Last month: The Harrys found a way to affect the Medusa statue in the dungeon's hub, solving half of its puzzle. At the same time, Yellow struggled with Blue's declaration that he wants to start discussing the Harrys' problems with others. He had a breakdown when Red suffered a nasty wound, and Blue dragging him into an argument right afterward didn't help...
I made ~*animations*~ for this chapter! Two of them, in fact, and even though they're not super fancy, my non-animator self is very proud of them! You can find them under my "dungeon 6" tag or in the Ao3 version of this chapter.
Dear recent Guest (of late October 2024): I know that the Harrys might seem weak to you, but to me, they're already formidable and only becoming more so over time. I've said it before, but this story is explicitly not a power fantasy; a protagonist who strives tirelessly to increase their own strength is far less interesting to me than an underdog who strives to help others and overcomes genuinely difficult challenges through courage and a refusal to give up. In both the Harry Potter and Zelda series, those who pursue power are generally the villains. That's why power is something the Harrys gain incidentally in this story to help with their goal of saving the world(s), rather than it being a goal unto itself. At the end of this fic (and even at the point they're at right now), they'll be able to defeat pretty much anyone and anything from their world using a mixture of Muggle combat skills, creative magic, and frightening endurance, which I figure is quite powerful indeed.
I appreciate you reading and reviewing, and if you want to write about those concepts you find so fascinating, I encourage you to do so! While I'd ask that people using this fic's OC NPCs and/or more unique facets of its worldbuilding mention my story as an inspiration for their fics, it's not like I hold any claim over the Legend of Zelda or Harry Potter. As long as it doesn't involve feeding others' creative work to a generative AI, anyone who wants to see their own story come to life has the right to make that happen in this community.
Content warning for dissociation, manhandling ReDeads, and the death-vibes of doing detective work on ReDeads.
Harry stopped short at the sight of the giant stone Medusa leering at him with elaborate, mismatched eyes. One eye was a shining, spinning sun, illuminated by a stream of light that spouted down from the room they'd just left. The other eye was in light as well—a dull, tarnished moon that seemed inactive.
"We'll have to put the moon in the dark, then," he said, half to himself. Yellow was next to him, but since his semi-private chat with Blue, he had been…not quiet and withdrawn, but his version of it. Smiling emptily, speaking with his usual peppiness, but only when spoken to, and buzzing around doing every scrap of work he could snatch out of his brothers' hands. Harry wasn't sure how much Yellow was listening to what any of them said; there had been a certain mechanical way about how he'd laid out everyone's bedrolls and fluffed their pillows that said he might have been mentally in another room.
He walked ahead of Yellow, who was staring glassily at an approaching purple ChuChu. The room had many doors, most of them unreachable. There were two, though, that caught his interest. The creepy statue's hands, which Blue had described as being stuck near the floor when he'd been in the room, were now moving. They went up and down, making two of the doors on the second level accessible. Harry had eyes for one of the doors at ground-level, though. He had a key, and that was the only door with a lock it could open.
Weaving through the ChuChus milling about, Harry made a beeline for the locked door. Yellow would follow; the Harrys, when mentally set on autopilot, tended to line up behind the brother ahead of them like ducklings.
As he went closer to the statue, each step became heavier and more difficult than the last. Harry had started out nimble and light on his feet as usual, and now as he neared his destination near the statue's left hand, his feet were like leaden pudding. Chills raced up and down his arms and silent alarm seized him by the scruff of his neck. He needed to look and watch out and possibly escape, but there was no threat to prompt any of it. No direction the danger might come from, other than here.
Harry frowned at the door under the looming statue's torso. It looked normal enough to him. He didn't see any shimmering in the air or the visual static of a messy dimensional rip. Whatever monster lay behind the door wasn't setting off his usual danger-sense. It was just that his sword was screaming loud enough to start overriding his body.
'Give me something to work with, will you?' he thought at the ball of foreign panic flailing in the back of his head. 'I'm going to get taken down by a ChuChu if you don't let me move.'
The screaming didn't stop, but the unseen force binding his legs lightened up. Now unstuck, Harry used a Banishing Charm to fling a Yellow ChuChu away from him before it could pounce. He caught one of the purple ChuChus creeping up on Yellow with a Levitation Charm and threw it into the shaft of light streaming onto the statue's moon eye. He released the spell once the monster had petrified, letting it shatter on the floor.
'What do you want me to do about the "nonono wrong wrong wrong"?' Harry silently asked, quoting a snippet of the Four Sword's gibbering terror.
The blade sent him mental images of a smirking Gerudo clad in pink—Nabooru—before throwing a flurry of other pictures at him. Heroes through the ages, their facial features never quite the same from one life to another, but always rhyming.
"Okay, so…a reincarnation of Nabooru?" Harry asked it. There was an approving buzz in the back of his mind. "What does that have to do with anything?"
Look!
Harry's legs took a step toward the door with the golden lock. "I thought you didn't like that door," Harry said, though he walked closer to it. A Yellow ChuChu lunged at him on his way there, clipping his arm. Harry hissed at the crackle of pain that raced up his limb. "Electrified monsters are the worst," he complained, conjuring his bow. His Dragon Hammer could (probably) be used on electric beasties, but he didn't want to risk getting splattered with electrified goo. He slayed the monster in three shots, cursing the tingling in his wand arm and the waste of arrows.
"Yellow, are you doing alright?" Harry called behind him. He dropped his face into his palm at his brother's immediate, cheerful answer of "I'm fine!" Yellow could have been missing an arm and he'd still say that in his current state of mind. Harry looked over to see his brother walking around in circles with a small herd of ChuChus slowly chasing him. Alright, he was actually fine.
"Okay, look where? Where is she?" Harry muttered to himself, swiveling his head this way and that. He stopped in front of the door and frowned up at it.
He could feel what the sword had been so antsy about now. A sense of violent vibration—something rattling and grinding in place. Fitting and not-fitting. Wrong-shape made right-shape and forced into place with more magic than Harry would channel in a lifetime. Time was a butterfly frantically struggling to escape the pin stuck through its middle.
"Saata, Ashkoma-baba, so khotiid madha sachan?"
Nerves strung to the breaking point by the amount of wrongness in the air, Harry both jumped and screamed. He whirled around with his Magic Rod and stala buckler at the ready.
A translucent woman clad in pink clothes and a tool harness stood behind him. The Four Sword rang a bell of half-recognition in his mind. As it had said earlier, this wasn't the Nabooru that the Hero of Time had met, but the memory of a more modern reincarnation. She was grumbling to herself in Gerudo words that the sword didn't seem able to translate, but reported as being different from anything in its ancient memories.
"What are you doing here?" Harry wondered. Had Vaati messed up while rearranging this dungeon, or was this on purpose? If it was on purpose, why would Vaati want to drag people through time? Locations, Harry understood. Locations could be chopped up and fused back together into whatever Vaati wanted. People were a lot less convenient, though, with their sense of will and relative fragility. Why pull a squishy human through time and space instead of a nice, sturdy chunk of building?
At his words, the woman blinked and looked down at him. "A little kid?" she asked in Russian-accented Hylian.
Harry jerked back. "You can see me?!"
Time-ghosts were one thing. Not a good thing, but probably harmless. Now he wasn't sure that was what this phantom was, though. Afterimages of people from centuries ago weren't supposed to be able to see through time.
She raised a bushy red brow. "Of course I can. You're here right in front of me, aren't y—?" The woman abruptly blinked out of sight. Like she'd never been there.
The tension in the air pulled tight to the point of strangling. A pinned butterfly fluttered its wings. Time rippled.
Terror rose like a clawing tide in Harry's gut. He doubled over, breathing hard against the sudden nausea. "Stop…freaking…out," he panted at the Four Sword. "Not helping."
The sword screamed in pictures. The Ocarina of Time, the devastation of Old Hyrule at Ganondorf's hands, a heart-shaped mask that radiated unimaginable malice, an ocean pouring from the sky as all of Hyrule cried out in despair—
Harry dropped to his knees, the pain in his kneecaps drowned out by the migraine spiking through the base of his skull. "Stop!" he wailed.
Hands closed around his shoulders. "Green, are you okay?" Yellow asked frantically. "What's happening?"
"Sword problems," Harry grunted. Internally, he ground out, 'You've warned me enough; I understand this is bad. I won't let what you're scared of happen again. Whatever 'it' is.' Because while he wasn't quite sure what that creepy rainbow mask meant, it had powerful picture-memory-feelings of time-screwiness attached. 'I'll fix this by solving the dungeon or cutting through Vaati's eyes or whatever I have to do, I swear. Just stop panicking. Please. You're hurting me, not helping.'
The white-knuckled tenseness coming from his mental tether to the sword slowly unclenched. A wailing alarm of danger, danger, danger still blared from the direction of the door right next to him, but he could think and move again. With his legs no longer frozen by fear that wasn't his own, he was able to climb to his feet.
"Messed-up time brings up bad memories," Harry explained to Yellow. "The sword was freaking out worse than I've ever heard it." He stretched out his neck, which was now good and sore from his imaginary chain being yanked. "Time problems were part of what caused the Great Flood, and I guess the sword—or maybe the Hero of Time—watched it happen."
"The Four Sword can reach that deep into your head and mess with you like that?" Yellow asked with horror. "You were acting really weird, Green. I noticed it even with…" He fluttered his hand by his temple. "You know how I get."
"It happens to all of us. Even Red," Harry soothed. "And yeah, the sword can do that. It's been doing that for as long as I've had it. That's how it's been changing how I think." He shrugged. "Just try not to think about it. That's what I do." Existential horror was only one wrong thought away; Harry was getting good at stepping around those mental pitfalls. "The sword should be calm enough for me to fight whatever's on the other side of the door now. I'll have another talk with it if it isn't."
"How smart is it? The sword in your head?" Yellow asked in a hushed voice. "Is it like having a whole person in there? Does it talk to you like Shadow Harry?"
Harry shook his head. The Four Sword's mental voice was abstract and disjointed, broken into descriptive facets that formed a whole. Even when it used words, the messages it spouted were rarely direct. If the weapon had a spirit of its own, like the Master Sword did, it was a weak and simple one. Through some mental feeling-around, he'd gained the sense that its powers of influence came only through the portion of magic and life-force that Harry had accidentally donated to it; Harry doubted it would be able to tailor its next wielder's personality the same way it had subtly reshaped his own.
"It's like having a kaleidoscope of memories and feelings in my head," Harry summarized. "Now, let's go finish solving this place so we can unpin Vaati's time-tangle."
Blue looked from his Navi Slate to the room he'd walked into. According to his slate, it was enormous for some reason. The same size as the boss-monster arena, even. Why? What had it been designed for, either by the people who'd built this place or the capricious demigod whose ego had recently crashed into it?
The room was only visible via the dully pulsing red lights dotting the floor and walls. They didn't do much to illuminate the room, but their locations gave him a sense of the giant space he was standing in. It was wide, flat, and open—maybe built with aisles lined by columns, which would account for the lights' spacing across the floor and the interruptions in the pattern.
At the back of the room, the closest to a visual goal that he could see, pulsed a somewhat brighter, two-toned set of lights. They resembled the orange and red eyes of the Beamoses they'd faced in this dungeon, actually. Two rings of orange with dimmed scarlet pupils throbbed in and out of visibility from a high point on the back wall.
Dim red eye-lights hovered here and there between the pulsing red spots on the floor. ReDeads, and a lot of them. More than Blue was comfortable trying to fight. Luckily, they were spread out farther apart than the lights; he hoped that distance was enough for him and Red to slip between them.
Although that would depend on whether he could convince Red to avoid a fight.
He breathed a resigned sigh. Was it even worth trying to hold his bull-headed brother back? If Blue tried to steer them away from battle, Red would tease him about being a coward, and then Blue would have to waste time kicking his arse to prove him wrong. Not that he didn't enjoy showing his brother what-for, but Blue really wanted to get out of this place.
The time in this dungeon was strange, and Blue didn't think it was entirely confined to the boss-monster's room. Some of the areas he and Red had passed through on their way back down to this floor had had suspiciously new-looking tiles, pillars, and decorations that had stuck out like sore thumbs against their worn, dusty surroundings. In a room of dingy brown tiles too dust-crusted for their designs to show through, there had been a handful of bright orange sun tiles that had looked like they'd been laid down just the other day. Three pillars among ten had been decorated with waggling, lurid crimson and gold painted snakes, while the other seven had been a fading, heavily-chipped rust-red and tarnished yellow-green.
It wasn't as though this was the first time Vaati had time-twisted things to make them look new. Blue was fairly certain the Wind Mage had done the same thing to the Light World locations he'd thrown into the Dark World. The crucial difference, however, was that those dungeons had been ripped out of space and time. They'd been removed from their home dimension, rewound to when they'd been un-flooded, and shoved into a place where they'd never existed before. It was fine for them to be displaced in time because there was no previous space they'd occupied in the Dark World. Even that temple of bones and flesh that had been ripped up and planted under Hogwarts had been alright in terms of space, having been taken from somewhere else in the Dark World.
This dungeon hadn't been moved first. It was sat in the same place it had always been, in its home dimension, but with portions of its time rewound. The building was trying to exist in multiple times, in the same place. Multiple versions of itself, crammed into the same mass.
Blue wasn't a proper scientist, and hadn't done much studying of physics and time-space and other such lofty topics yet, but he could feel it was wrong. The new-looking things in this old place had a subtle vibration that stood out in the settled stillness of the abandoned old labyrinth. They were unnaturally warm to the touch, and some had already shown signs of cracking under some unseen strain. Blue hypothesized it was the stress of multiple versions of the same object—old and new—struggling to occupy and not-occupy the same set of coordinates in both space and time.
'I hope Shadow can figure out a way to talk Vaati down from this line of experimentation,' Blue thought, shivering. He could feel the low rumble of a time-displaced object somewhere nearby; they'd become more common the lower down he and Red had traveled in this dungeon. It seemed to him like Vaati might next try to rewind portions of the Dark World where they stood in an effort to make it more like Hyrule. Lorule had existed at some point in time, after all, so if he figured out how to rewind the relevant parts of the world to that time period, people and all, he'd be able to recreate something his home without the inconvenience of clashing interdimensional magics.
There was a tug on his sleeve. "Blue, what are we doing here? We don't have to go through this room, do we?"
Blue almost said "calm down, Yellow" before realizing which Harry had said what he'd just heard. He conjured his Magic Lamp and looked incredulously at Red in the narrow sphere of light this room allowed it to give off. Red was pale, his pupils far narrower than the dark room called for and his eyes wide enough to show the whites all around. Perspiration sparkled on his forehead.
"What's wrong with you?" Blue asked. Red never got nervous. Normally, he'd love a room like this! Half-jokingly, Blue drawled, "What, did you get traumatized while I wasn't looking?"
Red let out a high-pitched, hysterical giggle. "Yeah, kind of!" he shrilled. "I'm just…not really in the mood for ReDeads. Okay?"
Blue mentally backtracked through the list of injuries he'd psychically felt or witnessed his brothers suffer across the course of this dungeon. Red had gotten his leg torn open and a big chunk of his face clawed off, but those didn't have anything to do with ReDeads…
Then he recalled waking up on the floor, his head ringing from the brief phantom sensation of being clapped between two sledgehammers. He hissed in sympathy. "Ooh, you got grabbed by one of them, didn't you?" he said. "After having your head cracked open by that dragon, too."
Red nodded jerkily. His crossed arms were becoming more of a self-hug. "Yeah, so I'd like to get the hell out of here if there's nothing useful to do."
"Unfortunately for you, the lack of a treasure chest on our maps doesn't mean a room doesn't have any use to it," Blue told him. "We're currently trying to find a way to shut off the light shining onto that Medusa statue's moon eye, which Green has a feeling will grant us passage into the boss door beneath the statue. Any of the rooms nearby the Medusa statue—like this one—could house the switch that will do the trick."
Red groaned and tossed his head back. "Ugh, I hate this."
Clapping him on the arm, Blue said, "Cheer up! I wasn't planning on having us fight our way through, anyway."
"How else are we supposed to get through?" Red asked. "Also, what do you think those big, blinky Beamos eyes at the back of the room are for?"
Blue rubbed his chin. "Answering your first question, I was going to have us sneak through. Dodge the biting trees, so to speak. ReDeads don't seem to respond to sight or sound, only proximity, so we'll just have to keep to the right distance," he answered. "As for the second question…I'm not sure. Green would be able to tell whether they're dangerous for sure. We'll just have to assume they're unfriendly and, er…"
There wasn't really any way to avoid their gaze, as high up as they were mounted. If they were linked to any sort of security system, the Harrys were as good as spotted the moment they stepped within range.
"We'll figure it out as we go, then," Red said. He drew his sword and conjured his Magic Rod. "You hold the light, and I'll cover our backs."
"Are you really alright, or are you going to collapse once you run out of stubborn bravado?" Blue asked. "I can do this room without you if need be—"
"I can do it!" Red insisted. "It's not as bad as Green's hallucinating thing. He was down in those creepy sea caves for hours; I just got my skull cracked twice. I'll get over it."
Blue sighed. Back when he'd been one person, he never would have thought his own personality would be so frustrating to deal with. "Sure you will."
"Yeah, I will!"
They paused at the edge of a sharp difference in the flooring, where dull blue moon tiles suddenly became sand. The substance lay several centimeters below the edge of the tiles, so he doubted the sand was something that had fallen in over the years.
The visual range of his lamp was unnaturally short in this room—some element of puzzle-magic, he was sure—but it stretched far enough for him to make out the edge of something dark in the sand. He stepped closer to the edge of the section of tile and held out the lamp.
Glass. Shiny black glass. There were furrows of it carved through the sand, centimeters deep and as wide enough for him to walk in. Jarringly dark, they crossed the smooth plane of sand like tire tracks in a thin layer of snow.
He sucked a breath through his teeth and looked up at the pulsing eyes at the back of the room. "Those are definitely Beamos eyes back there," he said tensely. "They might be too powerful for us to—"
The edge of the aging floor cracked and slid under his foot. Blue nearly fell into a splits, whacked one knee against the tiles, and tumbled face-first into the sand. Pain exploded in his nose as it was used as an impromptu shovel.
Red burst out into raucous laughter. "Oh, that was beautiful! I wish I could've gotten that on tape!"
The floor vibrated under Blue's cheek. Blinded by the sand in his madly stinging eyes, Blue struggled to force himself upright. "G-Get me—" he paused to spit out grit, "out of here!" There was a deep hum building in the air, separate from the rumble that had kicked to life under the floor. The sand felt electric; his hands, buried up to the wrists in the deep layer of fine silt, were tingling.
Red's laughter cut off at the fear in Blue's voice. Arms hooked under Blue's and he was hauled up over the half-step he'd stumbled off of.
Blue conjured his Magic Rod and pointed it at his own face. "Mundare," he gasped. The sand that had infiltrated his nose and eyes vanished, along with the fog of dust clinging to his glasses. Tentatively prodding around his aching nose, Blue proclaimed, "There's something in the floor! I think there might be a generator, and maybe some power lines."
"You don't say," Red sad faintly.
Blue noticed that neither of them had their lanterns conjured, but he could still see his brother staring wide-eyed at the back of the room. The red emergency lights were shining brighter now, flickering fitfully instead of pulsing on and off.
Brilliant scarlet tongues of lightning were coalescing around the eyes hovering in the darkness. Power rippled through the emergency lights mounted around the room—pulsing flickers, still frantic but finding a rhythm. The red heartbeat raced faster with every passing second, until—
BZZZHHIIIRR!
Two great shafts of scarlet light, each as big around as a telephone pole, carved across the sand. Orange drops of molten glass sprayed up in their wake like backsplash from a water hose. Faster than anyone could outrun, the beams flicked out and speared the dip in the sand left by Blue's fall. Before they could begin melting their way through the tiled section of the floor, the lasers neatly flicked off. Shimmering heat continued to roll off the gooey, glowing trench in the sand.
Silence reigned. Blue stared incredulously at the Beamos eyes, which were crackling and sputtering as the excess energy within them bled off. Those were doomsday weapons. He was tempted to say "screw it" and leave this room for Green and Yellow to figure out. ReDeads could be avoided, but what on earth was he supposed to do about huge death lasers? Ones that moved faster than he could, no less?
"That was awesome!" Red gushed beside him. "Do you think we can use our Mirror Shields on those lasers? Or get them to take out some of those ReDeads? I think I saw one get caught up in those beams when they were headed toward us."
"Red, how the hell are we supposed to keep from getting vaporized?" Blue snapped. "Those lasers move far faster than we can run!"
"Well, first of all, we have magic reflector shields," Red said. The lights had dimmed, so Blue could no longer see him, but he could imagine his brother ticking off on his fingers. "Second of all, that room has a bunch of pillars still standing in it, so I'm pretty sure they're safe to hide behind. Third of all, what about that shielding spell Yellow used earlier?"
"Even if either of us could cast a successful Shielding Charm, it wouldn't do us any good," Blue said grimly. The level of power in those beams was unimaginable. Blue couldn't begin to fathom how the people who'd built this place had achieved it with the Light World's primitive understanding of electricity.
"Then we'll hide when we can and use our shields when we can't," Red sad decisively.
Blue shook his head. "I don't even think our shields could—"
Red clapped him on the back. "It's just a bit of light, Blue! And you know what light likes to do? Bounce off of shiny things! We'll be fine."
"It's a hot light, Red! Even if it reflects off our shields, it could still heat them up and cook us underneath!"
"Let's just go, already!" Red huffed. He blinked into view with his Magic Lamp in hand, already running off. Without slowing in the slightest, he leapt from the tiles and began sprinting through the sand.
"Red!" Blue called after him. The eyes were charging up again; they'd activated as soon as Red's boots had touched down in the sand pit. He ran to the edge of the tiles, then halted nervously. How long did those eyes take to load a shot?
While Red ran for cover, Blue watched the eyes and the flickering emergency lights around them. He ticked off the seconds in his head.
Seven seconds passed, and then…Scarlet death raked across the room with a deafening, crackling buzz. This time, instead of moving swiftly in a straight line, the beams traced a somewhat slower diagonal path. Starting half a meter away from the pillar that Red had tucked himself behind, the beams carved through the footprints he'd left in the sand. They terminated a meter away from the tiles this time, since Red's energetic leap had given him more distance from the safe zone than Blue's tumble.
"I see!" Blue declared once the beams had shut off. Those eyes weren't just watching, but tracking. Blue didn't know whether they had cameras, were linked to a pressure-plate system, or were working via Vaati's ill-intentioned magic, but they would take a recording in the seven seconds it took for the Harrys to dart from one place to another and follow their path precisely.
Blue was starting to get excited. He could work with this!
First, though, he needed to make sure that certain things were set up. "Red, take something glowing out of your bag and put it where that pillar is!" he called across the room. "One of those glowing mushrooms or flowers you picked up near Hora's flower, not anything expensive."
Red obediently took a Silent Shroom out of his bag. It looked like a peculiar blue-white glowstick, its light pressed close around it by the room's opaque darkness. "Why am I doing this?" Red asked. "Plans work better if you tell people what they are, Blue."
"You're going to be mapping out the pillars in this room," Blue informed him. "I'm going to be taking out the ReDeads using those lasers, just in case this is one of those rooms where all the monsters need to die for something to happen."
"Aww, but I wanted to kill the zombies with the lasers!" Red whined.
Blue shrugged. "You can still do it if you want to, but I don't think you'll want to." He took a glowing sprig of Blue Nightshade out of his own magic bag and set it at his feet to mark the tiled area. "In seven seconds, you'll have to stun the ReDead with a Sunburst Spell as you're running for cover, get close enough to touch the zombie, and then reach the next pillar. If you don't get within kissing distance of the ReDead, the lasers won't move close enough to take it out."
"You could have picked any other phrase than 'kissing distance'!" Red nearly shrieked. "Now you've put that idea in my head!"
"Well, don't follow through with it," Blue said, grinning through his false sternness. "You might catch something."
"You suck," Red announced, dropping his glowing mushroom at his feet. "Have fun kissing ReDeads or whatever. I'll be off playing Laser Chicken." He conjured his Magic Lamp and took off running again.
Blue made his own drop into the sand and dashed toward the mushroom his brother had dropped. As he ran, he counted down in his head.
"Aw, damn, where's the next—there it is!" he heard Red say from another part of the room.
Lasers flicked out, then split off into different directions to retrace each boy's path. Blue conjured his Mirror Shield and hid behind it just before it was pelted by a splash of hot glass. The laser kept on until it had found where his footprints began. It was a wonder the start of the sand pit wasn't completely melted solid!
'That could be a part of the time-screwiness in here,' Blue mused. He could feel something (or multiple somethings) grinding in place in this room, after all.
Peeking around the pillar at his back, he scoped out his next move. Blazing light crackled past him as Red continued on his path-finding mission. In its brilliant glow, which cast light across a large swathe of the room, Blue made out the curled-up figure of a crouching ReDead and a pillar a few meters beyond. It was almost a straight shot.
"Alright," Blue muttered, locking his eyes ahead. He took a deep breath, let it out, and kicked off of the pillar. As he ran, he conjured his Magic Rod and sent two jets of white, purifying fire ahead of him. The second shot in the dark illuminated the ReDead with a dull gray glow.
The monster wasn't the almost-naked, nondescript kind of ReDead that the Harrys had come across in the second temple in the Dark World; it had long, wispy strands of hair clinging to its shrink-wrapped skull and ragged tool belts hanging off of it. Chunky, enameled metal jewelry with some kind of symbol on it hung around its elbows, too large to fit its withered arms.
There was no time to analyze the creature further, unfortunately. Blue got close enough to tag the ReDead on its cracked, dusty shoulder and kept on sprinting. Conjuring his lantern, he caught sight of faded red snakes wriggling across the side of a pillar. Blue dove behind it just as the lasers kicked on.
Superheated air slapped across every uncovered inch of Blue's skin as the sand two steps away from him was obliterated. His footsteps were replaced by a line of destruction. The ReDead's red-washed form appeared for only a second before it was wiped from existence.
Blue hissed through his teeth. He really, really hoped that Red didn't decide to do anything foolish in here.
Alright, moving on. He dropped a Silent Shroom where he was standing and then peered out into the pulsing red dimness. Another ReDead could be seen by its faint silhouette near one of the emergency lights.
Lasers flashed out again, solely following Red. Blue made a quick mental sketch of his side of the room. ReDead with its back to him, crouched six meters away to the northwest, assuming the back of the room served as "north". A pillar, positioned west-northwest, ten meters away. Another pillar lay straight ahead of Blue, eight meters away, but dangerously close to another ReDead.
'I want to see what kind of clothes and jewelry these things have on before I vaporize all of them,' Blue thought, calling up his Magic Rod. He thought he might be able to stun and scooch a ReDead close enough that he could run out, wrestle off one of its accessories, and run back into cover before he or the monster was turned to ash.
He focused his attention on the ReDead six meters away. It took a few tries, but he managed to land a Sunburst Spell that made it a more visible target. "Levio," he incanted. The monster floated up and hovered half a meter over the sand. Blue mentally nudged it a couple of meters closer to him, stunned it again, and repeated the process.
Dashing out of cover, Blue went straight for the thick metal ring dangling around one of the monster's elbows. He grabbed the monster's arm, swallowed his disgust at the feeling of its crusty skin, and yanked the bangle over its oversized, bony fist. The jewelry scraped its way free with a musty spray of corpse-flakes—bits of delicate, mummified skin that Blue had unintentionally carved off in his haste. Coughing and spitting, Blue ran back to his hiding spot.
The ReDead was gone a moment later. Blue used the laser-light to get a glimpse of what he'd just gotten his hands on.
It was one of those upper-arm bangles he'd seen a couple of the Gerudo on Death Mountain wearing. A flared rectangle of gold with inset enameling rose from a broad, hinged hoop with the papery remains of a cloth lining on the inside. The design depicted a pinwheel sun like the one on his Mirror Shield, though this one was surrounded by wavy concentric rings of red, orange, and yellow.
'That's not a symbol I've seen in the Hylian Bestiary, nor any living Gerudo wearing,' Blue thought. 'Maybe it's an obsolete religious motif, like the Old Gerudo moon-and-star? Or a cult symbol?' He stowed the jewelry in his bag for the time being. If nothing else, he was sure all that gold, tarnished as it was, would be worth something to a merchant like Beedle.
He conjured his lamp and threw it in the direction he remembered seeing a safe pillar in. It tumbled across the sand, spraying its magical oil everywhere. Some of the oil splattered across the side of Blue's goal, marking it with flaming red dots. Blue ran across those ten meters, halted himself by catching the barely-visible side of the column, and immediately set his sights on the ReDead to the "east" as searing death blazed past him.
Blue marked his spot with a dropped flower and then shot out as soon as laser had flicked off. He leapt over the thick line of orange glass and summoned his Magic Rod once he'd crossed it. Casting a Sunburst Spell ahead of him at the faint shadow of the ReDead, Blue skidded to a stop behind cover—a mere two meters away from the monster. He waited, shifting anxiously from foot to foot, until the sound of destruction retracing his steps ended, and then ran right back out. Since the monster was so conveniently close, he wrestled another bangle and one of its tool belts off before hiding in safety again.
He sat down and laid his back against the pillar, breathing hard. All the Harrys were fast runners, and accustomed to working their bodies hard when in much worse health than they currently were, but he'd just done four ten-meter-dashes back-to-back while casting spells with his energy-sucking Magic Rod. Blue set a Silent Shroom out next to his crossed legs, then planted his Magic Lamp in front of him so he could get a look at his spoils.
The leather tool belt had turned to hard jerky over the years instead of falling to dust, so it had managed to hold onto quite a few things. Pliers of many shapes, rods of silvery metal, a cute little stala hammer, a Bluestone-powered tool that sputtered to life and spewed a jet of blinding, hot white flames as soon as he touched it (Blue had promptly dropped it in the sand and kicked it away from him), and a heavy, strange-looking glove.
Blue picked the large glove up curiously. As with the flame-spitting thing, the object didn't care for his touch. The glove jumped in his hands like a living thing, and Blue dropped it with a yelp.
"I guess wizards shouldn't handle depowered Bluestone or things with broken enchantments," he mused aloud. He took his Goron gloves out of his bag, ignoring the sounds of lasers chasing his brother on the other side of the room, and tried picking up the more volatile ancient tools again. This time, they lay quietly in his hands.
Blue turned over the odd glove. It was made of solid bits of rusting iron and shiny greenish "cloth" made of finely woven stala wire. At the wrist was a thick, hinged band of iron with flaking blue and red paint and on the back of the hand was a large, faceted topaz gem. Each finger, including the thumb, had an iron ring shaped like an upside-down crown with a circle of charcoal gray stone in the middle, and each fingertip had a pointed iron cap with an ovular "nail" made of the same gray stone on the back. The glove wasn't in too terrible shape, under the thin layer of rust; it looked like all it needed was a touch-up on its enchantment, a good scrub of its iron bits, and some new paint, and it would be good to go. Shame he had no idea what it was for.
'Once we get to Oasis City, I'll get a chance to ask about what the glove does,' Blue thought, putting everything in his bag. He'd had his breather; it was time to do some more exercise.
Blue took out five more ReDeads in the same way as he had the previous three. Each time, he floated them in closer to him, keeping them stunned along the way, and did his best to snatch something off once they were close enough. Was it grave-robbing, and probably not the moral thing to do? Yes, but in Blue's defense, he'd happily let people rob his ReDead if he died wearing expensive jewelry. What was a mummified zombie going to do with the shiny things falling off of its shambling bones?
He finished his ReDead annihilation spree with six arm-bangles, over a dozen pliers and metal rods, four fire-spitting devices, four rusty gloves, a fancy snake-themed hair ornament that had fallen off of its owner's hairless head centuries ago, and two cylinders each of what he hoped might be ruby and diamond. Even though he felt close to keeling over after all that running and spell-throwing, that haul was worth it.
The room was dotted all over with glowing mushrooms and flowers by the time he and Red finally met up again. Both of them had run out of Silent Shrooms and Blue Nightshade and had resorted to dropping lacy little Wedding Flowers instead. The elegant, dimly white-glowing blooms grew like weeds in Central Hyrule, so each of the Harrys had idly picked at least a few.
"Did we do it? Have we solved the room?" Red panted. His sweaty brow fairly sparkled in the lamplight. Out of the two of them, he'd done the most running.
"I don't think we have," Blue answered with a puzzled frown. While he was happy about his loot, it irked him that he hadn't fulfilled any sort of objective by playing monster-tag. What else could the room want?
"What if it's something to do with the eyes?" Red asked. "They're the clearest thing to see in here. Maybe we were supposed to get back here to shut them off, or something." He drew back his lantern to throw. "Like, for instance, what if the room keeps on going where the eyes can't see us?" Red pitched the lamp underhand to the "north", beneath the great wall-mounted Beamos looming overhead.
The lamp arced through the air, passing though where Blue had expected a wall to be. The long splat of oil that it threw ahead of it stretched out even farther, revealing the shape of a few things that didn't seem to be flat floor or vertical column.
"There's a hollow spot in the back wall!" Blue exclaimed. "I bet that's where the control room is!"
Red let out a laugh. "Aren't I clever!"
They hurried under the Beamos eyes and followed the path of burning oil. Out of the darkness emerged banks of stone consoles. Some had big stone buttons and toggles, others had domes of stone and crystal that must have served as indicator lights, and many had slots and insets of varying sizes. Nothing had an interface screen or a keyboard, as far as Blue could tell. This tech must have been older than those inventions.
"If I were an 'off' switch, what would I look like and where would I be?" Blue wondered, rubbing his chin. Many of the buttons were labeled via etchings in the stone around them, but the writing just looked like snake squiggles to him.
"There's a pull-switch over here, Blue!" Red called from another part of the area. He was stood next to a wall with his lantern held out over a golden pull-bar set into the wall. "I don't know what it does, but it seems important," he said when Blue walked over.
Blue shrugged. "Well, a switch that does something is better than one that does nothing. I can't tell what any of the switches in here do, so we might as well start with this one."
Red grabbed the pull-bar, Blue held onto his waist, and the two of them hauled back. The chain the golden bar was attached to grated reluctantly out of the wall, causing the boys to bounce and jolt as they tried to match the strength of a Gerudo. Their efforts worked, though; there was a clunk, and then the bar snatched itself back against the wall with a clatter.
An unpleasant tingle washed across every hair on Blue's body as a low hum picked up in the air. The ground quaked underfoot, and yellowish lights flickered around them. Another shudder went through the floor, and the lighting properly kicked on. The angry rumble settled into a gentle vibration that shook dust from the ceiling.
Blue looked around. As he'd thought, this was clearly a control room. What he hadn't thought was that it would be full of melted blast craters, blackened bones, chalky gray ash, and the scattered detritus of a place that hadn't successfully been left with haste.
"Whoa. Looks like some really bad stuff happened here," Red said solemnly. He picked up a clay cup with a tarnished gold straw in it. "It looks like the people in here were just having another boring day until something came in and started blasting."
Blue walked closer to one of the shiny black craters in the floor. Given what he'd just gone through, he would have assumed the Beamos mounted overhead would have done this, but the circumference of this mark was too narrow. A smaller beam had done this, with greater accuracy. There wasn't a trail leading to the mark, just a pinpoint shot with ash and shattered bones strewn in front of it.
"There was another special Beamos," he declared. "One that wasn't mounted in place and could move, most likely. There isn't anything with a glowing eye aimed at this area, and it would be idiotic to point a laser robot that powerful at your own control room, so the thing that did this was either moved somewhere else or moved itself."
The room shuddered again—not in a real world way that Blue could feel in this boots, but a way that plucked at strings in his heart and bones. Half of the consoles shifted, sprouting fresh coats of paint in bright Gerudo gold, red, blue, and green. Some of the melted and knocked-over stools sprang up and regrew their bright red cushions. Lights in some of the consoles returned to life, shining yellow, red, and blue.
Ghosts appeared patchily among the half-revived hardware. Gerudo, all of them smaller and round-eared like the woman in pink that Blue had seen earlier. Many wore tool belts like the ones the ReDeads had been wearing, stocked with younger-looking versions of the same equipment Blue had just looted. They wore uniforms that the woman in pink hadn't been—blue and yellow saris of identical cut and drape, with big pins that looked like smaller versions of the Mirror Shield holding shut an orange sash that crossed over their heart. Each wore two enameled armbands like the ones Blue had found.
Some of the phantoms sat at their work stations, pushing buttons, monitoring light panels, or feeding metal cards full of punched holes into an appropriately-sized slot. They sipped from cups like the one Red had picked up, snacked on plates of fruit, and gossiped in words that Blue couldn't quite hear. A normal day, like many that had come before it.
Around that memory of an ordinary day lay a scene of bloodless slaughter. Spectres silently screaming as they ran from something unseen, jittering in and out of sight until they jerked forward and vanished. Scientists huddling and quivering in corners, pleading in voices that scratched incomprehensibly against Blue's ears until they, too, flinched and blinked out. Women crawling across the ground, one or two limbs ending in charcoal, until they reached one of the blast marks cratering the tiles and were gone. A few ghosts fled past the rest, ignoring the reaching hands of the desperate, and disappeared up a staircase that Blue now noticed at the back of the room.
"What could be up there?" he asked Red, pointing.
Red swept a hand around the room full of the previously bored and dying. "The thing that did this maybe? Bloody hell, it must have been awful." He shook his head, rubbing the back of his neck. "Why were they building lasers in the first place? I mean, pretty dangerous, innit? These people didn't stand a chance!"
A woman wearing an elaborate snake-themed ornament in her hair ran past Blue before falling with a black-ringed hole through her torso. He swallowed hard against the guilt and horror that rose in his throat. Had her ReDead still borne the wound that had killed her? He hadn't been able to see it before he'd led another Beamos into killing her for good.
"Erm. We should. We should investigate upstairs," he said, staring at where the phantom had vanished. He hoped her reincarnation, whoever they were, was having a better go of things this time around. "We've turned this part of the facility on, but I don't know if we've done what we came here to do yet."
"If you say so," Red said. He summoned his Mirror Shield and half-ducked behind it as he warily led the way up the stairs.
They emerged onto a terribly hot observation deck full of aging pipework. Two giant golden rods ran across the entire room, from front to back. They were host to an elaborate set-up of steel braces, cables that jumped from port to port, smaller copper tubes that coiled around themselves and did loops around the central pipes, and exhaust vents letting out the shimmering, iron-reeking air that made the room so unpleasant. Sand occasionally dropped in from the vents in the ceiling, whose blasts of cold nighttime air were slowly winning the fight against the machine.
Between the heavily-reinforced wall-mounts for the pipes lay a large, square pane of blue-tinted glass. There were melted holes in the glass at about the height where a smallish Gerudo's head might be. Three headless mummified corpses were laid out on the ground several meters short of the console at the front of the room.
The boys hissed sympathetically through their teeth and stepped away from the bodies.
"I'm going to guess this is the back side of those Beamos eyes," Blue said, holding a hand out toward one of the pipes. It was hot enough that he was surprised it hadn't started glowing; he and Red had given this old hardware a thorough workout. "Continuing with that guess, I'd say the scientists here were doing a live test with those eyes when another Beamos moved in somehow and started shooting the place up. They tried to stop the test so they'd be able to run across the field of sand with less chance of being vaporized, but the thing that shot them was too smart. It saw them through the glass and took them out before they could shut these eyes off. Whatever generators power this place were left on an automatic setting the test-Beamos could use on its own, revving them up when it spotted anything moving in its field of vision."
"That's a long guess," Red remarked. "Are you sure about all of that?"
Blue shrugged. "No, but do you have any better ideas?"
"Well, I'm going to say that other Beamos could probably fly," Red replied. He pointed toward the holes in the glass, then toward the lumpy, deep crater the two of them had passed while going up the staircase. "That's a straight shot across. Pow-pow-pow."
"A flying Beamos?" Blue shuddered. "Right, because that's what just the world needed. A flying, homicidal doomsday weapon. What the hell were these people thinking, building something like that?"
"'Let's see who can make the coolest laser robot', maybe? I dunno, I can understand how they might've gotten carried away without realizing."
Blue rolled his eyes. "Of course you would understand these reckless idiots."
"Hey, I figured out the flying thing, didn't I? I'm reckless, not gormless." Red walked up to the window and looked out over the vast sand pit. "Huh. Some of the blast-marks out there are different," he observed. "Neat holes, like the ones in the control room. And long lines from the big eyes up here, too, of course. People ran out there to escape, but between all those lasers, I don't know if any of them could have made it." He turned his head and squinted at something. "And that's a door in the wall over there. A huge door. Ignikanos could have walked through that if it tucked its heads a little. I bet whatever came in here was supposed to be allowed in, so the scientists super weren't expecting it to start shooting."
"Test rooms like this don't come cheap or easy," Blue said as he walked up to the console. "Other Beamos models might have been brought in here to do their own testing—maybe including the vase-style ones we've seen so far." There were several buttons on the console, each labeled in words he couldn't read and decorated with an enameled symbol. The whole thing was shiny and new, shimmering slightly as it struggled to exist twice over. Cracks had formed in its casing; Blue hoped it was functional enough for what he needed from it.
He pressed a dull blue button decorated with a white crescent moon. It was the moon eye of the statue in the next room that he wanted changed, and that was the button that most closely resembled an "off" switch for the Beamos eyes.
The room rumbled, then quieted. The electric buzz in the air dissipated and the slight vibration of the floor ceased. He assumed that meant he'd shut off the generators. Had it changed the statue, though?
"We're done here," he told Red. "Let's gather up the trail-markers we left lying around and go back to the statue room. As long as we took in here, Green and Yellow should be done on their side by now."
Notes:
-I bet you guys wouldn't have expected the Four Sword to be traumatized, huh? The heart-shaped mask it showed Harry was, of course, Majora's Mask. I've crunched the timeline in a way that Wind Waker didn't, so that mask is particularly relevant. In WW, there was an era after the Hero of Time that was going fine until Ganondorf rose again, with its own generation of the Royal Family and a Hero that either wasn't born or wasn't divinely called upon. In this fic-verse, OoT Link vanished due to time-screwiness, while OoT Zelda became known as the Last Queen of Old Hyule due to her ruling through and surviving the events of the Great Flood.
-Blue doesn't know what welding equipment is. The fire-spitting things are welder's torches, and the metal rods are welding material. The ReDeads he was mugging were robotics engineers like that phantom of Nabooru's reincarnation that Blue and Green saw. The damaged metal glove he found, on the other hand, was a Gerudo electrician's most important tool...
-Unlike Wind Waker and TOTK, this fic doesn't retcon Gerudo from farther back on the timeline as having pointy Hylian ears. Instead, those are a relatively recent trait of New Kingdom Gerudo.
-Before we had nifty doodads like floppy disks, computer programs were recorded on punch cards. To run a program, you fed the punch cards into the computer.
-In case it hasn't been made clear enough in the text, the problem with Vaati's current line of magical experimentation isn't that he's pulling things through time (which he's already been doing), but that he hasn't also pulled them through space. Instead of reversing the time in the dungeon (which is what he was actually aiming to do), he's quantum-entangling two versions of the same object, cramming the past and future into the same place and holding them there like two magnets that want to fly apart.
Next month: The Harrys face the heartless entity responsible for the Medusa Massacre.