This is hopefully the only author's note I'll ever make.

EDIT: I lied. I make notes later on to point out silly stuff.

I wrote this seven years ago. I remember getting excited over the finale, marveling at how the words seemed to roll so smoothly off my fingertips and feeling the swell of pride in my chest when I reached 100 pages (after I had changed the font to Courier New, that is).

But I'm not married to this story. The primary reason why I'm uploading this is because it's so terrible, horribly awkward and difficult to read that I thought maybe someone could get a laugh or two out of it.

I do not desire serious feedback. No chapters have been cut. The only edits I made were to reconstruct the formatting, which was lost when I retrieved the document from our ancient Windows 98 computer in the garage, and cutting walls of text into more paragraphs for ease of reading. All grammar mistakes, unnecessary capitalization, etc. were left in. Chapter 19 is my favorite.

That's all. Enjoy!

Chapter 1: The Memories

"ARGGGHH!"

A young boy woke up to hear the sound of a woman yelling. Rubbing his eyes, he fought to stay awake until he got out of bed and opened the window to peek outside.

Down below was the patio of the house he was living in with his grandmother, and his little sister Aryll. A wooden fence made a wide circle around the pretty wooden house, perched on Outset Island.

His new next door neighbor was a woman from Windfall who raised Cuckoos. She had moved by a few months ago to get a break from city life.

His little sister loved the seagulls. His grandmother had a lot of knowledge and stories that he loved to listen to.

"By Dickens, my chicken! Link, come down here at once!" He heard his neighbor's voice holler. She was pointing to a brown-speckled bird, which was trapped in a metal trap. The jaws of the trap was clamped tightly around the bird's leg, and it was squawking loudly and tried to run away.

Groaning, Link pulled on his boots, climbed on the window ledge and dropped down - two stories. He rolled when he hit the ground to prevent from getting hurt.

"ARGGG!" the neighbor yelled again. "You give me a heart attack when you do THAT! Why can't you walk down the ladder and go through the front door like everyone else? Now, save poor Lavi from that trap of yours!"

As he approached the trap with the bird, he smiled to himself. That chicken was the first thing he had ever caught in his new trap. He had gotten it two weeks early for his 12th birthday from Tetra, a female pirate, but no one but Link knew who gave it to him.

His 12th from last year was certainly action packed; he had sailed all over the seas to save his little sister from the evil Ganon, with the help of a talking red boat - the King of Red Lions - a band of pirates, a winged tribe called the Rito, and many other people and gods. When he returned home, there had been a celebration, and Link had settled back into Island life. His birthday had only been a few days ago, and he had delightfully received a new shield from his grandmother, and a new sword from Orca, the swordsman next door.

He crawled toward the bird, to make it less startled than it was before. Then, he pried the jaws of the trap apart and was rewarded with a flurry of feathers smacking him in the face, making his already-messy blond hair even messier. "Lavi" flew up towards the woods.

"And she had to escape before I could clip her wings," the woman sighed. "Link, try to poach somewhere else next time, okay? And don't go after my animals."

"Okay, miss," Link replied. He closed the trap using a stick, and took it with him behind the house.

There was a secret he hid underneath the house. One day he blasted a rock behind the house with a bomb, and found a secret passageway that led to a room under it. It seemed to be carved out of rock and into the island, so it was like a dungeon. Only he, Tetra, and Aryll knew about this place, and he kept his findings in there.

Hanging on the wall was the family shield, which he would keep until his grandmother asked for it back. Next to it, hanging on a hook, was his Grappling hook, and the shelf next to it had the sail he bought from a person on Windfall Island a year ago. Sometimes he would take it down and unfold it, then lay on it to remind himself of his days at sea. Around the room were other things he had collected during his journey.

He put the trap on another shelf, stared at the shield for a moment, and looked at the folded garments on the table next to him. He picked them up and held them in his hands.

It was the outfit he wore on his 12th birthday. When the evil bird had snatched up Aryll, he had jumped on the Pirate ship without changing- and thus making some spirits think he was the Legendary Hero.

The golden feather next to it reminded him of the Rito tribe, the people who had wings that grew from their arms and had a beak for a nose. There was one particular Rito whose name was Quill, and he had helped Link many times. He had wanted to give the feather to him as thanks, but had never seen Quill since. Link felt upset for not being able to see him again, and he missed Dragon Roost Island and simply being on the seas with the King of Red Lions.

He was snapped from his thoughts by hearing footsteps behind him. He spun around to see Aryll, his little sister.

"You're down here again, big brother?" she asked in surprise. "You've been coming here twice a day now!" Her expression softened.

"I guess you miss being on an adventure, huh?"

"A little," Link confessed. "Maybe I'm getting a little tired of this peaceful island life, with same everything. Same rocks to jump on, same lookout, same houses, same people."

His sister laughed. "You've said the word 'same' so many times I forgot what it means!" She giggled again, putting a slight smile on Link's face.

"Well, I came down here to let you know that breakfast is starting to get cold. You've been in here for a little while now," Aryll said with a frown.

"Gosh, you're right!" Link exclaimed. "I'm hungry!"

He put the garments back on the table and hurried outside, his little sister watching him run out. Silent, Aryll walked over to where he had left the costume. She fingered the soft cloth fondly as she remembered her first comment about it : "It looks kinda like you'll be hot it that, Link." Then she put those down and looked at a black box sitting on a shelf. She knew it held the legendary Windwaker, a magical and ancient baton used for calling the help of the gods. She turned and ran outside.