Twink changes into his new outfit and runs downstairs, where he finds another wall of red ice blocking the entrance to the Zora item shop. Once it’s melted, he runs inside to find the Zora shopkeep, totally unharmed and acting like Twink is his tenth customer today. He doesn’t even say, “Thanks for thawing out my doorway and saving my life!” So either there’s a secret exit out of this shop, or this dude has been trapped in here for however long this ice has been here (like the question of the monsters in Cockiri Forest, one I’m better off not contemplating) and didn’t suffocate. Weirder still, among the items he is selling is the Zora Tunic Twink just received from King Zora. I don’t think it’s possible to lose it, so why is he able to buy it? Not that a second one would be remiss if he wanted to experiment with some rhinestone or sequin patterns.
Okay, there is nothing else of interest anywhere near Zora’s Domain, so Twink returns to Hyrule Field and begins the long ride toward Lake Hylia. On the way, he spots one of the Big Poes that One-Eye was all in a lather to get his hands on, but I am entirely too shitty at horseback archery to have any chance at killing it. Let’s just pretend it never appeared. Near where he wasted 20 or so arrows, though, next to a tree in the field’s northwest corner, the Stone of Gaydar starts humming away in Twink’s front pocket. Twink pauses a moment, enjoying the sensation, before dropping a bomb next to the tree and wriggling into the secret hole. Hee.
Inside, Twink finds a deep pool of water with a mini-Gohma skimming the surface. So there was a penis down here. Noted. Twink takes care of the mini-Gohma with his bow and then plunges into the pool (hee again) with his Iron Boots on to grab a Piece of Ass. And with that there’s nothing to do but ride Ebona south and spur her over the gates to Lake Hylia.
First things first, Twink hops on one of his fortuitously planted magic bean plants and hitches a ride to the roof of the Lakeside Laboratory, climbs a ladder up to the observation deck (which Twink had been assuming was where the fugly scientist was growing his “medicine”), and loots the Piece of Ass. Next, he rides the same bean platform as it zooms all the way across the empty lakebed over to the fishing shack. Now, unlike his last visit, Twink rather does feel like fishing now, and not just because he has to–now that he knows Ruto is in the Water Temple, his enthusiasm for adventure has diminished. Keep piling on the sidequests and busy work, game! Twink will take it all.
Psst, dude, weed causes hair loss.
Like all of the people who were adults seven years ago, the chin-pubed operator of the fishing mini-game has not aged or changed one iota. Wait, he’s wearing a hat now. That’s practically a whole new model! Impressive. Unlike everyone else, however, he actually recognizes Twink, without any prodding, and isn’t even faking it like Malon did. “It’s been a long time!” he says, offering Twink a fist bump and a hit off this nasty shit he got at the Lakeside Laboratory. “How many years has it been? Seven years?! What have you been doing all this time?!” Oh, nothing, just getting molested by several supposedly pure and noble Sages of Hyrule while in a coma. Fishing Guy takes Twink’s pointed, angry silence as a cue to talk about his own problems: “You’re my only customer. I’m almost out of business!” he sighs. How is he still in business now if he hasn’t had a single customer in seven fucking years? Must be all those Obamadorf handouts. “On top of that,” he goes on, “my hair…” I think they put a hat on him just because it was easier to add a hat than to remove hair from the character model. Still impressed, though. Talon and Ingo haven’t even changed their overalls in seven years.
You can imagine that Fishing Guy is quite eager to get Twink fishing again so he won’t be out on the streets selling his body by the end of this sentence. After suffering through another explanation of the rules, and giggling about “feeling the vibrations” from the Rumble Feature once more, Twink is standing at the edge of the pond, dick fishing pole in hand. Now, the fish Twink needs to catch lurks in the reeds in a particular spot, so Twink casts his line right at the fat motherfucker’s head. Despite his frankly amazing aim, it takes several tries, each with nearly a solid minute of reeling, for this monstrous fish to submit. The DID refers to it as “a real lunker,” and Fishing Guy goes “WHOA!” like he’s never been this impressed by anything, so Twink is going to assume they’re both talking about his penis. For having such an amazing, heavy, girthy “catch,” Fishing Guy gives Twink another prize: the Golden Scale. Yes, the Golden Scale, sheathed in an emerald green bubble, is described with blue text. I don’t know, either. “Now you can dive much deeper than you could before!” the DID tells him. Well, obviously he could dive pretty deep before–wasn’t DID listening to Fishing Guy describe his record-breaking penis?
This has to be a euphemism for something.
Twink has one last thing he can do before facing his doom: in the Lakeside Laboratory, near the fugly scientist’s table of contraband, there is a pool with depth markers. With his blue tunic and horrible new boots, Twink can plummet to the bottom and Moneyshot the Gold-Assed Spider hidden in a crate, but there’s another prize to be gained by “diving” to the bottom, and the fugly scientist considers these items to be the height of cheating bullshit. However, thanks to the Golden Scale which is somehow not the height of cheating bullshit, Twink can dive and just barely brush his fingers against the bottom. When he surfaces he talks to the fugly scientist, who creeps through his meth teeth, “You may not have noticed, but I’ve been watching you. You touched the bottom just now. Fantastic!” Whoa, did he see Twink canoodling with Fishing Guy through his telescope? That is not okay. Whatever it’s for, he hands Twink another Piece of Ass.
JESUS CHRIST
Well, that’s it! There’s nothing else for Twink to do but hoof it down to the little water remaining in the lakebed, throw on his suicide boots, and trudge through the water into the entrance of the least favorite Zelda dungeon of every right-thinking person in the universe, the Water Temple. Night falls just as Twink hits the switch to open the door, and the howl of a wolf echoes weirdly through the water, making Twink feel even more like he’s marching to his death, right into Princess Ruto’s vagina. And as we’ll see, that may not be too far off the mark.
*opens wine bottle*
So here we are in the Water Temple. Before we go any further, let me note that I’m using a walkthrough for this. This place is horrible enough and, even with a guide, more confusing and trying than my bumblefuck efforts to guide Twink through the Forest Temple. Whatever dignity I had in this regard went out the window when I got lost in a symmetrical dungeon with helpfully color-coded mini-bosses. Anyway. Twink removes his Iron Boots so he can rise to the surface, walk to the end of the hallway, and take a look at the place properly. It becomes immediately obvious that he’s entered from the top, and that the temple is currently flooded with water. He ignores the Moneyshot target across the moat of water and hops in to swim to the central structure, so it’s entirely his fault when two water-skimming mini-Gohmas hop repeatedly on his head and keep him from surfacing again. This is going great already.
Okay, Twink retreats, kills them with arrows, and tries this again. On the east side at this level, he finds a corridor of blue stone that ends with a pool leading into another hallway underwater. At the end of this hallway he finds a block he can pull out into a divot. And that’s all he can do here, so he backtracks and takes his stupid Iron Boots off, only to immediately put them back on so he can sink to another hallway a floor below. Roughly half of my Water Temple footage effectively shows Twink sitting on the ground like a chump, pulling pairs of boots on and off. If Sheik could see him now.
Down this hallway, Twink learns the hard way why the Moneyshot is available underwater when most of his other items are not, even though you’d think it’d rust up like gangbusters–it’s the only weapon he has against anything lurking in the water. Which is not to say he is especially effective with it. The tiny, batlike stingrays that attack him in this hallway probably giggle with delight as the point of the Moneyshot zooms past them and they get to bite Twink on his stupid face. Eventually, our hero stops sucking long enough to kill these mild nuisances, and he can move on. Around the corner, Twink moves past spikes on the ceiling to find more spikes on the floor, and past those, a Moneyshot target above a higher ledge. Twink manages to make it to this ledge without impaling himself, and from there to a room above with a single crystal switch and a treasure chest surrounded by a spouting geyser. Ooh, is this a hot spring? Twink is going to be so mad if he finds out the Zoras have been hiding a spa down here. Like he doesn’t hate these dicks enough by now. Obviously, hitting the switch at range turns off the geyser and allows Twink a precious second to open the chest, which contains the Comp Ass, as if even a GPS implanted in Twink’s eyeball would make this place easy to navigate.
On the way back to the central chamber, Twink promptly manages to drop into the underwater hallway from the wrong side of the hole and impale himself on the spikes. Hooray! Now that it’s happened once, the hymen has been busted and the next dozen times he does it won’t seem so embarrassing. Twink now drops to the sandy bottom of the temple, takes a moment to reflect that the central structure is a giant penis jutting out of the lakebed, destroys some harmless rocks that were hanging out in the sand, and enters the final hallway leading east. But the floor spikes upstairs are starting to look really inviting, because at the end of this hallway he finds Princess Ruto.
Ruto’s appearance has changed a bit since Twink last saw her, but super unfortunately for him, one of the changes was not the addition of clothes. No, of course, her nipple-less, theoretically pointless boobs have grown, and she’s wearing some sapphire earrings she probably stole from Twink’s hope chest in the Chamber of the Sages. The “You’re happy to see this person in some alternate universe!” music swells as the camera pans over her disturbing form, not realizing that Ruto being the worst is a universal constant and not even alt-universe, heterosexual, dorsal fin fetishist Twink would be happy to see her. “Oh…you…” Ruto says with a smile. “If I’m right…Twink?!” Who the fuck is Twink, lady? This is…Guy…Incognito. He’s, uh, here to fix the plumbing!