Link gets lost and makes a new friend! (Rauru hates him.)
NPCs are sometimes bad at listening in this game. (That makes the NPCs more realistic I guess.)
Link studiously ignored Rauru for the time being as he climbed over the rocks and made his way up cliffs. Link suspected Rauru would not need to be so studiously ignored if, say, Link were not building a trebuchet for his cliff-climbing.
Not a catapult or a teeter totter.
Trebuchet. Link wanted airtime. Rauru was, in fact complaining, but not for the same reason Link thought he would be complaining. Link thought rauru was currently saying the same things that Zelda would be saying.
Zelda would be saying "Link, please don't launch yourself out of that. Especially not past those archers!"
Rauru was saying, "Link, you need to reposition that, you're going to end up in the wrong direction. Isn't the blizzard that way?" Link scratched out his numbers on the ground, added another rock to the counterweight, then got in as Rauru covered two of his three eyes. Rauru cursed the follies of communication.
Link, flung into the air, said "Aaaaaaaaa!"
Link, in fact, learned what Rauru was trying to say. He flipped out his paraglider, looked at the vast blank space of his map, shrugged, and found himself rammed by an aerocuda.
Instead of course correcting, Link left a trail of monster smithereens dissolving into gloom, tumbled down into a path, ascended through some spots, and rode a sky boulder up via recall. Link ran afoul of some soldier constructs and dove to catch the flame emitter club because yes please. Link caught it midair, remembered gravity was a thing, then flipped out a paraglider.
Link wondered how he ended up here as he was swallowed by a cloud of bad weather. This was the wrong bad weather to land in as Link had not packed cooling elixirs. Rauru kindly refrained from judgmental looks as he followed Link. Rauru did, however, engage in charades. Link got what Rauru was saying by holding his hands flat above his head with the fingertips pointing forward. As it turned out, the paraglider made a passable sun parasol until Link found a board. Link shoved a sapphire into the back of his Hylian hood as well.
"Well, Imusta dmitatleas titisastor mofso mes ortwe havewa ndere dinto." Rauru looked at a figure stumbling towards Link in the sand shroud. "Injured man?"
"Yeah, could you check him out please and see what is wrong with him?" Link said to Rauru as he started to walk in that direction. Link saw Rauru come quickly zooming back. "Monster!"
Link drew a weapon and watched the movement of the thing. Ew that was gross-looking. He snapped a photo really quick to add to the compendium and read about later.
Link confidently stabbed the shambling thing.
"Huh." Stabbing usually did more than that. "Hey, wait." Link got out a hammer and tried that. The hammer did little to dent the demon. "Hmmm." Link thoughtfully drew back. Fire time.
Or.
Rauru saw a smile spread across Link's face. He very much did not like the context of the smile. "You wanted me to test inventions that fling me around before I strap myself in, right?" Link strolled away from the Gibdo as he read the compendium entry. "Hey, Rauru? This is our new crash test dummy!" Rauru gabbled worriedly in Ancient Zonai as Link let the new crash test dummy accompany him towards the estimated location of the Gerudo Town. "Your new name is Buster." Link said happily to the Gibdo. It hissed and kept trying to kill him.
Unbeknownst to Link, Purah and Robbie did add in one of the missing features on the Purah Pad. The two had glanced at their own pad to see the zig-zagging of the Hero's Path. They both smiled and relaxed then the line zigged back north. Purah pinched the bridge of her nose as the path zagged south and into the desert.
Robbie decided to leave it and get back to work. "I don't know why we thought he was going to be any better at directions after the Upheaval. At least he got more travel points on the shrines?"
They looked at the scribbling line in the offline map area and compared it to the paper map. "Would it have killed him to go to the Skyview Tower?"
"I would say yes, but nothing else has killed him yet."
There are, as it turns out, rivalries fated to occur. Some pairs of people were born to animosity. Stamm was about to find this out for himself.
He was sitting by the fire this particular evening when a man strolled to the stable. Stamm noticed this traveler had no sword, but a torch. The man paid for the night at the counter, but decided he wasn't quite ready for bed. Yolero made his way to the cooking pot.
"Hey, mind if I use the pot?"
"Go for it. I'm Stamm."
"And I'm Yolero! It's been a long walk today but I got lucky and avoided any monsters. Well, actually, it's more like the monsters got lucky by avoiding me!."
Stamm grinned at the confidence of his new acquaintance. The newcomer sliced up some vegetables as they got into small talk about the weather. Eventually they went to cooking ingredients. Stamm said "I need to learn more pumpkin recipes by if I'm thinking I can help win this war against the monsters."
"Yeah," said Yolero, "Defense boosts are going to be essential for monster control crews."
"Oh no, this isn't just about defense boosts. Surely, you've heard the legends right?" Stamm saw Yolero's eyebrows raise in a silent plea to spill the tea. Stamm plunged forwards. "You haven't by chance heard about a legendary pumpkin, have you? I heard a rumor about the Master Gourd being in the woods up north. It can kill any monster you feed it to!"
"Legendary pumpkin? No, but I've heard about a legendary torch. The Master Torch!"
"A Legendary torch? And it's called the Master Torch?" Stamm felt very confused as Yolero pointed to the stick on his back. "That can't be right. Is it possible that you misheard?"
"No! It's a torch that burns the darkness, meant only to be wielded by a worthy hero!"
A small girl named Gleema from the stable wandered closer to the two men as the pot sizzled. Stamm shook his head. "Nah! You misheard the rumors! That's so embarrassing for you, friend! That's just an ordinary torch."
"Oh yeah? Who ever heard of a pumpkin being used to kill the Demon King?! How would that work? Even if it did hurt him, how would you get him to eat it?"
There was a bit more angry muttering and it looked like the men would start to try and fight so Gleema realized she had to be brave and intervene.
The little girl raised her hand. "Hey, um..." She swallowed as the two men stopped fighting and looked at her.
"Hey, sorry, we were talking. Can it wait, kid?"
"Um..." Gleema nodded. She could do this. "My older sister said it's actually the steed that's the proof of the legendary hero!"
"Huh?" said Yolero and Stamm in unison.
"Yeah! The equine no monster can defeat! The Master Horse! The Steed of Evil's Bane!"
Stamm snickered. "Uh, no. Sorry, that's just silly-"
"It's true! All the Stable people know it! That's why the princess' swordsman couldn't stop the monster in the castle, because he didn't bring the Master Horse with him!" Gleema glared at the two men when they started laughing at her. The two men went right back to arguing like little immature kids.
Gleema resolved, right then and there, to find the horse and prove it to the idiots. There was no Master Gourd, there was no Master Torch, but by Hylia there was a Master Horse!
For some reason, statistics on are broken as heck right now. It doesn't show how many views people are getting right now so reviews are the only way to know readers have seen a work. I need to leave reviews instead of just reading and running. If you are an author, it's not just you seeing a big old zero on the traffic numbers!
A crash test Gibdo might not work as well as Link thinks.