Where do people say Ganon comes from? Did Hylia make Ganon, and if so, why?

"They say he's a Gerudo. Yes, really."

"I listen."

"One of their sons, who took pity on his mother and aunts and sisters, because they'd been conquered, and their conquerors had pushed them onto more and more marginal land. He tried to help them fight back against Hylia's people, by becoming a god who could stand against her, a god of overthrowing that which is intolerable -

" - but, I mean, that can't be true, the Gerudo can't have been around the last time Ganon was free. Just, it was written and copied by people who knew that, and thought it was true or important anyway."

"Sometimes, people a god makes may do things the god does not want. I will ask the Gerudo about Ganon and other things when I see them. Also, no brothers or uncles or father?"

"Probably, back then. They don't like men anymore because Ganon is one and they... have different alliances now."

"Probably what, back then?"

"The thing Gerudo are famous for is not having any men. But now that you mention it, as far as I know, that's at least partly to do with the Calamity being a man and the Gerudo not wanting him to have the chance to reincarnate. So now that I'm thinking about it, actually, father and uncles and brothers are a weird omission."

"Do Gerudo eggs in cold or warm or hot mean male or female?"

"Gerudo give live birth. That means they don't lay eggs, they have babies without shells. They keep their society female by restricting immigration - immigration is when people from other places decide to live in Gerudo Town - and sometimes by committing infanticide - that's when they have babies and kill them."

"I do not like that. If they do not want male babies I think they should learn magic."

Shrug. "I think a lot of them must get left with their fathers but..."

"I want to teach the Gerudo magic. But if they had more magic they may hurt people with it, and I should learn how I am here and who Ganon and Hylia are."

Vaal sighs. "I wish that didn't make sense."

"Yeah. Many tools for helping can also hurt."

"Yeah. Hm, I was telling you earlier what a liar was and it reminded me of some puzzles that use some complicated sentence structures. Do you like puzzles?"

"I like some puzzles."

"In this one, there's an island. It's not a real island. The islanders - people who live on the island - are all a species that doesn't live anywhere else, and that species has two kinds. Like how bokoblins have colors, except you can't tell the difference between the islanders by looking at them. One kind always tells the truth, and the other kind always lies. A traveler, like us, went on a boat over the water to the island. The traveler wanted to interview people to find out what it was like living there. And when the traveler came on shore, the village, where most people lived, wasn't visible. It was down the road, but the road forked into two." Vaal gestures to illustrate that. "At the fork in the road, there was an islander. The traveler asked the islander one question, and then the traveler knew which way the village was. What question did the traveler ask?"

"I think for the puzzle I say the traveler says 'which path do you say goes to the village if I ask', because if there are two things, the lie about a lie is true. But the liar may say they say 'all the paths' when if you asked 'which path goes to the village' ey says 'no paths, there is no village'."

"Fair enough."

"There is a kind of mistake that is obeying a rule that no person makes."

"Oh?"

Griffie will describe tic-tac-toe, and note that if there isn't a rule that says you can draw things only in the nine spaces, then drawing things outside the spaces is a winning strategy if you think of it first. (Ey's considered some more practical examples, but non-adventuring ones don't immediately spring to mind.)

"I would have thought that if you did it that way, then the other person would get mad and say you didn't really win."

"That may be true, but I saw a magic puzzle where doing that was how to solve it."