Chapter Text
Princess Tetra Eldora Isla Loradena Nohansen of the Hyrulean Archipelago was bored.
Well, she was often bored, so that in and of itself wasn’t a terribly big deal. Usually she could just find something to blow up or someone to tease or any sort of thing that caused havoc and made Ma groan and gave Daddy another wrinkle on his forehead.
So, no, the issue wasn’t that she was bored. It was that she was bored on an official state visit to some crummy little island in the southern reaches of the archipelago and Ma had told her that she’d take away her gun if she caused a scene yet again.
So boredom it was.
She tried to keep herself entertained within the bounds of what she knew she could get away with. But there were only so many docks you could visit before they all started looking the same, and docks was all Outset Island seemed to have. And sure, beyond that there was a lot more nature than your average island, but with the same ol’ plants she saw all the time back home on Windfall.
By the end of their initial greeting of the Governor of Outset—a tiny old woman with grey hair and wrinkles that talked a lot about her grandchildren—she had fidgeted and squirmed and sighed more than Ma could tolerate, and so she was allowed to do as she pleased instead of sitting in on the talks to discuss what the island needed. “Though, Tetra,” Queen Zelda told her, “You’re going to be the one leading these one day, and should learn what you can before that. And you still need to keep your promise not to cause any incidents.”
Tetra didn’t even respond, because she was too glad to simply escape. She immediately ran to the beach, which was admittedly nicer than most other islands, enjoying running out into the water and laying in the sand and ruining her very nice clothes in a way that she knew Ma was going to be upset about later. But at least it was better than an incident, so she probably wouldn’t take away her gun. Probably.
It didn’t last very long, though. It wasn’t too fun to be on your own for very long. There wasn’t even Niko here to terrorize! She hadn’t even seen much of anyone on the beach, but there was still more beach she hadn’t seen yet. So she walked along it, keeping an eye out for anything interesting that might have been washed up by the shoreline, hoping there was so she wouldn’t have to resort to something so childish as building a sandcastle to have some fun.
But as her luck would have it, she didn’t have to walk very far at all before she could see something in the distance. Was it a log or broken timbre that had washed up? She started running, curious about what it could be.
It quickly became clear that it was about the size and shape of a hylian. And then that it was, indeed, a hylian.
She slowed down to a brisk walk. She was still morbidly curious, but… they didn’t look like they were moving at all. Had she found a corpse washed ashore?
Tetra couldn’t help but imagine what had been the cause of such a fate. A hapless sailor that couldn’t swim well enough when tossed overboard amidst a storm? That wasn’t as interesting as, say, murder, but that was perhaps a little more realistic than being stabbed and thrown overboard during a mutiny, with the side of their body she couldn’t see gnawed to the bone by a shark.
She came to a halt as she arrived at the body. It was a boy about her age, decidedly un-gnawed on, so maybe either story she had imagined was fairly unrealistic.
She kicked him in the ribs, just to make sure he was dead before she let her imagination run free about how that death occurred.
The boy groaned and turned around, squeezing his eyes shut like this was nothing more than a simple unwelcome wake-up call.
Tetra huffed out a laugh. Was he asleep? That seemed more ridiculous than being dead, with his sandal-clad feet in the tide and unruly blond hair sticking up in every-which way and sand sticking to his entire head. And with that oversized blue shirt and orange capris it really did look like he was in his pajamas.
Whatever made him sleep out here, he was bound to be weird.
Tetra smirked. Surely he had to be at least almost as fun to tease as Niko.
She crouched over him, leaned close to his ear, and whispered, “Hey, kid.”
No response.
She tried again, much louder this time. “Kiiiiiid!”
Still nothing.
She put her pinky in her mouth and stuck it, dripping with spit, into his ear.
He groaned, and brushed her hand away like it was an annoying skeeter, but still didn’t so much as open his eyes.
Well, at least that was some reaction. It seemed like she needed to try to physically jar him awake, since he was apparently immune to noise somehow.
Not that it hurt to use it to help knock him back into the land of the living.
“WAAAAAAAAAAKE UUUUUUUUUUUUP!” she shouted with a sing-song lilt to her voice as she vigorously shook his arm back and forth.
“Go ‘way, Aryll,” he mumbled, pressing his face further into the sand.
Tetra stood up and placed her hands on her hips. Not that his reactions weren’t fun at all, but this was growing tedious. She wasn’t going to try to be nice about it anymore.
She drew back her leg and kicked him, full force, right on his butt.
“OW! ARY—” He cut off as he saw her, staring for a long moment at her until he finally managed to blink. “You’re not Aryll.”
She couldn’t help but burst into laughter. “What a dumb face!” He pressed his mouth into a straight line and glared at her, clearly unaware of the fact that it was equally hilarious. “But you’re right. I’m not Aryll, whoever that is. The name’s Tetra.”
“Tetra? Like the princess?”
If he wasn’t going to put together that Tetra was the princess visiting the island today himself, then she wasn’t going to spell it out for him. “Yeah, like the princess.”
“Well, Tetra. I understand why my sister feels the need to wake me up—though she’s never managed to be as rude as you were just now,” he said as he stood up, dusting some of the sand off from… everywhere on his person. “But why did you?”
“Well, freckles—”
“Freckles?”
“Yeah. You didn’t tell me your name, so,”—she pointed at his nose that was littered with the things—“freckles.”
Freckles scowled at her (and she tried not to laugh at it too much). “My name is Link.”
“Well, now I know, Link.” What had they been talking about before this? Oh, yeah. “Anyhow, I woke you up because you were sleeping right there and I was bored.”
“But did you have to kick me?”
Ah. That tone. Tetra grimaced. He was actually hurt and upset about it. She enjoyed teasing people, very much, but she still had a problem telling when she had gone too far. Her parents didn’t like it, and she really was trying to be better about it. She still… struggled with that.
“Sorry,” she sighed. “The second time was especially excessive.”
He took his hands out of his hair and stared at her. “You kicked me twice?”
Wow. He really had been out of it, hadn’t he?
“Yes, I did, though to be fair the first time I thought you were dead,” Tetra admitted.
“DEA—?”
She hurriedly continued, “But I really am sorry and am trying not to be so mean or impatient so… is there any way I could make it up to you?”
Link crossed his arms and looked at her. “You said you were bored?”
She nodded. “I have no idea what to do around here.”
“We could try to find something more interesting to do that doesn’t involve causing bodily injury to other people.”
“Aww, but it’s so fu—”
She cut off as he gave her a look that reminded her far too much of her mother’s. “I thought you were trying to be nicer.”
What she had said was less mean, but she didn’t dare correct him right now. “Yeah. Right. Uh… what did you have in mind, then?”
“Well, we could explore the forest… or go check out the docks…”
Tetra stuck her tongue out.
“What?” Link asked.
“Aren’t the docks boring? There’s just a bunch of boats there.”
“There’s… a few interesting boats.”
She blinked.
He sighed. “Yeah, they’re not that interesting looking. But they do have legends about them and they’re probably the most interesting thing on the island.”
She thought about it. Sit here and be bored, go out and look at a bunch of plants while being swarmed by mosquitoes, or go see the boats and hear some stupid silly melodramatic story out of it?
She shrugged. “Sure, but it better be more interesting than most of those old legends. Like y’know, the ones with the heroes saving princesses and whatnot.”
“What? Those are fun!”
Tetra gave him a flat look and started walking back towards the docks.
“What”—Link huffed as he caught up—“what’s so wrong with those old legends?”
“The princesses are always just sitting around to be rescued by the hero. Duh.” She rolled her eyes. It should be obvious. Why should she be sidelined while some boy got to go have a fun adventure all on his own?
He sighed. “I guess I never looked at it like that. The demon or whatever always locks her up right away so that she can’t just stop it. The hero might need to save the princess, but it’s the princess and her powers that save the kingdom.”
Tetra looked at him as they came to a halt at the wooden slats of the dock. His expression wasn’t particularly amusing, and that was because he was just earnestly trying to explain it to her. She never could laugh at proper earnestness. It always unsettled her a little.
“If anyone or anything tries to lock me away, I’m still gonna make them pay for it.” She unslung her gun from the holster and spun it around her finger, miming pulling the trigger at an imaginary enemy and blowing the smoke away from the gun afterward before replacing it. The safety was on the entire time, of course—she was rash, not stupid.
Link was staring at her with his eyes popping out like a fish’s. “You have a gun.”
“Clearly.”
He didn’t say anything else, just continued staring at the holster with that silly expression. She laughed for a while, but it only took a couple of minutes for her to get bored of just standing there even if it was funny.
Tetra crossed her arms. “So where are these funny-looking boats supposed to be anyhow?”
He jumped. He actually jumped, a full foot, or at least several inches in the air. “Uh, I never said they were funny-looking. They’re interesting.”
She waved her hand. “Whatever. I’ll decide when I see them. So lead the way.”
Link looked like he wanted to correct her somehow but didn’t know what to say, and so, after moving through a few expressions, he turned around and started walking towards the other end of the docks.
There really were hardly any ships here. The royal yacht was by no means a small ship, but it usually was dwarfed by cargo vessels in ports. That really, really wasn’t the case here. And the strangeness was reinforced by the utter lack of people around loading or unloading or boarding or whatever. Or, even the fact that as in every other island she had visited, the town—or perhaps village would be a better term—began with shops and taverns right near the docks, but there weren’t even any shopkeepers out or children playing.
“Hey,” Tetra asked Link. “I know this island is small, but not that small. Where is everyone?”
He ruffled his hair into even more of an unruly mess than it had been. “Well, we’re probably smaller than you realize if you’re visiting. I’ve known the same twenty kids my whole life and everyone knows everyone… so we’re all really close or have the worst ani…anemone's the word, I think? Whatever means don’t get along. But yeah, normally there’d be a dozen or so people around, but I think that most everyone’s interested in seeing the royal family, since they’re visiting today.”
She scrunched her nose. Maybe it was good Ma let her get away before she ended up acting out in front of an entire island’s worth of people. That would spell trouble for her for sure.
“Here we are.”
She halted, looking at the wooden barge that had all sorts of pipes poking out of its whitewashed sides and an “S.S. Linebeck” so faded that Tetra could barely make out the letters.
“I was right,” she said. “It is funny-looking, not interesting. I don’t think this has any right to be called a boat by anyone.”
“I know how it looks, but it’s actually the fastest boat here on Outset!” Link boasted to her. Then he frowned and tilted his head to the side. “Well. Only if Captain Linebeck is actually the one steering it. And everyone knows he is abominably lazy with anything that doesn’t promise of a fortune for him in it.”
“So… can we go on it?”
She could have sworn his face paled as his mouth curled downward and his shoulders rose. “Uh! Well the most interesting thing about that one is that it supposedly came from a phantom realm of some kind. But no one really knows, and the other boat is much more interesting really.” He walked past the S.S. Linebeck. “Over here!”
She was tempted to go on it regardless, simply because Link seemed against the idea for some reason, but there wasn’t a ramp out at the moment and the sides were high enough that she’d have to jump to board it. Tetra decided that she wasn’t bored enough for that… yet, at least. Might as well see what this other boat looked like.
She immediately burst into laughter. She wasn’t sure what strange creature the bow was supposed to be, especially when it was painted with such vibrant colors, but it looked absolutely ridiculous. “What is that?”
“He is the King of Red Lions.” Link said defensively. “And he has a very noble history.”
“And a very stupid face to go right along with it,” she remarked. "He'd fit right in with the history books." She looked closer at the rest of the boat. It was clearly much simpler—nothing more than a sail and tiller to move it. “Can I go on this one?”
He shrugged. “I guess you could.”
Tetra jumped onto it, laughing as it wobbled back and forth. “Getting on?”
He shook his head rapidly. “Nope. I can tell you the Legend of the King of Red Lions right here from on the dock.”
She hadn’t asked for the legend, but he seemed intent on telling her, and she supposed it didn’t hurt to hear it while she was poking around looking at the sailboat.
“Once, when Hyrule was a land, not a sea, there was a king.”
“Lemme guess,” Tetra said, looking at the tiller. Why was she looking around at a boat like she had any idea how it worked? It wasn’t even that fun to wiggle. “He was wise? That’s usually how those old stories go, innit?”
Link shook his head. “Not this one. This one was foolish. Foolish enough to let evil creep up in his land.”
If she moved the tiller slowly it did shift the boat the tiniest bit. That was a little fun at least.
“Anyhow, the king, he still had a big heart and hated to see his people suffering. So he did something even more foolish, and journeyed to the home of the wind gods, where he stole the baton of the gods to try to quell the evil.
“The wind gods, when they discovered it missing, were angry, and unleashed their wrath upon all of Hyrule, letting the clouds unleash such a torrent that the land was quickly flooded beneath the waves forever. It sealed away the evil, but very few people survived to swim to the mountaintops that had now become the islands we live on today.”
Tetra pulled on the ropes. It made the sails move a bit at the top, so she immediately stopped, not wanting it to fall right on her head.
“The foolish king survived, and swam to the top of a mountain where he cried for forgiveness, realizing that it was his own folly that had made such a fate befall his kingdom. He wanted to help those few who had survived, and with the power that the baton of the gods held, he drew their attention.
“They asked what he wanted, and he said nothing more than to help his remaining subjects, but that he had no way to traverse the ocean. They said that the price of a kingdom was sufficient that he might keep a fraction of the power of the gods that the baton held. Cyclos, the rash brother, granted him a boat by turning him into one. He retained his speech, but was given an unnatural face that would make it difficult for anyone to accept any help he might offer them. Zephos, the kinder of the brothers, granted him a sail, so that he might actually use the baton’s power to move from mountaintop to mountaintop to aid his people.
“He spent the rest of his days pursuing that promise he had made to the gods, though more often people rejected his help than not, and never was truly able to atone for the sins he had allowed to befall his kingdom before his jaw stiffened so that he could no longer speak.”
Tetra frowned. “I’ve never heard that story before. Doesn’t make much sense, does it?”
Link shrugged. “I guess here on Outset is where the King has remained for so long, so maybe that’s why we have the legend. We also have the baton of the gods!”
She raised an eyebrow. Now that might be something worth seeing. “Where is it?”
“Oh, hidden away in a compartment somewhere on the boat.” She looked at him expectantly until he got the idea. “I guess I can show you.”
He came up to the edge of the dock and sat down on it, gingerly putting his feet in even though it wasn’t much lower than the dock at all.
Tetra smirked. It seemed he was a little scared of boats for some reason… it wouldn’t hurt to spook him while he was preoccupied getting out some supposedly deific artifact, would it?
So she untied the boat from the dock and pushed off with her foot.
Link lurched. “What was that?”
She shrugged, as if she wasn’t entirely to blame.
He looked past her and his eyes bulged out as he saw they were several feet out from dock. “What’d you do, Tetra? This boat hasn’t left the dock in… I don’t know, years if not decades! It’s not supposed to leave, ever!”
Tetra rolled her eyes. He was making such a big deal about it. “So what? We’ll just sail back.”
“I don’t know how to sail!” At least his face was proving to be just as amusing as she had hoped for causing this mischief, if nothing else. “I’m only twelve!”
“Well, I’m only thirteen, should I know?”
“If you’re going to push off dock, yes!”
She sighed. “Stop making such a big deal about it. It wasn’t that hard a push. How far can we get?”
Queen Zelda Erlen Scyrin Aurelia Harkinian Hyrule had been having a perfectly average day. Nice weather, official business that went as smoothly as could be expected, and letting her daughter run off to play before her behavior got out of hand.
And then it went disastrously wrong.
“Daphnes,” she called to her husband who was walking from the beach. “Any luck?”
Daphnes shook his head. “No sign of her at the beach or halfway up the mountain. Seems she found a different sort of spot to hide this time.”
Zelda sighed. “I think we need the help of the locals to look more. They’d know what spots to check better than us.”
It was mostly just frustrating that their daughter was so troublesome that they had to go to such pains to simply find her. But the governor of Outset—a nice, elderly lady named Coral—had been very accommodating and welcoming earlier. In fact, it was surprising that she wasn’t attentive to them as soon as they were in sight, but understandable as she was talking to her granddaughter, and she did turn to them once that conversation slowed.
“Your Majesties.” She bowed to them. “What brings you back here? I thought you were planning on departing this evening.”
“We were,” Zelda admitted. “Or are, even. But we cannot find our daughter, and were wondering if we could get some help searching the island for her.”
She frowned. “Oh, dear. That isn’t good news.”
Daphnes leaned forward. “Why? Do you know something?”
“Not specifically about the princess, no… but,” she sighed, “I do know that my grandson is missing, as well as a boat.”
Oh, Tetra, Zelda thought. Now where did you get yourself off to now?