I couldn't stand Navi. HEY! LISTEN! HEY! SHUT UP! Anyway...
You're riding Epona and neither of you are really paying any attention at what's going on and two little UFO lights that are sibling fairies swoop down and scare the hell out of Epona, who rears up and flips you face first into the ground. A skull kid wearing a voodoo mask comes over to ninjaloot you, picks up the Ocarina of Time and starts to toot it. Link gets up, gives his best football face, and dives for the skull kid but he hops up on Epona's back and tries to ride off with her into the sunset.
Have you ever seen Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? Think of Indy swinging off the army tank, except instead of a tank make that Epona and the skull kid is that wrinkly annoying general guy. Epona makes a sharp turn and Link does a barrel roll into the grass, and the skull kid rides off inside a tree. You chase after him and stumble into a long hole and plant your ass on a plant.
Skull kid tells you that you had a stupid horse that didn't listen to directions so he "got rid of it", then turns you into a living bouquet before floating away. It's no wonder the horse didn't like you. Have you SEEN yourself in a mirror?
Link shows off his O face.
One of the fairies, Tatl, gets left behind and ends up sticking with you initially because she just wants to use you to find her brother again, but later comes around and realizes the skull kid has to be stopped. At this point I decided that I much preferred Navi, because not only is Tatl just as annoying but she's stupid with her info too.
You continue through the cave and find yourself inside a clock tower, and on your way out the Hunchback of Notre Dame stops you, saying that he knows you used to be human/Hylian/whatever and that if you get back your "precious item" (Ocarina) then he can change you back to normal. However, he only has three days before he has to hitchhike across the galaxy so you have to get your ass in gear and get your instrument back, on the condition that you recover Majora's Mask that the skull kid is wearing.
You walk out of the clock tower and look up to see the pizza face boss from Super Smash TV looking down over the town, and you have 72 in-game hours to complete a couple of inane tasks (finding a broken fairy, hide and seek, and step 1 of the trading game) just to climb the tower. That, or you can cheat like hell with a couple of lucky backflips to skip all of that but I only pulled it off once so it's probably not worth it anyway.
If you talk to some people, you find out that the upper region of the clock tower only opens once, during New Years Eve. You can think of the big moon like the glass disco ball that descends in Times Square except the world blows up if you take too long. Anyway, you get to the top and the fairies find each other, but the skull kid is so bent up on revenge (you don't find out why until a bit later) that he's not interested in stopping the moon from falling. You blow a mighty bubble and knock the Ocarina of Time out of his hands, and when you run over to pick it up you relearn the Song of Time. Then you play it.
The skull kid tried so hard, and got so far, but in the end it didn't even matter because you send time spinning backwards and end up back inside the clock tower basement. The mask salesman creep, when finding out that you didn't retrieve the mask, shakes you like an unwanted infant before telling you about the mask's origin. It was used in tribal hexing rituals but the power of the mask was so strong it had to be sealed away to prevent destruction. The tribe vanished some time later so I guess someone decided to put it on or something, because the salesman had it in his possession shortly before he, somehow, got mugged by the skull kid.
Mugged by a little kid. "Stick 'em up or I'll make my fairies blink at you!"
Tatl tells you that the only way to stop the skull kid may be to call the four giants that watch over the world. Unfortunately, they've been sealed away in four different temples at each cardinal direction on the map. Before, you weren't allowed to leave town since you were a little Deku kid but now you're human and you have the dinky Kokiri sword, and that makes you a man so the guards have no problem letting you outside to get torn up by vicious jellybeans and snowmen.
As you're fighting through dungeons and rescuing the giants, you find out that the skull kid used to be friends with the giants but they left him all alone once they decided not to interact with people anymore, so the only way he thought to get attention was by pranking people. He found the mask salesman and ambushed him, stole Majora's Mask, and became possessed in the process, changing him from a mean-spirited prankster to an actual bad guy. Something is very wrong with the structure of that last sentence but I don't feel like fixing it.
This is the Face of Evil.
These are the Faces of Evil, one of the awful CD-i Zelda games and nothing to do with the topic at hand.
Once you beat every temple, you go back to the top of the clock tower on New Years and play the Ocarina to summon the giants. I'm certain these things used to be mascots from an old Bic pen package or something because they're very familiar and I doubt I could forget faces so ugly. Then again, it might be unfair to say they had ugly faces because they're really just big walking noses and with a look like that I can't blame them for hiding from the human race.
See???
The giants materialize out of thin air and walk over to the clock tower, look up, and push with all of their might against the big moon. After some struggling, they finally stop its descent and a conflict of emotions or something from skull kid sends him into a little coma. While the fairies debate on whether or not to detatch his life support or petition the President to keep him alive as a vegatable, the mask itself detatches from the kid's face and beams itself up into the moon's open mouth. Link runs into the tractor beam and goes up inside it as well.
"Inside", you see an open field with a single tree. 4 kids are prancing around and wearing masks of the bosses you defeated inside the temples. You talk to each of them and give away all of the non-transformational masks you own, then walk up to the 5th kid by himself with Majora's Mask. He asks if you'd like to play, and get sent into a room with no doors or windows. You know, the sort of room NAMBLA members dream of visiting. In here, you fight the mask's physical form. You beat it, the moon vaporizes, everyone is happy. Tatl is all
to Link. The giants are looking down at the emotionally-scarred skull kid and he realizes that he really did have friends, and how he was wrong for being mean to everyone. He wants to be friends with Link, and gives him a good sniffing. Looks like someone forgot to neuter him. Down boy."You smell just like that kid who taught me that song in the woods." The final puzzle piece falls into place; this is the same skull kid in Ocarina of Time that you kept murdering for the 200 rupee piece! Thanks to your brutality, he developed Munchausen Syndrome and tried to blow up the planet. Way to go Link, you short-sighted little asshole!
Oh yeah, and you never find Navi.