Last month: The Harrys fought and defeated Lanroller, the guardian monster of Vaati's city-poisoning power generator. From there, they struggled through the magic-wrecking Light flooding Diagon Alley to reach the source of the trouble. They destroyed the anchoring Eyes holding the generator in place, sending it back whence it came, then were sucked back into the Light World themselves. Thrown unprepared into a raging sandstorm in the middle of the vast Gerudo Desert, they were confronted by an angry Vaati and thrown into a dark, deadly labyrinth.
Art of the Beamoses in this chapter can be found on garden-eel-draws under the "dungeon 6" tag.
To Thunder Dragon: I apologize, but I still don't do fic requests. Even if I were interested in doing them, I've got my writing plate full for...probably the next decade, at this point lol. Between HP: FSA's remaining dungeons, an intended GoF sequel, a future Zelda spin-off fic, and my big chapters/slow updates style, this is all I'll be writing for a while.
Content warning for a broken arm and cauterized toes.
Harry wished he could take his stupid brain out and drop-kick it down the hall. His vision was swimming with greenish stars. Gooseflesh studded his arms like a permanent feature. Though it was hot enough for the pits of his tunic to be soaked through with sweat, he was shivering. His muscles clenched to the point of aching despite his attempts to make them relax.
Worst of all, he knew he was being irrational, but couldn't turn it off. His body thought it knew things that he didn't, and it was the one holding the reins here. The best Harry could do was keep his Magic Lamp close and slide his hand along the wall to remind himself of the presence of air and solid footing. The one good thing about him being on his own was that his brothers weren't around to see him shaking like a leaf.
After being tossed into this place, he'd awoken alone at the end of a long, dark corridor. No torches, no enemies, just dark blocks of stone and gritty tiles interrupted by the occasional shaft of light pouring in from a square vent in the ceiling. Harry used the spots of light like air pockets in a cave dive. He'd stop to stand in the hazy, swirling orange that poured in like smoke and stare down at where it lit up his boots. Looking up the long, slim chimney above him only served to remind him how far from the surface he was, this time buried under cut stone instead of cave rock or water.
He sighed and dragged a hand down his face. He missed when these places had been properly lit. Hell, if he'd wound up in the temple of corpses again, at least he would have had that freaky red light to see by. Dead stuff didn't frighten him like darkness and water now did.
'Well, at least there isn't any water here,' Harry thought. Before proceeding down the corridor, he paused to knock on the wall—"knock on wood", as it were. Because Merlin help him, if he had to swim in the middle of the bloody desert on top of being lost without a map and separated from his brothers, he was going to start screaming and chucking bombs at walls.
His hand, trailing along the wall to assure his brain he was still on land, met air. Harry looked up from his feet and peered into the void to his left. The hallway branched off into a narrower corridor there. Harry stood between his two options for a moment, the phantom voices of his brothers in his ears. Blue and Yellow would probably encourage him to keep going the way he'd been going, while Red would immediately want to check out the new and exciting direction.
He decided to head down the branching hallway. Several minutes of walking down the last one hadn't led him anywhere interesting; maybe this way would finally lead him to a room with torches.
Green lights, bigger and brighter than the tiny hallucinated dots forming constellations on the walls, appeared in the distance. They swung out from behind a section of darkness and hovered by the ceiling. Spaced close together and bobbing slightly in the air, they couldn't have been anything but approaching eyes.
Harry drew his sword and went into a ready crouch. Depending on what those eyes were attached to, he was ready to fight or flee. While he was on his own, with no one to drag him out of danger or drink a potion in the event he was too injured to, he didn't consider retreat a cowardly option so much as a sensible one.
He started backing up as the eyes floated higher and higher in the air. Whatever those were attached to, it was close to the massive size of a Light World Moblin.
Layers of yellowed, ancient-looking linen wrappings appeared at the edge of his lantern's light. Harry's building unease turned to a mixture of horror and hilarity. Was this what he thought it was…?
A bloody mummy shuffled into view. Hunched and stiff-limbed, its hidden body was made bulkier by layers upon layers of bandages that covered everything but a narrow, shadowy slice across its glowing green eyes.
Harry stood there for a couple of seconds, staring in openmouthed shock at the reanimated creature. First he'd wound up in this random crypt, and now this? Was this the Light World, or was it a horror movie?
"Gibdo", he heard echo in his head in multiple young voices with differing levels of dread. Mental pictures of monsters similar to this one wheeled behind his mind's eye, courtesy of the Four Sword.
He took a quick step forward and took an experimental stab at the mummy with his sword before darting back out of reach. To his surprise, the Four Sword got hung up in the linen wrappings instead of sinking into whatever lay underneath. How many layers of cloth were there on this thing?
The monster lunged forward after Harry's attack, running at him with more speed than he'd thought something so ReDead-like was capable of. Harry yelped and stumbled backward, then ducked and sidestepped as the monster lumbered by. As he turned back around to face the thing, he did a quick mental coin-flip between hands and chucked the thing he was holding in his left at the mummy's back.
Flaming oil trailed after his Magic Lamp as it flew through the air, then spattered against the monster's bandages. The linen caught quickly and burned with great speed. The yellowed fabric blackened and crumbled even faster than paper in the fireplace. Instead of the dried skin Harry had expected, the bandages fell away to reveal naked bone. A loud clang made him jump and re-conjure his lamp. Something large, dark, and shiny had fallen from the creature's back and lay like a dully reflective crescent moon on the floor.
The unnaturally tall, armored human skeleton now standing before him (Gibdo? A kind of skeletonized Moblin he hadn't seen before? What the hell was it?!) rolled its shoulders, then leaned down to pick up the huge, tarnished brass sickle-sword that had clattered to the floor when its wrappings had burned off. The hooked blade's edges glinted an eerie red in the light of Harry's lamp. With a hoarse, ghostly cry, the monster ran toward him with terrifying speed, the sharp crook of its sword sending up sparks as it scraped along the floor.
Harry had learned enough from Avoka to recognize an incoming arse-kicking when he saw one. Whatever this too-big, human Stalkoblin thing was ("Stalfos", several Heroes' voices chimed), it was a dangerous combination of big, dexterous, and fast that he didn't have the skills to fight on his own in blind darkness.
He dropped to the ground with his heart in his throat as the monster took a swing at his head, then barely managed to deflect the stab it took at him once he was on the ground. There was a sharp, nauseating twinge in his right arm as he was knocked into a backward tumble. When he was upright again, he saw the Stalfos straining to pull its blade out of the ground. It had put enough force into that second attack to lodge its hooked sword in the dungeon's sandstone floor.
'No thank you,' Harry thought with a shake of his head. He sacrificed the light of his lamp to conjure his Bomb Bag. Fishing out one of the smooth, heavy round shapes within, he chucked it into the pitch-blackness in front of him. Harry was off running, lantern in hand, before the explosive had even started pulsing red.
The bomb went off with a ground-shaking boom and a flash of light and heat against his back. Harry prayed that would slow the monster down until he found a place to hide or a door to close behind him. Dungeons usually had doors, right? According to his memories, monsters couldn't open those. Where the hell were the rooms in this place, though? Why was it all hallways?!
As he sprinted through the dark, watching the occasional block of filtered orange sunlight pass him by, Harry lost all sense of direction. There were more turns and intersections in this area of wherever he was, but they all led to hallways upon hallways. Everywhere to run, but nowhere to hide.
His forearm was definitely broken. Any tiny movement sent a stab of pain down through his wrist and up through his elbow. With each running step he took, the fracture screamed at him to stop. If he didn't remember to magically heal it within the hour, then he'd have to spend the next several weeks in a cast. Assuming those even existed in Hyrule, whose medical treatments consisted of either potions or herbal powders derived from Sheikah poisons. They didn't even have germ theory yet.
He stopped by an intersection and, biting the inside of his cheek hard enough to taste blood, vanished his Magic Lamp so he could conjure his Bag of Holding. In the absolute darkness, he dug through his bag with the mental image of the fried vegetable buns Link had given him and his brothers for their trip. A flattish, soft, lumpy shape appeared in his hand and he crammed it into his mouth. Harry chewed quickly, hardly tasting the food. His eyes and ears were keyed up to their limits as he scanned the void around him. Once he'd swallowed a few bites, something made more difficult by his dry mouth and tight throat, the pain in his arm lifted away.
Green lights appeared in front of him. The phantom stars floating around him disappeared, outshone by the real deal.
Harry didn't know whether this was the Gibdo he'd accidentally made more dangerous by setting it on fire or another undead monster still slowed down by its wrappings. At this point, he didn't care which one it was. He just had to run.
Switching his satchel for his Magic Rod, Harry aimed at the eyes and cried, "Depulso!" He threw all of his magic into the thought of 'get it away!' There was a reassuring noise of something heavy cracking against stone, but he didn't stick around to admire the results. Conjuring his lamp, he picked a random direction at the intersection in front of him and barreled down it.
Harry resumed his search for a door with increasing desperation. The sound of his boots slapping on the floor and his own increasingly heavy breathing drowned out everything else. If there was a Gibdo on his heels, he was too deafened by his exertion to hear it.
"Door, door, door," Harry chanted, swinging his lamp around the somewhat wider hallway he'd skidded into. "Are you a bloody dungeon or not?! Give me a door, already!"
Stopped as he was, he could hear the scuffling sound of linen-wrapped feet sliding across the ground. The hair on the back of his neck rose; he had to fight down the instinct that told him to throw his flaming lamp at the sound. He ran forward instead, putting his reluctant trust in the Gibdo's clumsiness to keep it behind him.
Then, up ahead, he heard the scrape of metal on stone. Harry swore viciously in his head and spun around. Between the Stalfos and the Gibdo, he'd take the lumbering mummy.
He ducked under the gnarled, reaching hands of the Gibdo and skirted around it, then switched items to send two blazing Sunburst Spells into the dark behind him. White fire splashed across both monsters, causing them to appear in the pitch-black as two faintly glowing, frozen gray shapes.
A second later, he bounced off a wall he hadn't been able to see. Harry yelped in pain and staggered backward, clutching his stinging nose. "I don't have time for this," he snapped at the stupid, unlit dungeon. "Just give me a door, dammit!" He conjured his lamp and held it up to see the next hallway he'd have to run down.
Orange-red light fell upon a pinwheel-like sun symbol made of lighter gold stone than the rest of the wall. It was set into an even larger slab of stone that didn't match the gritty yellow-brown blocks everything else was made of. Instead, the rectangle was smooth and polished, painted with faded designs of slithering snakes and wiggling heat lines radiating from the sun symbol.
He let out a breath. A door! Now, he just had to figure out how to open it before the Stalfos caught up with him. The grind of its heavy sword on the floor had started up again.
There was no handle or knob that he could see. The stone sun stuck out a little bit from the rest of the door, though, which was fitted a few centimeters back from the line of the wall. He planted a hand on the big button and pushed it inward. The door slid up with startling speed and thunked to a stop overhead.
No need to ask him twice. Harry hurried in. The section of wall closed behind him with a curt slam.
Then there was a "shink!" of scraping metal.
Harry groaned loudly and turned around. Yep, the door he'd gone through was the self-locking kind. There were tall, wicked spikes blocking his way back. He'd run from a tight spot and directly into a trap.
He sighed and faced the room again. This one was somewhat lit, at least. A slatted vane of sunlight dropped in through a grate in the ceiling and bounced far enough for him to make out where the walls ended. The large space was dotted with things that, at first, looked like man-sized golden vases with rotating bugles on top. It took several seconds of blank staring for him to notice the scorch marks on the ground and recognize the strange statues for what they were.
Beamoses. Six of the damned things, posted just far enough apart in the large room for there to be narrow, invisible corridors of safety in between them. These were weird-looking ones, though. Their "eyes" were orange, ring-shaped diodes at the ends of trumpet bells leading from golden loops of metal tubing and bundles of bare copper wiring. Each machine was connected to a corresponding port in the wall by a thick steel rope latched onto the back of each metal vase.
Harry cocked his head to one side as he studied the…electronics? Were those electronics? In Hyrule? Whatever was powering those things sure wasn't Bluestone, and pure enchanting wouldn't call for those wires in the heads or the power lines connected to their bases.
'What kind of nutters would leave the rubber off their wires?' Harry wondered, frowning at the bizarre sight. He'd have to take care not to step on those cords or touch the statues they were attached to. Not only because the Beamoses would shoot him if he got that close, but because the robots were probably loaded up with uncontained electricity that he couldn't see. Dudley had shoved him into an electric cattle fence before, when his relatives had been forced to take Harry along on holiday to the country; he'd learned the hard way that charged metal didn't always have the warning buzz that it did in the movies.
He sat down by the door to think, since it didn't seem like anything in the room would start trying to kill him until he took a few steps in any direction. Since the Beamoses were the most obvious things he could see, he figured the goal of this locked room was killing the monsters in it. Defeating Beamoses was tricky because none of the forgotten cultures that had built them had done so in the same way. Some could be chopped down and stabbed in the eye with a plain old sword, but others—like the green octopus-headed ones he'd seen before—were immune to all attempts at causing damage. There were also ones that could be blown up with bombs, or…
Maybe his bow? The ones that had to be stabbed in the eye with a sword had deeper-set electronics in their blocky heads, according to his not-memories. These ones had relatively fiddly little heads with their eyes mounted right on the surface. If their eyes were similarly breakable, an arrow could work.
He stood up, conjured his Bomb Bag, and looked for a target. First he'd try blowing them up, then shooting them (he was already resigned to using up his remaining arrows), then trying his Dragon Hammer. The last option of those three was sure to get him blasted, but the stala head of the weapon would keep him safe from the electricity running through these things.
Taking out a bomb, Harry took a few running steps toward the nearest Beamos and rolled the blue-black sphere across the ground. The statue's dark revolving eye paused to point in his direction. A low buzz picked up in the air and made Harry's scalp prickle as the ring-shaped orange light of its eye blinked on, followed by a brilliant red diode flaring to life in the center.
Harry squeaked as a blazing laser cut its way across the ground toward him. His eyes, so accustomed to the dark, were briefly blinded. He jumped backward as far as he could and kept scrambling away from danger, blinking away spots. That light was moving toward him way too fast—!
He got out of range just in time to avoid the laser about to rake its way up his right leg. The searing beam sliced through his boot like the fairy-enchanted leather wasn't even there—far more powerful than the Beamos lasers he'd encountered before—and carved its way across the front of his foot before he got away. At same time the Beamos's eye dimmed with inattention, however, the bomb Harry had bowled at it pulsed a warning a few inches away from the bottom of the vase. Harry grinned viciously, clutching his remaining toes.
BOOM! The Beamos was swallowed by an eruption of flame and swirling smoke. Harry counted his lucky stars that the monster's laser hadn't set off the explosive before he'd gotten out of range, or that the bomb hadn't detonated upon hitting the electrified vase.
His fledgling sense of victory faded when the smoke cleared to reveal the statue still standing there. It hadn't even been scorched.
Harry sighed. Time for Plan B. After eating a rice ball with a filling of pickled radish to restore his missing digits, he repaired his boot with a Mending Charm. There, all fixed. Conjuring his archery set, he pulled his quiver forward to count the number of arrows. It could hold thirty, and he'd started off the day with fifty—a number reached by buying a big bundle in Castle Town and looting as many as he could off of the Bokoblins and Stalkoblins that roved around the walled city. He'd stored the extra arrows in his magic bag and shuffled them over to his quiver as needed. Now, not counting the few Fire Arrows he had in his bag, he was down to twenty shorts for this whole dungeon.
'If I run out, we'll just have to see what happens from there,' he thought with a forced mental shrug. 'I've gone without a bow before, and I'll do it again if I have to.' The anxious urge to hoard resources chewed at the back of his mind, but he pushed it down with a reminder that he'd let it convince him into packing over two weeks' worth of food into his magic bag. Better to use the arrows when they were needed than save them until he died with his useless collection.
He drew an arrow and sighted the Beamos he'd just tried to blow up. Its eye was a pretty tricky target, constantly changing angles, and rather difficult to see in the small amount of light reflecting off the floor. Harry frowned and took careful breaths as he focused on his timing.
When the Beamos was close to facing him, the arrow left his bow. With a sharp ping that trailed off into a soft, bell-like ring, it bounced off of the Beamos's eye. The statue's spinning head paused, its orange face ring flickering. For a few seconds, it seemed to puzzle over what had happened. It soon resumed its mindless watching, however, no worse off than it had been before.
Harry sighed and dragged a hand down his face. Great, these were the damage-immune kind of Beamoses. In a room where the goal seemed to be killing all of them, no less.
He conjured his Magic Lamp, kicked it across the floor in the statue's direction, and stood there with his hands on his hips. There had to be some way to solve this. Dungeons were death-traps, but like most things in the Light World, operated on an inherent system of fairness. Any of Hyrule's puzzles could be defeated if he could just figure out how.
The Beamos continued revolving placidly in the firelight of his overturned lamp, immune to the burning oil spilled at its base. Harry studied the statue with a focused frown. If this thing was meant to be defeated, it had to have a weak point. Where, in all that electrified metal, was the weak point?
His eyes slid up the smooth, shiny vase of its body, noting the archaic moon-and-star Gerudo symbol engraved on it, and settled on its head. Its eye looked different from when it had been shooting at him. The orange ring surrounding the apparatus was dimmed, but the red center he'd seen before just plain wasn't there. Instead, he saw a dark circle of layered metal fins whose structure reminded him of a camera shutter.
Oh. The bloody statue kept its eye closed when it wasn't firing.
Harry exhaled and ruffled his shaggy hair. That red light in the middle was the weak point and this model of Beamos only revealed it when it was about to fire. So in order to defeat these, he'd have to shoot out their eyes a moment before they put a sizzling hole through him.
Alright, then. If the Beamoses turned out to be a theme in this place, it would be handy to have a technique for taking them out. Harry summoned his bag, rummaged through it for his Goron clothes, and pulled them on over the outfit he'd just had enchanted by Hora. The fire-resistance of the volcanic linen and leather might help protect him in the event he was lasered, and the iron plating on the boots would provide great defense for his legs in exchange for speed. He wouldn't be able to wear the extra clothes in this desert heat for long without keeling over, though, so he'd have to work fast.
After checking his placement in the room—picking a direction to run in that wouldn't get him shot by another Beamos—Harry nocked an arrow and crept up on his target. The Beamos noticed him when he was five steps closer to it. He forced himself to stay put as the orange ring of its eye illuminated and electricity prickled through the air. He bit down hard on his lip to help him keep his aim steady as the camera aperture spun open. He fired just as the red diode flashed on.
This time, the arrow stuck in the statue's head with a sharp crack of breaking glass. The automaton made a buzzing noise, purple smoke and reddish electricity pouring from the shattered light in the middle of its face. Lightning caught on the wooden shaft and feathers of the arrow and set them alight. Sensing an incoming monster death more spectacular than the usual puff of smoke, Harry unlatched his steel buckler from his belt and ducked behind it as he backed up along his pre-planned escape route.
The statue's head twitched spasmodically, then exploded. Metal fragments bounced off of his shield and pattered on his double-layer of clothes.
Harry cautiously approached the Beamos's remains. There were little chunks of electronics and whatever else scattered around its base—things he might be able to sell, if they weren't too busted. Picking around the automaton's corpse with great care, so as not to zap himself on the plugged-in vase still causing the air to tingle, he gained a thick cylinder of ruby crystal, a pair of really strong ring-shaped magnets, a big copper spring, and the golden bugle bell that the eye had been seated in. He hefted the metal cone and conjured his Magic Lamp to inspect it in the light. If he didn't know better, this thing was literally gold, not just gold-plated or gold-painted. It was definitely the densest thing he'd ever held, and the yellow metal dented a little when he took off a glove to press his thumbnail into it. He stowed it in his bag with an impressed whistle. Malfoy and Ron were going to flip when he showed them that. And there were five more Beamoses in here!
He put his shield back on his belt and approached the next Beamos in line with his bow drawn. His body was as tense as his bowstring as he got within five yards of it. Any second now.
The statue noticed him and paused. In the span of two seconds, the orange ring lit up, the camera shutter opened, and—
Harry released his arrow right as the red light blinked on. The arrow sank into the glass with a flash of red lightning. After ducking behind his shield and waiting patiently for the robot's head to explode, Harry went around slaying the rest of the Beamoses in the same fashion. It helped that they held their heads nice and still for a few seconds in between noticing him and trying to take a shot. So long as Harry also stood still and didn't let himself get distracted by thoughts of his limbs being sliced off, it wasn't too difficult to take these things out.
The last Beamos gave him some trouble, though. Harry stood in front of it, fired, and missed. His arrow bounced off the orange ring instead of landing in the red, just a couple of centimeters off. A jolt of unthinking panic made him run toward the robot instead of away as its laser fired. Harry jumped over the scarlet beam of light and dashed around the statue's base toward the other side.
Every hair on Harry's body prickled and stood up as he ran into what felt like an invisible cloud of electricity. A steady "bzzzz" chased at his heels, but didn't seem quite able to keep up. The Beamos's head was apparently worse at following him sideways than it was at flicking its laser out in a straight line. Was he actually going to be able to outrun it?
Harry hopped over the Beamos's lethal power line and barreled straight for the wall on the other side of the statue at full speed. Crashing into the wall would hurt less than catching one of those powerful blasts—that was for sure!
The laser's glow and buzz suddenly stopped. Harry slowed down to a cautious jog and glanced behind him. This Beamos was one of the ones near the corners of the room, so he would've had to be a lot closer to colliding with the wall in order to escape its range. What had happened?
He came to a halt and let out a surprised laugh when he saw the twitching, flickering Beamos's problem. It had cut through its own power cord! The hot red line carved across the floor had left a melted gap in the thick line of woven steel. Harry stood there with his arms crossed in satisfaction as the life bled out of the Beamos's dying eye. Yeah, served it right—
Oh, wait. He needed the head to blow up if he wanted the interesting things it held inside it. Did that mean he ought to cast a Mending Charm on the power cord so he could shoot its eye out?
Then again, if he could get the thing's whole head off, he'd be able to sell it to someone who knew the value of the electronics. Or he could turn it over to Link, who'd know how to take it apart and leave all the dinglebobs and whatnot intact.
With all the Beamoses reduced to inanimate giant vases, a silver key had fallen from the ceiling grate in the sunlit center of the room. At the same time, the metal spikes that had appeared over the room's two doors retracted into the floor. Harry ignored these facts as he monkeyed around the Beamos's head in search of ways to take it off its mounting. Sitting on top of the deactivated sentry's heart-shaped vase, he used his Magic Lamp to light his way as he inspected its construction. It looked like the head was mounted on a post threaded through the thick metal rings that made up its neck, so if he cut through that, the head would be his!
Briefly, he wondered what the hell he was doing. Why was he wasting time on disassembling a robot? He didn't know anything about robots, nor did he particularly care about this one. It was just made out of shiny and expensive materials, so he wanted it.
'Maybe it's because Yellow isn't here,' he thought. Yellow would have shrieked when he saw Harry placing his knee in the path of the dead robot's eye. Blue would have been the one to come up with the idea of cutting off the Beamos's head in the first place, and Red would have been cheering him on to stave off the boredom of waiting.
Harry laughed and switched his Magic Lamp for his Magic Rod. Well, since Yellow wasn't here, the foolishness his brother didn't see him getting up to wouldn't hurt him. In fact, it might earn them a couple hundred Rupees later! He shuffled around to put his torso on the back side of the Beamos's head, hooked his legs over the high-arching handle on either side of the vase, and leaned back to put himself at a better angle. "Diffindo!"
Ten Severing Charms and one instance of almost passing out while perched two meters off the ground later, Harry was the proud owner of a very heavy, (hopefully) very expensive robot head. He shoved it in his bag, then shakily clambered down from the Beamos's vase via one of the handles. Whoo, his head was spinning. That stubborn neck had taken a lot of magic to cut through.
As he recovered from his magic usage, Harry changed out of his Goron clothes. The airflow of his robes and the lightness of his Hylian boots were welcome sensations on his sweat-soaked skin. He was grateful he hadn't been wearing that double-layer of clothes when he'd gotten surprise-teleported to Gerudo Desert; without any time to stop and change while running around in that Gibdo-infested maze, he'd have surely overheated!
After gathering up as many intact spoils as he could find from the Beamoses he'd blown up, Harry stuck the silver dungeon key in his bag and left through the door he hadn't taken yet. He wrinkled his nose at the musty orange fog that rolled over him. This area was smaller than the last, and square instead of rectangular. Six large shapes stuck out of the mist carpeting the lower 80-ish centimeters of the floor—ornate, full-length mirrors identical to the ones he'd seen in the Hero of Lights' ruined puzzle. It looked like he and his brothers had been tossed into the place that had inspired that particular challenge.
A handful of fiery Keese roosted on the ceiling and fluttered over the orange fog. They were like roving spotlights in the dim room, their firelight illuminating the rippling cloud spread across the floor. It was a very cool aesthetic, actually. Red would have loved it in here.
The room was kept from being pitch black by glowing golden stones held up against the walls with brass brackets. Rather than a shaft of natural light, a Beamos occupied the middle of the room. The mirrors seemed to radiate out from it, in fact. On the far side of the room behind the Beamos, mounted between two stone doors as a lock, was a gold and orange sculpture of a sun that resembled a fancy hubcap. In the center of the hubcap lay a dull brown crystal that looked like a larger, unlit version of one of the fixtures on the walls.
Harry looked from the doors to the Beamos. Sun lock, mirrors, and a (rather hazardous) source of light. Yeah, this all made sense. He just had to swivel the mirrors to make the laser hit the sun.
He went up to the mirror farthest from the Beamos to experiment with manipulating it. Very quickly, he realized that adjusting a mirror and making a clean getaway from the Beamos's sights was going to be difficult. To make one of these things swivel, he had to hold on tight to the chest-height bar on the back and throw all of his weight opposite the direction he wanted the mirror to turn. Then the mirror would grate around and lock into one of four angle settings.
"I'm going to get a work-out in here," he muttered to himself, stretching out his shoulders. Not like that was anything new for one of these places.
Figuring he ought to check what the mirrors were currently doing in terms of reflection, he jogged toward the center of the haphazard, somewhat scattered spiral. The Beamos spotted him sooner than he'd expected. Harry jerked behind a mirror, then dropped to the ground as red light bounced chaotically around him. The laser wound up hitting the wall by the door he'd entered the room through, burning a glowing, molten mark into it.
Harry breathed out. Well, now this room was an extra level of nerve-wracking! He'd have to pay close attention to the angles here if he didn't want to catch a ricocheting laser to the chest.
What was the fog in here for, anyway? Beamos lasers weren't like flashlights; they could be seen crossing through perfectly clear air. There was no need for the smoke effects.
He pressed his lips together, mentally turning over the musty stink filling his nose. This fog couldn't be here by accident. It was a thick cloud of funny-colored water vapor in the middle of a building buried in a desert, not something naturally occurring. Was it poison gas, maybe? Or had the people who'd made the Beamoses not thought about how their lasers worked? Was it flammable? Because he really hoped not; there were a lot of fire hazards in here.
Two passing Fire Keese swooped at him. Harry held onto the handle of the mirror he was hiding behind to swat at them with the sword in his other hand. He wasn't about to let one of these nuisances chase him out of his cover so the Beamos to take him out. No, he'd learned better.
Harry conjured his Magic Rod and aimed at the monstrous eyeball bats roosting on the ceiling. "Aguamenti!" The column of water that rocketed out of his staff sent up clouds of steam as it put the flaming monsters out. When the water fell away, three startled normal Keese were left in its wake.
Then, as the water loudly smacked against the floor, it cut straight through the fog. A clear slice of un-obscured ground and wall were visible for a couple of seconds before the rest of the fog filled it back in. Harry gave his staff a considering look. That spell didn't seem like it was the most effective for clearing the fog, but the fact that the mist could be messed with gave him hope that there was a way to clear it out if it turned out to be a hazard. Maybe this dungeon would give him an ancient Gerudo vacuum, or something.
Snickering to himself at the idea, Harry backed up to put himself out of the Beamos's range. He slayed the Keese before they could hassle him by conjuring his Vine Whip and snatching them out of the air with it. Once he had one of the little monsters caught, he wrenched his whip down and slammed the fragile little bat into the unforgiving ground.
After he took out his fifth Keese, a soft whirring noise from nearby made him tense up and look around. It was the distinctive, but difficult-to-notice sound of a lurking Floormaster. The fact that it was loud enough for him to hear meant the monster had to be really close by.
But he couldn't see. The fog was at its most opaque where it pressed against the floor—right where one would have to look in order to spot a Floormaster's shadow slinking around. 'That's what the fog is for,' he thought, drawing his sword and squinting fiercely into the orange cloud wafting around his waist. It was a bloody smokescree—
Harry staggered as an invisible force—a transmitted sensation from one of his brothers—smashed into the back of his head. A second later, he was violently yanked off the ground. His feet went flying up as he sailed backward. He swung his weapon behind him, attempting to slash the hand encasing his torso without turning his blade toward himself, it was already too late. Floormasters had to be taken out before they got ahold of you, preferably from afar; Harry had never attempted to fight one at short range with his sword for that exact reason.
He shouted in frustration as he fell through the chaotic black and purple vortex that was the monster's internal portal. After running himself to exhaustion in that maze, he'd finally made some progress, only to get knocked back to zero! Where was this thing taking him, anyway? What was this dungeon's equivalent to the Great Hall entrance?
The portal threw him out into darkness. Laid out flat on his back, Harry couldn't see his hand in front of his face, let alone his surroundings.
He flipped himself onto his hands and knees so fast that he might have earned a couple of bruises. No. He couldn't be back in this place. Not the maze!
His lamp appeared in his hand with the barest thought as he scrambled to his feet. Plain sandstone brick walls, ceiling, and floor, indistinguishable from one another except for whatever angle they were built in. No light fixtures whatsoever. Not even orange fog, which Harry would have taken as a reassuring sight at this point. Green stars swayed in the blackness beyond his lantern's light.
"Not again," Harry whimpered softly to himself. His aunt and uncle had taught him very early on not to cry or throw fits, but he was perched on the edge of wailing and beating his head against the wall. It wasn't like anyone was around to see him act so shamefully. And, at this rate, there was no telling when he might see one of his brothers again. Might as well lose his mind while he had the chance.
A light suddenly interrupted the darkness some meters off down the hall. The horrible grating of metal on stone accompanied the line of sparks dragging toward him.
Then the scraping stopped. The sparks went out. Running footsteps clacked down the corridor instead.
Harry let out one of the screams building up in his chest—a sound that was equal parts fear and rage. He summoned his Dragon Hammer, shifted his weight from his legs and hips like Avoka had recently shown him, and heaved it into the dark. At the peak of the swing, when his weapon's rocket was ablaze, he let go of the handle. The Dragon Hammer became a blue spiral flying down the hall. Harry went running after it.
There was a deafening crack and a clatter as his hammer found its target. Harry ran past the sound, summoned his Magic Lamp, and kept sprinting down the hall. He was back to square one, running around this labyrinth being chased by monsters he couldn't both fight and see at the same time due to the limitations of his magical tool wheel, but at least he knew there was hope of proceeding. This time, he knew the maze had an exit. All he needed to do was find that door again.
Notes:
-The Gibdos in this fic are a mixture of the classic lumbering mummy/quick skeleton type found in OoS/OoA and Wind Waker Stalfoses. Their swords are like a huge, hooked, more cartoonish Egyptian khopesh
-The "fried vegetable bun" Harry ate was a Sheikah oyaki stuffed with finely minced Hylian Shroom, Hearty Truffle, and Hylian Herb.
-Insulated wires are simply Not A Thing in Hyrule. Maybe they'd been figured out by the peak of the Sheikah Civilization Era, but certainly not at this point or at the time Medusa Warren was built. Current Gerudo electronics are built in such a way that they have stone safe-zones that can be touched, but plugging/unplugging and changing out household battery spheres out must be done using Magnetic Gloves.
-The visions of Beamoses that Harry had were Skyward Sword ones (chop-and-stab), A Link to the Past ones (invulnerable stage hazard), and Ocarina of Time ones (vulnerable to Bombs).
Next month: A cultural exchange, temple puzzles, and a worrying magical encounter.