While in Gerudo, I bought the diamond necklace that protects against Guardian attacks for 1500, and then cleaned out the arrow shop of everything they had in stock. Their prices on arrows were too good to pass up. I spend over half my rupees, but it’s worth it. Well, I hope so.
Then I figure out how to eavesdrop on the bar in Gerudo, where the three women are talking about the secret club but wouldn’t tell me the password. I hear them say the password through the wall of the apartment next to the pub, and head over and try to get in. I’m successful, and it’s another clothing shop. They sell Gerudo-designed men’s clothing here, and they have a special suit made with luminous material that looks a skeleton. I would like to buy it, but I don’t have enough inventory slots to get it without getting rid of something else. This annoys me, since I have a house, back in Hateno, I should be able to keep stuff there, and not have to worry about running out of slots, and eventually get one of everything in the game, but apparently the design philosophy is not to allow this. So maybe I’ll buy it one day, or maybe I never will, but it’d be nice if I could figure out what it is useful for, and then get it if I really need it. I’m sure everything in the game has a purpose, and will be worthwhile for entertainment value if nothing else, but right now I don’t want to spend all my money and give up something that I know is useful in my inventory right now in order to get something that looks pretty cool, but I don’t know what it’s for. I don’t mind that the game limits what you can carry on you, but you really ought to be able to stash useful stuff somewhere.
I decide to head out into the desert and check out the southwest corner of the desert. It turns out to be a worthwhile expedition. I hike a very long way out into the wastes. Before very long I encounter the Muldorm, a whale-sized slug-like burrowing monster that can sense vibrations in the ground and is attracted to footsteps. I am only safe if I stand on a solid rock foundation. I can distract it by lobbing bombs, and if I am lucky I can trick it into swallowing a bomb and then detonate it. This only stuns the creature, but while it is disabled and helpless I have about 30 seconds to run up and hit it as much as I can with a heavy weapon. It takes 3-4 such cycles of this in order to defeat it. It drops a bunch of body parts, and some other loot.
I bring the muldorm guts back to Gerudo town and give it to the woman who needs it for her sick husband. She rewards me with 300 Rupees, which is one of the higher rewards I’ve received for a quest, but still not a great price for putting myself at such risk. Oh well, I’m not in it for the money.
I go back out into the desert, and this time I go still further. I had seen on the map what appeared to be a giant skeleton with the skull, and this is what I need to fulfill one of the other sidequests. After I get out about halfway, a sandstorm kicks up, and starts interfering with my map, and I lose reception. I just keep following a straight line, until I come to a large monster camp, where there’s a at least 7 or 8 enemies, including a moblin, a lizal, and several bokoblins, and they appear to be well armed.
I avoid them, sneaking around their camp, and due to the poor visibility they don’t spot me. About another half mile out, I finally find the Leviathan skeleton, and get my photo. Even better, there’s a shrine and a fairy fountain here as well. I had not been expecting either. I take the shrine first, and complete it. It’s a series of electrical circuit puzzles, and a larger than average shrine, but I solve it without great difficulty.
The fairy fountain has four or five fairies about, and I capture them all, and then unlock the fountain, which costs 1000 Rs. This fairy is the earth fairy, and she offers to enhance my clothing, so I take her up on it, and get just about everything enhanced that I can, except for my jewelry, because doing those requires my most exotic and rare materials, and I’m not sure it’s what I want to do yet.
With my enhanced gear, I trek across the desert to the eastern barrens, where there’s a shrine that I haven’t been to, but I know is there, because I saw it when I was on the Vah Naboris mission. I find the shrine, and there’s a Gerudo woman there, it looks like she’s in bad shape, collapsed at the entrance. I talk to her and she is talking like she’s ready to die, but just wishes that she could have one last drink from the bar in Gerudo town. I put two and two together, this is the woman who they haven’t seen in a while, who loves their specialty drink called Noble Pursuit.
In another bit of nonsensical game logic, I can’t offer her any of my food in inventory, even the cold stuff that can give resistance to heat. No, it has to be this noble pusuit drink. I can’t even be like “tough luck, lady, you’re in my way” and pull her off of the controls that activate the shrine.
So I teleport back to Gerudo, and talk to the bar owner, who now is willing to make a Noble Pursuit for me. But she’s out of ice. Well, I guess that’s why they put the ice house on the other end of the desert, then. So now I have to do a mission to get the thing so I can get the thing so I can get the other thing so I can do the thing and get the thing.
I run out to the ice house and get a block of ice. I’m supposed to carry it back to Gerudo town, well to the south end of the ruins outside of Gerudo town. The area is crawling with lizals and bokoblins. I sweep-and-clear the area first, moving quickly, and making use of my ice arrows to take down the fire-based lizals quickly. Then I pick up an ice cube, and carry it back toward the city. On the way back, more bokoblins appear, and I guess they’re deliberately there because it’s too easy to know that you need to clear out enemies ahead of time so you don’t have to worry about dealing with them while you’re carrying a giant block of ice over your head. But the game wants to make sure that you do have to worry about dealing with monsters while carrying a big block of ice.
Of course, due to the extreme heat the ice melts if you’re not standing in shadow, so that’s the mission. The ruins create a maze of shadows, and you can safely carry the ice block across the desert if you can stick to the shade. It’s very do-able, and not really too hard. Where I run into the bokoblins, I drop the ice in the shade and quickly kill one of the bokoblins, freeze the other, and move on. I sneak around a few other enemies that the game puts in my path even though I had cleared the area thoroughly on the way out.
I get the ice to the bar tender lady, and she tells me she’ll make the drink, and to go back to the shrine to tell the near-death woman that she’s making it, and this will revive her, and she’ll come running back to the bar. This is beyond ridiculous. If the game was even a little bit serious, I’d need to bring the drink out to her. Or we’d just directly go and rescue her, and forget about the ice, just get her any water at all.
Well, whatever. I go back to the shrine and tell her she’s got a drink waiting for her back in Gerudo, and she perks up and goes off running back home, while only moments ago she was acting like she was about to die. Pfft. Whatever.
Now I can enter the shrine. The shrine tells me that I’ve earned my spirit orb already by having gone through all that just to get into the shrine. So no puzzle, no combat challenge.
What’s weird about this to me is that while there are other “Blessing” shrines where there’s no challenge to overcome when you get inside them, all of the others have a difficult quest that you need to complete in order to access the shrine, which by its design is clearly set up by the shrine master as a test to gain entry. By contrast, this shrine just happened to have a sick woman blocking the door panel, who I had to help in order to get in, and which could not have been a deliberately set up test by the shrine master as a test. So, not knowing that I’d have to go through all this trouble to get ice cubes for her special cure drink, you’d think the shrine monk would have set something up inside for me to prove myself. But no, it’s a freebie.
There’s some more ruins further to the east that I want to check out, and then there’s the sand seal races, which should be re-opened now that Vah Naboris is no longer rampaging.
I get out there, and find a korok seed. Then a sandstorm whips up, and it’s night, and there’s no visibility.