Now that Ingo is chastised or braindead or whatever it is, Malon is running things at the pasture. “Thank you very much for the other day…” she tells Twink, like he did anything for her and didn’t just jump a fence on a stolen horse, shouting “SUCK MY BALLS, KYLE INGO!!!” on the way out. She goes on, “I haven’t even asked you for your name yet…” Dude, even Naggy at this point would be like “DURRRRRRR!!! DURRRRRR!!!” at her. Twink apparently tells her his name, because she goes, Suikoden style, “…….. Really? Twink! That’s what I thought! You’re the fairy boy from the forest! That was years ago! Do you remember me?” Oh yeah, “that’s what I thought,” indeed. She just wants to look like slightly less of a moron. In that vein, she adds, “You do? I was sure it was you because [Ebona] remembered you!” Twink is just kind of embarrassed for her at this point, but he’s also a little relieved that she forgot about him, since that means she hasn’t been pining for him every night for the last seven years.

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FUCK YOU EBONA

“Oh, I have to tell you about Mr. Ingo…” she says. No, you really don’t. But go ahead. “He was afraid that the Evil King might find out that [Ebona] had been taken away… It really upset him! But one day, all of a sudden, he went back to being a normal, nice person!” Yeah, it has to be a Triforce-powered lobotomy. Anyway, Malon is just ecstatic because, between Ingo’s personality reconditioning and her dad’s return, there’s at least one place in Hyrule that’s turning it around. To celebrate this, she “lets” Twink run a horseback obstacle course, and doesn’t even charge him for the privilege. Uh…hooray? I won’t get into the details of this minigame, since Twink, sensing his inexplicable luck at this sort of thing has been expended for the time being, only bothers failing spectacularly at it a few times before giving up and leaving. Suffice it to say I’m terrible at it, and cover for my own shortcomings by loudly accusing Ebona of being a lazy, good-for-nothing bitch.

Naggy, could you shut up for like five seconds?

Twink is finally tired of screwing around and decides he may as well–sigh–go find his BFF Saria. He makes the quick ride to Cockiri Forest, only to find it overrun by monsters. He can’t even get up the ladder into his treehouse to check on his Sea Monkeys without being assaulted by an asshole vagina flower monster. All the Cockiri children are hiding in their houses, complaining about how they can’t go outside for fear of leafy lady parts smacking them in their faces. The Weasley Triplets, prevented from frolicking outside and playing grab-ass, are just inconsolable. One of them tells Twink that Saria ran off to save the day, while another wonders where Midol has disappeared to at a time like this. Let’s just move past wondering why anyone cares where Midol is, as if he’s important–when exactly did this invasion of monsters begin? While it’s a little hard to believe that the Cockiri have been huddling in their treehouses for seven years, it seems like the story we’re being given is that these monsters just showed up within the past day or two, which is equally strange. So did nothing bad happen here in the forest, and therefore in the Forest Temple, until Twink woke up? Did Ganondorf get some psychic wizard premonition that Twink was out and about, so he dispatched his minions to the forest to terrorize the Lost Boys? And when did Saria leave for the Forest Temple? It must have been before Twink woke up, because she missed Rauru’s Sage Bat Signal. Nothing about this makes sense.

‘If Midol were an ice cream flavor, he’d be pralines and dick.’

I’m sure I’m overthinking this. Nothing new. Twink says goodbye to all these kids who don’t recognize him, even with his shrill little fairy at his side, and enters the Lost Woods. The first time Twink came here in search of the Sacred Forest Meadow, it was easy enough to find by following the sound of Saria’s Song. But now there is no fade in volume if you go the wrong way, so it’s all down to memory and trial and error. Given that my last recap of this game was five years ago, if you guessed that this means Twink takes the wrong path and gets dumped back in Cockiri Forest roughly two dozen times, you win a cockie cookie.

Eventually, he makes it to the aquatic shortcut to Zora’s Domain, where he finds Midol blocking the road again like a dillweed. Hands on hips, he demands, “What are you? Though you wear [Cockirish] clothing, you can’t fool me! I promised Saria I would never let anybody go through here.” The idea that Twink couldn’t just use his new adult body to bowl this little shit over is more than a little ridiculous, but let’s just play along. Twink whips out his Cockarina of Time and plays Saria’s Song, which he could have easily learned by just opening his fucking ears in this forest for five seconds, but to Midol it may as well be the most closely guarded Cockiri secret ever. “That melody?!” Midol freaks. “Saria plays that song all the time! You… Do you know Saria?” There are not enough derps in the world for this statement. “That song… Saria taught that song only to her friends…” he says, almost to himself. “OK… I trust you.” Just to make a vein start pulsing in my forehead, he adds, “When I see you… I don’t know why, but I remember…him…” Jesus Juggalo Christ. I would have thought that Midol, of all these moronic Cockiris, the guy that always insisted Twink was not one of them, would take his own assumptions about Twink not belonging and stack them up against this grown-up dude in Cockiri clothing with a motherfucking fairy and a cockarina and maybe come to a totally crazy conclusion about this stranger who is here in Saria’s hour of need. The Dicku Tree must have slapped the sense out of all these fucking kids.

Aww, someone has a crush.

A couple screens beyond Midol, Twink finally manages to bumble into the Sacred Forest Meadow. Immediately the Stone of Gaydar starts going crazy. Twink shrugs and blows a hole in the ground with a bomb. Inside the hole, he finds a fabulous secret chamber with a tiled floor and rainbow-reflecting mirrored walls. Hanging out in this room are two Wolfos. Given how he found them, Twink concludes that these are two super-gay wolves, and they were down here in this private disco haven snorting coke and humping. So he feels a twinge of regret about killing them. He feels a lot more regret when he opens the chest that appears afterward, because it contains another goddamn purple Rupee he can’t use. Twink has a bone to pick about this “Giant Wallet.”

Back up to the Sacred Forest Meadow. Before he can plow through the labyrinth separating him from the Forest Temple, Naggy leaps in front of him with her patented shrieking psycho girlfriend voice. “From here on, we’ll be going through some narrow passages!” she says. If anyone but Naggy had told him that, he’d be really excited. “If you can take it slow, maybe you can sneak up on some enemies.” Take it slow in the narrow passages. Got it. Again, because Twink tries to mentally block Naggy from existence as much as possible, he doesn’t exactly heed this advice and charges right into the labyrinth. He is rewarded for his recklessness by getting slammed into the moat by something that looks like a Goron on steroids. According to the Internet, because I sure as fuck didn’t know, these are called Moriblins. I’m going to call them Buttfuckiblins, since that’s what they’re about to do to Twink for the next 15 minutes, and they’re not even going to buy him dinner first.

On paper, it’s simple: Twink has to sneak around behind the Buttfuckiblins when their backs are turned and use the small nooks in each section of corridor to move out of their line of sight before they ram their spears up his ravaged butthole. In practice, Twink is fucking terrible at this. No, not me. Twink. I think we’ve established that my skills are beyond reproach. By the time Twink makes it out of the maze, his life meter is beeping feebly at him. Even better, another even larger Buttfuckiblin is waiting in the corridor between the maze and the temple entrance. This one uses his large club to pound the ground and send out a seismic wave of pain that Twink must avoid. I am unavoidably reminded of the Runic Colossus in the Thorim fight in World of Warcraft, which does the exact same goddamn thing, and I was always the one that had to tell people what side of the hallway to stand on. You’d think that would make me good at avoiding it here, and you would be wrong.

As soon as Twink reaches the top of the stairs, he looks to the stump Saria loved to sit on and fantasize about him, but it’s empty. Silently, Sheik drops down behind him. Twink turns around when he hears the Twink-Sheik Love Theme, suppressing the rather bitter thought that Sheik could have shared his secret for skipping all those asshole Buttfuckiblins. Rather than rubbing Twink’s shoulders or at least giving him a peck on the cheek, Sheik instead decides to exposit about The Cold Truth of Time Travel™, vis-à-vis Twink’s separation from Saria. Oh yeah, Twink has been crying real tears about that shit. “The flow of time is always cruel… Its speed seems different for each person, but no one can change it…” he says with a huge lisp in my imagination. “A thing that doesn’t change with time is a memory of younger days…” No offense to Hyrule–actually, a ton of offense to Hyrule, fuck that–but Twink thinks he likes this dystopian future better than his memories of younger days, given that now he has pants, a horse, and a boyfriend, and not a bunch of clingy girls climbing all over his jock.

JUST KISS ALREADY!

To come here again, Sheik says, and more importantly, to skip all the motherfucking monsters and Midol and blundering through the Lost Woods, he should play the Minuet of Forest, which Sheik offers to teach him. Well, he can’t resist making sweet music with Sheik, can he? Even if Sheik thinks this song is somehow dedicated to stupid fucking Saria. The Minuet of Forest is the first six-note song Twink learns, and I have to say it’s one of my favorites, and would have been a nicer base for the forest background music than Saria’s Song. It would have made the previous 20 minutes of incompetence on my part much more tolerable. With a promise to see Twink again–yay!–Sheik disappears with his Sheikah ninja magic, leaving Twink to tackle the Forest Temple on his own. He doesn’t even stick around to take a good, close look at Twink’s Moneyshot, though. That’s too bad.

Speaking of the Moneyshot, Twink needs to use it to get into the temple, by grabbing the bough of the tree hanging over the ledge. Once inside, he’s again accosted by two Wolfos. By the way, the Wolfos very kindly agree to only attack Twink one at a time. Very considerate. After those nice wolves are dead, Twink climbs the wall, kills a Gold-Assed Spider with the Moneyshot, and runs across some tree branches to get a Small Key out of a chest. This is also the first dungeon where Twink has to worry about keys, and trust me when I say he’s not really prepared for it.

The following description of Twink moving through this dungeon is going to be a bit disjointed, because you really have to proceed through the place in a certain order thanks to the necessity of the Small Keys, and because I think I’m hot shit and don’t need a strategy guide or a map, I fuck this up royally and spend more time backtracking than progressing. I mean…Twink sucks. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

When Twink walks into the central room of the dungeon, he finds an elevator surrounded by a square with a different colored torch at each corner. As soon as he moves closer, the four flames disperse and transform into four Poes of matching colors. Each Poe wanders off through a wall to a different part of the dungeon and the elevator disappears into the ground. Well, shit. For no reason, instead of exploring each possible path first and then choosing one, Twink uses up his only Small Key on the first door he finds.

This room is a bit of a doozy, and I may as well take my time with describing it because Twink will have to run through it about 20 times before I pull my head out of my ass. The immediate concern in this room is a Flamer Skull–its actual name, since I don’t think we mentioned it in the Wind Wanker recaps, is Blue Bubble, but that’s about the dumbest name possible for a flaming skull with wings. Twink smacks it between the eye sockets with the Moneyshot and then ineptly swings the Masturbator Sword at it until it dies. It’s really impressive to watch, I assure you. While the giant, time-consuming puzzle in this room stays solved even after Twink leaves, Twink will have to kill this Flamer Skull every time he re-enters the room. Which would be awesome if it dropped hearts or arrows, and not useless fucking Dicku Nuts. Serious question: is there a point to using Dicku Nuts, ever?

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Okay, so, the room. This is the first of several rooms Twink will encounter that looks like an M.C. Escher painting. There are a whole lot of corridors that run into each other and doors sticking out of areas he can’t reach, but ultimately there is only one direction to go. After climbing a couple ladders and running through a couple hallways and generally having no goddamn clue where he is, Twink comes upon a large block, uh, blocking his path. Naggy chooses this point to scream in his face that there are helpful arrows painted on the floor. Well, Twink can’t complain about that. The arrows, I mean, not Naggy. He pulls and pushes the block along the path indicated by the arrows until it hits a wall, and then goes around through a second hallway until he runs into the same block from a different side. Eventually the block falls into a depression and allows him to climb higher. Twink goes through this on the next floor with a second block and eventually enters a large chamber on the top floor with two Flamer Skulls and…a locked door. Son of a bitch. There is also a silver eye symbol, obviously intended for shooting, above the doorway. So not only does Twink not have the key to get through it at all, but he’ll probably have to come back through multiple times once he has something to shoot the eye. Awesome.

It’s at this point that the audio cuts out on my tape, which means the rest of this recap is done, well, not in silence, but to Toto’s “Africa,” among other things. I consider this a marked improvement over the Forest Temple background music, which–fun fact–is the actual audio track to rubbing a cheese grater on my soul.