#ootrain

But despite my entire point here, which is that you can’t really define or box in magic in its totality, you can, sometimes, get a sense of its non-euclidean edges. There are rules, always. Or boundaries. Or definitions. There are things it is for and things it is not for. Things it doesand things it does not do.

This mask magic, I think, isn’t any of the ones I already know of. Not fairy, not forest, not Sage. It’s not Triforce magic, but in a way I think it’s maybe closer to that than any of the others. Fairies generate, and the forest assimilates, and Sages channel. The Triforce changes, and so does the mask magic. The difference is the Triforce can change nothing into something or vice versa, but the masks are limited to changing something that already exists into something else.

‘Limited’, I say, like it’s a power barely worth mentioning. Ha.

Putting on the Deku Scrub mask never feels good. And it’s never going to. But it feels better now, than it did when the Skull Kid first forced the transformation onto me. At the time I thought he’d transformed me into a different shape, but I was wrong. He forced a merger of me and a separate spirit. It’s the same thing that happens when I put on a mask, except I didn’t agree to put anything on, and the spirit didn’t agree to be merged. I’m sure it’s what he’s doing to the giants. Just like with the Deku Scrub, just like with the… whatever it was from Woodfall Temple, just like with the giant bull-shaped monster I just buried under half a temple’s worth of rubble, I played the Song of Healing, and suddenly there’s a magical mask floating there with a spirit inside it. Calmer than before. More at peace.

The Song gives the spirit a choice that Majora didn’t. Gives it the option of becoming a mask. It’s not a great choice, maybe – I don’t technically know what the alternative would be if it said no. Maybe it would just die all the way? Maybe something worse? – but at least it is a choice. And that makes me feel slightly better about the song, given who I learned it from. I’ve played it enough times now to have a sense of its own non-euclidean edges. I think maybe, the choice matters. For the magic to work, there has to be consent. The spirit, literally, has to be willing. I’m never going to be able to know that for sure, because I’m never going to play that song for a spirit that isn’t willing, but still. It would feel different when I play it, if it could do that to spirits against their will. I’m sure of it. The Ocarina wouldn’t like it.

(Which raises another set of questions about whether this is only true because I’m playing it on the Ocarina of Time, and whether, say, the Happy Mask Salesman has the same limitation or not, and how upset I should be about that bag of masks he has.)

(I also wonder if changing people into masks is all the song can do. There’s a feeling, when I play it… it’s hard to describe, but I think it might be bigger than that. I should ask Madge about it. She’d know.)

Makes me wonder why I got off as easy as being merged with an angry little Deku Scrub instead of being turned into some kind of actual monster. Maybe because I’m the Hero of Time? Maybe I’m protected from the worst effects somehow? Or maybe because the Deku Scrub was a decent person to begin with and maybe the bull was a real asshole or something?

Or maybe because the merger of the Skull Kid and whatever malevolent entity lives in Majora’s Mask isn’t complete yet, and it’s the former that directed the change. Made it more of a prank and less of a curse.

I almost say as much to Tatl, but I stop myself. I don’t want to give her false hope if I’m wrong. Her heart’s already in a constant state of breaking, I don’t need to make it worse.

“I don’t want to rush you,” Tatl says, and she sounds as tired as I feel, “but the sooner we get in that portal and go talk to the giant, the sooner we can get somewhere warm enough that we can feel our extremities again.” She pauses and considers me. “You don’t strike me generally as a thinker, but you’ve been staring at that mask like you’re trying to kill it with your brain for the last fifteen minutes.”

“It’s been longer than fifteen minutes,” I protest, then wince as the effort causes several stabs of pain from an assortment of body parts.

“It probably seemed like it to you,” Tatl replies, “on account of you being so out of practice with thinking that hard about things. But I’ve been sitting here staring at you and waiting to see if you’re gonna die or not, so I’m pretty aware of how long it’s been.”

“You know it’s unfortunate,” I observe, “how unwilling you are to show concern or affection without wrapping it in barbed wire and delivering it via catapult.” I press a bloody hand against my ribs and wince again as I start forcing myself to my feet. “I’m not gonna die, Tatl, I promise. I need a potion and a nap, but I’m not gonna die.”

“So what were you thinking about then?” she demands, rather than acknowledge anything I just said. “Stare that hard for that long you must have come to some kind of conclusion.”

I could tell her, but I didn’t really come to any conclusions that are easy to articulate, and if I tried to say something like “my Hero sense is tingling” she would look at me in a way that makes me want to throw a tantrum worthy of the child’s body I am currently trapped in. That works so well on everybody back home that I literally have to remind people I’m not entirely sure it’s even a real thing and sometimes I’m just full of shit. Tatl would definitely jump straight to the latter conclusion.

So instead I say something else that has been percolating in my brain in between dizzying Goron jumps and bouts of hypothermia and getting my head beat in by a raging monster bull with a creepy eye that grows out of its back.

“This,” I gesture at the pile of meat and ichor and stone on the other side of the pool of light, “isn’t something that just anyone can do.” I point at the mask floating patiently in the pool of light just in front of us. “That isn’t something everyone else is equipped for. And if I hadn’t come and dealt with it, an entire nation, maybe an entire world might have wound up frozen over. A lot of people would have died.”

Tatl’s eyebrow arcs as she follows this non-sequitur back to the conversation it’s actually a part of. “A lot of people died anyway,” she said. “Darmani, for example.”

I stare at her, caught between something you could probably call stricken and something you could probably call incensed. Because she’s not wrong, but there’s nothing I could have done about that, but should there have been?

She shakes her head, reading my face like an open book. “You’re doing it again, Link. You’re taking it all on your shoulders. You’re buying the story they’re selling you. They’re selling themselves. There’s never one solution. Never.”

“But—”

“No. Tatl’s talking,” she snaps, and I’m tired enough that I let myself be quelled. “They could have moved to where it was warmer before people started dying. It wouldn’t have been easy. It wouldn’t have been simple. It would have had its own set of consequences. But they could have done it. They could have asked their neighbouring communities for help. They could have gathered an army to do what would normally take a Capital-H Hero. Yes. You did it, Link. But I bet enough bombs would have done it too. Or enough people with swords. Or maybe just a champion bull-rider.”

“I couldn’t have just let—”

“Link,” she says, and instead of the anger I expect, she sounds exasperated. Like an adult trying to explain something rational to an overtired toddler. “Stop listening for points to argue against and just listen for a second. I’m not criticizing you. I’m not saying you did anything wrong. I’m not saying there was a better way and you should have found it. I’m not saying there was a better way and they should have found it. I’m not even saying there was a better way!”

I stare at her blankly, because as far as I can tell that was exactly what she was saying. “Tatl,” I say slowly, doing my best to control my tone, “I need you to pretend, for like two seconds, that I have been run over by a raging, possessed demon of a bull like thirty times in the last twenty minutes, and then I need you spell this out for me, okay? In slow, small words.”

“You are traumatized,” she says. I feel like traumatized is a big word, but she does deliver it slowly, so I bite back the immediate, defensive complaints I want to raise. “And you are not dealing with it. You were stressed to the point of snapping before you came here. And you are not dealing with that either. You have anxiety,” three syllables, “around other people’s expectations,” four syllables, “and that is also not being dealt with. And then you merge with Darmani,” technically three syllables, “who has all the same issues, and the two of you just feed each other and make it all worse, because neither of you is dealing with it, and you’re both very stupid, and you think you can solve it by pretending,” three syllables, “it does not exist.”

I’m trying to remember how many words that was with three syllables or more so I can comment obnoxiously on it, so I miss my chance to respond at all.

Tatl, who I suspect knows all too well what I’m gearing up to do, continues before I can derail things. “Repeat after me, Link,” she says, and waits until I’m staring at her. “I died.”

“Why?”

“Repeat it, Link.”

I roll my eyes but give in. “I died.”

“And it sucked.”

I blink at her, surprised. “It did suck,” I point out. “I’ve never argued that point, did I? It super sucked. Zero on ten, do not recommend.”

“I died,” Tatl says again.

“I died,” I repeat again, confused more than anything now.

“And no one saved me,” Tatl adds this time, and my confusion clears.

“Tatl, that’s not fai—”

“And no one saved me,” she repeats.

“Tatl.”

“I died,” she says slowly, holding my gaze the entire time, “and no one saved me…”

I say nothing for a long moment, but if it weren’t for her need to give an occasional flap to stay in the air she’d be perfectly still, patient as a church gargoyle awaiting the Goddesses’ return. Meanwhile, I hurt all over and I’m hungry and I want to sleep, and I still have a not-entirely-coherent conversation with a giant nose to get through before I can do anything about any of it.

“I died,” I finally repeat, grudging and unhappy, “and no one managed to rise above the impossible circumstances facing all of us that day to defy the laws of destiny and physics to save me.”

“I died,” she says again, “and no one saved me, and that sucked.”

“I died, and no one saved me, and that sucked.” I say the words angrily, impatiently – like if I deliver them sharply enough, she’ll let this go and leave me alone. Like if I say them fast enough, the universe won’t notice I’ve said them and I won’t have to deal with them. But that’s the problem with the universe, I guess. It notices everything. And suddenly, despite my best efforts, my grasp on my composure is in serious peril.

Tatl, naturally, notices everything too. Her face softens. “Bad things happened to you, Link,” she says, “and nobody stopped them. I know there are reasons for that. Maybe they’re even good reasons. But they don’t change how much those events sucked.” I can’t handle it, and I have to look away. “If the universe was fair, you wouldn’t have had to live through them. But you did. And now you have to live with the knowledge of them. The knowledge that they can happen. The knowledge that they can happen to you and there’s a real chance that no one will stop them from happening to you. And the knowledge of how much that sucks.” She flits over to land on my shoulder, tips herself to the side to tuck in under my jaw in a way that would probably be comforting if I wasn’t feeling too many other things to notice. She’s silent, for a moment, and I have the sense that she’s flipping through a long list of potential directions to take this from here. In the end she just says: “It hurts no one if you admit it out loud to yourself.”

I laugh, but it’s not really a laugh. It’s closer to a sob with too much pride in it to be honest about itself. “It hurts lots of people,” I manage, picturing what dad’s face would look like if I said something like that to him. Or to Zelda. Or to any of them.

“Not as much as it’s hurting you to not say it,” she replies. “Link, it’s okay to make sacrifices for people. It’s okay to be a hero. But only if you get to do it as you. You’re a person – a kid – who went through several traumatizing experiences in a very short timeframe. You’re allowed to be a little fucked up over it, okay? And it’s important that the people who love you know that. You think you’re the only one upset that you died and no one saved you? I bet not. I bet there are people out there who would commit cold-blooded murder if it gave them a chance to be there for you now, in a way they couldn’t be there for you then. If you’d stop forcing them to wallow in a state of permanent failure and gave them the chance to make it up to you.”

I wait until my breathing is under control before I manage to snark: “So I should care more about what I need because it’s what other people need me to do?”

She grumbles something I can’t make out under her breath and then adds, “I only corrupted my point like that because I didn’t think you were advanced enough for the more direct approach and I’m willing to try anything right now if it will con you into accepting somebody’s help and dealing with your problems, you absolute tool of a garbage boy.”

I laugh, and it’s genuine this time, despite the thickness in my throat. “That barbwire was a little belated. Hit our limit on sincerity for the day, did we?”

“Shut up,” she grumbles. “My last kid is trying to kill the world by crashing the moon into it and I swear to all three Goddesses, he was easier to deal with than you. At least he listened sometimes.”

I collect myself enough to push myself off the wall. Tatl continues to grumble, aggressively diffusing what’s left of the tension of the previous conversation. It really is enough sincerity for one day.

“This is technically babysitting,” I say instead of answering that.  I cross my eyes down at the baby and stick out my tongue, which serves the dual purpose of allowing me to hide any unfortunate facial expressions that might answer it against my will and also utterly delights the baby.  “It’s more likely we would be kidnappers, but they think I’m Darmani, so they figured it was safe to go catch up on the sleep this little guy wasn’t letting them have.”  I turn as the baby hiccups his little giggles and look for another target for him to aim at.  There’s a large stone container on the left side of the room that I think is some kind of toybox.  It’s open, so I wait until the baby is looking at me again before I point at it. “Harder this time,” I say, putting on an Extremely Serious Face.  “You have to get it in the box or it doesn’t count.  Can you do that?”

The baby mirrors my Extremely Serious Face with an attempt at a version of it that is just entirely too cute to be effective, what with his little swirl of hair and his one little tooth and the fact that it took me a minute to place him once I’d gotten him to stop crying but now that naptime is over and he’s awake and happy again and I have seen him smile there is absolutely, utterly no doubt in my mind who this tiny goron baby is.

Ladies, gentlemen, and everyone in between or nowhere in the vicinity, I give you the Termina version of Darunia, Sage of Fire and Big Brother of the Gorons.

Well.

Littlest Brother of the Gorons, I guess.

Littlest, Cutest, Squirmiest, Most Precious Brother of the Gorons.

Darunia – who probably has another name here, but everyone thinks I’m Darmani and just assumed I already knew it and so introductions have not exactly happened yet – gives me a Most Serious nod, takes the ball in both hands, and then rears back and lets it fly.

It comes just disturbingly close for a throw by a literal baby, but it still misses, hitting the wall and bouncing back toward us.  I hear a tiny gasp from the little pebble behind me, filled with deep disbelief and personal embarrassment, and then a hitch in his breath like he’s going to start crying again.  I turn and raise a stern finger at him.  “Hey now,” I say.  “You had a nap so we both know you’re not tired enough for that.  Disappointment sucks, but you don’t get to make it everyone else’s problem.”  He stares at me with huge eyes and his lower lip quivers a threat but I hold his stare seriously.  I don’t break his gaze, even as I fumble blindly at the floor for the ball.  Tatl swoops down and pushes it over to my hand so I can pick it up and hold it out to the baby.  “Crying won’t make the ball go in.  Only throwing it again will do that.  What sounds more fun to you?”

With a look like he’s not entirely sure he isn’t being conned out of a good tantrum somehow, he sniffles one last time and takes the ball.

Tatl watches as the toy flies through the air, but goes wide of its target once more.  The baby gasps again, still angry, but there’s no sign of a tantrum looming in this one.  Now he’s offended.  Now he’s determined.  I get the ball and give it back to him.  “You’re really good at this,” Tatl notes.  For a second, I think she’s trying to encourage the baby, but then I realize she’s looking at me.

I blink at her as the ball goes flying again.  “At what?”

“Kids,” she answers, and gestures at the baby.  “He’s not even your species, you’ve never met him before, but you’ve got him eating out of the palm of your hand.  When this whole city, filled with people he knows and who are his species, couldn’t get him to stop crying long enough to breathe.”

“Oh,” I say, and shrug as I go to retrieve the ball. Still hasn’t gone in, but Darunia’s Very Serious Face is getting Very Seriouser and he’s getting closer as his tiny, baby Goron brain is figuring out how to interpret his inborn senses about space and physics.  Like any baby, really, except this one has better upper body strength than eighteen-year-old me does.  “Well. I grew up with the Kokiri.  That tends to teach you lessons about the quintessential nature of children that you might not learn in a family that includes only adults and people who will one day become them.  That helps.  Also, I’ve been spending a lot of time lately with the Gerudo kids.  They seem to be the only Gerudo who like me, so, you know. I’m in practice.”  I hand the ball back over.  “Gerudo kids are definitely not Kokiri, but kids are kids, you know? Maybe I don’t know what to feed this guy, but I know he needs to explore the world and figure out how it works.” I look down at him as he studies the shot he wants to make like he’s doing some kind of truly frightening calculus in his head.  “If he throws the ball this hard versus this hard, what happens?  Where does it wind up?  How fast does my best friend Darmani bring it back to me?  If I scream at this pitch, what do the grown-ups around me do? What about this pitch?  Or this one?  How do I get their attention?  Good attention?  Bad attention?  What makes me happy?  What makes me angry?  What’s worth being afraid of?  What’s worth having faith in?  What am I going to have to handle myself?”

The ball soars through the air and this time it hits the lip of the box.  The baby and I both gasp as it bounces up into the air, once, twice, and then falls just outside the box.  The baby starts to make an angry sound, like he really is going to cry this time, but I cut him off with a cheer as I scoop him up into my arms and spin us both in a circle, whooping triumphantly.  The noise and the spinning and the excitement is too much for the pending tantrum to survive and by the time I put him back down he’s giggling so hard he’s having trouble holding himself upright.  “You did so good!” I say.  “That was so much closer than last time!”

Look at this guy.  I thought he was a weird rock until I realized that rock had a face, sort of, under all the hair on the other side of it.  Is he a Termina version of one of the other Gorons I know?  Impossible to tell.  I cannot picture any of them this old, and between the hair and the ice he’s frozen in, it’s not like I can get a good look.

I reach into the inside pocket of Jim’s coat, mourning the loss of heat as I open a couple buttons to do so, and pull out one of my bottles of spring water.  Heat immediately seeps through the glass and my mitts and into my hand, even as cold air rushes the two-second gap I made in my woolen armour to fill the space against my chest and send a shiver through me.  “This,” I tell Tatl, smug despite the loss of warmth, “is why I dumped out all my bottles and filled them all with spring water.”

Tatl, who does not like it when I turn out to be right and she turns out to be wrong, gives me a sour look.  “And here I thought you just wanted a bunch of literal hot water bottles to cling to like a baby.”

I mean, that too.  But she’s one to talk, given that she’s spent most of the trip from there to here in my pocket cuddled up with one of them.  “You’re just mad because this is the third time we’ve needed it and I saved us multiple trips back to that tomb.  And you don’t get to be mad about that, because you’re not the one who has to climb the invisible ladder built by someone who was clearly a sadist when we run out.”

“No,” she agrees, “but I have to listen to you whine the entire way up it, and I feel like that should count for something. Are you sure you should pour that hotter than boiling magic water onto a living person?”

“Listen,” I say, “I know I sound like a crazy person to you when I talk about the way things are in Hyrule, but Gorons there live in a volcano, and I’ve seen nothing here so far that suggests these ones couldn’t if they wanted to.  They eat bombs, Tatl.  Bombs. Also, it can’t be any worse for him than being frozen like that.  For all we know he’s dead and it’s a moot point anyway, right?  Unless the ice is magic, which it is, I’ve seen this kind of thing before.”  Sort of. I mean, I’ve seen magically frozen people before, and I freed them using magic fire in a bottle.  I have no reason, based on my admittedly unrepresentative life experience, to assume magic water in a bottle would be any different.

“You’re the Hero,” she says, and I ignore that, because she doesn’t say that word the way other people say that word and I don’t really feel like rehashing our last argument.  I uncork the bottle, but Tatl says: “Wait.  Put on the mask.  We don’t know who he is or what he’s like, but he’s clearly having a day, and maybe he’ll react better to another Goron.”

I make a face at her.

“Link,” she says, dull, “you can’t go around turning dead people into masks if you’re not going to use them.  It’s rude.”

“Is that what’s rude about that?” I ask, but I shove the stopper back into the bottle and swap it for the Goron mask.  I don’t love that the mask isn’t actually shaped like his face.  It’s just a random, generic goron face, but I know it’s him in there – I know it because A) I put him in there, and B) I’ve already worn the mask once and I can tell once I’ve got it on.  I wonder if it’s because the form I turn into isn’t entirely him, any more than its entirely me, and is instead some kind of amalgam of the two?  Or if it’s because this is the Happy Mask Salesman’s magic and something about it requires a degree of depersonification?  Or is it because they’re dead and they don’t have a body and so the magic just makes it up?

What is it like, on their end of the song?  I play the notes, I get a mask and maybe some brief insight into the person they were before being a mask.  But what about them?  What do they go through?  What are they giving up?  What are they gaining?

Song of Healing, but what does that mean?

It doesn’t hurt as much to put on Darmani’s mask, compared to the Deku Scrub’s mask.  Probably because I don’t fight it as much.  Probably because Darmani doesn’t fight it at all – he wanted this; asked me for it, even.  He’s dead, but this way he can still try to help his people.  He can help me help his people.  It’s not better than being alive to do it himself, but it’s so obvious to me as the transformation takes hold that it’s better than being dead and not able to do it at all.

Probably it doesn’t hurt as much because the thing Darmani and I have in common isn’t anger, but a sense of duty.  Smoother path, that one.  Better emotional collaboration (complicity, maybe, Tatl would say). Easier to get from Point Link to Point Somewhere-Between-Link-and-Darmani.

And then it’s over and the world is much smaller than it was and, like with the Deku Scrub, a different set of senses overlay the ones I’m used to.  These ones are much more about physics, rather than the networks of plants creating worlds within the world.  This form is more aware of gravity’s pull than either of the other two, and not just because I weigh at least five times more than I do when I’m just me.  I understand without having to do any real math how wind resistance and friction and velocity are going to affect all sorts of things about my existence.  There’s a hill just behind the frozen old Goron and I know, with absolute certainty, how fast I would have to roll at it and at what angle to land on the top of the snow-bent tree at its peak (and snap it into splinters because I weigh five times more than I normally do).

“Can’t believe the hat stays when you do that,” Tatl says.  I swat at her, but I’m not used to this body yet and it takes so much more effort than I was expecting to be able to move my limbs, so she dodges easily.  For the best, really.  I’d probably kill her in this form and then she’d be just one more thing I have to live with.

“All right,” I say, my voice much deeper and way more internally resonant than I’m used to, “let’s see what the old guy has to say.”