Amanuensis

You're good Following up on this, I should note that Postman's Hat is a Hat instead of a Mask, so it can be stacked / worn alongside a proper Mask. Oh I missed this part so will be more explicit. So, everyone who targets the Blast Mask when it's triggered will perish. Most likely this will result in the Postman delivering to the Blast Mask and them both exploding. Or if coupled, everyone sending a PM to the Blast Mask Postman goes kabloey. Noble careers always come with some risks, I guess.

- Players sending PMs all target Postman - Postman delivers PMs, targeting all recipients

Ah, ok. Maybe Doc also misunderstood what you meant or he was referring to something else. I'll leave the reply to him then o7 You can certainly try. Surely a Zora has some useful traits / abilities. Just keep in mind this will be harder than in the game. I plan for a lot of no names to die

I know you asked Doc but I feel compelled to clarify the rules since there's a lot going on and it's my responsibility or w/e

LG110, Night 3-A: Odolwa Awakened Night 3-A will end on Friday, February 27th @ 10:00 PM EST. Commander Ishala Link the Goron cleared his throat. It was not a small sound. The chamber absorbed it the way stone absorbs things — fully, with a slight echo. Every head turned. The Goron looked at his feet. "I could help with getting close to the Dinolfos," he said. "Not much an arrow is going to do if it hits me while I'm balled up. I can pick up speed on the way in. Roll around inside. Hard to aim at something you can't see coming." A pause. He shuffled his feet. "Probably won't knock it over. But it'd keep it distracted. Could let some of you others get close enough to do something about it." He looked up. "Just a thought. If it helped." Amora turned from the Dinolfos to look at him. "That could work. A distraction, at least." She studied him. "Could you be aimed? If there was a way to direct the angle—" "We don't need to aim him," Ishala said. She had been listening from the edge of the group with the expression of someone sorting through plans and discarding them. "We need to launch him." She looked at the Goron. "Straight at it. Hard as we can get you moving. Your exterior will take whatever arrows it fires on reflex. It'll dodge — something that size always dodges — and when it does, it'll expose its back." She was already moving toward the platform's edge. "I'll be underneath, coming up from behind. The moment it commits to a direction, I have it." Link the Goron looked at the Dinolfos. The Dinolfos looked back, still and patient, the bow loose in its hands. "Right," he said. "Give me a run-up." They launched him. It was not graceful. It was effective. Link hit the platform in a rolling thunder of stone-on-stone that sent the Dinolfos backpedaling, its footing uncertain, the bow swinging wide as it tried to track something that fast and that round and that completely indifferent to being shot at. It fired twice. Both arrows rang off curved rock and clattered into the water below. The Goron careened between the platform's walls in great arcing loops and the Dinolfos kept moving, kept tracking, kept not finding an angle that wasn't stone. Ishala was already underneath the platform, crouched low, moving with the flat-footed speed of a soldier who had learned to cross open ground by staying under sight lines. The Dinolfos found its angle. It leapt — straight up, a coiling vertical launch — and came down with the bow raised, aimed at the top of Ishala's head. "CLOSE YOUR EYES." Kashika's voice cut through the chamber half a second before the Deku Nut went off. The flash was total. White and absolute and occupying every reflective surface in the stone room simultaneously. The Dinolfos shrieked — a high shriek that had nothing composed about it — and hit the platform not where it had intended but sideways, the aimed shot gone wild, the bow swinging loose. Ishala had her eyes shut and was already turning toward the sound. From an angle no one had been watching, Kieran landed on the Dinolfos's back. He had moved sometime in the preceding minute without anyone noticing, working his way around the chamber's far edge while the Goron held the creature's attention, and his strike came from the side and slightly above and connected with the specific violence of something that had been planned rather than improvised. The Dinolfos went down. The bow skittered across the platform stone. The Dinolfos reached for it. Ishala's blade came down through its hand. The screech this time was different — sharper, more immediate, the sound of something that has just encountered a consequence it hadn't calculated. It pulled the hand back. Ishala reversed her grip. The next stroke was clean and final, and then the chamber was quiet except for the Goron crashing against the far wall. Ishala looked at what remained. "That was easy." She picked up the bow and handed it to her partner. Professor Kashika The torch puzzle on the west walkway was practically solved the moment Kashika caught sight of it — three of the four torches had already been lit, and the fourth only required an arrow fired through flame. When the mechanism engaged, the water level in the central chamber began to rise in slow increments, stone grinding against stone somewhere deep in the temple's foundation. "Upper floor," Kashika said, and they went. The Gekskeleton was waiting for them. Not the Gekko of the original accounts — not the living creature Link had faced and that had, apparently, reverted to a harmless frog afterward. This was what was left of it after something had reached back through thirty-three years and pulled it upright again. Bone and dried sinew and two pale lights burning in empty sockets, moving with the mechanical certainty of something that was following instructions rather than thinking. It occupied the upper chamber completely, a Snapper's desiccated shell rattling beneath it as it circled, and it watched them come through the door with those cold lifeless eyes. They had fought the swamp wildlife on the road. They had fought Stalchildren in the palace courtyard. The Gekskeleton was larger than both, and it was faster than it looked, and it had three people down in the first two minutes — not dead, but hurt and moving slowly, which in a room with a circling enemy and a pit of poisoned water came to something close to the same problem. Heroshi had been carrying the water skins. This was what he'd done the whole march — carried things, fetched things, kept the scouts and the Wards and the fighters hydrated while they worked. Nobody had given him the job. He'd found it, the way some people find the job that needs doing and simply start doing it, without announcement or credit. He was not a fighter. He had said as much when Danna had asked for volunteers at the dock, and he'd meant it, and he'd come anyway. The Gekskeleton's tail swept the chamber floor in a wide arc. Link the Goron was on the near side of it and moving too slow to clear it, still recovering from crashing into a wall during the Dinolfos fight, and the arc was low and fast and there was no time for anyone with the right position to do anything. Heroshi put himself between them. The impact carried him into the far wall. He hit it hard and slid, and the Goron caught him before he reached the floor, and for a moment they were both still, and Kashika was already crossing the chamber, and the pale lights in the Gekskeleton's sockets found the next target and moved on. "Don't," Heroshi said, when she reached him. He said it clearly. He said it with the specific certainty of someone who has just assessed their own situation and arrived at an accurate conclusion. "Don't stop." She looked at him. She stood up. "Don't stop," she said to the room. The plan she'd had since the upper floor had required the Gekskeleton to be still for four seconds. It had not been still for four seconds. The firebombs were placed — tucked between the exposed ribs and the joints of the Snapper's old shell, nestled in the gaps she'd identified from the chamber's entrance while everyone else was watching the fight — but the triggering device needed a clear line and a stationary target. They needed four seconds. Link the Goron stood up. He didn't say anything. He just rolled. He hit the Gekskeleton from behind and below and it lurched forward and the momentum was wrong for it and it overcorrected and the Goron kept rolling, kept pushing, a sustained churning drive that walked the Gekskeleton backward step by step despite everything it did to correct, and it was reaching down to deal with him when the Goron gave one final rotation and hit with everything he had and the Gekskeleton went backward into the chamber door and the door went in. Kashika triggered the device. The explosion moved through the skeleton from inside out — the ribs first, then the joints, then the Snapper's shell fragmenting outward in a cascade of burning old bone that peppered everything within fifteen feet and sent a wave of heat and pressure through the open door and into the chamber beyond. The Gekskeleton came apart in the air. There was very little of it left when the sound finished. The Giant Key hung on the wall behind where the door had been, mounted as if placed there deliberately. Kashika took it. Then she looked through the door. Ap the Apprentice The chamber beyond should have been dark. It was not dark. It was lit from the center — from above the center, from the thing that turned slowly in the air above the circle of robed figures, catching what light existed and returning it changed. Odolwa's Mask, seemingly manifesting from thin air while the twelve Dreamers sitting cross-legged on the chamber floor with their fused Link-mask faces and their branded wrists were the ones building it, their humming a continuous low chord that resonated in the stone under her feet. In the center of the circle, beneath the mask, the Deku Queen sat with her eyes closed and her hands in her lap and her breathing so shallow that it took a moment to be sure it was there at all. Nobody moved for a count of three. Then Ishala burst into a sprint. She went through the circle the way water goes through a gap — finding the line of least resistance and taking it at speed, and the speed was considerable. The first Dreamer fell before the others registered her presence. The second and third fell together. She was not precise. She was not trying to be precise. She was trying to stop something and she was three seconds too late to stop it any other way. She had no choice, so she kept going, and going, and going. The humming fractured as the circle broke. The mask above them pulsed — once, twice, the light going wrong in a way that had texture to it, physical wrongness you could feel against the skin. Kashika was already running toward the Queen. The last Dreamer fell. Ishala stood in the center of the broken circle with twelve robed figures around her on the floor, the Link masks staring at the ceiling, the brands on the wrists facing up. She was breathing hard. She looked at her hands. She looked at the mask above them, which was no longer turning slowly. It was expanding. Kashika reached the Queen and crouched beside her and put a hand on her face, the way you check on someone you're not sure about, and the Queen's eyes opened. They were very dark and very tired and they had the quality of someone who has been a long distance away and has just found the way back. "I knew," the Queen said. Her voice was almost nothing. "I knew you'd come." Smiling lightly, she exhaled her last breath. Kashika stayed crouching for a moment after. Then she stood. The temple shook. Not an earthquake — more deliberate than that. The walls, the floor, the ceiling all registering the weight of something descending from above. Stone dust fell in thin curtains. The torches along the walls guttered and went out one by one as something displaced the air. From the shadows at the chamber's far end, where the wall met the ceiling and the ceiling was no longer quite where it had been, something very large opened its eyes. Odolwa looked down at them. He was not what the play had made of him — not the wooden giant with the blades and the songs, not the spectacle. He was older than that. He was the thing the play had been trying to represent with costumes and choreography and falling short of, the way a map falls short of the place it describes. He filled the chamber the way the moon filled the sky: too large for the context, indifferent to the frame. The giant's sword rose. RP Quest: Defeat Odolwa, Masked Jungle Warrior, and claim the first Boss Mask @The Unknown Medallion fell to the Gekskeleton and was removed from the Loop. The Postman's Hat remains donned and Night PMs will be allowed to be delivered in the Day. (3) TUM: Archer, Mistfallen, coco, (3) Haelbarde: Divergent, Stick, Hoid Slayer, (1) Doc: Wonko, (1) coco: Araris, (1) Divergent: TJ, (1) TJ: Doc, Player List 0 Amanuensis Ap the Apprentice 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

Day 3-A is now over. Night 3-A will take me longer as I've not yet started the write-up, so don't wait up if you're sleppy.

You can submit an invalid action if you want, just at your own peril

About 8 minutes remain in the Day to submit votes, PMs, or any relevant actions (3) Haelbarde: Divergent, Stick, Hoid Slayer, (3) TUM: Archer, Mistfallen, coco, (1) Doc: Wonko, (1) coco: Araris, (1) Divergent: TJ,

Might be a little late turnover tonight. Lot of... not considerate last minute customers. Will be stuck closing for a half hour past my usually time free.

For anyone who might be confused on the OoA, I believe this is the most accurate. In case of competing instances (like if a Circus Leader thieves from a Keaton Redirect that's redirecting a Bremen Roleblock on the Circus Leader), I'd either flip a coin or roll a die to determine who goes first in the precedence. Order of Actions: Postman Receives PMs > Worn Mask Passive Effects > Circus Leader Mask Theft / Keaton Mask Redirect / Bremen's Mask Roleblock > Equip / Unequip Mask > Execution / Night Kill > Great Fairy / Mask of Truth Results > Postman Delivers PMs > Mask of Scents Tracking > Don Gero Alert

Just posting this to mark off where I finished counting activity earnings before I go do my exam and then work (2) Haelbarde: Divergent, Stick, (2) TUM: Archer, Mistfallen, (1) Doc: Wonko, (1) coco: Araris,

Just under 11 hours remain in the Day (2) Haelbarde: Divergent, Stick, (1) Doc: Wonko, (1) coco: Araris, (1) TUM: Archer, Yeah, sorry, I debated but it didn't seem like actual RP given the fourth wall leakage

So, just to be clear, there is no 5th Loop, as the Final Day is the 4th day of Loop 4/D. This means that all the players who die in Loop 4/D remain dead, including any elims exed that Loop in an attempt to get the final Boss Mask.

Silksong game when

Just under 22 Hours Remain in the Day (2) Doc: Archer, Wonko, (1) TJ: Stick, (1) Haelbarde: Divergent, (1) coco: Araris, Ap the Apprentice The path to Woodfall was not built for fifty people. It was built for Deku Scrubs — creatures half the height of a human and a third the weight, comfortable with lily pads that dipped and log bridges that swayed. The monkeys knew alternative routes, higher ones through the canopy, and they used them, scouting ahead in silence while the main group worked its way along the water's edge one careful step at a time. Ap went where the Deku Scouts went. She was the right size for it now, or had been before the mask, and she had the right instincts — her grandfather's shop sat above a flooded subsection of South Ward, and she'd spent enough childhood hours on its window ledge to know how to read the weight of a surface before she trusted it. She crossed three lily pad sections without incident and tried not to think about the fact that they'd been slightly easier when she was made of wood. The conversation started, as most conversations do on long walks, because the alternative was silence and silence left room for the moon. "In the version I learned," said one of the older Clock Wards, "he came from another time. A future Termina, after everything had already gone wrong. He came back to stop it." "That's doesn't make sense," said the woman ahead of him. "He came from the past. Before Termina was Termina. Before anyone here could have known him. Otherwise, like us, he'd be dead." "Neither interpretation is supported by anything he actually said," Kashika called from further back. She was picking her way across a log bridge with the focused care of someone who spent most of her time on solid floors. "He followed the Skull Kid into the forest and fell into a hole. What came before that — he never told anyone who wrote it down, or if he did, nothing survived." A pause as she tested the next plank. "The time theories are popular because they're tidy. They mean his arrival here had a reason we can understand. But I've never seen evidence that rules out something stranger." "Stranger how?" someone asked. "Multiple realities. Parallel worlds branching from decisions made or not made. He could have come from a Termina that exists alongside ours rather than before or after it." She made it across. "It's not a comfortable thought. But the truth rarely is." The older man made a sound that suggested he found parallel realities faintly offensive. "Does it matter?" Ishala said. She had already crossed and was waiting on the far bank with the patience of someone who had stopped expecting theoretical discussions to resolve quickly. "To the history, yes. To this morning—" Kashika looked ahead at the treeline. "No." Ap had read three different books about the Hero of Time, had seen the Carnival play every year of her life, and heard her grandfather's version more times than she could count, which was the one she trusted most but also the one that left the most out. The books disagreed about his age, his origin, what the mask had wanted from him and what he'd given it. They agreed on the broad shape: the three days, the four temples, the giants, the moon. The Dreamers had their own version, she supposed — she thought about the branded wrists and the fused masks and the nihilism of people who had looked at the same story and found permission to give up. Same facts. Completely different conclusion. "He went in alone," she said. She was still getting used to her voice being just her voice again, no Deku harmonics underneath it. "He did most things alone," said Professor Kashika, watching the girl intently. "Fortunately, we won't," added Ishala, looking ahead to where the trees were thinning and the light changed — opening up, the swamp giving way to the wider water of Woodfall proper, the stone structure of the temple visible above the treeline. "So we have that over him." No one argued with that. Three monkeys were waiting at the causeway. They dropped from the canopy as the group approached the ceremonial platform, landing in a row on the log railing with the coordinated drama of creatures who had been waiting to deliver a report and wanted to make an impression. They spoke quickly. Kashika listened, her head slightly tilted, and translated without embellishment. "The Dreamers arrived before dawn. Twelve of them, robed, moving in single file." She watched the monkeys as they continued. "They had the song. The Sonata of Awakening — they played it at this platform and the temple opened for them." Her expression didn't change, but something behind it did. "They went in. The temple sealed behind them. None have come out." The group looked at the temple. It sat on its stone foundation above the water, silent, moss-covered, the entrance sealed again as if nothing had disturbed it. "They sealed it from inside?" Ishala asked. "Or the temple sealed itself when they stopped being outside it. The mechanism isn't fully understood." Kashika was already writing. "Twelve Dreamers. With the song. Inside, with the Queen, and whatever they intend to do with her." She closed the notebook. "We have the song too." The ceremonial platform sat at the center of the open water, ringed by lily pads, accessible by the narrow causeway the monkeys had kept clear. The altar stone at its center was carved with the Deku Kingdom's flowering emblem, worn smooth where generations of feet had stood. Ap was ushered onto it and looked at the temple — stone and moss and the stillness of a place that had been sleeping for thirty-three years and had been woken twice in one morning. "Play it the way the plays taught you," Kashika said, from the causeway's edge. "The temple should respond." Ap had heard the Sonata every year at the Carnival, played by the actor-hero at the moment when the stage crew sent colored smoke billowing from the boards and the crowd cheered as if surprised. She knew it the way she knew the Clock Town anthem — from repetition, from the air of a city that had been absorbing this story for three decades. She raised the pale ocarina and played it straight through without stopping, the same way Kashika had told her to play the Song of Healing: all the way to the end, even if it felt wrong, especially if it felt wrong. It didn't feel wrong. The water responded — a deep shudder felt through the feet, and the foundation rising from below the surface, stone dripping, the sealed entrance lifting above the waterline, the great wooden doors swinging open on the dark beyond. The group was quiet. "Right," Ishala said. "Let's move." The entrance hall smelled of standing water and old stone and something under both — older, organic, the smell of a place where something very large had lived for a long time and stopped. The torches were unlit. The Deku Scouts worked their way around the perimeter with small flame-starters while the group assembled in the dark, and the light came up slowly, revealing the central chamber: stone platforms rising from poisoned water, Deku flowers at intervals, the high vaulted ceiling lost in shadow above. The Dreamers had left traces. Ash marks on the stone where something had been drawn and then scuffed partially away. A length of cream-colored robe caught on a platform edge, torn loose in passing. The smell of something burned that was not torch smoke. And at the center, on the mechanical flower platform — the Dinolfos. It was not where it was supposed to be. Every account, every academic reconstruction, every retelling of what Link had found in this temple put the Dinolfos in a specific chamber deeper in the dungeon. This one was here, in the entry chamber, standing on the platform with a stillness that animals didn't usually have. Upright. Waiting. Its hands were not empty. The Hero's Bow. "That's not supposed to be there," someone said. "No," Kashika agreed. She was already thinking — Ap knew the quality of it by now. "The Dreamers repositioned it. It's guarding the eye switch." She looked across the chamber at the golden switch on the far wall. "The bow activates that switch, which raises the platform, which opens the upper floor. While the Dinolfos has it, we can't raise the platform. Which means we can't reach the Gekko, and without the Gekko we don't get the Giant Key, and without the Giant Key—" She stopped. " In the story he fought for the bow. Here the bow fights back." Ishala had her sword out. The fighters in the group had shifted into the arrangement people make when they are about to go forward rather than sideways. "The Dinolfos is the first problem," Kashika said. "Taking it down gets us the bow. The bow raises the platform and gets the second group to the Gekko and the Giant Key." She turned. "I need everyone who's better at thinking than fighting on the west walkway with me. The water mechanism runs parallel to the combat path — we can work it simultaneously." She looked at Ishala. "Your call on the split." The Dinolfos hadn't moved. It stood with the bow held loosely, watching the entrance with amber eyes. The torchlight caught the bow's curve — old wood, old string, a weapon carried through this temple once before by someone who'd used it to save everyone and everything. Ap looked at it. She thought about the moon tear ocarina, the Deku mask, and what Kashika had said in the workroom, when she didn't think Ap could hear: it knows who it belongs to. She thought about the Dreamers, twelve of them, somewhere above her in this temple right now, doing whatever they had crossed a burning city and a poisoned swamp and a kidnapped queen to do. Stories don't just happen to you, Ap reminded herself, quoting her grandfather. You must choose them.

LG110, Day 3-A: Save the Queen Day 3-A will end on Thursday, February 26th @ 10:00 PM EST. Professor Kashika She found the girl in the east corridor, sitting on the floor with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up, watching the traffic of exhausted people moving past her with the particular stillness of someone who has used up their capacity for reaction. The Deku mask — the Hero's mask, Kashika reminded herself, and felt the weight of that land freshly — had gone slightly luminous in the low torch light. An artifact effect, or the mask's own nature. Hard to say without instruments. Kashika sat down on the floor beside her. The Deku girl looked at her. Then looked away. "Your grandfather sent you to me," Kashika said. "So I already know you're not an ordinary Deku Scrub. You don't need to be shy." A pause. Then the girl made a sound — a sequence of short, reedy notes that rose at the end in the rhythm of a question. "I know," Kashika said. "It's frustrating. Your mind knows what it wants to say and your body has different ideas." She settled her back against the wall. "I've been the Woodfall Ambassador for six years, which fortunately for you, means I speak Deku. So here is what I want you to do: speak to me as if you're speaking your own language. Don't try to translate it. Don't think about the sounds. Just tell me what you want to tell me and let the mask do the rest." The girl looked at her with the mask's fixed expression, which communicated nothing. The eyes underneath it — Kashika could just see them, the way you see a face through thin fabric — communicated quite a lot. Then she spoke. What came out was Deku, a stream of it, the quick overlapping syllables that the Scrubs used when they had a great deal to say and limited patience for the pace of other languages. But underneath it, like a melody heard through a wall, Kashika could hear the shape of something else. A girl's voice. Telling a story. She listened carefully, asked three clarifying questions, and listened again. When the girl finished, Kashika was quiet for a moment. "Two separate actors," she said. "The figure wearing the mask — this new Skull Kid — who your grandfather believes is unconnected to the Dreamers. And the Dreamers themselves, who were using the chaos as cover." She turned this over. "The mask theft happened before the Dreamers arrived at the shop. Before the Skull Kid appeared at the Carnival. Someone knew the mask was there, knew the night of the Carnival was the moment to move, and moved precisely." She opened her notebook. "And separately, the Dreamers raided the shop's collection. Different goal. Different timing. They're not coordinating, and the Skull Kid might not even be aware of the Dreamers' machinations." The girl made a shorter sound. 'Makes sense.' "Your grandfather is a difficult man to surprise," Kashika said, mostly to herself. She wrote for a moment, then stopped. "And the Stalchildren here. The Deku Queen taken in the night." She looked at the notebook without seeing it. "The Dreamers have been busy." She closed the notebook and stood, brushing dust from her coat. "Come with me," she said. "There's something I want to show you." Her workroom was the only room in the palace that looked like she'd had a hand in furnishing it. The Deku aesthetic ran to carved wood and growing things; Kashika's ran to stacked paper and instruments in various states of disassembly and a large chalkboard that she'd had carried from Clock Town in pieces and reassembled here over the course of an afternoon that Ishala still occasionally mentioned. The Moon Tears were stored in a case against the far wall — thirty-two of them, each in its own velvet cradle, the crystallized tears of the moon caught on the business scrub's counter thirty-three years ago and brought by his children to her father, who had brought them to her. She unlocked the case. She did not take out a Moon Tear. She took out the thing beside the case: a small ocarina, pale blue-white, the color of winter sky just before the light gives out. It was not large — sized, in fact, for a child's hands, which had been intentional. "Moon Tear," she said, handing it over. "The same one the Hero of Time traded to the business scrub when he first arrived in Termina. I made this four years ago, after managing to locate it." She watched the girl turn it over. "I've tested it. In my hands it functions as an ordinary ocarina. I could not trigger any particular property from it beyond the acoustic." She folded her hands. "I had begun to think my theory was wrong. That it required a specific individual, or a specific lineage, or something I simply couldn't replicate without more data." A pause. "Your grandfather used to hum you a lullaby. Did you know there's another name for it?" The girl went still. "Play it," Kashika said. "The way he hummed it to you. Don't think about the notes — you know them. You've always known them." The girl raised the ocarina to the mask's mouth. A single note came out, tentative. Then silence. Kashika waited. "Again," she said, quietly. "From the beginning. And don't stop when it sounds wrong. It won't sound wrong for long." The second attempt lasted four notes before the girl's hands dropped. "You're trying to play it perfectly," Kashika said. "You're correcting yourself before you've finished the phrase. Stop correcting. Just play it the way he did — all the way through, even if it's imperfect. Especially if it's imperfect." A long pause. The sounds of the palace at night came in under the door — distant voices, the creak of timber, someone coughing in one of the dormitory corridors. Then the girl played it. It was not perfect. It wavered in the middle, and the third phrase came in slightly late, and the final note was held just a beat too long. It was exactly the way a child plays a song learned by ear from someone who loved them, and that, Kashika understood in the moment, was precisely the point. The light in the room changed. Not the torchlight — something underneath it, or threaded through it, the particular quality of illumination that existed in no lamp and no window but had a color somewhere between gold and the first warm feeling after cold. It came from the mask, and then it was everywhere at once, and then it was gone. The girl on the floor was not a Deku Scrub anymore. She was small, and dark-haired, and wearing a green cap that was slightly too large for her, and she was staring at her own hands with an expression that moved through several complicated feelings in rapid succession. Then she looked up at Kashika, and the expression simplified into something universal in every language that Kashika knew. She stood and put her arms around Kashika's waist and held on with the particular grip of someone who has been running for twenty-four hours straight and has finally been given permission to stop. Kashika, who was not an especially sentimental person, put one hand carefully on the girl's back and waited. "All right," she said, after a moment. "All right." The green cap fell sideways. Kashika straightened it. The girl's grip loosened. Then it did not loosen further — it simply stayed, and after another few seconds, it went slack altogether, and Kashika realized with mild alarm that the child had fallen asleep while standing up, held vertical only by the fact that she was leaning against someone. Her knees were already beginning to go. Kashika caught her before she hit the floor. She looked up and found, somewhat inevitably, that Squircle had been watching in the doorway — the road-worn young man who had, by all accounts, materialized in the Mask Shop at precisely the right moment and had spent the hours since functioning as an impromptu guardian to a girl he'd met during a catastrophe. He had the look of someone who had also not slept and was running on something beyond caffeine or willpower, but who was prepared to continue running on it for as long as necessary. "The east dormitory," Kashika said, shifting the girl's weight toward him. "Somewhere warm. She's done for the night." Ishala appeared in the doorway ten seconds later, which meant she'd been waiting outside it, which meant she'd heard some portion of what had happened. She had a look on her face that she would have denied was soft. Behind her, and somewhat below her, was the monkey. He was old. Kashika had known him for six years and he had been old when she arrived; she had no precise sense of how old, only that his face had a settled quality to it and his grey hair had gone silver at the temples and he moved with the deliberate care of someone who had learned long ago not to waste energy on unnecessary speed. He had been the Queen's companion for 33 years, at least. He had also been, briefly and unjustly, imprisoned in the Deku Palace's own dungeon, and he had not forgiven the former King for this, which was reasonable. He spoke. The sounds were fast and low and specific. "He says the Queen is alive," Kashika said, for Ishala's benefit. "She was taken to Woodfall Temple. The eastern approach, through the back route the monkeys use — they have three scouts watching the entrance." She listened. "Alive. Conscious, he thinks, though he only has the scouts' report and they're not — precise observers." She tilted her head. "He says there were Dreamers. And something else. He can't describe it in terms I can translate cleanly. Something old inside the temple that wasn't sleeping the way it should be." Ishala's expression did not change. She was very good at that. "Odolwa," Ishala said. "Or something like It," Kashika said. "The Hero of Time defeated Odolwa. Defeated — not destroyed. Returned the Giant to its proper place." Kashika moved to the chalkboard. "If the Dreamers have a way to reverse that. To pull the Giant back out of its rest, use it — or worse, use the Queen as leverage over it—" She wrote the word leverage and circled it. "The Giant won't distinguish between Dreamers and the rest of us. We can't count on it to." Ishala walked in and stood in front of the chalkboard, reading the equations Kashika had been building for the last four hours. "You'll need the girl, won't you?" "Yes." "Show me." Kashika picked up the Deku mask from the table where she'd set it. She held it up to her own face. Nothing — the same nothing it had always given her, the solid passivity of an object that knew it was in the wrong hands. She passed it to Ishala, who tried with the same result. The monkey hopped up onto the table and regarded the mask with his wizened eyes and tried for himself, turning it over and tapping the painted wood once, firmly, as if that might help. Nothing. He set it down and looked at Kashika and said something very short. "He says it knows who it belongs to," she said. Ishala looked at the mask. "Same age." "Near enough." "Same clothes." "I noticed." "What are you thinking?" Kashika picked up the mask again and turned it over. The painted face gazed up at her, eyes closed, patient. "I'm thinking that the Hero of Time was a child, and he is thirty-three years gone, and this world is in exactly the kind of trouble that summoned him the first time." She set the mask down carefully. "I'm thinking that the universe has a particular fashion sense." She paused. "And I'm thinking we need that girl at Woodfall Temple tomorrow." The dawn came gray and close, the swamp holding the light the way swamps hold everything — reluctantly, at depth, releasing it only when they had no choice. The courtyard had been cleared of ash. The tables in the Royal Chamber held the remnants of the night's meal, and the people sleeping in the dormitories and along the corridor walls and in the corners of the gardens were sleeping the deep specific sleep of those who had earned it. Kashika stood at the entrance to the main hall and looked at the faces gathered there: Clock Wards in their dented helms, Deku Scouts with bags and bands of fresh Deku seeds, refugees who had crossed the swamp road twelve hours ago and were now, improbably, being asked to cross further. Danna was at the front, back straight, the cut above her eye still visible. Ishala was beside Kashika, her sword at her hip. The monkey sat on the throne's armrest with his arms folded, silver-haired and grave. Kashika did not have a talent for speeches. She had a talent for explaining things clearly and expecting people to understand them. "The Deku Queen is in Woodfall Temple," she said. "The same people who sent the Stalchildren against this palace took her there. We believe they're attempting to use her to reawaken something in that temple for some nefarious purpose. If they succeed, the threat to this palace — and to everyone currently sleeping in it — becomes considerably worse." She let that sit for a moment. "We are going this morning. Some of you will come with us. Some of you will stay." She looked at the room. "I will not tell you that the ones who stay have the easier task. This palace has good walls and good scouts and the people in those dormitories deserve protection. Staying is a choice. So is coming." She straightened her coat. "I will tell you that we cannot do this with half a heart in either direction. Decide now, and decide clearly, and do not apologize for whichever you choose." The fire in the courtyard pit had burned down to embers. Outside the gates, the swamp was waking up — birds first, then insects, then the soft settling sounds of water finding its level. Somewhere above all of it, still, the moon. Kashika picked up her notebook and her coat and the pale blue ocarina that had worked, finally, in the right hands. "Right," she said. "Let's go save the Queen." Meanwhile... A woman was walking into the Royal Chamber, eyes a bit too wide and scanning the room, hands still a bit too pink despite thorough washing from yesterday's horror. "Coliver?" she said, looking at the assembled faces that were currently assembling their own judgements upon this interruption. "Excuse me, I'm looking for my friend. I haven't seen her since-" "We're all missing people," one of the more gruff members retorted. "North Gate fell with most of the people in it, most of my men in it." "No, you don't understand!" the Zora said. "My name is Makazi, and Coliver and Marton and I all made it here. Marton was fighting, but Coliver was trying to get food in the gardens, or helping out with the injured - I saw her here! Last night! Safe!" Makazi looked at the people in front of her. "Someone has to have seen her. Please?" RP Quest: Join the rescue mission to Woodfall Temple and Save the Deku Queen @Ashbringer disappeared overnight and was removed from the Loop. Players can now vote to remove one of their own from the Loop. Player List 0 Amanuensis Ap the Apprentice 1 @The Unknown Order Heroshi 2 @Araris Valerian Arenta 3 @Wahrheitswächter Wahi 4 @Ashbringer Coliver 5 @coco.pudding Amora 6 @|TJ| Cosmetica 7 @Honors Ghost 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

N2-A is now closed. Please stand by for D3-A. It might take me a bit.

30 minutes remaining

Is a Deku vegetarian technically a cannibal? Are they more horrific if they only have a taste for flesh? Anyway, approximately 2 hours and 50 minutes remain in the Night

Just to clarify my OP announcement re:PMs, you can send messages tonight as well. Same 500 word cap divided in 100 word increments (200 to one player, 100 to three players, w/e combination). I felt that PMs were too weak in their current state, given all the other limitations.

Sorry that one took so long now to go rush to finish my maths

LG110, Night 2-A: "Safe" Harbor Day 2-A will end on Tuesday, February 24th @ 10:00 PM EST. Professor Kashika The bones burned well. That was the one mercy. Stalchildren were not like ordinary dead things. Bury them and they came back. Scatter them and they came back. But fire — proper fire, hot enough and long enough — unmade them in a way that stuck. Professor Kashika had confirmed this through experiment two years ago when a particularly bold Stalchild had wandered through the embassy's east window and she'd had nothing on hand but a lantern and her own considerable irritation. She'd written it up afterward. Ishala had not been surprised by the methodology. She had, by now, stopped being surprised by most of Kashika's methodologies. The courtyard was full of smoke. Kashika stood at the edge of it with her notebook open and her hair escaping its braid in every direction, watching the pyre and making notes about burn rate. Behind her, Ishala cleaned her blade on a scrap of cloth with the economical care of someone who had cleaned a great many blades over the years. "Thirty-seven," Kashika said. "Thirty-eight," Ishala corrected. "You missed the one in the east garden." Kashika made the correction. "Thirty-eight Stalchildren, mobilized, coordinated, sent against a single target." She drew a line under the number. "Someone organized them. They don't do that on their own." "No." Ishala sheathed the blade. "They don't." The smoke rose in a dark column over the palace walls. In the distance — from the north, from the direction of Clock Town — the sky had a quality Kashika didn't like. Too bright for this hour. Too orange. She had been not-looking at it for the last several hours with the practiced discipline of someone who understood that looking at it would make it harder to work. "She'll be all right," Ishala said. Not for the first time. "You don't know that." "The monkeys are fast. And the Queen is not a fool." Kashika closed her notebook. "The monkeys are fast and the Queen is not a fool and we are standing in her burning courtyard at dawn with thirty-eight piles of ash where her palace guard used to be." She pressed the notebook against her sternum. "I ran the calculations last night. The moon is accelerating. Not quickly — not yet — but the rate is not stable. If it continues—" She stopped. "If it continues," Ishala said evenly, "you'll figure out something." "I am a physicist, Ishala. Not a—" "I know what you are." Ishala came up beside her. She was a head taller, and she had the particular quality of stillness that Gerudo warriors developed over years of training in the desert, the kind that felt less like the absence of movement and more like the presence of something waiting to move. "I also know what you'll do." Kashika looked at her. "And what is that?" "You'll stand in this courtyard and list the reasons it's impossible." Ishala's voice was matter-of-fact. Not unkind, just precise, the way she was precise about most things. "And then you'll go inside and start working on how to do it anyway. Because that's what you do. It's what you've always done." She paused. "It's why they came for me. Before all this started." Kashika went still. "You told me they approached you. You didn't tell me what they said." The silence lasted a breath too long. "They showed me the moon," Ishala said. "A vision. I don't know how — some mask they had. In it, the moon had already fallen. Clock Town was—" She didn't finish that sentence. "They said it was inevitable. That anyone with eyes to see had already accepted it. That the only question was whether you faced the end as a coward or a soldier." Her jaw tightened slightly. "I told them they had mistaken me for someone without options and left." "And then they sent the Stalchildren." "Then they sent the Stalchildren." Kashika was quiet for a moment. The pyre crackled. A monkey screamed somewhere deep in the swamp — distant, not distress, the high territorial call they used to mark direction — and both women turned their heads toward it. "She's alive," Ishala said. "I know." Kashika opened her notebook again. "I know." They heard the boats before they saw them. The flat wooden knock of a hull against the dock posts carried well over the swamp water, followed by voices — the particular sound of a large number of people trying to be quiet simultaneously, which produced a noise all its own. Ishala had two Deku scouts positioned at the outer gate. The gate itself was solid old timber, twice the height of a man, wrapped in living vines that the Deku cultivated deliberately — they served as a secondary alarm system, sensitive enough to tremble when someone put weight on the bridge. The bridge was trembling. Considerably. The gate opened on the first vanguard group and kept opening as more came through behind it. Kashika watched them cross the outer bridge: a young Clock Ward with a cut on her brow and the posture of someone who had been in charge of things all night and was not quite ready to stop yet; soldiers and civilians mixed together without the usual social distance between the two; a Deku scrub — Hylian-sized, wrong for a Deku Scrub, and moving with the visible self-consciousness of someone wearing a body they hadn't chosen. Several others who had the particular look of people who had recently fought something and won and were still deciding how they felt about it. The Ward commander reached the courtyard and looked at the smoking pyres and then at Kashika and said: "Professor Kashika?" "Yes." "Danna. Acting commander, Clock Ward southern escort." She looked at the smoke again. "We saw this from the swamp road. We thought—" "The palace is intact." Kashika gestured at the pyre. "Stalchildren. Overnight. We dealt with them." A pause. "The Queen is a different matter." The exchange that followed was not quick, but it was thorough. Danna had a soldier's instinct for information — she delivered hers clearly and received Kashika's in the same spirit, without interrupting and without the kind of visible horror that slowed things down. Clock Town evacuated. South gate the only clean exit. Hundreds still on the swamp road waiting for boats. The moon. The mask. The Dreamers with their branded wrists and their fused faces. A girl who had worn a hero's mask and couldn't take it off, from what she gathered from that Squircle fellow. Kashika wrote as Danna talked. Ishala listened and said nothing, which was her version of paying close attention. When Danna finished, there was a silence. "Majora's Mask," Kashika said. "Yes." "Stolen." "Yes." She wrote that down too, drew a box around it, and looked at Ishala. Ishala looked back. An entire conversation passed between them in the span of three seconds — the kind that only happened between people who had been in each other's company long enough to develop a shared shorthand for catastrophe. Kashika closed her notebook. "The palace will take your people. All of them." She turned to the nearest Deku staff member, a senior attendant who had been standing at a respectful distance throughout this conversation with the practiced patience of his profession. "Mako. Dormitories, full capacity. And tell the kitchens to start — everything. Whatever we have." Mako bowed and departed at a brisk shuffle. "We have eight boats we can put on the water," Ishala said to Danna. "Not tourist craft — our embassy security fleet. Flat-bottomed, six oars each. Send two back now and two more in thirty minutes. We'll have everyone across before midday." Danna's shoulders dropped a fraction. Just a fraction. "Thank you." "Come," Kashika said, and turned toward the palace entrance. "I'll show you where to put people. Then I need to find the Apprentice." The Deku Palace did not look like a human building. It did not try to. The outer gate gave way to the entry bridge — planks of pale cedar spanning the bogwater, lily pads drifting below on both sides, the surface of the water carrying the morning light in pieces — and the bridge led to a second, inner gate, this one carved all over with the Deku Kingdom's emblems: the great flower, the spinning top, the crescent moon they'd adopted long before the moon became an urgent concern. The gates were open. Beyond them, the main corridor ran straight to the Royal Chamber: a high-ceilinged hall of close-set timber, walls of living wood that had been trained and shaped over generations, the grain running in deliberate patterns that caught the torchlight differently at different hours. Vegetable plots ran along both sides between the columns. The Deku grew their food inside the palace walls the way other cultures grew flowers — as a matter of comfort as much as necessity. The smell was green and faintly sweet. The inner gardens opened off either side of the corridor — wide, tiered spaces where platforms of compacted soil rose on climbing vines, patrolled on normal days by guards who had, currently, more important things to do. The guard stations were empty. The gardens were not: Deku staff were already moving through them with the organized efficiency of people who had been given a task they understood, rolling out sleeping pallets from the storage rooms beneath the raised beds, carrying linens from the dormitory wing in stacked armloads. The dormitories themselves were built along the palace's eastern face, long rooms with low beds of woven grass that smelled of the particular clean smell of things dried in open air. Small. Warm. The Deku ran their buildings at a temperature that their visitors sometimes found close, but close meant warm, and warm meant sleep, and most of the people coming through the gate had not slept in close to a full day. "Families with children in the east dormitory," Kashika said, walking. She did not slow down for the tour; people could follow or not. "Injured in the anteroom off the Royal Chamber — the floor is flat, easier to lay people down. The Chamber itself we'll use as a common room, but the Queen's seat remains untouched." She paused at a junction. "She would have objected to that, incidentally. She won't be objecting to anything at the moment." Kashika kept walking. The Royal Chamber opened wide at the corridor's end — vaulted ceiling, the great flowering throne at the far wall, currently empty, the carved wood of the dais still and formal. The boiling punishment pot had been covered with a cloth. Under the circumstances, this seemed like the right call. Guards were setting up long tables across the floor, trestle-style, stretching from the base of the dais almost to the doors. Through the chamber's side arch, the kitchens were already making noise. "Eat," Kashika said, to the room, to anyone listening. "Sleep. The dormitories will be ready within the hour. If you have injuries you haven't addressed, the anteroom." She stopped at the center of the chamber and turned to face the stream of exhausted people coming through the corridor behind her. "The moon is not falling tonight." A pause. "Tonight, you are safe." She said it with enough certainty that several people in the doorway stopped moving for a moment. She believed, more or less, about sixty percent of it. That was enough for tonight. She went to find the girl with the Deku mask that wouldn't come off. RP Quest: Explore the Deku Palace, get something to eat, and get some rest until the morning. (5) Wahrheit: Araris, Mistfallen, coco, TJ, Divergent, (2) Hoid Slayer: Archer, Doc12, (2) Archer: Wonko, Hoid Slayer, (2) Mistfallen: Wahrheit, TUM, (1) Coder: Stick, @Wahrheitswächter vanished mysteriously during the boat ride and was removed from the Loop. The Postman's Hat remains donned and Night PMs will be allowed to be delivered in the Day. Player List 0 Amanuensis Ap the Apprentice 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

Sorry, had to step away for a moment. Day 2-A is now over! Take a load of while I prep Night 2-A.

15 minutes remain (5) Wahrheit: Araris, Mistfallen, coco, TJ, Divergent, (2) Hoid Slayer: Archer, Doc12, (2) Archer: Wonko, Hoid Slayer, (2) Mistfallen: Wahrheit, TUM, (1) Coder: Stick,

GM Confirmed Vote Count (4) Wahrheit: Araris, Mistfallen, coco, TJ, (3) Archer: Wonko, Hoid Slayer, Doc12, (2) Mistfallen: Wahrheit, TUM, (1) Wonko: Divergent, (1) Haelbarde: Archer, (1) Coder: Stick, Just under an hour and a half remains in the Day