Waking of Thursday, November 15, 2018 ~ 2
I put just a little more juice in the controller before moving on with Selmie’s
dialogue.
“*sigh...*” she said, and then, “Hey...
What’s that on your back?! That’s a radiant shield! You wouldn’t believe how
rare those things are! You practically never see them anymore... If you’re
carrying THAT shield, then... Whoa. This is big! You hiked all this way to meet
the best there ever was at shield surfing, right?”
Guess
that explained all the shields on her walls....
And oh dear I had a choice: “Yes!”
or “No.”
I kind of wanted to continue on
with my mad rush of a snow day, but.... well, I’d be nice to the lady. “Yes!” I
said.
“Knew it!” Selmie cheered, “Too bad
for you that I’m retired, huh? It’s been years since anyone knew me as the
Duchess of Downhill.”
Oh my gosh I breathed a BIG sigh of
relief. XD I don’t like damaging my shields, and hated to think I would be
roped into doing so!
“But if you don’t mind a few
pointers from a has-been, I’d be happy to critique your technique.”
And again: “Yes!” or “I’m fine.”
Hhhhuhhuhuhuhhhhmmmmm....
but I was sure I could find something....
in my inventory.... that I could throw away for this....
Hhhhh.
“Yes!” I said.
Selmie laughed. She was such a
cute, short-haired blond with cute clothes. Just comely.
“Such enthusiasm!” she said, “I
haven’t seen anyone with passion like that since...well, me!”
Hehhh....
|D I wondered what Siara would think of my being so codependent. Still.... what
was I really here for anyway?
A short while later I was hitting
the slopes for twenty rupees a pop, first the basic course and then the
advanced. As I’d never practiced very much, my time was pretty average, Selmie
said. But she encouraged me by noting that once I cleared the advanced course,
I could earn special shields for beating certain times.
“How’s that for incentive?” she
said.
Ooh
la la! 8D
Except, I was so full on shields
already that she couldn’t give me anything just at that time.
Ohh.
:c
I could have dropped a Lizalfos
shield; I had a million of those. But I didn’t feel like doing the whole slope
again just then.
But if I ever wanted neat new
shields in the future.... I definitely knew where to find them now!
I had been so distracted by
Selmie’s Spot that I hadn’t even locked down the shrine just next door, the Shada Naw Shrine. I completed it to
quiet the brreeping, and that was my
fifth shrine of the day.
After that I just kept on keepin’
on to the northwest, discovering one Goflam’s Secret Hot Spring. That was a
nice place to warm up my hearts.
Next in line was a shrine I had
already seen David get—well, I hadn’t actually SEEN him get it, but I sure
watched it drive him mad for hours and hours as he combed the northern faces of
the mountain range looking for it.
He had showed me on his map all the
places he had searched, and the shrine signals he had tracked (he had marked
them with stamps). But I had been more interested in the topography.... There
on the southern side of the
mountains, but still somewhat close to all the hot signals, there seemed to be
an overhang of some sort. It looked
quite massive....
But I said nothing.
I just watched until David noticed
the same thing.
It didn’t feel like a spoiler then.
It was another hidden cavern, and
it was kind of like the Kopeeki Drifts in that he’d had to roll a snowball down
a hill to smash the doors open. But once those doors had opened for him, I was
out! I didn’t want to see spoilers, and the interior of that place looked massive.
But now it was my turn to uncover
the same secret.
I hadn’t felt spoiled about
watching him roll the snowball either, for I had silently guessed how to do it before
he did! (And that before I’d even made it to Kopeeki Drifts!) You had to
Cryonis an icy little pond partway down the slope in order to bridge a certain
gap and let the snowball go over. And once it did.... smash! The two giant double-doors collapsed inward.
A vast, blue cavern lay within,
with what looked like.... roots, at
first glance. Pale roots arcing over the path as it bent around to the left.
But then I moved, and the parallax
set in. The pale protrusions were much farther away than I’d thought. But I
didn’t pay them too much heed; I had eyes only for the shrine I knew was here.
And I saw it.
But as I descended further and the
cavern widened and I began to take it all in, I could see the glowing orange
shrine, and I could see that it was set far down in the middle of the gigantic
space, and a bewilderment of dim colors slid over each other high in the gloom
as I moved and—AND A SKELETON??
It
had registered all at once, of a sudden.
OH MY GOSH THIS WAS THE HEBRA
LEVIATHAN??
David passed through the room at
that very moment and looked from my gaping mouth to the screen and back, and
laughed.
I
had found the third skeleton. Without
even knowing it.
Those long, bending, crooked pale
shapes.
I kept moving forward.
The jutting stalagmites around me
rightly crawled with iridescence.
The Hebra Great Skeleton. Oh my
gosh.
There was water here, too.... And it was temperate. It lapped along a hump of
blue-grey rock that led to the shrine like a path.
This was the To Quomo Shrine.
And that made.... six today, I thought.
It was a Blessing Shrine. I was
grateful for the Spirit Orb, but I was also keen to come back out and look
around!
I explored the Leviathan, chased a
Korok around on top of it. This one’s bones were different again. The skull
had.... an occipital protrusion, like a pterodactyl, and its snout was split, down the middle. It was in two
parts, all the way to the tips of the nose, which hooked slightly downward. The
bottom jaw was in two pieces as well, and those wide apart from each other. A
baleen feeder? It had very large eye sockets, and I could also see the
phalanges on this one. It seemed.... like a water creature. What on EARTH....
Then.... the Eldin Great Skeleton
had been a ground thing, Gerudo a flyer, and.... this one a water-dweller.
But how did it end up inside a mountain? Makes me think of.... Jabun.
Well.
I guess that’s why they call it the
Legend of Zelda.
So many elements all the same.
All different in every telling of
the tale.
And here was the water-whale god
inside the mountain.
Rest In Peace.
Was it.... getting foggy in
here....?
I moved on, and kept climbing.
And it wasn’t long before there
was.... another Shrine Signal?
I found it over the edge of and
down underneath the high, flat Biron
Snowshelf. The Mozo Shenno Shrine. Tricky one to get to.
It was a Major Test of Strength,
and so I went in with my Guardian Armor. I did well! Until I tried to backflip
away again, but evidently came up short as the Guardian cut me once with his
giant blade. After this we drew apart, and he did that spinny-laser in a wide
radius, casting up an updraft. But hot and mussed from the contact I equipped
my strongest Lynel bow (50 damage x3)
and nocked some hard specialty arrows.
“Don’t screw with me,” I growled, “I will wreck you.”
I killed him in the end. Hacked him
to bits just before his charging laser could fry my face off. And I got a core among the spoils!
That brought me to fifteen cores.
I could upgrade my Ancient Armor
set now, I thought. If I wanted.
But I kept trekking through the
mountains. More Koroks. Sherfin’s Secret Hot Spring. I wondered who all these
people were who had discovered all these hot springs, and why they were a
secret....
The Hia Miu Shrine.
I kept climbing about the north
faces, chasing lower altitudes and ledges that looked promising but led nowhere
until.... I’d finally had enough. Clinging low off my map, wary of the boundary
between solid ground and what the game would register as a bottomless fall, I
warped the nope out of there to Dueling Peaks. Wasn’t there a cave I’d seen around there once?
I checked.
There wasn’t.
The polygons.... they can trick
your eyes, when viewed from a great distance.
I was running out of juice, and for
some reason decided to just.... go home. I warped to the Shrine of
Resurrection.
“I went home,” I said to David.
And then David caught the affronted look on
my face as I saw.... there was a Korok waiting to be found in my bed-pod.
David laughed.
“GET OUT OF MY BED.” I say. D8<
I left the shrine and jogged down
the grassy slope to the Temple of Time, and the Goddess Statue.
But....
11 Spirit orbs.... Just one more....?
I would wait for 12, and pray for
three vessels at once.
I did nothing.
I warped to Tera.
But I did nothing.
I went to Pepp’s, and slept.
I was tired.
Been doing this icy mountain all
day on a day when it’s cold, cold, cold....
