A/N: I'm so sorry! My life has been incredibly busy lately. Marching band was taking up almost all of my time and the rest was taken up by dance and various little clubs I'm in! Not to mention I have homework to do, and voice, guitar, and saxophone stuff to practice. But marching band's over and I didn't make it into the musical, though I will probably be in the (less time-consuming) pit orchestra, so things are looking up now. Hopefully you won't have to wait quite as long for the next chapter. BTW, sorry for any guys who may not want to hear about feminine undergarments, medieval or no, but I do intend to include some practical stuff about how life in Hyrule would be different than life on Earth. Besides, it's underwear. Get over it.

Longest chapter yet! I hope it's worth the wait, but I have a sinking feeling it's really not. Sorry:\

Preoccupation and Pantaloons

Elizabeth sat in her open window, enjoying the unique sensation that comes along with having one's feet danging over yards upon yards of nothing but air. The sun was rising, causing pink to spread and fade like watercolors when more water is added. Elizabeth noted with a certain amount of amusement how much smaller it was in reality than in the game.

It was about the only thing she found even remotely entertaining about the situation. She was in an imaginary land and didn't know how. She also didn't know how she knew she wasn't hallucinating. She knew why she was... where she was, but that wasn't any more comforting. In fact, it downright terrified her.

The most terrible person ever to walk this new (well, to her) realm was supposed to be locked up. But he wasn't. Worse, no one knew how he'd gotten out.

How. How, how, how. It was the word of the day, week, month, or however long this had been going on and was going to take.

The situation went beyond crying. Elizabeth was in shock, her mind so deeply mired in chaos that she couldn't find room in her thoughts to express any kind of emotion. Her lack of any kind of response to anything they said was probably the reason for which Link and Zelda had decided not too long ago to leave her to her own devices. Elizabeth would have felt bad about this, but she just... couldn't.

She didn't know what she'd express at the moment, anyway. Mostly the teen just didn't believe this was happening. She didn't understand why, either -- why these people needed any help, why they wouldn't pick someone stronger, someone more capable. But there was a prt of her that was excited about all this, and glad they had chosen her. It was Hyrule. She'd been dreaming of this for so long...

But then she remembered everyone she'd left behind, all the people wh cared about her and for whom she cared a great deal in return, and felt guilty. Elizabeth knew they were probably tearing apart the world looking for her -- a world in which she could no longer be found.

She loved them. She missed them. And now Elizabeth felt horrible for ever having wanted something like this to happen, to leave the world they lived in.

Elizabeth was also terrified. One of the few things that Link and Zelda spoke of that penetrated her mind had been Ganon. Big, scary, lightning-shooting Ganon, who seemed to have gotten some of his ideas from Transformers. When her older siblings had played Ocarina of Time many years ago, Elizabeth had been there watching as they died repeatedly against him.

No one sane would not fear to meet this man. No one. I'm not strong enough, Elizabeth thought desperately. No way am I strong enough to do this.

She couldn't think about this anymore. Lifting her legs and turning to put them on the floor of her room, Elizabeth stood and, mindless of her (in this world) strange attire -- soft, loose blue pants that draped down from her hips to puddle around her feet and a light blue T-shirt -- she padded across to the door and left.

The hallways were made of gray stone in typical castle fashion, albeit probably the lightest gray they'd been able to find. On the walls between the torches in their sconces hung vivid tapestries. Elizabeth took the time to look at a few of them. Some depicted scenes she was unfamiliar with; many were of the Triforce and/or Goddesses. One, however, showed two figures she recognized: Link and Ganon, in his final form. Flames formed the border, and Link seemed impossibly small as he stood, shield raised and Master Sword gleaming, to oppose the scaly, titanic nightmare in front of him. Elizabeth found her gaze pulled to the monster himself. His eyes were the same burning yellow as Mr. Smith's, and Elizabeth wondered how she'd managed to fool herself into thinking that the two were not one and the same.

Those eyes were harmless in tapestry form, but they reminded her of their real counterpart. Elizabeth shuddered, thinking of the unpleasant sensation of having someone stare into her soul like that. Without even realizing it at first, she reached out to touch the beast. The softness of the tapestry, in direct contradiction of the fearsome image it showed, was reassuring. Only a picture.

"What are you doing?" Elizabeth gasped and whirled. A few feet down the hall, a figure that it would be impossible not to recognize as Impa stood. She wore a purple bodysuit in the Shiekan style, but abbreviated. The leggings covered only her thighs, and the sleeves stopped at most a quarter of the way down her arms. Embroidered on her chest in silver was a single eye staring ahead with a perfectly-shaped tear falling from it. For armor she wore only a breastplate, molded to fit her upper body and designed not to impede her movement; however, her hardened visage and well-defined muscles made it clear that she needed nothing more. She had a silver tattoo under each eye, each one with three spikes facing down from her bottom eyelid. Her boots were made of a thin, soft cloth and clearly made more to aid her in stealth than anything else, and upon her arms she wore simple black arm-guards like those an archer would wear. The only visible weapon she bore was the long dagger sheathed horizontally across her back, an open challenge to all who opposed her. Red eyes stared at Elizabeth, hard and unreadable -- especially to a social cripple like herself.

"I was just looking at the tapestry." Her voice was a croak, the way it sometimes got whenever she'd been so silent and lost in thought for so long she'd grown mildly unaccustomed to speech. She cleared her throat.

Impa gave a "hmm" that, to Elizabeth's ears, sounded disapproving. The teen tried not to fidget, but it was hard under that appraising ruby stare. Finally the woman spoke. "Your attire would pass, were we among my people. However, we are not." She turned and began to walk down the hallway, saying over her shoulder, "Come." Intimidated, Elizabeth obeyed.

Elizabeth had never been measured by a seamstress before, and found it an uncomfortable experience. The short, plump seamstress, however, was so no-nonsense that she suffered through it in silence and without too much embarrassment while Impa looked on. Finally she found herself being shoved towards a wooden screen with an armful of cloth while the seamstress instructed, "Now take off all those things you're wearing now including any undergarments and put these on." Elizabeth opened her mouth to protest but the seamstress plowed on: "I've given you a corset that laces up the front. Put that on under the shirt and tie it firmly, but not too tight or it will crush your ribcage. Some of these young ladies... well, never mind. Skirt goes on over the pantaloons, but of course you know that, how else would it work? Tuck the shirt into the skirt, and then put the belt on. Oh, and brush your hair." Elizabeth was handed a polished wooden comb. Blushing and completely overwhelmed, she headed obediently towards the screen and began.

It was a long time before Elizabeth emerged fully clad, uncomfortable-looking and clutching her old clothes in both hands. The new outfit wasn't so bad, but it was... different. She was wearing pantaloons, for one thing. And a corset. The pantaloons were nothing big. They went to her knees and were only the slightest bit loose. The corset was a little like a bra, only... well, it was a corset. Actually it reminded Elizabeth a little bit of the vest from her marching band uniform, which was depressing for a number of reasons: firstly, those things got cursed uncomfortable after a while, and secondly she was probably never going to see her marching band uniform again.

Elizabeth shied away from the thought. Marching band was one of the best things that had ever happened to the teen. Disney World and New York City flashed briefly through her mind, followed by band cheers at competitions and being picked on for blunders like wearing electric blue underwear under the white uniform pants when they were supposed to wear white. Her gut twinged painfully, and she pushed the thoughts away. Later. She would cry later.

The outfit was actually rather nice. The skirt was dark blue and made of a fairly common material that Elizabeth -- being somewhat fabric-illiterate -- couldn't identify. The blouse, on the other hand, she was pretty sure was made of cotton. It was light blue and very lightweight. The neck was fairly open, though Elizabeth had pulled it closed as much as she could before it started to look stupid. The sleeves were long and loose, with drawstrings at the ends and slits above the shoulder. There were geometric patterns in light gray around the hems of both skirt and blouse. Her hair, which she'd gotten cut the last afternoon she'd been awake for, was now neatly combed (or as neatly combed as it ever was, anyway) and hung to the name of her neck in back and to just below her eyebrows in front. It looked nice, but it was an annoying length: long enough to fall in her eyes, but too short to tuck behind her ears. The belt around her waist was made of dark leather with a triforce symbol arranged around each hole and placed at a similar interval all the way around.

She zoned back in on the present. Impa's expression was unreadable, as usual, but the seamstress was looking her over and making small tutting noises. "They don't quite fit," the woman muttered. "Still, they'll have to do until something more suitable can be made. Come here and we'll find your foot measurements." Elizabeth moved obediently over to her and extended her foot so that the tape measure could be wrapped around it. "We'll be getting you a few pairs of slippers and a pair of good, sturdy boots -- you're no court flower after all, and if the rumors are true you've got a great deal ahead of you." The seamstress stood and went over to a set of shelves on the wall, all containing shoes of a wide variety. She selected from them a pair of simple, slipper-like shoes made of a dark leather that matched her belt. They reminded Elizabeth of something a dancer would wear -- not ballet slippers, though. Jazz shoes? Yes, that was it. They reminded her of jazz shoes. She sat down to put them on.

"Now," the seamstress said as she did so, "I'll just take these away --" She reached out for Elizabeth's old clothes. Elizabeth felt a thrill of alarm and reached out to snatch them away.

"No!" the teen stated, perhaps a little too loudly. "I want to keep them." She glared a little at the seamstress. She didn't really mean to, it was just... those clothes were her last connection to her home world. Without them, she could have just made it all up. There was no way of telling. Elizabeth turned her glare on Impa, daring the Sheikah to comment. The older woman raised her eyebrow, but declined to do so.

"Very well," the seamstress said, shrugging. Clearly she'd been taken by surprise by Elizabeth's reaction. "I only meant to take them out of your way." She regained control of the situation. "Now then, come back in a few days and the clothes at least should be done. The shoes might be as well. We'll see. Now shoo, I've work to do!" The woman started shooing Elizabeth towards the door.

"Um, you don't really need to custom-make my shoes for me," Elizabeth said, blushing. She was used to mass-production, which meant almost no one's clothes fit perfectly. "These fit fine."

"Oh, nonsense, of course you need better shoes than that. Go on now, I'll see you in a couple of days!" And then suddenly Elizabeth wasstanding in front of a closed door, blinking and somewhat dazed. Somehow she felt more normal than before, though. Maybe being forced to interact with... um... Her thought-process stumbled for a moment. ...the real world, I guess it is, was a good thing.

"Come," Impa said, and set off down the hall. Elizabeth hurried to catch up.

Even if I am wearing pantaloons.