I walk down from the heights of Rito Village to check the bridge down at the bottom to see if it’s been repaired yet. It’s not, but there is a Hylian and a Rito talking about fixing it. They mention they need a Hylian specialized in construction, and I overhear them say that there was one such individual at Lookout Landing, so I make a note to head there real soon.
I also stop in at the Lucky Clover Gazette to talk to the boss, who suggests that I go to the Stables at Eldin.
So I fast-travel to the shrine near Woodland Stables in Eldin, and find that the Rito who works for Lucky Clover is already there, talking to the musicians. This time, they allow me to repair their wagon, by affixing wheels to it. I catch a horse, but can’t register it because I don’t have any more slots left, so I let it go and take Horsey out from the stables, attach a towing harness to him, and tow the musicians over to see the Great Fairy at her flower. I also learn that there has been sightings of a blond woman, who apparently matches the description of Zelda. But it’s hinted that this Zelda may not be the true Zelda, so I guess there’s maybe an imposter. But it’s very scant information, not much to go on.
They play a song, and the Fairy emerges, and I’ve completed a side quest, and unlocked clothing upgrades. I only have the one Fairy at the moment, so I’m very limited in the upgrades I can get, but I upgrade everything I can. It costs both rupees and materials, and only takes me up from the base rating of 3 to 5. But everything is necessary and will help some. The Fairy tells me the location of the other four Fairy Flowers, but in fact I’ve already located them through my previous travels. But now they are marked on the map and that’s good.
The musicians say that they are going to try to get the rest of the band back together, and I guess that will play into how I’ll need to unlock the remaining Fairy Flowers.
Some of the people are talking about Gorons and Death Mountain. And some kind of restaurant near there. And some of the Gorons have “strange rocks” and these should not be trusted.
After I’m through here, I fast-travel to Lookout Landing to try to find the builder who can repair Rito Village bridge, and the first thing I see is a Goron standing near the entrance to the underground citadel. So I run over and talk to him, and he’s apparently nice enough, but is lost and can’t remember how to get back to Goron City. His excuse is that he hasn’t forgotten, but that with the eruptions of Death Mountain the roads have changed. He gets instructions to head up the road toward Woodland Stable, where I had just came from.
I did just spend some cash at the Fairy Flower, so I need more, and to do that I pay a visit to the Well Investigator, who gives me 30 rupees and tells me that there are still 44 wells left to be discovered in Hyrule. Out of the 56 that the game started with, that means I still have a lot to discover.
I Ascend back up through the ground and emerge into the citadel. I talk to a few people who look like they have something important to tell me. The older lady who was sweeping the dust has knocked a hole in the wall, right where they suspected there might be a passageway. She says she thinks she can hear a demon in the tunnel, and is afraid it will come to take her. I gotta check that out right away, then. Hopefully it’s something they mistaken for a demon out of fear, and I’ll get some useful info out of it from whoever it is.
Another guy I talk to, Gralens, tells me about some info he knows. Hoz, Toren, and Flaxel have taken monster hunting squads on expeditions around Hyrule. It looks like I’m going to have an opportunity to help each of them, in turn, at some point. Suddenly I have a lot of things to do. He also tells me about the bigger monsters, the ones they have a hard time handling: Stone Talus, Hinox, Molduga. I don’t tell him about the other things I’ve seen: Lynels, Flux Constructs, Frox, Gleeok. Not even I’m ready to face them, yet.
I go back to the newly opened wall that the cleaning lady discovered, and explore the tunnel a bit. As I suspected, it’s an access tunnel to go between the citadel at Lookout Landing and Hyrule Castle. Only, it’s mostly collapsed and in a state of ruin. Much of the way is blocked by fallen boulders, and I don’t have that many bomb flowers to clear it all, and I only have but one hammer weapon to smash through with. I go as far as I can, encountering a couple of Like Likes, but just ordinary Like Likes, and I’m able to take them out without getting hurt. I do hear a mysterious growl as I start to enter the tunnel, but I don’t find the source of it, despite searching exhaustively. At one point, I hear a sound that I think is the sound of a snoring Hinox, but again there’s nothing to be found down here. I don’t get it. Eventually the tunnel changes from a rough hewn cavern to a more proper stonemasonry in the style of Hyrule Castle. I explore a bit more, hoping to find something interesting, a bit of information hopefully. At one point I find a chamber with a table and some old, moldy and tattered books, and it looks like this could be it, but they’re not interactable, which is disappointing. In a game as sophisticated and deep as this, if a thing looks like a thing, it should work like the thing.
All I’m able to find is a bunch of forage material, mostly minerals, and some weapons, but I don’t have any open slots, except when I break a hammer, and then I just pick up the nearest weapon and Fuse a rock onto it to make a new hammer, which I quickly break. None of the weapons I find is particularly good anyway, just more of the same decayed royal arms that I’ve been finding when near the Castle.
Eventually I explore the full cave, and unless I’m missing something, which I guess probably I am, I never did find the source of that demonic growl or the snoring Hinox. I decide to Ascend to the surface to see where I’m at, and emerge on the ground just outside of Lookout Landing, not quite halfway to the Castle.
I decide to return back to Lookout Landing and see who’s there who I haven’t talked to in a while, or at all, and it’s pretty much everyone.
I pick up a lot of new quests, and it’s hard to keep track of everything. Purah’s assistants want me to check out the depths again, I forget why for the moment. Thes male science guy says he can improve the Purah Pad again to give it a shrine detecting ability. I had been wondering about that.
I find at the clothing shop there are a bunch of outfits that I would like to buy, but I don’t have money and I don’t want to trade in a bunch of material right now. I think the game has done a good job at making all the materials more useful and interesting to keep. In BOTW all you could do with them is make recipes, which were mostly unnecessary, or trade them in for rupees or use them to augment your clothes, and sure, yeah, some of them had some useful special abilities, like octorock balloons that you could use to lift things, but the usefulness was always pretty limited and specialized. In TOTK, you can also use them for Fusion to improve your weapons and shields, which gives them a lot more utility.
Then, I turn around and see my old friend Hestu! That big walking broccoli has been missing for a while. I wonder when he showed up here!? I talk to him and give him as many korok seeds as I can to open up my inventory slots, and I have a lot of seeds — 73. When I’m done I just have 8, and I’ve added 6 weapon slots, 5 bow slots, and 4 bow slots. I think. Anyway I can carry a lot more stuff, which is great, because it means I can experiment with Fusion a lot more and carry some stuff that will be useful, like flame projector and rockets fused to things.
I talk to a man training with swords, and he offers me three swords. I was looking at one of them and thought it looked like the Master Sword, but it was just a Royal Claymore.
I talk to the man by the mini stable, and he needs help fixing the roof. Karson from the Hudson Construction Co is there, but he needs assistance. So I use ultrahand and put a piece of nearby lumber in the roof and that fixes it, and unlocks the Stable, giving me a Pony Point, and entitles me to a reward at the next full Stable I go to. Then I may be able to register that new horse I found, if it’s still possible to do so.
I tell Karson that the bridge is out in Rito Village, and he’s finished up with his work here, so he goes off to do the repair there. So I need to return back to Rito Village soon, and check on that, and also see what my next assignment is and get paid by the Lucky Clover.
Oh, and a big chunk of sky island fell from above and landed in the fishing pond. It has an inscription on it, and the resident expert on Zonai script tells me he needs to go to Kakariko Village to consult his notes so he can try to translate it.
And people are telling me that I should head to Eldin next. It’s the nearest point with one of the anomalous weather conditions that Purah wanted me to check into.
Suddenly I have like twenty things to do, the game has really opened up. I guess that’s what was meant to happen if I had followed the more obvious hints and been braver about the cold and went exploring Rito and the Hebra region first. Suddenly, I have so many directions to go in, and I’m not really sure which one I should do first. Some seem simpler and easier, while others seem more important.