Damn, this chapter is long! It's got a couple of illustrations to go with it, too! Using the pinned navigation post on garden-eel-draws, you can find an illustration of the Harrys' Goron Outfit and an example of the Gleeok Hatchlings the Harrys fight under "dungeon 5". Another thing this chapter has is raw Hylian with translations in the end notes!
Content warning for mild flesh-melting and dislocation of a limb.
"It's official: I've gotten the Tall Curse!" Parvati wailed. Lavender, sitting next to her on her bed, patted her back to comfort her. "I was hoping it would skip another generation, but no! I'm going to wind up just like my grandmother!"
Hermione paused in writing out her current transcription effort, a twenty-minute chant she intended to teach next month. "If you go on to rant about how 'tallness isn't cute', I'm going to start transfiguring your stray bobby pins into mice," she hissed without taking her eyes off her work.
"No, you don't get it!" Lavender said in Parvati's defense, since her friend was busy blubbering into a lacy handkerchief. "Her grandma is two meters tall!"
Hermione's head snapped up. "She's what?"
"The women in her family are either a little short or way too tall, with nothing in between," Lavender explained. "Now do you see what she's dealing with?"
Parvati let out a loud sob. "I'm going to be hideous! I've already grown two inches since I last checked. My robes are going to be summer dresses by the time I can go back to Madame Malkin's!"
"Do you have giants in your family?" Hermione asked. Never before had she been so interested in her roommates' inane chatter. "Do you know how far back it goes?"
"I'm a pureblood! Of course I'm not part-giant!" Parvati said in a burst of anger. Hermione rolled her eyes. Ah, so Parvati was like that, then. She was just less obvious about it than Malfoy. "It's just always been like this. Everyone always has daughters and the Tall Curse strikes everyone in a generation about a third of the time." She gasped, going wide-eyed. "Oh no, Padma! She must have been hit with it, too!"
"At least you won't be alone and you'll have someone to swap clothes with," Lavender soothed.
"But Padma's so boring! She won't have anything fun for me to borrow!" Parvati lamented.
A buzz against Hermione's hand made her look down at Zelda's open book. In the margins around the page of music she'd drawn up for Hermione, the queen wrote, "I believe your roommate might be a descendant of the Gerudo. It isn't written about in the Bestiary, but in my time, the average Gerudo was half a head taller than most Hylian men. That height could have become a more exaggerated trait over the millennia."
"The Gerudo are tall?" Hermione asked in surprise. From the illustrations in the book, she'd assumed the women tended to be on the smaller side, if unusually muscular. Actually, given that the Bestiary was from the Old Kingdom, the tribes might very well have been shorter before the Great Flood had shaken things up.
Her roommates looked over. "What are you talking about?" Lavender asked.
"Nothing, just talking to the book again," Hermione said.
"No, really, does the book ghost know why Parvati's going to be tall?" her roommate pushed. "Can she stop it?"
"Being tall isn't a curse! It's a genetic trait that many people find attractive," Hermione said with exasperation. "It isn't something you can just wish away, either. Zelda was just saying she knows about a group of people similar to Parvati's description of her family, is all."
Parvati sniffled and wiped at her eyes. "But isn't Zelda super foreign, though? What would anyone she knows have to do with me?" she asked.
"This world and our world are related," Hermione said. "Something must have happened to set us on a different track, but we probably had Zoras and Gorons and Gerudo tribes back on our Earth, once upon a time."
"Merpeople used to be handsome?" Lavender blurted. She blushed bright red when Parvati sent her an incredulous look. "Well, I mean, Zoras are…erm…"
Hermione nodded. "I can see it." The Inland Zoras taking refuge at Hogwarts came in many ages, some of them equivalent to those of the human students. They were also quite fit, with streamlined frames and lean muscle shown off by their general lack of clothing. If Hermione were a couple of decades older, she might have even found herself drawn to Prince Tiamus, who had a charming smile and was good-looking in a shark-ish "father of two" kind of way.
"Well, I don't think the fish-people are handsome. You two are weird," Parvati huffed. "What are those 'Gerudo' you mentioned? Some other magical creature? I'm definitely not related to anything like that."
"Zoras aren't magical creatures, and neither are the Gerudo. They can be Muggles or mages, just like us," Hermione said. "Haven't you read the notes on the Bestiary that Blue and I passed around? I'm positive that a summary of the article about them is in there somewhere."
"You handed us a hundred pages of the dullest reading in the world and expected us to actually look at it?" Lavender rolled her eyes. "Not to mention that Potter wrote it. He's great on a broom, but I'm pretty sure all of him were flunking Divination before this interdimensional nonsense happened."
"And, as anyone knows, one's performance in Divination is the most objective measure of intelligence," Hermione drawled.
"See, that's what those notes sounded like," Lavender said, poking a finger in her direction. "Now spill, in plain English. Tell us about those 'Gerudo' people. First of all, are they good at making cute clothes in tall sizes?"
"They'd better not be going around in ugly tall-people clothes. My grandma has to make her own outfits because the only things in her size are horrid unfitted sacks," Parvati chimed in. "I'm not making everything myself—I don't know how to sew!"
Hermione sighed deeply and dropped her gaze to Zelda's book. She hated having to ask such a profoundly dumb question, but her roommates were hardly going to drop the subject; fashion was their passion. "You wouldn't happen to know about Gerudo fashion, would you?"
Zelda chuckled in writing. "You sound just like my father did whenever I brought up having a new gown made. He never understood why I was so particular about my shades of pink," she remarked. "The Gerudo were known across the mainland for their expertise in clothes-making and textiles. A fine silk shawl from one of their master weavers was the kind of gift a lord would give his lady maybe once in a blue moon, they were so highly valued. I used to have a few Gerudo advisors on staff to help me with event planning and design projects and oh, the conversations we would get into…"
Hermione sighed again as the queen turned to a fresh page and went off on a ramble that looked eerily similar to the kinds of girly things her roommates went on about. In fact…
"Can you see this?" she asked, holding out the book to Lavender and Parvati.
"You mean all the blue handwriting?" Lavender asked.
Parvati tilted her head a little to the side as she tried to read Zelda's excited chatter. "We know that's how the ghost talks. What does it matter if we can see it?"
"It means that you and Zelda must have enough interests in common that you can speak directly to her," Hermione said. The fact that her air-headed roommates could pass the requirements needed to see the queen's pages while most members of Hogwarts's staff (including Professor Dumbledore!) couldn't clear the same bar was a little disturbing. It meant that either her teachers were too close-minded to learn from Zelda or they had the potential to abuse her knowledge; neither was a particularly desirable trait in a professor. Or it could mean that some of them were malicious, but she was pretty sure there were weren't any Lockharts or secret Voldemorts haunting Hogwarts's halls this year.
"Here, have at it. I need to rest my writing hand, anyway," Hermione said, setting Zelda's book down on Lavender's bed. As she walked out, she heard Parvati squeal, "Your favorite color is pink, too?"
Hermione shook her head, bemused. Perhaps because of Zelda's clear devotion to acquiring and dispensing knowledge, she'd subconsciously assumed the queen had also shared her disdain for silly subjects like fashion. Not that Hermione couldn't appreciate a nice dress, but there were so many more interesting things to be concerned with! She supposed fashion could also be a proper topic of study if she focused on certain specifics, like…er…
Well, she couldn't think of anything her roommates had brought up that could be considered worthy of intelligent discussion, but surely someone like Zelda wouldn't be interested in fashion if it were nothing but fluff!
She almost collided with Professor McGonagall on the staircase down to the common room. "Oh! Excuse me," she said, stepping aside to let the woman pass. Then she saw the Headmaster standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking far more serious than she'd ever seen him. Ron stood next to him with his spine as straight as a pole, staring up at her with a message of "help!" screaming in his wide eyes.
Hermione was struck by the panicked urge to flee and use her Time Turner to escape the oncoming conversation. Logic quickly intervened; there was no telling how her Time Turner might malfunction after its trip across dimensions, and even if it worked perfectly, she'd only be putting off the inevitable. She shook off her initial fear and wrangled her face into a politely confused smile. "Is something wrong, Professor?" she asked. "If you must know, I've been in my dorm all day writing out chants for future classes. I haven't been paying much attention to today's goings-on."
"Be that as it may, the Headmaster would still like to speak with you," Professor McGonagall said, her face a block of cold granite. Hermione shrank a little as she passed her teacher on the way down the stairs. For Professor Dumbledore to not only send the Deputy Headmaster herself to fetch her (as opposed to a Prefect), but also appear in person, he must have been furious.
It was nothing less than she'd expected, since the Headmaster had been especially watchful of Harrys lately, but that knowledge didn't make the tense, silent walk to his office any more pleasant.
With Professor McGonagall's intimidating presence at their backs, Hermione and Ron sat before the Headmaster's desk. Fawkes was present in the form of an adorable little nestling. Hermione suspected the dimension-crossing sickness that had struck every magical creature in the castle had forced the phoenix into an early rebirth. Instead of making eye contact with Professor Dumbledore, she studied the fluffy baby bird bobbling his head to look at everyone in the room.
"Fifteen minutes ago, Professor Babbling reported Green's absence from his morning class session," Professor Dumbledore said in grave tones. The lack of his usual pleasantries and warm, grandfatherly demeanor left a chill in the air. "I am sure that, between everyone in this room, we can imagine the reason for his failure to appear."
The muscles in Hermione's back protested from the strain it took for her not to sink into a timid hunch. She was determined to play the clueless card, however. Not only to cover her own arse, but to possibly blunt some of the consequences coming her friends' way. If it was confirmed that they'd not only taken off on their own, but involved another student in their plan, the Harrys' "manipulation" of their classmate would surely increase their punishment. She'd rather not see a repeat of what had happened to Malfoy after Professor Snape had caught him with the team charts for the second temple.
"What reason would that be, Professor?" Ron asked, beating her to the punch. Her eyes flicked to him in surprise. The two of them rarely thought along the same lines. "I haven't seen him as much lately. Y'know, between all the teacher stuff he's been doing and me trying to keep up with the homework," Ron continued.
"I've been kept occupied by my classwork as well, Professor," Hermione chimed in. "Just ask my roommates. I'm sure they're sick and tired of hearing me muttering and scribbling lyrics past midnight."
"I daresay that Mister McLaggen would disagree," Professor McGonagall said archly. "He's reported you visiting the boys' dormitory no less often than before, Miss Granger."
Hermione sucked in a breath through her nose, her eyes lighting up with fury. Her teeth ground together. McLaggen. That traitorous, no-good prick! First he gave Yellow a black eye, and now this? She was going to put him in a Full Body-Bind and stuff him in a closet for one of these days sure. If it took several hours for the staff-powered spell to wear off, so be it. She'd make him pay.
"McLaggen's a bloody git," Ron growled. "How a slimy Snake like that ever wound up in Gryffindor, I—"
"Just because our school has been fantastically displaced, that doesn't mean detentions are now off the table, Mister Weasley," Professor McGonagall said sharply. "As it is, you're already in for quite a few once our schedules have gotten back to normal."
Ron glared at her, his lips pursed with suppressed insults. "Like I said, we haven't been planning anything," he stated mulishly.
"The few times I've had the opportunity to meet with the Harrys, it's been for class reasons," she said. "Harry is better able to translate the semantics of Hylian chants into digestible phrases than Zelda, whose closer familiarity with archaic language can make her interpretations somewhat esoteric." That was a load of linguistics-babble. Zelda, through whatever translation spell made her able to communicate in English, was perfectly able to put the meanings of Hylian lyrics into plain language that even Red could understand. Professors Dumbledore and McGonagall didn't know that, however. Their inability to speak to the ancient queen directly meant they just had to take the word of those who could.
Ron scrunched his nose at her. Hermione internally winced; she'd thrown him a bit of a hardball to play along with. He wasn't stupid, but he didn't read dictionaries for fun, either.
Her attempt at obfuscation didn't crack professor Dumbledore's hard expression. His blue eyes speared her and Ron with fierce intensity. Hermione squirmed and looked away. Her skin continued to prickle with unease regardless.
"While your efforts to defend your friends by absolving them from the blame of involving other students could be considered admirable under other circumstances, I'm afraid they are only wasting time we may not have," Professor Dumbledore said.
Hermione's blood froze. "Wh-what do you mean?" she stammered. "What happened to Harry?"
"You make it sound like he's a hostage or something," Ron said. "How would you have any idea what's happened to him, though, if you don't know where he's gone?"
Professor Dumbledore inhaled and exhaled a controlled breath. "I do know where he has gone, Mister Weasley. Split apart or not, your friend has always been honest to a fault. I'm aware that he and his brothers have taken off for Death Mountain, most likely by broom. Professor Hooch has noted Harry's occasional habit of keeping his personal broom in his room instead of the equipment sheds." Hermione felt his gaze rake between her and Ron. "As students who are well-acquainted with the Hylian Bestiary, surely you understand why the Harrys' departure to a place deservedly named Death Mountain would cause some alarm?"
The words hung accusingly in the air.
Hermione finally gave into the urge to curl up like a pill bug. She hugged herself, her shoulders hunching to her ears. After the level of stubborn obliviousness the teachers had shown toward anything remotely Hylian this year, they chose now to show some spark of initiative? She'd taken their relative helplessness toward anything related to Vaati for granted.
"Now, Mister Weasley, Miss Granger, if you could tell us what direction to go in order to retrieve him, it would be most appreciated," Professor Dumbledore said, his chair creaking as he leaned forward over his desk. Against her better interests, Hermione shakily looked up. Blue flames peering over glinting half-moon spectacles seared her soul. "And I must apologize, children, but that was not a request."
Hiss-crack-BOOM.
Red sighed. Goddammit.
He sent a glare at the sky before running for cover. After two hours of working, he and his brothers had cooled down, rabbit-ified, and helped to clear out most of the rock sticking people's doors shut. Red was dirty, dehydrated, and soon to be in need of a nap. And now it was raining lava again, which was sure to undo at least some of their hard work! Couldn't the bloody volcano at least wait for a few more hours before having another fit? The Harrys might have been able to get it sorted out by then!
Sitting down under an overhang to wait the eruption out, Red tugged at the sweat-soaked neck cuff of the oversized red tunic that Dakko had handed him as part of his work equipment. Since the Harrys were too small to wear the few Hylian-sized garments the Gorons had on hand, they'd been outfitted with whatever they could get to stay put. A long-sleeved red turtleneck made out of linen-like Bomb Flower fibers covered each Harry from neck to knee, the overlong sleeves folded back and mostly hidden under a set of heavy gloves made of Eldin Ostrich leather. Wires tied around their wrists kept the gloves from falling off. Over their Hylian leggings, the Harrys wore tightly cinched Bomb-Flower-linen trousers. Iron-plated leather boots were similarly pulled over their shoes. Rather than latching them onto their adventuring corsets (which were hidden under their borrowed tunics), they carried their shields and Magic Rods on segmented iron utility belts wrapped twice around their waists. The boys looked like toddlers playing dress-up, but the Goron clothes helped their magic necklaces dim the volcanic heat significantly.
Red kept an annoyed eye on the sky as he impatiently waited for it to stop dropping refrigerator-sized chunks of lava. Around him, Gorons watched the "rain" with an even greater level of tired irritation. Red couldn't imagine enduring this several times a day for multiple weeks. Next time Dumbledore gave the Harrys "sensible" advice like ignoring a problem as big as this, Red would be sure to tell the old fart to blow it out his arse. He wasn't going to sit around while Vaati's monsters made people miserable.
A few odd notes of color in the sky made Red frown and squint. Everything on the mountain, but for the occasional accents of glowing blue-green rock, fell on a color scale of black to red to yellow-white. Two of the swiftly-growing dots the volcano had spat up were purple.
Red pushed himself to his feet and zig-zagged between a few Gorons under the cliff. He found Green and tugged on his sleeve. "Hey, do you think you could ask the Gorons around here if they know what those purple things in the sky are?" he said. "Purple usually seems to mean 'bad' when it comes to Hylian stuff."
"Something purple came out of the mountain?" Green rushed to the edge of the overhang and peered out.
The ground shuddered as two neon violet ovals slammed into the ground. Unlike the lava, they didn't splatter against the crust of cooled lava covering the ground. Instead they cratered their way through it, sending up a spray of solid and molten rock. Golden cracks started spreading across the surfaces of the strange purple stones.
"Yeah, those things," Red said. "Do they look familiar?"
The Gorons started shouting. Booming voices filled the air. Red looked over his shoulder to see Boss, in particular, cupping his hands around his mouth and bellowing what sounded like instructions to the crowd. He waved one arm in a wind-milling motion, encouraging the people around him to roll up and speed away up into the cliffs around town.
"He said that the 'beast's spawn' are back," Green reported. He unsheathed his sword. "Apparently, they can drown people? They managed to get a whole work crew last time. Boss and the other crew leaders are telling everyone to stay as far away as possible until they leave."
Red eagerly drew his sword. "Which means we're going to get up close and personal with them until they're gone for good!"
A large shard of purple shell went flying and one of the creatures slithered out of its egg. The newborn monster was a large snake with a bony, beak-shaped helmet over its face and shiny gold scales. Feathery red chick fluff stuck out from its tail. Its body was thick compared to its five-meter length, with leg-nubs sticking out around the fattest part in the middle.
"Oh, they're cute!" Red exclaimed.
Green rolled his eyes. "Red."
"Come on, they're fat baby snakes! Why wouldn't I find them cute?"
Green shook his head before taking off running toward the monster eggs. Red followed him, keeping an eye out for their brothers. Yellow and Blue dashed out of a nearby house they'd been taking cover in. Blue paired up with Green as the latter started circling around the newborn snake monster, while Yellow moved to back up Red.
The first snake to hatch looked around, its posture alert. Red slowed to a more cautious pace when its attention turned to him. It peered at him with round scarlet eyes, sizing him up like a cat eyeing a tasty mouse, then started slithering in his direction. Meanwhile, a big piece of the other egg fell open to send the occupant tumbling out. The monster righted itself with an angry hiss and spat purple poison at the patch of ground that had offended it.
The purple-coated stone instantly melted into an expanding pool of fiery orange lava.
'That explains how those Gorons drowned,' Red thought grimly.
"Are you sure we can fight these?" Yellow asked as he joined Red. Blue jogged over to pair up with Green. "Their scales look pretty thick."
"Well, they're only scales, aren't they?" Red said. "Steel's harder than that."
The snake facing him pulled forward and coiled, opening its wide mouth to bare its fangs. Yellow and Red threw themselves to the side as it spat a cloud of purple venom. Red landed in a roll, got back to his feet, and ran in at the monster from the side. He brought his blade down in a hard chop at the fattest part of its body, aiming to cut it in two.
With a spray of sparks and a piercing ring, Red's sword bounced off of the snake's shining scales and threatened to vibrate out of his numb hand. "Metal! They're made of metal," he grunted, staggering back.
"Then what are we supposed to attack?" Blue demanded. He edged away from the snake that had taken notice of him and Green. "They're covered in scales!"
Red didn't answer, startled into to hopping back when the monster he'd just attacked turned sharply to focus on him. He couldn't blame it, but he really hoped that deep breath it was taking wouldn't end in fire.
"Gah!" Red pitched to the side as the golden snake emptied its surprisingly big lungs.
Rather than flames, a nigh-invisible ball of compressed air shot past him, flying through the open door of the house behind him. With a loud "WHUMP" that did something funny and painful to Red's ears, the building's little porthole windows exploded. Metal, stone, and clay furniture jumped up against the walls, as if caught and thrown all at once, then landed with a clatter. Red winced guiltily at the sight of the broken pottery shards now strewn on the floor and made a mental note to set everything right later. He was so used to fighting monsters in the school halls, with their nigh-indestructible stone and lack of furniture, that he'd forgotten collateral damage was a thing.
"That answers where the extra pressure in the mountain's heart is coming from," Green remarked. "The mother dragon must be blowing that place up like a balloon."
"It can probably block tunnels to generate even more pressure by melting and cooling rock over the openings," Blue said. He skittered back with a yelp as the snake approaching him and Green sneezed purple venom on the ground. Green pulled him sharply to the side as the lava continued rolling forward. Blue cursed and scraped the lava-tipped toe of his boot along the ground to get some of the sticky, gooey stone off. "It spreads so fast!" he complained, tucking himself behind Green. "I'm going to trip over my own feet and wind up swimming in it, with my luck!"
The snake slithered right over the growing pool of lava with ease, keeping the downy tip of its tail upraised. Its body expanded as it sucked in a breath, but that wasn't what kept Red's attention on it.
Red's eyes zeroed in on that tail. It was covered in baby feather-fluff, not shiny scales.
"Steel's stronger than feathers!" Red crowed, raising his sword.
Blue and Green dove out to the sides as a cannon-shot of wind smacked into a mine cart hard enough to dent the metal. Stone flew up in a chaotic spray as the cart was sent tumbling.
"Is that supposed to mean something?" Blue shouted.
"Explain!" Green commanded.
"He means 'hit the snakes in their tails'!" Yellow called back. "They've only got feathers there, not scales!" He smacked the snake creeping toward Red, the flat of his sword clanging off of its bony mask. The snake spun around and spat venom at him. Yellow nimbly dodged to the side, then started leading the creature away in a wary half-crouch. "Red, I'm on distraction duty," he declared. "Hit its tail, please."
Red was happy to follow orders. While Yellow kept the monster's attention with quick little fencing taps of his sword, Red followed behind it. He went into one of the movement combos that Green had learned from Ravio's sword journal, a rapid slash-slash-slash-stab that ended in him leaping away from an expected counterattack.
The snake screeched, making Red wobble and clap his hands over his ringing ears. Then it coiled up and flung itself into a spin, spraying poison everywhere. A deadly violet cloud filled the air.
Red flung an arm over his face as venom splattered against him, immensely glad for his borrowed Goron clothes. Some still wound up hitting his hair, though, sending up a bitter stink. Then those droplets ate their way through the strands, falling onto the vulnerable skin underneath like liquid fire. Red jumped at the sudden shock of pain and barely managed to escape the lava spilling toward him when he found his footing again. He stumbled into a backwards run to escape the molten rock threatening to swallow his boots, pulling out his Magic Rod as he did. "S-Scourgify!" he whimpered, pointing at his sizzling scalp.
Thankfully, the Scouring Charm worked. The searing burn faded, replaced by the feeling of having attacked his singed scalp with a scrub-brush. He stopped running at the edge of the lava pool, which had stopped expanding, and breathed a sigh of relief. He hated to think what would have happened if that stuff had managed to eat its way down into his brain.
While Red had a pretty low opinion of helmets (they looked uncomfortable at best and suffocating at worst), it would probably be a good idea for the Harrys to buy some the next time they came across an armor shop. He felt like he'd be handle the medieval equivalent of a bike helmet, just not one of those scarily closed-in knight helms that Castle Town soldiers wore.
"MOVE!" Yellow yelled.
Red snapped out of his mild distraction and jerked to the side. It wasn't far enough.
An invisible punch roughly the size of a car clipped the left half of his body, and suddenly he was…upside-down? Red watched the sky and ground trade places multiple times, unable to wrap his mind around what was happening. Was he flying? What was that high-pitched noise? Why did his throat hurt? Ow, a lot of things hurt, actually—
He came to quick halt, though not a painful one. Red sagged into whatever force had caught him, his world still spinning. His head lolled around until he was aware enough to point his eyes down and do an inventory check. He still had four limbs, so that was good. No bones were sticking out, either. A muscle in his left hip was complaining like he'd pulled it too far, but it seemed like he'd still be able to walk. His left arm didn't look like it was on quite right, though. That wasn't a thing shoulders were supposed to do, was it?
Horror slowly set in. What the hell was wrong with his arm?! Was it even still attached? Was it going to fall off?
He didn't notice he was being slowly lowered to the ground until he landed with a mild bump that sent agony through his destroyed shoulder. Red clamped his teeth hard on his lower lip and only managed to half-muffle his scream. On instinct he curled up, making the sickening pain in his bizarre injury worse. Tears burned in his eyes as he fought off the nausea chewing its way up his throat. He'd gone through a lot of different kinds of pain in his life, but this utter wrongness was new. It was definitely on the level of a broken bone, made even worse to endure by the fact that it was so unfamiliar. He'd never built up a resistance to this!
"Stay still!" he heard Yellow's slightly higher-pitched version of his voice say.
Red was too busy fighting to keep his brain on and his lunch down to give his brother a sign that he'd heard. That didn't matter, though, because Yellow apparently wasn't waiting for one.
Gloved hands positioned themselves at the center of his upper back and the front of his mangled shoulder. "Sorry!" The hands shoved.
Fireworks exploded behind Red's eyes as he hollered for all he was worth. If he'd thought that had hurt before, that was nothing!
Red woke up with his head laying on a soft, rabbit-ified rock. He snapped upright, swayed dizzily, and automatically tried to catch himself. A hiss of pain slipped through his teeth when his left shoulder panged in warning. It didn't look disfigured anymore and it hurt way less than before, but that deep ache was still lurking—waiting for him to make a wrong move. He put a protective hand over the injury and looked around.
No more snakes. He pouted. Well, that sucked. How lame was it that he'd been taken out of the fight in one hit? Blue was never going to let him hear the end of it, he was sure, even though Blue sucked way harder at fighting.
His brothers all looked…mostly fine. Blue was hammering his Goron boot on the ground to crack its stone shell, while Green had holes eaten through his ash-mask and dark burns on the skin underneath. Yellow seemed stressed out, but unhurt. Red sighed. He'd really been the only one to get his butt totally kicked! How embarrassing.
Yellow noticed him sitting upright and ran over with a happy squeal. "You're awake! You're okay!" he exclaimed, kneeling in front of him. "I knew relocating your shoulder would hurt a lot, but I didn't expect you to pass out. How does it feel? Do you want to take a potion? We've got more—"
Red ruffled Yellow's hair. "Who do you think I am? I can handle a little…er, whatever happened there. You worry too much."
Yellow caught Red's hand and clutched it to his chest. His face was wrought with worry. "You dislocated your shoulder," he said solemnly. "It went out-of-socket when you caught the edge of that big air-cannon attack. I saw how to fix something like that in one of Blue's medical books. The writer was making fun of it for being a barbaric Muggle method, but I'm really glad it worked."
"Yeah, me too." Red cautiously rolled his bad shoulder and winced. "That was freaky! Broken bones are way less scary than busted joints. Can you imagine dislocating a knee? Or a hip?"
Both of them shuddered.
"Anything broken?" Green asked as he picked his way across the battleground. There were fresh lava ponds everywhere. "You went flying five meters into the air!"
"Only five? Huh, it felt higher," Red remarked. He'd pulled off an impressive number of spins in the short time he'd been airborne. "Nothing broken, but Yellow says I popped my shoulder out of its socket. What's up with you? Does that hurt? It looks like you've got the world's worst case of spots."
Green shrugged and used a Mending Charm on his ash-mask. "If it heals the way it is, I'll only have a few new scars on my face. If the next Red Potion we take heals it, that's cool, too."
Blue stomped up. "You made me pass out," he accused, jabbing a finger at Red. "You know the two of us are the worst with injuries."
"Hey, I stayed awake until Yellow fixed the thing," Red defended. "Getting my arm blasted was the easy part. It was putting it back that sucked." Getting his arm blasted had also sucked, but Blue didn't need to know that.
Blue's glare turned toward Yellow. "You didn't check to see how painful that procedure was before you tried it?"
"No, the book didn't say." Yellow chewed on the inside of his cheek and looked down. "Sorry, Blue."
Blue put a hand on Yellow's head, making him look up. "Next time, just keep in mind that he can suffer a little," he told him more gently. As gentle as Blue ever got, anyway. "So long as the Four Sword is half-broken and keeps having this pain-transference glitch, you and I need to make sure we don't incapacitate anyone else while we're helping another Harry."
"Yeah, I can suffer a little!" Red agreed. He grinned at Blue. "Definitely more that one of us."
Blue gestured toward the Magic Rods he'd enchanted. "At least I can study."
Well, Blue had him there. Red definitely hadn't been learning much from all those notes Blue had been beating him over the head with. He couldn't get his attention span to stick on the words for more than a few minutes at a time because they were so boring. Red gave up the point with a resigned nod.
"After all that, I think it's time we went into the volcano and took out that dragon." Green waved a hand toward the damage the snakes had left behind. One of the houses was sinking, its front side slowly descending into the lava pool that had spread under it. Several store signs were missing, having been blasted away. More than one building had its insides in total disarray, having a caught an air-cannon blast through their open doorways.
"Let's set as much as we can right first, though," Red said. "It couldn't take half as long as hauling rocks."
They stopped by the sinking house first. Red, Blue, and Yellow used Levitation Charms to lift it up while Green doused the lava underneath it in water. Red gritted his teeth and fought to stay on his feet while Green oh-so-slowly put the lava out. The Magic Rod sucked hungrily at his magic, turning his lungs to uncooperative stone and filling his vision with static. While Levitation Charms didn't normally cause strain on the caster, it felt like he was literally trying to hold up a house! With his arms!
"Done!" Green called out.
Red released the Levitation Charm and flopped on the ground. He lay there panting while his eyes gradually started working again. Magic Rods were no joke! Red hadn't had much time to test its ability to kick his arse back at the castle. While its power to multiply the strength of spells was impressive, using it definitely took a lot more commitment than flicking a wand.
Once Blue and Red had peeled themselves off the ground, the Harrys split up and ran around town to neaten things up. Red leaned in through the open doorways of a few houses and used Mending and Levitation Charms to move furniture upright and set broken pottery back on its shelves. He didn't want to barge into anyone's home, after all. When he was done, he took a moment to catch his breath from the Magic Rod's draining effects and rejoined his brothers in the center of town.
"Do you think we should wait for Boss to get back so he can put these clothes away properly, or do you think it would be fine if we just left them folded in the storage room?" Yellow asked, looking down at his work outfit.
"I was kinda hoping we could ask him to let us hold onto these until after we fixed the volcano, actually," Green said. "It has to be even hotter in the mountain's core than it was on the Hero's Trail, and we were practically steaming in there. The Dragon-Fang Necklace isn't perfect."
"Not that we don't appreciate it, Shadow," Yellow quickly said to the ground.
Green's shadow cracked open one annoyed yellow eye. "Hmph. You'd better."
Red looked up at the stone "bowl" holding the city, where a few Gorons could be seen cautiously poking their heads out of the caves. He waved his arms at them. "IT'S SAFE NOW!" he bellowed, hopefully loud enough for them to hear. "WE TOOK CARE OF THE MONSTERS!"
In a parade of rolling boulders, the Gorons trickled back into town. They carefully picked their way around the lava pools and took stock of the damage with critical eyes. Boss and his crew charged ahead of the others and rumbled to a stop in front of the Harrys. The trio practically pounced on the boys as soon as they'd untucked from boulder-mode.
"Duu vi sor e fachat?!" Dakko demanded. He flung his arms out to gesture at the town. "Arias assim klainas por dormar an astroche!"(1)
Oh, right, he didn't speak the language. Red immediately felt his attention start drifting.
"Nonne habos sottas maahons," Green said. "Mi ara siche dorimend povei fachen sa-na-komman sil sa habe sotta maahon atsa."(2)
Red considered the flood of words. 'Hmm…something something magic swords?'
"Sil denkas hantonad sor, aras mochenal komme neimend diverna, borda,"(3) Borim said with a shake of his head.
'Nope, not a clue.' Red tuned out and looked around for something interesting to hold his focus. He decided to study one of the Gorons' club-sword things. It lay on the ground at the edge of the little town square, having been dropped when the workmen ran from the lava snakes. Red wanted one of those. Maybe a Shrinking Charm would make it lift-able? While he did enjoy throwing bombs, he figured Yellow was more likely to let him and Blue smash rocks unsupervised if they found a less potentially deadly way to do it.
Green asked said something that made Boss's crew stare at him in disbelief before busting out laughing. Ah, so Green had mentioned the volcano quest, then. The conversation went back and forth for a bit longer before Green and Yellow squeaked what Red recognized as a gushy "thank you" and bowed. Seeing Blue did the same, Red bowed too. When in Rome, right?
Green led the way over to the Blue House after that. Red trotted along behind him, content to let his brother handle the talky stuff. If anyone needed him, he'd be staring at the lights and imagining himself changing out one of those bulbs.
While his brothers chatted with the eldest of the Gerudo ladies milling around the Blue House's lobby, Red imagined himself up on a ladder to reach the high ceiling. Chores that involved ladders were the worst. Dudley liked kicking the legs to mess with him. It was like he didn't realize that if he wound up causing Harry to break his neck, that would be murder. Or maybe like…the thing that was a little less bad than murder but had a scarier name. He'd seen it mentioned on TV during Aunt Petunia's crime shows. Man…Manslaughter, that was it. His cousin would be a manslaughterer, which sounded way cooler than a murderer—
"Yeh benn, voe?"(4) he heard in accented Hylian.
Whoops, he'd been caught spacing out. He glanced to the side to see the teenaged girl with all the earrings that he'd been sitting next to at lunch. Red found it funny that the super manly-looking Gorons used the standard French-ish kind of Hylian (just in a loud and gruff way), while the Gerudo way of speaking was all deep and tough-sounding. He wouldn't have expected that kind of accent from people who dressed so nice.
"Yeah, I'm fine," he said. "Er, wait…Ya, benn."(5)
"Yeh lokas'na Hylian, ne?"(6) she said, raising an eyebrow.
Aha, he'd gotten the gist of that sentence. Red nodded and gave her a thumbs-up. "Ya, I speak like five words. Studying is hard."
She clapped him on the shoulder and shook her head, saying something along the lines of "Well, you're screwed."
Red shrugged. "Mi bordas lokan. Ara benn."(7) So long as he had at least one of his Hylian-knowing brothers nearby, he was fine. Even on his own, he could generally figure out from context what a thing meant.
"Red, c'mon, we're going up the mountain now!" Green called over.
After waving goodbye to the teenaged girl, Red happily skipped over to join his brothers. "Did that lady tell you the way up, then?" he asked as they walked out into the volcanic heat. "Ooh, do we get to do another Hero's Trail?"
"No, thank goodness," Blue said. "The quickest way into the deepest section of the mountain is via a foundry built by the Hero of Lights to melt Bluestone down for all those power lines we've seen lining roads and such."
"You're supposed to use a special kind of magic to shape Bluestone for maximum power, but if you're trying to light up a whole country and most of your workers aren't mages, blasting it with crazy amounts of heat and casting or cutting it works, too," Green said. "The Hero of Lights built the foundry around three centuries ago and people were still using it up until the last fifty years. Sakari's aunt worked there, so she knows a lot about that place."
"A monster attack caused a series of cave-ins that flooded some sections with lava. A lot of areas were left unstable and no one knew the songs needed to recreate the heat-shields the Hero had enchanted, so the foundry was abandoned." Blue sighed. "I really wish we could have seen this place in its heyday. It sounds brilliant."
"Blue, almost two hundred people died in that big cave-in. They shut it down for a good reason," Yellow said with a frown. "We're going to have to be super careful while we're in there."
They trooped up the iron road toward the center of the mountain, slaying whatever small fry that decided to get in their way. Red fired an Arrow Spell at some Fire Keese that swooped down from a stalactite, scowling when all but one of the five arrows missed. "Next time we're in a place that sells bows, I'm getting one," he declared as he swatted the bats with his sword instead. "Green, do Gorons use bows?"
"If they do, we probably couldn't lift them, let alone draw an arrow," Green said. He sent a round of conjured arrows at a Fire ChuChu to make it explode, then slashed it to death. "I saw some bows at the Castle Town Bazaar, so maybe we can buy one the next time we visit." He scooped the ChuChu's orange-red jelly into a bottle, then turned around to slice at a Fire Keese that had snuck up behind him. "I hate Fire Keese! Keese in general are the worst."
Yellow, who was busy playing chicken with a bouncing Tektite, asked, "Aren't Lizalfoses worse, though? I'd rather deal with a few Keese than one Lizalfos."
"I haven't had a Lizalfos try to hassle me off of a platform in the middle of a lava river…yet." Green picked up the wing the Keese had dropped and inspected it for a moment before putting it in his bag. "Besides, at least dying to a Lizalfos wouldn't be embarrassing."
Yellow whipped around and bonked him on the head with the flat of his sword. "No! Bad Green!" he scolded. "Don't say things like that!"
"Ow!" Green clutched his new bruise. "How long are you going to be mad about that?"
"As long as I have to!" Yellow drove his sword through the Tektite's body when it was mid-jump, skewering it straight through its eye.
Red stared dumfounded at Yellow, who was still glaring at Green as he collected the slain Tektite's dropped shell. Yellow was angry? He'd told Malfoy that Yellow had a temper like anyone else, but he'd never thought he'd see it like this.
He sidled over to Green as they resumed their trek toward the Bridge of Eldin. "What did you do?" Red whispered, sending a glance toward Yellow. "He never raises his voice like that!"
"I almost died in the last temple and told him not to help me while I was bleeding out," Green mumbled guiltily. "In my defense, my brain was trying to turn off and I wasn't thinking straight."
A lightbulb went on in Red's head. "You've been telling him to buzz off since we got to the mountain," he said. "And since he knows you'd say the same thing when you're literally dying, he's just plain convinced you'd let yourself bleed out again if he didn't mother you."
His brother looked at him in wide-eyed surprise. "How did you get it so fast?"
Red winked. "I have to be good at something, and it sure isn't schoolwork."
"So how do I fix this? Yellow really freaked out earlier, and I'd rather not drive him to that again."
"What, you don't already know?" Red raised an eyebrow. The solution was obvious to him. "Let him be a mother hen for a while. Once he's sure you're not gonna throw yourself off the next cliff, he'll calm down again."
"You think I should do nothing?" Green spluttered. "How would that fix anything?"
"Well, you could stand to listen to him more, anyway," Red pointed out. "He's not nagging just to nag, you know. If he barks at me not to blow myself up, he's doing it for a good reason. You have to remember, Yellow is you. If you don't want you to be doing something, you wouldn't be telling yourself to stop just to be a stick in the mud."
Green's shoulders slumped. "I guess that makes sense. He's been super cautious since we got to the mountain, though, and it's a little grating."
"To be fair, the difference between making a little mistake and dying stupidly has been like this," he held up his hand with his fingers pinched a few millimeters apart, "since we ran into those fire-breathing Lizalfoses. You were already almost getting yourself killed back at Hogwarts, and now we're at a place called Death Mountain. If I had common sense, I'd be keeping an eye on you, too."
"You say you have no common sense, but honestly, I'm starting to wonder whether you have more than I do," Green remarked.
"I think Yellow got the bulk of it, while you and Blue take turns kicking around the ounce that's left."
"Yeah, that sounds about right."
They crossed the Bridge of Eldin, which was, like most things the Gorons made, very sturdy and useful but not the most graceful-looking. Red could practically see the strength behind all that thick iron. Unlike all the swirly stala stuff and fancy silver that Hylians and Zoras favored, this metal radiated all the brute force that had gone into bending it. Those big pins holding the plates together had been pounded in by a team of strong blokes with sledgehammers, not some Bluestone-powered gadget. Red patted the bridge's guardrail. If there was anything out there that he could respect, it was hard, stubborn effort.
"Okay, so where is this hidden trail Sakari mentioned?" Blue asked once they reached the end of the bridge. "I didn't catch all of what she said."
"It's straight to the left." Green pointed to a large pile of rocks that sat opposite the long, winding mountain path on the right. "Most people would take the path to the right, which ends in an observation deck for the Gorons to monitor the mountain from. With all these rocks here, that other path looks like the only choice, so the Gorons didn't have to try too hard to block the old foundry off." He readied his Magic Rod. "It's right on the other side of all this. C'mon, let's try moving the biggest rock first."
The Harrys lined up a safe distance away and flicked their staffs. "Wingardium Leviosa!"
The main boulder blocking the way slowly floated off the ground as the boys panted and strained. It was about the same size as the house they'd lifted earlier, but at least the house had been hollow! Red felt a cold tingly sensation in his brain as his consciousness attempted to flee. He could barely see what he was doing as he joined his brothers in heaving the boulder aside. It landed with a loud splash in the lava lake surrounding the mountain peak.
With the largest part of the roadblock removed, the wall of rocks quickly came down. Yellow pulled Blue and Red back as boulders went rolling like dropped marbles. The thunder of rocks slamming together blended into the sound of Red's heart thudding in his ears. He put a hand to his head and focused on taking deep breaths until he could see again. Casting big, sustained spells with the Magic Rod felt like doing a marathon run and being suffocated at the same time. Sure, they'd just lifted like fifteen tons of magic-resistant stone, but did his magic have to be so dramatic about it?
When his vision had returned to full strength, he saw…nothing special, really. There was a stretch of iron-plated ground that was visibly less worn than the other pathway, and that was it. "There has to be something here," Green said, jogging over to inspect the side of the mountain. "Sakari wouldn't have said that much about the foundry if she were just going to lead us in circles." He paced along the path, his brow deeply furrowed as he thought.
Red stepped onto the trail and took a look for himself. The stone was mostly uniform—the same rugged red stuff that made up just about everything on the mountain. One spot was darker and a little too smooth, though. It didn't have the same natural weathering as the rock around it. In fact, it bore more of a resemblance to the cooled lava covering the Goron City basin. "Hey, Green," he said, pointing to the odd patch. "Do you get any magic feelings about that?"
Green followed his pointing finger and then tilted his head to one side. "Hmm." He unsheathed his sword…for some reason.
"What—?" Red didn't get to finish the question before Green swung the Four Sword at the wall. "Green, that's solid stone! What are you—?"
Green walked a few steps to the side, clacked his sword against the mountain a second time, and then returned to the smooth section of stone to smack it again. "Aha! I know what to do!" he proclaimed.
"If you break your sword, we die!" Blue burst out. "Why would you risk shattering it against a wall?!"
"I might have taken a swing at a metal snake earlier, but I didn't already know it was metal when I did it," Red said uneasily. While he knew nothing about sword durability and maintenance, he was sure that hitting rocks with one was bad.
Green waved off their concerns. "The Four Sword said I could do it. The blade is magically weak, not physically. It's still pretty much indestructible; it just can't handle separation strain or magic that's too strong for it to counter." He started wandering around to the right-hand path. "I could tell from the sound of the sword bouncing off that the smooth rock is hiding something behind it," he explained. "Now help me find a Bomb Flower! We're going to have to free up the door."
Though still somewhat befuddled by Green's behavior, the other Harrys joined him in his search. While the his siblings picked their way across the road to the observatory, Red clambered up a few boulders to check out the small ledges around the central peak's base. From that vantage point, he was able to spot a circle of blue-black on a small platform that stood a little over two meters high.
"Found one!" he announced, sliding down. He ran over to the short cliff and hauled himself up using natural footholds in the stone. "It's gonna be hard to get it down and run it over there, though," he realized upon taking a good look at his perch. He could get back down without hurting himself, but it would definitely take two hands. It would also eat up too much of the Bomb Flower's short timer for him to run it all the way to the blocked door.
"What if we, er…" Green looked between his brothers, pursing his lips as he thought. "What if we lined up and tossed the bomb from one of us to the next?"
Red gauged the distance between where he was standing and the smooth stone. They'd have to work fast, but it was doable. "Yeah, let's try it," he said. "This thing weighs around two kilograms, so just make sure you're ready for that weight when you catch it."
The Harrys spaced themselves out along the left-hand path in order of Red, Green, Blue, and Yellow. Red took a deep breath, prayed he wouldn't wind up blowing one of his siblings' limbs off, and plucked the Bomb Flower. He pitched it toward Green like a shot-put. Green caught it with a grunt and bowled it like a cricket ball toward Blue. It took a quick sidestep for Blue to line up correctly with it, but he caught the red-blinking ball in an awkward hug. He did a frantic chest pass toward Yellow, who immediately chucked it at the hidden door and backed away.
The bomb exploded just before it hit. With an earsplitting crack, the thick layer of dried lava covering the opening blew apart. Red tittered nervously. If Yellow had been a half-second slower, he'd have wound up missing his hands! This was part of why Red hated coming up with things; assuming his crappy planning skills actually pulled through, there was still the thought of his dumb idea getting his brothers hurt that he had to mentally grapple with. The other Harrys were a lot better at dealing with that kind of responsibility. Well…not Yellow, but Blue and Green for sure.
Red scooted to the edge of the platform, dropped down, and then joined the other Harrys in staring at the dark hole they'd opened. "D'you think this one will snap shut on us as soon as we walk in?" he wondered.
"Probably. All your dithering at the castle gave my boss time to set up defenses around his beloved experiment, so I'm sure that foundry is five kinds of booby-trapped," Green's shadow said, startling them. Shadow Harry rose out of the ground with his hands on his hips.
"Next time something goes wrong, we won't wait around," Yellow promised. "It's awful that the Gorons have had to deal with the volcano acting up for so long."
Shadow Harry ruffled his hair. "There you go! Screw those dull, know-nothing professors! You've got better things to do than listen to their bad advice. What do they know about quests?"
"Why are you out of the ground?" Green asked warily. "You're not testing us again, are you?"
"No, Endraal and the Hero of Lights did that well enough. It's just that I'm at the end of my leash." Shadow Harry scowled. "The boss always has a certain level of passive tracking on me, even when he isn't paying attention. He can sense where I am right know, and even though he knows I'm shadowing you, he also definitely doesn't want me in that mountain." He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. "Honestly, I can't blame him. There's too much in there that would be sooo fun to destroy." He grinned with far too many teeth, his eyes sparking with a wild light.
"So why didn't you just take off? You don't have to give us a grand speech about it," Green said, mirroring Shadow Harry's pose. "Just go. Shoo."
"Now, is that any way to speak to your evil fairy godmother?" Shadow Harry conjured a roll of parchment into his hand. "And here I was going to give you a present before I left you to fend for yourselves." He made a show of moving to pocket the scroll. "If you don't want it, though…"
Green's eye twitched. His mouth twisted the same way Blue's did before he said something particularly mean.
Yellow stepped in front of Green. "No, we want it!" he cried. "I'm sorry Green was rude. He's just sore about all the nightmares from the sea caves."
Shadow Harry stood straighter and preened his smoky hair. "He has them still?" he prodded, looking pleased.
"Yes, even up to last night."
Green glared at Yellow. "Why would you tell him—ouch!"
Yellow kept smiling at Shadow Harry as he withdrew his elbow from Green's ribs. "Please, could you tell us what that is?" he asked, gesturing toward the parchment. "It's a kind of spell scroll, right?"
"Not only that, but it's a blank spell scroll, kiddo." Shadow Harry unrolled the parchment to show the lack of words on it. A normal spell scroll was covered in the same narrow runes as what filled Zelda's book. "If you touch it to an enchanted artifact, it'll transcribe it into a tool you can conjure. And it'll return to being blank after every time it's used, so you can add multiple things to your equipment and tool rosters with it."
There was a round of gasps. Red stared into space, imagining all the things he'd want to add to his summoning list. His broom and Magic Rod, definitely. A cool suit of armor, also definitely. How awesome would it be if he could go from boring old Harry to a badass knight in the blink of an eye? And he'd also have to add an appropriately intimidating weapon to the list, too. The Four Sword was useful, but it was also definitely child-sized and not very scary.
"Whoa," Yellow breathed. His eyes sparkled with wonder. "That's a lot of power to give us."
Shadow Harry wagged his finger. "Now, you can't just go around using it on everything, Heroes," he said. "I'm only giving this to you because I've got stuff to do and I won't always be around to enchant things to multiply." He shook his head. "Really, this broken Four Sword is such a pain! It should be multiplying everything you add to your person, but that part of its enchantment only worked once when you picked it up and decided to go kaput thereafter."
"It's supposed to do that all the time?" Green gasped. He looked over his shoulder at his sword like it had betrayed him.
"We'd save so much money if we could get that part of its magic working again," Blue said wistfully.
"This scroll has a cap on how many times you can use it, so choose wisely," Shadow Harry warned before handing it to Yellow. When Blue opened his mouth to ask a question, the spirit smirked and said, "No, I'm not going to tell you what that limit is. If you're left in suspense, you'll be more careful about using it."
Blue sighed. "I can't fault that logic."
"I'm off to while away the hours while you get rid of the nuisance in my playground for me, so try to keep your heads on until I can cut them off." Shadow Harry smiled and flicked his fingers in a little wave. "Toodles." He blew away in a cloud of black ash.
Green watched the ash vanish from sight. "I swear he keeps coming up with new ways to disappear," he grumbled.
"I think it's fun!" Yellow said brightly. He held up the blank spell scroll, marveling at it, then took his Magic Rod out of its loop on his Goron tool belt. "I know we've got limited uses on this, but I think it would be a really good idea if we could always make sure we had our staffs on hand," he said before tapping the scroll on the rod's crystal. Words bloomed across the page.
Red watched curiously as the spell wrote itself into existence. When would the scroll activa—?
His body froze as magic drilled its way through his skull. Knowledge funneled its way in, washing across the folds of his brain in an unstoppable tide.
Ah, so that was how Magic Rods worked.
Pawing at the dimming ache in his brain with one hand, Red conjured his Magic Rod into the other. That would certainly be handy. No more worrying over losing his staff while in the heat of battle! It didn't properly fit on either the Goron belt or his adventuring corset, so bringing it to hand had been a bit awkward so far.
"Do the Navi Slate next!" Blue said eagerly. He fished through Green's bag and pulled the techno-magic gizmo out. "It'd be incredibly handy if any of us could call up a map whenever necessary."
"Do you think the scroll would work on technology?" Green asked skeptically.
"The circuits run on a form of magic rather than electricity, so I don't see why not," Blue said. He held the stone and metal tablet out to Yellow, who tapped it with the scroll.
Red drew a deep breath and braced himself as words spread across the enchanted parchment, then shrank as more words crammed in. Soon, there was more ink than parchment. It took much longer to finish writing itself out than the Magic Rod spell. Hermione had said that a four-hour chant wasn't much as far as Hylian magic went. There was also the fact that the tablet probably had a whole lot of magical circuits in it—
The world whited out as pain consumed all his senses. Red stared and screamed sightlessly at the sky as the spell for every component inside the Navi Slate integrated itself into his unprepared mind. There were so many things to know! If Red had possessed any control over his lungs, his agonized screech would have been enough to outdo any banshee.
When the torture ended, all the Harrys collapsed and adopted the fetal position. Red's eyes rolled in his skull as he struggled to organize all the information that had flooded his brain. Too much! It was too much! He heard dozens of overlapping songs—one for every enchantment that went into making a Sheikah computer run. Every song had a different voice. His ears rang with a discordant chorus, where no one could agree on any one word or note. It was easily the worst thing he'd ever heard.
He wasn't sure how long it took before the new knowledge finally trudged into its proper place. Still suffering from a pounding headache, he forced himself to sit up.
"Let's never use the scroll on anything that complicated ever again," Green said. His emerald eyes were wide and harried. "If we buy a Sheikah Slate and our sword isn't back to multiplying things yet, I'm fine with it being one Sheikah Slate."
"I'd argue, but ow," Blue said from where he was still curled up on the ground. "Owowow."
"Yeah, that was scary," Yellow said shakily. He looked at the blank scroll with a mix of fear and respect before putting it in his bag.
"What a great foot to start our quest on," Green said wryly as he helped Blue up. "Can everyone walk?"
"Yeah, I'll be alright." Red tested out his strained hip and previously dislocated shoulder. They didn't hurt anymore! The blank spell scroll still had the same healing effect that normal ones did, which he felt was a fair trade for the pain he'd just been put through.
Blue gestured toward the hand keeping him vertical. "I'm standing, aren't I?"
"Good! Let's head in, then." Towing Blue with him, Green was the first to disappear into the dark. Yellow and Red soon followed him into the cave with half-revealed industrial metal doors.
Translations:
1. Duu vi sor e fachat?! Arias assim klainas por dormar an astroche! ⇒ How did you do that?! You're all small enough to sleep on an ostrich!
2. Nonne habos sottas maahons. Mi ara siche dorimend povei fachen sa-na-komman sil sa habe sotta maahon atsa. ⇒ We have magic swords. I'm sure anyone would do the same if they had a magic sword, too.
3. Sil denkas hantonad sor, aras mochenal komme neimend diverna, borda. ⇒ If you honestly think that, you're really something else, Brother.
4. Yeh benn, voe? [Yi benn, voe] ⇒ Are you good, dude? [Gerudo accent]
5. Ya, benn. ⇒ Yes, I'm fine.
6. Yeh lokas'na Hylian, ne? [Yi lokas nai Hylian, ari ne] ⇒ You don't speak Hylian, do you? [Gerudo accent]
7. Mi bordas lokan. Ara benn. ⇒ My brothers speak. It's all good.
Notes:
-In the Dark World, the Gerudo and Sheikah wound up blending with Loruleans and Lorulean-like humans to create the round-eared, relatively small humans now populating the dimension. Some people have ancestry that stuck around a little stronger, though, which is the case with the Patil twins. Given all the story lines and POVs I'm juggling, I figure I'm going to keep the Light World ancestry stuff limited to Draco, Parvati, and Padma.
-As someone who's studied fashion, I found it very funny to write Hermione's utter disdain for it. She'd have more respect for apparel design if she knew how much chemistry and 3D puzzling is involved!
-Dumbledore is not a bad guy in this story, just a bit ethically dubious for the greater good. Zelda wouldn't have trusted him back when she was alive, so he and a lot of his staff don't get to read her personal section of the Hylian Bestiary.
-If you look at the Gleeok Hatchling design I posted, the head is based on a black mamba (adorable) and the body is based on a gaboon viper (thicc). Both of those snakes are ridiculously venomous.
-I can say from personal experience that dislocating a major joint feels like Game Over when you're a kid. I dislocated my shoulder at age twelve and ohoho, lemme tell you, it looked wack, sucked hardcore, and still gives me grief over a decade later.