from it.

"Listen," he said carefully, "I am nothing like Ganon, or whatever it told you about me, okay? I am not angry at you, and I certainly won't hurt you. I swear it. But I am very confused right now, and I was hoping to get some answers from you."

Stabby's eyes narrowed a little, as if not believing him, but Sheik held his gaze without blinking, hoping it would convey how seriously he took his words. After a minute of internal debate, Stabby seemed to accept it for the truth, uncurling from his corner, looking apprehensively at Sheik's hand.

"Come on," he said gently, opening it completely, wriggling his fingers. "Let's take a walk."

He couldn't help but smile when Stabby's little hand took his, and he helped the little one to his shaky feet.

"I know where we can talk in peace," Sheik said as he led Stabby through the corridors towards the registry. "You also need a name," he said. "I can't keep calling you Stabby in my head."

"I l-like it," the AI said carefully.

"Of course you do..."