(I am beginning to suspect… that the Universe may be sentient.)

Changeling does not own the Legend of Zelda. The ownership of Link is also questionable. Really, the only thing Changeling probably owns here is the nicknames.

(Also, that it has both a unique sense of humor, and enough spite to brine a cucumber into a pickle in ten minutes flat.)

Who told you about my pickling hobby?

Consciousness was a slow and gradual battle. It was also entirely unappreciated, because the Links had just been in a battle, had in fact lost that battle, and were not pleased by being put through another one just to wake up. However, consciousness did not care about that sort of thing, and thus enforced itself upon the group regardless of how utterly unwanted it happened to be.

"Whatever we just did," Mask groaned with half-shut eyes and an arm slung over his face, "let's agree to never do it again."

"Seconded," Steam muttered.

"Farore, I feel like the Spirit Train ran me over," Mask continued, grimacing. "Repeatedly."

"You leave my train out of this."

"As some of the leadership, I can confirm that the Spirit Train did not actually run any of us over," Lore piped up.

"Thank you," Steam said.

"However," Lore continued, "we do seem to have spontaneously teleported to a mountaintop, and I have no idea when or how this happened. We also do not seem to be dead, and I was like ninety-nine percent sure I was gonna wake up dead. I am open to theories on this."

"Let's say 'Divine Intervention' and leave it at that," Vio muttered. "My head…"

"About that," Gen began, heaving himself into a semi-upright sitting position. "I have Questions. Like, several Questions. And I'd really like to actually get to ask them, so I'm taking this opportunity where nothing seems to be trying to actively kill us to ask, WHAT THE ACTUAL CRAP IS GOING ON!?"

Everyone blinked at him for a moment. Then Sketch poked Realm in the side and said, "I thought you were in charge of explaining it to him?"

"We were charging into a Boss Battle!" Realm protested. "I literally only had like thirty seconds, I had to be selective!"

"Wait, so what do you know?" Wind asked Gen curiously.

"The Universe is breaking, you're all me, and I think I got recruited to help you all fix it," Gen summarized levelly. "None of which explained to me why Demise was apparently responsible, or why he's apparently the host body for a bunch of other villains, or how this even happened in the first place, or how you all even got to my home at all. Also, there's three goddesses now? And time travel is actively a thing rather than just being passive, and there's other dimensions involved too?"

He threw his hands up in complete bewilderment. "I'm not even going to get started on all the utterly insane stuff I just watched you all do, because that seems like a whole other bag of worms, but Train Summons? And lycanthropy?" Gen let out a small, baffled scoff. "Yeah, I'm not moving another inch until I get an actual, proper explanation for all this."

A moment of silence passed.

"...Fair enough," Dusk sighed.

"Wait, no," Lore protested. "Gen goes first! That's how storytime works!"

Dusk leveled a Look at him. "We are making an exception due to extenuating circumstances," he said, enunciating each syllable with a frightening level of conciseness.

"Oh," said Lore, and wilted slightly in the face of such clear pronunciation. This was because exaggerated phrasing was a precursor to the Leader Voice, and Lore disliked being on the receiving end of the Leader Voice. Under normal circumstances he would have pointed out that Dusk was adamant about not being the Leader, and thus his impending use of the Voice was a contradictory nutshell. However, Lore was also an excellent judge of when people were Not In The Mood, and bringing up the Leader issue would definitely be toeing that line.

So all he actually ended up saying was, "I might as well go first then, since I've got the longest story to tell."

"Please do," Gen said, watching this interaction with wide and interested eyes.

"Right, well. It all started when I had this dream…"

Of all the powers that the Three Golden Goddesses possessed, omnipotence was (irritatingly) not one of them. Because of this, Farore was currently alternating between crippling anxiety and frantic productivity as she tried - futilely - to find the inevitable consequences for violating the Interference Laws.

It should be noted that the Interference Laws were not, actually, Laws devised by the deities who abided by them. Rather, the Laws were based off observances of consequences that a god or goddess' actions might have. In the words of ordinary mortals, the best equivalent would be 'karma'.

Well, either that, or 'Murphy's Law'.

Basically, Farore had meddled, and according to the Universe, she shouldn't have done that. Everything she knew about the Interference Laws said that, because she'd gone and stuck her nose where it didn't belong, there were going to be Consequences.

The only problem was that she couldn't find the Consequences. And it was driving her just a little bit insane with stress. Nothing in any of her domains was out of place or doing something it shouldn't - which was actually a bit odd, now that she thought about it, because Courage was always up to some nonsense or another - but whenever she checked, all Courage was doing was sitting around telling stories between Aspects. More to the point, none of Farore's other creations were doing anything truly out of the ordinary either. And given that Farore was responsible for literally every life form existing - Nayru and Din's Attributes notwithstanding, Wisdom and Power had always been the exception - she had a very wide net to look through.

The Consequences just didn't seem to be in Farore's sphere of awareness. And this made her nervous. Very nervous.

"Girls," she said, after the tenth fruitless scrutiny of everything she had influence over. "Do me a favor and check your Spheres of Influence for Consequences?"

Both her sisters stared at her.

"...Please tell me you're joking," Din said at length. "You - you have to be joking."

"I am not joking," Farore replied miserably. Nayru closed her eyes, looking very much as though she was trying to think happy thoughts.

"How can you not know where the Consequences are!?" Din shrieked. "You actively interfered, there are always Consequences! Usually very severe ones!"

"I know!" Farore wailed. "It's why I'm asking you if you can find any! Because I've looked everywhere and I don't know where they are!"

Din took a deep breath, visibly calming herself down. "Okay. Maybe this is good. Maybe the Universe is making an exception."

"I don't think that's how it works," Nayru said tonelessly, bringing her fingers to massage at her temples. Her eyes were still closed.

Din wilted. "I was trying to be optimistic…"

"Please just check?" Farore pleaded. "Because I'm beginning to freak out a little bit, if we're being honest."

"I'll be a few minutes," Nayru warned, her eyes still shut but now bringing her hands together in a pose of concentration.

"If I end up with Consequential feedback," Din sighed, doing the same, "I'm blaming you."

"Fine, yes, whatever you say," Farore said. "Seriously though, thank you both."

"Mmm," Nayru hummed absently, clearly only paying the bare minimum amount of attention to what was around her at the moment.

For a few moments, everything was silent as Din and Nayru concentrated, and Farore waited not-quite-patiently for the results.

Then Nayru stiffened, gasped, and dropped like a sack of rocks.

It should also be noted that Nayru, in an attempt to get any semblance of relief from her temporal senses (which had not stopped screeching about the rifts in space-time since Demise had first ripped them open) had basically put that part of her brain on mute. This had involved a great deal of stubborn denial, concentrated ignorance, and godly painkiller, and the end result had been that Nayru was receiving absolutely no input from her domain of time whatsoever.

However, Nayru had just gone searching, deliberately, through everything she was in charge of. Consequently, whatever barrier she'd been keeping between her temporal senses and the rest of her brain was dismantled, and everything flooded through all at once.

Now, given that Nayru was already familiar with the state of the timeline, this should, at most, have given her a raging migraine, but not much else. The timeline was a mess, true, but it was still relatively stable.

Yeah, about that, said Nayru's temporal senses, and slapped their goddess in the face with the knowledge that, oh hey, time is literally fracturing at the seams, Hyrule is falling apart, reality is literally going to wither away, and those holes in space-time you were concerned about? Yeah, those would be the reason for all of the above. That threshold for fixing things kiiiinda just expired.

All of this hit Nayru like the Spirit Train, and came with a complimentary screaming panic of chaos, paradoxes, and splintered timelines as all her temporal senses went haywire all at once because their goddess was finally paying attention to them and wow did they have some important stuff to point out. Naturally, it all had to be pointed out at the exact same time and at the loudest volume possible.

In theory, this was all actually perfectly justified, given that reality was no longer tentatively stable and was now actively imploding. The only problem with it all was that Nayru, being on the receiving end of all this, was thoroughly incapacitated and entirely unable to pass on the message for a solid thirty minutes while her sisters revived her.

"Godly jumper cables," Din said authoritatively, after the mentioned thirty minutes had passed with entirely fruitless efforts at getting Nayru to wake back up. Because poking, prodding, shaking, shouting, a flashlight in the eyeball, and a bucket of water had all failed, Din was moving on to the Drastic Measures.

For the interested, 'godly jumper cables' was actually just the very scientific term for Din and Farore sandwiching their unconscious sister in a group hug.

...Also it was easiest to donate spiritual power through skin-on-skin contact. There was also that factor. But it was probably mostly the group-hug thing. Group hugs are nice.

Whatever the reason, Nayru jolted back to awareness within seconds, and promptly let her sisters know by screeching, "FARORE I AM GOING TO STRANGLE YOU!" at the top of her lungs.

"What did I do!?" Farore yelped, immediately putting a safe distance of about thirty feet between herself and her murderous sibling.

"You invoked Consequences," Nayru hissed, cradling her head in her hands.

"Oh," Farore said redundantly, and retreated an extra twenty feet away. She was having to shout a little bit by this point. "You found them."

"I found them," Nayru agreed murderously. "And do you know what? Reality as we know it is falling apart at the seams as we speak. The space-time continuum can't seem to find a volume loud enough to express to me how much of a mangled mess it's in." She paused, grimaced in what looked to be an awful lot of pain, then continued, "I sincerely hope that I'm saying all of this out loud, because I can't actually hear myself think."

She folded over into a little ball and clamped her hands to her temples, where they began to glow a faint blue. Din, after a moment of deliberation, decided to leave Nayru to whatever damage control she was doing, and went to Farore instead.

"So," she started, false-conversationally, "that sounds bad."

"It'll be worse once Nayru gets the mental capacity for large vocabulary back," Farore muttered hopelessly. "Why is this - I only intervened because Demise was going to win, and that would be the end of the Universe as we know it. Why are the Consequences that the Universe is still ending?"

"Kinda seems like the world was doomed if we did, but doomed if we didn't too," Din agreed.

"That's not fair," Farore said, and her voice broke a little bit on the word 'fair'. "How could we have done all this, and come this far… just to watch it all fall apart anyway?"

Din was quiet for a moment.

"Well," she offered, "if we've already invoked Consequences, we might as well keep Interfering."

Farore looked up and stared at her fellow goddess.

"...are you serious," she said.

"The Universe isn't going to fix itself," Din replied, shrugging. "Look. You went up against Demise, about as close as face-to-face as you could get, and that caused some problems. Let's just be realistic about that. But reality isn't dead yet, just dying - and that means we have time to fix it."

"Please," Nayru groaned, alerting both her sisters to the fact that she was up and semi-active again. Farore promptly retreated fifteen more feet, and would have kept going except that Nayru waved her back. "I'm not going to murder you anymore," she sighed. "I've calmed down, I'm just generally furious now."

"Ah," Farore said. "Okay." She kept noticeably closer to Din, though.

"So, to paraphrase," Nayru began, "Courage didn't necessarily fail, but they also didn't stop Demise. So the holes went unfixed, and are now large enough and destabilizing enough that they are literally ripping Hyrule apart at the seams in every way possible. If we want to fix this, we're gonna need to do a few things."

"Which would be?" Din prompted.

"Well, we still need Demise taken down. He's the one powering the holes, and as long as he's still active, the holes are going to be a problem. Also, Hyrule is pretty fractured right now as it is. We all know it was never great, not since that Hero of Time fiasco with the splitting timelines and such-"

"You passed out for three days," Farore remembered.

"-but," Nayru continued pointedly, "it was stable...ish. That's not the case anymore. We're going to need to stitch Hyrule back together."

"That's gonna be an all-three-of-us job," Din winced.

"I mean it," Nayru warned. "We're going to have to literally stitch Hyrule and its history back together. We're talking about resolving all those Hero of Time timelines, aligning the consequent possibilities, piecing it all back together into one coherent story."

That got a wince from both her sisters this time.

"All this because I didn't let Demise destroy the world?" Farore asked disbelievingly. "I'm starting to think it might have been kinder to let him."

"NO," Nayru said emphatically. "Don't you see? This is bad, yes, but we can fix it."

"We can fix it and make it better than it was in the first place," Din agreed, in a slow voice of realization. "Girls."

"Oh," Farore breathed, catching on. Then she frowned. "...Did the Consequences make a mistake?"

"Somehow," Nayru said, "I think they knew exactly what they were doing."

It was several hours later that Gen finally sat back on his heels and said, "That is the most complicated series of events I think I've ever heard."

Speck, who'd gone last, frowned in mild offense. "Hey…"

"No, not you specifically," Gen said, waving an absent-minded hand in Specks general direction. "The whole thing seems ridiculously convoluted. I can definitely see why we all have nicknames now, otherwise I don't think this group would have ever gotten past the Introduction stage."

Lore opened his mouth-

"That is probably unfortunately accurate," Dusk said, giving Lore a Look. Lore subsided with a head tilt and an agreeable shrug, which Gen openly stared at before continuing.

"I'm just struggling, a bit, to wrap my brain around the concept that we're the people who are apparently supposed to prevent the Universe from imminent disintegration," he admitted. "I mean, we're just a group of kids and teenagers who got handed some pointy weapons and told to go Fix Things. Personally, I was barely handling my own Thing, and now I gotta handle a Universe Thing too? I'm gonna need a minute for that one."

"Can you take that minute and tell your story at the same time?" Lore asked. "Because I still need to hear about the blue girl who apparently lives in the Master Sword and also how you apparently met a sex molester who likes to use tongue?"

"The Master Sword is a girl?" Sketch repeated.

"You WHAT?!" screeched everyone else, having heard the words 'sex' and 'molester' right next to each other and becoming understandably alarmed by it. Or, rather, everyone who was old enough to know what sex was did. The younger Links, being Speck, the Four, Red, Blue, Green (but not Vio because he'd read a book by accident and had yet to get over his embarrassment to tell his siblings about it), Sketch, and Steam all just looked confused, and Ocarina-

"What's sex?" Ocarina asked, looking just as confused as the smaller Links were.

There was a moment of silence as everyone blinked at him and awkwardly remembered, oh yeah he's actually only nine or something in mental years. Then there was another moment of silence as everyone looked over to Mask, who very clearly did know what sex was, and even more awkwardly remembered, oh yeah he's actually like seventeen or something in mental years. And then there was about twelve more consecutive moments of silence as everyone watched Mask come to these realizations too, and turn a very interesting shade of purple.

"Oh my Din," he said meekly, and buried his face into his hands. "Am I gonna have to give The Talk to myself?"

"Um," Ocarina said, picking up on the atmosphere but having no idea where it was coming from.

"This is the most bizarre trainwreck I've ever seen," Steam commented, wide-eyed.

"Okay, new plan," Dusk decided. "Gen, tell your story. Lore, please keep your mouth shut. Mask, if you're gonna have The Talk then you might as well take the other younger Links with you, and Ocarina?"

Ocarina tilted his head.

"Brace yourself," Dusk advised.

"Okay…?"

"Later," Mask said fervently. "Please."

Gen watched all this with a growing expression of disbelief on his face, as it suddenly occurred to him that every single outrageously impossible thing that his lookalikes had claimed had happened to them, probably actually happened. Which meant that now, on top of the Train Summons and the lycanthropy, he had size change, temporal manipulation, body mixups, seasonal manipulation, watercolors, weather manipulation, world-hopping, and who even knew what else to cope with. Then he thought about his own adventure, which also included things like time manipulation and world-hopping, as well as Dragons and demons and a floating island in the sky. Maybe, he decided, he should disregard his suspension of disbelief for a while.

"How about I be a distraction then," he said, both to get his mind off the insanity and to rescue his new groupies from their impending embarrassment. "You wanted to hear my story, right?"

"That would be nice, yes," Mask muttered, still quite red.

"Right, so," Gen began. "Everything kinda kicked off on the day of the Wind Ceremony, when I had this nightmare involving a gigantic teeth-monster and a floating blue metal girl. Which is important, but not right this minute, more on that later. The point is, it startled me badly enough that I fell out of bed."

"Ouch," Sketch sympathised.

"Well, I needed to get up anyways, because I was gonna be late to the Wing Ceremony otherwise - do you guys still have Wing Ceremonies?"

"I have no idea what that is, please explain it," Realm told him, and everyone else nodded agreement. Gen blinked around at them all.

"What, really? I understand how you might not use Loftwings much anymore, living on the Surface and all, but it's an important part of Hylian culture…"

"Loftwings?" Wind repeated, head tilted to one side. Gen stared at him.

"You know, giant birds? The ones we partner with and ride on? Kinda the entirety of our traveling method?"

He was met with utterly blank looks from everyone around him. Gen looked blankly back, then let out a heavy sigh and ran his hand down his face.

"This is karma for me having all those questions about what trains were, I know it," he muttered. "Okay, so Loftwings. They're big birds, like really big, pushing eight feet at least. They can be all sorts of colors - if you can imagine it, there's probably a Loftwing colored it. Everybody meets their Loftwing during a Bonding Ceremony when we're ten or something, and it's your partner for life from there. Honestly I could gush about my Loftwing for hours, but I'm not gonna do that because then we'd be here all day."

"Can you just describe him real quick then?" Red asked, clearly already adoring the concept of a giant friendly dragon bird.

"Her," Gen corrected smiling. "She's bright red, she loves neck scritches, and she's not afraid to wark at me when she thinks I'm piloting like an idiot. When she was a hatchling and could still fit in my room, she liked to use me as a pillow, but now that she's bigger than me she thinks she needs to return the favor and now I have to spend the night in her perch at least once a week or else she gets snippy with me." He grinned wider. "I love her to bits."

Red let out a happy little sigh. "What else?"

"You'll have to ask me later," Gen said apologetically. "Hylia knows I could talk about my Loftwing for a week straight, but I don't think we have time for that and I'm trying to quit while I'm ahead."

"Understandable," Dusk agreed, because he'd had to tone back his own gushing about his horse (and goats). It was just one of those things.

"But anyways, you can train with your Loftwing to become a Knight, right? And the graduation is called the Wing Ceremony, where you fly a gauntlet with your bird to show that you're skilled enough to hold the title. So on the day of mine, I was gonna go meet with Zelda and get in some last-minute practice after she scolded me into it…"

In spite of everything that he represented, Demise, on occasion, tried not to be completely murderous. Rarely - very rarely - something could only be gotten through another person, and it tended to help if said person was still alive to do-slash-retrieve-slash-make the thing. As a result, Demise would sometimes set aside his all-consuming quest for utter annihilation in order to achieve a separate, smaller goal on the say to said annihilation, because ironically enough, annihilating everything sometimes got in the way of… well, annihilating everything.

But, he was also absolutely furious, and that tended to make him completely murderous.

This was the problem that Demise was arguing with himself about.

On one hand, he was angry. Very angry. Furious. Livid. A lot of other, stronger words meaning anger that Demise was too angry to properly think of. It was rather difficult to think around the sheer scale of emotion Demise was feeling right now, which was admittedly part of the problem, but not something that Demise felt like acknowledging because of how angry he was.

But on the other hand, the target of his fury wasn't something he could just obliterate. Well - he could, but that would invoke Consequences, and while Demise normally didn't care about Consequences, the ones for outright killing a fellow deity were…

There was nothing in the natural world that Demise would admit to fearing, but Consequences weren't of the natural world. And if the Consequences for killing one fellow deity made him apprehensive, then the Consequences for killing three made him outright intimidated.

The question was: was Demise angry enough to disregard the Consequences of hunting down and murdering the three goddesses to make them pay for ruining his perfect victory?

It was a very valid question, and one that Demise was sure he would give proper thought to once he stopped being quite so murderously furious. But past experience had taught him that he really shouldn't make important decisions when he was this livid, so for now he tabled that thought and poured his feelings into something more productive, like stretching his voids a bit wider to hurry up the death of reality and tightening the stranglehold he was keeping on his Hatred Incarnations.

He would probably calm down… eventually. Or at least, get used to his new level of fury and learn to work with it. It wasn't like being angry was anything new to him, after all.

'Absolutely furious' might as well be a default state for him by this point.

"So, here's the New Plan," Nayru said, in a very 'let's sum this up' tone of voice. It was a bit redundant, because the only people she was explaining it to were her sisters and they'd been there the entire time, but there was also the fact that they'd been plotting their way through at least a dozen different Hyrules and patching together no less than three different versions of Time (and sometimes more than that, depending on which incident they were dealing with at the moment). Honestly, a summary was probably a really good idea.

"Farore, you dumped Courage in the farthest timeline point from Demise at the time, right?" Nayru continued.

"That was because I panicked and didn't have the time to think it through," Farore reminded her sisters pointedly, "but yes, that's what I did. As long as that Hyrule is still relatively intact, they should still be there." She paused, then clarified, "It's the Heroes of Light aspect of Courage's home time, with Vaati and the Four Sword and Ganon behind it all."

"Which means we can point them towards the closest problems and let them hack at it for a while," Nayru said. "And that gives us time to do some damage control. How's threading Hyrule's history back together going?"

"Fine, until I try to patch in the Great Sea timeline," Din grumbled. "Actually, it all falls apart the instant I try to add anything past the Hero of Time fiasco. Which is totally fine. Not like most of Hyrule's history takes place after that point, or anything." She threw up her hands in exasperation. "Why am I even doing this job anyways? I'm not the one with Time Senses."

Nayru blinked. "Ah… right. I do forget that point, sometimes. Have you just been working by trial and error this whole time?"

"More error than trial, I'd say," Din muttered. "At least ninety percent error to about ten percent trial."

Nayru winced. "How about I take over that job instead, yeah? You can work on slotting in all those new landmasses that need to exist now."

Din visibly brightened; the land was, after all, her domain. "Does that mean I get to play with islands?"

"Within reason," Farore admonished quickly, because the last time Din had made islands, she'd gotten so excited that she forgot to anchor them within the usual plane of reality. (As a result, none of the goddesses had noticed when one of Demise's Hatred Incarnations took them over and one of Courage's Aspects got abducted into it all. If there was one good thing that had come out of all this holes-in-the-Universe problem, it was that it'd knocked loose the Hero of Wind from whatever alternate version of the world that he'd been stuck in.) There were a rather lot of loose islands to clean up now because of that. "Please just put the already-existing ones in the right places this time."

"But if there was this spot where an island would look really good…" Din trailed off, pleadingly.

Farore shared a look with Nayru, then sighed. "Run it by us first, and we'll talk about it, okay?"

Din gave herself a little fist-pump.

"But seriously, there's an entire New Hyrule that's a completely different landmass from the original one that needs to get incorporated somehow," Farore continued. "Not to mention that one timeline where the whole thing ended up at the bottom of the ocean, and the entire heaping mess that is now the Dark World/Twilight Realm/Lorule. Get on that."

"You got it," Din said, already frowning in concentration.

"Meanwhile," Farore continued, wincing, "I'll start trying to figure out how to sort the Rito and the Zora into separate species, and how to differentiate between the different Zora species when there only used to be one, and how to align the discrepancies of the Kokiri genealogy, and how to transition the Mogma tribes into the Subrosians, and how to connect all the different forms that the native people of the Dark World/Twilight Realm/Lorule take, and how to resolve Skyloft into what becomes the Ooccoo City…" She looked as though she was getting a headache just thinking about it.

"And I'll work on getting my temporal sense to shut up long enough to actually start patching it all together again," Nayru muttered. "Oh my Me, I'm going to have to account for Trains. How am I supposed to account for Trains when literally no other version of Hyrule has ever gotten that far?"

There was silence for a moment, as the sisters all contemplated the sheer scale of the job they had ahead of them.

"I swear, this was a much easier job back when we were just creating," Din sighed. "What is this 'revision and editing' crap anyway? It's like there's somehow twice as much work to do just because we can't tear the old framework down and start from scratch."

"That would defeat the purpose," Farore replied determinedly, as she reached for the first of the many species that needed her attention and began to work.

"-when Fi told me there'd been a disturbance in Faron, I thought it had to be Demise," Gen concluded. "So I came down to investigate, but I found you all instead, and… well, you know what happened after that."

"...Wow," Sketch said slowly. "So… you kinda made the Master Sword?"

"I guess?"

"And the Sword is a girl."

"I do not understand why that's a hard concept to grasp," Gen muttered.

"No, not like that," Sketch said. "It's just, the way you talk about her makes me feel like I should have met her, too? But I've had the Master Sword for months now and it - she - hasn't ever said anything to me, much less actually physically manifested."

"Oh," Gen said, frowning. "That's… huh. That's actually a good point. Let me ask. Hey, Fi?"

At that point, something rather odd happened. The Master Sword on Gen's back vibrated and emitted a singing-chime noise, then stopped. There was a short pause; then, quite unexpectedly, the Master Sword on Ocarina's back began to do the same thing. After a moment, this stopped too. There was a another moment of silence.

"Is this supposed to be happening?" A rather bewildered Ocarina asked Gen, who was following the descending Master Sword pattern with an open mouth.

"I have never seen her do this before in my life," Gen said.

Abruptly, the Master Sword attached to Sketch joined the show. It pulsed briefly, then went dormant again. There was another long pause. Then, the one that Dusk was carrying began to chime; and after a few moments, it started glowing too. As glowing was a new development, everyone immediately looked at Dusk's weapon expectantly.

"My apologies, Master," said the Master Sword in a distinctly feminine voice. Those Links who had been close enough to see and hear Fi during the fight with Demise immediately recognized the sound. "I appear to be unable to speak with you directly. Will this method of communication suffice?"

"Whoa, wait," Blue said, launching to his tiptoes and peering at the talking Sword. "I thought we were the only people who could hop timelines. How is she doing that?"

"It's the same Sword," Vio theorized. "All this time, all these different Hyrules… it's always been the same Master Sword. She's not affected because technically, she's already here."

"Also," Green noted, "I'm pretty sure she's Sacred. And imbued with the power of the goddesses. Which, I'm pretty sure has already been established as being immune." He pointed at the Triforce mark on Realm's left hand, since he happened to be the closest example.

"I estimate that theory has a ninety-percent chance of being correct, Master," Fi agreed.

"...I'm not Gen, though?" Green replied, confused.

The Master Sword emitted a chiming sound. "Master Link is Master Link. I do not differentiate."

"Oh, okay," Green said, looking blindsided.

"But if Fi's immune," Realm said, tilting his head, "shouldn't she be talking from Gen's Master Sword? Why's she doing it from Dusk's?"

Fi let out another chime. "Temporal misalignment makes manifestation difficult. I have optimized for my current situation."

Blue jabbed Vio in the ribs. "Hey look, she's related to you. Translate your fellow walking dictionary for me?"

Vio gave him a Look. "There's something wonky about time that's preventing her from actually coming out of the Sword," he said, "and so she improvised a jury-rig solution. Which you would know, if you actually read a dictionary for once in your life."

"I don't need to," Blue snorted. "Sooner or later, you tell me everything that's in it."

"That's no excuse!"

"Hey, it's been working for me so far. Besides, you're the one that actually thinks that sort of stuff is interesting."

"Maybe if you weren't such an uncultured plebeian, you'd-"

"KNOCK. IT. OFF," Green interrupted, and pegged them both with a Leader's Stare. They immediately withered under the assault. "I swear to you both I will put you on opposite sides of the group if you can't focus on what's actually important. Clear?"

"Clear," Vio and Blue muttered, and shuffled a bit closer together. Ironically, despite the fact that their personalities were about as different as could be, the fact of that matter was that they were still two parts of the same whole Link and separation was just sort of inherently terrifying. Not to the level that the Four had it, of course, but… still.

Also, the fact that Green was making that sort of threat meant that he really wasn't in the mood, which was also sort of inherently terrifying. All things considered, Blue and Vio simultaneously decided it would be best if they stopped talking now.

"...So," Gen said awkwardly, breaking into the silence in a valiant attempt to pull everyone back on track. "Fi? What's the status?"

"I am requesting confirmation that this communication method is acceptable," Fi repeated patiently.

"Oh, yeah, this is fine," Gen said, flapping an absent hand in the general direction of Dusk's Master Sword. "We can all hear you."

"Acknowledged," Fi replied. "What is your request, Master?"

"Oh," Gen said again, finally remembering that he'd called Fi for a reason. "Uh, we were kinda wondering why you don't do… this, from anybody else's Master Sword in their time."

Fi was silent for a long moment. "I am afraid that I misunderstand your query, Master. I am doing 'this' right now."

"Okay, yes," Gen agreed, "but you didn't do it before. Like, when Dusk drew the Master Sword for the first time, you didn't appear to him."

Fi emitted a long hum. "Calculations would indicate that my purpose was fulfilled and I entered a dormant state; however, this would make it impossible for me to speak from this current vessel. As this is clearly not the case, evidence suggests that time is in flux, and several events that have or will have happened, have not."

"...What?" Blue said.

"The holes-in-the-world problem is making a loophole for her to exploit because it lets her be both dormant and active at the same time, which is why she can talk from a version of herself that's supposed to be asleep," Vio translated.

"Oh."

"I predict a ninety-nine-point-nine percent chance that these temporal paradoxes will cause a Universal Collapse if not dealt with, Master," Fi finished, in the exact same tone of voice she'd used to request confirmation not a minute earlier. It was really hard to tell if she was hiding her emotions, just didn't care, or just didn't have the capacity.

"Thanks, we know," Gen groaned. "Options?"

Dusk's Master Sword let off a two-tone ring. "I would suggest a second attempt at subduing the Source, Master."

"Because he didn't hand out butts to us enough already," Gen sighed. "Okay, anything else?"

"Activating dowsing," Fi announced. "Uploading Demise's aura signature. Installing parameters. Scanning."

Gen, upon hearing the word dowsing, unceremoniously snatched Dusk's weapon from the scabbard and began waving it wildly through the air in all sorts of directions. In tandem with this, Fi began making beep noises.

"I know he mentioned this," Sketch commented, watching, "but I didn't think it made him look like a flailing Like-Like."

"Shut up, I do not," Gen retorted, despite having never met a Like-Like but guessing by the analogy that it was an unflattering comparison. He waved Dusk's Master Sword through the air again, then abruptly stopped when it let out a much more rapid and high-pitched beep than before.

"Signature located," Fi said. "Demise's aura is emanating from two separate sources approximately half a mile down and two miles southwest. I would surmise that this is not Demise himself, but rather a pair of trusted accomplices."

"Or," Mask said, having poked his head over the side of the mountaintop they were on and looking in the direction Fi had indicated, "they could be a really big blue pig wearing a cape, and a weird one-eyed pudgy bat with six wings. Does that ring bells for anyone?"

Red, Blue, Green, and Vio, the Four, and Speck immediately raised their hands, followed closely by Lore (who was laughing hysterically and repeating the words 'Pudgy Bat' with increasing enthusiasm), and Realm. Gen, meanwhile, quietly thanked Fi for her help and slid Dusk's Master Sword back into the scabbard on Dusk's back, albeit a bit awkwardly because it was just now occurring to him that he'd swiped another Link's weapon. Dusk just let off a small sigh and shrugged his shoulders in an absent motion of understanding commiseration which translated vaguely to, 'Sometimes you gotta do weird stuff to save the world'. Fi, for her part, simply went back to her original casing with no further fuss - her job was done, as far as she was concerned.

Unaware of this, Mask blinked at all the raised hands and clarified, "Okay, do those two together ring bells for anyone?"

All hands went down except for Green and his crew. Vio poked his head over the edge too and winced. "Well, shoot," he said. "That's definitely our Hyrule, and those are definitely our villains."

His three immediate siblings clustered around him to see for themselves. "I… thought they were in Demise's head?" Green asked, frowning.

"Apparently, not anymore," Blue growled. "Let's go punch them in the face until they tell us why."

"No," Green vetoed immediately.

"...Later?"

"Maybe."

Blue made a little fist-pump where Green couldn't see it.

"Hey, there's people climbing up," Red said, pointing down to where a blonde dot and several more metallic shiny dots were making their way along the path that led to the peak. "Is that Princess Zelda?"

The entire group of Links perked up at this.

"Oh my Din, it is," Green said, disbelievingly. "Why is she climbing the mountain with Vaati and Ganon on the loose!?"

"Ooh, do we get to meet your Zelda?" Lore asked brightly, having slightly calmed down from the apparent hilarity that was 'Pudgy Bat'.

"Forgive me when I say I really hope not," Vio groaned.

"Oh, she just teleported," Red relayed, from his vantage point looking down. "I guess it's only her soldiers that are doing the climbing, she's just kinda jumping ahead and then waiting for them."

"Classy," Mask remarked.

"Hey," Blue said warningly. "She's a Princess, you know."

"He's right, I am," said a completely unexpected voice from behind them, which made everyone startle a solid half-inch into the air. All the Links looking over the edge of the mountain whipped around in surprise. Princess Zelda in all her Royal splendor was not who they'd been expecting to speak next. "Link, I'm glad you brought reinforcements. You've seen Vaati and that Blue Beast, I assume?"

"Hard to miss them, to be honest," Blue said, entirely ignoring the fact that, until Fi had pointed it out, the whole group had been completely oblivious. "Also, his name is Ganon."

"Perfect," Zelda said, somehow managing to twist it into a curse word through sheer sarcasm. "Of course Vaati would find a way to team up with the most infamous Evil that Hyrule has ever faced."

"Yeah, we're working on that," Vio told her. "Turns out this is kinda related to that hole-in-the-world issue. Hence the reinforcements."

"Which I would love to ask you about," Zelda said, very pointedly eyeing everyone's faces, "but unfortunately I don't think we have the time. Last I heard, Vaati was threatening to literally blow the Castle down."

In the back of the group, Wind snorted something that sounded suspiciously like the word 'amateur'. When everyone looked at him though, he was only absentmindedly twirling the Wind Waker through his fingers and staring vaguely off into the middle distance.

"What?" he asked, upon noticing the attention.

"I know you just got back," Zelda said, reclaiming the focus of the conversation, "or at least, that's what I'm assuming that bright light was yesterday. Given that you four stopped sending me Void Reports a solid two weeks ago and they were supposed to be coming every other day…"

All four of the boys winced. "Sorry," Red murmured.

Zelda promptly gave them all a tight hug. "I thought the hole had gotten you," she said. "I'm sure I'll be very angry once the relief has worn off, but right now I'm just glad that you're not gone the way I thought you were."

"Awwwwwww," Lore cooed. Gen promptly stepped on his foot for interrupting the moment.

Zelda let go and stepped back. "My point is, Hyrule needs you again. Will you be our Four Sword Heroes once more?"

"Like you even gotta ask," Blue snorted.

Palpable relief sagged off the Princess' shoulders. "Oh, thank the goddesses, because I can see Vaati from here and he just started using small vortexes to launch boulders."

Off to the side, Wind let out a dejected sort of sound and slipped the baton he'd been fiddling with behind his left ear. When everyone glanced at him (and he actually noticed this time), he said, "That's a total rookie move. I was kinda hoping he might put up a good fight, but he'd just try and brute-force it. Not worth the effort."

"...Right," Green said, and made a mental note to ask about what that actually meant later. "That aside, you guys up for a fight?"

"One that we actually have a chance of winning this time?" Steam asked. "Sign me up."

"Don't we gotta get down first?" Ocarina asked, eyeing the substantial mountain slope between them and the flat ground below. "And in, like, actually decent time? Because I don't know about you guys, but the last time I climbed a mountain it took forever."

"Remind me to teach you how to get around that," Mask said. "But since we don't have time for that, just use your fastest option and jump a lot."

"Race you!" Lore immediately declared, and it was a testament to how much of a hurry they were now in that nobody bothered to object to this.

Which was how, approximately thirty seconds later, the entire group of Links all went rocketing down the mountainside at various speeds and with various volumes of adrenaline-fueled screeching.

I FINALLY figured out how to use Fi, you guys. I'm so pleased right now, you have no idea.

Anyways. As I'm sure some of you fantastically observant readers have noticed, that thing the Three Goddesses are up to might sound a little bit familiar. What version of Hyrule do we know about that has landmasses from all the games before, species originating from wildly different timelines, seems to mash all the backstories together at once, and has the longest-running timeline of any game so far?

It's still not gonna show up until the sequel, or maybe the very end of DL if I can swing it, but - rejoice, all you readers who have been anxiously awaiting the inclusion of BotW in this fic! In a very roundabout way, it just happened.

Wish me luck,

Changeling

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