Chapter 4

AUTHOR'S NOTES, DISCLAIMERS, AND OTHER RANDOM JUNK:

I own the Legend of Zelda series. I am also the head of Nintendo, and I make about a million dollars a second. I always get every new game and game system for free to test it, and they come in waterproof cases so I can play them in my private swimming pool, in my 10-story mansion on the Oregon coast. Hey, I can dream, can't I?

(I don't own Zelda, genius.)

The large brain-like mass loomed in front of our heroes like… well… like a large brain-like mass.

"We have to go inside that thing?" Liz asked disgustedly. Racu made no reply except sighing and walking into the spinal cord.

Suddenly, Racu had an image in his mind of a little text box saying "L2: Brain Maze" inside his mind.

"ARGH! What's with all this psychic communication?!?!?"

"What psychic communication?" Liz asked, nonplussed.

"Voices in my head…" Racu said creepily.

"Okay, back away sloooowly," Liz muttered. Racu shook his head, and stared at the walls around him. They seemed to be made of a oozy, slimy, mass that looked like a bunch of oversized worms wrapped around each other. At one end, the oozy stuff had been cut away to reveal a door.

Liz had noticed them also. "Look at these creepy walls!" she said, and poked one with her sword. Instantly, about 30 pounds of pus came oozing out all over the floor.

"Gross," commented Racu as he ran ahead through the door, away from the pus. However, he didn't get very far in the next room before falling into a pit trap.

"HEEEEEEELP!" he screamed as he fell. Liz followed him through the door but couldn't see anything except blackness.

"Racu?" Liz asked. "Where are you?"

"Down here!" he shouted up. "There's another room here, and… hey, don't bite me you stupid little neurotransmitter! DIEEEE!!!"

Liz heard random sword slashing noises and screams of pain from down below. "Hee, hee, hee!" she heard Racu say then. "I win!"

"Racu? Are you okay down there?" she shouted down.

"Yeah," he replied. "Some neurotransmitters attacked me, but I beat them all. Hey, there's a treasure chest over here! It has a Dungeon Map in it!"

"How come there wasn't a Dungeon Map in L1?" Liz shouted down.

"I guess the author forgot about it," Racu replied. "Anyway, there's a staircase back up here…"

Liz looked to the opposite side of the room and saw Racu, still holding the map and his drawn sword, alight from a staircase there.

"Alight?" Liz asked. "What kind of author uses that word?"

"A really, really, screwed up one," replied Racu. "C'mon, let's get out of this creepy brain."

Liz and Racu walked along the pathway, killing neurotransmitters whenever they saw them, until they reached a puzzle room. It consisted of four signs in a row from left to right, four handles attached to the wall from left to right, and a four blue blocks a little below the signs, in a row from left to right.

"Okay, how do we solve this one?" Liz asked with a sigh.

"Well, let's read the signs," suggested Racu sensibly, doing just this.

The first sign read "three," the second sign, "one," the third sign, "four," the fourth sign, "two."

"What the heck?" Racu asked. "It's like those screwed up puzzles where they write the word "yellow" in green ink and challenge you to say it right!"

"I'm going to pull one of those handles," Liz announced as she walked to the nearest handle- the second one from the right. She pulled it and the first block transformed into a treasure chest.

"Sweet!" Racu exclaimed as he removed 20 Gale Seeds to add to his Seed Satchel.

"Cool!" Liz agreed, moving to the handle on the far right. But when she pulled on that handle, the Gale Seeds suddenly vanished from Racu's hand, the door shut behind them, and all four blocks transformed into Brain Bugs!

"Ack!" screamed Racu as an evil-looking bug wearing glasses and with a dictionary under its arm chased him clicking his mandibles.

Liz had already drawn her sword and was fighting with one bug, but another was closing in on her.

"I can't kill it!" she shrieked. "WHY WON'T YOU DIE, STUPID THING!" The bug just clicked its mandibles and rushed forward again.

Racu, as usual, was appraising the situation. "Okay," he said. "They have to have a weak point. They all do." He drew his sword and boomerang and turned to face the bug approaching him.

He sliced at the book in the bug's arm, and knocked it to the ground. "ACK!" said the bug. "How dare you mistreat a dictionary! I'll have you know that those intelligent words cost me $19.95-"

Racu lunged in with his sword while the bug was complaining and taking no notice of him and shattered his glasses with the tip. The bug shrieked and vanished.

"OK, got it!" he shouted to Liz, who was attempting to fend off three bugs at the same time, all of which were attempting to tell her the meaning of the word "kleptophobia." "You have to distract it by getting rid of those books and then go for the glasses!"

"Great!" groaned Liz as she took another point of damage from hearing boring definitions. "Care to help me out at all, or are you going to stand there and watch me be bored to death?"

"Oh, right," replied Racu, as he sent his boomerang flying at one of the Brain Bug's dictionaries.

With a triumphant, feral yell, Liz slashed the bug's eyeglasses into shards before it could say a word.

"Die, stupid language arts freak!" she told it as it vanished.

Racu and Liz quickly dispatched the other two bugs. As soon as they were all gone, the blocks reappeared.

"I wonder what we did wrong?" Racu asked. "The first handle, that third one from the left, seemed correct, but…"

"Aha!" said Liz. "I finally get a chance to figure something out! The first sign had the word three which meant pull handle three first! She did so, and Racu took his Gale Seeds back. "So that means-"

"We pull handle number one next!" finished Racu as he did so. The second block transformed into a treasure chest, this time containing a Small Key.

"That's all we need to go forward," Liz said. "We can use the Small Key on the lock and forget about the other chests."

"Something tells me that's just the kind of trick they're trying to catch us in," Racu said thoughtfully. Let's open the other chests, even risking another fight with the Brain Bugs."

The third chest revealed 1 Rupee. "Oh, how absolutely crucial to our progress," Liz commented, dripping with sarcasm.

"You be quiet," Racu told her as he pulled the final handle. "Aha! The Dungeon Item!"

"Hey, there wasn't a Dungeon Item last chapter either! What's up with this author!"

"Yes there was, the Seed Satchel," Racu commented. "Now what is this?" He pulled out what looked like a lightning rod. "What does it do?"

Liz had just grabbed the rod rudely out of Racu's hand when, suddenly, four more Brain Bugs appeared!

"ACK!" screamed Racu as he drew his sword. "Not those STUPID BUGS AGAIN!!!!!!"

Racu dispatched of one with his sword before it could tell him the meaning of "antidisestablishmentarianism," but Liz was caught by surprise without her sword. Without thinking, she whipped the lightning rod out behind her. She couldn't see what had happened, but she heard electrical-crackly noises and the Brain Bug shrieking in pain before it exploded.

"Whoa, do that again!" Racu said in amazement, not even paying attention to the Brain Bug damaging him with a barrage of vocabulary words because he was so awed by the effect of the lightning-rod-thing.

Liz faced the bug that was attacking Racu and whipped the rod down over her head. A neurotransmitter popped out of the end, zoomed over to the Brain Bug, and electrified it!

"Sweet!" Liz shouted, whipping the rod in a circle around her. A whole army of neurotransmitters quickly dispatched the remaining bug. "It's a Neuro Rod! I heard about these! They create non-evil neurotransmitters to defeat enemies and do stuff for us!"

"Great," Racu replied. "One little issue though- it's MINE! You grabbed it out of my hand!"

"Oh, yeah," Liz grinned sheepishly, and she handed the Neuro Rod back. "Anyway, shouldn't be be finding the mini-boss sometime soon?"

"Don't say that," Racu replied. "You'll jinx it!"

"But we have this sweet rod now, we can get rid of anything!" Liz told him excitedly, grabbing the Neuro Rod back and whipping it around.

"ARGH! Liz, careful where you point that thing!" A neurotransmitter popped out of the end and hopped into Racu's hair, making it all stand up mad-scientist style. Racu put his hands up to brush it out and…

"YEEEEOOOOOWWWWCH!" shrieked Racu like a little girl.

"Oh, c'mon, you wuss!" Liz laughed. "It can't be that ba- YEEEEEOOOOOWWWWCH!"

"Now look who's talking," Racu said, as the neurotransmitter hopped back into neurotransmitter-space. "C'mon."

They used the Small Key on the lock and headed up through a room. Six Moblins attacked, but Racu grabbed the Neuro Rod back from Liz, and, using some Matrix-like moves, whipped it in a double-helix around himself, sending a total of 16 neurotransmitters into the Moblins, who became roasted instantly.

"Yuck!" said Liz. She poked a black smoking Moblin with her sword. It fell apart instantly, and in it's place was a Compass!

"Now that is just gross," commented Racu. "Moblin-meat Compasses? I think not."

"Hey the Dungeon Map says that the mini-boss is in the next room!" Liz shouted.

"Oh, great, that means- WAIT A MINUTE!!! The Dungeon Map doesn't show mini-bosses!"

"Oh, yeah," shrugged Liz. "Well, it's in the next room anyway. I just know it."

"Uh, huh, bet you 100 Rupees it isn't!" Racu challenged.

"You're on!" was the reply. The two heroes walked through the door into the next room, and-

"Now, children, it's time for your appointment! I am the EVIL PSYCHOLOGIST OF DOOM, and I am the mini-boss of this temple!"

Liz turned to Racu triumphantly. "Pay up, Subrosian Boy!"

Racu looked sheepish. "I… don't… have… 100 Rupees…"

Rolling her eyes and sighing, Liz turned back to the mini-boss, who looked like a ultra-thin lady with tiny eyeballs. Over these eyeballs were a pair of horn-rimmed glasses at least four times as large as the eyes they were covering, hanging on a sparkly blue chain. In her hand was a clipboard and pencil, and she was smiling maniacally.

"Hee, hee, so, do you have any psychological problems?" she asked sweetly. Liz and Racu were backing away slowly.

"Don't… hurt us… nice evil demon lady…" Racu was stuttering.

Suddenly, her voice became more sinister. "Oh yeah? No psychological problems, huh? Well I can GIVE YOU SOME!" And, snarling like a demon, she leaped at Racu and Liz.

Oooh, cliffhanger ending, huh! Well, I'll give you three reasons why this is a cliffhanger ending.

1. This is the perfect spot for one

2. I'm punishing all the authors in the Zelda section (and other sections too- hint, hint, Golden Sun section, mangazgal) who leave us with cliffhanger endings when we are the readers

3. I finally got three nice reviews for ZELDA CHARACTERS IN THE COURTROOM, so I'm going to work on that now, and I need to change modes! Joy!

4. It's a gimmick to get more nice reviews telling me to write more chapters.

Yeah, I know that's four reasons. So sue me. Actually, don't sue me, please, Nintendo?