#zorphin

When he resurfaced, it was with an odd-looking garment: a loose, heavy garment that looked like a modified muumuu with entirely too many hemmed-in pockets. 

“Lead-lined,” he said, pointing to one of them as he cinched its waistband with a long line of rope. “Or at least, it’s got a bunch of lead weights hemmed in all over. Helps counteract the buoyancy! Only thing is, I just can’t start actively swimming downwards, or it all slides off and I shoot back up like a cork. Mind holding this?”

That last part came as he finished cinching the waistband, which clearly bore about eight to ten feet more slack than it needed. He handed the end of the rope to Cironus.

“Probably easiest to tug me along. Just think of me as a big, stony balloon!”

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So it was that Cironus and Zalfe arrived upon the underwater temple, Danmalaak bobbing several feet above Cironus’ clenched fist, his free hand scribbling notes with a grease pen across a small whiteboard as he listened to Zalfe’s descriptions.

“Wow,” Cironus said after Zalfe regaled them with the story of Fjord’s mother. “That must have been one heck of a shell she offered!”

At the mention of invasive pests like starfish and urchin, Cironus nodded with a grin.

“I can take care of those,” he said, patting his stomach for emphasis. Every task seemed simple enough and it would keep him busy when he finally got settled. Plus, he would be helping. If he could make himself of use then hopefully there’d be less of a chance he would somehow get kicked out.

Zalfe brought him back to the present when she suggested they head up, if only to make sure Danmalaak didn’t drown.

“Right!” he turned to his friend who was floating above him, still dangling from his rope. “You doin’ good, buddy?”

Danmalaak, for one, didn’t appear to be struggling too hard. He’d been strangely cagey about the specifics, but from what Cironus had gleaned, either he didn’t need to breathe (being an animated pile of rocks) or he’d been trained sufficiently well in the art of free-diving that he'd not yet betrayed any appearance of struggling. Indeed, the goron had slid another whiteboard over the first, and was mid-scribble when Cironus voiced his question. He held up a finger (apparently one thing he couldn’t do was speak underwater), after which he finished the note, holding it at an angle so Cironus could read it below him.

The note consisted of a single phrase: the words “YOUR MOM?”, alongside a crude drawing of a conch shell and an arrow pointing towards the shrine. 

Danmalaak grinned, bubbles streaming past his teeth, and gave him a wink.

==========

At this point, it is incumbent to make sense of what Danmalaak was thinking when he wrote this note.

Zalfe’s explanation of Re Temple’s geographic- and theological importance as the Temple of Wishes was certainly interesting to Danmalaak, as were the kinds of wishes she mentioned Fjord’s mother making at the foot of the statue. Reflecting on Fjord’s own build made Danmalaak consider Cironus’ own - particularly given that Danmalaak himself barely came up to the zorca’s knees. He thought it would be amusing if it turned out that Cironus’ own mother came to this shrine and offered a similar wish. After all, between Cironus and his brother Sardon, she would certainly seem similarly spoiled by Nayru’s bounty!

==========

How unfortunate, then, that he could not say this idea aloud, and could only communicate it by whiteboard, where the nuances of language could be so easily lost.

What Danmalaak was unaware of was how such a simple phrase such as “YOUR MOM” could be seen as an insult.

As such, in response, Cironus gave his goron friend a deadpan stare.

And he promptly let go of the rope.

Danmalaak shot to the surface like a keese out of the Depths, popping out of the surface by an impressive three feet before landing in an equally unimpressive belly flop. Sputtering to remain upright lest his modified muumuu slip off into the depths below, he glanced, nonplussed, at the vague zora-shaped clouds below, and gave them a shout absolutely no one besides himself could hear.