Hysterics in Hyrule : Shadow Temple Shenanigans (*/f and f/f tickling)

[Gargalesis Ghost]

Another old Legend of Zelda story I wrote a while back, this one set during Ocarina of Time and focusing primarily on the middle aged Impa from the game getting tickled. Contains */f (monsters) and f/f tickle torture, face sitting, m to f transformation, and implied death. Enjoy!

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“It’s far too dangerous to go alone! You should at least wait for him to show up!” Sheik sounded desperate as he spoke, his arms waving and concern raising his voice to an almost feminine pitch, but Impa simply shook her head before taking another drink from the steaming mug on the table in front of her.


“I have no choice. I’m Kakariko’s protector. Sealing the damnable thing in the well was a temporary solution at best, and now that it’s broken out and taken up residence in the temple, I have to try and stop it.” She took another drink from the mug, which contained tea brewed from a mixture of rare herbs and spices as well as a small amount of her own blood. The drink was of her people, the Sheikah, who had founded Kakariko generations before in service to the Hylian throne, and was supposed to bring her good fortune in the upcoming battle she faced. Impa was a pragmatist at heart and didn’t believe in lucky drinks, but observed the tradition as was her duty anyway.


“And what if that… thing… kills you? What then? Hyrule needs you, I need you, Impa! You can’t just quaff that vile drink and head into the halls of the undead to die! Wait for the hero! I know he’ll show up here soon looking for clues on where to go next.”


“Lower your voice,” Impa said, though her voice was soft. The inn around them was quiet and near empty. Travelers through Kakariko had been rare at the best of times, and Ganondorf’s rise to power had outright killed what small trickle had been coming through years before but the Evil King might have spies anywhere and Impa didn’t want anyone overhearing them.


“I’m sorry,” Sheik whispered. “I’m just worried. You’re not young anymore, Impa, and you are vital to saving Hyrule from Ganondorf’s reign or darkness.”


“Not young? No, I suppose not.” The Sheikah were a longer lived tribe than the Hylians to be sure, but Impa neared her sixtieth birthday and the years were finally beginning to slow her movements. “Still, I can’t just sit by and let a malevolent spirit become the master of Kakariko. My home must not end up like the Castle Town. I know you still go there, that you’ve seen it. Rot, ruin, Redeads wandering and the stink of death everywhere.”


“I have seen it,” Sheik replied quietly.


“Then you know that I have to do this.”


“I-I know, it’s just…”


“Zelda.” Sheik straightened up when Impa whispered the name. “Everything will be fine. When Link arrives, he’ll come to my aide. I do not have to defeat Bongo Bongo, or even seal it. I need only buy enough time that the people of Kakariko are spared its wicked designs. I can do that much.” Impa smiled, a gesture meant to reassure Sheik, but all he did was sigh.


“I trust you with my very life, Impa, but Bongo Bongo is beyond you. And the Eye of Truth is sealed in the town well, so you won’t even be able to properly see the monster. And that is assuming you can even make it through the Shadow Temple without it to begin with.” Sheik leaned back and crossed his arms, his strange red eyes narrowing as he studied her face for any reaction to his words. “I can’t stop you, though. I just wanted to try and talk some sense into you.”


Impa stood, the old wooden floor of the inn creaking beneath her weight, then took a moment to adjust the breastplate she wore over the simple leotard that covered most of her body. She’d always preferred comfort and mobility to defense, and her clothing choices reflected it. After the lone piece of armor felt more comfortable, she brushed a strand of silver hair out of her face and smiled at Sheik one last time.


“I promise I’ll be as careful as I can. You wait in Kakariko for the hero, and help him make his way to the Shadow Temple once he arrives.” Then she was gone, her boots thudding across the floor and vanishing with the creak and thud of the inn door. Sheik remained at the table, thoughtful, and picked up the mug she’d been drinking from and sniffed at the remnants of whatever concoction she’d been drinking.


“Smells like death,” he said quietly to himself, placing it back on the table, then realized if he wasn’t sure whether he was talking about the dredges of Impa’s tea or the whole village of Kakariko. Perhaps, he mused, it was simply both.


______


In the last seven years, ever since the Castle Town had fallen to Ganondorf, Impa had patrolled Kakariko at nightfall in the hopes of protecting what little peace was left in Hyrule. She made her same rounds and wondered if it would be the last time she ever would. Her words to Sheik had been empty, she knew that. If she set foot in the Shadow Temple, she would die. It was a simple as that. The entire temple was filled with the restless dead, most not courteous enough to stay in their graves, and waiting in the deepest chambers would be Bongo Bongo, a dark spirit born of pure malevolence. There wasn’t a weapon or technique in her arsenal that could so much as wound that monster now that her seal had failed.


There were still a handful of villagers wandering the village, and she greeted each that she passed with a smile and a handshake, marking the same uneasy look behind each of their eyes. A strange cloud had hung over Kakariko ever since Bongo Bongo revived, and even if the villagers were unable to see the beast they could feel its presence permeating the very air.


Impa passed the windmill and stood, simply breathing in the night’s air and enjoyed the feel of the grass beneath her feet. The scent of cucco was heavy in the air where she stood, a pleasant smell of feathers and life and earth, and she breathed it in deeply.


“Lady Impa! Lady Impa!” a voice called out, and she turned to the speaker, a woman with shoulder length red hair and a dress that reached all the way to her ankles, its lower hem spattered with bird droppings. She ran up to Impa and curtsied.


“Ah, good, um, evening,” Impa said, realizing that she didn’t know the name of the woman that kept the cuccos in the village. “What can I do for you?”


“Oh nothing, I was just out for a stroll now that my work is done and wanted to say hello when I saw you. What brings you to this part of the village so late, milady? There’s nothing past the windmill but the old graveyard, and that hasn’t been safe since old Dampé passed away.”


“Yes, I know,” Impa replied. “I want to start patrolling there as well, see if perhaps I can beat back the spirits that hold sway there so it’s safe for the villagers to visit their fallen loved ones again.” It was a lie, but a believable one. Ever since Dampé, the old gravedigger, had died shortly after Ganondorf seized the castle, the graveyard had been overrun with Poes, a type of spirit formed of pure hatred for life. Even if you cut them all down, they returned the next night in greater numbers. Impa knew from experience, and shuddered a little at memories of her and Sheik panting, covered in grave dirt and grime as the sun rose in the sky after many nights of slaying before they gave up. The ghosts, at least, seemed to have no interest in the town proper. At least, not yet.


“Well, just be careful, okay? Kakariko would be lost without you, and all of us want you safe and sound in your bed by the morning.”


“Of course. Good night, um,” Impa paused, searching for a name that wouldn’t come, “you. Make sure you get to your own bed safely as well.” The woman curtsied again and left, humming a tune that Impa recognized as an old Hylian hymn. Why can’t I recall her name? I’ve known the girl since she was the same height as her cuccos! Pushing the thought away, she began to walk again, passing beneath a stone arch and alongside the old windmill, directly towards the graveyard.


The path there was short, meandering lazily upwards to a wide, flat expanse between a couple of the foothills of Death Mountain. Sooner than she realized, she found herself standing at the old graveyard gate, Dampé’s abandoned hut moldering off to her right. Row after row of crumbling headstones stared back at her, eldritch and threatening in the light of the moon, and the dead spoke and laughed from every direction in a whisper just on the edge of perception. Impa steeled herself, drew a short blade that she wore on the small of her back from its sheathe, and moved forward.


A cobblestone path was laid out in between fields of graves, sectioning the front of the graveyard into a grid, and when it split off to the left and the right she turned to the right, her footfalls clacking against the stones loudly. Lights danced and weaved over a number of the graves, signs that restless Poes lied in wait to ambush the living, and she avoided going near them. They weren’t particularly fearsome enemies, but she knew that what awaited her in the temple was far worse and she wanted to save what stamina she could. The path turned again, this time to the left, and she followed it, heading deeper into the graveyard. Unintelligible whispers followed her, rising in volume though still muttering in a language she couldn’t hope to understand as long as she drew breath, as she passed by a large tombstone with a freakishly huge spider clinging to the back of it, its abdomen shaped and patterned like a skull and gleaming gold. She shuddered and gave it a wide berth, weaving as far away from it as she could without leaving the path.


Another turn, then another, and another. Impa followed the path until it met with the left fork she had skipped at the graveyard entrance, then turned one last time to the right, following the now joined path to the deepest part of the graveyard. The tombstones here were ancient, weathered things, their inscriptions lost to years of exposure to weather and time. Save for two, none had been buried that deep in the cemetery in her lifetime. The path abruptly ended at a crest of the Triforce burned into the very ground and a large stone that covered the old royal tomb. It hadn’t been used in at least two generations, ever since a burial had been interrupted by a Redead that had once presumably been Hylian royalty. Shortly after that fiasco, the king of the time had the huge sepulcher that sealed the entrance built and placed. Flanking the royal tomb on either side were two more graves, both belonging to a pair of brothers that had been court composers when Impa was only a child working in the castle kitchens in between her training.


A Poe sat on one of these graves, different than the ones typically seen wandering the graveyard. The standard was little more than a spirit with glowing eyes, clad in rotting cloth, and waving a lantern around like a maniac. This one wore tattered clothing still, but much of it retained gilt and finery, and while the telltale lantern was still present, its other hand clutched a composer’s baton. It looked at her, making no move to attack, then shook its ghostly head sadly and faded, melting into the shadows of the night. Impa paused and prayed for the composer’s soul a moment, then left the path, walking around the royal tomb and continuing onward.


Behind it was a field. Once lush, most of what she could see by the light of the moon was wilting or outright dead and returned to thick, tacky mud. There was no path, but she knew her destination. Not far from the royal tomb sat a ridge, and atop that ridge was a staircase leading deep underground where the Shadow Temple brooded in decay, long forgotten by all but the remaining few Sheikah. Impa made her way there, stepping around the worst of the muddy patches, until she stood at the sheer rock face of the ridge. Above her she could see heavy wood latticework, a fence she’d built herself years before in the off chance any of the villagers actually wandered too deep into the graveyard and found the ridge. She might be getting on in years, but acrobatics and infiltration were both specialties ingrained in all Sheikah at a young age and she gracefully scaled the ridge, fingers seeking out secret handholds that few would ever find and even less be able to use. Impa reached the fence and scaled it easily as well, fingers hooking into the crisscrossed wood as she pulled herself up.


Once she made it over, she paused to catch her breath. A stone platform was set into the ground here, its surface emblazoned with the Triforce as well as the emblems of both the Sheikah and the dead. Behind the platform was a staircase leading downwards, carved through the living stone in a bygone age. The Shadow Temple was, in a very real sense, the original graveyard. It began as a crypt where the dead from a long and bloody revolution had been laid to rest, and then an underground temple had been added to honor them and quiet their restless souls. Over time, darkness had seeped from the crypt, though, and perverted and twisted the temple into a place of darkness where the dead wandered freely. That was when her own ancestors had originally closed it off, and the graveyard behind her had begun.


Impa placed a foot on the first step, wincing at the unnaturally loud sound of it, then continued downward. Sooner than she’d have liked, she found herself at the bottom in a wide, circular room. A small platform stood in the middle, emblazoned with the sigil of the goddess Din, surrounded by torches that burned brightly, filling the cave with an orange glow. At the back was a huge passageway leading inside.


“That shouldn’t be open,” she muttered to herself. Normally the passageway was sealed with a large stone door enchanted by the Sheikah. Lighting the torches would activate it and raise it, allowing access, but only the Sheikah themselves or those blessed by Din were capable of setting them all ablaze. At least, that should have been the case. Bongo Bongo might have been capable of it, though Impa suspected rather that it had been some agent of Ganondorf that had found a way to unseal the temple.


A lump rose in her throat as she continued on, finally stepping into the temple proper. No sooner than she passed the Sheikah door, she heard an ominous whoosh and spun on her heel in time to see all of the torches go out before the heavy stone door slammed downward, trapping her inside.


______





Sheik found himself absentmindedly wandering through the village the next morning. He was impatient for the Hero of Time to arrive, and worry for Impa gnawed at his soul. Even the townsfolk seemed on edge, as though they could feel the foreboding miasma creeping out of the nearby Shadow Temple as Bongo Bongo grew ever stronger. Most of them weren’t even leaving their homes, and the few that did looked haggard and run down. The only person he came across that seemed unaffected was the Cucco Lady, who greeted him cheerfully when he walked passed her.


“Oh, Master Sheik! How are you this morning?” She smiled brightly, brushing loose feathers from her dress as she sidled up to him. “The cuccos are restless today. You seem to be restless too.”


“I’m fine, I just have a lot on my mind,” he replied, a little shocked at how perceptive she was. In truth, he’d sort of written her off as more than a little strange, obsessed with her birds so completely that she barely knew how to interact with other people. “Um, how are your cuccos? You said they’re restless?”


“Yes, they can sense something is wrong in Kakariko. They’re very empathetic birds, you know.”


“Interesting. I wasn’t aware of that.” To Sheik, cuccos registered as little more than a source of eggs and meat at the best of times, and a minor annoyance when trying to remain hidden in areas occupied by them at the worst. He never would have imagined they’d pick up on the strange atmosphere caused by Bongo Bongo as the villagers had.


“It’s a problem, actually,” the Cucco Lady said, her brow wrinkling as she frowned. “Cuccos don’t lay eggs when they’re stressed. I’m running low thanks to that, and since selling their eggs is how I make my living, well…” she trailed off, her cheeks coloring.


“Is there anything you can do to help them? Maybe calm them?” Sheik wasn’t exactly sure why he asked, standing there in the morning sun. He knew nothing of the birds, and was immediately worried that she might ask him for help. The Hero could appear any time, and he would be damned if he missed meeting up with him because he was helping a strange woman make her birds happy.


“Well, there is something,” she replied, and Sheik groaned inwardly. He knew that was coming. “I could use a little help with it, actually.”


He leveled a hard gaze at her. “I would love to help,” he began, “but I’ve also got very important duties to attend to myself. I don’t have the time to spare, nor can I afford to leave the village right now.” Sheik didn’t want to be so dismissive of her problem, but he really couldn’t afford to miss the Hero.


“Oh, you wouldn’t have to leave the village at all. I’ve got everything needed already set up in the cucco house in my little pen at the rear of the village.” She looked at him, her green eyes pleading, and Sheik sighed in defeat.


“Alright, I can spare a little time so long as I don’t have to go outside Kakariko. Just a little while, though!” The Cucco Lady nodded and motioned for him to follow. She skipped happily through the village as he walked behind, wondering what she needed him to do. They eventually came to a small fenced in field at the rear of the village near the graveyard entrance with a small hut in the middle, presumably for the cuccos to roost in.


“Okay, let’s go inside!” The Cucco Lady opened the gate into the field and waved Sheik inside, then followed, pulling and locking the gate when she did. They walked across the small field, wordlessly stepping into the hut. The heat inside was explosive, Sheik’s brow almost instantly beading with sweat, and the smell of hay and bird droppings was cloying in the air. The Cucco Lady seemed unaffected by the heat and the stench, and rushed to the middle of the hut where a tall wooden chair sat. Sheik followed, noticing uncomfortably that there were heavy leather straps on the arms and front legs of the chair.


“Okay, explain. What are we doing in here? And why,” Sheik asked, pointing to the ominous chair, “does that look like something more at home in a torture chamber?”


“I said cuccos are very empathetic,” she laughed, pulling her red hair back into a ponytail. “They pick up on our emotions and it affects their mood. So we just have to make them pick up on something happy and it will make them happy!” Several broody looking birds watched them from all corners of the hut, their eyes beady and suspicious of the interlopers. “The chair is to help with that! It’s something my brother and I came up with when we were younger. Don’t worry, I’ll go first.”


The Cucco Lady planted herself in the chair, wiggling around until she was comfortable, then placed her arms and legs inside the restraints and looked at Sheik expectantly. “Wait, you want me to strap you to the chair?”


“I do! Nice and tight!”


“O-okay, then,” he said uncomfortably and went to work securing first her wrists, then pushing the hem of her dress up a bit so he could tighten the straps on her ankles. “Done. Is that good enough?”


“It is! I’m not going anywhere!” The Cucco Lady smiled brightly at him. Several seconds passed and she just sat, waiting, with that same smile on her face.


“So, uh, what happens now?” Sheik asked, ending the long, awkward silence.


“Now you tickle me! Tickle me until I can’t take it, then tickle me some more! Make me laugh and scream until I’m hoarse! Don’t stop even if I beg!”


“Wait, what?”


______


Impa stood with her hand on a statue of some sort of emaciated bird…thing, a bizarre cross between some ancient bird of prey and a winged reptile. There was an inscription on the statue’s base, but it was written in an ancient form of Hylian that she could only partially understand, something about truth and feet. In front of her was a wide chasm, and on the opposite side stood the door leading deeper into the temple, the platform it stood on too far for any normal person to jump across. Behind her to the left was the long stone hallway that led from the entrance to the strange room, and on the right was a doorway that led to a network of crypts.


She’d already explored the crypts and found little besides old earthenware pots, bats, and a sole Redead meandering around. The reanimated corpse was easy enough to avoid as long as she stayed out of sight, at least. Still, nothing that way seemed likely to help her across the chasm and she was at a loss. Sheikah trained from a young age in acrobatics and parkour so she might be able to make the unlikely leap, but it wasn’t a sure thing.


“What do you think?” she asked the bizarre statue, rubbing its beak as she spoke. Suddenly, she regretted a number of things. If she’d brushed up on her ancient languages, she might be able to read the inscription. If she’d taken a little time to search, she might have been able to locate the Eye of Truth, an ancient relic that revealed hidden things. With that, perhaps, the crypt would have yielded something more substantial. “I think I have no one to blame but myself, in the end.”


Impa walked toward the entrance to the crypt, then when she reached it turned and ran as hard as she could toward the chasm. At the edge, she launched herself, flying through the air with arms outstretched and her legs pinwheeling against the nothingness below. For a split second, she hung in the air, sure that she had just leapt to her own death, then she slammed into the platform opposite the statue, the impact enough to knock the wind from her as she scrambled and clawed her way up. A moment later she stood, grimy and panting, on solid ground.


The platform itself was worked stone and carved into the shape of a tongue hanging out over the pit. She followed it with her eyes and saw that the next doorway was shaped like a great, yawning mouth from which the tongue protruded and shuddered. Impa walked towards it once she caught her breath, trying to ignore a sense of foreboding that welled within her chest. She paused at the door, wiping sweaty white locks from her brow, then opened it onto a room that split in three separate directions. A passage stood on both the right and left, then a final one was straight ahead.


She moved forward and found the door straight ahead was locked. “Damn,” she mumbled, then stepped back. There was probably a key somewhere nearby, so she went with her gut and turned down the western path. At the end of a short hallway, Impa opened a door and found herself in a large room. The walls and floor were both some sort of greenish brick that was strangely smooth to the touch. Old wooden beams, broken and splintered, lay scattered about the chamber, and in the middle was a much more recognizable statue than the lizard bird from the pit. The grim reaper’s cloaked face stared at her, a reminder that the Shadow Temple was a place meant for the dead.


Impa walked to the middle of the room and stood next to the statue of Death. There was a small alcove behind it, closed with iron bars, and a treasure chest sitting in it, inaccessible. She’d have bet her own house that the key she needed was in the chest and clicked her tongue while she thought. The bars blocking the alcove didn’t have an obvious mechanism to raise them nearby, She saw another passage in the rear corner of the room and moved to check it instead.


The new passageway was made of the same strange brick, and there was a picture hanging at the far end of it. From a distance, it seemed to be a desiccated corpse smiling in the frame. Impa found herself oddly drawn to it and walked slowly down the hallway to inspect it more closely. Or that was her intention before the floor vanished beneath her and she fell, instinctively curling into a ball as she hit the ground below to mitigate the worst of the bone-rattling impact. She stood, her legs shaking, and looked up. From below, there didn’t seem to even be a floor beneath the picture, meaning Impa had literally just walked into a pit without even realizing.


“Pull yourself together,” she whispered as she took in the room she’d fallen into. Or cavern, rather. It seemed that below the temple itself was a network of caves, and she now stood in a very large cavern. Nearby was a small wooden dock with a ferry tied to it, though there was no underground waterway for the boat to float in. It seemed instead to bob up and down on mist below, and under that was a pit so deep that she couldn’t begin to see the bottom, only inky darkness.


Impa shrugged to herself and untied the ferry from the dock. The boat didn’t move, instead remaining suspended in the air as it had been, so she stepped on board. A Triforce blazed gold against the mouldering boards beneath her feet, painted onto the deck, and when she passed over it the boat began to move forward, its boards creaking loudly as it sailed over nothing. Another lizard-bird adorned the front of it, carved of wood rather than stone, and in its mouth swung a bell that began to ring as soon as the boat began to move. She leaned forward, resting against it, as she watched the cave slide by.


The boat moved through the cavern, creaking and groaning beneath her feet. It twisted through a narrow, winding passage until it passed into a widened area with statues standing watch on either side, then back into a crevice just barely wide enough for it to enter, bumping along the cave walls alarmingly as it did. When it exited the second narrow section, Impa saw that it was another large cavern with a long platform next to the empty river and only a blank, stony wall directly in front of her boat so she hopped off the side, landing gracefully, and watched as the ferry thudded into the sheer wall and plummeted into the darkness below.


The new platform was solid stone, though polished rather than just bare cave floor, and Impa wondered if it was an ancient, forgotten area of the Shadow Temple, possibly a crypt much older than the one above. A large doorway yawned open on the opposite side of the cave, though there was another wide pit between her and it with only a crumbling stone bridge reaching from side to side. Without a second thought, Impa hopped onto it and crossed quickly, trying not to think of the stone beneath her feet, weathered as it looked, cracking beneath her weight. When she hopped down on the other side directly in front of the door, a groaning sound came from behind and she turned just in time to see the middle of the bridge crack and crumble away, old stone tumbling into the abyss below. Without another glance back, Impa walked through the open door.


It closed behind her, slamming shut with a bang, and when she inspected it she found that it would not open from her side. The room she found herself in was a much smaller cavern of worked stone, with moss growing grey-green out of nearly every crevice. Nothing else adorned the walls, and in the exact center was a hole that seemed to lead even deeper underground. With no way out and no other exit in sight, Impa shrugged again and lowered herself into it, arms and legs splayed out so she could climb down slowly. It bore impossibly deep and she shimmied downward for what felt like hours, her muscles burning with the effort of holding herself against the stone to keep from just falling downward, until she reached the end. The bottom of the hole wasn’t a terminus, but it simply ended. She could feel the air rushing up from below, a sign that there was likely some sort of chamber beneath her. Taking faith in hand, she relaxed her body and let herself drop into the darkness.


The drop was shorter than she expected. Impa landed on a floor made of some sort of springy material, her body bouncing back up when she hit it. Aside from a bump on the rear she was otherwise undamaged, and stood shakily. The floor stretched for several paces and then just stopped, and no walls were visible anywhere. What she could see was illuminated by sputtering green flames suspended in the air, toxic will ’o wisps with a poison glow. Otherwise, there was just darkness everywhere beyond, the strange bouncing platform seemingly suspended in nothingness. She heard a gentle thud from somewhere, and when she looked up saw two hands, each larger than her entire body and covered in blisters and sores, descending from above and she screamed before they grabbed her and everything went dark.


______


“Please, not there! Nooooo!” the Cucco Lady squealed, tears welling in her eyes, before dissolving into a fit of fresh giggles as she struggled against the straps of the chair. Sheik felt utterly ridiculous, his fingers awkwardly kneading her ribs through the rough fabric of her dress, and he wondered how much longer he’d be expected to entertain her. The request had caught him completely off guard, though he reasoned that it made a certain amount of sense if the birds were as empathic as she seemed to believe. But tickling? He couldn’t even remember the last time the word had even been mentioned in his orbit, let alone the activity itself, yet here he was clumsily tormenting one of Kakariko’s villagers. This is ridiculous.


The Cucco Lady bucked hard when he hit one certain spot at the base of her rib cage, laughter swelling into a high pitched squeal, and something thudded below him. When he slowed his fingers and peered down, he saw that one of her shoes had worked its way off her foot and fallen to the boards below. Sheik paused as she caught her breath, her panting mixing with occasional giggles. He looked down and saw her exposed toes, sock-less, wiggling back up at him.


“You know,” the Cucco Lady said in a sultry voice, “my feet are probably my most ticklish spot.” Her statement was punctuated with another thud as the other shoe, purposefully worked loose, hit the floor next to its mate, leaving both feet exposed. “And I seem to have wiggled out of my shoes, too. Whatever will I do?”


“Okay, this is getting a little too weird for me,” Sheik said, straightening up and backing away from her. “Plus, we’ve been at this for at least fifteen minutes and the cuccos don’t seem any different. If anything, they’re acting like I’m attacking you. One even pecked me!” He moved to release her from the straps of the chair and a look of dismay came over her face.


“Wait, just try a little while longer! I’m sure it’ll help if you just keep at it! Please!” Sheik ignored her and unbuckled the restraints on her wrists, then stepped back and left her to release her ankles on her own.


“I’m sorry, but this is a bit much for me. I’ll be going now, but I hope your cuccos start laying eggs again soon.” He turned and paused. A hulking shadow stood in the doorway of the small shack, blocking the entrance entirely. When it stepped forward, Sheik gasped. The light revealed a figure of bleached white bone clad in old chainmail armor, its gloved hands hovering near the hilt of a sheathed weapon at its hip. A grinning white skull glared at him, an eldritch light blazing deep in its eye sockets. “What is a Stalfos doing here?!?”


Sheik felt a weight on his back as the Cucco Lady, free from the chair, put her arms around his neck and leaned against him. “Don’t be rude, that’s my brother. He’s just… not feeling quite himself these days,” she whispered into his ear, her breath tickling slightly and distracting him from the monster before him. It was the split second that the Stalfos needed, the creature charging as soon as Sheik’s attention slipped away. He sputtered as a mailed fist sank into his gut, the world around him swimming in a fog of pain.


“Why?” Sheik asked as he sank to the floor, staring up at the grinning skull and the Cucco Lady, who wore a mad grin matching her deceased brother’s permanent one. The only answer he received was the mail clad fist slamming downward, knocking him out of the cucco pen and into a world of darkness and pain.


______


Impa’s eyes snapped open and she found herself laying in total darkness with wooden splinters uncomfortably digging into her back and rear end. Gathering her wits, she thrust out with her hands and realized by touch that she seemed to be in a box of sorts, laying on her back. Considering that the Shadow Temple contained a large number of dead, she reasoned that something had tossed her into an empty coffin and shut the lid, though what could have accomplished that was lost to her. She recalled looking up and seeing Bongo Bongo’s rotting hands, but everything between that and waking up in the box were lost to her, nothing more than rushing wind, darkness, and confusion.


She pushed upwards against the wood above her and was surprised when it moved easily, sliding up and to the side. Impa sat up and found herself in a small burial chamber, sitting in a coffin as she expected, with two more nearby and two torches sputtering on the walls, the light stinging her eyes after the utter darkness of the coffin. By the look of the stonework walls, she guessed that she was back In the crypt on the upper floor of the Shadow Temple, or in an undiscovered one similar to it elsewhere in the temple. Either way, staying where she’d been placed was not her plan and she braced herself against the wooden sides of the coffin and lifted herself to her feet slowly, wincing at the aches in her body. Stepping out of the box, she ran her hands over her body, taking stock of her situation.


Impa’s short sword was gone, as was the small breast plate she wore to protect her vitals should it come to a fight. Even her boots were missing, leaving her barefoot and wiggling cold toes against colder stone in the crypt. Whatever put her here had left her with nothing but the form-fitting leotard she wore beneath her armor. She opened both of the other coffins to peer inside, dimly hoping to find her missing equipment or at least something she could use as a weapon, but both were bare.


“Shit,” she muttered under her breath. The room contained nothing else but the torches as an old wooden door leading out. Impa tried to pull one of the torches off the wall, but both were held fast by iron rings bolted into the stone itself. Impa paced the rest of the room, running her hands over the walls and stomping her bare feet against the stone floor randomly in search of a secret door or switch and found none. Sighing, she moved to the old wooden door and pressed her ear to it, listening for what might lie in wait beyond it. There was a quiet scraping sound coming from beyond the door, but nothing else, so she grasped the iron ring set into the wood and pulled.


Impa found herself in another of the rooms filled with the oddly slippery green bricks. This one held a large wooden frame in the shape of the letter X in the middle with shackles hanging down from its highest point and, strangely, what seemed to be a small mound of feathers beneath it. On the opposite end of the room from where she stood was a large, doorless passage to elsewhere in the temple, and on either side of it stood two more statues of the Grim Reaper, though instead of a scythe each held a large feather easily the size of a longsword. The sight of them jarred her, and she spent several moments inspecting them from a distance before she moved past the wooden X to look at them up close. Impa went over every cult and group of Ganondorf worshipers she could think of in Hyrule’s history, but none came to mind that would have anything like the strange statues holding the giant stone feathers. She made a mental note to investigate if she ever had the opportunity.


Impa walked past them and through the passageway beyond. Wherever in the Shadow Temple she was, the bone-piercing cold told her that she was likely very far underground and she wished fervently that she still had her boots at the very least. The cold seeped out of the floor and into her bare feet, making her toes go numb and creeping up her legs. Green brickwork gave way to smooth stone as she walked, which was a little easier on her feet though no warmer. The hall ahead of her curved, and when she slipped around it Impa found herself looking into another large chamber with a vaulted ceiling.


The walls of the new chamber were covered in spider webs and she noticed several of the eerie skull shaped spiders moving around. None seemed to take any interest in her, though, each seemingly preferring to move around their own little section of web. The floor of the room was a different sort of brick, carved originally from some sort of blue slate by the look of them, and Impa felt old flakes of stone dig into her feet as she crossed to the main point of interest in the room, a large clay pot, taller than she was herself, sitting in the dead center of the chamber. It was shaped like a skull, and there were even eye sockets and grinning teeth painted on it. The top of the pot spouted a bizarre multi-colored flame, filling the chamber with sickly light.


“I wonder what this is for,” Impa muttered, running her hand over the front of it. There were sounds coming from inside, something skittering around, and she took a cautious step back as the pot rocked on its base. It rocked again, tipping towards her, and she dived out of the way as it came down. “Shit!” The flames sputtered out as the pot rolled across the floor, and when it bumped to a stop the top faced away from her. Impa stood and moved around it, giving it a wide berth, until the opening came into view and she saw two giant hands, each easily the size of her own torso plus a little, crawling out of the pot using their fingers like an insects legs. The fingers were tipped with wicked looking claws and the hands themselves were covered in a rough, desiccated, warty skin. Both ended at the wrist. “Floormasters. Great.”


Impa scanned the room around her, hoping to see something she could use as a weapon, but there was nothing near besides the giant pot itself. One of the Floormasters took notice of her, the monster spinning on its nails to face her, and it lowered itself to the ground in preparation to make a dash in her direction. Its claws scraped against the floor as it dashed, but Impa side-stepped and delivered a hard kick to it. The monster went flying, tumbling across the floor and coming to a stop upside down, its claws weakly scrabbling at the air above it.


“Hmph, serves you right,” she said, trying to ignore the ache in her foot from kicking the thing. “Now I just need to…” she started, turning towards the pot, when the other Floormaster struck her full force in the chest, knocking the wind from her, then closed its fingers tightly around her body and dragged her to the ground with its weight. “Get off me!”


Impa struggled against the monster, but weakened as she was she couldn’t break free of its grip. The fingers tightened around her, claw tips digging into her side painfully, as though the thing knew she couldn’t get away and was gloating in a strange, silent way. A strange ripping sound came from nearby, and she whipped her head around to look at the source.


The wounded Floormaster’s skin was bubbling and moving as it lay curled up like a dead spider. It began to twitch, and then the flesh blistered and peeled away, dry and rotting like old parchment. From inside what was left of it came the sound of skittering claws, and Impa watched in horror as three new Floormasters, all tiny compared to the original, only a little bigger than a real hand, came crawling out on their freshly born claws. They wandered in small circles, their claws clicking on the stone floor, then all turned as one in the direction of Impa and the large Floormaster holding her down. Then they each reared back, holding themselves up on their wrists, and flexed their fingers in the air at her. It was a bizarre sight and made her remember lecherous old men that once filled the Hylian Castle in her youth, their hands seemingly at the ready to grope, grasp, and tickle any of the young women working in the castle, Impa included.


She doubted that the monsters had anything carnal in mind, though. As far as she was aware, Floormasters increased their numbers by splitting before they died and then draining life force from other creatures until they grew back into a full size monster. The three diminutive creatures flexing their fingers at her were mostly likely simply excited to feed and grow, and Impa was sure that her trapped body seemed like a feast to them. She struggled against the one with its fingers wrapped around her, fearing her fate should she still be in its grasp when the small ones reached her, then uttered a surprised, girlish squeal when it dug one claw tip softly into the spot just below her ribs.


“St-stop that,” she sputtered, fighting the urge to giggle at the strange, ticklish probe of the claw. The small ones seemed to take notice, their fingers flexing faster, and suddenly she realized that they might not be as different from the old perverts in the castle as she thought. She also became very, very aware of how exposed she was. Her feet stuck out of one end of the clasped Floormaster, kicking hopelessly, and everything from her breasts and above poked out the other with her arms pinned to her sides, useless. She watched as the small Floormasters lowered themselves onto their claws again and began to approach, dread filling her with every click and clack of their nails on the floor. “Don’t even think about it!” she cried as all three burst into a mad dash in her direction. Her yell seemed to give the monsters pause, but then the one holding her dug its claw in again, catching her by surprise, and Impa, warrior and faithful retainer to Princess Zelda, broke into a girlish giggle. That seemed to be all the encouragement that the small ones needed, and they descended, filling the dark Shadow Temple with laughter.


______


Sheik came around slowly, head pounding and the side of his face feeling tacky with dried blood. When his eyes fluttered open, he found himself strapped in the same chair the Cucco Lady had occupied for the short while he’d been tickling her. The rest of the shack came into focus, swimming darkness and splotchy shapes resolving themselves into walls and a floor.


“Finally awake! How’s your head, Master Sheik?” His eyes snapped towards the voice and he saw the Cucco Lady standing beside the shack’s door. The Stalfos that had cracked his skull before stood next to her passively, bony arms folded over its chest and a menacing glow deep in its empty eye sockets. “I’m sorry my brother was so rough with you, he doesn’t know his own strength ever since he became a Stalfos,” the Cucco Lady said, patting the undead monster’s arm.


Sheik didn’t speak, instead struggling against the heavy straps on the chair. He didn’t know what the Cucco Lady’s intentions were, but at the end of the day it didn’t really matter. Hyrule itself depended on his survival. He couldn’t allow himself to be killed by a madwoman and a monster.


“Oh, stop that already,” she laughed, pulling a knife from her belt and taking a step towards Sheik. “You can’t get out of the chair any more than I could a bit ago. Bet you wish you’d tickled a little harder and tired me out, eh? Too bad.” She walked up to him, knife gleaming wickedly in the dim light. “Don’t jerk too much, I don’t want to cut you.”


“What?” Sheik was confused. He had expected her to unceremoniously bury the knife in his gut, but instead she leaned forward and worked at cutting away his clothing, pinching the material and pulling forward so she could slice through it without harming him. “Wait, what are you doing? Stop!” Panic gripped Sheik as she worked, humming to herself, and after a moment she yanked the tattered remains of his shirt away and tossed them aside.


“What’s this?” the Cucco Lady asked, puzzled. A bandage was wrapped tightly around Sheik’s chest. She plucked at it, preparing to cut it away as well.


“No! Leave it alone!” She glanced up, curious at the desperate note in his voice.


“Whoops,” she giggle, sliding the sharp knife upwards and through the bandages, then pulled them away. To her surprise, two full breasts spilled out. “Master Sheik! You’re a girl!” Most of Sheik’s face was hidden by a mask, but what she could see burned a deep crimson. Wondering what else she might discover, the Cucco Lady stood and pulled the wrap from Sheik’s hair, watching in awe as long, golden locks spilled out. When she pulled off the mask, Sheik was revealed to be a pretty young woman, pale skinned even through the burning flush of embarrassment. “You’re so pretty! Why would you disguise yourself like that?”


“It’s none of your business,” Sheik mumbled, her head turned to avoid meeting the Cucco Lady’s eyes.


“Hmm, I suppose not. It doesn’t change anything anyway, though it does make what comes next more fun for me.” The Cucco Lady cupped one of Sheik’s breasts, giving it a squeeze and making her captive gasp.


“And what… comes next? Why not just use the knife and be done with it?”


“The knife? I’m not going to kill you, Mistress Sheik. My cucco’s still need to be happy, after all.” The words hung in the air between them, and Sheik reeled at the absurdity of them.


“Wait, what? What do you mean?” The Cucco Lady answered by plucking a loose feather from the floor at the foot of the chair and running it lightly across Sheik’s nipple, making the woman shiver in the chair. “You can’t be serious,” she said when the feather stopped and she could speak without the danger of sounding ridiculous.


“Can’t I?” The feather twirled between the fingers of one hand as the Cucco Lady curled the other into a menacing claw and reached for Sheik’s ribs. “I assure you, Mistress Sheik, this is no laughing matter.” Then the Cucco Lady went to work and Sheik found that her tormentor was right.


______


“Get off, get off!” Impa yelled before her voice cracked and her words melted into a helpless belly laugh. The Floormaster holding her dug each of its claws into her now, kneading gently. The small ones had joined the fray some time before, one tracing the wrinkles of her weakly kicking feet with its claws while another managed to wiggle its fingers between her trapped arm and torso, effectively trapping itself in her underarm. The third, and perhaps the most maddening, kept flipping her disheveled white hair out of its way and into her face while it used a single claw tip to tease her earlobe and the side of her neck. Impa had fought the sensations at first, grunting and growling as they broke her down slowly, but every moment that crawled by weakened her resolve until eventually she’d laughed, and once the first escaped the rest were impossible to stop, welling from her belly and spilling from her like a stream.


The monsters were relentless, tickling and scrabbling over Impa’s helpless skin without mercy. If they felt anything at all, it seemed to only be a hunger for more of her tortured laughter. She vaguely felt the one teasing around her neck pause, then a light tugging. When she squinted through the tears welling in her eyes, she saw to her horror that the thing was pulling at the tight fabric of her leotard, sliding it slowly downward to expose her breasts. It couldn’t quite pull the leotard down with its own strength, an observation that left her relieved once she realized it, until the one wiggling its fingers in her armpit wormed its way back out and joined it. With one pulling from each side, the fabric slid easily down, her breasts spilling out once it passed her nipples. The two Floormasters, without a moment’s hesitation, both dove back into her armpits, four fingers wiggling deep into each hollow, while their thumbs reached out and traced lazy circles around her nipples, squeezing moans from her in between giggles.


Impa was so distracted by the two Floormasters tormenting her underarms and nipples that she’d nearly forgotten the third miniature monster hand scratching at her feet. It seemed to notice that its attentions were being overshadowed as well, and after several minutes abandoned simply tracing the ever changing wrinkles of her flexing feet to instead rear up on its wrist and dig its claws in between her toes, the sudden shock of the sensation cutting through the rest of the tickling and wrenching a tortured scream from her, a high pitched wail sprinkled with hiccups and hitched breath that echoed through the room all around her, driving her to new heights of madness with her own bestial sounds. Her feet kicked reflexively and she nearly dislodged the fingers assaulting her toes, but then the large Floormaster tightened its own grip around her, crushing the air from her and forcing her body to go limp.


If they don’t stop, I’m going to die. The thought was a strangely calm one, bubbling up from some corner of her mind that wasn’t buzzing and screaming with the insidious touches of the Floormasters. It was almost reassuring, in fact, that the ordeal could end. The large one tightened its grip even more and Impa felt light-headed and woozy, unable to breathe properly and what air she could suck in quickly being lost to laughter. Before she even realized it, she’d fainted, her body going completely still with the exception of an occasional muscle spasm, as though her unconscious form could still feel the faintest tickling sensation.


______


The Cucco Lady had abandoned the feather some time before, though Sheik scarcely noticed. Instead, her long nails traced around her captive’s quivering belly, drawing nonsensical shapes until the flesh was a furious pink, while the index finger of the other hand dipped into the navel and scratched at the sensitive folds within. All Sheik could do was laugh as her tormentor assaulted her, exploring her tummy as she had earlier explored her underarms and breasts, delighting at the shrieks of the blonde woman any time she paused tickling and pinched at her erect nipples.


“Ooh, what about here? This spot always makes me beg. If you’d realized that, maybe you would have broken me before my brother got here,” the Cucco Lady crooned, moving her hands down to Sheik’s hips and digging her thumbs into them just above the hip bone. Sheik responded with a surprised scream that shook the rafters of the small shack. She screamed as long and hard as her lungs would let her, hoping to drown out the horrid sensation and the irresistible urge to laugh that rode it, but the Cucco Lady was patient and kept kneading her hips until it died away, replaced with helpless, hysterical laughter. “My goodness, Mistress Sheik, even your voice is pretty. It really is a shame to hide it from the world, so let’s see if we can make it echo through the entire village!”


The Cucco Lady showed no sign of slowing down, one hand still digging into Sheik’s hips as the other trailed down, tracing a teasing line down her thigh, before resting on her knee, the fingers splayed out like a spider ready to attack.


“Here’s another one that gets me every time,” she said, the began to slowly close and then open her hand over Sheik’s knee, nails dragging outward then in, outward and then inward, over and over. Sheik’s whole body jerked hard enough to make the chair jump and rattle on the dusty planks of the shack floor, but she couldn’t get away and within seconds the new sensation took over her brain with white hot panic and she half giggled, half wheezed as she babbled barely coherent words in desperate pleas for mercy. The Cucco Lady laughed right along with her, delighted at how horribly ticklish the new spot seemed to be, and soon her other hand abandoned its place at Sheik’s hip to join its mate, all ten of her fingers sliding back and forth over the captive knees without so much as a shred of pity.


Sheik desperately wondered how long it had been, how long it might still be, before the evil redhead ceased tickling her. The Cucco Lady clearly enjoyed it, and her face was nearly as flushed with lust as Sheik’s own was with embarrassment and unwilling mirth. It might still be hours before the monstrous woman grew bored, a possibility that terrified Sheik more than she cared to admit to herself.


“Wait, what are you- AH!” The Cucco Lady went rigid as two bony hands came from behind and grasped her sides, fleshless fingers digging in until she squealed and relented from tickling Sheik. The Stalfos kept up its assault, tickling the madwoman to the floor as Sheik watched, both glad for the moment to catch her breath and confused at the monster turning on her captor. “Okay, okay, stop!”


The Stalfos paused, its empty sockets staring down at her, then back up at the heaving chest of Sheik, and it made a horrifying sound somewhere deep in its chest that very nearly sounded like words to Sheik.


“Okay, I get it, you want to play too,” the Cucco Lady said, still giggling as she brushed the monster’s hands away. “I’ve got just the idea.” She stood, plucking hay from her hair and brushing dirt and dust from her skirt, then turned back to Sheik. Wordlessly, she crossed to her in two steps, leaned down, then Sheik felt the whole world tilt as the Cucco Lady grabbed the chair and flipped it onto its back, the crash of it hitting the floor knocking the wind from Sheik. Her feet, still shackled to the legs of the chair, kicked and wiggled weakly in the air.


“Whatever you’re planning,” Sheik coughed, “it won’t matter once the Hero of Time makes it to Kakariko.” She’d hoped to give the Cucco Lady pause, make her fear the consequences of torturing someone closely associated with the Hero, but her tormentor simply laughed.


“You hadn’t heard? The Hero fell in the Water Temple, bested by a shade of himself created by the great Ganondorf.”


“What?”


“He’s dead,” the Cucco Lady said simply, the teasing note leaving her voice. “The Hero is dead, the princess lost, and the power of Ganondorf grows by the day. Hyrule is doomed, and soon there will only be those loyal to the Evil King and corpses populating it.”


“That… that can’t be,” Sheik sobbed, unsure if the Cucco Lady spoke truth but fearing that it might be so.


“Oh, come now, don’t be sad,” the Cucco Lady whispered, and Sheik felt her tugging at the soft slippers on her feet. “Let’s get these off and see if my brother and I can cheer you up.” Sheik felt the slippers slide off and a light shock as the cool air of the shack kissed her freshly bare feet.


“Please, no more! I can’t, I can’t stand any more,” Sheik whispered, still agonized from her previous torture and terrified at the possibility that Link had fallen.


“Oh, but these little feet of yours are so pretty, and my brother hasn’t gotten to play with you yet!” The Cucco Lady’s manic edge returned to her voice, each word like a punch in the gut for Sheik. She realized that they were going to keep going until she was a mad as the woman torturing her or until she was dead. “If I don’t let him tickle you soon, I’ll probably end up laughing on the floor again, and if we play with these pretty feet, then we each get one to tickle. Doesn’t that sound fun?”


Sheik couldn’t remember the last time her feet had been touched, let alone if they’d ever been tickled, and held on to some dim hope that perhaps whatever they planned to do to her wouldn’t work. Maybe her feet weren’t ticklish, and the Stalfos would grow bored and torture the madwoman long enough for her to find a way out of the cuffs. It seemed possible until the Cucco Lady lazily slid a single finger down the arch of her right foot and her whole body jolted. A second finger slide felt like electricity tracing up her legs, and Sheik had to bite her tongue to hold back the scream that welled up within at the sensation, realizing the opposite of her hopes were true - those two tickles alone were enough to show her that her feet were more ticklish than anything the Cucco Lady had touched yet. A shadow moved in the corner of her eye, and she saw the hulking shape of the Stalfos appear above, next to the Cucco Lady, both reaching for her flexing toes.


“Please,” Sheik began to say once more, but then they made real contact, sharp nails skittering up and down one sole while hard, bony fingers scratched at the other, and her words left her along with coherent thought. There was only laughter.


______


Impa awoke, cold and alone, on the stone floor. She couldn’t quite piece together how long the Floormasters had tormented her as she screamed and laughed in the dark chamber of the Shadow Temple (Hours? Days? Millennia?), but she did remember finally growing light headed and unable to breathe. It seemed she’d passed out. The monsters were nowhere to be seen, probably gone after growing bored with their prey once she stopped reacting to their touch.


She tried to stand and her knees buckled almost immediately, so Impa sank to her rump and just sat, conserving what little of her strength remained and inspecting herself. Her breasts were still exposed and she pulled the leotard she wore back over them with a tired sigh. The garment itself had seen better days, her ordeal leaving it frayed and dirty as well as torn across the middle, exposing her navel and most of her flat belly to the elements. Impa’s body ached horribly, bone deep, as though she’d gone through the most rigorous training she could remember from her youth twice. Worst of all, every inch of her seemed to be covered in grime and filth, grave mud and ancient dust caked onto nearly everything. Impa had never felt so dirty in her life and loathed it.


A quiet click shot through the still air, bringing all her senses to high alert and her head swung around, afraid that she was going to see the Floormasters crawling back to her, their nails clicking on the hard stones. They were still strangely absent, though, and there was only the one sound. She waited, tensing her battered body, and a heartbeat later a loud, long creak followed the click, the sound of an old door grinding open on hinges that hadn’t moved in generations. A shaft of light crawled across the floor on her right, and when she turned towards it she saw a door she hadn’t noticed before standing ajar in the far wall, its hinges still squealing as it slowly banged open and torchlight from within reached out to her warmly.


Impa dragged herself to her feet, sweat beading on her brow with the effort, and she took a shaky step towards the open door. Then another, and when her legs didn’t give out beneath her she took one more. She half stumbled, half limped until she made it to the door, reaching out and catching herself on the doorknob as she felt her knees buckling again. Once she steadied herself, she stepped through.


The room on the other side was the shape of a square, lit with torches placed high on each of the walls. The walls themselves seemed to be carved from living stone, and the floor was nothing more than dirt. There was nothing else she could see, no other door or a treasure chest in a corner or even a monster hunched and waiting to pounce. It seemed to be a pointless, empty, dirty room.


Still, something about the room sat wrong with her, though she wasn’t quite sure what it was. She stepped forward, shaky legs taking her to the center of the dirt floor, and looked around to see if anything caught her attention, something to give clarity to the wrongness nagging at her. She still couldn’t put a finger on it until she looked down at the floor and saw several mounds of dirt scattered about the room. Each one seemed to be in motion, something below the surface fighting its way up and disturbing the soil above as it did, and she’d just walked into the dead center of all of them.


“Shit,” Impa muttered, gathering her strength to make a mad dash to the door when they all broke through the floor. No less than twelve arms, impossibly long and with waxy pale corpse flesh, burst upwards. Dead, empty veins were visible throughout each, and all of them ended in a white hand with blood red nails reaching up to the ceiling. Each one was nearly a foot taller than Impa herself and none had an elbow joint that she could see, instead seemingly swaying and flexing bonelessly. They formed a ring around her, not close enough that one could reach out and grab her, but she would have to pass close to several of them to make it back to the door. She sighed, a tired, frustrated sound in the quiet room, and hated herself for falling into such an obvious trap.


Impa took a tentative step, making sure to stay a safe distance from the hands, and waited to see if they would react. None did, they just continued swaying, their hands raised to the ceiling with upturned palms, so she took one more. Still nothing. She lowered herself, preparing to try and sprint in between the two directly in front of her. If she made it through them, then the door was only a step or two beyond.


That was when she felt two hands clasp around her ankles, their grip painfully tight, then the room turned upside down as the arms connected to them tore from the ground, lifting her into the air feet first.


“Let me go!” Impa screamed, trying to bend and reach the hands holding her, hoping to pry them open before something else happened. She couldn’t, though. Her body was too weak, and after several moments of struggling her muscles gave out and she hung limply, blood rushing to her head and making her skull feel swollen.


She saw the other hands start to close in, their arms digging trenches through the dirt floor as they forced their way through it by sheer strength, enclosing the wide circle around her slowly. A larger mound appeared below, not directly beneath her but close enough, dirt sifting and bubbling as something much larger that the arms clawed its way upward, and then the rest of the monster burst put of the ground.


It had no legs in sight, seeming just a hulking torso covered in the same bloated corpse skin as the arms. Two more arms jutted from it, though they lacked hands and it kept them scrunched at its front, and above them the fat torso tapered into an impossibly long neck that ended in a face that was little more than a skull with skin stretched over it and a large mouth with impossibly white teeth. Impa had no name for the abomination, nor had she ever seen its like before, but it resembled some horror she’d read about on old Sheikah records years before and one name stuck out in the memory. This… thing… was a Dead Hand, an undead freak far more dangerous than any Poe or Redead.


“I said let go!” She struck out at the torso with a fist, shuddering at how it sunk in to the waxy flesh, and the monster ignored her attack completely, instead craning its neck to inspect the thing nearest its face - her upturned soles. It stared for several seconds, clicking its teeth together and cocking its head to one side, then it looked down into her upturned face and uttered a sound that sounded like two gravestones scraping against each other.


Impa realized the sound was laughter.


It opened its mouth and an impossibly long tongue lolled out, hovering just above her wiggling toes, and she remembered the bizarre tickle torture the Floormasters had subjected her to and realized with a sinking heart that the Dead Hand might share their eccentricities.


“DddDiiiIirRrRRTtttyyyyyyyY,” the thing groaned in a raspy, dead voice, then she felt the tongue, scratchy and dry, lick from heel to toe of her left foot and she screamed, partly in horror and disgust, but mostly because the dry, dead tongue was the most ticklish thing that she could ever remember touching her feet. Her body jerked and flailed as it continued, every rough lick driving more of her sanity away, and she began to hopelessly beat at its bloated, disgusting torso with her fists.


Tears sprung to her eyes, and when she blinked them away Impa realized that the circle of hands had enclosed around her, all of them reaching for her writhing form. Two grabbed her wrists and pulled her body taut while others grabbed and tore what was left of her clothing away, shredding the fabric like paper. As soon as her ruined clothing fell away they were on her, blood red nails teasing and scratching every exposed inch of her, all while the rough tongue mercilessly continued to assault her feet, the horrid appendage somehow twisting in between several of her toes in between licks.


Impa dissolved into a cackling mess as the tongue licked and hands kneaded her underarms and belly, pinched at her hips, and caressed her thighs. One adventurous quartet of hands turned their attention to her breasts, two hands pulling and twisting her nipples while the other two spidered their nails along the undersides. Another pair of hands, even more brazen, teased her womanhood, first gently tickling her vaginal lips before one hand spread her open and the other traced a single, impossibly sharp nail up and down her clit. The longer it all went on, the less Impa was able to feel any individual sensation, everything melding into one horrible, irresistible full body tickle. She noticed either the torches in the room had begun to dim or her vision was going black, and real fear shook her.


Then something caught her eye through the mass of sickly pale arms, a movement at the entrance of the room. In a bizarre moment of clarity, she looked at the door and saw one of the small Floormasters standing in the entrance, seemingly entranced at what happened to her. After a moment of standing there, it hopped up and slapped the open door, slamming it shut with a resounding bang.


“Wait, no!” Impa screamed, a strangled sound that devolved into hiccuping laughter as the Dead Hand found a spot on her hips that sent fresh, impossibly ticklish jolts through her body. She screamed, and she laughed, and she watched with tears in her eyes as each torch slowly dimmed and winked out, leaving her in the dark with the monster.


______


“Please, stop! Please! I can’t take anymore!” Sheik managed to spurt before sinking back into helpless laughter. The Cucco Lady and the Stalfos had been tickling her feet for hours, ignoring her pleas and delighting in her squeals. The Stalfos only used its bony fingers, which was bad enough as is, but the woman kept changing tactics, jumping from fingers to cucco feathers to something pulled from the pocket of her dress that felt like a hair comb that sent electric jolts coursing from her trapped sole all the way up her legs. Sheik had told them every secret she knew, including her own true identity, begged and pleaded, and the pair never so much as slowed their torment. “I’ll do anything! Anything!”


“Is that so?” the Cucco Lady asked, giggling. “In that case, Mistress Sheik, or should I say Princess Zelda… I want you to laugh.” The Cucco Lady stopped and tapped the Stalfos’s shoulder to catch its attention. When it looked up, she motioned to the foot she had abandoned and it nodded, shifting over so it could tickle both of Sheik’s feet, one with each skeletal hand. Sheik scarcely noticed the difference and continued laughing up at the rafters of the shack as the Stalfos silently tickled both her helpless soles. The Cucco Lady stood and stepped around the chair until she stood at Sheik’s head, looking down at her. “My, you look like an absolute mess.”


The madwoman was right. Sheik’s hair whipped around, some sticking to her face while the rest frizzed out in any direction, her cheeks were wet with tears, and every inch of her exposed upper body seemed to glisten with sweat. Straw and dirt from the floor clung in her hair and her eyes were bloodshot. The Cucco Lady watched as Sheik’s chest heaved, sucking in as much air as she could, while the rest of her quivered in laughter, almost immediately spending every captured breath on the irresistible sensations traveling up from her feet.


“Look at that, you’re laughing just like I said. I should reward you.” Sheik watched in horror as the Cucco Lady lifted her own skirt, exposing her lower half and, her face flushing with lust and pleasure, lowered her sex directly onto Sheik’s helpless laughing face. “Mmm, just like that, Princess,” she moaned as she listened to Sheik’s muffled laughter and screams beneath her, and began to grind against her face as she bit her own lip. “More! I need more!” She leaned forward and tickled Sheik’s ribs while she rode her face, and the sounds beneath her put her over the edge as she came hard, covering her prisoner’s face with her juices.


She lifted her hips briefly and watched as Sheik gasped for breath, still giggling at the attention on her feet, then looked up at her with terrified eyes. The Cucco Lady knew that she’d eventually have to turn Hyrule’s former princess over to Ganondorf now that she knew her real identity, but there was no rule that said she had to do so immediately. Or that the princess had to be anything but still breathing. The King of Evil might actually reward her for giving Zelda to him as a broken, cackling madwoman.


“Time for round two,” she snickered, lowering her hips and grinding her pussy against Zelda’s face once again, shivering in delight at the feeling of the captured woman laughing up into her sex.