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The blood moon rises once again.
Its red glow shines on a ravaged land, spilling through cracks and broken stone to coax the bones of the earth. Through the webbing of a ringed skylight, its light in eclipse illuminates a circle of burbling, violet-black mucus. Rimming it are characters of the same, spelled out in odd, unsteady strokes.
As the crimson reaches its zenith, a black strand pops.
She lets out a sigh of relief.
"Does that mean you can still make a jar of electr—don't try that either! Okay, I will stop suggesting things. The volume per time I was just trying to say the same thing about the simultaneity."
She turns around and flounces into the building.
"Do come in. What are you here for, and do you take commissions?"
"I am doing fact-finding prior to an expedition to try to kill Calamity Ganon, and, like, probably, if you don't want anything too concerning."
She brightens visibly.
"Oh, if you're already on that, that makes this much simpler! What I want is more or less concerning depending on how strongly you feel about violating the natural order of existence and bringing revolution to our way of life!"
She rubs her hands together gleefully as she hops onto a chair next to a table full of scribbled sheets.
"How many of you are there, and can we convince any to come and live here? Here as in Hyrule! But I'm getting ahead of myself... Symin, done yet?"
Behind her, the man is supervising a large pedestal into which he's slotted the Slate. Above it, a glossy, stalactitic installation hangs. It runs with glowing Sheikah runes as a bead of blazing liquid blue dews at its tip.
"There are billions and many are bribeable but I'm unsure if summoning more of us will be straightforward."
"Summoning? Is Hell a parallel realm, then? Like in the legends of the Twili?"
The droplet of blue falls and strikes the Sheikah Slate in a splash of searing color.
"Yes, and there are two more kinds of summonable beings too, with different powers."
"No, they have their own places, fairies from Fairyland and angels from Heaven."
"Move things and change things respectively, and like me but with different standard wing types."
"That sounds much less interesting than what you do, but maybe I'm missing something... hold on. Ah, Symin. Give me the bad news."
"The system is wiped completely clean, Director."
"Of course. Not even the bootloader?"
"The bootloader inflated from the zirconia templating, as Leto predicted."
"Pshooey," she sighs. "Shame he's not around anymore. It'll take an image, though?"
Shrug. "I don't see why not."
The girl turns to Cam, brightening.
"So, CamCam. Can I call you that? Do you want a working Sheikah Slate? I don't normally do things like this for free, but considering the circumstances, let's call it a down payment on what I hope is a long and productive relationship."
"You may not. And sure, thanks, can you also tell me how to use it?"
"Aw well. Well, we need to set one up for you first. Actually, do you want to make a copy of mine?" She fishes a Sheikah Slate out from under the papers on the table. It's noticeably more worn than the one Cam made before, but looks modded on top of that. Parts of the casing have clearly been replaced to make more room, leaving it about 30% thicker. "It's upgraded! How does your thing work, exactly—the one you made looks newer than any Sheikah Slate than can be extant today..."
"I just make things ex nihilo but they can be copies of things that existed in the past. You want yours but newer or something?"
"If you can do that! And doesn't that mean you could anything out of ancient history? What if it doesn't exist? Can you make our lost archives? That would be incredible! It could set our progress ahead thousands of years!"
Copy of her slate but newer. "If it doesn't exist I have to design it, pretty much. The archives might not come through if they're magic like the stuff that's supposed to be on the slate."
"Good point... a lot of them probably are, but our ancestors have to have written some stuff down on pen and paper! An important project for later!"
She inspects the Slate and throws it at Symin, then she roots around in her papers more.
"Do you know what a Sheikah Slate does, actually?"
"What? No, the Champions control their Divine Beasts with their minds after they've soul-bounded to them. Where did you get that idea? Sheikah Slates are general-purpose authentication, computation, data storage and mesoscopic energy manipulation devices! The ultimate multitool of the ancient age!"
She finally digs up a notebook and leafs through it.
"There are basic functions like programmable computation, mapping, aetheric telecommunication, instant transposition—the last one's very useful if you're going to be bopping around like Linky is—but there are also runes, the best thing about them! Modules you can swap out to channel the fully generic energy manipulation abilities of the Sheikah Slate! You can have six in total, with my upgraded slate."
She plops the book down in front of him, open to the first page.
"I have an index here of the ones we've recovered or reconstructed, even some I invented myself!"
Would he like a choice of six from the following runes?
It goes on like this on and on with features of generally decreasing utility, until at the end there's a section labeled "Work in Progress".
"...wow. Uh, he isn't currently controlling the divine beast and seemed to think a Sheikah Slate would help. What does 'universal catalyst' mean here?"
"You talked to Revali? So you were at Vah Medoh? Link said Mipha was on Vah Ruta, so that makes sense! Sheikah Slates can control authorization of the Divine Beasts, and Linky used that to revert control of Ruta away from Ganon and back to Mipha's ghost, so that's probably what Revali meant."
"...I guess we need probably fix that vulnerability if we're going to be making Slates left and right. How annoying!
"They weren't meant to do that, originally; it was designed for five Slates with sufficient access level—we never figured out if it was five of the Council, or five of the Champions, or something else—five slates with administrator access touching the terminals of the Divine Beasts at the same time, before the Beast would let anyone add or remove authorized pilots. But we didn't have even one Sheikah Slate with admin access, let alone five! So Magda got up in their heads and messed with the control mechanisms so you could just touch any Slate to all five of the authorization terminals in sequence to reset the authorizations."
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