Chapter 8: Green Revolution
"So dark…"
A voice once used to practice but now distorted by bodily disfigurements whispered through the dank air in a bestial hiss. The throat which uttered it was twisted, clogged partially by the impractically round, rope-thick tongue. It was a good thing air was no longer required to enter the wind pipe and into the lungs, for then the creature would have long died, choked by her own tongue. The drawing of breath for speech alone was a difficult task, and still the voice which issued sounded strangled.
"So cold..."
Deep beneath the streets of the city the voice sounded, echoing in the maze of sewers that wormed through the earth. The creature once known as Alex Silva ran a long, gnarled finger down the cool metal wall of the sewer, her emerald eyes glowing eerily in the darkness.
"So damp..."
Her vision was not what it once was. She no longer saw the world through reflected light. No…what she saw was energy. Every object, whether alive or inanimate, glowed with one of six colors of light. She saw nothing as solid. Everything was transparent, allowing her to see past the boundaries of rock and metal which sprawled above her. Two colors dominated the city above: amber, and purple. Alex loosed a low snarl. So this was why her surroundings terrified her so. Not because the city was gray, but because it was amber. Well. Spirit had ruled this land long enough, she thought. Her attention returned to her immediate surroundings, to the vast tunnels which splayed around her in every direction. Emerald-veined lips pulled back into a smile, revealing the skewed yellow teeth within.
"Perfect."
Here, away from the sunless gray sky and the great metal and tar prisons which held the earth, she felt some semblance of peace again. Though she could still feel and see the overwhelming abundance of amber above her, the use of her new vision coupled with the sensation of her own power served to pacify her. Now that calm and control had returned, she had the capacity to think again. She would destroy the amber. She would overwhelm it, replacing it with green. Though she lacked the light of the sun, the energy coursing through the medallion was more than enough for her needs. Curling about herself, she closed her eyes and spread her energy out into the vines which sprouted from her. The plants writhed in response as the strands of green light slid through them, and then under her direction, they began to grow. Slimy black tendrils burst from the vines, snaking through the sewers at an impossible speed. More and more they came, covering the walls, cracking the metal, worming into the earth where they began drawing upon the rich nutrients of the soil. These roots continued to develop at an alarming rate, clogging the sewers and cracking the pipes. In the center of this vast network of growth, Alex stirred, uncurling and straightening as she rose toward the roof of the sewers. She bent the earth to her will, forcing the ground above her to splinter and crack open like an eggshell. Upwards she rose from the depths of the earth, out into the poisonous air of the city. Her luminescent eyes glared upwards at the cloud-ridden sky. To any other human, it was nothing but a vast expanse of gray. But she saw it…the vast network of pulsing purple lines which filled the air above. So shadow had a hand here, did it? She felt no hatred for shadow, as she did for spirit, only a twinge of annoyance that her ally light was hidden. Well if the sun would remain denied from her, than she would do without it. Drawing upon the vast well of power which was the forest medallion, she sent another wave of energy through her roots, until they trembled with it. Now…now the green would return to this land…
She raised her arms, and the ground began to shake.
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Careful…careful...
One foot in front of the other, shift the weight just right so the center of balance is perfect, ooh!- little skid there, nothing to worry about, move the other foot now, careful not to shift the other-
"Agh!"
'Whump!'
"Unnnhhh…."
Julie buried her head in her hands as she groaned.
"I give up. I can't walk in these things, it's impossible."
"Aw, come on Julie, it can't be that bad…here, try again."
The girl looked up from where she sat sprawled in a tangle of long legs and enchanted boots, her expression configured into a pointed: "Yeah, right" look.
"I think the problem is you're trying too hard to walk like normal. You have to glide,as if you were on roller skates."
"Link never had to do that in the game." she growled with a glare at the Hylian in question.
"Yes, but video game physics are never quite on par with the real world, " Jack pointed out.
"Oh, and you're an expert on the subject."
Jack just grinned and shrugged, holding out a hand to help her up.
Still looking about ready to kill something (or someone), she grudgingly took his hand and allowed him to help her off the ground. He kept a tight hold of her hand as she steadied herself, not letting go until she looked stable. So of course, the instant he let go, her feet decided to skid off in opposite directions and she landed right back on her bum.
Julie's left eye twitched dangerously.
"I take it you're not an avid roller skater." Jack remarked.
Julie snorted. "I haven't been roller skating since a birthday party in fifth grade."
Jack helped her to her feet again.
"Just keep your knees bent and let yourself glide." He gave her a little push forward.
"Wha- hey!" Julie slid forward, her arms flailing wildly in an attempt to maintain balance. She looked hilariously like a floating windmill.
Link fought back a chuckle as he walked over to Jack. "So...what exactly is this "game" you keep mentioning?"
Julie stopped windmilling her arms and grabbed a nearby lamppost. She, Jack, and Dr. Rivers exchanged glances.
"Oh geez...how do we explain this to someone who doesn't know anything about electronics?"
Jack furrowed his brow and stared hard at the red brick of a nearby school building, as if it would give him an answer.
Dr. Rivers, fortunately, stepped in. "Do you have legends in your world, Link? Stories told around the campfire, perhaps, about heroes on quests to defeat evil villains and slay vicious monsters?"
Link nodded.
"Well, the video game involves a lot of complicated technology that we can't really explain without something to show you..."
Jack's eyes lit up and he began digging around in his pockets.
"...but in essence a video game allows a person to take control of one of the heroes of such a story, to pretend to be that hero."
"So...is it like when the Kokiri boys used to smack each other with sticks, pretending they were having a sword fight?"
"Well...yes and no. A video game involves the manipulation of a...a sort of...illusion, through a controller..."
"Here!" Jack called suddenly. He raised his hand, proudly displaying the gameboy advance sp he'd just whipped from his pocket.
Link's eyes widened. The small black square was definitely not what he had been expecting. "That's a video game?"
Julie tottered over, quickly grasping Jack's arm for balance. "No, that's a video game system. Video games are sold separately. Its producers are evil like that."
Jack walked over to Link and further amazed the Hylian by flipping the gameboy open and switching it on. Link gaped as words materialized on the screen. "Gameboy Nintendo? What does that mean?"
"Gameboy is the name of this particular video game system. Nintendo is the name of the group of people that produce these."
Jack tapped a button and the title screen for Metroid: Fusion appeared. "That's the name of the game," he explained, gesturing to the title.
Link read the screen. "Press start...?" He looked down at the group of buttons and surely enough, there was a small gray button with the word "start" engraved above it.
Jack grinned at him. "Go ahead."
Hesitantly, Link pressed it. The words "press start" flashed multiple times and then the save slot screen appeared. Link oohed.
Dr. Rivers smiled and adjusted his glasses. "There, you see? Manipulation of an illusion through use of a controller."
Jack handed the gameboy over to Link, who took it almost reverently.
Navi buzzed excitedly. "What's that strange helmet? What do the bars mean? Hey, look! There's words here! Samus Data...energy...time...Main Deck...what do those all mean? What's this button do? Where's that music coming from?"
Link peered intently at the buttons, determined to figure this out. To him, it was a puzzle, just like numerous others he had encountered in the temples. All he had to do was solve it. His eyes narrowed. The "start" button had been used to start the game. That made sense. Perhaps this button marked "select" would let him choose between the rows labeled A, B, and C? He pressed it, but nothing happened. Frowning, he tried pressing the start button again. A blue rectangular box appeared at the bottom left of the screen with the words "Start", "Copy Data", and "Erase Data" on it. He pressed the start button yet again. Yet another box appeared, this one larger than the first even though it only had two option: "continue" and "start over". He pressed start a final time and the strange helmet turned towards him, the green part flashing, and the screen changed completely.
Julie pointed at the humanoid figure in the center of the screen. "That's the hero you play as."
"Who is he?" Link asked.
"What is he?" Navi asked.
"It's a female, actually. Her name is Samus, and she's a human. Er...a 'human' is what we call ourselves, by the way. She just looks strange because she's wearing armor."
Link squinted at the screen. "Strangest armor I've ever seen."
"Yes, well it's um...armor of the future."
Link continued his investigation. He found it strange that this supposed hero carried no weapons, and wondered why there was a green tube on one of the figure's arms. He tried pressing the cross-like button, and soon discovered it was actually four buttons in one. He pressed the left side of the cross, and Samus moved to the left. Pressing the right side of the cross made Samus move right, pressing the bottom of it made her crouch, and pressing the top made her point her arms upwards. Next he tried tapping the button labeled "A", and was delighted to see the figure jump. He pressed the "B" button, and three flashes of green light emerged from the tube on her arm and spiraled across the screen. Link's eyes widened. "Oh, she's a mage!"
Julie snorted with laughter, but Link ignored her. He had just noticed the tiny button at the very top with an engraving of a sun on it. He pressed it, and the bluish tint of the screen dissapeared.
"That just turns the backlight on and off. You can leave it off, you don't really need it in this light."
"What do these do?" Navi, who was examining the back of the gameboy, pressed down the L button.
"Ah, it makes her tilt her arms diagonally."
"And this one?" Navi zipped sideways and pressed down the R button.
"...that makes one of the strange symbols at the top of the screen light up. Oh! Her arm is starting to glow...is she charging up a magic spell?"
"Try pressing the B button."
Link did so. Some kind of gray projectile shot out of Samus's arm and hit the side of the screen, a circle of blue crystals whirling around the area it impacted. "Woah!"
Julie laughed. She and Jack both seemed very tickled by the way Link was reacting to the video game. Julie looked up at Jack. "Too bad you didn't have Link to the Past with you. That really would have blown his mind!"
"What- you mean Link to the Past came out for Gameboy advance? No way!"
Julie gave him a where-have-you-been look.
"Why did no one inform me of this? That's my favorite Zelda game."
"Really? Link to the Past?"
"Yeah. I'm old school that way."
"I prefer the N64 titles, myself."
Jack made a face. "Even Majora's Mask?"
"Why does everyone seem to hate that game?"
"Because the temples were all horribly tedious and the three day time limit was annoying as all heck?"
"But...but there was so much fun character interaction and the masks were all so cool and interesting and the music was awesome and Majora itself had such a cool design and wasn't it fun to see all the Ocarina of Time characters in different roles?"
"Breathe, Julie."
"Sorry, once I get going it's hard to stop..."
Dr. Rivers and Link just sort of stared at the pair. Dr. Rivers scratched his head. "I swear they're speaking english, yet I can't understand a word they're saying."
Link laughed. "Good to know I'm not the only one."
"Anyway, we should probably get back to teaching you how to use these things. Remember: it's just like roller skating. Only magic."
"Magic roller skating. Right."
Link turned to Dr. Rivers. "That reminds me: what is roller skating?"
Dr. Rivers sighed and adjusted his glasses. "Well, see, there are these shoes with wheels..."
Julie pushed off of Jack and started sailing away, Jack running after her.
"Bend your knees!" he shouted.
Julie grit her teeth and bent them, wincing inwardly as she began to pick up speed. Picking through the dregs of her memory, she went over everything she remembered from skating in fifth grade. Tentatively she shifted one foot forward, then the other, then the other, then the boots forked just a little too far apart from each other and she panicked, falling against the wall of a nearby building.
"Hey, don't stop now! You were doing fine!"
Jack ran over to her and tried to pry her away from the wall, which she was clinging to like there was no tomorrow.
"Come on, the first step to decent roller skating is to get off the wall."
Julie groaned, but she knew he was right. She had just let go of the wall when the ground began to shake.
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Donald Miller sat in the living room, scowling at the newspaper he was reading.
"Those idiots in Washington screwed up again" he growled to no one in particular. "The whole damn world just keeps getting worse every day…"
"Don did ya hear?" his wife, Rosemary, poked her head into the room. "On the news? You know how those skeletons were walking down Main Street earlier? Well now there's lizards too, did ya hear Don?"
Don snorted. "It's those damn scientists, interfering with nature when it shouldn't be interfered with and poking their noses into everything…playing god…I told ya, didn't I? I told 'em something bad was going to happen."
"Or aliens. It could be aliens, Don. Couldn't it be aliens?"
"Nah, it's the scientists. All that cloning and genetic engineering and junk…messin' with the fabric of life, that is. Dangerous. And now see what happened? Payin' the reaper, that's what this is."
Suddenly, the ground began to shake.
"Oh my! Is it an earthquake?"
"Can't be. We never get earthquakes. We're not on a fault line."
Rosemary peeked out the window.
"Ooh, the ground is all cracking up outside. Look Don, see it cracking?"
Don turned to look. He was just in time to see a bunch of long green and brown blurs shooting up from the cracks in the ground.
"What in Sam hill- ?"
The blurs slowed down and turned out to be trees, of all things, shooting up to magnificent heights which dwarfed the houses and even some of the larger office buildings.
"Oh my, Don, will you look at that? There's plants growing everywhere, look! Do you see them, Don?"
Don saw them all right. It was pretty hard to miss the wave of greenery that was sprouting from the earth, bushes and vines and trees of all sorts and sizes, breaking through the streets and sidewalks as if the concrete and tar were nothing more than tissue paper. Some of the vines covered the ground, leaves and flowers unfolding to hide what remained of the ruined roads, while others crawled up buildings and the newly grown trees. The bushes unfurled their branches and transformed from brown to green as leaves sprouted all over them. Finally the rumbling stopped, and the plants seemed contented to grow again at a normal speed. Don shook his head.
"See, what'd I tell you? Growth hormones seepin' into the water supply!"
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Julie opened her eyes blearily. The first thing that registered in her vision was a color: green. Lots and lots of green. The great blur of emerald began to recede as her vision focused, the unshapely blobs sharpening. Julie was amazed to find herself completely surrounded by plants. Not just surrounded, actually, for there were a couple creeper vines which had decided to use her as a trellis. Stripping the tendrils off herself with a grunt of annoyance, Julie stumbled to her feet and steadied herself against a nearby tree to keep the damn hover boots from sliding out from under her. The trees were all gigantic, large enough to shoot through the roofs of all the nearby buildings (not that the buildings in this part of the city were the tallest around. They were pretty much still in the suburbs).
Julie rubbed her eyes. "Did I miss something? When did we get to the enchanted forest?"
"Julie? Is that you?"
"Jack!"
Jack stumbled out from a tangle of nearby bushes and ran up to her, grinning. His clothing was a little torn and there was a twig or two sticking out of his hair, making him look ridiculous. Julie fought back a laugh as she turned to face him.
"Where are the others?"
"I don't know. I kind of lost them in that giant wave of green a moment ago."
"What happened? All I remember is the ground shaking…"
"Yeah, that blasted elm knocked you out right at the start, didn't it? Least I think it was an elm…never was an expert on tree identification."
"…I was knocked out by an elm?"
"Yes."
Pause.
"How?"
"Well, when you stumbled back from the shaking it sort of sprouted right behind you and clocked you upside the head as it shot upwards. You got off pretty lightly, actually, considering."
He said thoughtfully with a cursory glance around. Julie looked too. The trees certainly hadn't shown any regard for the objects that had been above them when they had sprouted. Several cars could be seen above them, speared through the middle or simply caught by the uppermost branches of the stronger trees. Not to mention all the buildings and houses which had trees poking out of their roofs.
"We should probably start looking for the others."
"Yeah…yeah ok. Let's go."
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"We have to do something. We have to do something, fast." Nabooru muttered as she paced back and forth on her medallion in the chamber of sages.
Zelda watched the spirit sage pace, her eyes sad and detached. She and Rauru had just finished filling the other sages in about dimensional evolution and conductivity, and now a heavy tension hung in the air as all the sages realized the gravity of the situation.
"I will continue searching the library for clues about this new disaster, and how we can reverse the damage." Zelda said softly, and disappeared in a flash of pink light.
The other sages watched her go, their eyes heavy with the weight of the world. All but one. Saria stood motionlessly upon her pedestal, her fairy bobbing worriedly around her. She stood with her back to the inner circle, staring out into the churning walls of liquid light which surrounded the chamber. In her mind's eye she looked down upon the great green ruin which had once been this peaceful alien city. It had been her, her power which had done this. It was her spirit which was materialized into that medallion, and it was the magic of the forest which even now fed the great green parasites that lay sprawled through the city.
Her heart was heavy with guilt as she surveyed the ruined buildings, the broken bodies of innocents who had been inadvertently crushed in the devastation of the earthquake or the rush of greenery which had followed it.
"We must stop it." her soft, hollow voice echoed through the stillness of the chamber, drawing the attention of the sages to the little Kokiri girl.
She turned to face them, and they saw the silent tears streaming down her cheeks.
"We must confine the medallions before they spread further into this world."
"But how?" it was Ruto who spoke, her voice gentled by the sight of the Kokiri's grief.
"A shield. A solid crystallization of our remaining strength. We can make a barrier to encompass the entire city. The medallions will not be able to pass through if we all contribute our power- in such primal forms, their instincts will compel them to obey the law of opposites without thought to the law of strength. We can confine the magic of the medallions- as well as the monsters which have been created by them- before they escape to wreak havoc on their world." Rauru spoke, his voice managing to exude unquestionable authority despite its gentle tones.
"But…but that will sap what is left of our power. We will be defenseless." Nabooru protested.
"What need have we to defend ourselves? Neither Ganon nor his minions of darkness can enter this sacred chamber. We are not the ones who need protection- let us not deny it to those who do."
Nabooru nodded, though her eyes still held doubt. Chanting softly, the sage of light raised his hands. The others each in turn did the same, offering the remainder of their power into his control.
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Within the ruined city, the poor, confused inhabitants gazed on in wonder as a flurry of sparks shot out seemingly from nowhere (though in reality they emerged from a certain portal floating in the center of a dry creek bed, startling a certain cop in the process) and surrounded the city. To them the sky seemed to turn the colors of the rainbow as the sage's barrier formed around the city.
From where he was irritably making his way down from a tree which had caught him during its sudden growth spurt, Link looked up at the sky and smiled. He had seen this magic before. The sages had used it to make a bridge once, allowing him to cross the perilous moat of lava protecting Ganon's castle. It was one of the few magics they could use while the majority of their power was incarnated in the medallions.
Now at least, he thought, this plague will not be able to spread.
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A/N: I'm still not satisfied with this chapter, but I think I've tortured you poor people waiting for an update (if you even remember my story) long enough.
Edit: I've edited this chapter to include a scene demonstrating the video game to Link, as was suggested in a review. Let me know if the transition is too clunky or if something seems out of place.