Member
Izurich(Title pending...)
It was a good day to be in the newly “reformed” Mafia Town, which really just made it not too much unlike most others. Even considering past experiences, there was seldom a bad day to be had here (except that one time with the volcano incident). The sun was never not out (except at night… and when it rained…), the sea remained ever calm, and from virtually any point on the island, you could get a good view of it all. It didn’t hurt that the crime rate was surprisingly low for a lawless, overcrowded island town taken over by homogeneous Mafiosos that egregiously tolled and taxed its other citizens into social decline. Yet, there was something inexplicably comforting about this place; a sense of grounding serenity within the atmosphere… almost like one could call it... ‘home.’
“Oi, Kid!” Hat Kid’s head perked up at the call that broke the child from her tranquil daze brought on by her gazing at the horizon from the high set deck where she sat. Addressing her was her former friend, then nemesis, and now sort of friend again, Mustache Girl (speaking of people who call Mafia town home).
“What are you doing up here? Don’t you know there’s a celebration going on without you? You know, to commemorate the time when you ’saved the world’ and whatnot,” she said with no small hint of halfway dismissive envy in her tone “which is… kind of exactly what I was trying to do, buuut… I guess we all learned something that day. Besides, that’s all in the past, and things are… a little better now. Bygones, and all that. So, are you just going to sit here until the sun sets and miss your own party, or are you going to come join us already?! Now, come on! They’re about to take the picture, and we at least need you in that.” At the ex-villain’s prodding demand, Hat Kid gleefully hopped to from her seat and followed behind her to join the others.
The two children arrived at a scene in disarray. An ill-qualified Mafia goon was messing with the camera, attempting to operate it, while DJ Grooves was trying desperately to get everything organized.
“Set focus… aperture... shutter speed... F stop… white balance… remove lense cap…”
"What are you doing?! Don’t change any of the settings! I just got through adjusting everything on it! Oh, I swear, I am working with complete amateurs here,” Grooves remarked, putting a palm to his head and shaking it in exasperation.
“Heh…and I thought you’d be used to that by now, Grooves,” the Conductor scoffed mocked, too busy and exhausted with trying to corral his grandchildren to assist his rival at all with preparations, but momentarily sparing the effort and attention to wittily jab at him.
“You folks look like you could use some help there,” a helpful nearby Tourist chimed in. “Maybe I could help get you guys’ picture for ya…” he suggested.
“Hmm…” the Snatcher inspected the seemingly (but not so) random samaritan, all but pretending to evaluate him based perceived competence. “Sure! You’ll do. Anyone will, at this point,” he snarked, almost in a whisper. “We'll just need you to sign here so we may… er-herm… waive off any liabilities on our part.” A contract and a pen to sign it with manifested before him from nothing, and he acted to clear his throat as he attempted to deceptively coerce their new photographer into a shady, lopsided contract agreement. Force of habit one might say. Fortunately, Kid arrived shortly beforehand and gestured to the spectre’s would-be unsuspecting victim not to sign; that it would be bad for his health. She knew that all too well.
“Umm… that’s okay. You don’t have to pay me or hire me or anything. I figure I’d just do you folks a favor while I’m here, since it’s convenient, you know."
Grooves, the self-appointed event organizer, implicitly concurred with the Tourist's voluntary conscription, and then noticed Hat Kid sauntering up next to Snatched, who she had just denied a legal slave.
"OH, would you look at that! The star of the show has just arrived," he announced with seemingly genuine excitement. "You're just in time, Darling. We were all just getting into frame," he directed with no amount of subtlety at the other attendees. "Places, everybody!" The DJ commanded everyone to assemble, never never once ceasing his obnoxious idle dance while directing them. As they were all taking their positions, Bow Kid walked alongside Hat Kid, presenting her with a Time Piece--for display purposes--and underhand tossing it to her. The look of approval she returned said that it was a good call on her partner's part, and the two exchanged prideful, sidelong glances and a fist bump before taking their places.
"Alright. Everything looks good. If we could just have you move that way a little, and you guys go ahead and scotch in a bit…" It took a minute of fine adjustment for everyone to get huddled together in-frame, but once they were set, they needed only to wait for the beep… aaannd… PO-
"Oh, wait. Hang on a sec. Memory's full. Gotta swap the card out real quick." The Conductor and Walrus Captain (among a few lesser heard others) grumbled impatiently at the momentary setback, in their own ways, and for different reasons.
"Okay. All set.., for real this time. Smile, wait for the flash, everyone say-"
"JUST TAKE THE BLOODY PICTURE ALREADY!" The Conductor ordered, having lost just about the last of his patience, yet retaining just enough to exercise uncharacteristic restraint necessary to censor himself in front of his little clones by sparing their ears and minds the use of their granddad’s favorite word. With his workload--on his day off--his frustration was understandable. Hat Kid spent a day dealing with those kids herself once, so she could empathize. Of course, simply because they could, everyone selectively misinterpreted the coincidental timing of the outburst and treated it as the thing to say.
“JUST TAKE THE BLOODY PICTURE ALREADY,” everyone repeated in (mostly) joyful unison. Their anticipation was pent up, waiting to be released with the click of a button. A red beeping light on the lense blinked for three counts, aaannd… POSE!
Hat Kid recoiled from the camera flash, startled by what she saw within it: a split-second glimpse of the Lord of Light’s initial assault on existence itself. Strange that she would see this, having not been there to witness it in person, but just as strange was that no one else seemed to see it at all or even notice her reaction to it; they were completely oblivious. Clearly, it was just a hallucination, but why was she having it? It held no place in her memory, traumatic or otherwise, so how could she possibly be ‘remembering’ it now?
At any rate, she preferred not to dwell on it. She shook the thought from her head with a blink and hopped down from Mafia's shoulder to go get a look at the photo. Some of the group took turns passing the Tourist’s camera--who politely reminded them that he would need it back soon when they were done with it--and eventually it made its round to Hat Kid. The image was… she wouldn’t say ‘perfect’, but that’s not to say it wasn’t just right. Everyone in it looked genuinely happy to be there (as much as some of them could/would allow themselves to), in the company of friends, rivals, old enemies, frenemies, and everything in-between. As luck would have it, the snapshot caught her just before she flinched. Indeed, the moment couldn’t have been captured better, but the moments that followed…
Just when she was all but free of her thoughts about the vision she had, she received a terribly vivid reminder of what it represented.
“Huh… what’s this?” Heads a few turned in the goon’s direction at the inquiry. “Why does Mafia glow?” He referred, of course, to the golden phosphorescence that began to spread over his entire form. He watched the prismatic embers drift from his skin and clothing alike as the luminous essence slowly burned at him until no space on him was left uncovered by it. Before he could even register what was happening to him, the pace of his demise was abruptly hastened when an invisible wind violently swept him away, reducing him to a silhouette in a stream of photonic dust, followed by nothing.
"Uh-oh. That can't be good," the cameraman commented before realizing that it was happening to him as well. "Oh…" was all he could get out before disintegrating in identical fashion. Snatched looked over himself to see the very same, and at a loss for words, he simply frowned in disbelief as he, too, vanished. Minus the weaponized lightstreams from before, when all worlds came to an end, the effects were mimicked almost exactly. Hat Kid's eyes went wide from the shock of realization of what was going on: the calamitous events of omniversal doomsday were repeating themselves.
She loosened her grip on the Camera she was holding, letting it drop and break against the ground as she turned to face the rest. The child hesitated to run to their aid in stunned denial of her instincts, knowingly powerless to do anything but watch them all vaporize in succession. The Goat; the Seals; the Crows; the Captain; the lone Owl; the Mafia Boss (dropped by the Owl); Rumbi; before she knew it, all of them were gone.
"Oh… darling…" was all DJ Grooves could weakly utter as his dying words, feeling himself perish. The Conductor back away fearfully, unsure of what to do other than clutch his grandchildren tightly, hoping to provide and retain some false sense of security.
“Wait… no!” He started, realizing that whatever unseen omnipotent force was at work was about to rip his grandkids away from him. “No, no, no… NO!” Sure enough, like everyone before, they were callously swept from his grasp, leaving him to fall to his knees with now empty arms reaching desperately to the wind. “Not my… my…” His voice trembled ever so slightly, conveying what his lack of visible eyes could not express. He wouldn’t be left alone with his grief for long before being taken by the light shortly after.
“W-what’s happening?!” Hat Kid turned to face Mustache Girl. “What’s happening to me?!” The typically spunky delinquent looked from the creeping glow enveloping her to her former nemesis for some kind of solution or answer, undeniably afraid of her imminent fate. “Please, do something. Make it stop! Please...” she pleaded, all but limply throwing herself at Hat Kid and clinging to her by the collar. “Please, don’t let it take me! I don’t want this!” By this point, she was almost on the verge of tears, sensing the life fading from her. “I don’t want to-” She wouldn’t have a choice. She belonged to the light now, and her ex partner in crime couldn’t save her from it.
Hat Kid looked on in horror as everyone she knew was erased before her eyes… all but one. She redirected her attention to Bow Kid, who’s eyes hung half open with the bearing of one mortally wounded. She held one hand against the spreading bright spot from her heart and reached the other out to her friend, who for the first time since the start of the event broke herself of her traumatized stupor and rushed to help her. All the same, her very being was extinguished before they could make contact. Hat Kid fell forward through the dissipating mass of her partner, coming within three times arm’s reach of the Time Piece she was holding earlier.
She tripped and stumbled over her own feet in a hurried scramble to retrieve the temporal relic and using its power to undo the apocalypse. All she had to do, she thought, was revert time to the moments before it started, doing so as many times as needed until she could find a solution. As she quickly discovered, she would never get the chance to try even once. Her hopes fell in sync with loose shards from the broken hourglass, empty of the quasi-magical sands that fueled it, as she lifted it from the pavement. Truly, just as before, there was no way out of this, and she was given no other option but to try as she could--to no avail--to accept that in her last moments.
It was around this time that she noticed what she previously mistook for the sun swelling with such radiance that it darkened the surrounding sky and everything under it by sheer contrast. From the celestial body solid streams of light finally began to shoot fire, snaking their way around the lonesome child to rapidly erode the island around her. From her perspective, she would appear to be the last thing in the world to go, and she stared unflinchingly into the all-consuming flare that closed in on her...
Hat Kid shot awake with a startled gasp, picking her head up off the desk to find herself in the sanctuary of her ‘secret’ pillow fort. She must have nodded off while writing about her progress on her adventure to defeating Galeem, which would explain the stressful dream. She assumed that’s what was entered in her diary anyway, for she couldn’t actually make out the words or comprehend the writings, even after rubbing the sleep from her eyes. She chalked her momentary illiteracy up to a simple case of sleep deprivation and concluded that she just needed more of it, so she placed the quill that was still in her hand back in its inkwell and crawled up through the pooled heap of pillows that buried her hideout.
She emerged bleary-eyed from the cushion pile with intentions of heading straight for bed, but on approach, she noticed a Time Piece sitting on the nightstand in front of the mirror instead of locked away in the vault, where she normally would have put it. As she went to lift the Piece from the table, she happened upon another curious finding: a photograph beneath the hourglass’s base. She picked up both and inspected the photo, recognizing it as the same one taken in her dream, but with some eerily morbid distinctions. The faces of everyone in it were crossed out in red, save for her own, which bore a more dead-eyed smile than she remembered. To add, the image was tinted in sepia tone for whatever reason, and even in the absence of color, should could tell hers weren’t quite right. When she focused on it more closely, she saw her face in the picture slowly animate, her pupils constricting and smile contorting into more of a wicked Cheshire grin, the pictured version of her directing its sinister gaze through the picture at the real her.
Unsure if what she was seeing was true, she blinked and shook her head in confusion only to reopen her eyes and find that it was back to normal; back to the way she remembered it being. She knew for sure now that her tired brain was playing tricks on her, and she didn’t need to stay up for another minute longer. Though, she allowed herself a moment to warmly reminisce on the memory she had in her hand--one that encapsulated so many others--before placing it in the frame of the mirror and making a trip to the vault to lock up the Time Piece… the one that she was no longer holding.
She looked at her hand that previously held the Piece not but a few seconds ago in surprise to find it mysteriously empty. She scanned the lower space around her to see if she had dropped or set it down somewhere without thinking, then panned her vision back up to face the mirror. In it, she saw not her own reflection, but that of a citrus-clad doppelganger holding the very same Time Piece she had just misplaced. Her mirror self stared back with eyes that didn’t feel and an almost blank smile that projected no semblance of sincere happiness. The real child had but a full second to register what she was seeing as her clone unfeelingly smashed the hourglass with both hands, not once shifting her expression or breaking eye contact while doing so. Spatial-temporal energy explosively poured out in the form of stardust, washing over everything in a burst of blinding white...
(Cue Theme)
The next thing she knew, Hat Kid descended onto a still platform suspended in an endless sea of weightless, breathable water with an equally expansive towering city skyline resting at its unseen floor. Laid out ahead of her was a series of structured platforms--some moving, others not--pristine in solid white textured with seemingly random arrangements of nondescript blue gem-like material. Her surroundings were unmistakable; she was in a time rift. Her only questions were ‘why’, ‘how’, and a touch of ‘what’. Why would a rift open itself from a Piece she already recovered to make her go through the extra trouble, how did it do that on its own to begin with, and what caused it to happen? None of it made any sense to her, but it didn’t matter now. From where she stood, she could see the Time Piece in question rested above a lone platform on the other end of the obstacle course. All she had to do was go get it back.
Sliding platforms, elevating inclines, spinning bridges, a few rotating prisms, revolving stairways, rising side by side walls to jump between, the obstacles and layout appeared to be mostly standard fair. Curiously, however, there were no discernable checkpoints to be found along the way, and the child would soon find out why. The stage boasted a tricky, unconventional, and potentially problematic gimmick: platforms in motion would randomly hasten, slow down, or altogether cease while she stood on them, and those at rest would begin to move. The speed at which any of the aforementioned occurred was a variable one to say the least, ranging anywhere from glacial to disorienting. What’s more was that once she left a platform to progress, it would be stripped of its axis to drift aimlessly away from the course, gradually shortening itself the farther she went.
Some time after crossing the halfway point, the structures ahead of her started to behave similarly, losing their anchoring gravity float precariously about like they were in space. With the environment clearly working against her, Hat Kid got into gear to traverse what was left of the course as it slowly came apart, and decided at one point to use the physics anomaly to her advantage. After jumping across a short subseries of rising geometry, she bounded for a moderately small cubic platform, booted the buoyant shape just hard enough to get it going, catching a handhold on one the the rectangular sapphire-like protrusions on the rotation, and timed her release to send herself sailing over what little remained of her obstacles. She landed seamlessly into a downward slide on a loose slope, vaulting from the ledge down to the home stretch, and slowing her fall to a crawl with her umbrella a couple dozen yards above the last unmoving foothold before her goal.
While she looked down at her landing zone, the child suddenly felt herself re-accelerate and plummet to the platform for a hard, unsteady landing. When she regained herself, she glanced back up to see the integral half of her parasol, disconnected from the shaft by the runner, sailing irrecoverably to the ocean’s surface. She put away what was left of her (usually) trusty multitool after a cursory inspection to redirect her attention toward her goal, which, going by her recollection, now sat farther away from the platform where she currently stood than when she first observed it at the start. It didn’t take her long to piece together the nature of the phenomenon. This was no optical illusion at work; it was actively moving farther away from her the more she progressed.
With a quick calculation in her head, she deduced that it could have moved at no greater than an estimated fifty percent of her progression rate, with a margin of error no greater than five percent. None of it really mattered though, in the face of the obvious. The flat bridge beneath her feet tapered to a narrow end in a shape resembling something between an aircraft carrier runway and a diving board, aimed in the direction of where the Time Piece rested some ways below at an obtuse angle. It became clear that the challenge was designed to be (or at least appear) functionally impossible, to see her fail or give up, but she hadn’t the slightest intention of doing either. There was always a way, and sometimes it was as simple as going against the grain and just going for it… not that she was left with much else in the way of options.
She backed up to the back ledge of the platform to give herself room for a running start, taking off in a hard sprint, into a dive, then a boosted somersault, and finally a propulsive, springing kick to the edge at the farthest end in a daring leap over the indisputably longest gap she’s ever attempted to clear. Kid could hear and feel false winds of freefall rushed past her ears in her dive, and even still, she could tell that the goal platform was inching away from her the closer she came. She reached out for the ledge, knowing that catching it would be the only chance she had of succeeding, but would ultimately end up missing it by her fingerprints. Time all but stopped for a brief, imperceptible moment as the realization set in for her that she had failed, and there would be no way back from this.
Hat Kid felt her arm nearly jerk out of socket from the sudden halt of her rapid descent. She looked up to the source of stoppage to find, of all people Linkle, reaching a hand reaching down for the child, holding her by the wrist.
“Nice jump,” she complimented. ”You almost had it.” Kid offered a soft, relieved smile to the Hylian as she moved to pull herself up to safety. Indeed, she almost made it, which made her glad for once to have someone around to make up for the difference, but this begged the question, how did SHE make it? Hat Kid didn’t see her there when she took the jump, nor did she see her at any point during the trial. The fact that anyone else was here, besides her, was strange enough as is, so how was it the green-clad heroine was here to meet her at the fiish line?
These thoughts rapidly raced through her head as she grabbed a hold of the ranger’s arm with her other hand. Too late did the realization hit her… she wasn’t. She wasn’t there. She would receive no aid from her this time, and the projected assurance of the contrary was nothing more than the Rift’s last taunt. The second she found this out, the friendly mirage that represented Linkle dissipated into a grey, murky cloud, like a fistful of silt washing away in a stream.
The helping hand extended to her crumbled in the child’s grip, severing her hold on solid ground and leaving her to fall helplessly into the bottomless blue. Though, her descent was more gradual than what gravity would naturally allow for. It was more akin to falling from orbit, a sensation she was keenly familiar with, and it occurred to her shortly that she wasn’t falling at all; she was sinking, feeling the waters of this dimension for the first time. Sadly, it changed nothing about her predicament, for they were no more physically substantial than would be empty air, and she could not swim them, try as she might. After exercising the briefest moment of futile struggle to find that out, she ceased and resigned herself to her fate. She spent what she expected would be her last conscious moments staring at the heavens, looking at the lone foothold and beyond it to the rays of light beaming through the ocean’s surface that acted as this dream world’s ceiling. She was given ample opportunity to see this, knowing that it would be for the last time, as the blackness of the depth soon deprived her of her senses, bringing her ever downward…
(Fade Theme)
(To be continued; due for completion...)
(Current) Word Count: 4121
It was a good day to be in the newly “reformed” Mafia Town, which really just made it not too much unlike most others. Even considering past experiences, there was seldom a bad day to be had here (except that one time with the volcano incident). The sun was never not out (except at night… and when it rained…), the sea remained ever calm, and from virtually any point on the island, you could get a good view of it all. It didn’t hurt that the crime rate was surprisingly low for a lawless, overcrowded island town taken over by homogeneous Mafiosos that egregiously tolled and taxed its other citizens into social decline. Yet, there was something inexplicably comforting about this place; a sense of grounding serenity within the atmosphere… almost like one could call it... ‘home.’
“Oi, Kid!” Hat Kid’s head perked up at the call that broke the child from her tranquil daze brought on by her gazing at the horizon from the high set deck where she sat. Addressing her was her former friend, then nemesis, and now sort of friend again, Mustache Girl (speaking of people who call Mafia town home).
“What are you doing up here? Don’t you know there’s a celebration going on without you? You know, to commemorate the time when you ’saved the world’ and whatnot,” she said with no small hint of halfway dismissive envy in her tone “which is… kind of exactly what I was trying to do, buuut… I guess we all learned something that day. Besides, that’s all in the past, and things are… a little better now. Bygones, and all that. So, are you just going to sit here until the sun sets and miss your own party, or are you going to come join us already?! Now, come on! They’re about to take the picture, and we at least need you in that.” At the ex-villain’s prodding demand, Hat Kid gleefully hopped to from her seat and followed behind her to join the others.
The two children arrived at a scene in disarray. An ill-qualified Mafia goon was messing with the camera, attempting to operate it, while DJ Grooves was trying desperately to get everything organized.
“Set focus… aperture... shutter speed... F stop… white balance… remove lense cap…”
"What are you doing?! Don’t change any of the settings! I just got through adjusting everything on it! Oh, I swear, I am working with complete amateurs here,” Grooves remarked, putting a palm to his head and shaking it in exasperation.
“Heh…and I thought you’d be used to that by now, Grooves,” the Conductor scoffed mocked, too busy and exhausted with trying to corral his grandchildren to assist his rival at all with preparations, but momentarily sparing the effort and attention to wittily jab at him.
“You folks look like you could use some help there,” a helpful nearby Tourist chimed in. “Maybe I could help get you guys’ picture for ya…” he suggested.
“Hmm…” the Snatcher inspected the seemingly (but not so) random samaritan, all but pretending to evaluate him based perceived competence. “Sure! You’ll do. Anyone will, at this point,” he snarked, almost in a whisper. “We'll just need you to sign here so we may… er-herm… waive off any liabilities on our part.” A contract and a pen to sign it with manifested before him from nothing, and he acted to clear his throat as he attempted to deceptively coerce their new photographer into a shady, lopsided contract agreement. Force of habit one might say. Fortunately, Kid arrived shortly beforehand and gestured to the spectre’s would-be unsuspecting victim not to sign; that it would be bad for his health. She knew that all too well.
“Umm… that’s okay. You don’t have to pay me or hire me or anything. I figure I’d just do you folks a favor while I’m here, since it’s convenient, you know."
Grooves, the self-appointed event organizer, implicitly concurred with the Tourist's voluntary conscription, and then noticed Hat Kid sauntering up next to Snatched, who she had just denied a legal slave.
"OH, would you look at that! The star of the show has just arrived," he announced with seemingly genuine excitement. "You're just in time, Darling. We were all just getting into frame," he directed with no amount of subtlety at the other attendees. "Places, everybody!" The DJ commanded everyone to assemble, never never once ceasing his obnoxious idle dance while directing them. As they were all taking their positions, Bow Kid walked alongside Hat Kid, presenting her with a Time Piece--for display purposes--and underhand tossing it to her. The look of approval she returned said that it was a good call on her partner's part, and the two exchanged prideful, sidelong glances and a fist bump before taking their places.
"Alright. Everything looks good. If we could just have you move that way a little, and you guys go ahead and scotch in a bit…" It took a minute of fine adjustment for everyone to get huddled together in-frame, but once they were set, they needed only to wait for the beep… aaannd… PO-
"Oh, wait. Hang on a sec. Memory's full. Gotta swap the card out real quick." The Conductor and Walrus Captain (among a few lesser heard others) grumbled impatiently at the momentary setback, in their own ways, and for different reasons.
"Okay. All set.., for real this time. Smile, wait for the flash, everyone say-"
"JUST TAKE THE BLOODY PICTURE ALREADY!" The Conductor ordered, having lost just about the last of his patience, yet retaining just enough to exercise uncharacteristic restraint necessary to censor himself in front of his little clones by sparing their ears and minds the use of their granddad’s favorite word. With his workload--on his day off--his frustration was understandable. Hat Kid spent a day dealing with those kids herself once, so she could empathize. Of course, simply because they could, everyone selectively misinterpreted the coincidental timing of the outburst and treated it as the thing to say.
“JUST TAKE THE BLOODY PICTURE ALREADY,” everyone repeated in (mostly) joyful unison. Their anticipation was pent up, waiting to be released with the click of a button. A red beeping light on the lense blinked for three counts, aaannd… POSE!
Hat Kid recoiled from the camera flash, startled by what she saw within it: a split-second glimpse of the Lord of Light’s initial assault on existence itself. Strange that she would see this, having not been there to witness it in person, but just as strange was that no one else seemed to see it at all or even notice her reaction to it; they were completely oblivious. Clearly, it was just a hallucination, but why was she having it? It held no place in her memory, traumatic or otherwise, so how could she possibly be ‘remembering’ it now?
At any rate, she preferred not to dwell on it. She shook the thought from her head with a blink and hopped down from Mafia's shoulder to go get a look at the photo. Some of the group took turns passing the Tourist’s camera--who politely reminded them that he would need it back soon when they were done with it--and eventually it made its round to Hat Kid. The image was… she wouldn’t say ‘perfect’, but that’s not to say it wasn’t just right. Everyone in it looked genuinely happy to be there (as much as some of them could/would allow themselves to), in the company of friends, rivals, old enemies, frenemies, and everything in-between. As luck would have it, the snapshot caught her just before she flinched. Indeed, the moment couldn’t have been captured better, but the moments that followed…
Just when she was all but free of her thoughts about the vision she had, she received a terribly vivid reminder of what it represented.
“Huh… what’s this?” Heads a few turned in the goon’s direction at the inquiry. “Why does Mafia glow?” He referred, of course, to the golden phosphorescence that began to spread over his entire form. He watched the prismatic embers drift from his skin and clothing alike as the luminous essence slowly burned at him until no space on him was left uncovered by it. Before he could even register what was happening to him, the pace of his demise was abruptly hastened when an invisible wind violently swept him away, reducing him to a silhouette in a stream of photonic dust, followed by nothing.
"Uh-oh. That can't be good," the cameraman commented before realizing that it was happening to him as well. "Oh…" was all he could get out before disintegrating in identical fashion. Snatched looked over himself to see the very same, and at a loss for words, he simply frowned in disbelief as he, too, vanished. Minus the weaponized lightstreams from before, when all worlds came to an end, the effects were mimicked almost exactly. Hat Kid's eyes went wide from the shock of realization of what was going on: the calamitous events of omniversal doomsday were repeating themselves.
She loosened her grip on the Camera she was holding, letting it drop and break against the ground as she turned to face the rest. The child hesitated to run to their aid in stunned denial of her instincts, knowingly powerless to do anything but watch them all vaporize in succession. The Goat; the Seals; the Crows; the Captain; the lone Owl; the Mafia Boss (dropped by the Owl); Rumbi; before she knew it, all of them were gone.
"Oh… darling…" was all DJ Grooves could weakly utter as his dying words, feeling himself perish. The Conductor back away fearfully, unsure of what to do other than clutch his grandchildren tightly, hoping to provide and retain some false sense of security.
“Wait… no!” He started, realizing that whatever unseen omnipotent force was at work was about to rip his grandkids away from him. “No, no, no… NO!” Sure enough, like everyone before, they were callously swept from his grasp, leaving him to fall to his knees with now empty arms reaching desperately to the wind. “Not my… my…” His voice trembled ever so slightly, conveying what his lack of visible eyes could not express. He wouldn’t be left alone with his grief for long before being taken by the light shortly after.
“W-what’s happening?!” Hat Kid turned to face Mustache Girl. “What’s happening to me?!” The typically spunky delinquent looked from the creeping glow enveloping her to her former nemesis for some kind of solution or answer, undeniably afraid of her imminent fate. “Please, do something. Make it stop! Please...” she pleaded, all but limply throwing herself at Hat Kid and clinging to her by the collar. “Please, don’t let it take me! I don’t want this!” By this point, she was almost on the verge of tears, sensing the life fading from her. “I don’t want to-” She wouldn’t have a choice. She belonged to the light now, and her ex partner in crime couldn’t save her from it.
Hat Kid looked on in horror as everyone she knew was erased before her eyes… all but one. She redirected her attention to Bow Kid, who’s eyes hung half open with the bearing of one mortally wounded. She held one hand against the spreading bright spot from her heart and reached the other out to her friend, who for the first time since the start of the event broke herself of her traumatized stupor and rushed to help her. All the same, her very being was extinguished before they could make contact. Hat Kid fell forward through the dissipating mass of her partner, coming within three times arm’s reach of the Time Piece she was holding earlier.
She tripped and stumbled over her own feet in a hurried scramble to retrieve the temporal relic and using its power to undo the apocalypse. All she had to do, she thought, was revert time to the moments before it started, doing so as many times as needed until she could find a solution. As she quickly discovered, she would never get the chance to try even once. Her hopes fell in sync with loose shards from the broken hourglass, empty of the quasi-magical sands that fueled it, as she lifted it from the pavement. Truly, just as before, there was no way out of this, and she was given no other option but to try as she could--to no avail--to accept that in her last moments.
It was around this time that she noticed what she previously mistook for the sun swelling with such radiance that it darkened the surrounding sky and everything under it by sheer contrast. From the celestial body solid streams of light finally began to shoot fire, snaking their way around the lonesome child to rapidly erode the island around her. From her perspective, she would appear to be the last thing in the world to go, and she stared unflinchingly into the all-consuming flare that closed in on her...
Hat Kid shot awake with a startled gasp, picking her head up off the desk to find herself in the sanctuary of her ‘secret’ pillow fort. She must have nodded off while writing about her progress on her adventure to defeating Galeem, which would explain the stressful dream. She assumed that’s what was entered in her diary anyway, for she couldn’t actually make out the words or comprehend the writings, even after rubbing the sleep from her eyes. She chalked her momentary illiteracy up to a simple case of sleep deprivation and concluded that she just needed more of it, so she placed the quill that was still in her hand back in its inkwell and crawled up through the pooled heap of pillows that buried her hideout.
She emerged bleary-eyed from the cushion pile with intentions of heading straight for bed, but on approach, she noticed a Time Piece sitting on the nightstand in front of the mirror instead of locked away in the vault, where she normally would have put it. As she went to lift the Piece from the table, she happened upon another curious finding: a photograph beneath the hourglass’s base. She picked up both and inspected the photo, recognizing it as the same one taken in her dream, but with some eerily morbid distinctions. The faces of everyone in it were crossed out in red, save for her own, which bore a more dead-eyed smile than she remembered. To add, the image was tinted in sepia tone for whatever reason, and even in the absence of color, should could tell hers weren’t quite right. When she focused on it more closely, she saw her face in the picture slowly animate, her pupils constricting and smile contorting into more of a wicked Cheshire grin, the pictured version of her directing its sinister gaze through the picture at the real her.
Unsure if what she was seeing was true, she blinked and shook her head in confusion only to reopen her eyes and find that it was back to normal; back to the way she remembered it being. She knew for sure now that her tired brain was playing tricks on her, and she didn’t need to stay up for another minute longer. Though, she allowed herself a moment to warmly reminisce on the memory she had in her hand--one that encapsulated so many others--before placing it in the frame of the mirror and making a trip to the vault to lock up the Time Piece… the one that she was no longer holding.
She looked at her hand that previously held the Piece not but a few seconds ago in surprise to find it mysteriously empty. She scanned the lower space around her to see if she had dropped or set it down somewhere without thinking, then panned her vision back up to face the mirror. In it, she saw not her own reflection, but that of a citrus-clad doppelganger holding the very same Time Piece she had just misplaced. Her mirror self stared back with eyes that didn’t feel and an almost blank smile that projected no semblance of sincere happiness. The real child had but a full second to register what she was seeing as her clone unfeelingly smashed the hourglass with both hands, not once shifting her expression or breaking eye contact while doing so. Spatial-temporal energy explosively poured out in the form of stardust, washing over everything in a burst of blinding white...
(Cue Theme)
The next thing she knew, Hat Kid descended onto a still platform suspended in an endless sea of weightless, breathable water with an equally expansive towering city skyline resting at its unseen floor. Laid out ahead of her was a series of structured platforms--some moving, others not--pristine in solid white textured with seemingly random arrangements of nondescript blue gem-like material. Her surroundings were unmistakable; she was in a time rift. Her only questions were ‘why’, ‘how’, and a touch of ‘what’. Why would a rift open itself from a Piece she already recovered to make her go through the extra trouble, how did it do that on its own to begin with, and what caused it to happen? None of it made any sense to her, but it didn’t matter now. From where she stood, she could see the Time Piece in question rested above a lone platform on the other end of the obstacle course. All she had to do was go get it back.
Sliding platforms, elevating inclines, spinning bridges, a few rotating prisms, revolving stairways, rising side by side walls to jump between, the obstacles and layout appeared to be mostly standard fair. Curiously, however, there were no discernable checkpoints to be found along the way, and the child would soon find out why. The stage boasted a tricky, unconventional, and potentially problematic gimmick: platforms in motion would randomly hasten, slow down, or altogether cease while she stood on them, and those at rest would begin to move. The speed at which any of the aforementioned occurred was a variable one to say the least, ranging anywhere from glacial to disorienting. What’s more was that once she left a platform to progress, it would be stripped of its axis to drift aimlessly away from the course, gradually shortening itself the farther she went.
Some time after crossing the halfway point, the structures ahead of her started to behave similarly, losing their anchoring gravity float precariously about like they were in space. With the environment clearly working against her, Hat Kid got into gear to traverse what was left of the course as it slowly came apart, and decided at one point to use the physics anomaly to her advantage. After jumping across a short subseries of rising geometry, she bounded for a moderately small cubic platform, booted the buoyant shape just hard enough to get it going, catching a handhold on one the the rectangular sapphire-like protrusions on the rotation, and timed her release to send herself sailing over what little remained of her obstacles. She landed seamlessly into a downward slide on a loose slope, vaulting from the ledge down to the home stretch, and slowing her fall to a crawl with her umbrella a couple dozen yards above the last unmoving foothold before her goal.
While she looked down at her landing zone, the child suddenly felt herself re-accelerate and plummet to the platform for a hard, unsteady landing. When she regained herself, she glanced back up to see the integral half of her parasol, disconnected from the shaft by the runner, sailing irrecoverably to the ocean’s surface. She put away what was left of her (usually) trusty multitool after a cursory inspection to redirect her attention toward her goal, which, going by her recollection, now sat farther away from the platform where she currently stood than when she first observed it at the start. It didn’t take her long to piece together the nature of the phenomenon. This was no optical illusion at work; it was actively moving farther away from her the more she progressed.
With a quick calculation in her head, she deduced that it could have moved at no greater than an estimated fifty percent of her progression rate, with a margin of error no greater than five percent. None of it really mattered though, in the face of the obvious. The flat bridge beneath her feet tapered to a narrow end in a shape resembling something between an aircraft carrier runway and a diving board, aimed in the direction of where the Time Piece rested some ways below at an obtuse angle. It became clear that the challenge was designed to be (or at least appear) functionally impossible, to see her fail or give up, but she hadn’t the slightest intention of doing either. There was always a way, and sometimes it was as simple as going against the grain and just going for it… not that she was left with much else in the way of options.
She backed up to the back ledge of the platform to give herself room for a running start, taking off in a hard sprint, into a dive, then a boosted somersault, and finally a propulsive, springing kick to the edge at the farthest end in a daring leap over the indisputably longest gap she’s ever attempted to clear. Kid could hear and feel false winds of freefall rushed past her ears in her dive, and even still, she could tell that the goal platform was inching away from her the closer she came. She reached out for the ledge, knowing that catching it would be the only chance she had of succeeding, but would ultimately end up missing it by her fingerprints. Time all but stopped for a brief, imperceptible moment as the realization set in for her that she had failed, and there would be no way back from this.
Hat Kid felt her arm nearly jerk out of socket from the sudden halt of her rapid descent. She looked up to the source of stoppage to find, of all people Linkle, reaching a hand reaching down for the child, holding her by the wrist.
“Nice jump,” she complimented. ”You almost had it.” Kid offered a soft, relieved smile to the Hylian as she moved to pull herself up to safety. Indeed, she almost made it, which made her glad for once to have someone around to make up for the difference, but this begged the question, how did SHE make it? Hat Kid didn’t see her there when she took the jump, nor did she see her at any point during the trial. The fact that anyone else was here, besides her, was strange enough as is, so how was it the green-clad heroine was here to meet her at the fiish line?
These thoughts rapidly raced through her head as she grabbed a hold of the ranger’s arm with her other hand. Too late did the realization hit her… she wasn’t. She wasn’t there. She would receive no aid from her this time, and the projected assurance of the contrary was nothing more than the Rift’s last taunt. The second she found this out, the friendly mirage that represented Linkle dissipated into a grey, murky cloud, like a fistful of silt washing away in a stream.
The helping hand extended to her crumbled in the child’s grip, severing her hold on solid ground and leaving her to fall helplessly into the bottomless blue. Though, her descent was more gradual than what gravity would naturally allow for. It was more akin to falling from orbit, a sensation she was keenly familiar with, and it occurred to her shortly that she wasn’t falling at all; she was sinking, feeling the waters of this dimension for the first time. Sadly, it changed nothing about her predicament, for they were no more physically substantial than would be empty air, and she could not swim them, try as she might. After exercising the briefest moment of futile struggle to find that out, she ceased and resigned herself to her fate. She spent what she expected would be her last conscious moments staring at the heavens, looking at the lone foothold and beyond it to the rays of light beaming through the ocean’s surface that acted as this dream world’s ceiling. She was given ample opportunity to see this, knowing that it would be for the last time, as the blackness of the depth soon deprived her of her senses, bringing her ever downward…
(Fade Theme)
(To be continued; due for completion...)
(Current) Word Count: 4121
