revivalproject | [Calibrations] It's dangerous to go alone, take this

Entry tags:

[Calibrations] It's dangerous to go alone, take this

WHO: Link and you!
WHERE: Link's Calibration room
WHAT: Calibrations
WHEN: June 10th to July 10th
WARNINGS: CW for death in the pool memory

On first appearances, Link's room is the inside of cosy little cottage.

There's rustic wooden furniture - that will appear to many as old fashioned - and Link is humming away as he cooks something at the small corner that serves as the kitchen. Propped up on the wall next to Link and the kitchen is the Sword the Seals the Darkness, a blade that many will recognise as the one that has been a constant presence on Link's back.

Draped over the back of one of the dining table chairs is the Champion's tunic, a distinctive blue garment. Sitting on that same chair, hidden partially by the fabric of the tunic, is the Sheikah Slate, a rectangular device that's sitting on one of the chairs. Atop the table itself sits the Thunder Helm.

In one corner, there's a small bookcase. On the shelves are a few assorted objects: a massively large scale, and a whistle.

There is, however, something odd that happens in this room. Sometimes, if you tilt your head at just the right angle or look out of the corner of your eye, the appears of it shifts - like a lenticular image. The cottage will be gone, and Link won't be humming away at the kitchen anymore. Instead, it will be a mysterious underground space, lit by soft blue glowing lights and faint orange constellations on the walls.

In the middle of this space is a small pool, or perhaps a kind of tub. It's filled with a bright blue water - and inside, as well, is Link. He's completely under the surface, dressed only in a pair of boxers, eyes closed. He's not moving.

To one side of the chamber, a picture hands on the wall.

On the other side, a pedestal - out of which grows a single silent princess flower.

And if, while within the mysterious underground space, if you tilt your head and gaze in just the right way again, there will be another shift. This time, it's strange in a different way. Large sections of the space seem to be just...gone, leaving behind only a blank white nothingness. In between those blank spaces are what is perhaps stone walls, something that might - maybe? - look like a room in a castle. But the details that do exist are so fuzzy and indistinct, it's hard to really tell.

There are a few pictures on the walls. But they feature only people with blank, featureless faces.

No matter what you touch, or interact with, there are no memories to be found here. And Link isn't anywhere to be seen at all. From this place, he is absent.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

A pound of flesh is apparently not enough. Dustin stalks his way around the edge of the cavern with increasing levels of agitation, inspecting the glowing constellations, running his hands along suspicious-looking divots in the rock in case they might reveal a hidden passage - nothing.

It's only in those moments that he twists around in frustration after yet another failed attempt at finding a clue that he sees the flickers of yet another space. Or rather, two spaces. One of them is the now familiar cottage, and while an obstinate, self-indulgent part of Dustin wants to focus on it and just quietly eat that delicious-smelling dinner until he wakes up, a larger part of him feels like that would be admitting defeat somehow. He is a sucker for forward progress, which is what finding an unexplored region of the dream seems like to him.

That's why, in spite of its apparent blandness, Dustin ends up narrowing in on the flashes of stark white that pop into the edge of his vision.

Dustin will find himself in a space that looks...incomplete.

Once, perhaps, it might have been a room in a castle. Stone walls. A window. But it's a bit hard to tell, because so much of the space is gone. All throughout the space are chunks of white void, spaces of nothingness.

Even the few pictures still visible on the walls feature only blank, featureless faces.

It's a space in which every possible identifier is simply...missing.

...This does not feel like forward progress.

Dustin spends some time just wandering around the room, drinking in the sheer weirdness of it. Different than suddenly finding himself in a cozy cottage, or a glowing underground cave with a guy in stasis sitting in the middle of it, this feels uniquely unpleasant - like he shouldn't be here. Not yet, anyway. It's like an unfinished level in a video game, or the glitched space behind a wall. Usually there isn't anything to find in spaces like that; they're found and explored for curiosity's sake, and nothing more.

So why does Link have something like that in a dream?

Dustin needs answers. After a few minutes of internal debate and feeling viscerally uncomfortable with himself about it, he resolves to try and get an answer from touching one of the pictures on a half-realized wall. The fact that none of the people in them have faces is a particularly unsettling fact that Dustin is desperately trying not to think about.

Nothing.

Dustin's fingers brush the picture, and absolutely nothing happens. No memory begins to play. It seems like there should be something here.

But there isn't. There's just the void.

It takes a few more increasingly harried attempts at grabbing things and expecting something to happen for Dustin to finally put the pieces together. There should be something here, but there isn't; he's been seeing memories before, in the completed spaces, and now they simply aren't here. Dustin is oddly familiar with the feeling, though he can't quite place how.

For the time being, Dustin resigns himself to the fact that there simply isn't anything here to find. Maybe he can find somewhere else to be? That seems to be the theme of the dream, anyway. In an attempt that might have looked a little ridiculous if anyone else was in this space to watch him, Dustin slowly twists and pivots his head to see if more spaces reveal themselves to him out of the corner of his eye.

Edited (the thread continues!!) 2023-08-07 14:18 (UTC)

There are no new spaces to be discovered. But Dustin will find that he is soon returned to the Shrine room.

Once there, Dustin could remain and investigate this space further. Though the only object of note remaining is the blue flower growing out of the side of the pool.

Or perhaps Dustin could try to repeat the experiment - and return to the cottage.

Well, good to know that this also works in reverse. Dustin doesn't spend much time in the Shrine room; oddly, he's actually looking forward to Link's dream company more than being alone in some strange space he can't escape from (except to other, equally strange and empty places - those don't count). Everything else feels too alien, too personal. If this is truly a shared dream of some sort, and these are Link's actual memories, what if he remembers having it and resents Dustin for seeing too much? He isn't okay with abusing Link's trust like that.

So, operating purely on the hypothetical, he wants to have a face to speak his mind to. Maybe it will help him get out of all of these spaces and move on to another dream, or to wake up, he doesn't know, but it's worth a try.

The warm lighting of the cozy cottage comes into focus out of the corner of Dustin's eye. He twists suddenly, only taking a moment to drink it in, before quickly walking towards the last place he remembers seeing Link: At the stove.

Link is, indeed, at the stove. And look, Dustin's arrived at just the right time.

"Dinner's ready!" Link says, as he produces two plates of sausages and creamy mashed potato, and brings them around to set on the table.

He doesn't appear to react to Dustin having disappeared for a while. Or anything Dustin might have seen, while in those other spaces. It's just Link, in the cottage, acting as if all of this is normal.

How weirdly convenient. Dustin watches Link swing past him with the plates, eyes narrowed in suspicion and befuddlement. He doesn't know.

"You didn't...?" Dustin trails off as he chews lightly on his tongue. This is a dream logic thing, isn't it? Is it even worth asking about? Curiosity compels him, even in spite of these doubts. "Did you notice I was gone?"

Link shrugs.

As it turns out: no, the dream logic isn't worth asking about. Maybe because it's a dream, and dreams aren't inclined to explain themselves. Or maybe just because it's Link, and he's not really one for giving proper explanations of things.

Dustin breathes a heavy sigh, but at least he's settled on a state of 'resigned acceptance' rather than the frustration and anger from earlier. Lowering his expectations helps.

"Fine." Reluctantly, Dustin shuffles back towards the table and takes a seat in front of one of the plates. He's content to sulk at first; this isn't even real food, after all, so what's the point in pretending to eat it? But he can still smell it, somehow. And it smells so fucking good.

Slowly, he picks up a fork. "Are you even aware of what I saw?" Dustin asks, sawing off a piece of sausage coated in mashed potatoes and tentatively holding it in front of his face, just for a moment, before shrugging and popping it in his mouth. "I guess not, probably."

Another shrug. Maybe he is aware. Maybe he isn't. Whatever way it is, what's certain is that Link's not inclined to tell.

If Dustin wants any answers about what he saw, he's going to need to get more specific.

As for the meal, Link does not hesitate or hold his food tentatively before eating: instead, he just goes for it. As Dustin would already know from their shared explorations with Felwinter, Link certainly likes to eat.

Dustin grunts his acceptance around a mouthful of food, not even bothering to watch Link's reaction beyond the start of a shrug. Of course he doesn't know. Why wouldn't Link be the most Link he's ever been inside a dream? After his long walks around the other two liminal spaces, Dustin can't muster the energy to be angry about this anymore.

Plus, it's actually really difficult to be angry about much of anything when the food he's eating is so damn tasty. Dustin makes a concerted effort not to look too eager as he tucks in for another heaping forkful of mash, and for a few minutes, he's content to just power through his plate like he hasn't eaten in his entire life. Some of this is probably being driven by his actual, real life hunger, he imagines. The food replicators in the Calibrations room provide enough protein to keep him going, but the output is so dense and flavorless that it feels like he's barely eaten anything at all.

It's not until he's scraping the mashed potatoes from the bottom of his plate with the side of his fork that, urged by some remaining curiosity, Dustin speaks up again. He's had time to think, and now he has a theory.

"...Do you remember your time in the castle?" he asks, glancing up with a slow arc of his eyebrows.

Link's already up and getting seconds - for himself, and Dustin if he wants them too - when Dustin asks the question. He pauses.

He remembers the castle in ruins. He remembers crawling over malice-infested hallways, dealing with the monsters that had taken up residence. He remembers making his way to the Sanctum, and fighting Ganon.

Apart from that, however, the really isn't much of anything at all. Just one memory, of Zelda and the King on the ramparts outside her room. A handful of vague feelings and impressions, that he hadn't really been able to make much sense of yet.

"...Not really."

Dustin determines his theory confirmed as soon as Link pauses, before he even answers the question. He nods, licks his fork clean, and also stands up to get seconds.

"Amnesia," Dustin declares. "After the fight, and the stasis pool...trauma-based?"

Link hums softly.

"The Shrine of Resurrection took my memories." A name that Dustin hasn't heard before - but it doesn't even take as someone as smart as he is to connect those dots.

Connect the dots and then some. Resurrection - Link had seemed in an awfully bad way after that fight he saw, and he was in a state of suspended animation within the pool indicative of a deep coma. Had he actually died? Did Link's people possess the ability to bring people back from the dead? Or was it a near-death thing that still required a lot of time and physical resources to complete?

Either way, Dustin is not as surprised as he probably should be. "Being unconscious for that long can really fuck with your brain, yeah," he shrugs while scooping another heaping lump of mashed potatoes onto his plate. "Sometimes I wonder if..."

He pauses, staring off into the middle distance.

"...Never mind." A quick shake of the head, hurriedly stabbing a pair of sausages to add to his meal. "How...complete, is it? The amnesia I mean."

Link nods, a small jerk of his head. His brain was, as Dustin had so eloquently put it, fucked. Although what Dustin perhaps didn't fully appreciate was that calling the time he spend in the Shrine a long time was actually putting it mildly.

"For a hundred years," he says softly. "Didn't remember anything when I woke."

Dustin just stares at him for a minute, his jaw noticeably slacked.

"...A hundred...no." This is his limit, apparently. Dustin sets his plate down so he can show appropriate disbelief with his hands, crossing them rapidly in front of himself while he shakes his head. "No no no. I don't care what kind of suspended animation bullshit you have where you're from, that--it was just fuckin' water, man. How--?"

Slowly but surely, Dustin seems to have talked himself back around. He squints with heavily furrowed brows.

"...You're sure that's how long it was?" he asks.

As Dustin rages, Link simply looks at him. Lets him rant.

"It's what they told me," he says. For obvious reasons, the exact passage of time wasn't something he could personally attest to.

Dustin shakes his head again, slower and more deliberate this time. He doubts this is just some elaborate prank that a small group of people played on him or something, but at the same time--

"Who's 'they?'" he asks. The briefly abandoned plate of food is reluctantly picked back up. "Who told you?"

"The spirit of the dead king," Link says, blithely. "And Impa."

Yeah, that's the sort of response Dustin was expecting to get. At least it's not just dead silence this time. He doesn't bother trying to follow up for details, instead giving his plate a deadpan stare before shuffling back to the small dining table in the center of the cottage.

"People you would want to take on authority, I'm sure," he says, just as blithely. "And the event was probably significant enough that it would be verifiable in records or oral histories..."

Dustin slumps into a chair and gives Link a flat look.

"...Anyone ever tell you that your shit's really fucked up, Link?"

Link blinks.

"...No." Funnily enough. Although perhaps that was because not that many people in Hyrule had actually realised who Link really was. They'd just thought he was another adventurer, a nameless face traveling the land.

And then after the Calamity, people had tended to pay a lot more attention to Zelda than him.

"Well, more people should," Dustin declares, matter-of-fact, just before stuffing a fork-full of bangers and mash into his mouth. "Your shit's fucked. Especially so."

(no subject)

newmemorywhodis - 2023-10-13 07:04 (UTC) - Expand

(no subject)

quark_assassin - 2023-10-15 15:20 (UTC) - Expand

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only