Cam appears.

Looks around.

"You rang?" he asks, raising his voice a bit in case whoever was manning the light projector is hiding.

For a pause, there's nothing. Then the air pressure around him spikes, vibrates, then stills. There's a sound almost like a diffracting wave run in reverse: smudged out at first, then running back together and coalescing into shape.

It goes a bit like:

a      de   n     a

you a

are   you  a demon

The weird slabs on the rails above him rock as the voice speaks, creaking gently. The ground underfoot teeters just a little. If he looks around, he's in some kind of... depressed... pit room thing... of dark metal-looking walls with raised gold patterns. Though the color might be hard to tell considering that the only thing to see by is the dim red moonlight streaming in from strange gratings-windows above.

"Y...es? What were you expecting?"

There's another pause. When the voice comes back, it's a bit steadier.

I did not expect this to work.

"Who... are you."

I am Revali, legendary archer of the Rito. Champion of my Divine Beast Vah Medoh, to which you are summoned. And what is your address?

"I'm Cam. I... don't know of a legend about you and have not heard of Divine Beasts before."

The air rasps, producing almost a "tch".

I am sure nor have I heard the great legends of... Hell. Yet here we are.

He says "Hell" by a mangled pronunciation of the name from one of the more common demon languages.

"How did you know to try this? I don't think anybody's been summoned to wherever the heck this is before."

I was told of it in a dream. Or some miserable facsimile of one, at the least.

"A... miserable facsimile.. of a dream."

Is it a dream if one does not sleep? A daydream, a vision, a hallucination borne of this half-life unending. Call it what you will.

"What are you?"

What am I?

The walls around him shudder, the blocks above screeching to and fro.

I am dead.

"So some sort of... ghost, haunting the... beast."

A spirit bound to the chassis of this Divine Beast I once called mine. For one hundred years I have waited, for something—anything! For an age there was nothing. Nothing except us and his cold dead grip. Nothing until it came back. I have waited for one hundred years. We will never be free.  It returns. It  comes for me. It is  inside us.  I t   will ne v     e

It will never cease.

You are a demon. You make deals, or so I am to understand.

"That's standard, yeah... what's coming for you?"

Calamity Ganon.

We were meant to destroy him. Instead, we died. We failed. The world burned. And now I am here, clinging to a shadow of existence. Then he was gone, for a long time, for decades and decades. Until today. Yesterday. Or was it longer? No, weeks. No. The Great Calamity returns. I cannot fail again.

I want you to destroy him. May he never return for one hundred thousand years. More. If he does not ever return, the better.

In exchange, I offer you my soul.

"I don't actually collect souls. I know that it's a whole tradition and everything but it's not my bag. How about I go see if I can verify that Calamity Ganon is bad news for myself, and if he is, I explode him or whatever, gratis."

And how do you intend to verify this?

"...fly around, talk to people, see if there are calamities ongoing and some specific guy who looks up if I say 'yo Ganon' is doing them?"

Calamity Ganon is not a "guy". It is—malice incarnate. A spirit of destruction. Natural disaster given life. The ancients named him many things. If you wish to see evidence of the Calamity, it is as simple as gazing eastward from one of Vah Medoh's viewports.

"Well, I'm not sure I will be able to kill anything like that unless it's incarnate enough to die, but like, I don't want to kill some random person with a similar name or anything, I've got some due diligence to do."

Pardon me: are you not a demon able to conjure lightning, endless fire and powers yet more exotic? Ganon is not of such flesh and blood as we are—were—but older incarnations of the Calamity were quelled by weapons made of Hylian hands.

Vah Medoh was one such instrument, once.

The air rustles.

I am not inclined to simply let you loose on all of Hyrule. Promise that you do not intend harm on the innocent people of her greater lands, and that you will pursue the obliteration of Calamity Ganon with due haste to prevent the destruction of Hyrule once and for all, if it is indeed the threat which I claim.

"I can conjure many things but lightning and fire are not actually my central capabilities? I don't want to hurt innocent people, that's not what I'm about at all. I guess I might get distracted if I find some other disaster in progress before I can verify the Ganon thing."

The last time the Calamity rose, one hundred years ago, Hyrule Kingdom suffered four or five weeks of harrowing by legions of monsters and corrupted Guardians before Ganon was somehow silenced—but not, it now seems, rightly sealed. It has been less than a month since the Calamity's reemergence, and its throes of power today are... lesser.

By the legends, Calamity Ganon requires six months and six days of waxing to unleash its true form upon the world, upon which it is still possible to beat back, but at far more unbearable cost.

I do dearly hope that you can manage to not be distracted for most of half a year, or we are all truly doomed.

But not lightning and fire, you say. If you find Calamity Ganon to be worth your attention, the voice says with a slight sneer, the most emotive it's managed to be yet, what power do you bring to smite him, then?

"I can conjure material objects." He makes a little wooden sphere, and then: "And most of those can be wrecked by more of the same." Interpolates it into sawdust.

Can you conjure a Sheikah Slate?

"If it's not magic or anything sure." Sheikah Slate?

He gets something that vaguely looks like a metallic Wii U Gamepad in the same black and gold motif as everything around him. There's an eye symbol on the back with a cyan iris and orange tron-lines. It's pretty heavy.

It doesn't seem to do anything if he pokes at it, though. Its screen stays black. The cyan-and-orange patterning looks like it might be supposed to glow, but it doesn't.

"Is this possibly magic?"

It's... inactivated.

Purah always said Sheikah artifacts weren't magic. I suppose we got the last laugh after all. The voice is dull, despite the words. Her people may still be alive, in their village secluded by the Necluda mountains. I wonder...

The air seems to congeal with a sort of thickness. The evil purple growths strewn around the space and making up his summoning circle seem to pulse. A haze of blue and violet sparks in an arc in front of him. The screen of the Sheikah Slate—fizzles. For a split second, a blue print of the eye symbol on the Slate's back flashes on the screen, but then it glitches into orange and blue lines, and then it goes black again.

The Sheikah may be able to restore it. There was ever only one working Sheikah Slate found. If your conjured copy works, you may be able to return control of Vah Medoh to me. If Calamity Ganon saw it necessary to disable the Guardians and the Divine Beasts, he must have feared them—this may be key to destroying him. If the other three Champions' souls are also bound to their Divine Beasts, and we are all restored...

The Divine Beasts were created as ultimate weapons to seal away Calamity Ganon, once upon a time, together with the Princess' divine power and the Master Sword. Link and Princess Zelda are long dead, most likely, but with four out of six, and Ganon seemingly weakened, there may be a chance.

"Okay. Well, where are the Necluda mountains?"

Can you not conjure a map?

"I can conjure a scale model, but it won't have labels. You could tell me about a good map and I could make a copy of that one."

The War Room on the third floor of Hyrule Castle had the most detailed map of Greater Hyrule I've seen hanging on its wall, the last time I was there.... though it is likely destroyed now. There is one in the Cheftain's roost in Rito Village, which ought to be intact.

"Destroyed now doesn't matter." Map from the War Room!

(The map is not quite as detailed as this one, but the main features are there. Labels are as shown.)

"Cool, cool. And we are now where?"

We are in the skies above Rito Village. You are looking for Kakariko village, to the south east. Avoid the Hyrule Field and Hyrule Castle—why are the Castle and Castle Town unlabeled? They've been reduced to smoking ruins, obviously, but to go to the trouble of erasing—the corrupted Guardians in central Hyrule have reactivated, and some variants fly. It is unsafe to approach.

I'm hoping those wings aren't cosmetic. We are a long ways up, and it will take very long to get to Kakariko on foot.

"Oh, yeah, they're not and if they were I could make a flying vehicle. Might anyway, it's faster, what's the scale on this map?"

The distance from Rito Village to the castle is about 50 miles as the Rito flies.

So the depicted landmass is about the size of Ireland.

"Oh, that's not so bad, I'll get there in about an hour on the wing."

Us with wings are thus privileged, says the voice in a tone that almost reaches "smug".

I propose the following: in exchange for you verifying whether Calamity Ganon is the threat I so claim within five weeks, and if so pursuing his annihilation or sealing to prevent his destruction of Greater Hyrule for at least another ten thousand years, you are permitted to leave your circle and make war on Calamity Ganon and his agents in what way you see fit that does not unduly harm innocents, upon which satisfaction you must come to me for renegotiation, else return whence you came.

"Oddly comprehensive dream you got. 'Unduly' is not a great word to put in this kind of negotiation, though, and you also can't make me come back - that's not an unsafe wording exactly, it'll let you dismiss me when the time comes, but it won't happen all by itself. This also leaves pretty unspecified how diligent I have to be about checking the duration of a sealing, which I don't currently know how to do at all anyway."

Clearly not comprehensive enough. To an extent I must resort to trusting your goodwill and reasonable judgment, or this is a doomed endeavor.

Revali sounds irritated.

You appear to have your feathers in order. This is—setting expectations, you can say. Ceremony, at best. How do you expect me to quantify what level of civilian casualties is acceptable collateral? Do I look like I know how to check the duration of a sealing? Hyrule Kingdom has been in worse hands, I am sure.

"I am going to aim for zero civilian casualties, failing that minimal, and failing that at least fewer than would die anyway without my best available intervention."

Monsters have feasted on man-flesh every day since the capital fell one hundred years ago. With Ganon's recent awakening, the nights have become cut with laser flashes visible from here across the great plains of Hyrule. When the sky falls, you cannot shield everyone. I thought I could do anything once.

And then I died.

But thank you, I suppose. On behalf of what remains of Hyrule.

"Is the sky falling a literal issue hereabouts?"

Metaphorical. Though it felt like it, the day of my failure. The way Ganon's towers plunged out of the earth, the walls toppled, and Malice rained from the sky, and the wind itself seemed to shriek against me... but I am no one to speak. What I saw was a short sliver of the harrowing to come. When I found myself again in spirit form, I saw Hyrule decimated.

I remember the Hylians had nineteen towns across the lowlands and valleys when I lived. The Elders worried they would crowd out us all come a few more generations. On your map there are marked two.

"Malice... can rain?"

The damnable purple substance infesting the interior of Medoh you see around you. They are of Ganon, perhaps even part of him, in some way I don't understand.

It comes in different forms. A shroud of it surrounds Hyrule Castle now. Sometimes you can see a monstrous form in the swirling. Or perhaps it is my maddened imagination. The day the Calamity came, masses of it rained from the sky. The solid and liquid forms are merely corrosive, but monsters heal from it, and the mists can infest and convert. It's how the Guardians and the Divine Beasts, originally created by Ancient Sheikah to combat Ganon, were turned against us. A dirty trick.

"Do you want me to like, powerwash it out of here before I go or something?"

It will grow back. The true hold of the Malice is incorporeal, inside Medoh. This gunk is merely a symptom.

"Wow, gross. Okay. Anything else before I go looking for corroboration?"

The Master Sword—it is also known as the sword that seals the darkness—I do not know where it is, but it is important, in the prophecies the Hylians dug up. No one could wield it except Link, but the King hardly tested everyone in the kingdom before handing it off to the first person who could pull it out of the stone. If you can find it, it may be of some use.

And... if the situation with the Sheikah Slate takes longer than several months, I guess it would be preferable to receive an update so as not to keep me in suspense. It's terribly boring up here, you know.

"Would you like me to leave you a device that tells stories or something?"

...Yes. How does that work?

"How much of an explanation are you looking for, here? It'll run on electricity. The - oh, you won't speak any languages I know stories in. Music? Dance productions? I have no idea what angle you're seeing from, if you want something visual tell me where."

I was asking whether it needs to be operated or how. Regretfully, my spirit's ability to act on this world is greatly diminished. It took eight days to grow this summoning circle, and you can see for yourself the abysmal quality of my writing. I cannot operate small physical mechanisms and buttons, much less touchscreens*.

*lit. "Sheikah screens"

Any sound or image an ordinary eye can see, anywhere in Vah Medoh, I will be able to interpret. The device can be placed on the floor you stand on, with large grips for me to anchor its position myself.

"Oh, yeah, I did get the impression that you're not high on manual dexterity so I was just going to start it for you and have it run continuously. What kind of grips?"

Similar to the grip on the Sheikah Slate in design and proportion to the rest of the device. Not smaller than the Sheikah Slate's in absolute size.

Cam makes a TV with a year's worth of assorted dance and music-with-visuals-a-la-Fantasia queued up on shuffle, with a couple doots attached to the back so Revali can grab it.

Thank you. Do you agree to the proposal, then?

"Go fact-find and follow up, if it takes a couple months swing back here? Yeah."

Then it is agreed. Say hello for me to the Rito of the Village, if you visit.

Revali's presence seems to fade away with the words. At the very last, there's a soft whisper:

May the winds be with you.

"Thanks."

Now... where is the exit.

If he gets out of the pit, he's in a central hall with openings to different parts of the Divine Beast, with all kinds of weird doodads and platforms and generally bizarre architectural choices, like the person who built this thing really liked puzzle platformers for some reason. Malice goop is strung about the place, and some of the growths have slitted yellow eyeballs that swivel around to focus on Cam if he gets near.

But one of the openings heading up clearly goes outside. He can see some of the sky past it.

Oh, also there's this tiny three-legged robot thing entering from another of the doorways, whirring angrily at him?

It's the same black and gold design as everything else, but it's infected with pulsating purple between the patterning. Its single eye tracks Cam, charging brighter and brighter blue as it beeps loudly.

"Hey Revali, this kind of thing isn't like, a person, is it?"

The response is barely resolved: No. I forgot it was there. You may destroy it.

Unfortunately, talking is not a free action! The robot thing shoots him in the chest with a blindingly bright sci-fi laser beam. It briefly leaves a slight burn.

Good thing Cam's not wearing a shirt!

He interpolates the robot thing.

It explodes with blue energy! A few wisps of purple also escapes. Once the dust clears, though, it is indeed now interpolated into dust.

The automated defenses may activate, Revali murmurs. When you leave. The fie ld   tu    rts will atte mpt to a  tt

The rest of it is inaudible.

"Well, I hope none of it shoots your TV."

He hops out the exit and dives till he likes the angle for snapping his wings out.

It is VERY COLD outside but fortunately he is a demon. As he dives, large floating drones in a similar style to the thing that attacked him onboard turn and shoot at him, but he's a small target, the beams are slow-moving on these distance scales, and they aren't doing any trajectory correction, so they'll miss him even if he doesn't particularly try to dodge.

He'll blow them up anyway, they might shoot anyone lasering wildly like that. Boom boom boom boom.

Gliiiiide.

They are blown up!

As he breaks through the cloud layer, Hyrule unveils itself beneath him.

It is very early morning, the sky beginning to turn light, but the sun's not visible over the horizon yet. The land is still mostly dark, but can be made out.

Straight down is what must be Rito Village, an assemblage of huts and hanging bridges built up around a rock spire rising from a large lake. On three sides it's bracketed by mountains, but to the east a long bridge opens it to a stretch hills and mesas dotted with lakes and passes, cleaved by a steep canyon that cut northeast to southwest, running far and out of sight.

Farther to the southeast stretches a great plain scattered with visible signs of (possibly erstwhile) settlement: towns, farms, roads. It's hard to make out details at a distance, but it's crowned at the north by a city with a dilapidated castle. Past the central plains are mountains, forests and wetland. There's also an active volcano a great distance east of where Cam is, past more plains and forests; and snowy highlands to the south.

The castle is shrouded in a glowing violet haze. Now and then, one can see a brief flash of light down in the central plains, and more rarely ones farther afield.

Where does he go?

He spirals thoughtfully, then plummets to the village. He has to start somewhere, and he has a hello for them.

As he descends towards the village, he will notice that there's a growing downdraft, until when he's in the immediate overhead airspace it's so strong that he's almost plummeting like a rock. The village appears to be populated by... bird people? There are humans off on the other side of the bridge. Some of the bird people are pointing at him and seem alarmed.

There's empty areas on the sides of the lake he can crash land into, or he can go for the lake, though it looks like it might be difficult to climb out of; it has very steep rock walls, no flat shores or anything. There are also other smaller rock spires rising out of the lake, some of which connect the bridge. Or he can try to glide out in a safe direction to see if he can get out of the downdraft before he crashes, but it's unclear how far it extends, if there's a limit at all.

He'll take the lake.

He can successfully pull off a controlled splashdown. When he surfaces, he might see a man in brown running along the rim of the lake towards him, waving an arm. He's holding a large spool of rope.

The sides of the lake are sheer rock walls, maybe a few dozen meters tall.

Cam adds some ladder projections to the cliff and makes it up them on his second try.

The man gets to the ladder and looks vaguely confused, but stows the rope on his back and helps Cam up the final stretch if it looks like he needs it.

"Where'd you fly in from? I suppose you haven't heard the news."

He's looking curiously at the wings but doesn't comment on them.

"Please, tell me the news!"

He points at the sky, where Vah Medoh—from greater distance now obviously a giant robot bird—is circling.

"The Divine Beast descended two weeks ago. It used to be that you'd be lucky to catch sight of it on a clear day, but now it's flying lower over the village, and with the downdraft it's generating, none of the Rito can stay in the air around here. It's hell on travel, I say. You'll have to trek out to Kolami Ridge to take flight."

"I did notice the downdraft! It must be inconvenient as all get out, are there places you need bridges or anything?"

"There are paths for Hylians and other flightless folks, but it's not good for business—for me or the Rito. Their hunting grounds in Hebra are outside the no-flight zone, but it's trouble on their logistics to not have use of the landings in the village."

"Well, the ghost of Revali trapped in the Divine Beast says hi and I'm going to go on a quest which will among other things probably result in him being able to put it somewhere less inconvenient."

He blinks, stupefied.

"...Revali? As in the ancient Rito champion? I thought the Rito Elders were just telling tall tales..." He shakes his head. "I'd say you were having a laugh, but with the way these few weeks have been going, I half believe you. But I'm not the one to tell this to. I just run the stable." He jerks a thumb behind him at a marquee in the distance with a giant horse head effigy on top, surrounded by campfires and a few horse-drawn carts. "Elder Kaneli will want to know about this. Maybe you want to pass a message to the guard shift at the bridge."

"Sure. Can I have land-bound directions?"

"I can take you there. I'm heading back to the stable and it's right by the main bridge." As he starts walking and gestures for Cam to follow, he adds, "Do you need a change of clothes?"

"Not especially, why, is it rude not to wear a shirt around here?"

"...Well, no, but you look very wet."

The man looks like he's containing some questions.

"I'll dry off," Cam shrugs.

He shrugs.

They make their way over to the stable. The bridge is in fact a chain of narrowish suspension bridges connecting a series of rock spires up to the main spire in the center housing the vertically architected village. It clearly isn't used to seeing more than nominal foot traffic and is just wide enough that a small cart could fit through.

The stable is right by it, and appears on inspection to double as a restaurant, inn, horse care service provider and general rest stop: there's a number of travelers sat around or coming in and out of the large marquee, and a few other people in similar brown outfits to the man who greeted Cam, sweeping up or manning the counter out front. Two bird people with spears, one cyan-feathered and one brown, are chatting to a merchant-looking fellow with a horse and carriage.

Oh, and Cam might notice that the non-bird people look mostly human, except for their pointed ears. The one who Cam talked to had tips understated enough that they could be dismissed as a personal genetic quirk, but with a larger sample size it's obvious that it's a widespread, if not general species trait.

The cyan bird person notices the two of them approaching and turns to greet them.

"Galli," she says. Or so one might infer from her voice; they don't present any human-legible sexual characteristics. She notices Cam. "Is this the one who fell... from..."

"Wow, I've never seen anyone like you before!" the brown one chirps.

"I'm new here! My name is Cam."

"That didn't really answer the question," says the brown one. The cyan one elbows him.

"Do you need assistance?" she says instead.

(The merchant guy the birds were talking to has wandered off, their conversation apparently over. Galli's heading back to the stable, stopped by a fire to chat with another man in a brown tunic—)

("...Lester, are ghosts real?"
"Are ghosts what? How would I know?"
"The customer said—"
"Customers say they shit gold after breakfast.")

(—it's in a variant dialect Cam has a worse but functional grasp of.)

"Nope, I'm just popping in here to say that Revali's ghost is in the divine beast overhead and he says hi and I'm going to try to fix his whole situation along with other issues around here. He mentioned a Calamity Canon."

"You mean Calamity Ganon?"

The blue bird kicks the brown one again.

"Excuse me, you're saying you—you're talking about Master Revali? The Rito Champion from before the Calamity? You spoke to his ghost?"

"Yeah, he's up in the divine beast." Point. "The one that's making it annoying to fly. He didn't warn me about that."

Did Cam leave the nonfunctional Sheikah Slate up there or is he carrying it with him anywhere visible, by any chance?

He left it, he can make another one whenever he wants!

"That's... a rather outlandish claim. Are you supposed to be some sort of spirit?" The blue one sounds doubtful.

"He didn't even imply that," says the brown one. "I heard the people across the great ocean look like that."

"Do they? I'm not from there but that's interesting to know. I'm not a spirit."

"Stories," the blue one says. "Do you have any proof of this?"

Shrug. "It's not especially important if you don't believe me, he said to tell you 'hi', not, like, 'evacuate'."

They exchange a glance.

"Okay?" says the blue one. "I'll... pass that on, then."

The brown one elbows her. "What was Master Revali like? Is he as cool as the stories say?"

"We have work to do."

"You mean standing around looking pretty?"

"He's very concerned about Calamity Ganon. Would you say that's a serious issue?"

The blue one is getting irritated. "Is that supposed to be a joke?"

"Well, the last time Calamity Ganon appeared it destroyed, like, all of Hyrule Kingdom."

"Maya!"

"I'm right! Wait, is it coming back? Is that what the Elders were whispering all about?"

"Is it not obvious from here? That's what I was told, anyway, and there was ostensibly Ganon-related gunk in the divine beast."

"The news from the travelers is suggestive," the blue one says, "But only the Elders are old enough to remember the Great Calamity, and they haven't formally spoken on the matter. These signs could merely be an... aftershock. By the account of the legend by the Hylians, Calamity Ganon only rises once in many thousands of years. It has only been one hundred. It does not mean whatever is happening isn't dangerous, of course."

The words has the air of an explanation repeated a great many times.

"Good to have more perspective on that, I knew I needed to fact-check! If you wanted to find out for sure where would you go and what would you do there?"

"You should ask the Elders," says the brown one.

"You could ask the Elders," admits the blue one reluctantly. "Or you could visit the Sheikah, who studied the Divine Beasts and Ganon before the Great Calamity. You could also seek out the Zora—their people live long, so many of them would have been there one hundred years ago."

"Oh, good ideas." He pulls out his computer to write those down. "Where can I talk to the Elders, as long as I'm in town?"

"You can find Elder Kaneli, the cheftain, at the cheftain's roost at the highest point of Rito Village." The blue one points. She's staring at the computer. "Elder Sala is on expedition to Tabantha, and will return in five days."

The brown one does not limit himself to staring. "What is that?"

"It's called a computer. I'd explain more but it'd take a long time. Thank you!" And off he goes to the high point.

Nobody stops him! Some people try to get him to buy stuff or stay in their inn. There are a few other off-brand humans—Hylians—here, just sort of hanging out and enjoying the view, so maybe the village is open to tourism? There doesn't appear to be any sort of access controls, or indeed architectural elements like "doors" or "fully enclosed walls", even for what appears to be people's private residences.

The village isn't laid out completely linearly, but if he sticks to the central spiral staircase up he won't have navigational difficulty getting to the very top. A large, rotund owl person is seated in a rocking chair there, reviewing a sheaf of papers. He looks up as Cam appears. He does not have a secretary or anything; it's just them.

"Hello, sir, I've just been up in the divine beast overhead and Revali's ghost says hi and that he's very concerned about Calamity Ganon."

Owl man almost drops his papers. He cranes forward, setting down his work on a table next to him.

"Master Revali's ghost? He is—in Vah Medoh?"

"Yup. I mean, or somebody else's ghost who's lying, but it seems the conservative explanation that it's him."

He sighs.

"It has always felt like he was watching over us. It seems I may have been more right than I thought. But the timing... bad portents. What matter of being are you? Did he give you a message, or some sort of token or instruction to pass on?"

"I am from another universe and he wants me to kill Calamity Ganon."

"Well. That is rather extraordinary, if true. If you can kill Calamity Ganon, you would be doing all of Hyrule a favor that cannot be repaid. One hundred years ago, the efforts of Master Revali and the other Champions proved less than sufficient, and today, if Ganon truly returns... we are far less prepared."

"Yeah, I got that impression. I'm planning to hit up the Sheikah to see if they can fix a slate if I give them one, and generally confirm with people I encounter that if I can locate a physical form belonging to Ganon it should explode without further ado."

"You have found a Sheikah Slate? The legends are unclear whether he does—the stories of the sword that seals the darkness and the divine light of a princess suggests it is not as simple as cutting him down with sword and arrowfire—but if there is such a physical form to destroy, you certainly should. Perhaps an end to Calamity Ganon will free Vah Medoh of its madness.

"Does Master Revali hold the Divine Beast back from a greater rampage? Is his spirit waning; is that why it now turns upon us? No, the state of Hyrule Castle and the return of the Guardians bodes otherwise. Is he well, do you know?"

"I just made the Slate. And then left it up there, because I can just make another one. He didn't say anything about a rampage and he doesn't seem to happy but I left him with something that will hopefully stave off boredom."

If anything, Kaneli seems even more taken back by that.

"You speak of it so casually! The Hylians worked for years to unlock the powers of the Slate." He shakes his head. "Don't tell me. It's not my place to guard their secrets.

"If Master Revali did not mention a danger, that reassures me much. Perhaps it will convince Teba to calm down. If there is anything we can do to release his spirit, say it and we will see to it... perhaps after the current crisis is over. It has been one hundred years."

His expression grows more troubled. He strokes his... beard? Tufts of facial plumage woven into a thick chin-braid. It's unclear how that works.

"You seek the Sheikah, then, as the next step on your quest?"

"That's the plan."

"How do you plan to seek them out?"

"...fly in that direction for a while. If you have a better idea I'm all ears."

"If you intend to head for Kakariko Village, it... may not be the best course."

"Okay, how come?"

"The situation with the Sheikah is complicated. They themselves prefer not to speak of their affairs to outsiders, but we know enough from the legends. Their history with the people of Hyrule, with their wondrous workings, and even with their own, is... fractious.

"Eighty years ago, their Lady Kotomi chose to turn away from their past and closed Kakariko Village to pilgrims. She did not speak on her reasoning, but knowing the part their dabblings played in the Great Calamity... the announcement did not surprise many. The masters of their ancient technology were sent away to the corners of Hyrule, where some of them chose to continue their study alone, but the Sheikah village retreated into itself. Kakariko eschewed the things of their distant ancestors and hasn't looked back. Visitors report now it's a quaint and peaceful settlement, with trades in fabrics and produce, and the occasional blade of masterful make.

"If you appear with a Sheikah Slate and wild claims of Ganon and the Divine Beasts... likely, not much will come of it. Many uninformed travelers have made the journey, intending to seek insight on ancient artifacts they dug out of ruins, and most we hear, they were simply turned away. At the same time... there's a saying in the old tongue: cheat not the shadow folk, for their grudges run deep and strike sudden."

"Oh, I'm not really worried about them stabbing me or whatever, I'm indestructible. I guess I should test that against magic stuff in case that's different."

"I doubt they will draw blade on you," says Kaneli, "but not all forms of retribution—or all forms of overzealous caution—take the form of direct violence. A largely intact Sheikah Slate is not an odd-looking arrowhead from an old temple. And if you have the power to create more... a warrior long retired can startle easy."

"Some stories say that ten thousand years ago, when the ancient court of Hyrule purged the Sheikah from their confidence and their lands, it was not the King's men that buried away the Sheikah's greatest works, but the Sheikah themselves, refusing to allow their creations to fall into untrusted hands. In other tales, factions of their people delved farther in the path of vengeance—curses, assassinations, sabotage. Today, the Yiga clan pulls strings unseen, and whatever anyone says, they are cut from the same cloth as their kinder cousins. In times in legend when the Sheikah twined their paths with the Hylian royals, they were said to be the blade that cut infection to the root: clean, but deep, and not often discriminate."

"But more to the point, Kakariko Village simply is unlikely to have the tools to assist you. There you will find not answers, but suspicion, fear, and perhaps enemies. It is the nature of Hylians to see monsters in shadows, after all, and this age... is full of both."

He shakes his head.

"Maybe I am growing paranoid in my old age. The Sheikah of today are a pleasant people, those rare ones who leave their visit to village once every many years. Stories are stories. It has been a hundred years, a thousand. Nonetheless, if you seek a solution for ancient technology, there is a simpler way."

"And what is the simpler way?"

"I mentioned the masters of technology exiled from Kakariko Village seventy years ago. Exiled is a strong word, perhaps: I understand they were not forbidden from continuing their work, merely to bring it no place near the ancestral lands. And I have heard rumors, in more recent decades, that Kakariko Village still receives rare reports from those remote laboratories. When travelers have curiosities they wish inspected, or ancient parts to sell, I hear it is those expatriated researchers they go to."

He tugs open a map rolled up by the ceiling and frowns at it.

"By what I remember, the main locations they congregated at are in Akkala, Hateno and Yarna." He clears his throat. "Allow me a moment to confer..."

Kaneli cranes over his chair and past the open side of the hut, and lets out a series of sharp trills and caws. Similar sounds echo back from below, voices crossing over in cacophony. Cam will recognize the form of the language from his summoner's tongue, but barely any of the vocabulary is familiar—there are bits relating to location and specific names. It's something between a poll and a manual sort of search engine over open air.

Once the birdsong harmonizes to concordance and peters out, Kaneli turns back and jabs at the map.

"The lab in Yarna Valley is defunct. The Akkala and Hateno labs are still operating, here and here. Their original founders from the time of the Calamity were still alive two years ago, Lotto says, good for them—I actually met Robbie once when I was a fledgling, you know?—so they will be able to help you, most probably."

"Great, thanks, I'll go that way first."

"Rito Village isn't in good straits itself at the moment, but if you need anything from us, you can ask. You'll need to head out to Strock's Lake or farther to get in the air."

And Kaneli can give him some more pointers on flight paths to get the best winds, and safe approach distances for Hyrule Castle and different types of Guardians.

"Do you need any material objects? Like if you normally rely on imports that the downdraft is complicating or the crops aren't doing great or whatever."

"It's no particular thing. It just takes a lot more time to go out and hunt, and we've had to set up a scheduling system for leaving and entering the village so the bridge doesn't get clogged up, and the children can't get their flight practice in, and tourism isn't doing great, though I'm not sure that's even the Divine Beast's fault."

Kaneli scratches his head.

"We're getting by, don't worry about us. We'll always have plenty of seed from the traders, if nothing else. If you can get Vah Medoh back to normal, that's the best thing we can ask for."

"It would literally take me less time to make you a big pile of sacks of corn or something than it took for you to explain that, for reference."

Kaneli blinks owlishly. He scratches his head, opens his mouth, closes it, and tries again.

"Well, then we'd be grateful to take a big pile of sacks of corn, and—dried trout, can you do that? At the landing at the base of the spire."

He points down over the side of the hut and hoots an instruction for some Rito milling around the bottom to clear out.

"You got it!" Big pile of sacks of corn. Big pile of bags of dried trout.

A few of the Rito down there are startled. Some people lean over the railing to look as word spreads in bird calls. Kaneli peers at the sacks, intrigued, before turning back.

"I thank you on behalf of the village," he says. "Again, if you need anything, our doors are always open*. Wind be with you—I pray that your quest goes well."

*A common wordplay slightly muddled in translation, about the fact that Rito architecture does not have doors.

"Thanks! What's the quickest way out of the downdraft?"

Down the stairs the way he came, over the bridges, and continue on the road. Left on the first fork and keep going until he sees a hill that goes down to the canyon, and he's safe to flap off from there.

"Thank you. Hopefully next time you hear from me it's all good news."

Off he goes.

The path is as described. The terrain gets rockier as he goes. He sees a few merchants and travelers on the road, but none after he splits left. No Rito—they must take another route for their hunting.

It's obvious when he finds the aforementioned takeoff point. After a distance the hill slope drops away into a deep canyon, maybe a mile or so wide and half again as deep. A way off to the south there's a bridge crossing.

It's a bit windy, but no downdraft if he tries to takeoff. The opposite, if anything.

Where to, now?

Both Akkala and Hateno are on the coast, but the former is at the very northern tip, which he'll need to route around the active volcano to get to. Or not, if he doesn't mind the heat. Hateno is past Kakariko Village in a mostly straight line. Neither is obviously much closer eyeballing the map. He can't see either location from here; there's mountains and stuff in the way. Or he could check out Kakariko Village anyway, or maybe he can investigate this spooky business around the castle?

He's happy to go straight over the volcano, it's not going to do him any harm. Maybe he'll need to swoop around it a little bit if it's actively smoking so he can see.

It's in a state of eruption, but it's more sprays of lava and basalt than smoke, and a whole damn lot of lava and pyroclastic flows spilling all over the mountain. He will probably be fine if he doesn't literally fly over the crater; airspace is big and he is small.

As he heads thataway, he passes over more gentle hills, lakes, and a large and dense forest run around by a river that seems to spill with mist, and eventually the rocky spires of Death Mountain. He also gets a closer look at Hyrule Castle on flyby. It sure is very ruined and garbed in a lot of spooky purple. Even at distance, he'll be able to see the flying specks of Skywatchers patrolling Castle airspace.

At some point he'll also find his first instance of how Kaneli described a Guardian Stalker: a bigger, bulkier and more-legged cousin of the thing that shot at Cam on Vah Medoh, its tapered head swivelling on a squat mechanical body as it lumbers about looking for prey. It's missing a leg but not apparently impaired for it. Ignore and move on, observe at safe distance, or approach?

How about "explode at safe distance".

It explodes! WOW that leaves a big crater. Wildlife is spooked.

He wasn't expecting it to explode that violently, wow! Good to know!

As keeps going, he'll pass over another stable that look like the one back at Rito Village. Even near the foot of the mountain, scattered people he sees don't seem to be terribly minded to evacuate to a safer distance. Flying over the volcano, he'll even find a few stray travelers appearing to be navigating surviving footpaths on foot? Inexplicably  aren't catching fire from standing next to open, live lava flows? Also he might see a few people made of rock, apparently a thing.

Also, uh, there's another giant magitechpunk automaton, this one patterned after maybe a salamander or lizard with a very low-poly head, crawling around the top of the volcano. It doesn't seem to mind splashing through the rivers of lava.

Apparently these people are... fire resistant. Hopefully the salamander is harmless, he doesn't want to kill it if it's not the killing people kind of magic robot.

It doesn't appear to be attacking anyone right now, just hanging out. If he keeps wide berth of it and the peak of the volcano, it will continue to ignore him.

He is actually going to get a bit closer to it to see if it's hostile, better him than somebody going for a walk.

It turns to look at him as he gets closer. When Cam gets within a certain distance, ports on its shoulder spiral open, and a swarm of spherical drones fly out. The big guy himself doesn't look particularly perturbed, but the swarm spreads out around it, patrolling the air and ground with red searchlights. Some of them are flying towards him.

Wow okay. He interpolates the drones. It can't have an infinite number of those, can it? He circles around for another provocation, maybe he can empty it out.

Now it looks perturbed. It scuttles around, producing more drones, but quickly it does, in fact, run out. The last few don't head out and seem to hover near the thing itself, scanning in all directions defensively. The big guy clambers to the top of the crater and... is... doing... something.

Its legs stiffen and its claws dig into the ground. Angry magenta light runs down the sides of the arches that make up its spine, its eyes glow brighter, and the luminous rings on his shoulders and neck slowly grind and begin to turn. The air feels like it's vibrating.

The lava in the crater—gushes. There comes a fountain eruption, then another, higher, the slag splashing and dripping off the giant mechanoid salamander. The rock base of the crater breaks and sinks as liquid level rises; lava slops over the edge of the caldera, joining the running rivers on the slopes, which are themselves surging with accelerated flows.

Oh for fucksake. He kills the salamander. Applies liquid nitrogen to lava until it's no longer endangering folks downslope.

How, specifically did he kill the salamander?

Interpolated it to smithereens.

there is a BIG ASS EXPLOSION

Good news: It is not proportionally big as the giant salamander is to previous magitech automatons he has blown up.

Bad news: It is, uh. Not only a heat-and-force explosion. Maybe. It's unclear. There's a blast of blue energy that rips outwards, ahead of the main fireball. In the split seconds before it hits Cam, it's decohered into more of a diffuse wave, but it still tingles as it passes. The shock of the main fireball rocks him, just with the wind and pressure. But a few seconds after the blast wave seems gone, the earth and air seems to shudder. A terrible roar—closer to the crashing roar of a spilling river than the roar of a monster, but not none like the roar of a monster—comes from the west.

Seen from afar, the violet Malice shrouding Hyrule Castle surges.

Boiling out of the mist is a thing of rage and hatred. It flows into shape from the violent energy, bearing no concrete form but amber eyes, a gaping maw, and hooked, boarlike tusks. Its wordless scream projects across the land for miles and miles, striking unnatural dread into all who hear, summoned demon no exception. It's a sound of anger, of confusion: above all else, of hate, blinding and immortal. It climbs, winding around the castle as if grasping the cracking towers on invisible limbs. The sky blackens and the dawnlight fades and the moon bleeds red and full, and the air sparks with motes of cold heat—

And a golden star pierces through it.

It burns brighter and brighter, through the winding silhouette of the beast, through the haze. The thing howls as it's torn through inside out, and it fights, but to no avail.

Over long seconds, the Malice collapses back to its the formless soup-haze, still boiling over, but quelled.

For now.

The golden light flickers and dims, spent, until at last it, too, winks out. The sky bleeds back to the hues of early morning. The castle is still cloaked in its evil haze.

...Right, where were we?

Well, Cam was tumbling through the air trying to stabilize his flight versus that explosion. What the shit, why would it explode when he got it down to fine particles? What does that? Even if it were for some reason made entirely of sodium there wasn't that much water around!

He ultimately manages to catch himself before hurtling into a tree. Is there anyone currently in lava related danger or anything.

Did he successfully liquid nitrogen all of it? Does he wish to continue liquid nitrogenning all of it?

The volcanic crater is now significantly larger and a bunch of rock went flying, which he cannot possibly track at this point, but the actual flow of lava and volcanic activity is indeed waning, as far as he can see. He doesn't see anyone in lava-related danger, but his unobstructed field of view is very small compared to the total surface area of the volcano; the surface is very craggy.

He makes a little model volcano. Anything flowing towards inhabited areas?

Nope! Most of the structures he sees on the model are around  the lower altitudes of the volcano, and if he's scale-modelling with material substitution for meat that makes it obvious where they are, so are the people. The excess lava largely collects in the pre-existing mid-altitude lakes and rivers and is probably contributing to some surge in flow levels further downstream, but there aren't any new downstream flows or suddenly overflowing riverbanks or anything.

Oh good.

He will continue on his way and mostly avoid the magic robots if they let him. Too damn explody.

After he's past the crater, now conveniently free of hostile magic robots, the environs cool down quicker than the opposite on the approach.

He'll come across some odd-looking camps nestled in the volcanic rock spires on the east side of Death Mountain, made of scrappy wood and salvaged material. They showed up in his scale model, but in real life and full scale, it's more apparent that the figures inhabiting them might be yet a third... fourth? type of novel sapient species. They come in different colors and have a small and squat variant, and a large and lean variant, and they have primitive clothing and tools. They don't notice him as he passes, possibly because a lot of them are in uproarious conference, possibly about the giant explosion that just passed over their head.

Once he hits the Akkala Highlands, it's smoother sailing. Another couple of stables, people and carriages on the roads, small settlements, farmland here and there—population is sparser than it should be, and signs of old destruction and abandonment are about, and a lot of the folks he glimpses again appear a little harried, but it's not the ruinous post-apocalypse one might picture.

Kaneli's pointers weren't exactly a postcode and street address, but if Cam finds the coast and follows it north, he'll eventually catch sight of what looks like a retrofitted lighthouse near the end of a cliff, bearing a large telescope pointed south west, and various lesser installations reminescent in construction of the magic robots and the Sheikah Slate.

Hopefully none of them will shoot at him.

He looks for a place to land and settles on the cliff to knock on the lighthouse.

He is mercifully unshot.

No one answers.

Someone's clearly home, though. He can hear someone banging around and cursing inside.

Perhaps it's very cluttered in there and they don't often clear the path to the door. He'll give it a minute.

Nope! Whoever it is is talking to himself. There's also a female voice now and then.

KNOCK KNOCK.

Two seconds pass.

"WHAT IS IT?" yells the male voice from inside.

There are approaching clatters, and after a few seconds, the door flings open. A short man with huge white tufts with a pair of odd goggles stands in the doorway, incensed, holding a long and thin looking-glass sort of instrument. Behind him is a cramped workshop in disarray.

"Something very important has just happened, and I need to figure out what! If this is about the new... lens..." He trails off as he finally absorbs who he's looking at. "Now what are you?"

"I'm a demon! My name is Cam."

"What's that? State your business! I've got important things to do."

Cam makes a new Sheikah Slate. "Can you make this work?"

"WHERE DID THAT COME FROM?!"

He attempts to pluck the Slate out of Cam's hands and turn it around. "Where did you get this? It's in perfect condition..." He prods the screen, then holds down a combination of buttons on the rim. A series of mechanical clicks sound from inside the Slate. "Out of power. How did you manage that? No, no, I must resist!"

He shoves it back at Cam.

"Come back tonight—no, tomorrow! I need to gather this data. There's been a magnificent flare of phosphoric energy in the aether. Nearly took out half my instruments! Regretting turning Purah down about that Guidance Stone, now, but she's in a much worse location to characterize it. This could be an incredible leap for Sheikah Science!"

"...did your flare of phosphoric energy possibly coincide with that explosion at the volcano thataway, that was me."

"It came from that direction, certainly. Now what did you do?"

"There was a salamander thing and it shot drones at me and when it ran out it made the volcano erupt a bit more somehow, and like, there's people living on it, so I blew it up and it was a bit more explosive than I might have hoped."

"YOU DESTROYED DIVINE BEAST VAH RUDANIA?!"

"...I guess! I was afraid it'd hurt somebody!"

"That's..."

"INCREDIBLE!"

"I mean, TERRIBLE! The Divine Beasts were our last hope against Calamity Ganon! Not that I was getting much headway on the problem... nonetheless! This is a disaster!"

"How were they going to help, the flying one was full of that nasty goop. I was planning to just confirm he needs to be dead and then try exploding him too."

"We're pretty sure they shoot giant laser beams that scour the power of Calamity Ganon from the world! Or possibly they're just giant laser beams. They're not much help now, but they're also not helping Ganon much right now, so we could have turned them back to our side! Probably."

"Okay, well, I can make Sheikah Slates and they just appear without being charged for some reason, does that imply I can replace the salamander thing?"

"You make them? You made this?" He points at the Sheikah Slate. "Out of what?"

"Nothing."

"And you can make any sort of technology? That's ridiculous! And you can make another copy of Vah Rudania? But if it comes out dead, that's not very helpful, is it?"

"Yeah, how are these things powered? That's why I came to you."

"Energy doesn't come from nowhere, kid. Something small like the Sheikah Slate I can top up from the Ancient Furnace over the hill, no problem. It'll even recharge itself once you've got it going! An entire Divine Beast? When we dug those things out of the ground, we were afraid to touch them at first because our instruments were giving us impossible readings, so off the charts we thought one wrong move might blow half of Hyrule sky high! Which you apparently almost did!"

"Where I'm from energy totally does come from nowhere! I can make fully charged electrical batteries no problem. What's this running on instead?"

"Ancient energy. We still haven't fully characterized all of it's forms, but it's a family of degenerate structured-particle-automata in the conjunction of the aetheric, astral and mystic* planes, usually electroweakly confined along a material substrate. You're lucky most of the energy seemed to have overflowed in the aetheric when you ruptured the containment—no, not luck—how did you destroy Vah Rudania? The energy matrix should have vented four nines of the power as astral radiation when it failed! And speaking of astral radiation, JERRIN, DEAR!"

    "Yes?"

"RECONFIGURE THE SPECTROGRAMMETER!"

He rattles off a series of setting adjustments.

*closest mappings in English by connotation, but really their own names.

"I interpolated it - like this -" He does the sphere of wood into sawdust trick again.

"What the... is that atomized, or more or less fine—doesn't matter. If that's instantaneous, it'd have done it. Amazing! We thought the inherent safety of the power units was immutable, so simple and ingenious, but if all the crystal units were simultaneously discorporated..."

"So your furnace thing draws from these other planes that are full of magic energy and can charge things like that?"

"Approximately. Though it's not popular to call paraplanar phenomena 'magic'. I couldn't care less, but boy, you'd have ruffled a lot of feathers saying that around Magda back in the day."

"If I can't make it I'm inclined to round it to magic but if you say so. How's the furnace made?"

"I can see where this is going. First of all, an ancient furnace needs to be lit with an ancient flame to begin drawing power, and in fact it's terribly fiddly to calibrate and maintain! But second, you could tile all of Hyrule with ancient furnaces every mile, and you might be able to charge Vah Medoh to capacity in a year. It's a whole many orders of magnitude of difference! That's assuming you don't get slapped by diminishing returns when you try and do that, which you absolutely will, even at a mile of spacing!

"An ancient furnace isn't creating ancient energy: it's closer to condensing free-floating planar energies into pseudo-molecular structures we can utilise. Again, this space is very poorly characterized, but there are transport limits to the capture; it's very possible to extinguish a furnace by exhausting the local area—for example by landing a Divine Beast on top of it. True story! Now that's an idea—

"If you tiled Hyrule with Divine Beasts, each sparked to minimum power with a donation from one of the extant ones—they're much more effective at drawing power, we never figured out why—if you tiled the skies volumetrically with Vah Medohs—no, we'll get a lot of fantastic experimental data about the behaviour of the planes, but the transport factors are too steep. The density is self-defeating. Naively extrapolating, you might get a few Vah Medohs worth of total charge in a few months, but our models are useless at this sort of scale, and I'd bet you my forge that high-order effects make the yield even worse. Not to mention the potential consequences to ecology, geology and the fabric of reality itself! Uncharted territory, all of this.

"...okay, so how did they charge them in the first place? Did they just take a few years each?"

"I have no idea!"

"It would have been hundreds of years, if they were using methods known to us now. They didn't tile the earth and skies with ancient furnaces, that we know. Many of the mysteries of our ancestors are lost to time."

...okay. Forensic conjuration time. Surroundings of Vah Medoh when it first, let's say flew.

It's in a big Sheikah tech scaffolding, sort of like a rocket launch pad, and at the time of capture is exiting nose pointed straight up not at all like a bird. The broader environment is somewhere snowy and rocky, if his substitution or lack thereof allows him to determine those properties. There's a large irregularly-shaped building next to the scaffold done up in the same aesthetic, not large enough to contain Vah Medoh as a whole, but maybe enough to contain a wing.

The scaffolding is hooked up with thick, bundled cables to five identical towers. They're a dozen storeys high, engraved in complicated sigils, and crowned with clear orbs. The structures seem to extend belowground if Cam squints at the base of one and notices the spiral stairs down.

"What's that—where did you—when?"

"- I don't know, is the date important? I could figure it out if it matters." Can he get a complete model of one of the tower silo looking thingies.

"You can conjure arbitrary things from history?"

Yep! How big does he want it.

Oh, how about a foot high. "Sure can!"

He can now see more details, like even smaller etchings on the glass orb. There's a sort of setting inside the orb—it's hollow—but the setting is empty. There are smaller cables running up the sides of the tower, openings, a door at the base. What exactly is he looking for here?

"You could get us the lost ancient archives! All the incredible knowledge we left behind in our exodus!"

"Unless it was magic, sure! Does this doodad look like it'd be like a furnace only better or something?"

"Maybe! Maybe not! I can't tell without a full scale model... we need Purah and Symin in on this. Symin knows ancient Hylian the best out of all us, and Purah's more specialized in the fiddly stuff. I do physics! Materials! Weapons! This could change everything!"

"Okay, where do I find Purah and Symin?"

"Hateno Ancient Tech Lab! It's over by Hateno Village, do you know where that is? Leave a copy of the tower with me! Even if it's not an ancient energy condenser, the things I'll learn from it!"

He barges out the doorway and scans around for a location.

"A whole one? At full size? I'm not positive it wouldn't collapse the cliff."

He leans over the cliff edge and points down at the bank.

"Drop it down there, on that bit of dirt. Can you do the underground parts as well?"

It's not a terribly tall cliff. The top of the tower will probably come up a bit short of the altitude they're at.

"I'm not positive it won't fall over like that, do you want it on its side to begin with maybe?"

"Inconvenient to explore! Can you do one on its side, and one vertical, but leaving out all the underground parts? We can strip it down for parts... but that's not a concern anymore!" He guffaws.

"I'm also not sure it won't fall over without its underground parts!"

"Create it with the underground parts upright, then create a big mound of dirt burying everything below the original ground level?"

"If you would like me to just extend the cliff in that direction I can make you one embedded in the New Cliff?"

"That certainly works! Don't extend it too much, though, in case we want to import more buildings."

Cam goes out and surveys the existing cliff a bit and then zhoops it out with a tower in it.

Robbie runs off down the hill, cackling like a maniac. A woman in similar garb pokes her head out the door, squints at what's happening, and sighs. She waves tiredly at Cam and goes back in, shutting the door behind her.

Cam is now unattended!

...okay. He will carry on toward Hateno.

The lands of Akkala go past as he flies. More lakes, more rivers, more settlements. Nothing much stands out.

Eventually, he hits a mountain range. The grass slopes go rockier as he crosses, and eventually turns into crags marble blue rock. When he gets deep enough, nestled in the mountains over a great lake hollow is a grand city seemingly carved and polished out of that blue marble, glittering in the sun. Inhabiting it are people that look like they've been fused with fish, not wearing much except some of them light jewelry and wielding weapons. There is a giant, exquisitely chiseled fish sculpture on top of the central palace of the gleaming city. They appear to have a theme.

Gosh, fish people. Hopefully they aren't being menaced by a giant magic robot squid or anything.

Nope! There is a giant magic robot elephant though.

Is it menacing.

Perhaps fortunately for it and its surrounding geography's structural integrity, it isn't doing much of anything! In fact, where the other magic robots before were glowing purple, this one is glowing blue in where that might be expected. It's mostly still, gazing in the direction of Hyrule Castle.

It's a way west of where his projected flight path. Does he want to take a look?

No, if it's just standing there he's going to leave it alone, if he provokes it something's going to wind up exploding.

Onwards he can go, then, past the rocky blue mountains. He finds a bit of plains, a river, and there's another huge mountain. What's up with the mountains around here? It's taller than ones before, piercing far and above the snow line. Its peaks are cast in glacial sheets, and also a bunch of... evil... stuff.

It's goopy Malice! More similar to the organic-looking stuff he saw on Vah Medoh than the amorphous haze he glimpsed of the Castle. It's all over the top of the mountain.

Half this continent needs a pressure washer. Is it menacing anybody?

Nope! No one appears to be on this giant icy mountain by eye and if he tries to conjure for people there aren't any. The Malice isn't even moving or attached to any kind of magic robot animal. He may spy some of those horrible yellow eyes growing out of the muck if he gets close enough or employs some binoculars, but otherwise it's just sitting there.

Hi, creepy horrible yellow eyes, enjoy the view of this tiny speck flying far away from you.

Hyrule has run out of plot hooks to lure him with, and he will make it eventlessly the rest of the short way to Hateno Village.

He'll actually see the tech lab before the village proper, a retrofitted windmill seated on a hilltop kitted out in ancient technology.

It has outside its door a weird contraption looking like a solid metal hot air balloon with a squat torch stand out front, which he might have noticed another of back in the Akkala Ancient Tech Lab. This one, however, has a brilliant blue flame roaring in its pyre, and the engravings in the metal globe lit up in the same color. Next to it there's a circlular pad embedded in the ground, also glowing weakly blue.

He lands right outside the lab, looks around, knocks.

He is not made to wait this time. Pattering footsteps approach, then the door yawns open to reveal small girl in red, eyelashed glasses.

"Linky! Do you have something to do with..."

"Uh, hi, I'm not Linky whoever that is."

"...that's new," she says to herself. "And who are you?" She sounds delighted.

"My name's Cam! What's new?"

"You! I've never seen anyone like you before. Where are you from? Does your species have any native magic?"

"I'm from Hell, and yes, I can make things." Sheikah Slate.

"Wow."

She stares.

"Wow! Symin! Symin, come look at this! Can I see can I seeee—"

She makes gestural grabby hands for the Slate but does not actually attempt to snatch it out of Cam's hand.

He hands it to her.

She squees as she turns it around.

"Can all of your people do this? Is this actually made of real starsinter—it looks so new!—or is it a construct that's going to vanish after a while—what are the limits—" Poke poke. Button combination. Click click click. "Out of power. Did you do that on purpose or can you not make it charged? Symin!"

A white-haired man looking middle-aged and bookish finally emerges behind the girl. She practically throws the Slate at him.

"Guardian Stone! Power this up!"

    "What..."

"Go!"

"I don't seem able to make them charged. It's real and presumably made of real whatever they're made of. I have a volume per time limit but it's a very large one, and I need some idea of what I'm making and either dead reckoning or something like line of sight or touch to where it's gonna go."

"That's amazing! Is the volume per time continuous or discrete? As in how simultaneous can you make it: can you make something that will break if it less than all of it is existing at the same time, even for a nanosecond? Can you make antimatte—DON'T TRY THAT!! Do not make antimatter under any circumstances I am very very serious please!!!"

"I can't make antimatter - I've never personally tried but other demons have. I can probably make something that isn't too big that has that property but it might take me a couple of tries. I'm not sure what you mean about the volume per time limit."

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."

"Two more? Also from Hell?"

"No, they have their own places, fairies from Fairyland and angels from Heaven."

"Amazing! What do they do? What do they look like?"

    "Director?" says the man in the back.

"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?"

"Ostensibly let Revali control his divine beast."

"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?

• Magnesis: Manipulate up to large metal objects using magnetic fields. Note to self: adapt modulator algorithm for generic field-focusing. pg. 81 vol. 3
• Cryonis: Induce artificial solid-to-liquid phase transition, up to three simultaneous medium-sized masses. pg. 6
• Chronos: Slows down a cone of space for as long as the device is pointed in the direction, up to 2 minutes. pg. 62
• Liquidus: Induce artificial liquid-to-solid phase transition, up to three simultaneous medium-sized masses. pg. 8
• Bomb: Manifest physically instanced ancient energy nodes of various shapes, which create medium-sized polyphasic exlosions when detonated. Note: useful for decoupling bonded ancient parts. Update: potential splitter lets us configure fractions of planar dispersion pg. 62
• Stasis: Stop time for up to large objects for several seconds, length dependent on mass and volume. Update: works on monsters with real-time harmonic correction! pg. 141 vol. 2 vol. 4
• Thermos: Maintains up to one medium-sized object at constant temperature indefinitely. Applies to contents of containers. Note: useful for reliably annealing steels; suspect a variant was used to manufacture reactive lamina and and brazen starsinter. pg. 15
  
• Focus: Focuses biomystic energy in a targeted location indefinitely, intensifying effects of special herbs grown in range.
• Camera: Captures an image and analyzes frequency signatures to identify objects in image against a database. pg. 10
  
• Spectrum: Captures a polyphasic spectrum and generates a phasic frequency analysis. Note: see pg. 8 compression vol. 6
• Isometris: Aligns small objects to a snap grid. pg. 16
• Eris: Universal catalyst? vol. 1
• Reimage: Transpose ink from paper to paper. pg. 31
• Umbrella: Umbrella. Note: now better coverage. pg. 22
  

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".

• Invert vol. 9
• Cleanse vol. 13
• Rejuvenate vol. 10

"...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."

"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."

"This is salvageable."

"It is! Totally is. No evidence we needed all four anyway, and you can make more, right? It'll be missing all the programming... not worth trying to reimplement all the software on Vah Rudania. We can just have two of one. We can have any number of them! This is fine."

"You can make more Divine Beasts, right."

"I don't see why not..." He makes a little model one. "Yes but like the Sheikah Slates they will not be charged."

She sighs.

"They are, strictly speaking, the same kind of thing as the Guardians... the Gorons did take a serious go at destroying Rudania sixty years ago, so they'll miss it the least, at least. Think of it, some Rito also tried shooting down Medoh a couple of decades back, but that was an accident. Mostly. So you're not the first to think of it... the first to succeed, I guess. Oh no, Linky will be so upset. And Zelda, too... did you see Daruk? The Goron champion, his ghost would be in Rudania?"

"I didn't get that close, no."

"...Well, nothing to do about it now."

The wind is taken pretty much out of her sails.

"Um, so I was going to say. If the ancient Sheikah were anything like modern-day ones, they would've had a lot of ideas they wanted to create, but couldn't. Especially since all the records suggest that their relationship with the Hylians, which provided most of the industry base for the projects against Ganon was... strained, at times. And they definitely had a much better understanding of Calamity Ganon than we do, seeing as their plan worked to a tee and ours... didn't. And was mostly recycled from their plan.

"So the first step we want to do, if we're taking this seriously, is to reconstruct as much of their knowledge as we can, and see what we can make happen. If we can seal Ganon for even longer, or forever, or even destroy him altogether. The powers of the Divine Beasts are very obviously tuned to oppose Ganon, so maybe there are methods even more extreme we can build with your powers, to remove him for good."

"That would be cool. Can you point me to some things to conjure, or like, tell me what their language is called and I can get whatever they wrote down in material format?"