Text Key
"Audible speech."
'Directed thought, telepathic speech.'
Chapter 2 – Ezlo Throws His Hat In The Ring
The thing about Minish Woods was that, while it looked harmless from the outside, it quickly revealed its nature as a not quite earthly place as one ventured further in. The trees closed in on the path, branches merging into a leafy roof that only allowed thin steams of sunlight to reach the ground, and moss quickly replaced the long grass of the fields as a vague mist curled through the undergrowth, limiting how much a wanderer could see around them.
You knew from experience how easy it was to get lost in here. Probably not quite as easily as that one cursed wood that your grandfather had once told you about to the west because that's where all the old ghosts liked to lurk, but the Minish Woods seemed designed to turn people around back to where they started… or as far away from the exit as physically possible.
If the Picori really did live here, that might have been a deliberate feature.
Still, that didn't make you any happier about going back in. You'd avoided the place since your father's death and your rescue, but now the fate of Zelda depended on you going into its depths. So you went, taking your memories and misgivings with you.
The woods hadn't really changed since that fateful day, despite all the years that had passed since then. Maybe five years weren't that much when it came to nature, but it was still uncanny how you'd seemed to walk into the past through the simple act of crossing that tree line. You half expected to see your father round around the back of one of the trees, the pattern of stains on his travelling cloak shifting as he motioned for you to follow. Considering how clear your memories could come across when your mind wanted to go there, there was always the chance that he might.
"This seems like the sort of place that Celebi would like…" Utari murmured from her place on your shoulder.
"Celebi?"
A half-memory of something green and fairy-like flitting through the trees almost had you turning to look at the forest around you before the touch of a nonexistent hand stopped you.
'If he was here, we would have heard something,' Delaine said. 'He wouldn't have hidden from me.'
Huh. There was something there. What, you couldn't say without diving deeper into someone else's past, which wasn't really an option when you were having trouble not getting dragged into your own history.
"Aaah… I guess he was some sort of forest kami?" Utari supplied in response to the question you hadn't properly asked, scratching behind one of her ears before launching into further exposition. "Er, a kami is sort of partway between a spirit and a god. More powerful than any ordinary human, but not as potent as most might define a proper 'god' as being, though I've never seen any hard definitions for that sort of thing. I didn't see any shrines around or anything, so I presume you don't worship them in Hyrule. He was pretty low key compared to most I've encountered, but he definitely had the presence, especially when he wanted to remind you of the fact."
"Sounds a bit like the great fairies people tell stories about." You carefully made your way across a moss-covered bridge, testing each plank before putting your weight on it. Each held, but you couldn't find it in yourself to trust something that looked this old and worn without some confirmation that it would hold fast. "You've known a lot of these kami?"
"I've met a few. Lots of wolves for some reason. Not that I'd recommend complaining about that to their faces, what with all the teeth," the Picori added sotto voce before speaking up again, "Shumari did too, so I'm surprised you don't remember it from his point of view."
The image of a wolf the size of a small hill smiling down at you with what could have been approval or grinning malice crossed your mind, along with the sense that she could crush you with all the effort most people would put into crushing a sparrow's egg if they really wanted to. Though you'd never seen her before in your life, you still knew her name.
Moro.
You shoved the memory away, only for another more familiar one to surface.
'You need to be careful in wild places like this, Lief.'
You'd turned around to look at your father – or at least, your memory of him. Between him and your mother, more of his looks had come your way, though your mother's dirty blonde had tempered his dusty lavender to your pinkish brown – puce, your brother liked to call it once he discovered the word covered your particular color and meant 'flea poo' – but your father always had struck you as looking more impressive, like some storybook hero galloping straight off the page. Maybe that was because he didn't live long enough to be tempered by age like your uncle or grandfather… or maybe it was because your only memory came from a time when your father played such a figure in your mind. It was easy to see someone as tall and strong when you were small and weak.
In the sight of your mind's eye, he was looking down at a smaller you, who was stumbling over her feet as she tried to keep up with her father's long stride, with an amused smile even as he made all those tiny adjustments to keep himself close enough to catch her if one of those stumbles turned into a proper fall.
Regardless of that, he had the youngish look of a man still a few years off of thirty, tempered by the attitude of an experienced knight and single father, the last made all the more obvious by how carefully he maneuvered himself around the small child he was walking alongside. Even with his usual plate armor traded for an outfit not unlike your own – save for the addition of a few pieces of leather armor and the glint of chain mail peeking out from under his green tunic –, he cut a classically romantic figure with his hair tied back in a relaxed ponytail, a well-worn long bow held loosely in hand while a quiver of arrows lay against his lower back.
'Like Robin Hood.'
You shoved Delaine's random thought away as your memory played on. Utari was saying something, her tone seemingly concerned, but it was just a vague murmur compared to the soothing voice of your father.
'Because while there might not be any monsters hiding among the trees, there's still danger,' he continued, looking around with a wariness that didn't carry into his tone. 'Wild animals are one of those dangers. Even prey animals can kill a man when pushed into a corner.'
'And the others?' the smaller Lief asked as she rolled herself over a tall root that crawled all the way across the path.
The root was still there, hardly changed from what it had looked like in the memory save for the placement of the moss, but now you could just step over it with only a little effort instead of struggling to pull your entire body up and over something almost half your size. It didn't hurt that you now had the sense to avoid the tallest section.
'The environment itself holds many of them,' your father answered as he helped your memory of yourself get down from the far side of the root without falling, looking around as he did so. You did the same, evaluating the scenery for anything you might have missed. 'And I don't just mean things like uncertain ground, dangerous plants, and violent weather. It is very easy to get lost in these woods, especially once the mist rolls in. After that, it's only a matter of time until the lack of shelter or food brings you down for good and if you happen to run into a bit of random bad luck…'
'That's why I've brought you here – I'm going to teach you about the woods. Signs you can navigate by, what you can and cannot eat, how to set a snare...' your father had said before cutting himself off with a smile. 'Hunting proper I think we can leave off until you're older – I don't think you have the arm strength for a bow just yet. Besides, I don't want to risk you taking over for me as primary provider of the house just yet.'
As the past Lief gave a little squawk of protest and your father fell to laughing, you grimaced. The joke had been such a small, innocent thing – an offhand comment that wasn't meant to mean anything more than a momentary distraction… and definitely wasn't meant to become a stab in the heart in any time you happened to look back at that moment.
You moved on, slipping through the trees as the words of one of your father's lessons echoes in your ears.
'The first skill you need when hunting is stealth. Not only not being seen, but not being heard or scented. Smell is harder to fool, because we're not so dependent on it as most beasts. We go for sight instead – which makes us very good at picking out camouflaged creatures. It's not foolproof, but it makes us a bit more clever in a way most creatures aren't adapted to. Still, that doesn't mean that we should ignore the other senses. Tell me, what do you hear? What do you smell? And how can you keep others from hearing, seeing, and smelling you?'
The mossy ground made silence easy, as did your green tunic made camouflage, but you couldn't remember what the rule for smell was – was it damp or dry that weakened or intensified smells, or was that one of those finicky rules that only applied to certain objects at certain times?
Something shuffled ahead, leaving you just enough time to duck behind a cluster of bushes as an Octorok appeared. As it drew closer, you calculated your options. You could try to sneak away – the Minish Woods offered plenty of opportunities for such a thing – or you could fight it and hope that there was just one… after all, the ones you'd fought earlier was relatively easy to put down and there was no reason to believe this one different.
You shifted your grip on your sword, knowing the moment that you drew it, the hiss of steel blade on brass tang would almost certainly draw the monster's attention. If it had backup, the situation might take a turn for the worse, but if you could get to it quickly enough…
'The second… is the ability to strike decisively,' your father's voice echoed as you plotted your next movements. 'That can be the difference between life and death… for you or the creature you're after. Find a creature's weak point and end the battle in a single stroke, identify a creature's strength and rob them of the ability to use it... or even use it against them. Regardless of what you do in a fight, you cannot afford do to it halfway.'
You made a choice and jumped out of the brush, slamming your heel into the Octorok's face before following up by planting the end of your sword's sheath into the middle of its back. Despite not puncturing the skin, the trauma was still enough to see it disintegrate into smoke and a faint smear of oily residue on the forest floor, a couple low value rupees glittering under that slick mess.
'I'm not even going to pretend I understand how that works,' Delaine muttered as you quickly collected your prize as the remaining residue evaporated into the air, leaving the rupees just as clean as the others in your purse. The takedown was quick and, more importantly, much stealthier than actually drawing your weapon and risking a wrong flash of light or noise at an inopportune moment.
'What's not to understand?' Shumari asked. 'It's no different than killing a person and going through their pockets, they just explode into nothing first and leave the valuables behind, which vastly de-complicates the process.'
'THAT'S THE PART THAT DOESN'T WORK, FOX FACE.'
With a bit of effort, you pushed the burgeoning argument to the back of your mind, instead putting your entire focus on the woods around you. There had to be some sign that would take you to where you needed to be, something more concrete than 'the Picori reside in the Minish Wood'. Not a plain signpost – that would be too much – but for there to be absolutely nothing was… was patently unfair. The idea of getting lost hadn't even occurred to you, even though you know how this forest worked.
"Are you sure that you don't know how to find the Picori?" you finally asked Utari after ten minutes of walking in not quite circles. "You don't have a spell or anything?"
The mouselike biographer gave a full body grimace, her twitching tail ticking your cheek slightly. "I've never come out this way and I never thought to ask anyone else before… before this all started! And all my magic is elemental – it's not good for things like finding. Ooooh, this is terrible."
It was terrible, but you supposed the only thing you could do about it was keep going.
An hour later, you were beginning to suspect that, if the Picori were anywhere in this forest, they'd picked a corner of Minish Woods that was impossible for anyone to actually reach. You hadn't managed to circle around to anyplace you'd been earlier, if the lack of familiar landmarks and the presence of monsters you hadn't killed yet was any evidence, but that same sense of futility was mounting. Useless, useless.
'You're not useless. This forest is just dumb,' Delaine muttered as you stepped over a moldering barrel someone must have abandoned decades ago. The imaginary woman seemed to gather herself before calming down. 'Alright, let's try something else – first, find a place to sit down.'
You did, finding a fallen log fairly easily. It had an irritating springiness to it that spoke of a few years of wood rot, but it was livable for the moment.
'Alright. Now that you're sitting comfortably, we can try meditating.'
Your irritation spiked. "How is that going to help anything?" you asked aloud.
Utari's head turned towards you, but it was Shumari that answered your question. 'Just give it a minute and you'll see.'
You sat and, following old lessons, cleared your mind. Worries were shelved, emotions shoved aside, and flitting thoughts swept underneath the proverbial rug until you were still. Like a pond undisturbed, Swiftblade had said during one of your few lessons with the master swordsman, it would leave one free to interpret the ripples of a single splash without any other distract–
'Well, shit,' Delaine said, completely shattering your tranquility. 'I thought that was going to work.'
You had no idea what 'that' was supposed to be, but you did feel a little better for the five seconds of internal peace you managed to put off before the voices in your head decided to complain about your lack of ability.
'It's not your fault,' Delaine amended, her palpable frustration abating for a second. 'It's just… there's some disconnect between us that's keeping that ability from working. Which is a bitch, because Aura sensing would be pretty useful right now, seeing as we don't have any better leads –'
A frightful screech suddenly rang out, followed by a series of words that struck you as being profane without you actually understanding the language they were said in, though if Utari's offended noise was any indication, she did.
As far as leads went, a mysterious racket in a forest of silence certainly counted, right?
If you hadn't become hopelessly lost already, the person in trouble was somewhere towards the marshes that led into Lake Hylia. There was already a slight squishiness to the moss around your feet and a taste of chill damp ahead of you, so that meant you were headed in the right direction.
Clearing the last barrier of green, you drew your sword…
Only to find a couple of Octoroks harassing a… a… what was it? Some sort of green bird? It's bottom didn't look right. Too… formless. Was that fabric?
'It's a hat. With a face. A bird face.'
To be fair, it was better than it having a regular person face, but you still couldn't help but stand there for a moment, completely and utterly dumbfounded by the sight.
"Hey! Don't just stand there! Help me!" the hat –bird? hat-bird? – yelled at you.
Shoving away the confusion – what was that thing supposed to be and why was it talking? –, you lunged forward, skewering the nearest monster on your sword and then forcing it off the blade with a kick when it failed to disintegrate fast enough. A missed step to the right – you hated this marshy ground – saw your next strike fail to come anywhere near your target. The Octorok in question seemed to consider this development before spitting out a rock at high speed. You barely managed to avoid making a potentially fatal flinch as the rock hit your shoulder – though the wince couldn't be helped – but your earlier mistake of slipping wasn't repeated as you made your next attack, stabbing clean through the monster before it could do anything to stop you.
'Enjoy the small fry while you can,' Shumari said as the Octorok melted away and you cleaned your sword of any lingering filth, 'because these fights are going to get harder as we go on. I'm speaking from experience.'
"Woo! That was a bit close! But you seemed to handle it handle that quite well," the hat-bird squawked, hopping a bit closer. It was still weird to look at – and how such a being would come into existence was beyond you, even if Delaine was willing to explain it as 'magic'. "Not that I couldn't have handled it myself, mind."
You gave Utari an aside glance, which she returned. Yes, the hat-bird without arms, legs, or wings was going to defeat two monsters that Lief had to hit with full force to stop. "Sure."
'I hate to be the first to ask, but where is this guy getting his ego?' Shumari asked.
Delaine seemed less surprised. 'Yeah, that's Ezlo. He's just like that.'
"Ezlo?" you asked under your breath. What kind of name was that?
Shumari seemed similarly skeptical. 'Are you sure you're remembering that name right? Because that almost sounded like 'Elmo' to my ear.'
'Look, Fox Face, I've got a good memory for stories and I played the hell out of the Zelda video games as a kid, teenager, and adult. I think I'd remember who the titular Minish Cap was and that is. Mother. Fucking. Ez. Lo.'
The hat-bird looked pleased with the apparent recognition. "Oho? You know of me?"
"Kinda," you answered, trying to keep up with two very different conversations. It didn't help that you didn't have any clue about what the second was about – what the hell were 'video games'? – beyond the fact that Zelda was somehow involved.
'Did you actually beat any of those games?' Shumari asked.
A moment of awkward silence passed before Delaine responded. 'One.'
'One? Out of how many?'
'Okay, first off, Link's Awakening doesn't count because the Gameboy cartridge I had fell apart–'
'How do you even do that?'
As the voices' argument started building up steam and volume, you could feel the beginnings of a headache coming on. If you could just tune them out…
"Far be it from me to know all the nuances of human culture, but aren't you a bit young to be traipsing around the woods by yourself?" Ezlo asked. "It seems patently irresponsible to me, letting a child come in here alone."
"We–"
"We're on a mission to repair the Picori Blade!" Utari said loudly. "Because the Sorcerer –"
"Wind Mage," you corrected quietly. You'd remembered that trace of knowing that you'd felt when you'd looked at Vaati for the first time – knowing what he was, what he was about, what he was like. Wind Mage was simply the smallest and least important of those details.
How you knew that, you didn't know. Maybe it was the same way that you'd 'known' what Moro looked like or why the mention of Celebi had brought to mind the impression of some small green fairy-like creature flitting through the trees.
"Wind Mage," the biographer corrected, her quill scratching as she a note of it on her slate. "The Wind Mage, Vaati, broke it into pieces when he unsealed the chest it was holding shut and turned the princess to a stone statue."
A strange look crossed Ezlo's face – though considering that you had little experience with reading the emotional state of birds, it might have been a figment of your imagination. "…Vaati, you say?"
Your hand clenched around the hilt of your sword. "I couldn't stop him."
"Is that why you're doing this? Because of a grudge?" the hat-bird asked.
"Because he hurt my precious person," you replied, looking Ezlo straight in the eye. "And because I need to save her. Restoring the Picori Blade is the best way I have to do that."
The hat-bird studied you for a moment, clearly going through some silent appraisal process that you had no context for.
"…very well then. I will help you!" Ezlo finally declared.
"What. How?" Utari asked.
You had a better question. "Why?"
"Because that is a good reason for a quest. Because you helped a stranger in danger despite having no real obligation to do so. Mostly because I have nothing better to do with my time," Ezlo said loftily before casting a distinctly unimpressed sidelong glance at you and your companion. "The fact that neither you nor your Minish companion – who is clearly a library Minish by that orange garb and the glasses – seem to have any idea of what you're doing doesn't hurt either."
"…I could have gone without the insult, but he's right," Utari muttered, adjusting her glasses. "We don't know where to go or what to do when we get there."
Delaine might know, given that you're almost entirely certain that she's the one who 'warned' you about Vaati – little good that it did – but she's currently having a screaming match with Shumari that you have no desire to get involved in. It's bad enough that they're giving you a headache without even being an active participant in their fight.
'– but the Minish Cap was the one that I got all the way through on my own,' Delaine said as the conversation finally calmed down enough for you to follow it… not that you really could, considering that you had no context for what they were talking about.
'Oh, that's a lot more helpful than the fifteen percent of Twilight Princess you managed.'
'My hands were crippled! You try button smashing and L-targeting when your fingers won't cooperate half the time! The 3-D games are almost impossible with that kind of handicap!'
'Okay, what about quitting A Link To The Past right as you –'
'I WAS STUCK IN THE DARK WORLD AS A DEFENSELESS RABBIT. I SPENT THREE DAYSLOOKING FOR AN EXIT.'
Actually, you would have preferred that they'd kept their argument to a distant buzz so that you didn't have to understand just enough of that sentence to be utterly and completely confused by it. "Stop… yelling."
"What was that?" Ezlo asked. The appraising look was back again.
"They won't shut up."
It wasn't whining or even whimpering, even if your tone sounded very much like it. That would be your story if anyone tried to call you out on it. It was painful wincing. That was slightly more dignified.
…maybe if you kept telling the lie, it would be more believable.
"Lief's got some of her… previous incarnations living in her head," Utari explained. "I used to work with one of them, which is why I'm following Lief around now. Shumari was… is difficult and annoying even at the best of times, but Delaine..." She made a strange waggling gesture with her hand in lieu of any better description.
"They've been arguing about… 'vidya games' for the last ten minutes," you muttered, hands still clenched over your ears as if it would help keep out the noise. It doesn't. "I don't even know what those are."
'You require education, young grasshopper– ow!'
Delaine's presence pulled back from Shumari's with a quiet aura of smugness. 'The next time she's on bedrest for a week and doesn't feel like being asleep for the whole ordeal, we'll do that. At the moment, we have a quest to attend to.'
'If we were both corporeal, you wouldn't be able to do that so easily,' Shumari muttered.
'Maybe, but your kneecaps would still be in range, Fox Face, and I've got more than enough Irish in me to make you regret having them.'
"They're fighting again," you muttered before turning your attention back to reality. The Minish Woods are just as you left them, save for the light peeking through the tree canopy. That had turned from a golden afternoon shower of illumination to a deepening orange-red that encourages the shadows to come out from the nooks and crannies where they'd been hiding. It wouldn't be long until it was completely dark and, without a moon to light the way, it would be impossible to navigate the woods.
"Why am I not surprised…?" Utari asked with a sigh. "Anyway, it's going to be night soon, which means we need to set up camp."
"Oho, that won't be necessary," Ezlo said. "It is hardly any distance at all to the *hem* Picori village you were seeking, though I can understand how you could get turned around. It's a very subtle magic that is woven through this forest. Very good for maintaining privacy."
And very good at keeping the lost from being found in time to do any good, you almost said, just managing to bite back the words at the last second. The last thing you needed was to offend the people you needed to help restore the Picori Blade to its original condition.
Instead, you ask a question. "You can get us there?"
"In no time at all. If you take me with you, of course," the bird-hat said. "I, too, am on a quest to break a curse of Vaati's. And I have little doubt that somewhere along the line, your quest might end up being just the thing I need to break it."
Of course, there would be a condition to Ezlo's assistance.
'Well, most people want something in exchange for their services,' Delaine pointed out. 'And that's not an unreasonable thing, wanting to break the curse that he's under.'
'And he's being pretty forthright about it. Lot better than some people I've had to deal with,' Shumari added.
'Yeah, always annoying when people leave out the 'when I said I needed to reach such-and-such a person, I really meant murder' bit.'
"So? What do you say?" Ezlo asked. "Or are you talking it over with the 'voices'?"
You could have gone without the faintly condescending tone. "They're the ones who said I should trust you."
"Hm. An oddly literal turn of the phrase 'voice of reason'," the bird-hat muttered before raising his voice again. "But I'm hardly in a position to be questioning the inherent oddness of an individual's existence, am I? And your Minish friend vouching for your story hardly hurts either."
You hummed a little at that before deciding you didn't really care what Ezlo thought of you. "Which way should we go to find the Picori village then?"
Ezlo motioned at a vaguely defined path with his beak, one that you recognized as being where you'd come from. "That's the first part of the path – the easiest part. After that… well, I wouldn't want to spoil the surprise, but there's a bit of trickery involved."
"Alright then. Let's go."
You only managed to take four steps before a problem came up.
"Hey! Part of the agreement was that I would be coming with you," Ezlo hissed as he hopped along the path, almost a good four feet behind you. It looked like a laborious process, considering that the full-bodied heaves were giving the hat-bird only a handful of inches to show for his efforts, which raised questions as to how he got out in the forest in the first place. Had someone dumped him here or was there a freshly abandoned house around here that Ezlo had called home prior to acquiring his curse? "Or are you breaking your word? Shame on you, leaving a helpless old man alone in the woods."
Well, that was a nugget of information that you didn't really care about in the first place. "I'm not. You're just slow. It's easy to leave you behind."
'Uh oh.'
Ezlo coiled his cursed body up again before launching himself at your head, somehow dodging your flailing hands as the part of him that most resembled a hat locked around your head. A few fruitless tugs only went to prove that the hat-bird wouldn't let go of your head until he wanted to… and right now, he didn't.
"As I don't have legs, this is the fastest way to travel," he explained, twisting his head around to look you in the eye. "You can't argue about it being easy to leave me behind now, can you?"
Maybe you couldn't argue, but you could still complain. "You're wet."
"Well of course!" Ezlo said with a superior matter-of-fact tone. "This is marshland! It's only natural that's anything that's sat here for any time will be a little damp."
If you were five years younger, you'd cry at how quickly you're losing control of your life. As it is, you'll settle for moving on to the next leg of your quest.
As if picking up on your displeasure – not that it would be particularly difficult, in your present mood –, Ezlo added. "If it makes you feel any better, it is immensely comfortable up here."
"It doesn't."
Like you suspected, Ezlo's path was the one you'd raced down while coming to his rescue, trailing all the way back to the clearing where you'd started running towards his screams. It was much as you had left it – long grass and crawling carpets of moss blurring the lines of fallen branches and the odd trace of human intervention, like an old stump left from some long forgotten logging expedition and a barrel already halfway sunken into the ground beneath it.
"Aha! I thought it would still be here!" Ezlo crowed.
You couldn't see anything here that would be worth crowing about. "What?"
"That!"
"It's a stump," you said, looking at the focus of Ezlo's attention. Cut clean across the top a few inches above where the gnarled roots anchored it to the earth, it was unremarkable in every respect except maybe for the fact that it seemed partially hollowed out and even that stood the risk of being a part of its natural decay.
"It's good to know your eyes work," the cursed accessory said sarcastically. "Yes, it is a stump. It's also home to an enchantment that we happen to have need of if you wish to make any progress on this quest."
"And?"
"I'm going to shrink you."
You already hated this plan.
Picking up on your annoyance with a speed you wouldn't have expected from such an obnoxious creature, Ezlo spoke again. "There is no other way to reach the ones you seek without one of them coming to you… and I somewhat doubt they're in an exploratory mood with all these monsters running around."
You hated it when people you didn't like had a point.
"I better get off before you do it – I don't think I'd be much help the size of a flea," Utari noted, hopping off your shoulder. A flash of concern had you reaching for her, but as soon as she landed on the stump – completely unhurt by a fall that was easily ten, if not twenty, times her height – you relaxed.
'Poncle skill. Probably comes from being so similar to bugs,' Shumari said, which raised more questions without explaining much of anything beyond the fact that incredible jumping ability was within the little scribe's list of skills.
Ezlo seemed slightly stunned by the display as well, though he soon rallied. "First, stand on top of the stump," he ordered. "Then completely stand still. I will handle the rest."
You did as commanded, carefully avoiding the splintering edges as you took up position.
Ezlo seemed to gather himself for a moment before barking out six words that you couldn't quite understand or remember beyond the fact that they were spoken and that there had been a sense of power behind them even though they hadn't been anywhere close to whispered. Then, you felt the world shift.
The best comparison you had to compare it to was the sensation of putting your full weight on something that suddenly refused to hold it, like an unexpectedly weak board in an upper level of a barn or a cobblestone on the edge of a cliff. Not quite falling, but close enough that your heart immediately started climbing up your throat in an attempt to escape the confines of your body and gravity. As the world pulled up and away, you finally lost your balance and any illusion of control over your descent into the stump. Luck – or perhaps intended design? – saw you bounce off of a couple toadstools inside of it instead of anything harder before you hit the ground.
"You're a lot more graceful with a sword in your hand, it seems," Ezlo said with a sniff.
You didn't reply, instead focusing on getting up and getting a good look at your surroundings.
From the inside, the stump was very different from the low tripping hazard that you'd seen from the outside. The walls climbed upwards like the walls of Hyrule Castle, though you doubted that any Hylian design would feature walls that curved like these, dotted by mushrooms and climbing designs of rot that almost looked like designs until your eye caught more blatant signs of decay. A giant crack ran through the 'ceiling' of the structure – likely what you'd fallen through, and now someone else was coming down it, albeit with a lot more grace.
"You sure look different at my size!" Utari chirped as she landed in front of you, her mouse-like eyes glittering in amusement behind her glasses.
Where before you were nebulously aware of the mouse-like frame hiding under the scribe's orange cloak, it was hard to miss those spindly, unmistakably inhuman legs from this distance or the sharp pointed claws that she had instead of blunt human nails. Still, there was an appealing excitement and openness in Utari's face that made it easy to like her.
"…you too."
The two of you stepped out of the stump and you got a fresh look at the world from the Minish perspective. Blades of grass stood higher than trees while the trees themselves were so distant they might as well been clouds, pebbles became boulders, and the bugs…
You watched an ant that was the size of a small cat pause in its work to look at you, antennae twitching as it assessed you, only to go back to walking as it apparently came to the decision that you weren't its problem.
The bugs, you could have done without.
"Straight down this path for a span," Ezlo instructed, gesturing at a faint groove in the soil that ran in a rambling line through the grass. "That will take you to the Minish village."
"…I thought it was Picori."
The hat-bird laughed. "Hah! They are one and the same, though Picori is what the humans call us. A bold assumption to make based on something as basic the sound of our language, but humans are always making assumptions about things, for good or ill."
'That's not exactly a human-exclusive trait, birdbrain,' Shumari snipped.
You sighed as you started walking again, intent on reaching the Picori village before night finished its fall. If this was any indication, this was going to prove to be a very, very long quest.
Author's Note
My god, it's been like… five months since I updated this. Writer's block has been hitting me hard, even on the Pokémon chapter rewrites (thankfully I've only got about two chapters of that left to go before finally moving forward on the plot)… not to mention this summer has been miserable. My area's been contending with flooding like you wouldn't believe and I've had constant vet visits for both my dog and my cat. The cat is thankfully less expensive, despite having four visits in the last two months (she messed up her face scratching, the fool).
The name for this chapter was originally going to be 'To The Picori' but then I was like '…but what if I make a Super Smash Bros character announcement joke instead?'
Yes, those are some of the more… memorable ways that I failed to complete Zelda games. Third runner up was how I managed to get myself trapped in a dungeon that I shouldn't have been able to access at that time (one of the Oracle games). And yes, the Minish Cap is the only Zelda game I have been able to finish unaided (though I should note that it's also the only Zelda game that I've played as an adult – everything else was played before I was 14). Having both joint and nerve problems in my hands makes video games hard… not to mention not being able to afford new systems and the difficulty in getting a hold of older games (outside of emulators).
…not that that stops me, mind. I'm just as bad at quitting as I am playing.
Anyway, reviews are appreciated. Regardless of if you leave one or not, thank you for reading.
