Link was peacefully foraging for peaceful berries on a peaceful day in the peaceful kingdom of Hyrule.
He was bored to peaceful tears.
If you'd told him four years earlier, right after he'd defeated Vaati, that he'd miss all the fighting, he would have laughed. He'd stopped the mad minish wizard just in time to save his best friend Zelda, who was unlucky enough to be the princess AND to have had the Light Force inside of her, making her the most powerful villain magnet ever, and fighting Vaati had been after fighting just about every monster that could ever exist all over Hyrule, sometimes while being the size of particularly small bug himself.
And yet, here he was, feeling completely aimless and with no idea what to do with himself.
Distracted as he was by absolutely nothing of interest, he failed to notice the string strung across the woodland path. His foot caught in it, and down he went, just barely catching himself with his hands rather than going face first into the tree stump he'd fallen on.
He cursed a fair bit, telling Din in no uncertain terms that a bit of blasting of all parties involved in that string being there would be welcomed, then blinked. That was a shrinking stump. But they were all gone, they'd vanish with the minish, not to return for at least 100 years.
So it couldn't be a shrinking stump. Besides, if it was, he'd be...
His train of thoughts was cut short by the stump, and everything else around him, suddenly starting to get bigger.
And bigger.
And bigger.
Faster than he could say 'what in Hylia's sock drawer?', he was the size of a minish for the first time in years, inside the stump he'd just fallen on and facing...
"Ezlo? What... how... what are you doing back here? How did you...?"
Ezlo tackled him in a hug with a cry of "LINK!"
After a few minutes of joyful reunion and comments on how big Link had gotten, despite his current minish size, Ezlo finally stepped back and with no transition at all, became very serious.
"I need your help. I didn't know who else to ask, and well, who better than you? You ARE going to help, right?"
Link's eyebrows raised in interest, but he was still very curious. "You're not going to tell me how you're back, are you?"
Ezlo shrugged and rolled his eyes. "Long story. Who cares? I need your help. So help. Please?"
Link didn't have to think twice. "YES."
"I have to warn you, it could be dangerous. Haunted places, etc."
Link grabbed the picori by the shoulders and locked eyes with him. "I'm helping. Where and what. Tell me. TELL ME!"
Ezlo leaned away from him, looking slightly concerned.
"O...okay then. You've been bored, have you?"
"Very," Link confirmed, still staring straight at him and squeezing his shoulders just a tiny bit too tight.
Ezlo squirmed out of his grip and cleared his throat.
"Okay, so... you know all the evil Vaati released?"
"There's none left," Link said. "I looked." Boy, had he looked. All over, first out of diligence and eventually out of sheer boredom.
"Did you? Good for you! You missed some. A bit got absorbed by this little bit of forest east of here."
Link tilted his head. "Absorbed? By a forest?"
Ezlo crossed his arms and nodded gravely. "It's semi sentient. The forest, I mean. We think, well, I think, nobody agrees, but anyway... the forest was trying to purify the evil. And it looks like it sort of did!"
"Sort of?"
"Yeah, it went from the kind of evil that wants to kill everything to the kind of evil that wants to get rid of people specifically. We think. Well, I think. It's an improvement! It's not even killing, it's just... transforming anyone who wanders in the forest. That's why you need to be small. It won't go after you like this, it'll think you're one of us minish."
Link's eyes widened and he grinned. Something to fix, something he could do that would save people again. Something to DO. The thought that Ezlo's theory on how the cursed forest would mistake him for a minish was entirely untested did not so much as cross his mind.
"So what are we waiting for?" Link asked, grabbing Ezlo's hand and walking for the exit to the stump's inside. "Let's GO!"
Thankfully, Ezlo was able to magically transport them. At the size they were, they would have been walking for days to get to the Eastern end of the eastern forest.
It was only once they had been walking in the woods for a while, once the novelty of rediscovering how different everything looked when he was tiny wore off, that Link started to feel like this was less than exciting so far. The forest felt totally normal.
"Finally feeling it, are you?" Ezlo said. "That's what's left of the evil absorbed by the forest. It still hates people, so it's trying to trick them."
Link tutted, annoyed. "I don't feel ANYTHING," he said. "I thought you needed help? Is there actually anything going on here? Didn't you say something about somewhere being haunted?"
"Turn around," Ezlo instructed.
Link did. "Nayru's Crap!" he said. The words had just spilled out. He promptly slapped his hand on his mouth, shocked by his own language. The path stopped three steps behind him, the way backward completely blocked by a solid wall of trees. He hadn't heard anything move, hadn't felt any breeze, even.
Ezlo nodded. "Nothing seems out of sort, but then when you try to leave, you can't because the path you were on is gone. If you weren't passing for one of us right now, your flesh would start vanishing pretty soon."
The minish pointed ahead and said something Link didn't understand. The fog lifted in front of them, revealing a duo of walking skeletons, Hylian sized and therefore huge to Link, wandering close by. Link's eyes widened before narrowing in a frown. "You said the forest wasn't killing anyone!"
"This is what people who get lost here turn into," Ezlo said. "They're not dead. They're what's called stalchildren."
"So what do we do?" Link asked.
"Well, obviously it's too late for them," Ezlo replied, gesturing at the walking skeletons. "We can't bring them back to being people, the rest of their body is gone. They wouldn't survive as just bones if they were people."
Link glared at him. "Then what do we do to prevent more? Burn the woods?"
Ezlo's eyes widened. "No! They're semi sentient, I told you! And they were trying to help!"
"Then what do we do?!" Link asked again, throwing his arms wide.
"We make a God, of course," Ezlo said. He snickered at Link's expression.
Due to their tiny size, it took Link and Ezlo another hour of walking to get to where they needed to be. Ezlo could only manage so much precision going to relatively unknown places, arriving a fair distance from their destination had been expected.
On the way, the Minish had explained that the woods were actually very, very old. Old enough for the accumulated spiritual energy to have the potential to turn into a deity if it all came together.
"Not like Hylia or the Three Golden Goddesses, mind you," he had specified. "You guys just don't have a proper word for it. Something between a Guardian Spirit and a God."
Their job, what Ezlo needed help with, was to help the spiritual energy come together. Ezlo was convinced the energy wanted this, and assured Link that if he was wrong and it didn't, nothing they did would work. They would not find themselves forcing the energy into a new form, because forcing spiritual energy to do anything was not possible. You could guide it, help it, but not force it.
They finally arrived at a large clearing. At his current size, it looked basically infinite to Link and he was glad they weren't going to try and cross it: he could see a lone tree in the distance, a solid day's walk away for a minish or a temporarily minish sized Hylian.
"Alright," Ezlo said. "See that tree? You need to climb it to reach its heart. I can't, I'm way too small."
Link stopped and stared at Ezlo. Ezlo tilted his head.
"Hm..." Link said. "Isn't this still part of the woods that Big People can't go in without being turned into Stalchildren? Or is it ok to be big just for a bit?"
"Goodness no, any Big Person who made it this deep would just poof their skin right off and turn instantly."
Link scratched his head. Was he missing something? "So how...?"
Ezlo's eyes widened and his jaw went slack. He looked Link up and down. "Oh," he said. "Oh... right. I forgot problem A when I solved problem B..."
Link groaned and rolled his eyes. "Let me get this straight. You needed me because I'm big, but I can't be here if I'm big, so you shrank me. And you forgot that you needed me because I'm big. Din's Toes, Ezlo!"
Ezlo had collapsed in a sitting position on the ground, knees to his chest and arms around them, with his face buried in. He nodded.
Link took a deep breath. That was absent minded even by Ezlo's standards. Suspiciously so. It was entirely possible Ezlo had indeed thought of that problem and chosen to ignore it and let Link figure it out.
It was also entirely possible Link had just forgotten how bad Ezlo was at thinking things through.
Either way, the result was the same. Here they were and he needed to touch the heart of that tree, whatever that was, and for that, he needed to climb it.
"Can you get me closer to the tree now that it's in sight?" Link asked.
Ezlo's face peeped up from behind his arms. "You think you can figure something out?" he asked.
What Link thought was that he kind of had to. He plastered a cocky grin on his face and nodded. "You bet!" he said with all the assurance he didn't have, going as far as giving Ezlo a two fingers Victory sign.
Hey, an unsolvable problem was at least something to kill time with.
Three hours later, his work done, Link was deposited gently back on the ground by the now much bigger Great Deku Tree.
Ezlo, who Link had left behind, was positively gaping at him.
"You actually did it," he said. "In the name of Farore's nostrils, HOW?"
Link buffed his nails on his shirt.
"You rode a chipmunk," Ezlo said. "I got that part. That's fine. Slightly insane and definitely impressive, but nice and explainable. But... the light show when you touched the heart, what was that? And how did you stop it? And how did you talk to the spiritual energy? There was this light, and then you were gone... You scared me, Link! And then... and then you were back and the tree..."
Link tilted his head. "Why, I'm sure I just did what you didn't get around to tell me that I needed to do," he said mischievously. He'd been transported to the Spirit Realm when he'd touched the heart, and it had become quickly obvious from what little Ezlo had told him that the minish had had absolutely no idea how to help the spirits become one or what would happen when Link touched the heart.
Ezlo's eyes widened. "No you didn't! I was just going to... pray or something! Touching the heart was to get the spiritual energy's focused attention!"
Link shrugged. "Long story," he said, quoting Ezlo from earlier. "Who cares? We did it! Say hello to the Lost Woods' Guardian, Ezlo. The Great Deku Tree."
Ezlo looked up as high as he could. He could just make out that the tree had not only grown a lot, but acquired a face of sorts.
"Great Deku Tree," he said. "It's an honor."
The Tree chuckled.
"The pleasure is all mine, Master Minish. You did well to bring Link here. More than you know, I suspect. Now that I've achieved my true self, I can do what you both wished. The evil The Lost Woods absorbed can't be purged now... this forest will continue to dislike Hylians and other similar races. But it is otherwise not malevolent. I will arrange for it to be a place people avoid – I'll make it blur their senses and fill them with disquiet - and I will grant wanderers a chance to escape. There's nothing I can do for those who refuse to leave, they will still become stalchildren. I will, however, take care of them when that happens. They will not be unhappy."
Ezlo nodded, absorbing it all in.
"And you, Hero," the tree said. "I am in your debt. You will always have a friend in me. Always."
Link smiled and turned to Ezlo. "You'll come back next crisis, right?" he asked. "This was the most fun I had in years! I nearly died in there, it was awesome!"
Ezlo smiled awkwardly and nodded. He was pretty sure he wouldn't be able to come back again after this, not for 96 years, so Link would have to work through his adrenaline addiction on his own.
Hopefully the young hero would never meet anyone who was quite as much trouble as Ezlo himself, and would mostly fail to find new interesting ways to nearly get himself killed.
Author's Notes:
I haven't played Minish Cap in a while, so I sort of characterized Ezlo as he lives in my head. As for Link, I kind of figure that normal life would feel pretty sluggish after an adventure like that. He'll grow out of it. Eventually.
Things you might be wondering, aka plot holes the size of the Lost Woods:
1. How did Ezlo find out about what would become The Lost Woods, and how did he come back?
2. Where did Link go and what did he have to do to get all that spiritual energy, and/or all the little spirits, to become one semi deity?
Long story. Or to put it another way, aucune idée.