After much procrastination the seventeenth chapter is upon us, and it is a long one.

Last chapter I mentioned my forums. I couldn't be bothered with them basically. However, when my website goes live there will be a section in there for my fiction with an rss feed so you can stay updated with the latest news. You will be able to find the link in my profile page.

Chapter Seventeen: The Old Man / The Really Long One

After a few months talking to the newest narrator, Link decided that awakening Samus from the plotholeine stasis she was in and to continue with their quest.

The room they were in was cylindrical, round and very circular. Along the perimeter of this room there was a generic room-sized spiral ramp that Samus had grown to recognize as the Space Pirate architectural ascending device of choice. Looking up Link saw that the room was almost conical; perhaps gherkinal would be a better word. Near the top on the wall were what looked like holes in the wall, approximately the same size as Samus in morph ball. He saw that all five of these were on a separate platform, unreachable by the ramp. From each of the five holes were wires that went up to a large iris structure in the roof, beneath which was a floating platform, about the same size as the iris, which seemed to be held up by a small flame underneath it.

What Samus saw was a standard Pirate circular ramp, probably populated by large insectoid creatures, some of which would possibly be immune to all but the right combination of missiles and beams. At the top of the room, of no special shape, were five bomb slots connected to an iris door in the roof above a floating platform. Setting off a bomb in each of the bomb slots would probably open the iris and judging by the size of the platform, it would act as an elevator to whatever was above this room once stood on with an open iris. These bomb slots were on an isolated ridge, inaccessible from the ramp. This was not a problem to Samus as the iris looked to be a viable grapple beam surface.

The duo casually walked up the ramp on the side of the room. Neither of them had apparently noticed the glass containers of metroids in the centre of the room. This was not really surprising as they were not there before the horizontal line. There were six of them surrounding a larger one which looked empty. The metroids within looked dormant, as though they were under some form of anaesthetic. There were wires coming from each metroid, the type you seen in hospitals attached to some patients.

After a perimeter's worth of ramp Samus heard the infamous screech which spread fear through the bodies of people who heard it. She looked down and saw the metroids, and what looked like a cow being inserted into large glass tube through a hole in the floor. The metroids were bashing the sides of their tanks trying to get to the sleeping cow. Suddenly, smaller holes opened in the floor of the large tank and in the floor of the individual tanks. The wires detached from the metroids and within a few seconds the metroids were in the middle tank, feeding on the newly awakened cow. For about a minute all that could be heard was the bovine equivalent of a scream and the occasional screeching of a metroid.

Then the cow was dead and the metroids returned to their tanks, letting the wires attach to them.

"What just happened?" asked Link who looked more shocked than scared.

"Metroids," said Samus and referred Link to a paragraph in chapter one. "From the looks of things, we have just witnessed feeding time. Although what the Pirates are using them for this time I don't know."

Samus jumped down to the bottom of the room and started scanning the containers and the metroids to find out what they were being used for. Link came down and saw Samus frightened for the first time. She was muttering things along the lines of "that's not possible" and "they can't be doing that" and "holy mother of Jesus".

"What's going on," asked Link.

"By the looks of it, these metroids are having their energy sucked out through these wires. The only thing possible is that they are being used for electricity. But that wouldn't make sense. I can only imagine it has something to do with the golden orbs hovering above each of the towers as seen in chapter eleven."

Link could tell that Samus was keeping something from him, but before he could force her to tell him there was a chorus of screeches and the metroids bashed into the side of their containers hard enough to smash them.

One of them flew straight towards Samus and attached itself to her head. In severe pain, she did what she was used to doing in this situation. She rolled into morph ball and laid a power bomb. A few seconds later and the bomb exploded, leaving bits of metroid innards about the floor.

Samus watched in amusement as Link flailed around with a metroid attached to his head, slowly sucking the life out of him. She dodged an oncoming metroid and then decided it would be worth saving him now. She armed her ice beam, charged and fired at the metroid, freezing it in mid air. The weight of it caused Link to fall over, shattering it.

Armed with the knowledge of these things' weakness Link equipped his bow and pulled a few ice arrows out of his quiver. He pulled back on the (wiimote whilst holding the B trigger, lol) arrows and was engulfed in a blue smoky aura. He let go and the arrows sailed through the air with all the grace of a thing that sails through the air really gracefully. They hit one of the metroids in the middle of the group of four on one side of the room. The resulting ice blast froze all four, causing them to fall to the floor and smash into a million pieces.

"Well, that was simple enough." said Link, wiping the sweat off his forehead. He had completely forgotten that Samus was hiding something from him.

The two had climbed to the top of the room now. Samus guessed that the bomb slots in the wall on the inaccessible ledge would open the door, so based on that premise she used her grapple beam attached to the door in the roof to swing to the ledge. Yes, that is certainly a bomb slot she thought to herself as she rolled into morph ball and laid a bomb in it. It exploded and the bomb slot glowed blue, the wire that connected it to the door mimicking it. She moved round to the next one and did the same, and getting the same result she proceeded to do the same for each of them.

Disengaging morph ball after the final bomb slot she saw that there was no effect to activating all the slots. Looking around watched as the last three she had activated were distinguished in order. They must be activated simultaneously thought Samus. Her first instinct was a power bomb in the centre of them which would put them all within its blast radius, but on second thought she remembered the time she tried that on Tallon IV, leaving her one power bomb short when she was facing one of the guardians. She shook away the painful memory of being whittled down to half an energy tank before finding a hole in the wall that contained, of all things, a box containing a whole energy tank's worth of energy and a power bomb.

"You got any more of those λ45s?" she asked Link.

"I got six left. What does it matter though, you shouted at me last time I used one?"

"Doesn't matter, I just need them. Get them out and I'll pull them up to me."

"No. Tell me what you want them for and I'll do it."

Knowing that she would have to submit to him sooner or later she replied "Fine. I need to put one in each of these holes in the wall so that they explode at the same time."

On hearing that, after seeing how Samus got up, Link got out his grappling hook, spinned it around a few times to build up momentum and threw it at the door in the roof. It latched onto a hole in the door and Link jumped and swung towards the centre. In the centre he stopped the rope swinging, climbed up it a bit, and then started it swinging again so that he could swing onto the ledge. After three swings, with enough momentum to reach the ledge, he began the final forward swing. When he was just further than the platform in the middle of the room his grapple unhooked from the hole and he started to fall. Samus saw this and let him carry on until he was near the bottom of the room, then she activated her new Zero Point energy device and slowed Link's descent. He stopped a few inches from the ground and felt himself being pulled up by some invisible force. Within a few seconds he was shaking on the ledge next to Samus.

Showing no mercy, Samus simply said, "Well go on then. Do what you came up here for. You'll find a button on the side of each of the bombs that puts it into remote mode so you can detonate them all at once. And you'll need to turn down the magnitude with the rocker switch on the side so we don't have to go to the bottom of the room just to be safe."

Having no idea what she just said Link just handed over the five bombs which Samus proceeded to follow her instructions on and insert into the bomb slots.

The two jumped down onto the platform and Samus pressed a button on the bombs' remote. There was a beeping ticking sort of sound coming from each of the bombs for a few seconds before they exploded, this time with a small blast radius. The wires coming from the slots lit up and the door above them opened. The platform shook a bit and then ascended.

The other side of the door was the outer rim of the centre tower. Looking around, Samus could see the great satellites on the smaller towers with their beams of something. Link looked down and for the first time in his life felt vertigo. All of a sudden he was being pulled back from the side by Samus, this time using her hand.

"I don't want to waste more energy saving you," she said, "now follow."

Link obeyed the woman who had saved his life twice in one chapter and stood with her on the elevator in the side of the building.

"Yeah, about that," he started, "never pick me up with that thing again."

The elevator took them to the top of The Palace nauseatingly quickly. At the top they turned round and saw in the centre of the summit a small hole, wide enough for about two people to fall down side by side Samus observed.

There was a mechanical sound coming from it and within a few seconds there emerged a head, looking away from the duo for dramatic effect. The head was shortly followed by a body, wearing a black cloak to add the aforementioned dramatic effect.

"Ganon!" Link shouted.

But it was not Ganon. The Old Man turned around so that Link could see this for himself. The Old Man laughed to himself, a sort of cliché evil laugh.

"I never thought I'd say this," said Link, "but who are you and what have you done with Ganon?"

"Ganon is irrelevant at the moment," said the Old Man. His voice had all the qualities of Ganon's, thought Link. It was the sort of voice you'd expect to hear coming from someone in control of an army.

The Old Man had spent several lifetimes trying to find the secret to eternal life, managing to do so through time travel, an important element to the future of this story. However, just when he was close to succeeding, he was killed by a man named Sgt. Cortez. Cortez was not important, as he too died within ten minutes of doing what he believed to be right to save mankind from the TimeSplitter Army. TimeSplitters were one of the Old Man's latest creations in his effort to gain immortality. None of that is important though for reasons that shall be discussed later.

What is important though it the way in with Cortez killed the Old Man, whose name unimportantly was Jacob Crow.

Crow was in his underwater lair in the early 20th century, off the coast of Scotland. Cortez stole the raw Time Crystal that was important to Crow's time travelling. Of course, Crow did not like this and started to attack. Cortez was nearly dead when he time warped back in time to help himself out in the fight against Crow. The twin Cortezes managed to kill Crow, but not before he managed to say his last word: "Rosebud". Cortez thought nothing of it and made a comment about never eating calamari again and then proceeding to save the world.

However, Crow's last word was the voice activated password for his emergency teleport that, due to a plot hole that I do not care to explain yet, sent him to a parallel universe. Crow had predicted that he may encounter a situation like that so he made arrangements, once again through the plot hole, to be resurrected.

He had been dead for over five minutes when he arrived in Hyrule. His arrangements went according to plan and his past self resurrected him before going off to get killed by Cortez. At least, that was the story he had told to Ridley.

It was all true, except the part about his past self resurrecting him, but I shall not divulge any further now.

Time, as it is well known, has two axes. Along the temporal axis, one can travel yesterwards and morrowards, or to non-chronophysicists, to the 'past' and to the 'future'. The other axis, called by most chronophysicists (3 off them) the differential axis. It basically works on the principal of all times being equal and therefore making "meanwhile, ten years ago it was raining" a grammatically correct sentence.

If one was to draw a timestring (a complex timeline) it would be five minutes on the differential axis before the destruction of that universe due to paradox that Crow escaped to a different parallel universe: The one where this story takes place, commonly referred to as the Nintenverse.

I shall not bore you with more basic metachronophysics, but shall instead get on with the story.

A moment passed, another came and stayed for much more than a moment. Samus thought it was like in one of those old Earth western movies she had seen. She was the sheriff, with her incompetent deputy at her side, looking down the dusty empty road at the bandit waiting to draw his gun and fire before she could react. Link, having not seen a western movie didn't know what to liken it to.

Samus had scanned Crow and he seemed to be unarmed, but obviously was not.

Then all of a sudden, something completely irrelevant broke the silence. A tiny wormhole (known as a maggothole, small enough only to carry sound and light waves) opened behind Samus. Out of it appeared something much larger: a can of beans from 1930s America, and a voice.

"Lennie, you crazy bastard," said the voice, "What did you do with that third can of beans?" A.N. For those of you who have not been forced to study Steinbeck's Of Mice And Men, you would not have noticed the disappearing third can of beans at the beginning that he never really explains.

"That was a maggothole," said Samus, "what the hell are you doing in this building to summon something as big as a can of beans from a fictional world through one?"

She already knew the answer, but for the sake of suspense, it shall not be revealed.

"It matters not," said Crow.

"Why are you unarmed?" asked Link, deciding that the question must be asked sooner or later.

"I am prepared to die," joked Crow, in the manner of one who knows a lot about space time paradoxes.

"What already," said Samus, "you've only just been introduced! You haven't even been physically described fully!" She charged her power beam, not even considering the possibility of a trap. Of course there was not trap. She fired and it bounced off a force field around Crow that her scanners missed. Crow smiled an evil looking smile, which turned into a frown and then a look of fright as the beam bounced off Link's mirror shield and came back at him.

"This makes no sense at all," said Samus, "but he seems to be weak to your weapons."

And another maggothole appeared. Crow's voice came from the past and explained how he wasn't worried as he had already killed Samus in a trip to the future.

Link, holding his sword in front of him, charged into Crow but was bounced back.

"Not so easy, is it Link," said Crow, completely oblivious to his own voice that appeared out of thin air.

"Ok, I'm not going to worry about how you know my name, but…I have no idea what I was going to say. How do you know my name?"

"It matters not," replied Crow, "now that you see you cannot defeat me you will join me."

"Never!" shouted Link and Samus in unison.

"If you knew what we were doing here, you would know that you have no choice but to submit to us."

Confused with the usage of the words 'we' and 'us' and the sudden psychic communication she had with Link, Samus charged up her power beam. Crow was looking at her and did not notice Link aiming an arrow at his head.

Samus fired. Crow laughed at the inexplicable trajectory of the beam, which seemed to be headed towards Link. Link fired his arrow, which went through the power beam, absorbing all its energy. This pierced Crow's shield and hit him between the eyes, killing him instantly.

"I don't know what he was trying to do here," Samus lied," but it must have been pretty powerful if it could summon two maggotholes, one of which was capable of enmatteratilating a fictional object, and removing it from it's original source."

"I have no idea what that means," said Link, "but it must be bad. Good think it's over now, what with that guy dead and all."

"Wrong," said Samus, "we still need to stop what ever was happening here."

"Well observed Samus," said Ridley who had just landed behind them, "I don't want to kill you this time. I want you to join us."