LG110, Day 1-B: Dawn of an Old Day
Day 1-B will end on Sunday, March 1st @ 10:00 PM EST.
Skull Kid
He had been in the rafters for a while now.
The Skull Kid was good at rafters. He was good at shadows generally — at the particular trick of being in a place without being of it, present and unaccounted for, which was a skill he'd developed young and refined over a long and complicated life. The ceiling of Odolwa's chamber was high and dark and full of good places to sit and think and watch, and so he sat and watched and thought about timing.
Below him, the battle was not going well for the mortals.
It had not gone well for a while. It had started badly — the soldiers falling first, in ones and twos, the Deku Scouts and the Clock Wards and the monkeys who had been so brave and so outmatched that watching them had produced in him a feeling he didn't have a name for, something adjacent to respect and not comfortable enough to sit with. Odolwa didn't distinguish between opponents. He never had. He moved through them with the terrible patience of something that has been sleeping for thirty-three years and woken angry, his sword describing long arcs that cleared space as thoroughly as weather.
The Skull Kid watched a Clock Ward go down and looked away.
He was not here for this part.
The mortals were doing better than they had any right to. That was the interesting thing. There was a Goron with a bow who had found angles Odolwa kept failing to account for, each shot placed with a deliberateness that said the shooter had been watching the giant's movement patterns for a long time and was now using them. There was an herbalist — small, moving constantly, hands always producing something from somewhere, the kind of person who fought by making other people better at fighting, which the Skull Kid thought was probably the most dangerous kind. There was a Zora in the water, using the flooded sections of the chamber floor to approach and retreat faster than anything with legs could track. There was the woman with the sword who had killed twelve Dreamers and simply kept going, bleeding from three places and not acting like it.
And there was the girl with the mask.
He'd known about the mask. He'd come here partly because of the mask, though he didn't need it. The Deku mask was worn by a child in a green cap who moved through the battle's edges firing bubbles and Deku nuts with the systematic efficiency of someone who was not particularly trying to be heroic and was simply doing the most useful thing available at every given moment. She'd been in Woodfall before. He'd felt her arrive, the way he felt things that mattered, the particular pressure of significance landing in a place.
She reminded him of someone.
He pushed the thought aside and watched the ceiling instead. The arrows they'd fired earlier had done good structural work — he'd had to move twice, which he resented, and the cracks running through the stone above were deepening with each impact and each of Odolwa's ground strikes. The giant's own weight was helping. The Skull Kid appreciated the irony.
Below, the numbers had thinned to a count he could manage on his fingers. The ones still standing were the ones who had been hardest to kill all along — the fighters who'd survived by being clever, the ones who'd found the edges of the room and stayed there, the ones who'd been keeping each other alive through the long attrition of the night. He counted them. He waited.
The Professor was talking.
He couldn't hear the words from up here, but he could read the shape of the conversation — the way people leaned in when something important was being said, the way movement stopped and eyes sharpened. The woman with the sword was listening. The two Gorons. The herbalist. The girl with the mask, who had turned away from Odolwa completely to look at the Professor with the focused attention of someone receiving instructions.
Then the Professor and the sword-woman stepped apart from the others.
The Skull Kid went very still.
He had seen many things in his long, strange life. He had seen the giants sleep and woken them with cruelty. He had seen a boy with an ocarina stand between the world and the moon and refuse to move. He recognized the shape of what was happening below the same way he recognized the shape of the three-day loop — not because it was comfortable but because he had been part of it once, and shapes like that left marks.
The woman handed something to the Professor. The Professor tucked it away without looking at it. They were speaking quietly and the Skull Kid did not need to hear them to understand.
When they kissed, he looked at the ceiling again.
When he looked back, the sword-woman was running.
She ran directly at Odolwa, which was the only way to run at Odolwa if you intended to hold his attention. She hit him from the left and rolled right, and hit him from the right and rolled left, keeping just inside the arc of the sword where the angles were wrong for a killing blow and right for a cutting one, giving everything she had to the task of being the most infuriating thing in the room. Odolwa turned to track her. His back came around. His eyes — such as they were, behind the mask — fixed.
The arrows went up.
They were good shots, all of them. The Goron's especially — placed in the exact cracks the earlier volley had opened, driving deeper, the small explosives at the tips doing the work they'd been designed for. The ceiling groaned. Stone dust fell in thick curtains. Odolwa turned at the sound and the sword-woman was still there, still making herself impossible to ignore, still bleeding and still moving.
The Skull Kid began to descend.
He kept to the shadows. He kept to the edges. He was watching the ceiling and watching the mask — Odolwa's mask — and he was calculating the distance and the timing and the specific moment between the giant falling and the mask becoming available.
The ceiling came apart in sections.
The Professor was shouting — the word was move, or something close to it, the universal instruction of someone who has triggered something irreversible and needs everyone to survive the next thirty seconds. They moved. Through the broken door, back into the temple's body, into whatever stable spaces remained between the cracking walls and the grinding foundation. The Skull Kid went up and through a gap in the collapsing roof and out into the night air, the rubble thundering down below him, the sound of it enormous and then subsiding into the particular silence that follows something very loud.
He hung in the air above the ruin and waited.
When the dust settled enough, they came up. One by one, through cracks in the debris, coughing, pulling each other out. The Skull Kid counted them against the list he'd kept and found they had all survived the collapse, which was better than the alternative, and the feeling that produced in him was still not comfortable enough to name.
He held up Odolwa's mask.
The moon was close. He could feel it the way he always felt it — not from outside but from inside, the pull of it in his chest, the old connection that had never fully severed even after everything that had happened, even after the boy with the ocarina and the years that followed. The moon was close and the mask was in his hands and the world was running out of time, and he felt the largest feeling he'd felt in years and opened his mouth and let it out.
He laughed.
"Too weak," he said, to the mortals below who had survived a night of everything and were standing in the rubble with their weapons still in their hands, looking up at him. "Too few." He turned the mask over, feeling its weight, its warmth, its absolute and total certainty about what it was. "Too late."
He laughed again. It felt the way laughing had always felt — like releasing pressure, like the only honest sound he knew how to make.
Something hit him in the face.
He blinked. He looked at the small pale husk of the Deku nut falling away from him and then at the girl below, who was watching him with the particular expression of someone who has just done the only thing available to them and is not sure if it worked.
He laughed harder.
"Oh," he said. "Oh, I like you."
He was still laughing when the Professor said something to the girl, something short and pointed, and he caught the shape of it the same way he'd caught the shape of everything tonight — not the words but the weight. His laughter stopped.
The girl raised the ocarina.
He knew that melody. He had known it for thirty-three years, carried the knowledge of it the way you carry a wound — present, specific, not healed over. The first three notes went out over the rubble and over the swamp and over the fallen temple and up into the night, and the moon above him shuddered.
He moved.
He came down fast, the mask in one hand, everything else at his disposal. The power he'd spent thirty-three years quietly accumulating, carefully hoarding, reserved for the moment he'd always known was coming — he sent it at the girl in a wave that should have knocked her sideways and ended the song.
The Professor stepped into it.
She was not a fighter. She had a physicist's relationship to her own body, which was to say she treated it as a tool for getting to places where thinking could happen, and it had served that purpose adequately for forty-something years and was now being asked to do something considerably outside its specialty. She stepped into the wave and it went through her and she went down and she stayed down.
The girl kept playing.
The second mortal came forward. He didn't see which one — he was moving too fast, pushing too hard — but whoever it was gave the girl another four bars before they fell. Then another came, and another. They were forming a line between him and the song, the way they'd formed a line in the temple between the living and the dead, and he was taking them apart one by one and the song was still going and he was running out of patience and they were running out of people.
The last one fell.
The Skull Kid raised the mask.
He looked at the girl. She was looking back at him over the top of the ocarina, and she was not stopping, and her eyes had the quality of someone who has decided something and finished deciding it, and the song was in its final measure, and the moon was so close now that its shadow fell over all of them.
He knew what was coming.
He had always known what was coming.
He laughed one final time — the real laugh, the one underneath all the others, the one that sounded less like contempt and more like the thing that comes after a very long time of being alone, when someone finally does the thing you needed them to do and you can't say thank you any other way.
The last note went out.
Time stopped, then retreated.
"Try again."
Happy Mask Salesman
The bell above the door made its soft brassy laugh each time the wind jostled it, and the old man said it was rude to ignore a laugh. So the Happy Mask Salesman—his hair white now, his smile slower but no less bright—lifted a feather duster like a conductor's baton and bowed to the bell before turning to the shelves.
"Up, up," he told his Apprentice, and she hopped onto the stepstool, green cap askew, wooden sword clacking against her knee.
She was looking at her hands.
He noticed it the way he noticed most things — sideways, without appearing to notice at all. She was looking at her hands the way people look at things they expect to find different and are adjusting to finding the same. The stepstool, the shelves, the rows of masks in their proper places: she looked at all of it with an expression he had never seen on her face before and could not immediately name.
"Grandfather," she said.
He turned. Something in her voice put the feather duster down before he'd decided to put it down.
"Tell me," he said.
She did. And did. And did.
It came out fast — the words pressing against each other, the way words do when they've been waiting under pressure for the moment they could finally be released. The Carnival. The play. The real Skull Kid rising above the stage with the real Mask on his head. The shop broken open, her grandfather unconscious on the floor, the drawer empty. The Dreamers with their fused faces and their branded wrists and their conviction that the world deserved to end. The panic in the streets. The South Gate. The swamp road in the dark with three hundred people and a moon that was falling down. A Deku mask that would not come off. A woman named Kashika who had known what the mask needed and a song that the mask had been waiting for. A temple full of old bones and older curses. A queen who had said I knew you'd come and then stopped saying anything.
The Skull Kid floating above the rubble with Odolwa's mask in his hands and the moon so close it was burning.
An ocarina. A song. Twelve bars that time had been waiting to hear for thirty-three years.
When she finished, the shop was very quiet. Outside, the trumpet player was practicing. The notes tilted in the particular way that said: almost right, try again.
The Happy Mask Salesman stood still for a long moment. He was, by long practice, a man who processed things at the speed they needed to be processed rather than the speed feelings preferred, and what he was processing now required a particular kind of stillness. He had known — not the details, not the shape, but the weight of the thing behind the details and the shape. The drawer he had opened and closed without taking the mask out. The empty hook. The sensation, on the morning of the Carnival, of something having shifted in the arrangement of the world without his having been consulted.
A part of him had always known. He simply hadn't known the form it would take.
"And the person who attacked me," he said, carefully. "Before the Dreamers arrived."
"We never found out who." She was watching him with the particular attention of someone checking for damage. "You sent me away before we could."
He thought about that. He thought about waking on the floor with a lantern still burning and a ledger on the wrong page and a pen still capped, and about the walk across the shop to the drawer, and about pressing his hand to the flat blue cloth. He had sat back on his heels and listened to fireworks and covered his face with both hands, and he had thought, in that moment, that the next hours would be the longest of his life.
He had not imagined this particular resolution.
"I'm glad," he said, "that you're safe."
It was not adequate. He knew it wasn't adequate. He said it anyway, because it was the most true thing available, and he had always believed in starting with what was true.
She crossed the shop and put her arms around him — not the careful hug of a child being polite but the grip of someone who had been somewhere very far away and was checking that this wasn't all a dream. He held on.
After a moment he let go, straightened her cap, and went to the drawer.
He already knew. Or had a strong enough feeling that made him think he knew. He opened the drawer and pressed his palm to the faded blue cloth and felt the floor beneath it, and closed the drawer again, and stood.
"The mask did not come back with you," he said.
"It didn't?"
"No." He looked at the wall — at the hooks, the rows, the neat arrangement of thirty years of careful tending. Every mask in its proper place. The fox mask, the heron mask with the cobweb she'd cleared from its beak. The bear mask. The Deku mask on its hook, small and worn, the painted eyes closed as they had always been. He stood in front of it for a moment, and something in his chest did something complex and quiet.
"The Goron mask," he said.
"I don't know."
"It's not here." He turned. "The Goron mask is in Snowhead. At Darmani's grave." He looked at the Deku mask again.
She followed his gaze. Neither of them said anything for a moment.
"Majora's Mask won't respond to time," he said. "Nothing I know of does, except what it chooses. That is — was — always the nature of it." He picked up the feather duster and set it down again. "Professor Kashika understands its nature better than I do." He stopped. He chose his next words carefully. "Don't cry, child. I am sure she's alive too."
The girl's lips trembled, tears already pooling.
"What I need," he said, "is for you to find your companions. The ones who remember — they'll be in Clock Town, disoriented, trying to make sense of all this. The young man who saved you. The Goron. The others." He moved to the counter. "And I need to reach the Clock Wards. Commander Vicsen. He ran the evacuation in the first time, you said — which means he's capable and he'll listen, and we need someone who won't laugh at what you've told me before the Carnival tonight." He paused. "I don't imagine I have long before someone comes through that back passage again."
She was already shaking her head.
"I'll be all right," he said, before she could speak. "I was all right last time, wasn't I? More or less." The smile came slowly, the way it always did. "They want something from me. That means I'm useful. And useful things don't get thrown away."
She looked at him with an expression he had seen on her face in the original telling — the one that said she was running all the arguments and finding them technically valid and hating them. She was very good at that. She had always been very good at that.
"You still have it," he said. He looked at the pale ocarina in her pocket — not the tin one she'd left the shop with the first time, but the moon tear one, the one Kashika had made and given her. "As long as you're alive to play it, the song exists. As long as the song exists, there's refuge." He tilted his head. "The Hero of Time understood that. He ran the loop again and again until he found the way through. You've already triggered it once."
"I had help."
"Yes." His eyes moved to the drawer, and back. "That is exactly the difference between a real hero and a legend. A legend does it alone. A real hero knows when to ask." He crossed to her and took her hands, the not-quite-hands of a girl who had worn a Deku mask for a night and would carry the memory of it the rest of her life, and he held them the way he held things he was careful about. "I want to tell you something, and I want you to hear it properly, so pay attention."
She paid attention. She had always paid attention when he used that tone.
"In everything you've told me," he said, "I did not hear a single moment where you ran away." He felt the small movement of her hands — the beginning of a protest — and continued. "You had every reason to. You were alone, in a strange body, in the middle of a city falling apart, with people you had never met and enemies you had no framework for. You are eleven years old and you do not have the training or the strength of the Hero of Time. You had a wooden sword and a tin ocarina and a habit of showing up where you were needed." He paused. "And it was enough. Not because fate decided it should be. Because you decided. Over and over and over again, in a temple full of things older and larger and angrier than you, with the moon falling and everyone around you dying, you decided."
The trumpeter outside found the right note. It rang out over East Street clear and high and held.
"That boy — wherever he came from, whatever he was — he was a hero because he refused to stop." He squeezed her hands once and let them go. "I do not think he had more courage than you. I think he had more practice." He straightened her cap. "Go find your companions. I will find Commander Vicsen. We will not be separated long."
She looked at him for a moment longer. Then she fished the moon tear ocarina from her pocket and turned it over in her hands — the pale blue-white of it, the weight of what it was made from and what it could do — and put it back.
"I know," he said.
She went. The bell above the door laughed.
The Happy Mask Salesman stood in the empty shop and looked at the drawer where Majora's Mask was not, at the hook where the Deku mask was no longer hanging, and picked up the feather duster from the counter.
Outside, the trumpet player was still holding the note.
When the bell rang not long after, he bowed to the door and turned to face his customer. The Day was still young. Others would be expecting him. Maybe even some with memories of a past life, looking for his granddaughter.
For now, it would be good to keep himself busy with some work.
No one else died. The Minions of Mischief won Odolwa's Mask.
@Wahrheitswächter, @Ashbringer, and @The Unknown Medallion were resurrected!
Players can now vote to remove one of their own from the Loop.
The Postman's Hat is no longer donned, and thus PMs are forbidden.
RP Quest: Warn Clock Town and Find Your Friends!
The Happy Mask Shop
Name
$
Description
Uses
Bremen Mask
5
While donned, summon a flock of cuccos to cancel the vote of 1 player (Day Action) or block the action of 1 player (Night Action).
2x
Bunny Hood*
5
Passively multiples the number of Rupees earned by 2x.
~
Don Gero Mask
5
While donned, if you are targeted by any player, this Mask will alert you of all their identities (Night Action).
2x
Postman’s Hat*
5
Passively enables Postman’s Service and earns +1 Rupee for each unique player that is delivered a message.
~
Blast Mask**
20
While donned, if you are targeted by any action, kill you and every player that targets you.
**1x Per Game
Captain’s Hat*
20
Passively allows you access to the current Loop’s Dead Doc.
~
Mask of Scents
20
While donned, discover a player’s target (Night Action).
2x
Romani Mask
20
While donned, if you are killed by any means, drink an ice cold glass of Romani milk to delay your death by 1 turn (Day/Night Passive).
~
Circus Leader Mask
50
While donned, summon the Circus to steal a random Mask from the target player (Night Action).
1x
Gibdo Mask
50
While donned, if you are killed by any means, become a zombie that can only post during the Nights. Gibdos can vote at Night to count on the next day. Gibdos do not count for Boss Mask parity at Loop’s end.
~
Keaton Mask
50
While donned, redirect either a vote (Day Action) or action (Night Action) of a player to another target.
2x
Stone Mask
50
While donned, become an untargetable object. No actions can affect you, including votes. Once put on it cannot be removed.
~
Great Fairy Mask
100
While donned, resurrect a single player (Night Action).
1x
Mask of Truth
100
While donned, discover a player’s alignment (Night Action).
1x
Fierce Deity Mask**
200
When donned, your team wins the current Loop (or Game if Final Day).
**1x Per Game
Player List
0
Amanuensis
Happy Mask Apprentice, AKA 'Ap'
1
@The Unknown Order
Heroshi
2
@Araris Valerian
Arenta
3
@Wahrheitswächter
Wahi
4
@Ashbringer
Coliver
5
@coco.pudding
Amora
6
@|TJ|
Cosmetica
7
@Stick.
meeee
8
@Haelbarde
Link the Goron
9
@Wonko the Sane
Zymni
10
@Doc12
Thistle
11
@Burnt Spaghetti
Cindra
12
@CoderDrag0n8
Squircle
13
@Mistfallen Soldier
Kieran
14
@Divergent
Gor Elam the Goron
15
@Archer
Ouae the Zora
16
@Hoid Slayer
Avery
Unfortunately, Coder has requested a Pinch Hitter. Am reaching out now with first dibs going to @Aeoryi
No idea what you mean