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"You've got to be kidding… This is exactly what you should be using your Purah Pad for. Did you forget or something?" She clicks her tongue as she remarks absently, "Well, I guess that's in character for you, isn't it."
He frowns.
"Can I see the Purah Pad?" she says.
He hands it to her.
…And then he runs over and launches himself off the balcony.
"L—Linky! Linky," she runs over to the balcony and scans the ground for him, "you forgot—"
He's nowhere to be seen.
When she finds him sometime later behind a stack of barrels in an alcove under the balcony, all she says is, "Hey."
He crosses his arms and looks away from her, so she walks over to the barrels and scoots herself up onto them.
"Look." He doesn't uncross his arms or turn his head in response to her single word but something in him tenses just a little less. "I'm sorry for what I said. I should have realized it was still something that bothered you."
His head tilts ever so slightly in her direction.
"But seriously," she continues, "you should be using the Purah Pad for that kind of thing. It's got that stuff in there just for you to do that."
He cocks his head sideways to look her in the eye.
He speaks, finally.
"That's not what that's for." He's quiet. "We both know that stuff's supposed to be for Zelda's field research."
She nods as she speaks. "That's what it started as, yeah."
He presses his lips together. Looks down. Back up.
He's a little louder, mumbling a little less, as he says, "But."
She leans her head to the side. "But ever since you lost the Sheikah Slate, the princess says she kept fielding requests she remind you of things and jotting them down—once she'd done it enough in the Purah Pad in particular, she came to me and suggested I tailor it to you instead of her, and then we'd surprise you, give you this prototype one permanently once she had given it a thorough test. Which… she was supposed to be doing when you two went under the castle, but…" She lets herself trail off.
"But she never came back." He looks down.
"Yeah." She frowns.
He shifts uncomfortably but in a way Purah can tell is anticipatory, like he's worried about where she's about to take the conversation.
…His worry is justified, considering what she springs on him next.
—At least she broaches it gently.
"She said half the time you didn't even remember you'd asked her to remind you to do something. That sometimes you acted like it was just something she was just… telling you to do for the first time."
Even with his downturned face, she catches a glimpse of the grimace that crosses it. "…Got a lot of stuff going on," he mutters.
"—Linky."
He pulls his knees in close and doesn't say a single word.
"Linky, I have a lot of stuff going on. I know what's a typical amount of forgetting when you're focused on six things at once and what's a little strange."
He tenses and looks away from her.
Bad choice of words. Better walk it back. "…Not that you're strange."
She sighs.
"I'm just saying something like forgetting to eat lunch because you were too focused on your work is one thing. Forgetting as much as it sounds like you do is something else."
He leans back against the wall behind him pensively.
"C'mon, it's not like… I'm…" He lets a slow breath out. "…Was I like this before?"
"I mean… you weren't exactly an open book with me back then. But—if I had to guess—no. You always seemed really put together back then—don't get me wrong, I know now you were a mess, at least emotionally," she ignores his eyeroll as she continues, "but you always seemed to know what the plan was, where you were going, what you were doing. Only ever deviated if it looked like it'd be to the princess' benefit."
He looks like he wants to say something, but then his face changes before he quietly says, "Can you call her Zelda? You know she felt weird about the whole princess stuff after everything. Can't get everyone else to change—" he tries not to think about the fact that'd involve, y'know, talking to people— "but I know I can try with you."
Purah's eyelids drop ever so slightly. "…It's habit, Linky," she says quietly.
…He says nothing.
"Zelda cared—cares—" she revises, because she knows Link won't say the princess is gone, and frankly, she's inclined to agree with him, "about you as much as you do for her. So she'd deviate from her plans if it was for your benefit. That's why she decided she wanted you to have the prototype Purah Pad and she'd just wait for the first real one, you know. The plan changed."
He trains his eyes on the brick foundation of the lab and doesn't respond for a long time.
"…I didn't tell her I was having trouble," he finally says.
"I don't think you needed to, Linky. She's astute. I imagine she picked up on it after the third or fourth time you asked and then didn't remember when she reminded you."
His brow furrows as if this sequence of events had never occurred to him.
Purah knows he should be smart enough to realize that, so she furrows hers right back.
If he has anything to say, he sure isn't letting Purah know.
—But then—
"…You seem to have some sort of idea about what's going on, then," he says, with a tone that says he's maybe willing to admit the jig is up. "You know something or just have some sort of guess?"
She taps her chin. "Hard to say, Linky. Probably a little of both."
He eyes her quizzically. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"I mean it's an educated guess. More like a hypothesis based on what I know than just a stab in the dark."
She lets Link take this in, but his response after the moment of silence tells her maybe she should have just come out with it.
"…Well?" She'd have thought he'd have sounded impatient… but instead, he sounds self-conscious. Unsure of himself.
"Well. It's possible—it's—" She quiets. How best to phrase this…
He knocks his head back. "What, Purah?"
—Now he's impatient.
He can tell she's just stalling.
She sighs. "You know how you still have all those scars, even though you were healing for a hundred years?"
"Yeah?"
"It's entirely possible your brain still has scars, too, Linky."
He bites his lip. "…I don't think I hit my head before I…" He doesn't finish the sentence.
She doesn't doubt he's had a concussion or… six. But she sets that aside, at least for now. "I didn't see outer evidence of that, either, Linky. But…"
She glances up at the boards above her before she continues, lowering her volume a tad, even though she knows no one is up there.
"You were barely breathing when they pulled you off the field, I'm told, and I know you weren't breathing when I put you in the shrine. But I don't know when you stopped." She pauses, but for only a moment. "You've got a fairy to thank for restarting your lungs and heart, by the way. We were worried that if we didn't at least get them a little started, the shrine might not do anything. But also, you were too injured for either of us to want to attempt doing it the hard way." She mimes doing a few chest compressions to demonstrate her point.
"…And that says 'brain scars' how?"
"When you stop breathing, once a few minutes pass, it's kind of like your entire brain gets hit all at once. Well. Sort of. Also not really."
He frowns and cocks a brow at her.
"Look, I'm not a full-on healer, Linky. I don't know how else to explain it. When you start dying, your brain gets all funky, like leaving raw poultry in your bag a bit too long." When his skeptical look doesn't abate, she presses, "Linky, I know from my own sense of smell that you know what that's like."
"My brain started smelling like hot garbage?" he says flatly.
"Well, you always smell like that, Linky—" She stops as he sighs. "—Maybe not that far, because you hadn't had time to start decomposing, but it got… tenderized a bit. Your goose was cooked, or whatever. Medium rare Linky."
"—Please never say that again," he says, squirming in his seat.
She ignores him as she goes on. "Presuming the brain scars hypothesis holds up: given how many scars from before are still on your skin, I'm quite frankly surprised that memory seems to be your only issue, Linky."
The silence between them after she finishes her sentence is the loudest silence she's felt in right around a hundred years.
"What?" she says unassumingly.
"Nothing," he mumbles.
"Sounds like something."
"It's just…" He scoffs, though it's clearly directed at himself. "How many more things have to be—? I can't hold a conversation with most people. I don't have a right arm anymore. I'm tired all the time because there's gloom inside me. I forget important stuff. What else can we heap on?"
She leans back onto her hands. "Hey, cut yourself some slack. You almost died. Twice."
He bats the toe of his shoe stubbornly at the dirt beneath it.
"Besides," she adds, "avoiding talking about something doesn't stop it happening."
He knocks his head back and sighs indignantly toward the ceiling.
"Linky. What is it?"
"It's… I don't want you to— Here's the thing—"
He squeezes his eyes shut as if willing himself to reset the conversation.
Defeated, he finally settles for, "…Most of the other stuff seems like it's just the remembering thing but… like… painted a different color."
"Weird way to put it, but okay."
"What I mean is…"
He huffs and decides to lead with an example.
"So. Sometimes when you ask me a really long question, by the time you want me to answer, I don't remember half of what you asked. So I… don't. Answer, I mean."
She blinks until the korok puzzle her brain is doing snaps into place. "Wait, I thought that was just your whole…" she gestures vaguely, "thing."
There's a near-silent near-snicker, completely humorless, that comes off him before he answers. "Well, I mean, it's not not that. …I don't think I would have told you if you hadn't…" he waves his hand aimless, "forced the topic on me. I shouldn't forget part of a sentence while someone's still saying it." He looks guiltily off to the side. "In fact, for that one it doesn't feel like I'm forgetting at all. It's more like I'm never bothering to remember in the first place. Which is… like… a bad way to talk with people. Right?"
She tilts her head as if considering. "I mean, not necess—"
He buries his face in his hands as he cuts her off. "That's… that's the whole reason I even came to ask you about the phenomena. I know I didn't write down everything you said the first time, because I didn't know everything you said the first time."
Purah hesitates and then says, "And instead of answering you, I just made some unfunny joke about you being good at forgetting stuff."
He rolls his eyes and lists his head in her direction. "Hey, I'm sure in the right mood I'd have found it funny."
"What mood is that?"
He freezes… and then simply pops his lips. "…I dunno. Ask me again in another hundred years."
She smirks. "Is that it, then? You just… forget things you mean to remember and never remember things you don't mean to forget."
He shakes his head. "And there's the… um."
He sucks on his bottom lip. "Sometimes I'll have this list of things in my head to do when I get to a stable. Then I'll see a puzzle by the side of the road a korok left me and do that and suddenly the entire list is gone and I don't even realize I meant to go to the stable until I've gone off to solve that puzzle and help Addison with his signs and find Koltin and give him bubbul gems and then it's 2 am and I'm too tired."
"You know, you can put those things in this log, too."
"Oh, sure. They'll fit right in next to all my other important tasks: Kill mummy. Find Zelda. Buy eggs." She snorts in the little pause he leaves before he continues. "Besides, I don't actually forget those, a lot of the time, because I'll remember at least some of 'em when I'm getting mad at myself and starting a fire to sleep next to. It's more like I just got distracted until it was too late."
"So, like, I'd need to put a reminder not to get distracted down there, which I'm totally sure I'd remember to check and not get distracted from. After all, I always remember all the details of the very important quests I've put down in there, and I never have to ask anyone to remind me what to do next," he says, voice dripping with so much sarcasm Purah's convinced she could collect it and distill it into some sort of sarcasm elixir.
"Message received, Linky. Goddesses above, remind me to never get on your actual bad side."
He leans back, satisfied he's finally pushed one of her buttons, and it's several seconds before either of them says anything more.
"…How on earth did you manage when Calamity Ganon was still active?" she asks curiously.
It occurs to her that he wouldn't have known any different, not then, but she doesn't tack that on as she finally sees something that seems closer to a real—if subdued—smile cross his face at the chance to answer that.
"…Impa was really patient with me. She made me show her what I'd taken down of what she said, and she wouldn't let me go off until I'd gotten all the important parts. And she sent Cado off to look for me if I didn't check in about my progress regularly." He glances up. "She also insisted I get better handwriting; my handwriting back then was worse than some of the kids in Hateno. Before Zelda started teaching 'em."
She doesn't hide her eyebrows' marked raise. "Well, at least I know one thing wasn't new, then. You left me a note way back when, something about Zelda, but I couldn't make heads or tails of it and had to come ask you for clarification. And. Well. Of course, you wouldn't provide it, not back then, so…"
"Heh." The laugh is tired, flat. But it's there.
"I'm just glad to know you finally write like a civilized Hylian all because of my sister, then."
He offers a shrug her direction. "I mean. Maybe I don't anymore. Haven't tried since I lost the arm."
"…You wanna test that?" She knows he's pretty deft with a sword in that Zonai arm, but writing is also a slightly finer endeavor than swordplay.
"Nope," he says succinctly, standing and clearly having reached his limit in the conversation.
—She holds her hand out.
"Wait."
"What." The way he tenses is almost imperceptible.
Almost.
"You didn't tell me everything."
"What? Of course I did."
He's put on a trained tone, one a knight might use to not risk showing their hand during confrontation, one she recognizes from the smattering of other knights she'd come face-to-face with before the Calamity, but his face and body are giving a different answer.
"Link."
…He doesn't say anything, but he does sit back down.
"You said most of it seemed like it was remembering-related. That means you thought of some stuff that wasn't."
He wraps his arms around his knees. "…Y'know. I don't have to tell you my entire medical history or whatever."
"Sure. But I feel like you wanted to."
He frowns.
"Was that feeling wrong?" she presses.
He winces. "…Only a little. It's you or… like… some healer I don't know how to talk to. Right?"
She tilts her head to the side. "Or you stay quiet about it another 6 years."
He lets out a humorless snicker. "Or that, I guess."
His hand fidgets against his pants for a moment. Finally, he says, "Do you think you can give me a bit?"
"Define a bit."
He rolls his eyes. "Like, a few hours, Purah, god!"
"Which god?"
"Purah."
When she starts to preen, he darts out from under the awning like his life depends on it.
…She doesn't call after him this time as she looks down at what's still in her hands.
He'll figure it out.
She's out staring at the castle, pondering it, when something grabs her elbow and yanks her hard in the direction of her lab.
She only gets the chance to turn to see who's done it once she's inside with the door shut behind her.
Not that she needed to see him to know it was Link.
She follows him as he walks over to the table and falls into one of its chairs, satisfied there's no one else inside.
Through his closed mouth, she can see he's running his tongue over his teeth, no doubt a nervous tic as he collects his thoughts.
Finally, he starts, "I… didn't want to mention the other stuff because… because it… I guess it freaked me out?" He breaks eye contact and looks down at his clasped hands. "It's stuff that seems like it's… more concerning. Than the forgetting, I mean."
"I'm listening."
He's quiet for a long moment, but eventually, he looks back up. "…Do you remember? When Hoz's crew fought that bunch of monsters in Hyrule Field for the first time and came back here all victorious and excited to tell Gralens?"
"Yeah, they were so loud the whole fort couldn't help but pay attention to them."
He stares her down, and it's only a little unsettling given he doesn't usually do that to her. "And do you know where I was?"
She hesitates and then nods. "Hoz said that evening that you were such a good help… then he came to me around noon the next day before they were planning to head out to Fort Hateno. He was all concerned because you'd been in bed since like dinner the night before. He thought you were sick or injured or something."
Link shakes his head. "Just tired. Couldn't keep my eyes open." He mumbles the last bit. "Surprised I made it to dinner, honestly."
"And I take it that wasn't from the gloom?" …She'd thought it was from the gloom, at the time. Had made sure not to share that conclusion with Hoz, because she suspected Link hadn't shared that particular side effect of the Upheaval with the man.
He sighs and gives his head another shake. "I mean, I'm sure it didn't help, but no." If he thinks about it, it's more like the gloom just gives stuff like this a bit more of a punch when he's already on the receiving end of a figurative (literal?) beatdown.
"Just…" he slaps his hand at the table a few times, "fighting monsters alone is easy. I only have to know how many are on each side of me, so I, like, group 'em into littler groups in my head and only bother to remember specifics about the ones I'm facing. And maybe it's okay if I tank a few hits, or I'm a little tired after."
He smacks his lips, sucking in a bit of air as he does, and ignores Purah's harsh look of concern. He's been doing that since he came out of the Shrine; why stop now? "But. Like. When you add the crew in, all of a sudden I gotta know exactly where the monsters are and where the people are and who's fighting who so I can keep everyone from getting killed. By the monsters or by me. If I slash in the wrong direction or lose track and guard against a monster that's not even going for the person behind me…"
He picks at a bit of chapping on his lip. "It's too many things to remember at once. Too many monsters. Too many people." He was once a normal member of the guard—likely a squire considering his age when he pulled the sword—but the fact nearly all his experience in-memory is of guarding just one person is not lost on her. "And the worst part is that they wait for me to get there before they charge in. Somehow, I manage it, but… afterwards I can't think of doing anything else but falling into bed and never waking up. It's like I'm… borrowing myself from the future or something, and after I'm done, the future wants me back. But in the meantime that means there's nothing left." He leans back slightly from the table.
She chews on that and then responds with a handwave, "So tell 'em you can't do it."
And then he leans back forward. "Whuh—I can't do that! It's not fair to them, Purah!"
She crosses her arms. "It's not fair to you, Linky. Unless you like having to sleep for half a day afterward."
He scratches at his cheek.
…He might like sleeping for half a day. When he gets the chance.
But she's right that he doesn't like needing to.
He doesn't even always feel rested when he wakes up, either.
…He takes some ironic solace in knowing that probably is the gloom.
She looks off to the side for a moment and offers, "If you really can't stop yourself from helping, maybe at least set a ground rule that they don't have to wait for you if you're not there and they're ready to charge. Or, like, limit yourself to managing a group. It's a monster control crew, not a monster control Link-and-the-people-he's-protecting."
He hmphs at her suggestion; multiple people fall to the monsters when he's there, knocked out, needing medical attention after. How much worse will it be if he's not?
…He's not causing people to get hit. Right? They're not slacking because he's there.
Right?
"Linky. Please." She's looking for a promise, but…
"I can't promise that, Purah."
She lets out a long, tired sigh.
"Then at least promise to stick around for more than 20 minutes after you wake up next time."
He purses his lips, glances toward the door, then finally says, "…Fine."
She can tell he's thinking she's bold to assume he'll sleep it off here every time, but she stays quiet.
…So does he, so she finally breaks the silence, saying, "…Is that all you didn't wanna say down in the grass, then?"
He runs his finger across the wood grain of the table, in one of its rare bare spots. The cogs in his head are turning hard; he's trying to figure out if he should take the out and just stop there.
—But he doesn't.
"…The other one's silly."
He sounds dismissive of his own sentence as he says it.
She counters it with two simple words.
"Try me."
He squeezes his eyes shut, looking almost a little embarrassed, as he speaks.
"…When I woke up, on the Great Plateau… did you know I had to relearn what a lot of stuff was called?"
Her eyebrows shoot upward. "—No." Clearly, she's only now realizing the extent of what she didn't know about how Link would come out on the other side of the Shrine of Resurrection.
If she didn't think it'd alienate the man in front of her, she'd be jotting notes down on a free sheet of paper.
"King Rhoam was really helpful back then."
She gives him a quizzical look.
"Ghost. Old man. Don't ask."
She sighs. Of course Linky, the guy who could hear swords and see koroks and dragons and maybe also telepathically get messages from Zelda and/or the goddesses themselves—his stories were always so wild, but she had no choice but to believe them—would be able to see ghosts.
He bites at his left thumbnail as he continues, and she fights the urge to tell him he should probably wash his hands with how gross his nails in particular look.
"I knew words, but when I'd look at something I couldn't attach a name to it. It was strange. Not just weird stuff like the Sheikah Slate and all that, either, but really basic stuff like apples and barrels and… I dunno, pants? By the time I got off the Great Plateau I'd at least figured out a strategy for managing to remember what things were called, and… by the time I'd taken down Calamity Ganon, I usually didn't have trouble anymore, anyway."
…There's a guarded look in his eyes.
"—I'm sensing a 'but'," she says.
He sighs. "…Right after I woke up… up there, in the sky… the same thing happened. Like… I got out of the rooms I started out in, right? Went and picked up a tree branch to keep as a makeshift weapon… and I just… stared at it. Must've been at least a minute or so. I just… couldn't place what it was called. Saw an apple and did the same thing. Construct who was roasting mushrooms by a fire had to tell me." He puts on a flat voice mimicking a construct. "'Oh, you appear to already have some roasting experience. That looks like a nice baked apple.' Had to fall back on some of the stuff I did after the Shrine of Resurrection, try to force my brain to connect the word and the thing again."
She purses her lips. "…Why didn't you say something earlier?"
"Because it wasn't like the Great Plateau. It always came back. It's not like I didn't know the words this time or like I had to study them or something." He finishes, reserved, "More like it was just… easy to misplace 'em."
"Are you still having that problem?"
"Sometimes? Not as often. I promise." …She doesn't need to know he only (re-)realized what a pumpkin was called yesterday. Or that he's forgotten the word "scimitar" a couple times now, something he's hoping he'll maybe stop doing once he's in the desert and maybe seeing Riju's swords on a regular basis.
"Did you hit your head down there?"
"I know I didn't. Though—" He cuts himself off.
"What?"
"When I came to, King Rauru told me I almost died."
She cocks a brow.
"Ghost. Old goat man… Llama man? …Don't ask."
…She doesn't.
"Besides, I can't imagine… this—" he holds up his right arm, "—was a very simple procedure. Do you think there's any chance…" He trails off.
"…Shrine of Resurrection part 2?" She's almost mournful as she says it.
He nods more vigorously than she's ever seen him nod. "But, like, maybe if I didn't fully die. And I didn't forget literally everything I knew."
"…I could see it. Maybe you lost a lot of blood. Maybe you weren't getting enough air. Can't know since I wasn't there," she says with a wince. "Has everything been… worse? Since you woke up in the sky?"
"Maybe? I wanna say it feels like it, but it's hard to be sure." He considers all the troubles he'd been having before, the stuff he hadn't told Purah, a couple things he still hasn't told her because they aren't that problematic, not really. "Maybe I am. Or maybe I'm just more tired so it's just making more stuff more difficult. I dunno."
He twiddles his thumbs. The air between them quiets.
After a few moments, she says, "…I feel like you should let me look into all this, Linky."
—With that, ever so subtly, he reels.
To his credit, he stays steady as he says, "…Purah, I have things to do."
"Really? What were you planning to do when you left, then? In the late evening, at that?"
…
He avoids her eyes.
…
He fidgets.
…
"—I'll figure it out!" he blurts.
She cocks a brow with a smug smirk. "Sounds like you don't have a plan that can't wait for morning."
He squirms in his seat.
"At least stay until then. You don't have to let me look you over, but maybe I can do something else? Take a look at the Purah Pad, maybe? Make some adjustments that make it easier for you to use?"
He rolls his eyes, but he at least goes to reach for the Purah Pad… only to realize it's not there.
His eyes widen and his hands go to search his person for it for only a moment before Purah clears her throat and lifts up the device. "You never took it back from me, Linky." She sits it on the table.
He nervously clasps his hands and eyes it pensively.
"Hey, by the way, I have a question about some stuff I saw on there."
"You snooped through my stuff?"
"Oh, I thought you were all into it being Zelda's, not yours," she says, slightly mocking.
He sighs. "…What is it, then?"
"I was taking a look at some of the stuff you've written about different people, and I was wondering: why is this all in third person?"
He shrugs.
"Oh. I didn't realize you went into a fugue state to write these, Linky," she says, voice drenched in sarcasm.
He sighs. Again.
Lots of sighing today.
"I—It's… Sometimes, the person from a hundred years ago… it doesn't feel like it's me."
"Sure. Okay. But most of these are about you now." She flips through them to find one that most illustrates her point. "'When Link first visited the village, Tulin was still a child growing up in his father's shadow, and his eyes would light up seeing Link in action.' Why write in third person for those?"
Link shifts uncomfortably.
"…You think it might happen again, then," she says quietly.
He swallows and—finally—nods.
"When I woke up on the Great Sky Island, I was half-convinced it'd been another hundred years," he starts, exhaustion she can tell is from his core seeping into his tone. "All the stuff… and the word thing… they didn't have me optimistic. The only thing that helped me think that it wasn't was that I didn't forget."
He swallows. "I thought… if it happened again… I might like to know things I thought were important about who I used to be and who I used to know without feeling like I had to be that person, you know? Know what it means to be Link from Link and not feel pushed into being Link again. Philosophically speaking. I guess."
"You didn't wanna have to rely on my or Robbie's or Impa's… even Zelda's ideas of what you should know."
"Yeah. No offense."
"None taken. You're the one who'd know you best, Linky. Well, in theory, anyway."
He goes quiet and eyes the Pad in her hands for several long moments.
She clears her throat.
"You still want me to take it for the night?" When he nods, she adds, "You'll do okay without it?"
He leans his head on his hand. "I can live without a to-do list for a night, Purah."
"You sure? You were eyeing it pretty hard."
He shakes his head. "Just thinkin' about something." After a moment with nothing further from her, he adds, "You really can take it for the night, Purah."
"Okay. Just checking."
He stretches and stands. "Might try to sleep in your big chair, if that's okay, though. Just so something makes me question instead of going through my normal steps and then forgetting the Purah Pad here." He considers that he's left it in Purah's hands twice now just today and adds, "Again."
"Go for it, Linky."
Turns out he doesn't have to remember the Purah Pad come morning, for what wakes him is it landing squarely on his chest.
He's still shaking the sleep from his brain, but he manages to force out, "Guh—What the heck, Purah?"
"Get lost."
He lets the memory of deciding to sleep in the most uncomfortable position in Purah's big chair instead of down in the shelter like usual slowly creep back into his awareness before he says anything else.
"What?" he finally lets roll off his tongue as he rolls his shoulders and tilts his neck from side to side and goes into his morning stretching routine.
"You heard me. You got places to be, don't you?"
He folds over to touch the floor. "Yeah, but isn't 'get lost' a little… intense?"
"…Maybe. But a missive arrived from Zora's Domain while you were sleeping. They wanted to know if there were any updates on when help might be coming, and…"
He stops. "You didn't tell them I was gonna be there ASAP, did you?"
"No, but I told them not to worry."
He sighs and switches gears. "I'll head there next. Sidon's probably dying to see me." He pauses to pull an apple and hard-boiled egg from his bag and tilts his head back a bit toward her and adds, "Hopefully not literally."
He shoves the whole egg in his mouth and then takes a bite of the apple and ignores Purah's unappetized face when he turns around to face her.
"…What'd you do to the Purah Pad, anyway?" he sputters out between chews.
…She ignores his lack of etiquette and gestures to it. "Take a look. You're smart enough to figure it out."
He takes it into his hands. "—Sometimes I don't feel that way." He glances up at her and back down to it. "You and Robbie put more bells and whistles in this thing than the Sheikah Slate had, y'know."
"Linky. I've seen you build an electrically-powered cart. You're definitely smart enough. But I guess if you want a rundown…"
She keeps talking as he takes it upon himself to flip through the device's tabs.
"I went ahead and added what you missed to the regional phenomena info, that way you don't need to ask me again, improved the tech for tracking the waypoints—though that's a bit more under-the-hood so I'm not sure you'd notice it if I didn't tell you. There are also some slight changes to how the sensor and compendium work, but you're still gonna have to go to Robbie to get those things fully up and running. Stop by Hateno sometime, maybe?"
"If I remember."
"You have a note to go there already in the Purah Pad. How long you been putting it off?"
"…Does it matter?"
"Guess not. I suppose it is your Purah Pad."
He chews on that (and on another bite of his apple) for a moment, and then he says, "Yeah. I suppose it is."
"Besides," she adds, "I put an alarm in there, too. I thought maybe you could use it to wake yourself up if you've set up camp somewhere, but you can also attach a task or note to it. In case you might get distracted."
He absently nods as he finds what she's talking about and gives it a quick once-over.
Once he flips to the Pad's leftmost tab, he remarks, "What's this, though?" He turns the Pad so Purah can see he's got it on a new screen that wasn't there before.
Purah squints for a moment before she exclaims, "Oh! I figured I'd sort all your notes on the people you knew into their own section, called it 'Character Profiles'. Thought it'd make it easier to refer back to, you know? Like a compendium, but for people."
"No, I get that. I was asking about the one I'm on."
…He means that quite literally, as she finally takes notice he's got it open to an entry about… him.
"Oh, I just noticed you were missing someone. Someone important. Might wanna fill it in with your own opinions on the guy, though," she says with a wink.
He rolls his eyes but at least gives it a thoughtful glance before he clips the Purah Pad to his waist and continues getting ready.
"…Thanks, Purah."