(...This is getting ridiculous.)

I do not, nor will I ever, own Mighty the Armadillo.

(I think I need protective measures. Possibly explosives. Or maybe I should just hire a Minecraft Creeper. After all, if he explodes then I don't have to pay him.)

Din tapped her chin. "So that takes care of... Lore, they called him?"

"Yes, he's taken care of," Farore agreed. "How's Nayru?"

"Fine..." Nayru called from her horizontal position. "Just really, really dizzy..."

"It's when stuff like this happens that I thank myself for not taking charge of time," Din said sympathetically. "You sure you're okay?"

"I'm certainly getting there," Nayru replied. "I just got caught off-guard. It won't be happening again."

"Let's hope not," Farore agreed. "Think you can join us on Courage Watch soon? Things are either getting interesting or getting close to breaking the Universe and I'd like to know which it is."

"Let me look," Nayru said, pulling herself into a sitting position and peering through the reality window. "Okay... oh, we're good. It's just getting interesting. Out of curiosity, how long has Lore been talking?"

"At least a couple hours. He's almost done detailing that mess with the island that doesn't exist."

"Good riddance too," Din said huffily. "Honestly, the nerve of some deities, making their own land without asking me first..."

Nayru tilted her head. "Wasn't he asleep at the time? Can you really hold someone responsible if they didn't know they were doing it?"

"Just watch me."

"I don't quite think that's how it works..."

"-and after I finished cursing out the Windfish, I started swimming in a half-randomly chosen direction and was very, very bored for a very, very long time. Then I hit land, went to sleep, woke up, started walking, and was very, very bored for a very, very long time again. Then I found the Tower along with this hole, and then you all fell out of the hole and we started getting acquainted. After that I got a nickname, then Realm asked me about my life story and I started telling you all about how Princess Zelda sent me a telepathic message in the middle of the night-"

"We know that part, you don't need to tell it again," Blue interrupted.

Lore pouted. "Killjoy. I was this close to establishing a full story loop too... Anyways! That's me in a contradictory nutshell. What do we do now?"

"Previous experience says we climb back through the hole and see where we end up next," Dusk informed him. Lore eyed him, then the hole, which was now twelve feet off the ground rather than thirteen due to having grown a bit.

"So one of you can fly, then?" he asked curiously. "I don't know if you've all noticed, but we Links are a bit vertically challenged and that hole is way far out of our reach range."

"Hookshot," Dusk said, holding said item up in demonstration.

"That'll work," Lore agreed. He tilted his head, then asked, "So are you the leader then?"

Dusk blinked. "I... sorry, what?"

"You seem to be the one with the best grasp of what's happening," Lore said. "Or you just take everything in stride. Possibly both." He paused. "Then again I could be reading this completely wrong and your leader is actually Realm."

"It's definitely not Realm," Blue snorted. "He can't keep his bearings to save his life. He could get lost in a hallway."

"...That's actually happened before," Realm said sheepishly. This statement was met with a loud smacking noise as the more easily irritated of the Links facepalmed themselves.

"Of course it has," Sketch groaned.

"I'm not the leader," Dusk said firmly. "I'm about as far from being a leader as you can get."

"You're not?" Sketch repeated, surprised. "Din, I totally thought you were the one in charge." He turned to Wind and said, "Didn't you think he was the leader?"

"I definitely thought he was the responsible one," Wind agreed.

Lore frowned. "What then, is Green the leader? I'll be honest, I thought he had his hands full with just his three immediate siblings."

"I do," Green replied. "Trust me, the last thing I want is to be in charge of more people. It's not me."

"Technically," Dusk said, "we don't have a leader. We just kind of wander along and take majority votes."

"That won't work," Lore said, shaking his head. "We're gonna need a leader. The bigger this group gets, the more we're gonna need a governing structure of some sort. And you do seem like a competent candidate."

Dusk stared at him. "Okay, two things. First, I'm not leader material. My pack function is Beta, not Alpha, and my Alpha isn't even here right now so there's really no point in arguing about it."

Lore raised a finger questioningly and Dusk said, "I'll explain later. Second – did you just say something logical?"

Lore grinned and shrugged. "I never said I don't pay attention. Now what's this about your Alpha being AWOL?"

"Here we go again," Steam grunted, and made his way over to Sketch as Dusk began telling his story for the third time. "We're gonna be here awhile. Wanna pass the time by helping me with that self-sustaining lantern idea?"

"Sounds fun," Sketch agreed. "I actually had some ideas about that involving the holder for the wick – if you're incorporating flint into the design, I think I might be able to adjust the shape to allow for a greater increase in the output..."

The two Links trailed off into metalwork jargon while the remainder of the group blinked in confusion.

"I'm not the only one who's missing about half of their conversation, right?" Realm asked.

"I'm following it," Vio said, shrugging.

"Of course you are," Blue sighed.

"And what's that supposed to mean?"

"You're just such a bookworm that it figures that you'd know."

"There's nothing wrong with being a bookworm," Vio argued.

Blue smirked. "I never said there was."

"Your tone implied otherwise-"

"Seriously!" Green broke in. "Knock it off, you two!"

Wind started snickering "Just like me and Aryll," he observed with a grin.

"Siblings are fun," Red agreed, giggling.

-song that never ends; it just goes on and on my friends. Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was; and they'll continue-

"I will imagine muzzles on each and every one of you," Demise snarled.

-singing it forever just because: This is the song that never ends; it just goes on and on-

"Muzzles with two-inch thorns placed just so they'll tear into your lips every time you move your mouth to sing that infernal song," Demise continued darkly. "And the thorns will be made of acid."

-my friends. Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was; and they'll continue singing it forever just because: This is the song that-

"Fluorosulfuric acid," Demise elaborated. "Which will eat through the muzzle in little over two minutes and then go to work on the very delicate, very fragile skin that makes up your face. It will be very painful and I will highly enjoy listening to your screams."

-never ends; it just goes on and on my friends. Some people started singing it, not-

"But I will be merciful," Demise said, "and will grant you pardon from this fate if you would just SHUT UP."

-knowing what it was; and they'll continue singing it forever just because: This is the song that never ends-

"So be it," Demise said silkily. "Majora, take notes. This is how a professional inflicts burn damage."

I'm sorry, did you say something? Majora asked over the unending chorus in the background.

-it just goes on and on my friends. Some people-

"Take notes," Demise repeated. "I think you'll appreciate this."

Bake coats? Majora repeated. Why would I do that? Coats make for terrible fuel, not to mention that they burn out almost instantly and never retain a flame for more than twenty minutes at the most.

-started singing it not knowing what it was; and they'll continue singing it forever just because: This-

"Who said anything about coats?" Demise snapped.

There is no such thing as cat boats, Majora said. Good news everyone, I believe we are whittling down his sanity.

-is the song that never ends, went the chorus in the background, now with much more enthusiasm. It just goes on and on my friends-

"DO NONE OF YOU CARE ABOUT MUZZLES WITH FLUOROSULFERIC ACID?!" Demise roared.

-Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was; and-

"Oh, I'm going to enjoy this," Demise growled, and promptly manifested the fluorosulferic acid muzzles on everything in his head that had a mouth.

All it really seemed to do, though, was augment the already-infuriating song with timely screaming.

"-so I decided to start searching for Bellum on my own because I still had the King even though he wasn't alive anymore and ended up finding Sketch on an island... and from there it all just sorta snowballed," Wind finished. "Am I the last one?"

"Yes," Sketch called.

"Good job," Lore said, clapping. "You all just managed to pack six-plus adventures into less than six hours. That is impressive."

"We've had a bit of practice by this point," Realm admitted. "I think a couple of us have told their stories about... three times by this point?"

"Four," Vio corrected.

"Four times," Realm agreed. "I'm a little confused though... are you sure you told your story right?"

"Eighty-six-and-a-half percent sure, why?" Lore asked.

"You mentioned a sentient blue bear with wings?"

Lore tilted his head, then reached into his bag and pulled out a pair of half-moon librarian glasses, which he then stuck on his face and pulled halfway down his nose to look at Realm over the tops of them. "You can get lost in a hallway," Lore pointed out. "Dusk turns into a wolf, Sketch turns into artwork, Wind can control the weather, Steam can see dead people-"

"Zelda was never dead!" Steam protested.

Lore turned his over-the-glasses look on Steam for a moment. "Shush, I'm making a point here," he said, then looked back to Realm and continued, "Steam can see dead people and four of you used to be one person. Does the blue winged flying bear sound so absurd compared to all that?"

"...Okay, point taken," Realm admitted. Lore grinned and immediately stuffed the glasses back into his bag.

"Where did you get those?" Red asked curiously.

"Oh, it's bigger on the inside," Lore said, pointing to his bag as though that explained everything. "And on a completely unrelated note: now what?"

"Well," Dusk said, "unless you've got something you vitally need to do before heading off to save the Universe, you're going to Hookshot up to the hole with us and see where it goes."

"Good thing I have absolutely nothing that I vitally need to do," Lore grinned. "After you. Leader's privilege and all."

Dusk grimaced. "We've been through this already. I'm not the leader."

"Well if you're not, and nobody else is, does that mean the position is open?" Lore asked. "And can I apply?"

"...Are you sure you want the position?" Steam checked. "I'm almost positive we're cultivating our own brand of insanity and that can't be easy to deal with."

"Well then, it's a good thing I already lost my sanity ages ago," Lore said emphatically. "Who better to lead the bunch of crazies than the craziest in the bunch?"

"Not all of us are crazy," Green objected. "Some of us are just really exhausted and go along with the weirdness because it takes less effort that way."

"Tell me about it," Vio grumbled, and threw Blue a pointed stare, which Blue completely missed much to Green's eternal gratitude.

"Eh, my point still stands," Lore decided. "Can I get a test run, at least?"

There was silence for a moment as everyone considered that. Then Realm shrugged.

"I can get behind a test run," he said. "If it doesn't work we can always make Dusk the unofficially unspoken leader again."

Dusk blinked in confusion, but everyone else seemed to agree with that idea without much issue.

"Excellent," Lore beamed. "I'm officially LiT!"

"...What?" Blue said.

"Leader in Testing," Lore explained. "And for my first leadershippy order in my test run, I say we should all head through the hole and see where it takes us!"

"Problem," Steam said, raising a hand. "I don't own a Hookshot. I've got a Whip, but there's nothing to latch to between here and the hole, so..."

"Hitch a ride with Dusk," Lore decided. "Does anyone else have issues?"

Red, Green, Vio, Blue, and Realm all raised their hands. Lore blinked at them.

"And you couldn't have mentioned this earlier?" he said teasingly. "Okay. I've got a couple extra hookshots I can pass around, so Steam can hitch a ride with Realm and make sure he doesn't lose my stuff, and... Blue can give his siblings a ride?"

Blue frowned for a minute as he thought that over, then turned to Green and said, "You remember that Power Bracelet that I'm only allowed to use when absolutely necessary?"

Green sighed, then dug out said bracelet from his bag and held it out to his sibling with a resigned look on his face. Blue snapped the trinket onto his wrist, then gave Lore a grin and said, "I can absolutely give my siblings a ride."

"Ooh, my first leadershippy order is a success!" Lore enthused, handing his two extra Hookshots out to his designated Links. "Let's see if my second leadershippy order follows the trend. Everyone, let's go!"

He held his arm out and fired his Hookshot, but he didn't actually turn his head to see where he was aiming. Instead, he just grinned at his newly established underlings until the item snagged on something and pulled him into the hole. It was both impressive and ever so slightly concerning.

"Well," Sketch said," at least this won't be boring with him around."

"And they're on their way again," Farore noted. "Who should we have them meet up with next?"

"The Heroes of Time," Nayru said immediately. "The sooner those two get within a relatively stable sphere of influence the less likely they are to accidentally cause a universal collapse."

"Good point," Farore agreed. "Unless there's a different Hero that would benefit more. Din?"

"Well, the other set of Four Sword heroes seem to be in good position..."

There was an interesting fact about sacred swords that nobody except the swords themselves knew – and of course, the swords weren't telling, so how could anyone figure it out in the first place?

Basically, they were all rather snobby.

Of course, since all the sacred and divine weapons were, in fact, weapons, this little characteristic tended to come out in the sword's choice of wielder. The Master Sword was the most well-known for this; if you were considered unworthy, you were severely burned at best and outright killed at worst. To date, the Master Sword had only allowed exactly five people to wield it – and, given that those five people were actually the same people just reincarnated a bunch of times... well, you get the picture.

A similar case could be found in the wielders of the Four Sword – and not just because historians had a terrible debate over whether to count the wielders by the number of people they used to be versus the number of people they were while doing said wielding. When it came right down to it, the Four Sword had exactly three wielders.

One of them happened to be the one who 'built' it, more or less, but because the Four Sword was one of those weapons which needed to charge up in order to get the full effect, the Hero of the Minish never experienced it in the way that his reincarnations would. As such, his 'wielder' status was a bit suspect, but because he'd been the one to make it work in the first place he was on the list simply for being the guy who did it before anyone else.

Of the two who actually used the Four Sword in all it's ability, there was Link, the Hero(es) of Light and the composite of Blue, Red, Vio, and Green; and Link, the Hero(es) of the Four Sword and the composite of a rather odd hive-mind construct known as the Four. They also, conveniently, happened to be the exact Hero(es) that Din was looking at.

The Four, unlike their counterparts who would come into existence some few centuries later, didn't exactly have separate personalities. Or... maybe they did, but it all got smushed because of the hive-mind. It was a difficult to tell, really, and so the Four had given up on that venture within the first week of drawing their swords.

Everything they did, they did in unison. They moved in unison, they talked in unison, they even thought in unison, most of the time. The Four were perfectly synchronized with each other, and when they weren't it usually ended with them all sprawled on the ground with headaches from the discordant feedback.

This happened very rarely, though, because it was deeply uncomfortable and none of the Four liked it, and so they went out of their way to make sure it didn't happen. Of course, having the hive-mind made it easy, but there was still the danger of a treacherously-placed pebble sitting innocently on a path just waiting to trip one of them up.

The Pebble Incident, as it was later dubbed, was firmly filed under 'Never Mention Ever Again'.

The Four were aware, of course, that normal people didn't have the connection that they did, and that seeing four identical boys moving and speaking in complete unison might cause more harm than good in some cases. It had taken weeks of practice, but the Four were able to ignore the hive-mind and act separately, if they needed to. The problem with that, aside from the mountain of slip-ups and accidental use of plural possessives in a singular setting, was that it felt wholly and utterly wrong. Almost integrally wrong, as though the very core of their existence was being pulled apart.

It wasn't so much like one boy had been split into four boys, the Four decided later, but more like one boy had been split between four bodies. And while those bodies had a few differing traits between them – the red one, for example, was a bit more prone to giving strategic input to the hive-mind than the others – for the most part, all four of them thought the exact same thing. At the moment, they happened to be on their way to Vaati's Palace to rescue the kidnapped Princess Zelda, but curiously their thoughts didn't necessarily reflect this. In fact, the thing going through the Four's heads was about as far from Princess Zelda as it could get.

'Who's idea was it to make mountains so freaking high?' to be specific.

"...or they're on their way, at least," Din concluded, then tilted her head in confusion. "Huh. For some reason I feel like I've just been criticized."

"It's probably nothing," Farore dismissed. "What about the other two?"

"Well, the little guy keeps shrinking when I'm not looking and then I lose him," Din complained. "And the first Hero isn't near a hole at all so there's no real point in that. I would just direct the main group to pick the second Four Sword set up after we take care of the Heroes of Time."

"Sounds good," Farore agreed. "Speaking of which, I'd better go influence the Heroes of Time. If I learned anything from all my other aspects, it's that none of them know how to recognize a divine prompting anymore..."

Ocarina poked his head into the Throne Room and frowned. He continued to frown for about twenty seconds, then pulled his head out and gave his older-but-younger self a confused look.

"Correct me if the answer won't cause a universal collapse," he said. "I thought that I was supposed to be having a fight in this room, but there's nothing here. Did I take a wrong turn?"

Mask raised an eyebrow, then poked his own head into the Throne Room and spent about twenty seconds frowning at it.

"No, this is the room," he replied slowly. "Just... advance with caution. Lots of caution. Like, enough caution to make overkill look like it's not enough."

"I cannot possibly need that much caution," Ocarina argued. Mask raised his other eyebrow to join the first one.

"Wanna bet?"

"Not against you," Ocarina muttered, and poked his head into the Throne Room again. When nothing tried to decapitate him, he slowly moved until he was standing just inside the entrance and waited to see if he'd set off anything.

When nothing continued to happen, he relaxed his tense stance by a tiny amount and began advancing further into the room. Mask trailed behind him, looking markedly less worried than his counterpart if one ignored the small crease between his eyebrows as he glanced around.

"It shouldn't be this quiet," Mask muttered, which startled Ocarina for a second. "There should be an organ..."

"The instrument or the body part?" Ocarina asked. "Because I'll be honest, I'm hoping it's the instrument."

"He should be playing an organ," Mask said as if he hadn't heard the question. "Something's wrong."

Ocarina looked around, then sheathed the Master Sword on his back and stood up from his ready position. "Maybe you should have a look around, then. You've been here before, technically speaking, and you'd know better than me. If something's wrong, you're a lot more likely to know than I am."

"There's already at least four things wrong," Mask said, scowling. "There's supposed to be an organ."

"Yeah, I got that, thanks. What about the other three?"

"Spoilers, spoilers, and... yeah, spoilers."

"How helpful."

"Glad you agree," Mask smirked. "Someone has to keep the continuum in one piece."

There was a moment of silence, during which Mask continued to smirk and entirely expected his counterpart to sputter some retort about how annoying he was. However, when this summarily failed to happen, he glanced up at his (infuriatingly taller) older-but-younger self to see what the issue was.

Ocarina seemed to have been rendered entirely speechless. He worked his mouth for a few seconds before eventually managing to say, "Didn't we leave that back in Hyrule Field...?"

Mask frowned, followed his gaze, and promptly forgot about everything else. Sitting against the wall in a manner that had made it previously unnoticeable was a fairly sizable and utterly black, and extremely familiar hole.

"...What the heck!?" Mask sputtered. "Do these things migrate now!?"

"I'm going to take a guess that this isn't supposed to be here?" Ocarina asked.

"This is definitely not supposed to be here!"

Ocarina considered that for a moment, then looked at at his counterpart's face to gauge how serious this was. This immediately proved to be a mistake.

"Stop enjoying this!" Mask snapped as Ocarina tried and utterly failed to keep a straight face. Mask had been taking everything with a maximum of fifty-percent seriousness ever since he'd shown up, and Ocarina was dearly relishing seeing his future self look so flustered.

"Sorry, sorry," he said in a strangled sort of voice. "It's just – I never realized karma was so funny."

"Shut up and take notes for your turn," Mask retorted. "Seriously though! This is a problem!" He gestured wildly at the empty room with the hole in the wall. "There's supposed to be an organ!"

"Okay, why is an organ so important?"

"Because Ganondorf is supposed to be playing it!"

Ocarina blinked at the sudden information while Mask slapped his hand to his face. "I shouldn't have said that," he muttered. "Oh, I think I just took the timestream and strangled it."

"Bother the timestream," Ocarina interrupted. "You said Ganondorf was supposed to be here?"

"Really shouldn't have said that..."

"Get over it, I think we've got a slightly bigger problem."

"Bigger than the strangling of the timestream? Do tell."

Ocarina stared. "Okay, are you sure you're me? How can I see the bigger issue before me does?"

"I'm too old for this..."

"You're twelve."

"That is entirely irrelevant," Mask sniffed.

"Oh my goddesses," Ocarina groaned. "Look, if Ganondorf is supposed to be here but isn't, and this hole is here instead, and we saw a different hole literally erase a Cucco from existence, then does that mean what I think it means?"

Mask paused. "...Yes," he said after a moment. "I think that means exactly what you think it means."

"...Is that good?"

"I don't know."

They both observed the hole for a minute as they attempted to process that fact that Ganondorf had apparently been eaten by it.

"Is it growing?" Ocarina asked after a while.

"Looks that way."

"...Great."

Mask sighed. "We're gonna need to fix this."

"I didn't even get done fixing the first mess though," Ocarina complained.

"I didn't even get done fixing the second," Mask griped.

"About that-"

"No, I will not tell you how to fix the second."

"Dangit," Ocarina sighed. "One day I'll catch you in a slip-up, and it will be glorious."

"Keep telling yourself that," Mask replied, grinning despite the situation. "That aside, any ideas for this?"

Ocarina studied the hole. "Adventuring Rule Number One?"

"You think explosives will somehow make this better?"

"Could they somehow make this worse?" Ocarina countered.

Mask paused. "Point," he conceded. "Do you want to do the honors or should I?"

"Both of us at once," Ocarina said. "That way nobody gets denied an explosion."

"That would be such a shame," Mask agreed teasingly as they both pulled out bombs from their Adventure Bags and tossed them at the hole. This almost immediately went wrong in two distinct ways.

Firstly, the hole seemed to be entirely unaffected.

Secondly, and far more interestingly, there was now a ginger teenaged boy in the room with them. He was covered from head to toe in soot from the detonations, in addition to a few burn marks on his clothes and the tip of his hat which appeared to be slightly-on-fire.

"...Is this something that bombs do in the future?" Ocarina asked his counterpart in a quiet voice while the ginger teen blinked in confusion and quickly extinguished his hat.

"Of course not, what kind of a question is that?"

"A bewildered one," Ocarina replied, right before the new arrival locked on to their position.

"Did you just try to explode me?" he asked. "Did you actually just try to explode me? That's amazing! Well, either that or it's rude. Give me a minute, I need to run through all the cultures I'm aware of to see if you just insulted me or not." He abruptly began muttering gibberish to himself under his breath.

"I have no idea what's happening," Ocarina said.

"...sm'f om y'jr rb'rᾳmy pᾳg sᾳm rcok'pdobr, y'jr yjᾳt'pert nidy..." the boy mumbled.

"Is he even speaking Hyrulean?" Mask wondered.

"Holodese, actually," the new arrival said abruptly. "And unfortunately for you, I've just been insulted according to their customs. Plug your ears."

"Plug our-"

"I HAVE BEEN INSULTED!" the ginger boy bellowed. "WHO WASTES PERFECTLY GOOD BOMBS ON LOWLY INTER-DIMENSIONAL TRAVELERS!? IT'S A TRAVESTY TO THE EXPLOSIVE!"

"What...?"

The teen stuck a smoky finger into Ocarina's face, since he was the taller of the two and thus a more visible target. "Do you have no respect for the great and awesome awesomeness that is TNT? You don't just waste something like that on travelers! We're dusty, have no idea where we're going, and entirely liable to misplace your entire towel population."

"None of those words made sense in the way you put them together," Mask sputtered. The newcomer took absolutely no notice of him.

"Honestly, if you're going to use bombs, you need to use them right," he continued disapprovingly as though Mask hadn't even said anything. "Clearly, you have no idea how to do this, so I shall take it upon myself to educate you, poor little lost lambs that you are. Bombs, as we all know, are the greatest tool to have ever been bestowed upon mankind. As such, there are certain rules one must follow to appease the gunpowder gods in everyday use. Firstly! Always thank the explosive for it's noble sacrifice to your cause..."

The ginger teen proceeded to go off on a wildly confusing tangent, which neither Ocarina nor Mask followed in the slightest. At that point, though, the hole in the wall began ejecting multiple other teenaged boys as if it was perfectly normal.

"I really have no idea what's happening," Ocarina repeated weakly, watching this. For a void that had previously devoured everything that came into contact with it, there were a startling amount of people using it as a doorway.

One of the new arrivals, a taller boy with fierce eyes and sandy-blond hair, gave them an apologetic smile before focusing on the ginger teen. "Does anybody know what he's doing?"

"Being himself," a brunet teen offered.

"AKA, scaring the locals," a shorter boy finished.

The tall one let out a sigh. "Right, I'll get it," he said, and proceeded to walk right up to the sooty ginger boy and smack him upside the head, which effectively cut off whatever the redhead had been saying about matchstick sacrifices in the meantime.

"Oi," the ginger boy complained. "I was on a roll!"

"You were making the locals question both your and their sanity," the other teen retorted. "I know you literally just joined up less than twenty-four hours ago, but there's times to be serious and I think this it one of them. So just, not now, okay?"

"...Killjoy."

The calmer one promptly flicked him in the forehead, eliciting an "Ow!" before turning to Mask and Ocarina and saying, "Sorry about that. He's new."

"...Okay," Ocarina said in the manner of someone who has just given up on making life make sense. "I'm just going to stop caring now.

"Good plan!" the ginger teen exclaimed. "Life's more fun that way. Are either of you Link, by any chance?"

Both Hero(es) of Time blinked in utter bewilderment. "...We both are," Mask said after a moment. "But how did you...?"

"You're wearing hats," the ginger boy said, as though that explained everything. "The only people I've ever met that wear hats are usually important in a way that's curiously relevant to whichever quest I'm currently on, and since I'm currently trying to meet more of me and save the Universe and you're wearing hats while I'm trying to do it, that means that you're probably me. Make sense?"

"No," Ocarina said.

"Perfect! So, I'm Link, Hero of Legend, but you can call me Lore for the sake of convenience and avoiding that awkward moment when someone has the same name as you and neither of you know which one is being addressed. This is Dusk, over there's Realm, those two are Wind and Sketch, Steam is next to Wind, and Green, Blue, Red, and Vio are the colored cluster in the back." The newly-introduced Lore grinned concerningly. "Welcome to the group! Please direct any questions, comments, concerns, and/or cries of anguish at Dusk until otherwise noted."

Dusk, who turned out to be the one with the fierce eyes, let out a sigh that sounded very-well used. "Why me?"

"Because you're much less likely to make said questions, comments, concerns, and/or cries of anguish worse," Lore responded without missing a beat. "Now then! You two new Links, make your way over to Red and tell him your Heroic Title and any special ability you may or may not have picked up over the course of your adventure, and be prepared to receive an awesome nickna-"

"Is this supposed to be impressive?" Mask interrupted.

He received confused and surprised stares from everyone else present, including his older-but-younger self. Mask met all the looks with a shrug, then continued, "Sorry, I just don't feel impressed. In fact, I'm pretty sure whatever effect you were going for just skipped me entirely."

"...This is new," Lore admitted. "You seem to be mildly immune to... well, me. How are you doing that?"

Mask shrugged again. "I've seen some weird stuff. Between the accidental time travel, getting engaged to a Zora, finding out my actual species, dealing with the Happy Mask Salesman, not to mention all the actual masks and the insanity that went with them, owning an instrument that literally warps physics, getting stuck in a three-day time loop, switching my species on whim, a doppelganger of me, countless doppelgangers of everyone else, an entire country I've never even heard of before, and the single most messed-up celestial body I've ever had the misfortune to see... well, at some point I think I just stopped being surprised."

"I hear that," Dusk agreed.

"I'm sorry, 'switching our species on whim'?" Ocarina repeated incredulously.

"Ah crap. Can I still say 'Spoilers' and get away with it?"

"No."

"Of course not." Mask let out a sigh, then turned to the group of apparent other Heroes and said, "Anyways, I'm Mask, and this is my older-but-younger self, Ocarina. We're the Hero of Time but from two different points in our life."

This statement was, surprisingly, not met with exclamations of shock and surprise. Instead, most of the other Links just nodded like they'd all heard similarly ridiculous things before and were used to it. The two exceptions were Sketch and Wind, who glanced at each other with expressions of, 'Is it weird that this is our new normal?'

"I'm guessing, by the way you two talk," Realm said after a moment, "that Ocarina's actually the younger one? How's that work?"

"There was time travel involved," Ocarina replied. "A lot of time travel. It was very confusing. The simplest version is that, mentally, I'm about nine, more or less, but then the time travel happened and I ended up in my sixteen-year-old body because of Reasons."

"Then you have me," Mask explained, "who went through more time travel and then grew from there, making me physically twelve. But because of more Reasons, I'm mentally somewhere in the teens."

"...That is incredibly complicated," Steam said.

"That's time travel," Mask shrugged. "My personal theory is that if you don't have a headache, you're not thinking about it right."

"Ooh, that's good," Ocarina said suddenly, snatching a piece of parchment from his bag and scribbling something down on it. "I'm gonna use that."

"Go ahead," Mask replied with a look of extreme amusement.

"Did... did you just give yourself your own personal theory?" Vio questioned. He looked as though he had the beginnings of a headache, and Mask grinned at him.

"There you go, now you're getting it."

EDITED ON 6/5/2017

Okay, I didn't exactly mean for this to take so long, but life has this absolutely fascinating way of making me think the stress is over and then slamming me with more stress from a completely different direction. Great feeling. Love it.

It occurred to me, as I rewrote this chapter, that Lore is beginning to take on qualities that sound suspiciously similar to the Doctor. I have no idea how this happened, but I'm gonna roll with it.

Changeling

Holodese Translations:

...sm'f om y'jr rb'rᾳmy pᾳg sᾳm rcok'pdobr, y'jr yjᾳt'pert nidy... (...and in the event of an explosion, the thrower must...)

BrandonBGamer: Again, this is not a crossover fanfic. Incorporating Pokemon into this would require such a massive plot shift... I don't think I could pull that off without completely killing the story. Why not try to write it yourself? It is your idea, after all, and you would know your Link infinitely better than I would. Or if you don't want to do that, please wait to ask me again until this story is done.

XzDaFelixZ: Well, I can't guarantee how long it will be, but I refuse to let this story be anything but good (hopefully). So no worries.

Find me on Tumblr at changeling-rin!

Find the fan-run ask blog on Tumblr at ask-the-dimensional-links!