Once back out on the little sandspit of an island, Link spent a moment contemplating how to get back to shore, then spotted a little log raft with a simple square sail.
He had a good idea how to use it, which… was actually a bit strange, once he realized that, and he stopped and sat down to think about it.
Maybe it was something he'd learned before entering the Shrine of Resurrection? But that didn't feel quite right… perhaps because most of the things he'd done with his weapons since leaving the Shrine were instinct, not learned skill, or something he'd learned by experimenting with his lupine body. But how to sail a small boat… that was something where he was thinking casually of technical terms, like how to tack against the wind, and it was only slightly spoiled by the fact that there wasn't nearly enough wind to actually get sailing.
After giving it some more thought, Link decided that he didn't have enough information to be sure, and what he did have was the materials to get back to shore. He had a raft, and he had a way of propelling it… not by holding on to the raft with his forepaws and paddling with his hind paws, though that would probably be an option.
Instead, Link put down his Slate and flicked through to the weapons section, then pulled out a leaf as large as he was. He held it carefully in his jaws, not wanting to bite through the stem, then swiped it across at the raft's sail.
It rippled instantly, making a sort of hollow boom sound, and the raft slid a handspan or two across the sand.
Link put down the leaf, pleased, then looked around.
It would take him only a short while to get to shore… but, then again, there was that island out to sea over there…
After thinking about it for a minute or so, Link dragged the raft around the sandy island, then shoved it out into the water and jumped onto it. He swept his Korok leaf to blow on the sail, then frowned as he didn't really start moving as much as he'd expected.
Maybe he'd got something wrong?
Contemplating it, Link blew wind on the sail a second time, then huffed as he realized what was going on.
When he used the leaf, he was blowing himself backwards. The wind wasn't coming from outside the boat… which meant…
He turned around, then began using the wind to blow air behind the boat. That worked, and within a dozen swipes he was flying across the sea.
White water curled away from the logs at either end of the raft, and the one downside was that he had no idea where he was going… at least, not without stopping and checking.
Doing it like this the sail was mostly making it harder, actually. Link ducked down to look underneath it, then nodded in satisfaction as he saw the island was still ahead.
Going around in circles at twenty knots would be an annoying way to get tired. Though, now he thought of it, he pulled the sail around so it was in line with the way he was going – then trapped it under his back, holding it so he could use it like a kind of upside-down keel.
By this point he wasn't really relying on that odd mixture of intuition and memory any more, but it still seemed to work.
Link's raft brushed against the sand, then grounded, and he moved to the front of the craft before jumping up and down to see if it was going to come off again in a wave.
It felt a bit queasy, so Link decided to pull it up onto the shore in case it got lost.
The moment his paw touched the beach, though, a voice echoed through his mind.
I present you with a challenge, the monk said. In your travels, you've relied on the equipment you've found along the way.
Link felt a bit offended.
Here, you must cast this equipment aside and face this trial with only your wits and whatever you can scavenge, the monk went on.
Then the Korok leaf vanished.
Offer up the orbs to the three altars on this island. Only then will I acknowledge your skill and return your items.
Link tilted his head, then checked his Slate.
Then made a growling noise, because he'd been looking forward to that grilled bass.
...well, if you don't rely on those items then this should be easy, the monk said. Look, it took me ages to write that macro and it's probably going to be quicker for you to complete the challenge than it is for me to rewrite the macro.
Sighing, Link pulled his raft up onto the beach, then raised his muzzle and sniffed the air.
There was a heavy scent of… bananas, which would either mean banana trees or a ninja assassin to steal weapons from. Either would do.
For the first hour or so, Link mostly got a good sense of how the island was laid out.
He'd landed at one end of a long, sandy beach, with an upswelling inland of him that formed one corner of the island. Then there were two other high points, one of them with a sloping ramp leading up to it and the other a steep-sided prominence.
It didn't quite look sheer, though, which was good because Link was going to have to get up there at some point.
As for the scent of bananas, there weren't any actual ninjas to steal from – just banana trees – and Link picked several bunches, storing them in his Slate, then added to the otherwise-empty ingredients stockpile with coconuts, smelly durian fruits, a very big radish and some truffles.
There were crabs on the beach, plenty of them, and fish in the sea, and Link would almost have considered it a pleasant place to spend a few days relaxing were it not for the fact that even here – out in the sea, far from any other land – Calamity's servants could be found.
There was a Hinox with an orb on the necklace it was wearing. There was the sound of Bokoblin laughter from both of the high points on the island, and a wooden tower with another orb resting on a leafy platform.
There were Bokoblins lounging on the beach, cooking fish around a campfire, at least until Link turned up to inform them that he'd quite like to share the food and that he also wanted their weapons.
After resolving that little dispute, Link had some roasted sea bass, thinking as he did about what he was going to do next… and about the disadvantages of being stripped of all his equipment.
There actually was a reason why he wanted to use swords, clubs and spears against monsters, if he could – both for the extra range, and because it meant he could hit harder without hurting himself if he missed. And a good, sharp sword could add extra impact to that… to say nothing of how he could certainly hit something with an arrow from much further away than with his jaws.
Then a rock landed next to him.
Link rolled upright, looking around, and saw an Octorok pop up out of the sea nearby and spit another one at him. This time he ducked, avoiding it, and picked up a spear before flinging it at the floating creature as it popped up.
That finished it off in a single hit, but another Octorok started spitting at him as well, and Link didn't have an unlimited supply of spears. He did have bombs, though, and created one with the Slate before nosing under it and flicking it out into the sea.
When it exploded, not only did it get rid of the Octorok, but it also caused half a dozen stunned and tasty-smelling fish to float to the surface.
Link made an interested noise, contemplating his Slate, then went swimming out to retrieve his prospective dinner.
It seemed there was something to be said for fishing with explosives.
Now supplied with plenty of fish of various kinds, Link went slinking up to the lower and easier of the two rocky formations, then padded his way up the curving path and inspected the top of the plateau.
There were some big Electric Chuchu, and some Bokoblins, and – almost as importantly – a cooking pot. And several barrels of high explosive.
Link contemplated luring the snoring Hinox up here to try and blow it up, but reconsidered. It would be a lot of work, and if it didn't pay off then he'd have given up his opportunity to do something else useful.
Instead, he quietly made a bomb, then flicked it over the lip of the plateau and triggered it when it was close to the explosive barrels.
There was a concussive bang, several flashes of discharging electricity, and Link pounced into the monster camp while the Bokoblins had gone from lounging around a camp fire to running around in circles on fire without their weapons.
He flattened one with a pounce, bit at another, used it as a flail to hit a third off the plateau, then snagged a dropped torch and lit it on fire to wave menacingly at the fourth Bokoblin.
The monster made angry noises back at him, picked up a barrel, and flung it at him. Link ducked, avoiding the hit, then lit the cooking pot on the way past and ducked behind one of two big metal boxes.
When the Bokoblin came around the box a few seconds later, he found that Link had gone. And left behind a bomb.
The Bokoblin had very little time to contemplate the unfairness of this situation, though Link did appreciate the various exotic fruits that landed around him.
Voltfruit and hydromelon both smelled very interesting.
After having a nice meal, Link headed northeast – slipping past the Hinox – to make for the first and, he suspected, easiest of the three orbs.
There were two Bokoblins on a wooden platform around a tree, and then another one on a separate platform. It would have been an ideal situation for Link to use an arrow to snipe out the sentry, but he didn't have any arrows at the moment.
Still, he had an alternative – and, though the weather was rapidly turning foul as a thunderstorm rolled in, that wouldn't cause Link any actual problems today. He wasn't carrying anything made of metal.
Creeping closer in the undergrowth that covered the island's lowest hill, Link judged his angle – then created a bomb, and held it in place with a paw behind some of the thicker sections of leaves.
Then he let it go, rolling it down the slope to the base of the tree the Bokoblin sentry was placed on – and detonated the bomb.
The Bokoblin found itself too busy falling from the platform to take note of a wolf darting out from the leaves, and Link finished it off before taking hold of a bundle of five arrows. Then he continued on to duck underneath the bigger platform, listening to the puzzled Bokoblins trying to work out what had happened to their sentry.
He waited until the next lightning strike, then tapped his Slate for a moment. That done, he ran out from under the platform and raced up the ramp.
Dropping what he'd got out of the Slate, he skidded to a halt and turned to face the Bokoblins.
He growled, hackles raising, and the Bokoblins made threatening sounds back.
Then one of them noticed he'd dropped a rusty shield next to them, and a moment later they were both struck by lightning.
Link felt quite satisfied by it all, really. He was quite sure that counted as using his wits.
Link rolled the orb down off the wooden platform, running ahead of it as it rolled before letting it thump into his flank, then considered whether to take it over to his cooking pot or to the other pedestal he'd seen.
It took a moment, but Link decided to go to the shoreline pedestal instead. His plan for what to do with the Hinox might make distance matter, so activating the shoreline pedestal now seemed like the best choice.
That meant he had to actually get the orb through the rain and to the pedestal, and while the rain wasn't a problem rolling the orb was. He tried picking it up in his forepaws and immediately fell over, he tried balancing it on his nose and dropped it three times, he tried balancing it on his forehead and that didn't work either.
He also tried storing it in the Slate, but apparently that was something that either the Sheikah Monks hadn't thought of or it was something they had thought of and that would trivialize too many of their shrines.
Next Link tried rearing up and draping his front half over the orb while pushing with his rear legs, and that worked a bit so long as he kept his front half sliding instead of sticking to the orb. Once he did stick though he immediately rolled over it and ended up on his back in the mud, so that wasn't an ideal outcome.
Then Link had a bit of a think, and used the Sheikah Slate's Stasis rune to freeze the orb. He drummed on it with his paws a few times, then let the Stasis rune time out, and watched as the orb went rolling rapidly along before ramping up and over the ridge.
A moment later, Link remembered to follow it, and hurried along to watch as the ball rolled along – through the underbrush – before coming to a stop on the damp sand of the beach.
After thinking for several seconds, and looking up at the sound of a nearby lightning strike, Link had an idea.
Link's idea worked, though his way of moving the ball along the beach was not the most dignified thing he had ever done.
Standing on top of the ball and running directly away from where he wanted the ball to go worked, though, or at least it worked after some practice, and before long the orb was bobbing gently in the shallows and Link had to work out how to get the orb up to the pedestal.
The solution was, at least, obvious, but it meant Link had to aim his Cryonis rune and that was always a bit fiddly… especially when he was trying to make the ice appear directly underneath the orb, and the jolt from rising up into the air could make it so that the orb slid and rolled gently across the ice to splash back into the sea.
By the time Link had managed to get the orb stable on a Cryonis ice platform, the rain had stopped entirely, and he paddled out to the ice before putting his muzzle underneath the orb and flicking it onto the pedestal.
To his great relief, it accepted the orb and turned blue. One down, two to go.
Then Link shook himself to send salt and rainwater spraying everywhere, because there were some things you just had to do.
Link's second target was the larger of the rock plateaus, and he loped back across the island to climb up the uneven side. That put him over the snoozing Hinox, and he did his best not to wake up the slumbering monster as he climbed.
Since he was also doing his best to actually climb the tower, that mostly meant stifling what would otherwise have been finding out how it sounded when a wolf tried to invent new swear words. Link was normally not much given to talking unless necessary, but climbing without the aid of high explosives was one of those things that was starting to frustrate him.
Eventually, he reached the lip of the plateau, and raised his head carefully to look around.
There were Bokoblins on towers, and a Moblin wandering around. He could hear other Bokoblins, too, chattering to themselves as they cooked breakfast, and Link considered his options before slinking up onto the platform and behind a stone wall.
The Bokoblins on the towers were his biggest problem, because they would be harder to get at and had bows. But, on the other paw, they had bows, and would shoot arrows, and at the moment Link's best way to attack them was with arrows.
And Link currently had exactly five arrows.
Then again, it wasn't like Link couldn't get at the arrows anyway, if he killed the sentries.
After weighing both options, Link decided to continue creeping about a bit more, to get a better picture of the situation. He unstowed his Slate, took out a single arrow for emergencies, and gently picked it up in his teeth. Then he crept silently along the side of the wall, looked around the corner, and came face to face with the Moblin.
It gasped, and Link flicked up his arrow to hit it in the face before launching himself forwards to knock the big monster onto the ground. An arrow flicked at him from one of the sentries as the other blew its horn to sound the alarm, and Link dodged just in time so the arrow ruffled his fur.
A Bokoblin swiped at him with a club, another began probing at him with a spear, and the Moblin he'd just downed tried to kick him off. Link retaliated with a bite and a snarl, then decided he was in a bad tactical position, and jumped to the side – kicking the Moblin in the side of the face as he did, just to keep it distracted.
He snatched one of the arrows out of the dirt and flung it back at the Bokoblin archer, knocking it off the tower with a wail as it expired, then picked up another arrow and killed the other sentry. That just left the regular Bokoblins, and Link decided to get some distance and replan.
Shrugging off a blow from a club as he got moving, Link darted around a corner and spotted a chest.
Suddenly curious, he opened it as the Bokoblins sorted themselves out, and his eyes lit up.
When the monsters came around the corner after him, they saw Link wielding a really very high quality broadsword.
Their shouting, confident charge halted as the ones in front tried to stop and the ones behind them ran into the ones in front, and Link smirked.
Then his paws scuffed the ground, and he attacked.
Pleased with himself, Link gathered up the Bokoblin weapons, then checked both the orb (on a platform, but that wasn't too bad, because there was a ladder and those were tolerable) and the pedestal (under a large rock).
The rock went quickly enough, frozen with Stasis and then knocked away in a trick that Link was getting quite used to, then over the next few minutes he nosed and shoved and wrestled the orb onto the pedestal.
Two down, one to go, and Link investigated the rest of what there was to find on the rocky pedestal. There were certainly signs of a settlement that had been here before, but there were also more exotic fruits, and Link picked them up with careful efficiency.
Now all he had to do was sort out that third orb.
Before putting his plan into motion, Link did a mental double-check. Was this really the best approach?
After thinking about it properly, he decided the answer was – yes.
Several paces back from the edge of the high plateau, he started loping, then quickly accelerated into a run. He jumped out over the edge, opened his glider with a practiced motion, then floated downwards towards the Hinox.
Craning his neck a little, Link steered himself downwards so he'd be landing squarely on the Hinox's chest.
This was going to need to be done in a hurry.
The moment his hindpaws touched, Link closed the glider and his forepaws went thump onto the monster's chest. It made a grumbling noise, starting to wake up, and Link bit through the Hinox's necklace cord with a single clash of his jaw.
That left the orb rolling, and Link jumped off the Hinox to corral it with his flank before starting to shove it away from the monster.
As he did, the Hinox stood up, and fixed its single eye on him before making a threatening noise.
Link did his best to hurry up, ducking his head and headbutting the orb to move it faster, then decided that had been a bad idea and switched instead to shoving it backwards.
Since that actually worked worse, and was harder to control, Link switched back to jumping onto the orb and running backwards while on top of it.
The Hinox responded by tearing a tree out of the ground and swishing it at him.
Link ducked away as the monster slammed its new weapon into the ground, knowing that he wouldn't have a good time if it managed to hit him, and scrambled to get some arrows out of his Slate. Then he flung one at the Hinox, hitting it in the eye, and it wailed and crashed to the ground.
Picking up another arrow for when he needed to do that again, Link went back to the orb and began wrestling it up the slope to the final pedestal.
Finally, after using most of his remaining arrows on the Hinox and having to catch the orb after it rolled all the way back down the hill, Link rolled the orb onto the pedestal.
It dissolved, the pedestal turned blue, and the monk spoke again.
There, the macro's run, your items are back. Now, come to the shrine and I will give you your reward.
Link would have looked for the shrine, but at that moment the Hinox tried to turn him two-dimensional.
Not feeling especially like he wanted that to happen, Link jumped off the plateau top onto the slope, and considered for a moment if he should try and finish the Hinox – before reluctantly deciding that there was way too much finishing off that needed to be done to make that practical, and loping into the forest.
That took him several minutes, but by the time he was done the Hinox was far behind and it sounded like it might just have given up.
Relaxing, Link decided to have a meal to celebrate before looking for the shrine, and checked his Slate.
As promised, his items were back. However, the grilled fish and banana that he'd been planning to eat wasn't there, and a moment's checking revealed that absolutely everything Link had picked up on Eventide island was gone.
Link sighed, because he'd been looking forward to that dinner, then caught sight of something.
The shrine.
Which was on top of a pillar of rock on top of the rock platform where the Bokoblins and the Moblin had been. And the pillar looked like it was going to be even harder to climb.
Link hissed between his teeth, then sighed and got moving.
If he was going to glare at someone, he wanted them to deserve it.
Getting back up onto the rock plateau was just doing something Link had done before, again, but getting further up to the place where the shrine was presented a bit more of a problem.
Now that he had his equipment back, Link could have made a pile of lumber and set it on fire with a fire arrow, and used the resultant updraft. But while that was an option, it would mean burning up some of the lumber he was going to use to pay for his house.
And while Link would do it if he had to, a bit of thought led to an alternative approach.
The stone slab that had been covering one of the pedestals was still there, and it was even in about the right place. So Link froze it with Stasis, hit it several times with both his paws, then dealt it one last upwards blow and jumped on board.
That solved the problem of getting high enough quite satisfactorily, and Link jumped off the slab when he was at the right height before wincing slightly at thealmighty splash as it hit the sea.
It sounded like it had hit a Lizalfos, though, so that was probably a net positive all things considered.
Inside the shrine, the Sheikah monk Korgu Chideh looked pleased to see him.
I solved the problem, the monk explained. I looked over the macro after it had finished running, and I realized that I'd got it set to transfer the contents of your slate, then when it transferred back it did it slot by slot but it also included all the empty slots. That meant there wasn't any space to hold the things you'd picked up on the island itself.
Link understood most of that, but he gave the monk a look anyway.
...I suppose it would be a bit less of a happy situation if you'd lost some things you'd gathered, the monk admitted belatedly. Well… if it's any comfort, there's some money in that chest? And I have an orb for you.
They paused. And I have turned off the macro, it won't happen if you visit Eventide again. Promise. Please don't look at me like that, it's intimidating.
Several hundred rupees and one orb richer, Link drifted back down to the beach, then pushed his raft out into the water.
He'd been planning on sailing around a bit before he arrived on Eventide, so now the question was… should he go north, or west?
They both looked like equally viable options, but Link had more information about the map to the north so he decided to head in that direction. That meant getting the raft out past the rocks around Eventide island itself, then turning so he had the sail held where he wouldn't be impeding it, and waving his Korok leaf to speed up.
With a lot of sea room, Link could build up a lot of speed, and something about it sang in his heart. It was deeper than his memories, soul-deep, something about the salt-spray in the air and the wooden craft below him rocking on the waves and the wind rippling through his fur.
Admittedly that last part had probably originally been hair, but it was close.
Link felt fairly sure, now, as he raced across the waves on a log raft, that at least one of the Heroes of the past had been a sailor. Maybe more than one.
Then the whole raft trembled a little, and Link looked up in time to see a Lizalfos wail despairingly as it flew overhead before crashing back into the sea and expiring.
Another Lizalfos spat at him, but by the time it had finished he was already past.
Link considered all the information available to him, and decided that this was a perfectly acceptable way to deal with a Lizalfos.
Around a minute later it turned out that Mapla Point was a lot less amenable to being run over than a single Lizalfos, and when Link picked himself up off the beach he discovered that his raft was now in about twenty separate pieces.
He huffed out a sigh, then decided that clearly it was back to walking. And that a sailor needed to be able to see where they were going.
Still with a choice of going west or north, Link elected to continue going north. He sniffed out some Koroks around the headland, moving up the hill as he did so, then crossed a spur of land to the Solewood Range and went north from there along the gently sloping flank of a great mountain.
It was a harsh stretch of land, with almost no trees and only a little grass, and Link wondered if it was something to do with the mountain to his left. There was a cool and dry wind sweeping down the flank, ruffling his warm fur, and if that was going on most or all of the time then it might be a problem for trees.
Or it might not. Link was not a botanist, and the lack of great flashes of insight suggested that any past incarnations of the Hero he could draw upon had not been botanists either.
The ground flew by, Link's paws touching the ground in bursts between long flying leaps, and he settled into a loping rhythm as he travelled along the coast. It was peaceful, in a sense, and Link let his mind wander.
Until there was a loud chirp chirp! sound from right next to his ear.
Link stumbled, recovered, skidded to a halt, and checked his Slate.
Sure enough, it was alerting him to a nearby shrine.
Picking the Slate up in his jaws, Link tested which direction he was getting the alert in. Not south, obviously… a little bit to the north… none at all to the east… it took less than a minute to narrow down that the shrine was somewhere to the northwest, up the mountainside.
Up a bit of the slope which, of course, was fairly steep.
Link huffed out a sigh, then began pacing up the slope – on the lookout for the easiest part of the route.
Some minutes and scrambling later, Link finished hauling himself over the lip of a lightly wooded mountainside terrace.
There were some blue mushrooms, and some fruit, and Link gathered those up because they were there and because they might be useful – or tasty – later.
"You're new," a wolf said.
"I'm looking for something," Link replied. "Have you seen some kind of small building? With glowing lines on it?"
"Not anywhere near here," the wolf told him. "Why, do you think there is one?"
"There's supposed to be," Link said, checking the Slate's map again now he'd finished stuffing fruit and mushrooms into it.
The Shrine sensor chirped again, and Link tilted his head a little as he looked at a small cliff on the western side of the flat section.
Then he flicked to a different mode on the Slate, and produced a bomb.
"Um," the wolf began, raising a hesitant paw. "What's that?"
"A way of solving problems," Link answered, picking up the blue cube by a small handle, and set it down right by the cliff itself.
"Doesn't look like it," the wolf complained, as Link came back over to the Slate.
In reply, Link pressed his paw on the screen.
The bomb exploded, blowing away a thin screen of rock and knocking over a tree with a crash, and when the dust had settled there was a shrine visible inside the rock face.
"Well, that's me told," the wolf admitted.
Link picked up his Slate again, tapped it to open the Shrine, then went inside to see what the puzzle was.
As soon as he reached the bottom of the lift, an ethereal voice drifted through the air.
I am Tahno O-ah, the monk said. By finding this place, you have already proven your worth.
Link looked around the interior of the shrine.
It was a small platform, with water on all sides, and there was just a treasure chest and a monk. Nothing else to be seen.
"Rf?" he asked, looking up the lift, then at Tahno O-ah. "Rrr-f?"
I am not very imaginative, the monk replied.
Then Link opened the treasure chest, and found that inside was a pair of trousers.
You know how it is, the monk said. You get something for someone, and then you find out their measurements are wrong…
AN:
Not much of a challenge, that one.
It's amazing how much doing a playthrough can provide inspiration, really.