[center][h1][color=darkgreen]Linkle[/color][/h1][/center] [center][h3][color=red]Merge Rate: 33%[/color][/h3][/center] [center]Word Count: 2228 [/center] [center][color=darkgreen]Level 10[/color] - (30/100) + 3[/center] [center]Location: Frozen Highlands ~ Snowdin Outskirts [/center] [i][color=67a4e0]Frisk[/color] [@Majoras End] [color=skyblue]Albedo[/color] [@Lugubrious][/i] [hr][hr] "Maybe Frisk isn't erasing the time. They could just be creating a whole new timeline when they go back, leaving the old one behind." Linkle added to Albedo's ruminations on Frisk's ability. "There's a Legend where the Hero did something like that, going forward in time then coming back to stop the Demon King Ganon in the past after he had already done it the future. My teacher used to get in full on shouting matches with the other old timers in the village over what that meant for the future the Hero traveled to." She sheepishly scratched the side of her face. "I could never really wrap my head around it. I don't think something can just all of a sudden not have happened after it's already happened, you know? Because it happened." After taking a short rest, long enough for Frisk and Papyrus to have a little talk, the three of them set off without the Stalfos. Linkle grabbed her sled and pulled it after Albedo as they trudged through the snow, offering Frisk a ride amid all her loot if they didn't feel like walking. As they traveled without any obvious dangers across the snowfield, Linkle caught their new companion up to speed on their situation. "Most everybody had red eyes, that's how you can tell they've got Galeem in their heads. They can't see it up there. They can't even think about it, so it's no use trying to tell them something is wrong unless you free them. And if one of it's minions tells them to do something they have to do it." She furrowed her borrow, a grimace worming its way across her face. "Everything is still fuzzy, but I think that's how it was for me. I've only been free for a few days and I think I was part of a posses they assembled and sent after this cute little pink guy named Kirby. When we woke up we found him impaled with a sword." "Oh, he's okay!" She added quickly. "There was a healer on hand, this Medabot girl named Blazermate. She saved him. If she hadn't been there I don't..." She trailed off, but she knew exactly what would have happened and she was sure the others would to. She shook her head, moving on to a more pleasant part of the story. "Anyway it was a good thing she did. He was the one that freed us, the whole group at once. Me, Tora, Bowser, Blazermate, Din. There were a lot of us, they must have hated him. I'm not sure how he was free, and he couldn't talk well enough to tell us, but I guess he just avoided it or shook it off himself. There are people that can do that. Albedo got this close to curing himself with alchemy!" She held up a hand, braggadociously holding her fingers just a tiny width apart. "The Master of Masters was another. We met him while wandering down the road we found ourselves on. He's the one who taught us about Spirits, how to make Friend Hearts, and told us we were the one that were destined to save the world. He can see the future with a magic eye he lost somewhere, so he already knows how everything ends." "We eventually learned there were thirteen of these Guardians that we had to take down. The first one was a big, evil, even bossier version of my friend Bowser. I didn't get to join that fight, though. There's this monster called Master Hand, he's like an actual giant hand that works for Galeem, and he always shows up to mess with us before we confront a Guardian. He summoned a bunch of our groups loved one and told them to kill us if we tried entering Dragon Bowser's lair, so while everyone who got past that was fighting him I was trying to save another friends boyfriend and he wouldn't [i]stop healing himself so couldn't get a heart into him so I missed the whole battle.[/i]" The frustration of the memory was palpable. "It was a really dirty thing to do to us, so I'll never forgive it." "But they won without me, and we got a bunch of new friends when the whole castle Dragon Bowser was using for a lair was released when he went down. There's this wave of darkness that shoots out that washes the Galeem out of the heads of anyone around when you beat the Guardian, it's really handy. Then, I guess somebody found a map of the world in the castle that we've been using to travel around looking for more Guardians. We split up to cover more ground, some of us went to this place called the Dead Zone. That'll be important later. The first place my group ended up was this cool place called the Land of Adventure. It's great! There's this town called Lumbridge, full of heroes and quests to do, and apparently the whole land reforms around the town every night so every day is a new adventure. Anyway the most important guy in town, a man called the Guildmaster, sent us to do a bunch of quest before he would tell us where the biggest monster in the land was. We aced those quests! We knocked out every quest the town had to give in a single day." "I'm still not sure why, but after that the Guildmaster tried to kill us. Or, I guess, just fight us? He was acting really weird. See, when we met him he was dressed in a black coat just like the Master of Masters wore. He didn't know the Master of Masters, though, and when I was out doing something else he opened a portal and dumped a bunch of us into a casino where he was a giant and was making them fight these minions of his. I jumped in, and it turned out he has a dice for a head under his hood! His name was...hard to pronounce, at least the one he used. His real named turned out to be King Dice, I got that form one of his friends afterwards. I was in the middle of a fight when it happened, so I didn't see it, but another person in a black coat came around and took him away in the middle of everything. These Black Coat people are another confusing thing that keeps coming up. I don't know whose side they're actually on." "Eventually we hooked back up with Dead Zone group and headed out into the wilderness and found the guardian, this ENOURMOUSE dragon on a floating island in a black void. When we beat him the dark wave wiped the void away and showed us a placed called Smash City Alcamoth. It's really beautiful, this whole city floating over a crystal clear ocean. The people running it were friends with some of the people in our group, so we kinda turned it into our main base." "After that we divided into three teams to tackle three areas. The other team earlier hadn't gotten to the Guardian of the Dead Zone, so I went with with the team that headed back there to finish the job. The Dead Zone is awful, it's full of disease and the undead and some of the most disgusting monsters I've ever seen. There's a big evil tree growing right in the middle of the city. That's where we think the Guardian lives, but before we got to it we ran into this zombie girl named Marie. She was something called The Skullgirl." The high energy with which Linkle had relayed the rest of the story died out as she reached this part. "She fought us, we beat her, and then in her ashes we found this [i]thing[/i] called the skull heart. You can make any wish on it, and so long as that wish isn't [i]selfish[/i] it'll be granted. So I thought I was being really clever when I wished that I had enough power to beat Galeem and save everybody." She looked down, placing a hand over her chest. "But I'm not clever enough to see a trap even if everyone is telling me it's there. Nothing would ever be good enough for the Skull Heart, so it dove into my chest. Ate my heart. Brought me back from the dead. Now it lives in there, trying to turn me into Queen of the Stalfos like it was doing to Marie. Then a guy in a black coat showed up, a different one with time stopping powers and a knife. Apparently because he thought I was going to start killing [i]everyone[/i] he scooped me up, teleported me to the middle of nowhere, dared me to kill the Guardian of this area by myself, and left me in the snow. I wandered to Snowdin hoping to catch a boat back somewhere I knew, and that's where the wild man found me and punched me through Grillby's." She perked up at this point, looking fondly at the boy in front of her. "But after that I met Albedo, so I guess that day wasn't all bad. And I got that guy back pretty good, I used ice magic to freeze him up inside a ravine. Oh, speaking of..." The area was actually looking pretty familiar, so Linkle insisted they take a short detour across the snowfield to the ravine both to repair the seal in case it had been damaged and to show off her handiwork. What she found when they arrived, however, put her instantly on edge. The iceberg cap on the ravine had been shattered into pieces, chunks scattered hither, thither, and yon around an ominous hole in the ice. She stepped up, looking down into the darkness. She didn't know why, except maybe in the dumb hope that he was still there sleeping off the exertion before starting a vengeful rampage. At least he hadn't taken this out on Snowdin, though it was unfortunately impossible to tell when he had escaped. "Why can't seals ever keep evil bottled up forever?" She said, looking around the flat white land round her with worried eyes. There was no way to know where he was now. "Okay. If we see him he'll probably want me the most, so you two just leave it to me and keep heading to Edinburgh." She grabbed her sled again and hurried them along back to the path, encouraging Albedo by example to quicken the pace. "You won't have to worry, I'll catch up later. I already beat him once, I'll think of something." She continued the next leg of their journey tensely silent, scanning the horizon and even the sky for movement of any kind. The silence around them as they entered the forest was welcome and let her relax a little. They weren't out in the open anymore, and though he could be hiding behind any tree she didn't think he was that subtle. She would hear him coming, so she kept all four ears peeled as they walked. All she heard was their own footsteps and the distant cry of birds. Albedo noticed them to, but something about it peaked his interest. She nodded at his request to investigate, following after the boy as he lead them off the path. Anything that caught Albedo's interest would have to be pretty interesting, so she was curious herself about what significance he found in the bird calls. What they found was strange in how ordinary it was. Linkle grasped how strange it was to find a real corpse in the World of Light, let alone one so expertly butchered. Albedo helpfully laid out the significance of the body to their young companion, before continuing on just as cautiously as Linkle had been. The source of the body was discovered shortly afterwards, as the sounds of battle filtered through the forest and drew the three of them to a small ridge. Down below a small army of warriors and monks were engaging a massive creature. "Hey, I've seen that thing before. It was wandering around the icefield outside Snowdin." Linkle whipped out both her crossbows, starting forward to join help the warriors down the great beast, but Albedo held up a hand to single her to wait. The three strongest of the group had the fight well in hand, so she held back while he observed. It wasn't long after that the beast we felled by a spectacular display of magic from the fully armored fighter and the group began working on butchering it. Albedo said that was a mystery solved, but Linkle wasn't sure. Sure, these guys were probably responsible for butchering the animal they had found earlier but how did they manage to keep it together long enough to cut it to piece? Albedo turned to her and Frisk to see what the wanted to do, but to Linkle there was no question. She re-holstered her crossbows and cupped her hands around her mouth. "Heeeeey!" She called down to the group, waving her arms at them. "Hey Frisk, maybe you could ask that guy about his magic?" She said, before raising her voice back up to speak with the squadron. "Nice job! Are you guys from the monastery? We're friends with Father Guerra."