Art of Link's elder sister has been posted to the garden-eel-draws tumblr under the "characters" tag, as well as displayed in the Ao3 version of this chapter.
A mild content warning: Link is going to do some uncomfortably accurate speculating about Harry's abusive upbringing.
Harry awoke to being wired. It was like he'd sleepwalked into the kitchen and downed a pot of coffee. Everything tingled.
What was this buzz? Something was just a little too much. What was the something? His magic?
Harry sat up, discovered he was laying on a futon, and got to his feet. He had to go. He had to do something. Energy jangled in his nerves. Everything inside him was moving too fast and this room—wherever it was—was too slow.
He stepped over his still-sleeping brothers, who were also lying on futons, snuck past Hagrid lying curled up on the room's large bed, and crept out of the room.
Two near-identical, overlapping voices greeted him as soon as he'd shut the door behind him.
"Oh, finally."
Harry halted, dumbstruck by the sight of two Malfoys glaring at each other, before his brain caught up and he remembered the red-eyed, masked one was a Sheikah. "Er, were you waiting?" he asked. "When did I fall asleep?"
"After you stopped glowing yesterday," Avoka said. "The four of you conked out where you were sitting and Link went to bed early. He said that he 'sang your song'. Does that make any sense to you?"
So that was why! Harry's magic was still ringing from Link matching its frequency. Memories from the night before were strange, made fuzzy by an electric green haze, but he recalled feeling one with his sword as Link worked on it. The power of the red power crystal had flowed into him as much as his blade and made his magic feel…much. Too much. The backs of his eyes and the inner crevices of his heart were burning.
"I think he was singing whatever he hears my magic as," Harry said absently, more occupied by looking for a way out. Sword practice would be great right now. Or maybe some reckless spell-slinging to make the buzzing in his soul stop. His teeth were vibrating and his ears felt full of static electricity. Harry scratched at one of his ears as he made his way toward the door to the front section of the house. Had it turned a little square at the end while he'd been asleep, or was his too-full mind making things up?
"Wait, where are you going?" Avoka called out. His voice was less nasal than Malfoy's, the accent more street-level and similar to Harry's through the Four Sword's translation. "You just started glowing yesterday and passed out! We've got questions!"
"You can ask me while I exercise," Harry said briskly. He opened the door to the front room of the house, glanced at the door labeled "Link" in painted green letters, and then went to the shoe well. His feet were currently only clad in socks, meaning someone had wrestled his boots off while he'd been unconscious. He put on one of the four identical sets by the door and then prepared to step out.
Avoka and Malfoy fell over one another getting through the dining room doorway. "Hold on, it's still raining!" Avoka loudly whispered with a glance toward the labeled bedroom doors on either side of the room.
Harry conjured his Magic Rod and cast Impervius Charms on all of his clothes, then took a pointed school hat out of his bag and charmed that as well before putting it on. He finished off his preparations with a Warming Charm on himself. "There, all good to go," he said. "Follow me or not—I just have to do something before I explode." He pulled the door open and stepped out.
It was still raining, but Vaati's storm had bled off its initial fury. Likely because he'd whipped this up on a whim, rather than for some weeks-long plan. It was at the level of a normal heavy rainstorm now, rather than an airborne whirlpool born of hurricane-force winds flinging around a solid sheet of rain. Yesterday, after tumbling dizzily off the train to Castle Town, the Harrys had had to hold onto one another to keep themselves grounded. Malfoy, for all that he was built like a slightly more substantial waif, hadn't had half as much trouble with the wind. They'd all gotten a lot of worried looks and admonishments from the poncho-clad guardsmen at the city gates as they'd passed through. It was really nice, how people around here seemed to care more about strangers.
Harry looked around the little courtyard surrounding the house. He hadn't been able to see much of it yesterday, what with the blinding amount of water flying around. Now, he could easily make out the high fence made of outwardly curved ribs of wood wrapped with barbed wire. His group been able to make it in because the gate had been left open, but he could now see it was almost indistinguishable from the rest of the fence and held shut with a hefty Bluestone-powered padlock. Various mechanical things sat within the enclosed area in varying broken states. He saw discarded casings of all kinds, random sheets of metal, bent poles and cracked beams. It was a whole little scrapyard piled up behind and around Link's house.
The house was quite intimidating from the outside, he now noticed. It was larger than Harry would have thought, made of heavily stala-braced stone blocks and possessed of a roof whose clay tiles were interrupted by lines of metal spikes. The chimney leading up from the workroom, which puffed blue smoke from the ever-burning magical forge, had more stala spikes protruding from the top. While on the inside, the place was like a stone version of a normal Muggle house (complete with a kitchen full of appliances), from out here Link's home was a forbidding fortress of dark, armor-clad granite and shining thorns. What on earth did Link's family do, for them to live in a place like this and for kidnapping to be a regular problem?
He judged the height of the fence. Four meters, with barbed wire around the top. He was going to need his broom to get over that. He took it out of his bag.
Avoka came clomping out of the house on raised wooden sandals with a Japanese umbrella in hand. Malfoy stepped out afterward, dressed similarly to Harry. "What are you doing?" Avoka demanded. "Running away?"
Harry shook his head. "I'm just doing sword practice," he said. "I need something to hit, so I'm going to find a tree."
"You're at a Bluesmith residence. The weapons-testing platform is right over there." The Sheikah pointed to a section of the yard behind the house. Through the gray curtain of rain, Harry faintly saw the dark concentric rings of target boards.
"Oh, cool!" He put his broom away and strode in that direction. "What does this being a Bluesmith house mean?"
Avoka spluttered incoherently behind him before exclaiming, "They've been at the leading edge of Bluestone engineering for the last three centuries! They practically invented the concept! It's how they got their surname!"
"But aren't they blacksmiths?"
"To pay for research expenses the castle doesn't cover, but that's not how they earned their last name or reputation." Avoka shook his head. "Unbelievable, that that friend of yours told you to find Link but didn't tell you what family he's from! You don't even know who the Mad Owl is, do you?"
"Another Bluesmith, I guess?" Their beaked goggles made them look a bit like owls, after all, and the bird seemed to be their family symbol.
Avoka sighed. "And to think I mistook you for a Yiga…The Mad Owl is Link's big sister, also known as Gaebora Bluesmith. Yes, like the guy you found in Death Mountain; it's an old family name. She's big, loud, talkative, and sometimes more full of ideas than common sense. Once Link tells her about you, I'm sure she'll have a million questions about your world's versions of magic and science, so brace yourself."
"I bet Blue would enjoy that. He loves questions," Harry said. He entered the weapons-testing space, clearly marked by a Bluestone and stala-ringed stone circle hammered into the dirt. A variety of hittable things in different shapes and sizes stuck out of or sat atop the platform on stala poles or circles. By the house, under one of the workroom's glassless windows, sat a pair of large bins labeled "dummies" and "dead dummies".
"What does 'Bluestone' engineering entail?" Malfoy asked while Harry inspected one of the more humanoid dummies. It was made out of leather stuffed with something heavy and that crunched when he squished it. Sand, most likely.
"Creating experimental magical technology and developing enchantments for the consumer market. Duh," Avoka said. "Part of it is mechanical stuff, and the rest is about composing new spells for different technologies and getting them fit for enchantment on a mass-production scale. What else is Bluestone good for?"
"What is it good for? It's not required for enchanting, after all," Malfoy said. "Is it only for catering to Muggles?"
Harry sent him a look. "Malfoy," he said with exasperation. "Muggles make up most of both worlds."
Avoka looked between them with confusion. "I don't know what a 'Muggle' is, but Bluestone is something that makes enchanting way easier and less annoying. I mean, if you lay a spell on something in the old-fashioned style, there's no easy way to find or fix any flaws in the music and the only method you can use to correct anything is adding more magic to it to cover the holes in the first spell. Also, the magic you used is just…stuck there forever. You can't move it to anything else or break it without destroying the object. Bluestone spell nodes are interchangeable, so you can lay an enchantment on one, magically affix it onto a prepared object, and have it enchant that object with its pre-loaded spell. A team of mages can also enchant a whole lot of nodes at once, which makes it possible to mass-produce magical objects and pre-loaded spell nodes.
"It's really easy to disenchant something if you want to change out the magic, too. Spell nodes will run out of magic after a while if they aren't connected to a power line, but you can charge them back up with a particular chant or by plugging them into a power source. Even if they shut off, Bluestone remembers the spells laid on it until it's disenchanted, so those nodes will start right up.
"The one big drawback is that Bluestone explodes if parts of your spell are too unstable or you mess up in a risky section of a chant, but only bluesmiths—as in, people in that profession—have to worry about that kind of thing. That's why Link's family's goggles look the way they do; anyone testing the limits of Bluestone inevitably winds up having a lot of things blow up in their face."
Harry unsheathed his sword and poked at some of the dummies. As he did, spell nodes in the metal plates or poles they were mounted on switched from orange to a brighter blue and generated flexible, almost-invisible force fields around the stuffed leather objects. He whistled, impressed. Since he wasn't going to take an experimental cannon to these things or anything, this would save him some Mending Charms.
"Are you a mage yourself?" Malfoy prodded with a too-casual, searching tone that Harry didn't like. He gave the Slytherin a warning frown over his shoulder. Malfoy ignored it, going on to say, "It sounds as though you have some experience in enchanting."
"I have some magic, but I don't use mine half as much as Link and the only things I enchant are potions. I don't have the patience to start spells from scratch like Link does." Avoka scrunched his nose with distaste. "Hanging around him and Gaebora for almost three years has just taught me more than I ever wanted to know. You should really ask Link about it. He specializes in spell-crafting, and he'll happily talk your ears off about it if you give him the chance. His sister focuses more on the hardware end of things."
"What kind of mage are you, if not an enchanter? I thought that was Hyrule's principle magical practice," Malfoy said, now sounding more genuinely curious.
"Only because anyone with a magical talent can do it. It's the one single thing that Light World mages have in common, with all the different powers we might wind up stuck with." Avoka scuffed one of his sandals on the stone of the testing platform. "My talent is particularly, er, fine-tuned. The scope of it is a lot narrower than the magic that runs in Link's family." He averted his eyes with an air of embarrassment. "It's not something really…approved of, or useful for a Sheikah. It kind of defeats the purpose of training for stealth. Mostly I just push my magic into augmenting the occasional potions experiment, since it causes trouble when I use it for what it actually wants to do."
Harry looked up from the target he'd been about to take a swing at. "That sounds interesting," he said. Witches and wizards often had certain subjects they were better at, but rarely anything like the focused talents of Light World mages. The way Ruka had described them, those abilities were more like superpowers. "What kind of talent is it?"
"Well, erm…" Avoka produced a throwing knife from somewhere and it blazed into golden white light in his hand. It lit up the rain with a twinkling halo. The Sheikah chucked the super-charged projectile at one of the training dummies, where it punched through the force field and stuck deeply into its chest. "It's flashy, but all it does is add a little extra force and monster-slaying power to anything I can throw at the cost of giving away my position. It's good for emergency self-defense and not much else," Avoka said with a sheepish shrug. "My ancestors supposedly used it for great things, but the best I can do is sink an arrow into a stone wall. According to my boss, I'm just using it wrong." He rolled his eyes. "I have no idea what the 'right' way is, though."
"Well, I don't know what the 'right' way is, either, but I think it's cool. You can turn anything into an arrow," Harry said. He could easily imagine all the throwable items that Avoka could weaponize with that talent. If Harry could pick up a rock and turn it into a bullet, he'd be able to save himself from a lot of melee fighting. "Could you teach us—me and my brothers—how to use a bow? We're new to pretty much all this weaponry," he gestured toward his sword, "and it seems like you're good at explaining things."
That caught the Sheikah flat-footed. "You're…You don't know how to use a sword? You don't have weapons where you're from?!"
"We still have bows and swords and such, but most people use guns or wands. Only a few experts know how to use weapons like the ones around Hyrule. Those kinds of things are mostly just historical artifacts where we're from."
"But you said you beat a Gleeok. And Endraal is—well, she had to be the one to restore the mountain, so you probably aren't lying about helping her, but how…?" Avoka trailed off in confusion.
"Self-teaching, magic, having four of me, and this thing." Harry conjured the Dragon Hammer. "We found this in the facility after beating a big flying sandworm that had swallowed it."
Avoka's eyes almost fell out of his head. "That's Kaepora Bluesmith's lost hammer. That's her Dragon Hammer," he said fearfully. "Link's grandma's hammer!"
"Is she important, too?" Harry asked, regarding the oversized tool with new intrigue. "This thing is really cool, so I'd love to thank her for making it. Erm, I think the original got turned into magic, though, so I don't know how to give it back."
"She's a madwoman!" Avoka proclaimed. "She's built herself a flying laboratory that she drifts over Hyrule in! Her cane has rockets in it! That hammer you're holding probably has a rocket in it, too!"
Harry grinned. "Oh, it does. It's brilliant! We killed that Gleeok with it—our swords weren't enough to get through its skull."
Malfoy and Avoka wore matching expressions of unease at his enthusiasm. "See, the Gorons gave us that look, too," Harry said. "Having this saves us the trouble of using explosives to do the same thing, though, so isn't it safer?"
"You're just a kid! What would you need bombs for?" Avoka asked.
Harry thought the answer to that was obvious. "Things like Gleeoks?" He was glad his brothers hadn't gotten desperate enough to start chucking bombs at the monster in lieu of using their hammers. The clever dragon would have probably used its hurricane breath to blow them back in their faces.
"But why are you fighting things like Gleeoks? You said yourself yesterday that you don't have any divine heading here—no goddesses or spirits to support and guide you. What's pushing you to do this? Not that I'm ungrateful, but really, this is a lot of strife you're putting yourself through for a country that thinks yours is just a frightening myth."
Harry chewed on the inside of his cheek. Technically he did have a spirit guiding and supporting him, but he figured telling the paranoid Sheikah he was being helped by one of Hyrule's legendary bogeymen might spook him. "I have a magic sword and figure I ought to use it the best I can," he said. "I mean, who else was going to deal with Ignikanos? The core of Death Mountain was so hot, I don't know if even Gorons could have survived down there. And it took a lot of doing just to reach the dragon, let alone slay it."
Harry was supposed to defeat Vaati because he had the sword designed to beat him; therefore, it followed that it was up to himselves to handle Vaati's monsters. Besides, it was just the right thing to do. Harry couldn't imagine seeing something hurting people, knowing he could help, and doing nothing. That just didn't make sense.
Avoka and Malfoy pinched the bridges of their noses. "See, this is the nonsense I deal with," Malfoy said. "No sense of self-preservation whatsoever."
"I can see how he and Link are technically related now. You should see Link try out his inventions sometime. It's terrifying how fearless he is with a helmet and kneepads on," Avoka commiserated. He made a prompting gesture toward Harry. "Well, go on. Show me how terrible you are with a sword, dragon-slayer."
Harry got into a battle stance and struck a humanoid dummy at its neck, chest, and gut with three horizontal swipes. Then he backed up and stabbed at the center of the target on its torso.
Avoka clucked his tongue. "Your footwork is a travesty," he declared. "Do you know any katas? Start one and repeat it."
"What's a 'kata'?"
The Sheikah gave him a bewildered stare. "Where have you been learning your sword techniques? Scribbles in a bathroom stall?"
"I've been learning from someone who was training to be a knight!" Harry said, offended on Ravio's behalf. The boy had taken very good notes! It wasn't Ravio's fault that Harry didn't always understand all the instructions and pictures. "He lived in ancient Lorule, I think. Probably around the same time people here were living in the Old Kingdom. He used similar writing."
"You don't learn how to use a sword from a book," Avoka said, aghast. "Your muscle-memory must be all wrong, if you haven't had any correction from a teacher. Go into a…a 'sword form', then. I think that's the Old Kingdom term for it. You've at least been running drills, right?"
Harry nodded and got into a low stance. Turn imaginary weapon aside, step in, stab, retreat. It was a fairly simple one, and effective for dealing with Lizalfoses. He repeated it over and over like he usually did during practice, Avoka walking around him with a frown on his face.
"Alright, I have an idea of what's wrong here," he said after Harry had finished the movement for the tenth time. "You don't pay attention to your feet, you don't know how wide a proper stance is, you don't line up your movements together, and your whole…everything is too loose." He waved a hand up and down to encompass Harry's everything. "It's obvious you've never crossed swords with another human."
The Sheikah put his hands on his hips. "You could just go to the City Guard to train, though. They're law-keepers and wall-defenders, mostly knight-adjacent Hylians. Major cities in Hyrule all have a City Guard for defense during monster invasions and general law-enforcement. Those guys hold open sessions so the townsfolk can learn to defend themselves against monsters. You could sign up as a soldier, too. They'd never turn down a potential battle-mage. The last time we had one was a hundred years ago; being able to cast spells through an unspecialized Magic Rod is a rare talent." He turned his nose up with a sniff. "Although don't let yourself get a swelled head over that. Being from a different dimension just gives you an unfair advantage there."
Harry made a face, imagining himself training alongside a class of Light World natives who'd grown up around weaponry he considered ancient. The idea of showing his utter lack of familiarity with a sword around a whole bunch of medieval people didn't exactly appeal to him. Also, he was inevitably going to have a lot of dumb, basic questions that needed answering and he'd rather not ask in front of a full class. That was part of why he leaned a little too hard on Hermione's help sometimes; she was used to his stupid questions, and asking her saved Harry from giving the Slytherins an excuse to taunt him.
"Are you like Link?" Avoka asked. "You definitely don't seem to have his trouble with words, but…Link doesn't like being around large groups of strangers. His ears are really sensitive and too many things happening can make him panic in a really bad way. He's only gone to one festival in his life, for example, and considers that one of the worst times he's ever had. He couldn't string a sentence together for two days from all the stress."
"Blue and Yellow have some trouble with crowds and noise, but it's not quite as bad as that," Harry told him. "For me, I just can't imagine learning with a whole class. I've been teaching myself, and it's kind of this quiet, focused thing now. I wouldn't be able to remember what I was learning if it were too loud. My brothers don't even learn with me, since they get all the same muscle-memory that I do."
"Hmm." Avoka rubbed his chin. "Well, you're pretty pitiful and I've always wanted to teach Link how to use a sword—he's too gentle for his own good—so I guess I'll show you how," he declared. "Just don't be surprised if you get some Sheikah training mixed in. I'm not a knight, remember."
"Sheikah training like sneaking and other ninja things?" Harry asked excitedly. How cool would it be to learn how to sneak from a real, modern ninja? If he paired those skills with his Invisibility Cloak, he'd be unstoppable! "I'm good at stealth!"
"Much to my annoyance," Malfoy groused.
"Good. Sneakiness goes a long way toward making up for scrawniness," Avoka said approvingly. "Now, let's get you started on your first kata so I can begin setting your wonky muscle-memory straight."
A half-hour into sword practice, at some point during which Malfoy had left out of boredom, Avoka casually dropped, "You know, you really ought to go to the castle and tell the king what's going on."
Harry accidentally flung his sword. It vanished over the other side of the weapons testing platform and reappeared on his back. "I should what?!"
The Sheikah winced at his reaction. "Erm, talk to the king?" he repeated. "I mean, I'm going to tell the commander of the Central Kingdom Royal Guard what you told me in around, er," he consulted a pocket watch that he pulled out of his sleeve, "an hour, and she's going to want to see my informant. And then King Arcturam is going to want to see my informant, so…"
"Why would he want to see me? I'm not lying!" Harry said with growing panic. Talking to Zelda had been uncomfortable enough when he'd first started out because, even if she was dead, she'd still been a queen. And Prince Tiamus was nice, but he was a prince, so that was less intimidating. A medieval king, though? Of all of Hyrule? A living one? Harry couldn't imagine himself speaking to anyone so important. That was like strolling into Buckingham Palace and asking for an audience. Utterly bonkers. Someone like that would never have a reason to see someone like him unless he wound up in a world of trouble. Even the Minister for Magic had only talked to him that summer because he'd blown up his aunt and he had an escaped convict after him.
"No one thinks you're lying, I promise! It would just be to corroborate the details and thank you for helping the kingdom!" Avoka hastily reassured him. "I know you don't consider helping Endraal, slaying a Gleeok, and ending an ecological disaster a big deal, but they'll definitely think otherwise."
Harry shook his head emphatically. He did not want to wind up famous here. In Hyrule, he was happy being part of a quartet of unusually young adventurers who did a few unexpected things and left the area a little less chaotic in their wake. Getting famous for that, though? Hard pass. He didn't want to be the Boy-Who-Lived here, too. Why couldn't people just treat him like normal?
"Make me anonymous, then. Don't tell them who did it," he urged. "Neville! Tell them Neville Longbottom did those things, not me." The next time he went in to sort things out, he didn't want townsfolk already thanking him. While it would be different from the Boy-Who-Lived thing in that he'd have actually done something to earn the thanks, he still didn't want to float around on that kind of favor. What if he really did get a swelled head over it, like Snape already thought he had?
Avoka groaned and rubbed his temples. "Hylia help me, you really are just like Link. He's so bloody weird about compliments." He took a deep breath in, then exhaled through his nose. "Since you can still talk, explain to me what your problem is."
"I'm famous where I'm from, and people treat me different because of it. That blond bloke who looks like you? He used to bully me because I was famous, but I didn't want to be his friend. Last year, half my school was convinced I was trying to kill them because I can talk to snakes. Everyone knows me, so any little thing I do gets way too much attention."
"You can talk to snakes?"
"And even when people are nice, it's just…They give me special treatment that other people don't get, and I don't like it. My friends don't get treated like they're made of gold, so why should I?" Harry rambled on. "Please, I want to be normal here. Like Link is! He's related to famous people, but he gets to be normal."
"He gets to be kidnapped," Avoka corrected, looking profoundly tired, "but I've hung around him long enough to understand what you're trying to say." He started pacing. "Alright. So you, as someone who has performed services for the kingdom, don't want to be publicly thanked or celebrated. Right?"
"Right," Harry confirmed. "Besides, the Gorons already gave me some clothes."
"That's not—" The Sheikah slid a hand down his face and sighed. "Okay, sure. Moving on, the process for reporting that Hyrule is under country-wide threat by a Class B or above malevolent entity requires an informant to explain the cause of the trouble directly to the royal family. It creates the least confusion that way, if the source goes to the ruler and the ruler coordinates from there."
"I can't talk to a king. That would be just…no." All he could imagine was sitting down for tea with the Queen of England, a thought that wedged itself sideways and upside-down in his mind's eye.
"But you need to report to the royal family, otherwise the king might just put out a summons and have soldiers escort you to the castle."
"He can do that?" Harry gasped. Then logic sank in. "Oh, right, he's the king." Could the Queen of England do that, too?
"Yes, he's the king," Avoka agreed. "And you're supposed to talk to him." He paused, apparently struck by an idea. "Or…" The Sheikah's eyes crinkled with a smile that Harry couldn't judge the intentions of. Were it on Malfoy's face, he'd be worried. "You could talk to the princess. She counts as royalty, too, and she's way less scary than her parents."
"The princess?" Harry repeated dumbly, because he was accustomed to thinking of a queen. "Is her name Zelda? I've heard that's a tradition here."
Avoka looked positively elated by his response. "Yes, that's her! Just act that level of clueless when you go to speak to her, and you'll get along fine. She isn't too fond of people bowing and scraping."
Talking to a princess felt significantly less momentous than having an audience with the ruler of a whole country. Princes and princesses back in England went out on the town and made fools of themselves all the time, after all. He had a much easier time conceptualizing them as posh people like Malfoy with fancier titles. "Will she be alright with speaking to me, though?" he asked. "And, erm, will she make a big deal out of it?"
"She'll be happy talk to you, and I'll ask her not to make a whole affair of it," Avoka said firmly. "We know each other, since I guard her tower sometimes. She'll tell the king not to throw any feasts, either. What's important about your story is the threat to Hyrule, after all."
Harry nodded. "Yes, definitely. Vaati's no joke. He has a new trick and wizard magic now, so he's even more dangerous than he was in the legends."
Avoka clapped him on the shoulder. "Just tell that to the princess, and you'll have done your duty to the crown!" he said cheerfully. "Now let's go have breakfast, and then you can accompany me to the castle when I report there for my apprenticeship."
Harry's heart climbed up his throat. He swallowed hard. "Today?" he croaked.
"Did you have anything else planned?"
"…I guess not."
Link sat on the kitchen counter, nibbling on some cold pork from the icebox. The dining room table was currently crammed with conversation. Gabbi had awoken to five new foreigners in the house and had immediately pounced on the fact that some of them knew Hylian. Ever since she'd seen Hagrid use the old and strange-looking umbrella he'd arrived with to light a fire, she'd been captivated by the concept of Dark World magic.
"So you use little sticks with creature parts in them, and that's it? No enchantment required?" she asked, her voice made louder by enthusiasm. The color-coded boys and Malfoy all flinched at her volume. Link was so accustomed to it that the spike of pain in his ears didn't faze him. Better to endure the noise of the world than suffer the unnerving deafness caused by his hearing dampeners.
"The wandmaker has to do some extra work before we get them, but yeah," Green said. "When we cast a spell, it's usually just saying a word and waving our wand. If we're going to enchant something, we just lay a few spells on it like that. Charms are easiest, but transfigurations will do a lot if you can get them right."
"AMAZING! I ought to see whether there's a way to tie together a gemstone-enhanced spell node matrix that can incorporate enough elemental specialties to simulate that kind of generalized casting ability," Gabbi boomed. "Sometimes I get so deep into the realm of motors and circuits that I forget things like Magic Rods still EXIST! Admittedly, I've always been more of a gearhead than a mage. Have you talked to Link, though? He's GREAT at that purely magical stuff!"
Link blushed, ducking his head. His sister had always praised and talked up his skills, and he was never sure what to do with such compliments.
"Gaebora, your volume," Avoka reminded for the third time in last fifteen minutes. "They aren't used to it like Link."
"Ah, right. Sorry, kids," Gabbi said at a less deafening sound level. Link's head was pounding from her previous volume, but like Avoka had said, it was nothing new for him. "Anyway, you've mentioned things like 'charms' and 'transfiguration' as enchantments," Gabbi went on. "What are the different classifications of magic in your world? What defines them? Could you demonstrate some?"
Link finished his breakfast, poured himself some carrot-apple juice, and returned to his perch on the counter to engage in one of his favorite pastimes: visually eavesdropping. Or, as his friend Maple would put it, staring like an owl.
Contrary to what most people assumed due to his passive nature and the communication difficulties they mistook for simple-mindedness, Link noticed a lot of things. He'd quickly figured out how to pick a disguised Yiga out of a crowd, for example. They had a particular way of training their agents that resulted in all of them using the same repeated patterns of nonchalant body language when not under specific cover. It was just hard to get away from a team of Yiga when they were in the mood for a hostage situation, no matter how early he recognized suspicious factors lining up. In a similar way, he also knew that his sister was terrified about him being an easy target but didn't want to worry him by saying so, which was why she'd added barbed wire to the fence outside and, until he'd convinced her to stop a month ago, found every excuse to stay home from the forge when he was at the house. Avoka, he'd learned through the many things that went unsaid, was deeply afraid of going unseen and unheard. The boy kept his mask up at all times and wore strictly traditional Sheikah clothes in colors meant to blend into shadows or crowds, but paradoxically went out of his way to draw attention and dominate conversations.
It was these powers of observation that had Link watching the color-coded boys with interest. He had puzzled out that the brown-themed one with somewhat more yellowish eyes was Green, while the other was Red. Yellow and Blue were easier to tell apart.
They all had different languages they silently spoke in. Red was deliberately focused on things other than the conversation, using his close attention to the ceiling lights and temperature-regulation pipes overhead to keep his reactions to Gabbi's slowly returning volume to a minimum. Yellow was scared, but hiding it under a pleasant tone and disarming smile. From this angle, Link could see the boy's white-knuckled hands twisting together under the table with every too-loud word. Yellow's eyes rarely stayed on Gabbi's face, most often flicking between the hand she had braced on the table in leaning over to talk to them and the hand she was gesturing with. Blue was similarly quiet and over-attentive, though more wary than frightened. He had a spiky, defensive sharpness to him that lay barely hidden under his polite expression and well-timed nods. Green was handling the bulk of the conversation, being the most fluent in Hylian. He showed more anxiety on the surface than his brothers, his smile strained and his nails digging into his thighs.
Avoka gave Gabbi another nudge when she lost her grip on her inside voice. The color-coded boys relaxed minutely. Malfoy, who had given up the pretense of politeness a couple of minutes in, resolutely kept his hands over his ears. The Harrys could have done the same without Gabbi being upset about it, but they hadn't made the slightest attempt.
Link sipped his juice and shifted his point of focus from behavior to appearance. In this, his alternates were more unified. Shorter and slighter than him, with bony hands, wrists, and faces poking out of their heavy cover of clothing. Avoka and his double were close in height (Malfoy was five centimeters taller) and had similar lanky, fine-boned builds, but Link's alternates were dramatically smaller than him in both height and width. Some of that was to be expected, since the kind of magic that ran in Link's family tended to make Bluesmiths quite muscular and almost Gerudo-sized by the time they were eighteen. Link didn't think this difference in stature could be completely chalked up to that, nor his Gerudo grandmother's blood; at twelve years old, he hadn't hit any of those big growth spurts yet.
The Harrys had faintly shiny, long-healed burns on their palms and some of their fingers moved a little stiffly—the result of a magically potion-resistant injury, perhaps, or a lack of access to proper medical treatment? Blue's glasses, new and pristine, were the only set that properly fit. The others habitually tweaked their scratched, beat-up spectacles to keep them sitting correctly. Their hair was in a grown-out bowl cut, made somewhat less obvious by their trimmed bangs and what was likely self-done layering. Link had seen his sister cut her own hair enough times to recognize it. The blind spots created by having one set of forward-facing eyes and no secondary mirror had made the snips around the back more uneven. Evidence of a lack of care about appearance, low income, or—at their young age—neglect?
Combine all of that with their underdeveloped stature, the submissive way they moved, their fearful shrinking at swells in volume, and their habit of watching Gabbi's hands, and Link had a certain sinking feeling about their situation. There was also what Green had said yesterday, about Link being "better". That statement on its own made no sense, but the way his eyes lingered on family photos did.
Call it a wild assumption founded purely on surface-level conjecture, but Link didn't think his dimensional alternates had a Gabbi of their own back in their world. In fact, he wondered whether they even had a guardian at all. The Harrys' top-quality magic bags said "yes", but their lack of enchanted armor and general sense of shabbiness pointed to them having become adventurers with whatever money and materials they'd been able to scrounge up. The fact that they'd survived Death Mountain in such a state meant they must have been extraordinarily capable to make up for their lack of equipment, but Link still found himself concerned.
Young adventurers rarely looked so unsponsored unless their only other option was staying in an orphanage. He'd seen many kids like that stop by his family's business to buy the cheapest pig-iron swords they had in the shop out front. Orphanages weren't terrible, from what he'd heard, but most didn't do much more than keep the children fed, give them a safe place to sleep after school or apprenticeships, and let prospective parents peruse their stock. They were tax-funded shelters that kept one housed, fed, and clean, and that was it. For a lot of children, that wasn't enough. Those scrappy street kids—the ones who were smaller than others their age and whose eyes burned with the fire to prove themselves—rarely survived long enough as adventurers to become repeat customers at the shop. They were the ones who came in to buy a bastard sword and the flimsiest disc cuirass on the rack, then made their next appearance in an obituary a few weeks to a couple of months later. Link saw that same kind of hard-scrabble determination in these alternates of his.
One little-publicized fact about adventuring was that it usually required a lot of family or state funding, a ridiculous amount of natural talent, and years of prior combat and survival experience to succeed at it. Except for rare standouts (like Hyrule's once-a century Champions or Farore's chosen Heroes), becoming a self-made solo adventurer meant quitting or dying horribly within one's first year on the job. In Hyrule's wilderness and dens of hidden treasure, you could burn, freeze, be electrocuted, kicked off a cliff, trampled, suffocated, stabbed, shot, blown up, crushed, impaled on spikes, clubbed by Stalfoses in your sleep, starved to death in the depths of an endless labyrinth, and more.
When a younger Link had warned would-be dungeon explorers coming to buy their first weapons about that, thinking it a courtesy, he'd often gotten yelled at for daring to poke holes in their dreams of success. By age ten, Link had figured out that it was easiest to vend whatever the buyers wanted, get anyone under seventeen to sign the liability waivers, and do nothing more. It was his job to make and sell, he'd been told by customers and coworkers alike, not to care. That didn't mean Link always did the smart thing, but he'd gotten better at phrasing his advice and choosier about giving it.
Link crossed his ankles and continued watching his counterparts fiercely pretend they didn't want to flee like mice. Blue and Yellow had picked up on his silent observation and were giving him funny looks in between watching his sister gesticulate. Link kept on staring, unbothered; the Harrys would inevitably find him odd if they hadn't picked up on it already. There was no hiding the fact that Link didn't think quite the same as everyone else. Even when he desperately pushed himself to perform the exhausting song and dance that was others' idea of normal, people still sensed his difference and would condescend toward him for it. Since he had a feeling he'd be spending some time around these foreigners in the future, he saw no need to exhaust himself delaying the inevitable.
Should he say something about what he thought he saw in his alternates, though? Do something? This wasn't his business, after all.
An important lesson that Link had had to learn the hard way was that involving oneself in affairs that weren't one's own was to take quite a risk. If he picked the wrong customer to dissuade from scaling Mt. Lanayru with a Hookshot or choosing a weapon that would get them killed in battle, Link could wind up being yelled at beyond the point of tears. In the less public Bluesmith workshops, meanwhile, an overabundance of helpfulness was a dangerous thing. People being brought in to help with an experiment had to be properly informed before being allowed to interfere, and even then a lack of firsthand understanding could have explosive consequences where Bluestone was involved.
He supposed, watching his doubles politely suffer under an amicable interrogation they clearly found frightening and didn't seem willing to protest, that it was fine to meddle in what he was familiar with and could easily handle. It didn't seem like he could make things worse by intervening in a small way. He piped up to say, "Gabbi, the forge? You're the boss."
"Oh, shoot!" His sister checked her pocket watch. "Yeah, I've got to be there in five minutes. I got so caught up in learning that I forgot the time!" She laughed and shook her head. "Are you coming in early, since you're already up, or are you going to take a nap after breakfast?"
Link leaned back and forth, considering. He'd messed up his already unusual sleep schedule yesterday, but he could feel some "tired" rattling around in there. No matter how much he slept, he was never at one hundred percent before ten a.m. "Nap," he told her. "I'll do more night-work today."
"Alright, I'll see you later, kiddo." She leaned over to kiss him on the cheek, then bowed to the foreigners at the table. "Thanks for answering my questions! You've given me a lot of new ideas to work on!"
"Y-You're welcome," Green stammered. "It was nice to meet you."
Link huffed through his nose. Somehow, he doubted that.
Gabbi took her lunch pail and an extra sausage from yesterday's dinner out of the icebox and hurried off to work. Once she was out the front door, the boys at the table let down their respective facades.
"I did tell you to brace yourself," Avoka said. "She forgets her size and sound sometimes. Also, she's a tad deaf, thanks to a few too many explosions."
"You don't say," Malfoy moaned, hunching over and rubbing his ears. Link winced in sympathy; he knew only too well the woes of touchy hearing. "I've barely started the day and I already have a headache."
"Put some truffle oil in your porridge as a pick-me-up, then," Avoka advised. "We've all got a meeting at the castle." He pulled down a canister of grain from the cabinets and handed it over to Link, who got off the counter and shook enough for several portions into a large pot before adding water.
"Malfoy, too?" Green asked in surprise.
"His ego would balance yours out. The princess needs to hear the whole truth, after all, not humble understatement," Avoka said. "A royal scribe will be recording the meeting for the king to see, too, so being as objectively honest as possible is best. Consider this negotiating with the king through a less intimidating middle-man."
The Zora kid gave Green an annoyed glare and said something in English that had the other boy looking chagrinned. Green responded with something that made Malfoy's vertical pupils widen with interest. Link added water and a pinch of salt to the pot of watery grain, set the stove to boil, and turned to watch the unspoken conversation under the foreigners' words.
He'd been able to tell right away that Malfoy was not to the color-coded boys as Avoka was to Link. He wasn't even sure they were friends. Malfoy had a proud, assertive way of moving that occasionally turned small and uncertain at some things the Harrys said. His default physical language was loud, though, like Avoka's, and directly clashed with the others' meekness. When Malfoy got pushy enough that Hagrid stepped in to say something, the Harrys relaxed but Malfoy's hackles went up. Interesting.
Link fetched a wooden spoon and gave the cereal a swirl. The boys weren't quite hostile to one another, but it looked like conflict was what they were used to. Recent rivals, maybe? Or enemies, even? Link didn't have much of a mental concept of that. The only enemies he'd ever had were the Yiga agents that kept capturing him to use against his sister. He didn't think Agents Hebbi or Koumo were completely irredeemable, though; Hebbi was more respectful of Link's communication problems than some people who weren't even bad guys, and Koumo said funny things sometimes. There had also been plenty of clients at the shop who'd berated Link for being "slow" or saying the wrong thing, but he would just consider those people entitled and irritating, not enemies. Avoka had a rival, but Link couldn't begin to understand the friendly hostility between him and Maple. He wondered what it was like, having an opposite like that.
"Don't be stupid, Potters. Modesty helps no one," Malfoy finally snapped at Yellow and Green in Hylian. He looked at Avoka with a keen, calculating gaze. "There's a castle housing hundreds of children sitting in the middle of Lake Hylia," he said. "It's a school, and it was taken here just like Hogsmeade and all those wizards in town were. Currently, thirty-five Zoras—including a royal of the Lake Kingdom—are also sheltering there due to the ongoing monster infestation in the lake. The castle is cut off from all supply routes and its stores of food are limited. If Potter is willing to accept any help the royal family can give, what could they do to assist us?"
Avoka suddenly looked more energized than he had all morning. He'd complained to Link several times that the Royal Guard was still trying to figure out what was up with the dingy-looking copy of Hyrule Castle sitting in the lake. They'd even become desperate enough that there were rumors they might reach out to Link's grandmother so they could use one of her flying machines to travel to and from that isolated isle without being swarmed by Skullfish.
"Why don't we hash something out before you make your case to the princess?" Avoka suggested. "If you make it sound good for the scribe recording your conversation, the king will be that much easier for her to convince."
Malfoy flashed his teeth in what probably wasn't meant to be an evil grin, but definitely was. "Excellent! Finally, someone around here has some sense. Now let's talk."
Notes:
-The force fields around the training dummies are a weaker, earlier version of the force fields around the ancient Sheikah monks in Breath of the Wild.
-With bluesmithing being a magic-based (as opposed to electrical) combination of computer science and several fields of engineering, Link is basically a software-development prodigy with some hardware-making skills, while his sister is a hardware specialist who can develop her own accompanying software if needed.
-The Harrys have a combat teacher now! I know some people might be disappointed it's not an adult professional, but in this story, the Harrys aren't people who have the highest level of comfort or trust with adults. Even in canon, there's often a certain level of suspicion there. As such, I figured they'd be happiest learning from a kid their own age. Being taught by a Sheikah who knows more about speed, stealth, versatility, and long-distance attacks than wielding a single long blade in open combat would complement their existing skills and let them build upon what they'd find most useful. The Harrys are not only wizards, but also kids with unfortunate experiences whose ingrained abilities lean towards not getting hit and not being seen, rather than facing everything head-on. With that kind of nature, they're going to prefer building up different skills than the average Hero of Hyrule would.
-Hagrid's Western-style umbrella looks rather strange in a world where only Japanese-style umbrellas exist.
-There is definitely a big, scary dark side to Hyrule's adventuring industry. Our world's closest equivalent for becoming an adventurer would probably be climbing Mount Everest. It's incredibly expensive, with not a whole lot of payoff in most cases and a higher degree of difficulty and likelihood of dying than most people realize. The Harrys, with their overpowered Dark World magic and ridiculous resilience, have fully missed the fact that adventuring isn't something kids their age tend to survive doing. Being from a place where nothing is free and survival is set to Hard Mode, they're still marveling over the fact that you can pick fruit off a random Light World tree without getting fined for it.
-"Hearty" foods in this fic-verse provide a smaller level of magical healing than a Red Potion—the equivalent of one to six hearts. The only way for a food to heal the player (within the same time limit of 1 hour that potions function within) is for it to include a Hearty ingredient.