Last month: Harry had to navigate solo through the darkness of Medusa Warren, battling his own fears as he fought to survive the Gibdos patrolling the labyrinth. In a brief escape from the maze, he came across ancient Beamos automatons more powerful than those he's encountered before...
I've animated the ChuChus! Check out my "pixel art" tag on garden-eel-draws to watch them go! I've included those gifs as part of a compilation post for some of my newer/updated animations. Pixel art of the Medusa Warren's rooms has also been posted under that tag, as well as the more specific "dungeon 6" tag.
Content warning for mentions of the Harrys' upbringing and Draco's likelihood of getting hate-crimed.
Ron hated to admit it, and never would have said so out loud to anyone, but this Avocado bloke was kind of intimidating. The boy had strolled into the Gryffindor common room with squared shoulders and his arms folded behind his back, stony-faced and controlled in a way that no thirteen-year-old was supposed to be. His narrowed scarlet eyes had flicked around the room, halting to pierce Ron with enough intensity to make him jump. Then, striding forward with all that grim confidence, he'd asked Ron in confidential tones if he could ask him a few questions.
It had felt rather like being "invited" to an interrogation. How a kid with Malfoy's delicate, punchable features and waifish build managed to emanate such a strong Auror-like presence, Ron had no idea. Maybe it was his creepily perfect posture and the way his hands kept tucking into his weapon-concealing sleeves.
They went up to Ron's dormitory. Hermione was there with the Hylian Bestiary sitting next to her, poring over music she'd sketched out on the mysteriously "acquired" Sheikah Slate she kept hiding from any Zora visitors to Gryffindor Tower. Neville, Seamus, and Dean had gone outside earlier to experiment with the vial of Exploding Solution that the latter two had teamed up to buy from Fred and George. They'd brought Neville along as a responsible supervisor.
Hermione smiled when she saw them walk in. "Avoka!" she greeted happily. "Welcome to Gryffindor Tower. Did you have any difficulty finding it?"
When she called his name, Avoka froze up and blinked, apparently startled. "Draco told me what floor it was on and the talking portraits gave me the other directions I needed," he said after a short pause. "Why do your paintings talk, by the way? Are they spirits?"
"With wizard portraits, the person who had them painted magically imbues them with some of their personality. It makes the portrait act like how they would have in life, to a limited degree," Hermione explained.
Avoka's big Light World eyes went as round as coins, losing their air of intimidating seriousness. Briefly, he looked like a normal kid his age. "You can make living simulacrums out of paint?" he asked.
"Oh, no, it's the magic that does it, not the medium. Photographs can be enchanted the same way."
"The more I learn about your magic, the gladder I am you all live in another dimension," Avoka said with a shudder. "Absolutely mad, the amount of power any one of you possesses."
Ron snorted. What a Muggle thing to say.
Like, sure, any one mage had the potential to wield great power, but few actually jumped through all the academic hoops needed to reach it. The average person wasn't exactly the next coming of Merlin; they tended to use the spells they found useful and didn't bother doing the research to learn anything too complicated. All the difficult stuff they learned after taking their O.W.L.s dribbled out their ears once they graduated school. It was in a mage's nature to carve out a magical niche for themselves with the handful of spells they needed and comfortably roost there.
Ron's mother was great with household spells and potions for healing and cleaning. His father was good at charming objects, casting Memory Charms, and undoing Dark spells, thanks to his job in the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office. If his parents needed something like an unusual potion or an internally-expanded bag, they'd save up to buy it instead of trying to do that specialized magic themselves. Even the people who made the complicated potions and Bags of Holding had their own magical niches, in which they knew everything about the magic related to their work, but didn't have much use for fancy spells outside their field.
The kinds of mages who became magical legends were the sort that chased cursed books across the world and made lots of enemies in their pursuit of knowledge. People like Professor Dumbledore, for example. The man knew a whole lot, and had a whole library in his office, but he'd probably gone through a lot of strife just to learn magic he wasn't going to have much daily use for. Most people didn't have famed nemeses they clashed with every decade or so; there wasn't any point in them breaking their backs under unnecessary reading material.
"Just because we can, that doesn't mean we do," Ron said. Avoka turned to give him a curious look. "Sure, anybody could learn how to make the inside of a suitcase as large as a palace if they studied hard enough. Who's going to put in all the time to study that, though, when you can just buy one from a guy who already knows how to make one?" Ron went on. "Some spells are kind of like…er, what's a thing you'd get…Like making a sword. You could go through all the bother of learning how to make a sword, and now you can make swords! That's cool. But if all you need is the one sword and you don't really want to make them, then why bother learning? Just go get a sword from the sword guy."
Avoka lifted his chin and closed his eerie red, too-big eyes as he considered that explanation. Opening his eyes, he remarked, "So you are good at explaining things for beginners. The Harrys said you were."
Warmth bloomed in Ron's chest. "They said that about me?"
The ninja nodded. "They often talk about you and Hermione when they aren't talking about one of their brothers. I have to assume your relationship to Harry is your world's analogue to my relationship with Link."
"Harry's double is best friends with a Malfoy?" Ron squawked. He had yet to see Link, but now all he could imagine was a taller version of Harry with slicked-back hair and a snooty sneer. Harry had told him that Link was friends with this bloke, but best friends? Ron had trouble believing it.
Avoka clicked his tongue. "Despite the fact that everyone assumes I'm rich for some reason, I'm a no-last-name ward of the state without any family property to my name or even a registered family tree. I think you'll find I'm a bit more down-to-earth than the spoiled brat I happen to share a face with," he drawled in the same tones that Malfoy would use to talk up his pedigree. "Besides, Malfoy isn't that bad under all the garbage his parents shoveled onto him. I've got a magical sense for malice, and that kid is way more bark than bite. Like me, to be honest."
"You punched him in the throat earlier," Ron pointed out. It wasn't anything beyond what Ron might have done if Malfoy had started mouthing off about Harry or Hermione, but Ron was the kind of person who barked as much as he bit. If he was going to pick a fight, he was going to see it through even if he knew he might lose.
"Yeah, I gave him a reason to stop talking as opposed to really hurting him," the boy replied. "I could have hurt him if I wanted. There are a lot of awful, painful things I could do. But I'd rather bluff someone into backing off or give them a warning tap than go through with a threat." He looked down and played with one of his hair loops, color rising in his cheeks. "Admittedly, I got angrier than I should have. I oughtn't have hit him for being rude, only threatened him into shutting up. I just really hate it when people talk that way about Link."
Ron's face screwed up as he tried to recall what Malfoy had said before getting hit. It was hard to listen to the words coming out of Malfoy's face when the Slytherin was in the mood to pick a fight. It all started sounding like "hex me, hex me, hex me" after a while.
Hermione looked a bit uncomfortable. "Malfoy was, er, calling Link intellectually disabled," she said tentatively. "Does that happen often?"
"My friend has a disability that yours apparently lacks, so yeah, he moves and speaks a certain way," Avoka snapped, his eyes blazing. "You got a problem with that?"
"Oh, no, not at all!" Hermione waved her hands in innocent protest. "Regardless of whatever difficulties Link might have, Draco shouldn't have said that. He earned that knock you gave him."
The fire in Avoka's gaze subsided. "Well, that's alright, then," he sniffed. "No one knows what the problem is, since Link doesn't have the physical signs of the syndromes that typically limit speech and coordination. For whatever reason, he just has troubles with words and understanding the finer points of conversation. You know, the kinds of things that stuck-up people like Draco put way too much stock in. Tch." He crossed his arms. "If you ever meet Link and he tells you I have a bad habit of knife-threatening people, let it be known that it's those judgmental jerks I'm usually waving a knife at. If anyone wants to have a go at my friend, they'll have to get through me first."
While Avoka's earlier statement that he was Link's equivalent to Ron or Hermione had originally sounded absurd, Ron could kind of see it now. Because this bloke might have gone about things a little differently, but he seemed to be just as loyal to his best mate as Ron was to Harry. The notion of any version of Harry being circled by a protective version of Malfoy was just very weird to think about.
"What is Link like, if I may ask?" Hermione asked, leaning forward on Blue's bed. She flicked Zelda's book open as she spoke. "You're the only one of us who's seen both him and Harry in the same room."
Ron was curious, too. Avoka seemed quite different from Malfoy, after all, even though some elements of their personalities lined up. The bossiness and aristocratic poise were still there, but…more positive, somehow. Like Avoka was the kind of rich kid who might toss you a Galleon to treat yourself with at the sweets shop and tell you to keep the change because he could afford it.
Avoka perked up at Hermione's question. "Oh, you can always ask about that!" he said brightly. "Link is a really sweet person! He's always quick to help, and a good listener. A great cook, too—he knows all kinds of recipes, since he's got family from all over the place. And he's wicked smart. Bluesmithing—what he does when he isn't blacksmithing—is a really difficult branch of enchanting magic, which is already hard enough on its own! He's taught himself all these languages for his spell-crafting, and he knows a lot about the enchanting magic used in other cultures." As he spoke, all of Avoka's stiff gruffness melted away, leaving a normal thirteen-year-old who was really chuffed to gush about his best mate. "Link's sister is a really nice lady, and she basically raised him on her own—"
"Link has a sister?" Ron cut in.
"If his sister had to raise him, does that mean he's an orphan, too?" Hermione inquired.
"Yes, Link has a sister named Gaebora. Like the owl in the legends. She's over a decade older than him and did all of the raising even back when they lived with their grandma, so she's basically his mum," Avoka explained. "And yeah, he's an orphan. The Yiga caused an accident at his parents' lab when he was only a year old. A Blue Flame furnace meltdown, to be specific. If you ever get the chance to go to Hateno, look for the hill that's melted flat on the top. That'll be where the lab was."
Hermione sucked a breath through her teeth. "So Blue Flame really is like nuclear power," she murmured.
Ron felt a bit peaky. "Doesn't Link's house have one of those furnace things?" He'd overheard Zelda and Hermione gabbling about it after Blue had passed that information along.
Avoka shrugged. "They're safe as long as you don't screw around with them. Most of the Yiga are bloody idiots—you kind of have to be, to worship Ganondorf—so I imagine one of them bumbled into letting the demon fire out of its cage," he said. "The Harrys have mentioned that an evil wizard killed their parents, so I'm guessing that's their version of what happened to Link. Was that wizard your world's match to the King of Evil, or a servant like one of the Yiga?"
"Voldemort himself went to kill Harry's family," Hermione said in a hushed voice. "Harry's mother performed a special form of magic when she died, though Harry hasn't told us the specifics. Whatever spell she used, it made Voldemort's Killing Curse reflect off of Harry and hit its caster instead."
"Not that it kept the evil git down," Ron groused, crossing his arms. "He's floating around as some kind of ghost, we reckon. He's shown up in one way or another during the last couple of years."
The ninja laughed. "'Voldemort'? That's a made-up villain name if I've ever heard one." He tapped his chin. "Vol-de-mort. Flight from death. Or 'Flight of death', if you're trying too hard to be cool. Sounds like a wannabe immortal, a guy with a rather high estimation of his own scariness, or a coward. Or all three!" He snickered to himself.
Ron and Hermione stared at him.
"What? It's a phrase in Hytopé, what they speak up in Hytopia. Or, er, 'French'? That's what Draco called it," Avoka said. "I mean, it could be a clunky-sounding combination of random syllables, but if there's any sense to be made of the name that guy gave himself, that's how I'd translate it."
Hermione snatched up her Sheikah Slate, did some poking around, and then slid a stone stylus out of the side to start scribbling something down.
"So, Link's sister?" Ron prompted. "Is she, like, actually nice?" He didn't know much about children being mistreated by their parents, but he was quite familiar with arseholes playing nice in public. His mum was plugged in to all the local gossip, and she knew what husbands were smacking their wives around behind closed doors and what neighbors left their pets outside in the winter to freeze. He was certain that Harry's relatives were people like that. Harry had clearly been trained to keep up appearances.
Avoka gave him a funny look. "Yes…?" he said. "I mean, if she weren't, Link wouldn't have turned out nearly as well as his did. His disability makes a lot of things harder for him, so his sister gave him special homeschooling and crafted all the aids he needed. They both brainstormed the best ways for him to handle his troubles, so he has a lot of work-arounds to use. If he'd been raised by someone who didn't care, I…" A disturbed grimace crossed his face. "I'd rather not think about it. It would have been really bad, let's just say."
"Harry doesn't have a sister," Hermione told Avoka. "Instead, he has an aunt, an uncle, and a cousin that he lives with."
"They put prison bars over his windows last year," Ron said. "We had to yank them off in order to get him out of there."
"And when he had to face a magical creature that turns into one's worst fears, it turned into this uncle," Hermione solemnly added. The Hylian Bestiary rattled, and Hermione looked over at it. "Zelda said his hands were burned pretty badly at some point a while ago, so they're scarred up in a way that's hard to see," she said. "There's no guarantee that his relatives caused that, but it's a bit suspicious, isn't it?"
"He's so skinny, too, when he comes back to school after the summer recess," Ron mused. This year had been different, since Harry had spent some time in Diagon Alley over the summer, but he'd been scarily bony at the start of first and second year. It wasn't like his friend ever had much meat on him to begin with!
The lines around Avoka's eyes tightened. "Link has been doing his best to feed them, but they're really cagey about being given anything. They keep trying to pay him back in ingredients, and he's been pretending not to notice as long as it gets them to eat something," he said. "Green also kind of seizes up whenever I give him a compliment during training. At first I thought it was just something carried over from Link, but no, they've got their own hang-ups. It's like they don't understand niceness when it isn't a give-and-take transaction. The only reason Green hasn't tried to pay me for his training is because I told him I'd take it as an insult if he did." His eyes curled at the corners with mischief. "That shut him up quick."
"We're trying to arrange some help for him," Hermione said. "There are a couple of adults here that we trust to do things in a way that won't get him in trouble with his family."
"The trouble is, Harry doesn't want help." Ron crossed his arms. "It doesn't make sense, but that's how it is. If we bring up anything about how he might've been treated wrong, he panics and changes the subject. Or snaps at us to mind our own business and stop asking questions. Depends on the color."
"Ah, so the stubbornness is a shared trait," Avoka remarked. "Link is like that. He's got certain things he just plain will not budge on unless he comes around to changing his mind on the subject himself. If you push too hard, he'll flip out in a really bad way that hurts him—it has to do with how his disability works—and the next time you bring it up, he'll turn around and walk right out of the room. The best way to get that boulder to move is to sprinkle in incontrovertible facts that go directly against whatever he's got twisted in his head." He shrugged. "Of course, my Link is a pretty logical, rational sort. Bluesmithing is as much a science as it is a form of magic, and it's a vital part of how he thinks. Your Harry might be a lot more emotional and squishy, prone to rationalizing unreasonable ideas in the face of opposing evidence." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I've got a fair amount of experience doing that myself."
Ron regarded the boy curiously. Another difference between this ninja and Malfoy was that Avoka was startlingly honest. He seemed to understand himself well, and wasn't afraid to state his flaws. Unlike Malfoy, whom it was still difficult to wring even a basic apology from.
"Speaking of people who have problems, though, I wanted to talk to you about someone I just found out is in trouble," Avoka stated, squaring his shoulders. That previous authoritative Auror gravitas fell back around him like a comfortable cloak. "What is your degree of acquaintance with Draco Malfoy?"
"What's our what?" Ron asked. The way Avoka talked was odd; he flipped between normal and fancy speech like he was equally familiar with both and had trouble telling the difference.
"We've worked with him to solve dungeons before and he saved Harry's life when he was split across dimensions," Hermione replied. "We're aware of his heritage, and have been keeping it secret from the rest of the student body. I'd consider him a friendly, if somewhat awkward acquaintance."
Oh, so that was what the weird phrasing had meant. "He's been more decent lately," Ron said. "I'd still say he's a blood-supremacist, old-money brat, but he's mostly stopped using slurs, he's been less racist, and he hasn't been nearly as much of a prick, so he's at least getting better by his standards." He shrugged. "I wouldn't roast his arse over a fire unless he did something to deserve it."
Avoka breathed out. "Alright, I can work with that." He folded his arms behind his back and stood with his feet shoulder's-width apart. "Draco is at risk in his own House," he reported. "There are students at this school that he would describe as fully-fledged followers of your world's Dark Lord. He believes that, should news of his recent difficulties get out," he cast a wary glance toward the door, "those classmates would attempt to kill him."
Ron nodded, unsurprised. Slytherin was the House practically every Death Eater had been part of. Salazar Slytherin's belief in blood-purity nonsense had tainted the whole institution. There were some decent Slytherins, but they were far outweighed by the number of bigoted, pedigree-obsessed purebloods who'd throw their lot in with the first warlord who gave them the chance to murder Muggles scot-free. The rot in that House went all the way down to its founder, and there wasn't any way to fix it as far as Ron knew.
Hermione gasped and put a hand over her mouth. "There are Death Eaters at this school?!" she cried in horror. "Sure, some of the Slytherins are rather open in their dislike of muggleborns, but I didn't realize the state of things was so dire. Why didn't Malfoy say anything about it?"
"Because he didn't think we'd care, obviously," Ron told her.
He did care, a bit. Malfoy was Malfoy, but he was also an exotic half-breed in a den of blood-supremacists. If that glamour half-disguising him decided to quit fully in the middle of the common room, then the boy was beyond screwed. After all the posturing he'd done over the last two years, he'd made himself known across the school as the richest, purest, most illustrious pureblood there. If he got found out, the weight of that reputation would drag him so deep into the mud that there would be no escape. Nowhere in the school would be safe for him to hide. It wouldn't just be Slytherins after him; while Slytherin had the highest concentration, every House had its arseholes. Muggleborns, half-bloods, and purebloods alike would all want a piece of him for different vindictive reasons, some of them having nothing to do with Death Eater ideals. Malfoy had staked his claim of being better than anyone else that loudly.
Malfoy had poured all that effort into peacocking around, and for what? Being afraid of the people he'd used to look up to because—surprise!—he wasn't as pure as he'd thought? Having every classmate turned into a potential bully because he'd suddenly gotten knocked almost to the bottom of the ladder that made up wizarding society through no fault of his own? Living in constant fear that at any moment, the illusion protecting him might fail in front of one of people who'd want to kill him for his "betrayal" of their stupid philosophy? What a great reward!
Ron hadn't said anything about it because it involved a whole lot of politics that he didn't know how to navigate. He was a pureblood with a long pedigree that included the Black family (as many lineages did), but he wasn't that kind of pureblood. The complicated social dances that people like the Malfoys bothered with were well above his head. All he knew was that there was a delicate balance to such things, easily shifted by a few words pointing in one way or the other. Ron didn't have the fancy-speak needed to handle Malfoy's problems. Hermione, who was even less subtle than him, would surely cause a disaster if she stormed in and started lecturing people.
"How can we help?" Hermione asked. "I could talk to the Headmaster. We chat fairly often so he can hear what Zelda has to say. He can't read her section of the Bestiary."
"What's Dumbledore going to do, though?" Ron asked. "Expel those guys? It's not like he can send them home, unless he can get them to hop on a train all the way to Outset Isle and ask one of the Harrys to show them where the invisible portal is. Or should he imprison them in the dungeons for as long as we're here? Good luck doing that, with Snape around. Whether he's a former Death Eater or not, he always protects his precious Snakes."
"I was thinking your Headmaster could put them on a list, maybe. Not capture or interrogate them, since that might tip them off about Malfoy and cause him more trouble. If the Harrys can manage to open a portal that's accessible enough for those of you who want to evacuate the castle to go home, those students could be discreetly sent away and asked not to return to this school next year. In the meantime, maybe Professor Snape could keep a closer watch on Draco inside his House and you guys could keep an eye on him in the halls. You're all known associates of his, it seems like, so it wouldn't be too suspicious," Avoka said. "I don't know your world's laws, and I don't think these kids Draco's scared of have technically done anything yet, but I don't think it's safe to leave this alone." His gaze sharpened and his voice went grim. "My mother died because someone with Yiga sympathies was left unchecked in a place like this. I'd rather the same didn't happen to an innocent student."
Huh. That was a much more light-fingered plan than any that Ron or Hermione would have come up with. It was less doing and more watching and waiting. Quietly setting up a trap to be snapped shut at the right time. The kind of thing a posh kid who understood all that political claptrap would come up with.
"Malfoy's definitely not innocent," Ron scoffed, "but he doesn't deserve to get murdered, either." While he did think living in fear for a little while like the Muggles he wanted to subjugate was a helpful experience for Malfoy, Ron wasn't cruel enough to want that fear to have a real and life-threatening source. No, he'd rather the prat were just mortified about having pink hair and big silver freckles like a pale, fishy Weasley. Sadly, magical society wasn't the kind of place where such things were seen as the minor issue they were.
'That's what happens when you let a blood-purity preacher be one of the four shining pillars of the one school that practically everyone in the British Isles goes to,' he thought sourly. He couldn't imagine what the other Founders had seen in that git Salazar Slytherin.
Hermione's brow had knitted at Avoka's suggestion. "That seems like hardly doing anything at all," she fretted. "Draco would still be stuck in that House with who knows how many dangerous people around him. Wouldn't it be safer if he were switched to Ravenclaw? He's almost as bookish as I am, so he'd be able to suit that House's philosophy just fine."
Ron gave her an exasperated look. "Hermione, you don't just change Houses," he told her. Because just about every kid in magical Britain went to Hogwarts, one's House affiliation was something that followed them through life. It was possible to be re-Sorted, certainly, but there was a certain stigma attached to abandoning one's original House. It would be on one's educational record forever as a mark of infidelity that some people were petty enough to care about.
"The Harrys were going to, earlier this year," Hermione argued. "Why can't Draco?"
"Because three of the Harrys don't exist on paper and it'd be mad to declare that there were suddenly four Harry Potters to the Ministry if this is a temporary thing, so it wouldn't have gone on Harry's record," Ron explained. "The kinds of people Malfoy would want to work with out of school would see a Slytherin who went Ravenclaw and turn their noses up."
Hermione and Avoka gave him baffled looks. "Why?" they asked in unison before exchanging a glance.
Ron sighed. There wasn't really a reason why, other than "because". A lot of things were "because" in magical society because magically preserved records were harder to lose than Muggle ones and witches and wizards lived a good forty years longer than Muggles. Tradition was hard to get away from when the people in charge wouldn't let any of it go and had the capacity to hold onto it for so long.
"It's how things are," he said. "Like Malfoy's big problem. It's part of how everything is built and how people think. All you can do is work with those rules, even if they're dumb. You'll cause a lot of trouble if you don't."
Hermione frowned at him. "That was a rather Harry-ish thing to say, Ron."
Ron blinked. "Er…" He supposed it was. Harry was usually talking about his family, though, not all of society. One of those things was a problem small enough to do something about. Changing a whole country's way of life, even in one tiny way, was a lot harder. "I think we should focus on stuff we can actually pull off, is all," he said. "If you burn down the school to eventually make things better, how much is that going to help Malfoy in the meantime?"
That got a guilty wince out of Hermione. "Oh. Right."
Avoka was watching their exchange with shrewd interest. Ron gave him a level stare, and the ninja awkwardly cleared his throat. "Well, then, we have a plan! Kind of. I'll still have to talk to Draco's guardian about it," he said. "For now, while the boring meeting between all the adults is going on, I've been asking around to see what living as a mage in your country is like. The Princess was curious, so she asked me to do something of a cul—"
Hermione gasped and hopped off of Blue's bed. "A cultural exchange?" she exclaimed in delight. "Oh, finally! I've been hoping to have some time to sit down with Prince Tiamus and talk at length, but we're both kept so busy between the classes we're running and his duties to his kingdom. And you work at Hyrule Castle! The heart of Hyrule! You must know so much about this place!"
Avoka leaned back a little from Hermione's enthusiasm. His eyes flicked over toward Ron for a nervous moment. "M-Maybe? I've read probably a quarter of the castle library," he said. "Erm, odd question, but why aren't you scared of me?"
That was a good question. This boy was a natural at radiating an aura of being bigger than he was, intentionally or not. Despite his attempts at speaking casually, he acted more like an adult than someone who, according to Yellow, was a month younger than the Harrys. Avoka's quick hands, short temper, and fondness for knives made it even clearer that he wasn't someone to be messed with. He was a difficult kid to let one's guard down around, scrawny little twig that he was.
Hermione blinked at the ninja. "Why would I be scared of you?" she asked. "You haven't given me any reasons to be so far. I mean, if Draco had spoken about Harry or Ron like that a few months ago, I might've decked him in the face. He was being quite rude."
Avoka looked askance at Ron, who gave him a shrug. Hermione was Hermione. Sometimes she had way more respect for teachers than was healthy, and sometimes she was perfectly fine with setting their scariest professor on fire or rifling through his cabinets. When their Defense teacher had turned up with werewolf features that would have terrified anyone else, she'd accepted his invitation to tea without hesitation. In short, Hermione had her own definition of what counted as intimidating and Avoka the young Auror didn't seem to fall under it.
"Sure," Avoka said with uncertain cheer. "Well, what do you find most interesting about magical society, Hermione?"
Hermione tucked some of her bushy hair behind her ear, took a deep breath, and then they were off to the races.
Blue sat cross-legged on the ledge he'd managed to monkey his way up to and ignored the monsters clamoring below as he studied the puzzle set before him.
Four pressure-switches that needed to be held down, and only one Harry to do it with. That was his conundrum.
The room was a little overlarge for a puzzle that was so simple at first sight. It contained not only the switches, but also a generous handful of yellow and dark purple ChuChus currently trying to ooze their way up to where he was. The faded remains of gold and red silk festooned the walls where they hadn't fallen to the floor and the stone tiles underfoot were decorated with fancy sun pinwheels. Blue imagined this room had been grand, once. Now it was full of googly-eyed slime.
He took his sword off his back and threw it down at the cluster of monsters. It sailed through one of the purple ChuChus, which broke apart and reformed as the blade passed through it. "What are you?" Blue asked, folding his arms and scowling at it.
The Yellow ChuChus were electrified annoyances, but things he knew he could slay if he kept his distance. These new purple ones were a total mystery. While they weren't electrified and didn't appear to be any smarter or more dangerous than the average jelly monster, they were immortal for some reason. What was that about?
Blue pursed his lips. First he'd deal with the things he understood, and then he'd address the ones that he didn't. Conjuring his archery set, he picked off the Yellow ChuChus with his remaining arrows. After bringing their spoils of money and skin-tingling golden jelly to him with a Summoning Charm, he leapt over the four purple monsters remaining and landed in a roll. Time to address the next thing he could maybe do something about.
He stepped on one of the pressure switches, checking to see what level of weight would set it off. It took quite a lot, unfortunately. If Blue wanted to trigger it, he had to hop onto the whole thing. The pressure he could exert with one foot wasn't nearly enough.
Conjuring his bag, he rifled through both his belongings and his memory. "What do I have that weighs close to what I do?" he wondered aloud. His Dragon Hammer, heavy as it was to him, only weighed four kilos. There were quite a few gemstones and other cool rocks he'd stuffed into his bag and hadn't yet sold, but he couldn't balance enough of those on a switch for their combined weight to press it.
A cold, sticky, heavy glob of ChuChu knocked him to the floor while he was lost in thought. Blue's shoulder thudded hard against the tiles, though his enchanted clothing made his landing a touch less painful than it could have been. He clawed at the dark goo threatening to ooze across his face before conjuring his Magic Rod. "Depulso!" The monster flew off of him and splattered against the ceiling. It reformed in the air, splashed against the ground, and popped right back up. As it approached Blue, along with the other three monsters the boy was steadily backing away from, it slid over one of the pressure switches.
The switch went down.
"Ah, I see!" Blue said, thumping his fist into his palm. That was one part of the problem figured out; he knew what weights he was meant to use in the absence of his siblings. Now, how was he meant to get these things to stay put long enough to set all the switches?
Jogging backward to avoid the immortal monsters sliming after him, Blue reassessed the room. There were three notable features: the switches, these odd ChuChus, and the flammable-looking cloth on the walls. He'd figured out the first two, so…
Blue aimed his Magic Rod at one of the sagging curtains. "Incendio!"
The dry, delicate silk lit up eagerly with flames. It was fully alight in seconds, and crumbling to ash within a minute. When it had burned away, a purple Rupee was left in its wake. "Ooh, now isn't that an incentive?" Blue remarked. "Accio Rupee."
After fumbling to catch the money he'd thrown at himself, Blue ran around setting the rest of the room's decaying decorations on fire. Once everything was burning or in ash on the floor, Blue paused to admire his work. There was something dangerously satisfying about setting things on fire. Fire represented a lot of things he'd never gotten to enjoy much of. Light and warmth. The ability to defend himself. The ability to destroy.
Dudley had gotten to break his toys and break his mother's vases and break Harry's meager belongings without consequence. Harry had never gotten to break anything, even things that were supposedly his, without paying dearly. Blue watched the fire burn with beaming, childish delight.
As the curtains crumbled, a square of light appeared where Blue was standing. He looked down curiously at his feet, then studied the motes of dust floating around him to trace the source. One of the previously covered walls had a square hole in it. Within lay a brightly shining mirror that stung Blue's eyes when he caught glimpse of it.
'There wouldn't be a mirror system bouncing light in from the outside if it weren't useful for something,' Blue mused. Like the weird ChuChus and switches, it had a purpose. And, since those blackish-purple ChuChus seemed interestingly well-suited for blending into the darkness of this place, he had an idea of what to do.
"Levio." Blue caught one of the monsters wobbling after him with a Hover Charm and mentally nudged it over to the light. As soon as the dark jelly crossed the boundary of the bright square, it turned to gray stone. Suddenly, Blue was holding a ChuChu-shaped statue.
"Yes!" he crowed. He set the ChuChu down on a switch, then applied the same treatment to two more of the monsters before hopping on the last switch himself.
In a loud, echoing clamor that made Blue cover his ears, a stairway revealed itself. Slices of the wall on one side of the room banged down one by one to form a dark, narrow passage. Blue hurried to it, eager to proceed. Summoning his Magic Lamp, which he'd been getting quite a lot of use out of down here, he walked down the steep descent.
The tight access tunnel let out into a wide room with a low ceiling. Brass-framed mirrors stood out of a thick blanket of orange mist like London's tall buildings in a morning fog. Blue wrinkled his nose at the musty stink. He hoped this haze wasn't from some kind of mold.
He called up his Magic Lamp, hoping it might make it easier to see anything below knee-level. Small monsters like Octoroks and Ropes would have been perfectly suited for a room like this. There were other monsters, too, like ChuChus and Floormasters, which could tuck into a form low to the ground before popping out for a surprise attack.
The Magic Lamp didn't do much to visually cut through the fog, only turning it a brighter orange, but it did clear a small hole in the thick cloud roiling around him. Blue took a grateful breath of the less foul air before beginning to creep through the room. His methodical pace turned out to be a good idea, as random knickknacks seemed to be scattered all over the floor. Small clay pots, large rocks, and what looked like human bones formed frequent tripping hazards. Blue winced at the sight of the bones. It looked like he wasn't the first adventurer to find this place.
This room's theme seemed to be mirrors, mirrors, everywhere. Ten of the bulky things stood at seemingly random points around the room. He stopped to study one, noting the sturdy brass handle on the back and the design of its base. Casting his gaze across the field of mist, he saw a door with a flat metal sculpture of a sun mounted on it, with a smaller mirror sitting on a pedestal a few meters away. The vanity-sized mirror stood under a shaft of bright sunlight, which it reflected onto the large, swiveling mirror closest to it. A pale prism hung in the air, tracing the light's path. Interestingly, the fog didn't seem able to cross the light; instead, it built up along the sides like water pressing up against glass.
Blue stretched out his neck and shook out his shoulders. Alright, time to play the kind of game those thieves had ruined back at the Hero's Trail. This ought to be fun.
As he made his way to the first mirror of the puzzle, something struck him in the back of the head. White and gray stars sparked in Blue's eyes, dropping him blindly to his hands and knees. Blinking visual static out of his vision and gritting his teeth against the pain in his kneecaps, he forced himself back onto his feet and hid behind a mirror.
He quickly spotted what had hit him: a Floormaster, which was now scuffling at the floor for another piece of ammunition. It raised up a clay pot and turned in his direction.
"So the fog was for monsters like you to hide in," Blue muttered, pulling his head back behind the mirror. The pot shattered against the metal back of it with a musical clatter. "And the clutter on the floor was meant for your entertainment. Great." With as many small objects as he'd seen on the ground, he suspected there was more than one Floormaster in here who'd like to make use of it.
Blue made the shadowy monster flinch with a Sunburst Spell, then followed up by using a Levitation Charm to nail it in the wrist with the rock it had bashed him with earlier. The Floormaster reared back with a cry of pain and vanished under the fog.
Hearing the soft, hair-raising whirr of another Floormaster, Blue pushed away from the mirror and ran. He whirled, Magic Rod raised, only to see…nothing. He clicked his tongue in aggravation. This orange fog was nothing if not effective.
He pointed his Magic Rod in the direction he'd just fled from. "Incendio!" A sparking ball of flame cut a furrow through the mist. For a moment, he could see the Floormaster puddle hiding under it, and that moment was enough. "Depulso!" As the monster was flung backward, it sprang out of its pool of shadow. Blue switched to his bow and took aim. He landed two shots in the disoriented Floormaster's big, square palm before it ducked underneath the smokescreen again.
From behind, a pot came flying in and shattered across his shoulders. Blue cried out in pain and fell against a mirror. "Would you stop?" He conjured his lamp and chucked it at the third Floormaster that appeared, then had to duck another rock from the first. "Screw you!" He picked up a femur on the floor and threw it at the monster. It whacked against the Floormaster's wrist, whereupon it became another fun toy for the creature to throw.
Blue darted between the mirrors, exchanging fire with the Floormasters. The shadows were fairly durable; he hadn't killed many of them back at Hogwarts, and never without his brothers to help him pour on long-distance magical attacks. The monsters would have been more easily dispatched with his sword, but he didn't want to get close enough to get grabbed. With their long, flexible arms, Floormasters had a lot more reach than any of the Harrys, and any breathing room in between sword slashes would be enough time for them to strike.
"You know what?" Blue used his shield to block a large bone sent spiraling in his direction. "I'm not going to let you waste my time! You're not worth it." He went to the first mirror of the puzzle to catch the light reflected from the one under the sunlight, then started hauling at the handle. The mirror was difficult to get going, but once he overcame its initial resistance, it slid agreeably until clunking to a stop at a right angle to where it had started. Now a rounded rectangular prism of light shone all the way across the room to hit another large, swiveling mirror. Blue ran along the path of light to reach the next mirror, surrounded by roiling walls of fog on both sides.
Ducking another rock thrown by one of the Floormasters, he seized the next mirror and dragged it a click to the left. A beam of light swept across the room. It briefly cut a clear line across the fog before the mist rolled back in.
Blue hummed, considering the shape of the mirror now blazing on the wall. Since he could visually trace the path of the light on its way there, the mirrors must have been messing with the natural phenomenon somehow. Was it perhaps…a little bit magic?
He stepped out from behind the mirror, then looked for the closest monster to experiment on. "Hey, you!" he shouted at the one he found hefting a human skull behind him. He conjured his whip and snapped it at the shadowy hand. It seized the Floormaster's ammo and brought it back to him. The monster grasped at the air in confusion, then whirred loudly and jabbed an accusing finger at him.
The intelligence of Light World monsters was a tad unnerving, but Blue couldn't deny the advantages of being able to surprise or piss these things off. "If you want this, you'll have to take it from me," he taunted, walking backward as he spoke. The giant hand scooched across the floor toward him. "Yes, that's it. Come and get me."
Blue led the monster around the mirror and backed up through the stream of light passing across the room. When it was in position, he took aim with his Magic Rod. "Accio Floormaster!"
The creature seemed to stumble forward, its shadowy base rippling across the ground. It didn't fly over in the same way as a Rupee, but it did get dragged about two meters toward him—far enough for it to wind up in the path of the reflected light. It froze in place, blanching a sickly gray.
"Oho!" Blue clapped his hands in delight. How many other monsters did this work on? Was it all of the creatures affected by the Sunburst Spell? Was there a way to make this effect portable using something made out of the same enchanted mirror-stuff?
He waited for the length of time it would take a ReDead to recover from a Sunburst Spell, ducking the other two Floormasters' projectiles as he did. The one he'd led into the light didn't unfreeze; it appeared that it was pinned in place for as long as it was stuck there, rather than being briefly stunned. Excellent.
Slaying the paralyzed Floormaster with his sword was a breeze. As soon as he'd finished collecting the yellow Rupee it dropped, he got back behind the mirror and started pulling at it again. One more click, and it was both pointing at a third mirror and forming a path that crossed near another Floormaster.
Blue darted behind the next mirror and turned it toward the Floormaster. Like before, the monster locked up, turned gray, and stayed that way. The light kept on flowing past the monster, however. Cutting through the fog, it landed on a small orange sun symbol painted on the wall. He hadn't seen it earlier, when it had been hidden by the upper wisps of the mist.
The dark chip of crystal in the middle of the sun blinked on like a topaz lit from within. With a rumble, the symbol and the bricks around it sank into a slot in the ground, revealing a room behind the wall and a treasure chest within.
"Ooh!" He slayed the frozen Floormaster, collected the blue Rupee it dropped, and jogged along the path of light to check out the hidden room.
A swarm of Fire Keese fluttered out of the opening and swooped at him as he approached, Unlike the Floormasters, they didn't care whether he'd turned the lights on. Diving into the bright stream around him, they pelted his head and did their best to set his hair on fire.
"You…little…buggers! Aguamenti!" Blue sprayed a wild stream of water around him. One of the Keese died of a conk to the head from his Magic Rod. The others were extinguished in wisps of steam. He dispatched them one by one with the help of his Vine Whip, then stood, sodden and huffing, in the doorway.
Under two lighting crystals sat a glimmering red treasure chest. Blue crept toward it, casting paranoid looks around in case of more Keese, then opened the treasure chest. Within lay a silver Rupee.
"Isn't that nice!" he remarked, putting it in his bag. Now he'd more than made up for the money he'd spent a little impulsively (not that he'd admit that to Yellow) on that Bluestone-powered kettle over on the Great Plateau!
He walked out of the cubbyhole, ducked a pot thrown by the last Floormaster, and went around inspecting the walls. Without Green and Red pushing him, and no pressing deadlines at the moment, he wasn't particularly bothered about making progress if there were more interesting things he could be doing. He found two more sun marks hidden in the fog and looked over his shoulder to do the mental math of bouncing light over to them.
"I wish I had a map I could write on," he grumbled as he jogged back over to the last shining mirror in line. Sure, technically he could draw one himself for this room and then make extra marks on top of it, but that would turn his fun, treasure-finding distraction into a boring distraction. The only point of a distraction was for it to be interesting!
He twiddled the mirrors all kinds of ways. Most of them didn't do anything more than carve temporary furrows into the mist. One configuration allowed him to kill the last Floormaster without any fuss. Another opened up a wall that led to a chest that held a large bundle of arrows. Blue took the arrows gratefully, then frowned at them. Was it coincidence? Or had this temple somehow sensed he was running short? The arrows didn't seem like anything that could have been hidden in here when the place had been built; they looked like they'd been fletched just yesterday, not like artifacts that had been left in this complex.
"Shadow?" he asked the air, looking around.
For several seconds, there was no response. Then his shadow, cast across the wall by the crystals burning bright over the treasure chest, twitched its head to look straight at him. Blue heard a quiet "tch" as an invisible finger flicked him in the ear.
Blue suppressed a smirk. It seemed that despite the spirit's annoyance toward his own recent helpful behavior, Shadow still felt compelled to set up the temple to reward the Harrys for their efforts. Well, Blue wasn't going to spurn the dark entity's favor by saying "thank you".
"I'll get some use out of these down here, I'm sure," he commented instead as he conjured his archery set and added the arrows to it. With his quiver comfortably full, he stepped back out into the room of mirrors.
In one last bit of productive distraction that his brothers weren't around to call him out for, Blue went around methodically smashing every skull and pot in the room. Single arrows, dried and shrunken Bomb Flowers, and small-change Rupees went flying as he used Banishing Charms to catapult the breakables into walls with more force than he could throw them on his own. He grinned at the cacophony of breaking bone and clay.
Only once he was certain he'd stripped the room down in as many ways as he could did he finish the mirror puzzle. Which, to be honest, wasn't too tricky. Red would have had trouble with it, but that was Red.
After a few minutes of mentally plotting out paths of reflection and twiddling giant mirrors, Blue had the sun lock on the door lit up gold. The sun rotated, then split apart at its metal frame. The doors it was affixed to withdrew into the walls and thunked loudly into their hidden niches.
Beyond the doors lay…darkness. Not absolute cave-darkness, but something that was as much a feeling as it was a visual shift. In contrast to the sun-theming he'd seen so far, with rooms made of warm golden stone lit by dim orange light, the room past those doors was a cold, unsettling blue-gray. Blue didn't need Green's sword-feelings to know he ought to be on his guard. He approached the open doorway with caution, his Magic Rod in one hand and his sword in the other.
Maybe it was just him, but the air suddenly felt cooler as he walked into the bluish atrium—and not in a pleasant way. The sun-themed rooms he'd been in so far had been only a few degrees more tolerable than the searing desert outside. One would think a break from the dry, musty heat would be much appreciated, but the chill creeping up the back of Blue's neck was far from a welcoming sensation.
He looked around in a habitual sweep for enemies, idly noting the number of yellow and purple ChuChus wobbling around, then froze. Looming over him was a great leering statue of a woman with coiled snakes for hair. The massive statue leaned out over the room from a torso rooted in the back wall, its hands held out flat and palm-up near the floor. Her mouth was a crescent of zig-zagging, tarnished gold spikes held slightly open in a silent threat. One eye was a sun-pinwheel symbol made of verdigris-ridden bronze, while the other was a blackened silver moon and star. A shaft of sunlight, startling orange against the forbidding blue granite of the room, shone into the moon-themed eye and left the other eye in darkness.
Once he managed to break eye-contact with the eerie statue, Blue realized the room wasn't just an atrium for the colossal snake woman, but a sort of hub. There were five doors in this place, four of them either locked or otherwise inaccessible. The grandest of those of the doors was a great block of reddish stone decorated with a faded gold inlay of three hissing cobras with a sun hovering over their heads. A shiny golden lock shaped like a horned eye hung from it on thick chains. Two other, plainer stone doors were placed several meters up the walls, both of them shut tight with no visible way to open them. At ground-level, past the statue's hands, were two more doors. One was locked, and the other had a pale blue, moon-shaped button in the middle.
There was something else to this room, though, that Blue couldn't put his finger on. It wasn't all that unsettling in terms of looks, even with the ChuChus oozing toward him and the creepy statue staring at him with its giant tarnished eyes. The wrongness lay mainly in the air; it was a silent hum that drew ghostly fingers down his arms and told him to look with a soft nudge at the back of his mind.
'Is there a weak spot in the Veil here? Are we supposed to use a Moon Pearl?' Blue thought quizzically. He dissuaded some of the ChuChus from following him by rolling a bomb in their direction, then jogged around the surviving purple ones to go to the source of the hair-raising feeling.
The closer he got to the grand door that lay in the shadow of the looming statue, the stronger the sense of wrongness became. He laid a hand on the door. The metal inlay was unnaturally hot, vibrating under his fingers. Subtle, but fast. The golden surface had a slight visual vagueness to it from the speed of its tiny tremors, and touching it made his fingertips feel numb.
Soft, buzzing static played at the edges of Blue's vision. His ears felt like they were boxed in cages of warmer, stuffier air. Something beyond this door was wrong. More wrong than the patches of time-displaced new gold and freshly-carved stone he'd seen in this temple so far.
A voice suddenly spoke behind him, making him jump. "Saata, Ashkoma-baba, so khotiid madha sachan?"
Blue whirled Magic Rod raised. "Who's there?!" How had anyone else found this place in the middle of a blinding sandstorm?
The flickering, slightly translucent Gerudo standing behind him didn't answer. Instead, she looked over her shoulder and called out something else in the same guttural language.
Blue backed up to get a better look at the woman, who didn't seem to notice he was there. She was quite a lot smaller than any Gerudo he'd seen—taller than a Hylian or most Sheikah, but shorter than Link's sister. Her build was muscular, but wiry and slim, and her ears were round. He hadn't seen that on any humans from the Hylian mainland before. Her skin was also a peculiar gray-brown-green that contrasted harshly against her vivid orange hair, a complexion he'd seen on the Hylian Bestiary's portrait of Ganondorf and assumed had been fanciful on the artist's part. Like one of those archaic depictions of Ganondorf, she had pale golden eyes; most Gerudo that Blue had seen had some shade of green.
The woman looked forward again and adjusted the chunky tool-belt secured around her slim waist by a set of suspenders. Hanging from it was an array of wrenches, hammers, files, and other things he'd seen in Link's workroom. She flicked her long ponytail over one shoulder before walking forward, muttering, "Kah! Saaqil sim badi ottova sov durl, vukan onni zabbat kak delatova." And then she passed through the huge locked door like it wasn't there.
Blue stood there, perturbed. He really hoped that was a ghost he'd seen, and not a part of the hair-raising sense of incongruousness radiating from behind this door. Ghosts were normal. He was fine with ghosts, even body-snatching Poes. If that not-quite-real, round-eared, oddly small Gerudo was a sign of what Blue suspected, though, then Green really needed to hear about this.
Translations:
1. Saata, Ashkoma-baba, so khotiid madha sachan? ⇒ Alright, Ashkoma, you old girl, what do you need now?
2. Kah! Saaqil sim badi ottova sov durl, vukan onni zabbat kak delatova. ⇒ Hmph! As slow as they are to open this door, you'd think they forgot how.
Notes:
-By the portraits having "spirits", Avoka is referring to a class of youkai called tsukumogami. These result from tools and other useful objects developing a spirit over time, particularly upon passing 99 or 100 years of age.
-The purple ChuChus are Dark ChuChus from Wind Waker.
-The big sun-and-moon statue is inspired by the one in Wind Waker's Earth Temple, but works differently.
-I'm not going to come up with a whole Gerudo conlang, but the snippets that appeared in this chapter are derived from a mixture of Russian, Farsi, and Arabic.
Next month: Red contends with the unexpected trauma left behind by his fight with Ignikanos.