For being nearly a hundred and twenty years old, Robbie turned out to be quite a spry old man and they only needed a few hours to make their way back to his place. Well, first they made it to East Akkala Stable at the foot of the hill the lab resided on top of.
"Director." A dark-skinned Hylian of blonde hair approached us. "Did you find what the disturbance was all about?"
"Ah, Aya, yes, yes. Seems you were right, getting out of my lab for a bit did lead to some interesting discoveries." The old man admitted with a wry smile.
The Hylian giggled and turned to look at Magnus. "And who is this? A traveler?"
"This is Magnus, he will be learning at the lab for a bit." Robbie said, making him nod in greeting.
Aya looked at him, measuring him up, after a moment she nodded. "I see, then I will see you around, Magnus. And please come out more frequently, director, staying cooped up all day in there, don't make me talk to your wife."
Robbie's goggles rolled as if they were his eyes and practically dragged him up the hill. Magnus could only smile and follow along, it was nice to see the area wasn't as empty as he had thought at first. Just because there was no 'settlement' didn't mean people didn't live in the area.
The building was quite impressive. If Magnus had to guess, it had been a lighthouse in the far past given just how solid the construction was of what had been left. On top of a massive telescope and crane set had been built. On the side rested a pile of destroyed, disarmed, rusted and abandoned guardians, on the other there was some kind of forge glowing blue and holding a similarly blue fire going.
Robbie approached it, pressed his hand on the side and nodded.
The old man turned to look at Magnus. "This," he gestured to the glowing totem, "is the secret of Sheikah technology, the blue flame!" A chord marked his words. "This is not magic, but still powers all the Sheikah technology, all guardians, the divine beasts and even the shrine of resur- nevermind the last one." He grumbled and continued. "My ancestors created it in a way I have still not revealed the secrets from, but I've managed to use it to create new things. Come, follow me and I will show you the fruit of my research!" Another chord sounded as he headed into the lab.
"Robbie, is that you?" A blonde Hylian woman prompted as the two of them entered. "I heard your silly accompaniment." There was warmth in her voice.
"Jerrin," he answered in a similar manner, "I've brought a visitor, and prospective student."
"Greetings." Magnus bowed his head to her. "I'm Magnus."
Before Jerrin could say anything, Robbie started speaking. "He was the source of the disturbance… what did you do exactly?" He turned to look at him.
"I used some darkness and light to trick the Yiga attacking me into thinking I had more people as support."
"Can you do it again?" The old man prompted.
Magnus nodded. "Yup, just remember it's not real." He breathed in and blew through a nearly closed fist, as if he was using a trumpet.
A much more controlled cloud of Darkness spilled out, it easily held a vague oval shape, sagging towards the bottom. The room visibly grew darker as the Darkness cloud swallowed all light that hit the ethereal construct.
"Very impressive." Robbie observed it closer.
"It's not done, that's just the first step." Magnus said and concentrated on the element of Light.
This part was a bit harder, especially in such restricted space, and one so well illuminated. But after a bit a pale hand with nails painted green reached out, grabbing onto the edge of the cloud of Darkness to open it up like a passage. The hand was connected with a similarly pale skin, the only color that showed all the way to her shoulder were the green tribal-like tattoos decorating her skin.
The young woman that appeared to step out of the darkness was his sister Claire, who shared his mother's blood. She was about his height, as noted before her skin was practically chalk white and almost glowing, the green tattoos she had gotten did glow, same as her eyes, though that only came up when she was feeling emotional. His most recent memories of her were of her hair having turned orange, so he went with that, honestly he didn't remember if she had ever set a color for it.
A moment later the illusion collapsed on itself as his control over the Darkness slipped, once that happened, the Light was free to break away from the construct and dissipate.
"Who was that?" Jerrin prompted.
"My sister Claire, or well, half sister since we share a mother." Magnus explained.
Robbie stepped forward, approaching the spot the illusion had been cast, his goggles moved around, inspecting everything. "Very impressive, I don't think I have seen light and dark used that way."
"It's a trick I remembered not too long ago." He admitted. "And works mostly because both elements are sourced from me, their interaction can get particular."
The old man nodded. "So you created a much larger one." He stated.
Magnus nodded. "Yes, it was also night so it was much easier to saturate the area before creating as many illusions of my siblings as I could. The hardest part was messing with their sense of balance to induce vertigo, which was done by brute forcing a pressure change with Light and Dark, which neither are good at."
"Interesting… it does give me some good ideas." Robbie mused and Jerrin rolled her eyes.
"Still, I promised to tell you my story once we arrived." Magnus said and once the three of them had sat down he proceeded to tell the married couple of researchers about the nature of his arrival to Hyrule.
Once he finished talking the two older people kept their thoughtful silence for a few moments.
Jerrin once more felt like the voice of reason. "That sounded very irresponsible of you, and your family to allow you to do that."
"Maybe, but it honestly feels mild compared to something I remember getting into with my siblings. There was one time when we were eight and decided to see what it felt to be in each other's bodies, so we got our minds switched around a few times. Or the time we got turned into mice, the time we decided to live a whole day with inverted gravity, or the time… well, you could say my life even before coming to Hyrule was very interesting, and I still don't remember all of it." Magnus told her.
It didn't seem to ease the older Hylian's impression.
Robbie, instead nodded to himself. "I was right in offering you a chance to study under me, not only do I get a student with a high potential," Magnus chuckled at the word, "but I can also throw it at Purah's face for not wanting to teach my son." He nodded to himself, followed by one of those chords.
He then seemed to remember something. "Also, let me show you my work." He laughed jovially and jumped off his chair to move to the center of the room. "This is my creation, the ancient oven, I managed to build it using what I learned from the ancient Sheikah technology, fed the necessary materials it can reconstruct old parts and even create some new ones I designed myself."
Magnus looked at it, he found it pretty similar to Dogu figurines, which fit given the Sheikah's very Japanese aesthetics. Robbie picked something off the table and showed it to him.
"This is an example, the Ancient Arrow." He explained and tapped carefully on the oversized head, causing it to open and project a glowing blue edge reminding him of the same blue flame and energy the Sheikah used. "It was originally designed to deal with the Calamity once it awoke, now it's just measurably more effective against Guardians and similar threats." He added regretfully.
Jerrin interrupted the moment. "If you'll be staying we will have to talk about accommodations, you can stay in our son's room since he's traveling." She stated and soon they were discussing some other subjects like the division of chores and such.
Magnus was quite hopeful for his stay at the lab, he already had a few ideas to discuss with the two of them for things to do.
Kohga, leader of the Yiga clan, was grumbling to himself, maybe a bit louder than he should. But he was the damn leader of the clan and everyone knew better than to open their mouths just because he was being loud. He would be as loud as he wanted!
He kicked the ground a couple of times in frustration before he resumed walking, part of him already dreaded meeting the elders he was going to visit. The mission had been a failure, but in that failure something important had been learned.
He had been sure that sending two foot soldiers and a blade master would have been more than enough to capture the traveler. Maybe it was because he had given the order to capture that they had gone easy on him.
Not only had the traveler fought back, but apparently managed to summon some kind of back-up they had never seen before. He still didn't trust the comment about summoning a giant of some kind.
He would have called them cowards for running away instead of fighting like proper Yiga. But bringing the news of the Traveler's abilities was indeed a boon, the idea that they were capable of creating such unnatural darkness and summoning some kind of ghostly knights. It was like Calamity's abilities.
Kohga stopped walking and fixed his clothes and mask, made sure his hair was in place and faced the door in front of him. He breathed in deep to tuck his belly a bit before he pushed the door aside and entered the room.
"Elders, I bring news about a way to possibly revive the Calamity." He stated triumphantly.
If he played things right, maybe there was still a way to profit from the Traveler's presence for his clan.
Magnus found it very easy to click into a new routine with Robbie and Jerrin.
If anything he had quite the amount of free time during the morning and nights, meaning he had resumed his morning routine of training.
After that came a few chores for the day, cleaning both the laboratory and living areas before preparing some food for the day. After that Magnus' job was to go through all notes the two researchers had and utilize his system to organize and archive them.
While the two of them were quite organized, there were decades of research notes, papers, annotations, ideas, commentaries, observations, experiments and who knows what else. It had only taken an offer from him to utilize the System to put things in order to be practically ordered to do so.
Not only helped a lot in familiarizing with things, but also pushed him quickly into acquiring a new perk that fit the situation like a glove. It provided him with knowledge and experience for proper scientific documentation, not just organizing it, but understanding and more easily drawing correct conclusions even from fragmented clues of information.
He was glad to have learned to speak and read Hylian, though he was also quickly learning the meaning of Sheikah runes as he transcribed all the knowledge in. It was also around the third day of just inputting knowledge that he decided it would make it harder later on if he didn't start to organize things as he added them.
This quickly devolved when the effects of his latest perk were noticed by Robbie and Jerrin. There was no actual visible effect, but the multiple screens projected in front of him.
"Uh, I barely remember having written that." Jerrin commented as she eyed one of the entries concerning the input system of the Ancient Oven.
Magnus looked at it. "Oh, that's because you didn't write it about the Ancient Oven, you see the different background color? That signals it's actually been added from another point," he tapped on it, causing a second screen to open up, "as you can see, it comes from this study of general input systems in Sheikah tech, I just felt it complemented very effectively the description of the system." He explained. "Especially because it explains something you go over a few paragraphs below while also giving the reader a good direction if they want to know more about the subject."
He was actually pretty proud of how he was managing to organize things, the joys of digital media and its advantages over physical storage when dealing with large amounts of data.
"You know, we never thought about adapting the Sheikah Slate to provide this kind of function. It would have certainly made a lot of note keeping much easier." Robbie said out loud, though it appeared to be mostly to himself.
"Sheikah Slate?" Magnus asked as he continued working.
The old man nodded. "It was one of the pieces of ancient tech we managed to recover during the initial excavations and get it working. It's a handheld tool that allows its user to interact with all other Sheikah Technology along with providing a number of useful abilities." He said and drew a rectangle with his fingers. "In a way it's much like your System. Can't tell you much of the specifications as Purah took the lead in getting it working, but I can tell you we wanted to reproduce it as its use would have been invaluable in the efforts of fighting Calamity Ganon."
"Can't you use the Ancient Oven for it?" He prompted.
Both adults shook their heads. "No, even now Cherry's not advanced enough to reproduce the Slate." Robbie answered. "Maybe if I had Purah's notes I could get it to cobble something very basic together. But the Sheikah Slate was on the level of the Divine Beasts in complexity, too advanced unfortunately."
While the subject of reproducing the slate was put aside for the moment, the two researchers had regained a sort-of fire and taken quite the interest in not just Magnus' work with their documentation. But also finding a way to generate some method for accessing the digitally stored information.
He was a bit surprised when a week after he arrived the Ancient Oven suddenly turned off during a maintenance routine.
"Ah! The flame went out." Robbie stated.
"It looks that way." Jerrin asserted.
"What does that mean?" Magnus asked.
Robbie turned to him. "You remember the flame I showed you on the first day? Well, that's not a source of blue flame, more of a receptacle, the actual source is on the hill next to it." He answered. "If you go out at night you can make it flicker in the distance, one trip lasts quite a bit, but it was our son, Grante, who used to take the trips over. Since he left to travel I forgot we had not set a replacement."
The old man grumbled and continued. "I will have to go do it quickly."
"You can't go, Robbie, you're too old and there are monsters on that hill." Jerrin reproached him.
The young man thought about it and pointed at himself. "So I should go instead, I'm definitely capable of fighting monsters and I can easily run away if necessary."
He certainly had no problem about it, plus it would be nice to go out and stretch his legs, back in Death Mountain it had become a bit of a problem to find a good moment for himself given how busy he had gotten himself.
Jerrin nodded and without a word grabbed a torch before handing it over. "Thank you for keeping this old coot from hurting himself." Robbie just flinched embarrassed.
Magnus laughed a bit and took the torch before nodding to her and walking out of the laboratory. Looking in the direction of the other hill he could actually make the faint flicker of blue.
The distance between hills was a bit too far for him to blink across, forcing him to head down by foot to a better position to do the jump. He really hoped there was a monster on the other hill to make up for the trip.
Prince Sidon was feeling more than a bit nervous. He had expected Magnus to arrive at the Zora Domain a few days earlier, but time had passed and there had been no news of the traveler.
He had sent some of his people out to confirm he had left Death Mountain and many had confirmed to have seen him heading down the path and even stayed in the Foothill Stable for a short time afterwards. But after that he seemed to disappear.
"My prince." A Zora guard approached him. "We have er… news about the traveler."
"Tell me." He ordered as gently as possible.
"He hasn't been seen in any stable South from the Foothill Stable and there's been no news about a purple-haired traveler, but we did find signs that the Hinox West from the Akkala Falls was felled not long ago." The guard explained.
"Did anyone in the stable to the North from there see anything?" He asked.
"No sir."
"If he didn't head there, then where he…" Sidon stopped as he connected the dots. "The Great Fairy Fountain! She must have seen him." He turned to the guard. "Spread the message that I will go look for the traveler myself, I think I know where he went."
"Prince-"
The words were lost as the Zora prince rushed off the edge and into the waters below. He swam quickly North and used one of the underwater channels that fed the spring for Toto Lake; it was the fastest way to get to the falls on the other side of the mountains. He would have liked to ride the water all the way to the lake, but the elevated East wall on the lake would make it pretty hard for him to climb.
Instead he stopped before taking the falls down to the lake and took the road East, it felt frustrating for the prince to have to walk when he wanted to rush. But at the same time he knew there was no rushing, a few more minutes now didn't change Magnus hadn't been seen for days.
Soon he had to step off the road to head in the direction of the Great Fairy Fountain. Instantly he noticed just how lucious the area was, there were blooming flowers everywhere and animals scurrying all over the place. The sound of dozens of tiny feet splashing in puddles and rushing through moist bushes.
He felt a bit guilty for not having visited the Fairy in a long time, especially when she basically made sure the area thrived. Though he did remember the area being a bit more sparse, and it hadn't been long enough for the Akkala Maples to have grown so much, he actually was pretty sure these trees didn't grow to more than ten meters in height, and these were easily reaching double that and growing thicker.
In comparison he wasn't surprised to see the fountain in full bloom, surrounded by plants, critters and more than a few small fairies flickering constantly. Sidon stepped up the mushrooms, Mija didn't make herself wait as she emerged in full glory.
"Ah! If it isn't the little Prince, my oh my, how have you grown." She greeted him jovially.
"Greetings Great Fairy Mija, I came to inquire if a traveler called Magnus came around in the last few days." He decided to go straight to the point.
"Oh yes, the little man," she laughed softly, "he came around about ten days ago, he filled me with so much energy…" Mija shivered, causing her accessories to tinkle, "you can see the results of that."
He nodded to her words. "I can see, it's good to see that Magnus could help. But I came because no one has seen him after heading in this direction."
"He arrived late in the day and headed to Tarrey island to pass the night, apparently he was attacked by Yiga there." Sidon stiffened and Mija just laughed. "Oh, don't make that face. The young man got away safely, he even made sure to come back and reassure me he was okay after it happened."
That eased his worries, though it didn't completely exclude the possibility he was attacked again shortly after.
"Then do you know what he did after he left the second time?"
"He told me he was going to head North and then West to go around the lake towards the stable before heading towards the Zora Domain. But if he never-" She stopped talking when one of the fairies fluttering around forced itself up towards her ear.
Sidon knew that technically all fairies could speak, it was just that none could understand their voice outside of other fairies and similar beings.
"Oh… oh… I see...You're in luck, young prince. It seems this little one decided to follow Magnus after he left the second time, apparently she was a curious one." Mija started and poked the fairy, the glowing being tinkled around happily, playing with her finger. "She says Magnus met an old man where the road splits and headed further North after talking for a bit. She didn't dare go closer, so she didn't hear, but it appeared it wasn't forced."
Sidon nodded. "Thank you for the news, Great Fairy Mija, and you little fairy." He smiled honestly, feeling a sense of relief.
Mija laughed softly. "Don't worry, little prince, you're just worrying for a friend after all." He nodded to her words and once more thanked her, but as he prepared to leave she stopped him. "Don't rush, I do have a little gift for such an honorable worry."
Sidon stopped confused and faced the fairy.
"As you can see, Magnus really provided me with a lot of extra energy, enough I can bestow a little boon upon you to make your search easier." She explained and leaned down, her hands gently wrapping around his body and pulling the Zora closer.
From outside it may look like a kiss, but the prince's been modestly trained in the basics of magic. He can observe the Great Fairy's blessing wrap around him, reinforcing his clothing in multiple levels. It's also a very relaxing and personal experience.
"There we go." Mija placed him down again. "It should provide you with some of the speed you enjoy in water on land."
"Once more you've my gratitude." Sidon bowed. "I will be going now, though I promise to try and come around more often, I think we Zora have forgotten the services the Great Fairies provide to our region."
Mija just rolled her eyes and giggled, wishing him well.
Sidon quickly returned to the road before giving the blessing a try and started running through the road. He was used to going fast being one of the fastest Zora in the kingdom, but that was in water, on land he was as fast as any Hylian, maybe even a bit slower given how moving in land felt almost awkward and forced.
Now he felt the same comfort on land than in water, it allowed him to swim through the air without actually swimming. It made its way to the East Akkala Stable very quickly.
Considering that there are tons of ruins all thousands of years old. I'd consider anything younger than 1000 or so rather recent.
