Happy holidays! We had a rough year, but here's tentatively hoping it'll be better in 2022? Maybe? Moving on, there's a Hylian train in this chapter that I've illustrated under the "concept art" tag on garden-eel-draws (and linked in the Ao3 version of this chapter) if you want a visual!
[STORY EDIT: I just learned that I forgot Spirit Tracks Zelda's proper relation to Tetra, so if you go back, you'll see I've edited in that she's Tetra's great-great granddaughter instead of just her granddaughter. Whoops :P]
[MAJOR EDIT 4/12/2022: The number of dungeons in Quest II has been cut to five to improve future quality of writing.]
"Hey, Yellow! You're peppy and full of tooth-rotting cheer or something, aren't you? Help me out here." Several light slaps pattered on Yellow's cheek. "Your brothers sleep like logs. Get up!"
Yellow found himself suddenly hoisted into the air by the back of his shirt and flailed in instinctual panic, his eyes flying open. He was faced with the dizzying sight of the world swaying around him. There was a rather scary amount of green. Last he remembered, he and his brothers had been smack in the middle of Hogwarts. Why was he seeing trees and sky? Why did the trees look like that? Why was it so bright and hot?
"Good, you're awake!" his own voice chirped from below.
He looked down. "Shadow Harry?!" he gasped. What was he doing here? "Erm, hi?"
The dark spirit, whose smoky hair and robes looked very strange in direct sunlight, gave him a grin and a jaunty salute. "Hullo, Yellow. Took you long enough to wake up. Now rouse your brothers, will you? It's hard enough, forcing myself to be helpful. I don't feel like dodging swords while I'm at it." His extended black claws dropped Yellow a meter to the ground and shrank back into a human arm.
Yellow barely managed to land on his feet, his sore knees and legs dumping him on his rear as he did. He used a nearby tree to stand back up, taking note of the wobbling stripe pattern going across its pale trunk. It was the same kind of tree that had shown up with Ruka.
Clarity hit him like a thunderbolt. Vaati had said he was going to give them a taste of paradise. This was a tree from Hyrule, and there were a whole lot of them. Ergo, they were in Hyrule. This was…maybe not that bad? They'd been meaning to come here to buy armor anyway, and they had a general idea of where the portal back was. Green had even hashed out some arrangements with Ruka, so they knew someone who could help them and where he lived. Vaati might have just saved them some time.
Yellow went around the small, sunlit clearing they had landed in, shaking his brothers. Red and Blue awoke slowly, grunting and whining respectively that they hurt too much to get up. Green, meanwhile, snapped awake so fast that Yellow barely avoided knocking heads with him when he sat up.
Green looked around, wild-eyed. "Not dead? Hyrule?" he asked breathlessly.
Yellow nodded. "That's all I know so far."
Shadow Harry clapped his hands together to get their attention. "Okay, now that you're all conscious, listen up!"
Green bristled beside Yellow, his hand going to his sword. Yellow hugged him to hold him still. "Wait! He said he's trying to be helpful!" he cried. "Let him talk for a minute, okay?"
"He almost got me killed," Green growled, still staring daggers at their doppelganger.
"Yeah, but he didn't actually get you killed and he gave us good advice, so maybe play nice for a minute? Please?" Yellow gave him puppy eyes.
Green glared at him. "…Fine." He lowered his hand from his sword.
Red and Blue climbed to their feet, Red looking ready to punch God. His scarlet eyes burned with violence. "What do you want?" Red demanded. "If it's a sword fight, I'll kick your arse! If I can't beat Vaati, I'll just fight you instead!"
Shadow Harry laughed. "Oh, kid, you're cute," he said, pretending to wipe away a tear. "The only reason you four aren't a single corpse covered in shattered sword bits is because the boss didn't give you the chance to swing it at him. If you had, the blade would have exploded and the magical backlash would have killed you." He conjured his own shadowy version of the Four Sword and made it hover vertically above his palm. "As things stand, your blade is worthless." His black blade dramatically cracked. "The only powerful evils it has the energy to banish are the anchors for the boss's spells, and even then, you still need a boatload of Force Gems to do it. On top of that, while your world's echo of the Golden Power had just enough life in it to spawn Force Gems for you to find, you'll find no such help here. The divine powers of Hyrule have nothing to do with you."
Green and Red crossed their arms with identical challenging glares. "According to the Bestiary, part of the reason you exist is to discourage anyone who tries to fight your bosses," Green said. "How do we know you haven't been lying all along, trying to scare us off?"
Shadow Harry rolled his eyes. "The magical glasses Blue currently has on his face were re-enchanted by me, remember?" he said. Blue blinked and put a hand to the bridge of his nose. "I'm being unimaginably nice right now, compared to the treatment I usually give kids like you," Shadow Harry continued. "The Heroes of Hyrule have always had fairies, spirits, talking owls, and wise old people to tell them what they need to do. Since your teachers have only been hindrances and you have no idea how to do a quest, I'm stepping up to make things easier on all of us. Deal with it." He closed his outstretched hand into a fist, banishing his sword into smoke, and then opened it again. An array of five glowing gray orbs, each a slightly different shade, appeared over his palm. "I'm not here to demoralize you, just to tell you how weak you are and how you can change that. You're not strong enough to meet your match yet; if I struck you down as you are now, a frail child with an equally fragile sword, I'd just be embarrassing myself."
"Who are you calling frail?" Red shouted, going for his weapon. Blue grabbed his arm and twisted it the wrong way. Red yelped and tapped out a defeat on Blue's thigh.
"We're all about to fall over from exhaustion! Don't go picking fights we can't win!" Blue hissed.
"What are those glowy things?" Yellow asked, pointing at the gray lights floating over Shadow Harry's hand. "Do they have to do with us getting stronger?"
"They do, Yellow. Good guess." Shadow Harry wiggled his fingers, causing the glowing orbs to line up on top of each other and pop into a rainbow of colors. "These lights represent the powers of the maidens who sealed my boss away the last time he escaped. Most of them, anyway. My boss doesn't know this, but before they died of old age, the maidens poured their magic into seven magical stones. Their descendants took on the duty of shuffling them off to the most inconvenient ends of the country to deter robbers, and I doubt a little thing like the Great Flood would have stopped them from continuing that tradition in the New Kingdom; Hylians are stubborn like that." A fond smile graced his face.
"Two of them, I know were destroyed because I watched a Hero break them," he explained, conjuring up a couple of phantom lights in his other hand before crushing them in his fist. "An evil enchantress was using the crystals to fuel her powers of mind-control, and, well, the sword-kid of the day wasn't too happy about it. You know how it is with Heroes." He shrugged with an expression of "what can you do?"
"The remaining power crystals are the key to repairing your sword, and I figure they should do the job well enough in combination with your wizard magic," the spirit continued. "I'll handle finding the right blacksmith to add their magic to your blades. All you need to do is go through a few ancient obstacle courses and fetch the magic rocks." He flicked his hand toward the Harrys, scattering the rainbow of lights around them.
The anger faded from Green's expression as he studied the symbol on one of the slowly revolving globes. He seemed fascinated by the Triforce glowing within the iridescent white sphere among the collection.
"How do we find these?" Green asked, pointing to the white orb.
Shadow Harry's confident expression faltered. "Er, I don't know. Usually you sword-bearers just kind of…figure it out," the spirit admitted. He pursed his lips, tilting his head to one side. "Or…hmm. If I know my boss, he's going to realize he sent you to a place full of magical weapons you can use against him and he's going to start spewing monsters everywhere to deter you. Monsters like to gravitate toward places they shouldn't be—it's a spiteful, dark magic thing—so maybe you could ask around and see what places people are running away from," he mused. "It'll be a day or two before the boss has the power to do something big like that, since he just threw a good chunk of his energy into a transport spell, so just settle in for the time being and go where the screaming is loudest once the monsters show up. If the boss decides to send any of those dungeons to your world to hide them, you'll be able to track them down by the dimensional weirdness going on. Then you can find a Moon Pearl, stick it in that weird spot, and warp right to where you need to go. There, problems solved."
"How big is Hyrule, though? How are we going to search all of it?" Blue asked. "Assuming it's at least the size of Scotland, there's no way we can find five individual hidden buildings! There's a difference between searching the grounds of a school and the span of an entire country!"
The other Harrys reeled, now realizing the monumental difficulty of the task Shadow Harry had just dropped on their heads. They never would have found the temple in the lake if not for Ruka, and they'd only known to investigate the Forbidden Forest because Yellow had seen the future in the Moon Pearl that Shadow Harry had given him! If finding the temples on the school grounds had only been achieved through pure circumstance, how on earth were they going to find concealed locations across a totally unfamiliar country?
Yellow and his brothers exchanged overwhelmed looks, shuffling closer together. They'd struggled through four labyrinths, and now they had to find and survive five more? If the difficulty level just kept going up, they'd be dead within a few rooms of the next temple!
"Nayru's love, you're pessimistic little things aren't you? You're a different breed than what I'm used to," Shadow Harry remarked upon noticing their wide-eyed expressions. He vanished the glowing orbs and put his hands on his hips. "Okay, look: this world isn't half as unhelpful and hostile as yours is. It's rich in resources and if you ask for help, you'll generally find it. Hyrule is a blessed place and providence isn't uncommon, even for those with no connection to its goddesses. Also, there are shops in this world that sell healing potions, armor, and maps for all your adventuring needs. Even once the boss recovers from teleporting your castle and starts throwing monsters into the mix, it'll only be challenging, not impossible." He seemed to catch himself, his yellow eyes opening wide, then looked away with a disgusted scoff. "Ugh, look at me, comforting my nemeses. The Hero of Time's ghost must be laughing at me right now. You're lucky you're not a Hero of Hyrule, or I wouldn't be bothering with this. I'm only being helpful out of pity."
"I thought we were the substitute Heroes of Hyrule, though," Yellow said. That's what all the evidence had been pointing to so far, up to and including them pulling out a dimension-crossed magical sword by accident. "That doesn't count?"
"You aren't the substitute anything of anywhere. You're definitely the real deal, just not of Hyrule." Shadow Harry spread his arms out grandly. "You're this era's Hero of Lorule, kiddo! Or the Dark World, if you think that sounds better. No matter what you call it, it's definitely not the kind of place that calls for an entity like me; living there is hard enough," he declared. Putting a hand on his chin, he remarked, "If what little I can recall about your world's version of the hero tradition is accurate, it's a miracle you were able to survive the second temple, let alone manage to break the boss's hold on the castle. Fate did its best to curse you with weakness, misfortune, and a faulty weapon, and yet you've kept fighting anyway. As someone who gets a kick out of making mortals suffer, I can appreciate a good struggle like that."
He puzzled his hands together, resting his extended index fingers on his lips. "So," he pointed his interlocked fingers toward the Harrys, "some last-minute info I gathered while you were conked out: your version of Hyrule Castle is sitting like a dingy gargoyle on an island in the middle of Lake Hylia. Given how new the boss is to using your world's magic, it's sheer luck he didn't accidentally teleport the thing right into the water. Also, that village by your castle got tangled up with Castle Town, which is creating some delicious chaos. Er, what else…Oh, right, I put you four on Outset Isle instead of leaving you lying in the middle of the Great Plateau because I thought it'd be funny." He shot them finger-guns and a smile worthy of Peeves. "Now that you're all up to speed, I'm going to go set Castle Town on fire while I still have some free time. Bye!" He bubbled away into the ground.
The forest was quiet. Yellow edged closer to his siblings. Without Shadow Harry to fill the air with his bright chatter, their lush surroundings felt terribly empty. They were together and yet alone, four boys left to navigate an alien world. Yellow jumped at the sound of chirping from unfamiliar birds and stared owlishly at the strange tropical trees. The promise of being able to go home and snuggle in his warm, comfy bed had be one of his main motivators as he'd endured the trials of that horrible water temple. There was no chance he'd be seeing his bed, or any part of Hogwarts, anytime soon. He was stuck on an island—possibly stranded, given that the Harrys had no money for train tickets—and nowhere near mainland Hyrule. Let alone Lake Hylia, wherever that was. Shadow Harry had dropped a proverbial mountain on their heads and taken off without giving them even a hint at where they needed to go, and Yellow didn't know what to do. He looked to his brothers for guidance. Green or Blue always knew what to do.
Red and Blue were already staring at Green, who stood in an intense thinking pose with his eyes screwed shut and one hand pinching the bridge of his nose. For a while, they waited in tense silence, hoping their leader had a plan.
Green opened his eyes and squared his shoulders. "Before we spend enough time here to start worrying about buying food and water, we should take a train to Five-Spear Island to find Ruka. He said every island has least one station, so there's definitely a way for us to get there," he said decisively. "Once we have some Rupees to work with, we'll figure out another plan."
"Do you think the Minish are still around, hiding things in the grass? Vaati's real, so there has to be some truth to that Bestiary article," Blue said. "If so, we could find some pocket change just by looking hard enough."
Green hummed in thought. "We shouldn't spend too long, just in case we can't find enough money to buy food, but we could search for a bit."
They split up into twos, Yellow with Blue and Green with Red. Yellow cautiously tiptoed into a patch of thick, bright green grass that went as high as his knees. "There might be ticks or spiders, you know," he said. "Or snakes. We can't talk to Ropes, so we might not be able to call off other kinds of Hylian snakes. What if you get bitten?"
"I'm choosing to ignore what you just said in favor of finding treasure hidden by mythical mouse-people," Blue said, sweeping his hands through the grass. He chanced upon something and raised it up with a triumphant cry. It was a fist-sized, lozenge-shaped jewel that shone the same vivid green as most of the triangular gems that monsters in Hogwarts dropped. "Thousands of years and an apocalyptic flood later, the Minish are still around! Amazing!"
That was pretty cool. Yellow didn't consider himself a history buff, but he knew most cultures died out or turned into something completely different within a few millennia, if not a handful of centuries. England wasn't the same as it had been even a thousand years ago; for one thing, the language had definitely undergone some revision. Actually, it was amazing that Hyrule still existed under its original name and monarchy after however many thousands of years it had been around. The Bestiary had implied the place was where human civilization had started, and somehow it was still going!
They moved farther into the forest as they gathered more Rupees. The stones were rather different from the Force Gems they were accustomed to. Force Gems were almost weightless at any size, with an odd slickness to their surfaces that made them feel distinctly unreal. Holding a Rupee was like touching a real, physical jewel. They had a certain weightiness that set them apart from glass, with little flaws unique to each one. They also didn't disappear when touched to the Four Sword, nor did they get any less heavy when dumped into the schoolbags the Harrys thankfully still had with them. He wondered if, during however long their stay in Hyrule turned out to be, they'd eventually become unable to gather any more Rupees just because of the stones' combined load.
Yellow tossed the fifth gem they'd come across into the bag he and Blue had set on the ground to share, then did a double-take when the green jewels slid toward one another and merged with a blue flash. He picked up the resulting cobalt gem and turned it over in the light. Even though they felt real, Rupees were apparently magical. Weird.
Blue waved at him from several meters off. "Hey, Yellow, there's a hole over here!" he said, pointing to a small pond in front of him. "It's big enough for us to go down and see what's below."
"Nooo, no it's not!" Yellow snatched up the bag and hurried over to keep his curious brother from doing something stupid. "We're just looking for a few Rupees before we get on the train! No adventuring!"
"But look, it's the source of the spring! There must be a hidden pocket of freshwater down there. We could follow it back to a subterranean river, or maybe a cavern with treasure in it," Blue said, his eyes shining with interest. "Shadow Harry said there are all kinds of things hidden around Hyrule and the Bestiary backs him up. We aren't going to have any classes today, what with everyone at Hogwarts having a collective meltdown from being thrown across worlds, and we have an artifact that lets us stay underwater safely for as long as we like. Why not check whether there's treasure?"
"Because we have no food, barely any money, and no place to sleep?" Yellow reminded him. "Yes, it's interesting, but we don't have time for poking around unknown holes right now. Just make a mental note of it and we can come back later." He dragged his pouting sibling away from the clear, sparkling pond. For someone as studious and logical as he was, Blue could have a terrible lack of common sense sometimes.
"Hey, look! A cool hole!" he heard Red announce behind him. "D'you think we could—"
"No!" Green and Yellow snapped. They stood shoulder to shoulder with their arms crossed.
"We're doing the sensible thing today, so that means Yellow and I are doing the talking now," Green declared.
"I'm sensible!" Blue protested. "I arranged the last trip, didn't I?"
"You also like poking giant spiky vines and investigating mysterious holes," Yellow pointed out.
"Green would want to look down there, too, if we had lunch money!"
Green shuddered. "I think I'm full up on exploring dark, mysterious underwater holes for now," he said. His brothers went quiet, suddenly remembering why Green had a new fear of deep water. Yellow hoped they wouldn't encounter too much of that here. Green really hadn't handled the last temple well, and another place like that might very well break him.
Putting his hands on his hips, Green declared, "If we come across another interesting hole once we're a little more established here, we can figure out what to do about it then. For now, though how many Rupees do we have all together? Red and I found three greens in the grass and a red one inside a big log."
"Blue and I found five greens. They kind of mushed together into one blue," Yellow said, taking the gemstone out of his bag. "I'm guessing green means one and blue means five?"
Green took the Rupee and held it up in front of his face. "Greens are ones, blues are fives, yellows are tens, reds are twenties, purples are fifties—" He blinked and shook his head, then cast an annoyed look at the sword hilt poking over his shoulder. "Oh, now you tell me! All those Force Gems and nothing, but when we start collecting Hylian gemstones, you speak up!" He dropped the blue Rupee in his bag, muttering, "That's…some kind of racist, isn't it? It's the same color system."
Blue sighed. "You should have already known the color system after I had you translate it from the Bestiary," he reminded Green.
"You had me do a mountain of translations, Blue. I'm lucky I can remember what magic sword I'm using after cramming all those pages into my brain." Green adjusted his bag on his shoulder. "Now that we have a little money, it's time to hunt down a train," he declared. "No getting distracted, alright? I know we're in a cool magical country in another dimension, but we can't wander around. We need to find Ruka, buy adventuring things, then go find Hogwarts."
"Why do we need to find Hogwarts, though?" Red asked.
The other Harrys stared agog at him.
"'Why do we need to find Hogwarts?'" Blue repeated, aghast. "Why would you even ask that?!"
"If we go back there, the professors are never going to let us go out again, ever. You know how paranoid Snape got after his classroom blew up? All the teachers are going to be like that now," Red said. "If we never go back, we don't have to deal with classes and stuff while we're finding those rainbow gems."
"Just because we aren't there, that doesn't mean classes are going to wait around for us!" Blue exclaimed. "If the staff didn't stop teaching when there was a giant blood-supremacist snake going around Petrifying students, they aren't going to give up now. I don't care if we're on a totally different planet; I'm not flunking out!"
"Who cares about flunking out when we're on another planet?"
"Do you want to learn magic or don't you?"
"We can learn Hylian magic if we go out and explore instead of being stuck in the castle getting babysat!"
"And what's going to happen once we fix everything and go back home? We're going to be bouncing between a correctional school and the Dursleys until we're eighteen!"
Green walked between the bickering duo and pushed them apart. "Okay, okay, calm down," he said. "Red, no, we aren't going to stay away from the castle for however long it takes for us to put it back in Scotland. We've never even been camping before; do you really think we'll be able to rough it for months? And Blue, we'll definitely go back, but we don't have to go straight to Hogwarts right away. Red's right: the teachers aren't going to want to let us out of their sight. We should pick up some armor and maps before we go to Lake Hylia, just in case it takes a while for us to get back on the road. That way we'll be able to fight monsters around the castle and learn about Hyrule's geography in the meantime."
Yellow stood back and watched Green de-escalate the conflict, an impressed smile on his lips. Just because he was compelled to mediate quarrels and stamp out potential arguments before they could begin, that didn't mean Yellow enjoyed doing it. Letting someone else put out the fire was nice.
With Blue and Red separated, silent, and stewing, they followed the path of dark, rich dirt out of the forest. They were faced with the smell of the sea, a swaying wood-and-rope bridge, and a breathtaking view. The Harrys summoned their magic glasses and crowded around the worn wooden guide rail corralling them onto the little outcrop that extended from the forest, looking down at Outset Isle with wonder.
Below lay terraces connected by main roads paved with dark panels of polished stone, hosting fields of wheat and vegetables, rice paddies, and A-shaped buildings with thatched roofs. More stone paths wound from building to building, converging at the broad metal and stone bridges linking the two distinct halves of the island. Glowing blue lines traced along the roads, flowing into raised reliefs that decorated the stone supports of every building. People went through the calm daily routines of rural life, tending to fields, sweeping stoops, minding cattle, and hanging laundry on lines strung across fenced-in backyards. The widest, lowermost level of Outset formed a fully connected whole and seemed to be a shopping area. The buildings were there were bigger and more rectangular, with tiled roofs and red-painted, crown-like wooden decorations on top. There, the grass-lined stone and dirt paths became cobblestone and the fields were replaced by manicured bushes and palm trees. Brightly painted signs and colorfully dressed tourists abounded, in contrast to the more peaceful scenes above. A beautiful white-sand shore extended beyond the shopping area, cleaner than any beach Yellow had ever seen. The water gently lapping at the sand was a shining turquoise that sharply deepened to sapphire a few dozen meters out.
Lastly, Yellow noticed the long line of train tracks extending farther than the eye could see on either side of the island, forming glittering golden branches to travel to the many other islands silhouetted in the distance. Movement to the left caught his eye. He watched as a dark bullet shot toward Outset, navigating the curves in the tracks with physics-defying agility. At every turn, bursts of blue-white energy would fire from the side of the vehicle like guidance jets on a rocket, adding to the constant streak of light following the train as it flew. As it neared the small, open-air station between the beach and the shopping area, it slowed into visibility.
The train was a heavy, ornamented beast of polished stone, burnished bronze, and glowing orange and blue accents. Its engine was shaped like a smoothed-down dragon's head with shining bronze teeth, fiery orange eyes, and zig-zagging horns. Instead of wheels, it ran on what Yellow could only describe as rail-grippers. The dragon's head hauled three wave-patterned passenger cars behind it, all connected by black rubber accordions that gave the train a streamlined shape. Each car hosted domed, circular orange gems that resembled the eyes in front. Two more "eyes" lay on the center front of the engine and the back of the caboose. As the vehicle pulled into the station, the orange domes in front flared blue and threw jets of energy ahead of the engine, while the ones in the back dimmed and turned orange. Once the bizarre bullet train had pulled to a stop, the bronze and glass doors on the sides of the passenger cars slid open to let a stream of people on and off.
Red turned to Green, practically vibrating with excitement. "Magical dragon train," he said, his voice hushed with awe. He held onto the guide rail and leaned over it precariously. "Let's go, let's go, let's go!"
"How did they build all those train tracks across the top of the ocean?" Blue asked, captivated by the vehicle in an entirely different way. "I've heard of the Transatlantic Tunnel, but this is impossible! They're on top of an ocean! They'd have to find some way to construct countless support struts, a whole underlying structure to hold up and stabilize the track, and—and that train! Where are the wheels? Is it a maglev? How on earth does it take those turns at that speed? It seemed like it was using directional rockets, but the energy firing from those domes didn't look anything like—"
Red put a hand over Blue's mouth. "Magic! That's it. That's how it works," he said.
Blue elbowed Red in the chest. "Clearly this was at least somewhat conventionally engineered!" he burst out when his mouth was freed. "Those are normal train tracks! That vehicle is obviously analogous to a modern high-speed train! All of those glowing glyphs and stones must be charged with some form of energy. Is it electricity? Magic? Something beyond our understanding?" He turned to Green, his expression burning with intensity. "We have to find a book about how the trains work."
Green gave him a slow blink. Red boggled at him like he'd spoken in tongues. "You want to find a book about trains," Green said flatly.
"Trains," Red stressed. "As in, the things that just take you places. I just want to ride it because it goes fast and looks like a dragon, not because it's a train."
"To be fair, it's a really cool train," Yellow said, putting a supportive hand on Blue's shoulder. "That makes it interesting."
Green rolled his eyes. "I guess," he said. "Maybe they'll have a pamphlet at the station, or something. I'm not translating a whole book about trains, though. You'll have to kill me first."
The domes on the back of the train slowly lit up and it slid out of the station with a fresh complement of passengers. It steadily picked up speed until it was once again a distant bullet flying along the shining tracks.
"Well, it looks like we have some time," Green said, starting toward the rope bridge. "We can go window-shopping while we wait!"
Notes:
-Surprise quest-advisor Shadow Harry has appeared! He won't be as ever-present as a helper character like Navi or Fi, but he'll pop in every now and then and help or hinder when he feels like it.
-I want to make it clear that as denizens of the Dark World, which has been almost completely separate from the Light World for a long time, the Harrys are not connected to any of Hyrule's various Powers That Be except for the artifacts related to the Four Sword. Harry's having a taste of Zelda weirdness this year, but he isn't stealing Link's (future) thunder and he has his own Dark World destiny coming to wallop him in Fourth Year.
-The water level of the Great Sea has gone down several hundred feet in the 2,600-ish years since Wind Waker, so all the islands are bigger and a little different than they were in-game.
-TRAINS! I've never been on one, but they've always fascinated me. This version of Hyrule is both an echo of the UK circa 1993 and a midpoint between Spirit Tracks steam power and Sheikah tech, so they're not up to building things like Guardians and Divine Beasts yet, but they've got the concept of maglev (in this case magic-lev) bullet trains down pat. Well, more like giant enclosed rocket sleds, but they still had the same idea of "make tube go fast". Those rockets the train uses are the predecessor to Guardian lasers! The power output is just weaker and way less focused—like a punch with a blunt fist as opposed to a precise, lethal stab.