"Oh, yeah, and the universal catalyst seems to decrease the activation energy of chemical reactions! Not really, but something to that effect. Too complicated to explain in a minute. It's blocked by all kinds of phenomena, so if you point it at someone they don't instantly die, but they'll have a bit of an unpleasant time. Mostly useful for chemistry! Very interesting, though."

"Anyway, of these options for what to install I think I like Chronos and Stasis best, and Magnesis could be handy, and most everything else I'm unclear on the use case or it'd be redundant."

"With Camera, I can load you up with my database, and if you find Linky you can talk him into giving you his, and then you can know what something is if you take a picture of it and it's in the database. It's a bit like an encyclopedia, if you have that where you're from? My database is mostly random junk from around here, but I'm sure Link has a lot of good stuff! He goes all over Hyrule.

"A lot of this is definitely specialized more for research, since that's what I—and the ancient Sheikah, I suppose—were interested in."

"Link has Magnesis, Cryonis, Stasis, Bomb and Camera.

"Bomb is more useful than you might think! It's remarkably selective in what it damages if you tune the resonances right. Link's default setting lets him break down big piles of rubble without taking the whole roof down with it... usually. We used it a lot for excavating ancient ruins.

"Cryonis he uses for getting over lakes and such. Doesn't work well on lava, because it only changes state of matter, not temperature! You just get deadly hot solid rock. Cryonis ice still feels cool to the touch, but that's because of thermal-conductive properties. Not very useful if you can fly."

"I'm also indestructible. Selective explosions could be good though, my explosions aren't at all!"

"I can demo some different configurations for you... actually, ask Robbie. He'll have much more patience for it. But the main default setting is good for removing or disintegrating loose material while not damaging anything still in bulk, if you don't want to fiddle with it. So what are your choices? If you're still undecided and don't have anything you terribly want, you can get two of one rune, so for example you'll be able to Stasis two things at the same time by switching copies."

"That sounds good to me."

"So that's Chronos, Stasis, Stasis again, Magnesis, Bomb, and... Camera or another Chronos?"

"Is Camera more useful than just -" He snaps a picture of her and shows it to her.

She peers at it.

"That's good resolution! But it does image recognition as well, I said, and if you hunt down Link and copy his database then the Sheikah Slate will give you his notes on anything you take a picture of, and the kid loves wildlife photography, I tell you. Its also good for detecting hidden or camouflaged things."

"Huh. I guess I could stand to know what stuff around here is."

"Chronos, two Stasis, Magnesis, Bomb, Camera, then? And I'll also download you the map information I took off Link, and you'll want to get the travel gate registered..."

She hops off the chair and trots towards Symin.

"What is Link's, uh, deal? You keep mentioning him."

"He's the Hylian Champion! The Princess' knight, wielder of the Master Sword, yadda yadda. He was mortally injured one hundred years ago and we put him in the Shrine of Resurrection to see if it would bring him back—it did! Missing most of his memories. So now he's running around again helping us figure out this Ganon situation. I need to introduce you to him, but he's haring around somewhere in Gerudo Desert by now, I reckon. What's your plan for dealing with Ganon, by the by?"

"Oh, I was going to explode him." He does the sawdust trick again. "Like so."

She raises an eyebrow as she's coming back over.

"I don't know if there is something to explode! You see that big swirly thing over the castle a while back? No one's ever seen a concrete form, not even the ancient Sheikah who managed to seal him for ten thousand years properly. If you destroy all of the physical manifestations of his power—the Malice, the monsters, the infected Guardians and tech—I don't know if he'll just start creating more! We were going to use the Divine Beasts to soften him up, in theory, knock loose his hold on the physical plane, and then the Princess was supposed to use her magic powers to seal him away, again in theory. Maybe you can replace some of those parts. Link says the Princess is still in Hyrule Castle, somehow.

"But the problem is we don't know why it didn't work last time. Why Ganon knew enough in advance to seize control of the Divine Beasts, why the Princess couldn't awaken her divine powers until, apparently, she did, why Link and his supposedly legendary sword didn't do so hot even to the end. Oh, and we don't know where the Master Sword is either. All open questions!"

"Inconvenient. I could evacuate the planet and make you a new one?"

"Wow, that's a thought! Can you really do that? I don't see why that wouldn't work, unless Ganon is secretly an intelligent manifestation of the world's people's hate and evil, in which he might follow us there, which is possible! We don't know what he is, really. And there's a lot of beings which could be hard, dangerous or even lethal to evacuate, like the Great Fairies, or the deep-sea Zora, or the Minish, or the dragons... and legendary realms like the Twilight Realm or Dark Realms or the Sacred Realm... a lot of things we don't know to be confirmed to exist, but some of them probably do!

"If we end up leaving them behind, they could end up eaten by Ganon; or the people that do go might suffer for separation or other reasons we can't predict. What if the legendary Dream Stones are real and we forget to take along and on the new planet no one is able to sleep because of that? The Subrosians from the deep mines of the Continent South of the Sea, which I do know exist, they get thinner and weaker the longer they are away from their homeland, and it's not solved by digging new mines to live in Hyrule or lava baths or importing a lot of their special lanterns. There are a lot of mysteries like that!

"Also, you're not going to convince most of the world to follow you to a different planet until Lynels are overrunning their walls, no way."

"I can really do that but that's a lot of reasons to think it won't work. How is Link or the Divine Beasts supposed to kill Ganon if he isn't material?"

"It's really unclear what Link does! Maybe he just bodyguards and fends off the minions until the Princess can do her thing? He has these... we called them Ganonblights. Creatures formed of his Malice and stolen ancient technology. Link says some of them are still sleeping in the Divine Beasts, one of them destroyed Akkala Citadel but we managed to take it down, there's one that came out of the Gerudo sinkhole and wandered off into the desert after ravaging Gerudo Town and no one's seen it again... oh, or are you asking what the plan is now?"

"Yeah."

"Well, the Princess is still around! Or her ghost, maybe! We suspected when a few weeks ago this bright light started shining from the Castle even as Ganon's muck started spewing around again, but Link confirmed it. He said the Princess spoke to him. The specific plan is that Link's supposed to free all the Divine Beasts so they can shoot their lasers to weaken Ganon, and then Linky goes into the Castle to I guess free the Princess' ghost, or something? He wasn't specific about it and nor was the princess, and Link was all just like 'I trust the princess' about it."

She makes a face.

"So maybe you can do your disintegration trick to speed along the middle part, but it sounds like a bad idea to run the risk of, like, Ganon possessing you? Or something? He didn't do that one hundred years ago, but maybe he just didn't have anyone important enough and possessable. Unless you're telling me you're immune to that too.

"But really, with all of these resources at our disposal, I think that's a tad unambitious!"

"He can possess people?"

"He possessed the Divine Beasts! In a sense. I think that's not exactly the same, though, since the Divine Beasts are designed to be possessed. He infected some Gorons with Malice one hundred years ago, we're not sure how, and they became violent and hostile until the Zora figured out how to fix them, but that's not the same thing as possession either. We don't know; that's the problem! He he's shown so many abilities it's possible that he can do anything he wants, just at varying cost... and what you can do is worth a lot, even to whatever kind of thing he is."

"You're not wrong. Uh, I mistook the salamander divine beast for just another magic robot like the little ones, and it seemed like it might hurt someone, and, uh, it has exploded."