Chapter 20: Beetle
After being frozen solid, I honestly thought that I was about to die. Thankfully, knight Link had thought quickly and had thawed me out before any real damage had been done. Then, considering that that… thing had been the first to attack, I got into a battle stance. Unfortunately, close combat was NOT an option, so I joined the other two. I then put one of my hands into my bomb bag and grabbed a bomb, but I didn't pull it out because I had been waiting for the thing to show its ugly face.
Saying that I was pissed would have been an understatement, but I still tried to keep my cool. Keyword: tried. As soon as slave Link told knight Link and me where it had appeared next, I threw three bombs at it, even though I knew that none of them would have exploded in time. Then, knight Link shot another fire arrow, but this time, at it. While the fire arrow had hurt it, the spread of the fire caught the bombs that I threw and made them all explode at once, prematurely. The result was a true one-hit-kill!
All three of us stood there, in shock and awe of what had happened. Heck, slave Link was even doing a pretty good impression of a fish. Honestly, I thought that it was spectacular right up to the point where I had shouted out that that thing had deserved what it had got. Suddenly, though, the floor began to move and I realized how bad of an idea that it was to have used explosives in a potentially unstable location. Before any of us even got to say anything, the floor broke away and we fell into a cellar-like basement.
After assuring that everyone was okay, we began to look for a way back up to the ground floor. However, along the way, slave Link noticed something that was shining on the top of one of the shelves. It was so high up, that he had to use his hookshot in order to get it down. When he did, though, we all saw that it was some sort of a robotic toy bug. The toy bug looked like it was modeled after a beetle and it seemed to have both very large pincers (that were big enough to hold even a bomb) and wings.
There was also a piece that was meant to go over a person's wrist. Curiously, slave Link put it on and seemed to press something that sent the beetle flying off of his wrist and straight across the room. It was then that I also saw that the beetle had a camera where its eyes were supposed to be and it was showing what the beetle was seeing on the wrist part. Not only that, but it was apparently steerable via moving one's arm and its pinchers could pick things up and drop them, too. Eventually, slave Link sent it up an air duct and flew it around a little bit on the ground floor until he found a rope that was holding a door into the cellar closed and clipped it using the beetle's pinchers.
This opened up a way for us to get back up to the ground floor and after looking around a little bit more, we came to the conclusion that we needed to go up more floors, yet. So, after confirming that the second floor was stable, we continued on. It honestly took us a while to trust the second floor, but we eventually felt more comfortable with it the longer that we were there. What didn't take us very long, though, was realizing that while most of the first floor consisted of formal areas that were obviously meant for conducting business and having tea (or crap like that), the second floor had been a party floor.
On the second floor, there were rooms that had stages, bars, and other things of the like. It was a huge contrast to the first floor. However, there was one door that not only lead into a room that took up most to that story's space, but it also had a massive lock on it. In fact, it was the exact same kind of lock that would have needed a big key! Thus, we began our search for said key.