Copyright disclaimer: Oi, I've told you twice already... I don't own the Legend of Zelda franchise. I've never even been to Hyrule.

CHAPTER 3: The Complications of a Certain Winged Family

As we walked to the house of the "Oriola" family, I imagined an unrecognizable heap of ash and a distinct smell of smoke. However, when Pipit and I arrived at the house, I was near speechless. It was behind a gate with lush green grass even in the summer hear and vibrant flowers surrounding the driveway. Pipit walked up to the gate and pressed a button.

"Whaddaya want," squawked a voice on the intercom, though it was more of a command than a question.

"Detective Pipit back for more investigation," Pipit answered.

The black metal gate scratched across the ground as it slowly opened. As we walked further into the property, scenarios popped into my head. Before we even started, I had an idea. The house—or, better put, mansion, was located in the eastern district, and thickly surrounded by trees. None of them were burnt. The mansion itself looked too modern for its surroundings: it was all angles, glass and greyscale: sharp, colorless lines against vivid green curves that shake in the wind.

"The fire didn't spread from the basement?" I asked.

"Oh, just wait until you see it." We came upon the front door of the mansion. It was made of matted glass that had been tinted black, and there were large triangular windows on either side. A burly man stood in front with a severe face and three-piece suit. "I hope you'll be done by today," he said angrily as he turned and slid the black door aside. Pipit stepped in, and I followed. "He's the Oriola's butler," Pipit said.

"Since I haven't seen you before, let me give you some background information," said the butler as if he had better things to do. "This guy—" he said, shoving his thumb over his back at Pipit as we followed him through the house, "knows all of the real names, so I'll just leave those out. The head of the family is... was working for the Skyloft government. He married his secretary a month after divorcing his first wife, with whom he'd had a child with—she's the only person left in the family. His secretary had three kids, two boys, one aged sixteen and one twenty-two, and a daughter who was twenty-five. His real daughter was treated like an outsider. They found her—"

"With all due respect, sir, we have this information already," Pipit politely interrupted.

The butler grunted in reply. "Fine."

After we'd walked through the entire maze, we were led to a door just like the one in front of the house.

"The basement." He slid the door open and walked away.

"Why isn't he in custody yet?" Pipit said to himself, and flipped out his phone, texted a message quickly, then put his phone back in his pocket. "To the belly of the beast," he said.

The stairwell was dark, and at the bottom, Pipit flipped a switch and then everything was a blinding, clinical white. The ground and walls were pure white marble panels, and the ceiling was opaque glass. There were ashes in irregular shapes on the ground and some on the glass ceiling. I counted five large dark spots in an almost straight line and figured that was the family.

"Everything points to the daughter," Pipit said.

"It wasn't her," I answered immediately. "But please share the information." Pipit nodded and handed me his journal, titled "FIELD NOTES". His handwriting was almost beyond incoherent, but I understood the gist of it:

Scratches in the shape of wings cut into backs of family members. Covered in gasoline and burnt to death. Found in fetal position, estimated time of death all at or around 7:46, two hours before the neighbor called police. Third degree burns almost to the bone, had been burning for hours. Daughter had similar markings on her back but was tied up in the corner and found unconscious. Gasoline cans found under her bed and an entry in her diary a week before saying, "If we were all angels, we wouldn't fight anymore. They wouldn't hurt me anymore."

I looked at the glass door that led to the basement. It was airlocked, and there were no windows anywhere. The door was the only way to the basement. There was no lighter found in the girl's room.

"I'm going to visit the neighbor, and then I'm going to visit the girl," I said to Pipit.

"Okay," Pipit said, because I wasn't the kind of person to work with other people in the first place, and we both knew it.

The walk to their neighbor's house took me six minutes through the woods. It was a single-family sized house and had a large front porch, and on the front sat an aged woman smoking. When she saw me, she stubbed her cigarette and pulled a large knife out of her boot, pointing it at me.

"Their daughter came to you because you were the closest thing to a mother she had, and you were angry that her own family hurt her. She came to you every day, didn't she? You worked with her father under the government, you were a colleague. Her stepbrothers cut her back, I saw the razor blades in their desks. She told you about her dream of being an angel—"

"She was being so mistreated!" she interrupted with a strained voice.

"So you decided to kill her whole family. You used one of your many lighters and set them on fire. But do you know what you did by putting gasoline cans under her bed? She's in a psychiatric hospital, she's been accused of murdering her entire family. She'll never be accepted into society again. That makes you no better than the family that mistreated her. You're under arrest." She took the blade and pushed it into her lower stomach. Blood steadily dripped down the handle.

"That won't kill you," I said, and she groaned as police cars showed up. I'd called them on the walk over.

She coughed, "How long did it take you to figure it out? Ten minutes? I'd spent a year planning it. A means to an end," she said. "How simple our minds are."

I speak the most when confronting the accused, and then offered a few sentences here and there at all other times. Someone told me once that the only needed speech was truth, and I always gave the perpetrators their truths; it was both their resolve and mine, so they could move on and so I wouldn't dwell on the lives that I'd changed, probably ruined.

The only living daughter of the Oriola family began to cry when I told her who killed her family. She told me everything about her family, from her dad divorcing her mom to his marriage with the archetypal evil stepmother. When he remarried, he started acting mean towards her and neglected her, as did the rest of the family. He took her to work one day and met his colleague who gave her candy and said she was very smart and pretty. They became something like a mother and daughter duo, with the girl constantly suffering through the abuse of her family, until they were all murdered. When I left the building, I saw Horwell leaning against the wall. He nodded at me, and I nodded at him. I couldn't help but wonder after everything was over about what that woman had said.

"How simple our minds are."

My mind began to span larger things, like the psychological motivation behind the crimes of the many people I'd put in jail and how their lives were affected by it. Then I had to stop, because a wave of deep-rooted guilt began to wash over me. I pushed the wave back. Don't think about it, I said in my head, and I started humming to keep my mind off of it.

"You solved it too quickly," Pipit said after we regrouped. Regardless, he patted me on the back and smiled. I smiled back.

I walked around the city all of that week, helping people with menial tasks like finding lost dogs, giving directions, and carrying groceries. I received thanks, handshakes, hugs, praise. On Sunday I visited the Skyloftian Library of our Great Hylia to attend the lecture on Farore's Courage. The speaker was a professor at the Golden School of Farore, which trained students in many kinds of fighting styles as well as philosophies and a goddess-fearing religion. It was one of three schools that celebrated the three Golden Goddesses.

"Courage," she started. "What is courage? Where does it come from?" A student sitting in the near-empty first row raised his hand.

"Farore," he said with a posture of surety.

"Yes and no," the professor replied. "It starts with the goddess Farore, yes, but the rest of it comes from what you believe in. If you have nothing to motivate you, no virtues, you won't have courage. It comes from the heart." She then went into the history of the Golden Goddess Farore, and I left with much more knowledge than I'd entered with.

"Thank you for coming," the librarian said to me as I stopped by her desk. Nayru's Wisdom is next week, and we have a scholar and a poet coming from the Golden School of Nayru. Care to attend?"

"Yes," I answered, and she replied, "see you then."

Eyes were blinking on my back no matter where I went. I didn't speak for three days, didn't sleep for three days, and was not assigned any cases. After my three days of restlessness, I got a call from Fi.

"There's a case for you, and the Intelligence Division wants you on it. It's big. It will take a few months to prepare for. You'll need to come into the office twice a week and go straight to Intelligence, but on the days you are not at the office, you should still work on other cases. Do you accept?"

"Yes," I said, because I was listless and at that point I'd have done almost anything to get onto my feet.

"Good morning, detective," said Keet, who worked in intelligence. He was prone to just lazing around, but he could wipe your name off of everything. The intelligence office was above Zelda's office and below the forensics labs. It was two floors, and seven people were on the intelligence team. They were never seen around the building, and most of them slept at their desks. Keet handed me a Manila folded marked "classified" and put his hands in his pockets.

"That's the information you currently need," he said. "Read up and get to work." He gestured to the cluster of almost bare desks all facing each other in the middle of the room, three on either side and one at the head, which was the director's desk. No one was there, so I just sat in the closest desk and flipped through the file:

CASE: INTER-DISTRICT ORGANIZED CRIME SYNDICATE DRUG BUST, ("OP: POPPY").
Summary: Opium grown illegally in the East has been found in every district but is only sold in the South. Members of organized crime syndicates previously at war have been seen together on numerous occasions.

LIST OF SUSPECTS

There was then a list of five or six names, and three were bolded, meaning they were most likely circulating the opium, dealing it, or leaders of the gang. Just as Skyloft City had five districts, it had five main gangs: Bokoblins of the North, South, East, and West, coined Boko-North, etc. All of the Bokoblin gangs were somewhat connected, but the gang in Central was the top dog: the Imprisoned. They were disconnected from the Bokos and were more a legitimate organized crime syndicate than kids with too much time on their hands: even though they hadn't moved in almost a year, they were a group of elusive terrorists that were always on the move. They could control the Bokoblins on a whim, and were the disconnected unofficial dictators of crime in the city. The Imprisoned was not on the list of suspects, just as I'd expected.
The list gave the names, ages, addresses, and suspected gangs they were from.

ITINERARY FOR DETECTIVE LINK
Week of July 22: Dance lessons, club etiquette. Extensive research with director on suspects.
Week of July 29: Dance lessons. Create fake identity. Apply for winter job.
Week of August 5: Dance lessons. Costume fitting. Wipe current identity.
Week of August 12: Dance lessons, club etiquette. Program equipment.

"Keet..." I said. "What is this?"

He raised his eyebrows. "Didn't you read it, it's on the second page, under Duties. You'll be working undercover in a nightclub." I think I felt my eye twitch.

"Why do I need dance lessons if I'm a bartender?"

"You're working as the entertainment," he said, with extra emphasis on the last word. "You start next week."

I definitely felt my eye twitch.

"Don't worry, you have almost half a year to prepare," he said earnestly.

Author's note: Link as a stripper. The end. Kidding! We get to meet our main antagonist in two more chapters. Get pumped. Thanks for reading, reviews and PMs always welcome!