Chapter 17: In the Belly of Jabu-Jabu
And the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow up Jonah.
And Jonah was in the belly of the fish three days and three nights.
~Jonah 1:17
Drip. Drip. Drip.
"Navi, why didn't you tell me it was raining?" Link stirred but did not open his eyes.
A fat drop of something had splattered on his lips. He began to lick it off, but it certainly didn't taste like rain. What is this stuff?
"Are you awake?" The fairy's voice echoed as if they were in some sort of cavern.
He grunted, afraid to look for himself. "Where are we?"
"Open your eyes and find out." Navi landed on his chest. "By the way, I wouldn't lick that stuff if I were you."
Link opened his eyes just as another drop of Lord Jabu-Jabu's saliva smacked him in the forehead. "Oh." Suddenly, the last meal he had eaten threatened to reverse course.
"If you think that's gross, look at what happened to the Zoras."
Link had no particular desire to see the guards or what was left of them, but he did want to get out of there, so he sat up with a groan and, with Navi's help, peered into the darkness and the recesses of Lord Jabu-Jabu's mouth. Bloodied fish heads, bones, and other signs of the god's recent meals had been scattered like so much debris.
"You should feel lucky," said Navi. "You could have ended up like them."
If the saliva had made him sick, the sight of the half-chewed guards killed Link's appetite indefinitely. "How are we going to…?"
"Get out of here?" Navi chirped. "Either we find a way to get him to open his mouth again…or we follow the rest of the food out the other end."
"I was afraid of that."
Checking his pouch to make sure he hadn't lost anything important, Link took several deep breaths before wading into the puddle of saliva at the back of Lord Jabu-Jabu's mouth. He tried to cross quickly, but the floor kept moving beneath him so that it took at least three minutes to make his way to the throat.
A sudden jolt flung him onto his stomach. It was then he realized that what he had been standing on the whole time was Jabu-Jabu's tongue.
"Don't try to fight it," said Navi. "Just try to land in one piece!"
Link tried to answer her, but a scream came out instead as he slid from the edge of the tongue and fell into the esophagus. Even the slightest attempt to stay his momentum only made things worse as he joined the train of food and fluids on its way from the mouth to the stomach.
When he finally lurched out of the esophagus, there was a terrible moment when he flailed in midair with nothing to hold onto. Then he dropped, disappearing beneath an ocean of stomach acid.
A garbled voice assailed him from somewhere nearby. "Ggh eff my yew imbisle! Ime triing too ged too dee sir fiss!"
Link caught the word "surface" and decided it wasn't a bad idea. Thrashing his way through the acid, he broke into the clean air—or what passed for it—and spat out half a pint of Jabu-Jabu's digestive fluids.
Seconds later, another head joined his above the surface, and Link knew, even without a description, that this was Princess Ruto.
"Are you deaf? I told you to get off—you landed right in my face!"
Link bobbed in the acid, eyeing the spout on the left side of Ruto's head. "Nice to meet you, too. I'm Link. This is Navi. You're Princess Ruto."
"Of course I'm Princess Ruto, you dolt!" The princess scowled at him. Imagine, a human peasant introducing himself to her, the future Queen of the Zoras! "Who else would I be?"
I wish you were Princess Zelda, he wanted to say, but Link swallowed his ire and forced a smile. "Your father's worried about you. I have to get you out of here."
"I'm perfectly capable of finding my own way out, thank you." Ruto harrumphed. "Besides, who said I wanted to leave?"
Navi squealed. "You mean you want to stay?"
"Look," Link said. "We didn't have to come for you. If this is the way you want to be, we might as well leave and save ourselves the trouble of arguing." Trying to hide the grin on his face, he dove beneath the surface and swam away from her, hoping he had judged her response correctly.
"Wait, don't go!"
Link counted to three before surfacing again. "Did you say something?"
"Please." Ruto lowered her head. "I know a way out, but before I agree to leave, you have to help me find something important."
Despite his curiosity, Link tried to appear indifferent. Something important…like a Spiritual Stone?
"How do we know what to look for?" said Navi.
"You'll know it when you see it," Ruto hissed.
"Wait," Link said. "How did you get in here to begin with?"
"How do you think? Lord Jabu-Jabu swallowed me when I tried to feed him this morning. That's how I lost my stone, too; I was wearing it when I came to the altar."
Link's heart beat faster at the mention of a stone. "Wouldn't it be easier to look for it somewhere else? I mean, everything here has to leave the stomach eventually. Otherwise, we'll have to swim to find it. I don't know about you, but I don't want to swim through this."
Ruto made a face. "So you're suggesting we wait here for Lord Jabu-Jabu's stomach to empty itself? By then, we'll be digested. That's stupid."
Link drew his sword so quickly that both of his companions jerked in surprise. With a quick stabbing motion, he pointed to the wall of the stomach. "This is what I'm suggesting."
The instant Link's blade poked the lining of Jabu-Jabu's stomach, the walls contracted so fiercely that the acid rose several feet, almost to the esophagus. He and Ruto, already immersed, simply rose along with the tide. Navi, on the other hand, was forced to cling to Link's shoulders to avoid being drowned.
Ruto, hardly knowing what she was doing, had seized Link's left arm. "Now what?"
Almost as soon as the words left her mouth, a stream of bubbles erupted from a hole near the bottom of the stomach. It was too dark for them to see the hole, of course, but they certainly felt the suction pulling them under the surface.
Link held his breath as he went under, but he dared not open his eyes. Ruto, ignoring any danger from the corrosive fluid, groped for her lost stone with eyes wide open.
The current swept them out of the stomach, along a tube with soggy feelers that brushed Link's skin, sending chills through his body and giving him all the more reason to keep his eyes closed until the dreadful ride had ended.
They splattered onto solid ground almost two minutes later, sucking in the air of the chamber they had fallen into. Aside from a few shallow puddles, things seemed largely dry here.
The smell of blood and burnt flesh wafted into Link's nostrils, threatening to choke him. He found his sword, slick with moisture and flecks of food, lying nearby.
"Navi? Princess Ruto?"
"Here." Ruto waddled into sight, clutching something shiny in her right hand.
He frowned. "Did you see Navi?"
At that moment, the fairy burst from the tube above them, drenching both in fresh digestive fluids.
"Link, you're alright!" Navi locked her tiny arms around the curve of his left hip.
"Thank goodness." Link wrung the fluid from his tunic with a smirk. "I thought I'd lost you. No more 'hey, listen'!"
"Quiet!" Navi pinched his nose.
"If you two are finished, I'd like to get out of here now!" Ruto glared from the shadows.
Link's gaze flickered from her face to the jewel in her hand. "I promised your father I'd bring you back."
"Then hurry up and do it!"
Link stiffened, but before he could say anything, a loud squish distracted him. He looked down to find his leather pouch squashed beneath the toe of his right boot.
"Is this yours?" Ruto held out a wet lump of parchment: one of Zelda's letters.
Link snatched the letter from her hand and bent over to recover the pouch. Just as he had reattached it to his belt, he froze. "What was that?"
Biri.
Ruto's brow furrowed. "What was what?"
Biri.
Suddenly, Link pedaled back, waving his sword at the darkness. "Get down!"
"Why should I listen to—?"
A flash of light cut the princess's words short. Just ahead, three jellyfish hovered in midair, their tentacles dangling and snapping with live electricity. One of them swooped towards Ruto.
Without thinking, Link rushed forward.
Navi squeaked. "Wait!"
Link hacked the jellyfish's umbrella with his sword and received a vicious jolt for his trouble. The current slashed through his body, catching Ruto and Navi in the process. Another jellyfish drifted close, but the jolt from the first one had paralyzed him so that he could only watch as the other approached.
Bari.
The first flash had only begun to fade when twin streaks of lightning struck the two remaining jellyfish. Rather than disappear, these bolts lingered like cords fixed to the heads of each jellyfish. Once attached, the cords started to spin in a circle around the room, dragging the jellyfish along with them and thus creating a perimeter of dangerous electricity.
Link recovered his mobility in time to shove Ruto away from the spinning jellyfish as they came around for their second circuit. Straining to be heard over the sizzle and pop of the electricity, he shouted at Navi, "Find out what they're protecting!"
Navi flew to the center of the room without a word, returning moments later in a fit of excitement. "I think…I think it's his heart!"
"Lord Jabu-Jabu's heart?"
"I think so, but it looks funny!"
Link glanced from Ruto to the center of the room and back again—and made his decision. Leaving her, he advanced to the center of the room, keeping his sword low to avoid striking another jellyfish as he slipped inside their perimeter.
All at once, he saw the god's heart beating in the shadows, swollen with the curse Ganondorf had laid on it. Covered with boils, parasitic beetles, and clusters of dried blood, the organ struggled to pump life to its host against impossible odds.
"Look!" Navi fluttered beside the veins and arteries connecting the heart to the chamber's ceiling. A round disc of flesh, oddly out of place amidst the tangle of blood vessels, smoldered as it held the lightning bolts connected to the jellyfish in place.
Link pressed his lips together. Can't risk hitting the heart, but doing nothing is worse. Pulling his left arm back, he hurled his blade upwards, slicing through the disc of flesh. A few severed veins spurted over the rest of the heart, but the sword fell back to the ground without any significant harm to the god's life.
The lightning bolts dissolved in smoke, releasing the jellyfish. Both creatures immediately pounced on Princess Ruto, stinging her multiple times. Link made as if to rush to her aid but hesitated when he considered the horde of beetles chewing at the membrane around Jabu-Jabu's heart. It was possible the god could survive boils; the insects were another matter. He had to find a way to get them off. Now.
He bit his lip, knowing what he was about to do would be very painful. "Follow me!"
"What now?" Navi chirped her alarm but followed swiftly after.
It took them a full minute to distract the jellyfish. When they finally succeeded, Link trotted just out of their reach until he had led them to within a meter of Jabu-Jabu's heart. By then, sweat poured from his forehead, and he had clenched the hilt of his sword with both hands until the knuckles turned white.
I hope this works. When the sparks from their tentacles began to scorch the hair on his arms, Link rolled beneath the nearest of the two jellyfish and speared it through with his sword, clapping his teeth against the jolt.
This time, the shock almost knocked him unconscious. Every nerve burned with fire as the current passed through his system, but what it did to the insects plaguing Jabu-Jabu was far more deadly. The combined electricity from Link's body and the jellyfish's tentacles leapt to the membrane of the heart, cooking most of the beetles instantly. Others, sensing a threat, tried to scuttle away from the danger and were charred to a crisp.
As a spasm shook the god's heart, Link feared his impulse had backfired. The one remaining jellyfish had strayed into the path of the electricity rolling off his body and was not faring well, but then neither was he—and more importantly, neither was Lord Jabu-Jabu.
In the back of his consciousness, he felt someone pulling him away, away from the dying jellyfish and away from danger. Ruto?
"What kind of man are you? It took you long enough to rescue me from those jellyfish!"
"Sorry," he mumbled.
"Link?" The spot that was Navi floated somewhere in the haze that was his field of vision. "Don't ever do something like that again."
"Let's get out of here." Ruto coughed to disguise the tremor in her voice. "We've wasted enough time already."
Link was about to ask how she planned on leaving when a gush of water suddenly flooded the chamber, lifting them off their feet and bearing them away with the carcasses of the beetles and the jellyfish. He had his answer.
I meant to post the Zora's Domain chapters earlier in the week, but those of you who have attended major cons like Gen Con know how hard it can be to readjust to the routine of everyday life after letting your freak flag fly. Needless to say, my sixth Gen Con was a blast. Saw some GREAT cosplay as always, including at least three Princess Zeldas and approximately one Link for every time the average player hears Navi shouting "Hey, listen" in an average play-through of OOT. In other words, I saw a LOT of Links.
Check my profile for the link (pun intended) to my Facebook album if you're interested in a pictorial journey through Gen Con 2012. I still plan to keep releasing my chapters about once a week. May the way of the Hero...you know the rest.