“This is all the captain’s fault.” Espio hissed, clutching the trunk of the palm tree as though it were a throat.

Mighty pulled his head out of the sand just far enough to converse without getting his ears melted. This island would be quite pleasant, if there were any food, water and earplugs. “You say that about everything.”

“Because everything is. His. FAULT.” Espio punctuated himself by slamming his head into the tree, which already bore a seven inch groove from his horn. ‘Fault’ summoned a coconut from above, splitting into gooey halves across Silver’s head. The missionary probably didn’t notice, as he wasn’t coping well with the noise.

Cream was quite possibly dead. Her ears were a lot bigger than everyone else’s, which is a pretty poor survival trait on an island where Amy Rose is screaming.

In desperate attempt to knock himself out, Espio continued to piledrive the palm tree, stopping only when his horn caught in the pulpy bark. After a few minutes of wasted effort, Espio kicked Mighty, who yanked him out with one arm. Instead of thanking him, the chameleon nodded. “I’m going to kill him.”

“The palm tree?”

“No.”

“The missionary?” He asked, desperate hope in his muted voice.

“No. The captain.”

“I was afraid of that.” Mighty grumbled, ducking under Charmy. The bee was currently bouncing around like a flying pinball with a two-inch stinger, clutching his head and screaming a scream that would have been considered loud anywhere else. “You know, that’s not really a good idea…”

“Oh, but it is.” Espio was laughing now, pulling knives out of his gi and piling them up behind him. In a few seconds, the pile was bigger than Mighty was. “It is. You see, we’re shipwrecked on an island. We have no food, but we have a screaming woman on a rock that kills anything within ten feet of her. We have no fresh water, but we have a missionary from Italy that will make sure we die of exposure as observant Catholics, whether we like it or not. We have no ship, but we have the ovefed gecko who crashed the ship we had into a cliff wall. The last one is the only thing useful to us. Do you know why?”

“Why?”

Espio pulled a particularly deadly-looking knife from the innermost pocket of his gi. If Mighty had to guess, he’d say that Espio’d been saving it just for Vector. “Because I know how to cook crocodiles.”

“Again, that’s not really a good…” A lesser knife bounced off his armored forehead. “On second thought, I’ll just put my head back in the sand now.”

“Smart boy.” Espio was examining his reflection in the ‘Kill Vector’ knife. It was about an inch longer than his usual kunai, and thin as his finger. A single glance at the razor edged death in his hands brought images of something going into one of Vector’s eye sockets and out the other. Specifically Vector. Not Charmy, not Mighty, not the priest…well, maybe the priest, if he ran out of the regulars. But if any inanimate object could think, then it was this one. And it was thinking of Vector.

Espio closed his eyes and smiled like a shark. The ‘bloody vengeance’ center of a ninja’s brain is about three times bigger than anyone else’s, and Espio’s was running like it was plugged directly into a nuclear reactor.

There was only one problem.

Espio yanked Mighty out of the ground like a turnip. “Where’s the captain?”

“What do I look like, a map? You’re supposed to be good at finding people, ninja boy.” The knife cut a little nick out of his eyelid. “Sawhimheadingtowardstheboat.” Mighty waved at a pile of fresh driftwood on the far shore and dug his head into the bedrock when Espio let him go.

Two seconds later, Vector came up from the water with a barrel overhead. “Good news! One of the water barrels didn’t break!” A throwing knife thudded into it, causing a little groan from Vector. “Espio, I’m sure you’re thirsty, but we’ve got to make this last until…Whoa!” The barrel became a shield against a dozen more.

Espio screamed something. Vector didn’t speak Japanese, but he’d guess it boiled down to some kind of death threat. Instead of looking for a translator, he sunk back beneath the water, swimming away as flying knives left frothy trails around him. Espio followed the watery shadow, jumping between the floating debris of their ship while introducing Vector to his endless supply of sharp, foreign things.

He landed on a half-sunken piece of the mast. Vector came up instantly, snapping it between his jaws like a candy cane. Espio hopped, landed on his captain’s nose, and leapt into the air. At the apex of his jump, he somersaulted in midair, casting shuriken at Vector. The crocodile picked up the remaining halves of the mast, used one to block the shuriken and threw the other overarm. Espio bounced off it, spun through the air, and landed on another floating boat chunk.

Silver noticed the fight when a poorly-aimed knife nailed his foot to the sand. Now, he was threading bits of his cassock around the hole in his foot, watching the fight from the cover of a palm tree. Mighty was next to him. “Are they always like this?”

“I can’t speak your language, strange man. If you’re worried about those guys, they’re pretty much like this all the time.” He muttered. “They don’t usually stop unless something important happens. You know, like us about to sail off a waterfall, or the king’s navy showing up from behind a reef. That sort of thing.” A line of knives drummed out death as they nailed themselves against the palm. “Doesn’t seem likely that something like that’s going to happen today.”

Silver waited for Cream to translate, then recalled that Cream was lying facedown in the dirt a few feet away. She’d torn up the tent she’d been wearing to bandage her ears, but they hadn’t held together. Silver wondered if he might take a swing at it, before a tremendous crunching noise brought him back to the fight.

“Huh?” Mighty nudged him on the arm. “Hey, did you just see that?”

“What?”

“Never mind that.” Mighty grunted, looking up. “I just saw something…Whoa!”

“Wha…WHOA!”He jumped away as a shadow passed over his face, squirming like a caterpillar. Unlike regular shadows, which are little patches of darkness that show up when something’s in the way of the sun, these shadows were crawling all over the place on their own, hissing and buzzing. Even Espio and Vector noticed them, after getting passed over by a particularly large clump of darkness.

After running madly across the tiny island, they seemed to select one spot from all the others. Without a moment’s hesitation, they started to spiral inwards around that central point, forming a tight, compact spot of utter blackness, as though an invisible hand had just spilled a cloud of ink into the universe. It wasn’t far from where Silver was standing. He quickly considered which side of the tree was safest: the one with two insane pirates or the one with some kind of black hole popping out of the sand.

There was a sound that defied description, the effect of hearing which was the feeling that your ears were getting further away from each other. The central point began to bulge and squirm, rising off of the sand and morphing into a vague, bipedal shape. As the marooned pirates watched, it began to refine itself into the silhouette of hedgehog carrying a sword in one hand and holding its abdomen with the other. The sound began to subside, and color began to filter into the hedgehog’s shape. It didn’t make much of a difference, as he was mostly black.

Once the mercenary had fully torn himself from the shadows, the strange noise fully vanished, and the shadows slipped back into their familiar dormancy on the farthest side from the sun. Silver gave his a suspicious look as it sulked back to his feet.

The mercenary, a black hedgehog with red stripes and a gaping wound on the side of his chest, looked around the island, noticed Silver, opened his mouth to speak, and fell over.

- - - - - - - -

“Land Ho!”

“I can see it just fine, your majesty.” Ali grumbled, wrestling with the boards of the raft. Knotted vines hadn’t held together as well as he’d hoped they would. From the looks of things, they’d be swimming momentarily.

Muscat was on the horizon. It wasn’t the largest city in the world, nor was it the prettiest. It did have an overpowering stench of fish that reached for miles across the landscape, though. Ali was all for it, though. Where there were fish, there was food. Were there was food, there were inns. Where there were inns, there were beds. Were there were those three things, there was one tired, breaten, broken Ali Baba heading for shore as fast as he whip himself into going.

Shahryr simply stood o his toes, chin in the air as he watched his country edge ever closer. Soon enough, he’d be back in his Oasis, the peasant would be shut up and removed from sight and everything would be back to normal.

Normal indeed.

…Why did his feet feel wet?

“Peasant?”

“Grab a timber and swim, your majesty! It’s just a couple of miles and the tide favors us!” Ali inhaled a gallon of salt water when Sharyr simply placed himself on Ali as though the fox were wearing some sort of saddle. “My…bad…the tide…favors…me…it would seem…”

“Less drowning, more swimming.”

- - - - - - - -

“…Hey, he’s waking up.”

“What?!” There was the noise of a three-foot rabbit shoving a six-foot crocodile out of her way, promptly followed by the sound of a crocodile falling into a large rock, denting his head and throwing the rock at the chameleon that laughs at him. “Sir Shadow! Sir Shadow, wake up!” Some shouted, shaking his shoulders.

No, he wanted to be dead now. Please. Seriously. Let me freaking die now. The real world is full of naïve foreign princesses, psychotic blue hedgehogs, evil weasels, birds being carried by bigger birds made of wood and suddenly finding yourself on a giant flying stingray. In contrast, the afterlife is full of virgins looking for a change in job description. The only reason I haven’t been there since I hit puberty is that suicide is, for some unfair reason, considered a sin. But the weasel killed me, so now I get to have my celestial orgy. Finally. Yay. Whoopee. Back the fuck off.

His psychic message, venomous as it was, was ignored. In fact, the shaking simply increased, refusing to let him believe that he was dead. Damn. Well, maybe if he was very lucky, he’d find some virgins anyway. After his last few days, he was due for some karma. In fact, he was certainly owed something for the last twenty-five years of his life (In other words, all of them.). If not a virgin, then at least someone a little more…Ahem…Experienced?

He opened one eye. There was a prepubescent rabbit two inches from his face.

If this was supposed to be his virgin, then Allah was getting a pointy shoe up his ass. If she was supposed to be his ‘experienced’ woman, then that pointy shoe was going on full auto, until he either ran out of ass, energy or feet. “Who the fuck are you?”

Those two watery eyes opened a little wider. She seemed rather hurt. “…It’s…me, Sir Shadow.”

“Me?”

“Yes, me!”

“Nice to meet you, me. I’m pissed off. Now get out of my face.” Shadow growled, shoving her out of his personal space and nearly off the island altogether. Mercenaries are not pleasant.

“W…what did you do that for?!” She demanded, rubbing the spot where she’d fallen.

Shadow turned around, glaring. He’d just been denied access from the big, sexy party in the sky, and his previous experiences hadn’t made him any less irrateable. This rabbit was an unfortunate lighting rod for the angry thunderstorm a-brewing, and the fact that she reminded him of the princess who’d started this whole mess had a lot to do with the way his eye was twitching right now.

The rest of the island’s residents winced, groaned and ducked, as irritation became manifestation. When the dust settled, she had her ears tied in a knot around the tallest palm on the island.

They all stood back as he stalked towards him. Shadow’s lidded gaze fell on the white-furred hedgehog with a haircut that reminded him of really fresh hashish. “Where am I, and what’s that awful noise?”

The white hedgehog opened his mouth and said something that wasn’t words. Contrary to past experience in this sort of thing, drawing his sword and pressing it to the man’s neck only made him even more difficult to understand.

“He doesn’t speak arabic.” There was an armadillo staring at the screaming rabbit. He looked like a sailor, albeit one too poor to sail on anything bigger than a life preserver. “He’s a missionary. From Italy.” He mouthed the next few words. ‘Don’t say Jesus.’

“Why don’t I want to say Je…”

“Hey, he’s awake!” The voice was like a fist, flying through one ear and coming out the other with a handful of brain matter. You’d have to be deaf as a rock not to flinch at that. It belonged to a burly crocodile similar in attire to the armadillo. Apparently, he hadn’t been paying attention to the rabbit’s misfortune, and failed to notice her as she swayed in the breeze above his head. “So, how’d you do that stuff with the shadows there?”

“Never mind that, can you get us off this island with it?” A purple chameleon with an accent asked, bisecting the space between Shadow and the croc.

“Umm…That’s not exactly feasible at the moment. I just escaped from battle, and my essence is low at the moment.” There was a collective groan, including a bee that Shadow hadn’t noticed. “Can anyone tell me where I am? And what’s that god awful noise all about?”

“Somewhere south of the pirate seas.” The crocodile muttered. “We got marooned here just a few hours ago, when that screaming girl messed up my steering.” He jerked a thumb in the direction that the noise was coming from.

“Girl? The rabbit?”

“No, the godawful noise.”

“What?” Shadow listened closely to the sound for a moment before wincing and wishing he hadn’t. “That’s a person?”

“In theory.” The Armadillo muttered. “We think it’s some kind of siren. If it comes over here to eat the flesh off our bones when one of us dies, then we’ll know for sure.”

“Sirens are supposed to be good at singing, aren’t they?” Shadow asked.

The armadillo shrugged. “Maybe she’s pursuing a new musical direction?”

“It sounds the battle-cry of ten thousand tiny goblins inside my eardrums, venturing outwards in all directions with axes designed largely from cactus skin. On fire.” He winced, clutching his head in an attempt to strangle some of those goblins, and possibly himself. “Also, I suspect demons are involved. Possibly Ibliss.”

“Yeah, that’s Death Metal for you.” The armadillo extended a hand. “I’m Mighty.”

“…Call me Shadow.” Mighty was about to say something, but the bee barged in from stage left, emphatically introducing himself as Charmy several times over in a few seconds before the crocodile shut his head between two coconut halves, and identified himself as Vector. The glaring chameleon was introduced as an asshole.

“My name is Espio, you idiot.”

“Whatever.” Vector motioned towards the Italian. “His name’s Silver.”

“How do you know?”

“Because that girl’s been translating for us. The rabbit.” Vector looked across both shoulders. “Where’d she go?”

“Look up.” Shadow grinned.

“…Oh. Was that you?”

“Yup. Go ahead and let her down if you like. I think she’s learned her lesson.”

Vector snapped his fingers. Espio told him to go fuck himself. There was a minor scuffle, and Espio was thrown into the palm, where he dislodged the rabbit through sheer, skull-breaking force. She came down on her knees, glared at Shadow, and ran off to the other side of the island to sulk. Vector scratched his head. “That’s odd. She was really excited about seeing you wake up, for some reason.”

Shadow stopped waving sarcastically at her. His ‘My-Job-Is-In-Danger’ sense was tingling, and he didn’t know why. There didn’t seem to be something trying to kill his client in the vicinity, although that was probably the case wherever she was right now. “…Can you tell me why?”

“I dunno. I guess she was trying to tell us, but that kid was talking a mile a minute there, you know?” Vector shrugged. “She said something about getting separated from you in a valley or something. Apparently, there’s a weasel running around trying to kill her.” Vector twirled his finger around the side of his head in the classic screwball gesture.

Shadow throat clenched as though it were trying to strangle itself. “What color?”

“She looks sort of yellow to me.”

“No, the weasel.” He turned his head like a zombie on the brink of his second suicide. He was currently on the brink of realizing something he really didn’t want to know, on the basis that ignorance is bliss, at least until the rabbit gets back in touch with her royal guards. “Is it a purple weasel?”

“Uhh…Could be. She said he had some kind of projectile attack. Sounds like magic to me. Why, you know her?”

That was strike one. “How did you meet her?”

“She was floating in the sea.”

“How?” He demanded, teeth clenched in testicle-popping fear. “How did she get there?”

“I…I dunno. She must have fallen in a river.” He rubbed his chin. “If I guess correctly, it must have been the…”

Don’t say Akbar, don’t say Akbar, don’t say Akbar…

“Akbar River.” He ducked as Shadow clenched his fists and screamed at the sky. “Y…You okay?”

With adrenaline strength, he grabbed the collar of Vector’s dirty jacket and tried to pull him to eye level. This meant that Vector’s nose was rubbing into his forehead, but the point was made. “What. Was. She. Wearing. ?.”

“…What?”

“TENT.” He hissed, shaking with unexpected strength. “WAS. IT. A. TENT?”

“What? No.”

“AAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGHGH ,DAMN YOU ALLAH, YOU SON OF A BITCH YOU’RE LUCKY I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU LOOK LIKE, BECAUSE IF I DID, I’D BE ON MY WAY TO YOUR what?” Like an emotive pez dispenser, Shadow snapped his eyes from the sky back to Vector. Then, he yanked his collar so hard that he put a bend in Vector’s snout. “Say that again.”

“She wasn’t wearing a tent.” Vector muttered, eyes tearing up from the aforesaid jaw-bending.

“Again.”

“She wasn’t wearing a tent.”

“Again. With a new sentence structure.”

“…A tent was not being worn by her?”

“One more time.”

“The Hijab she was wearing was not a tent.”

“Music to my ears.” He sighed. “What’s a hijab?”

“If I tell you, will you stop bending my nose?”

“Sorry.”

Vector took a moment to straighten himself out, contemplating Shadow’s odd mood swings. He’d seen a lot of things, but men with periods was a new one. “You’ve never heard of a hijab? Have ever left this country?”

“No. All my favorite clients live here. Including the other squeaky-voice rabbit that was almost killed by The Fang in Akbar Valley a few hours ago, which I must have somehow missed when I was there. This makes total sense.”

Vector had a dissenting opinion, but he didn't think saying so would be a wise move. “Well, a hijabis a vague term for body covering. It’s sort of a holy thing in other countries. Mohammed told his followers that women should be dressed in loose, roomy clothing to prevent adultery.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Yeah, it’s not practiced in Oasis. One of the old kings was afraid that people were going to impersonate one of his wives and kill him in his sleep or something. And you know how suspicious Shahryr is, so he must have figured it was a good idea. It’s a big deal everywhere else, though.”

“Really.”

“Yeah. The Turks, the Persians, the Assyrians…Oh, and Sheba.”

“What?”

“Sheba.”

“What about Sheba?” The collar was grabbed a second time, as Vector muttered ‘here we go again’ under his breath. “You didn’t say anything about Sheba before. Why are you talking about Sheba now? Do you know someone from Sheba? Someone here? Someone short, sulky and annoying to whom I just knotted the ears of?” Vector needed a moment to process that. “ANSWERS.”

“Look, the only reason I said Sheba was because they’re crazy about it over there. The Hejab, I mean. Gets to the point where you can’t even tell for sure if there’s a lady under there unless she starts talking to you.”

The nose was bent again, in the other direction this time. Shadow had the look of someone leaning over the edge of a cliff. “But it doesn’t look like a tent?”

“What?”

“The thing that she was wearing. The hijibbity. It didn’t look like a tent.” He shook. “TELL ME IT DIDN’T LOOK LIKE A TENT.”

“I d-d-d-d-dun-n-n-no. W-w-hat-t-t’s a t-t-ten-n-t?” Vector asked, in the innocence of someone who hasn’t slept on dry land since all the harbors started shooting at him when he came near.

"A big flappy thing that people sleep in when they’re too poor to buy a roof.”

“Oh.” Vector scratched his head. “Oh, wait. Like a circus tent? I saw one of those once when I was a kid…” He scratched he head once more, mentally envisioning one of those, remade to a fraction of its size, wrapped around a rabbit, and then thrown into a river. “…Yeah, I guess it did look like a tent, then. Sort of.” Shadow’s grip withered, and he fell over. “Hey, funny story. I asked her why she was wearing it before, and you know what she said?”

“No.” He said. It wasn’t a response to Vector, but his general feelings about life in general.

“She said she was wearing it as a disguise. Funny, right? You get it, right?”

“No.”

“Well, you know. One girl in oasis wearing Hejab? Who’s not gonna recognize that?”

“No.”

“That’s right, nobody. Unless you’re dealing with some kinda moron or something. Of course, it was pretty messed up when we fished her out of the sea, so she took it off. Weird kid, huh?”

“No.”

“Yeah, no kidding!” Vector laughed, catastrophically misinterpreting Shadow’s expression. “Geez.” He grinned from ear to ear. Considering the relative length of his snout, this grin broke records. “You’d have to be dealing with a real idiot for that to work. Eh?”

“…Yes.”

- - - - - - - -

The Samak made its strangest catch that day, floating just out of shouting distance to the Muscat harbor. Being a fishing boat near the pirate seas, it was not unknown for bodies to be found inside its nets. In general terms, those bodies are almost always dead, to be thrown over the railing without anything but a fisherman’s prayer.

Live bodies have a rather rougher time of it. And here’s why.

Halim, the youngest fisherman of the Samak and the only non-human, had just pulled in the last catch of the day. The perch were plentiful this time of year, and the Samak’s nets were full to bursting. Every few seconds, a gleaming, scaly muscle with fins and eyeballs would slip out from the top of the net, like water spilling from a too-full vessel, and make a mad, spasmic dash back to the ocean. Halim, the ram, stumbled over his own hooves as he chased after one such fish, failing gloriously while it flipped across the side. With a little sigh, he pulled himself from the seasick planks. Dharr, the eldest fisherman, would not miss a single perch.

Besides, he mused, there were plenty more to be had. With Dharr’s two sons, Halim reached into the chilly foam, grasped the net and heaved mightily.

Another arm reached out, from inside the net, and made a spirited attempt to pull his goatee off. Screaming alarm, he dropped the net, nearly sending his fellows into the drink with it. Dharr looked up from the sail he was tending to.

“Halim! Are you on a ship, or are you in a garden?! Pull that net, boy!”

“The-the-the…” Halim swallowed his bleating and pointed at the twitching fishnet. “Something alive is in there!”

“They’re called fish, you blasted goat! Perch, if you’d like to be a scholar about it!”

“Perch have no arms, Dharr!”

“And goats have no wits! Now pull your weight, you blasted…” Even as he spoke, another pair of arms sprang from the net, strangled Dharr’s eldest son, banged his head against the railing a few times and sunk beneath the surface of the perch. Dharr’s youngest screamed and hid behind a barrel.

The deck shook as Dharr jumped to it. He was six feet tall and had the kind of physique that you get from a lifelong hobby of shark wrestling. Scars included. In want of a sail, Dharr had once clenched the anchor between his teeth and swum back to harbor. Anything smarter or less edible than a perch in his net was in serious trouble. “What ho…?”

Taking a harpoon in one hand, he leaned across the side and probed the net with one mad, beady eye. Sure enough, an arm reached out, grasped him by his chest hair and tried to pull itself out of the net with it. With a roar like an elephant seal on a bad day, Dharr grasped the arm with his free hand and pulled. The fox on the other end of it went flying over Halim’s head, we he landed in the sails, bounced off and landed headfirst in a barrel.

His flailing legs were grasped, both of them, in one of Dharr’s hands, as he plucked the fox from the water barrel and held him up for inspection. It took a few minutes for Ali to realize that he wasn’t in the water anymore, and another moment for him to fully understand the trouble he’d swam to.

“In my nets, only two things are found.” Dharr had breath like a barnacle, which came from between clenched, yellow teeth that could have bitten through a clamshell. “Fish and fish thieves. And you, little fox, don’t have the look of a fish about you.”

“Ah. Well.” Ali’s torn, sodden jacket began to slip off of his narrow shoulders. “I can explain everything, and it’s kind of a long…”

“Father, there’s another one!” The youngest son had suddenly found some new courage, and was wrestling a rather larger pair of arms to the deck. Ali was pinned the wall of the cabin with the harpoon, as Dharr plucked the net, in its entirety, out of the water and onto the deck. Among the perch was a large, rotund man with a moustache that could have passed for a scarf.

“And who…” He was pulled into the air by that moustache. “…Are you?”

The man adjusted his spectacles and tried to speak with an upper lip that was a hundred and eighty degrees out of place. “Unhank fmwee shwoo feffant!”

“He can’t speak like that.” Halim volunteered. The rotund man was dropped and rolled to the cabin wall, where he sat, massaging his mouth.

“Thank you, good sheep.” He growled. “What I was trying to say was ‘Unhand me, you peasant!’”

“Care to pick your words twice over?” Dharr asked, pulling the harpoon out of the salt-tainted woodwork. Ali fell to his ass. Shahryr, on the other hand, stood to his feet and tried his best to tower over someone thrice his size with exponentially more body hair.

“It is you who should pick your words with care, wretch! Do you not know to whom you speak?”

“You don’t look to be a fish. That leaves one other possibility, no?”

“Fish? You bloated imbecile! I am Shahryr! King of Oasis!”

- - - - - - -

A few leagues away, Charmy was becoming more and more used to the sonic disruption of this island. Bees are more adaptable than one might think, and this one had almost reached the point where he might ignore ten billions decibels shoving at each other to drill holes through his skull. The coconut that Vector had clapped around his head was airtight, so that might have something to do with it.

“Hey, Mighty?” He asked, through the little mouthhole he’d chewed out for oxygen.

“Yep?” The Dillo had given up on blocking the sound. Now, he was simply trying to appease it, by lying on his back and moaning.

“Isn’t that black guy a mercenary?”

“You got it, shrimp. A genuine, bloodthirsty sunnuvabitch for hire from the most uncomfortable armpit of the desert.”

“You always said that mercenaries are the most dangerous people on the planet.”

“They are indeed, barring that freak.” A thumb was jerked towards the unsiren, still breathing pure, acoustic death. “See, regular people like you and me only fight when we need to. So, we’re only as good as we need to be. Good enough to punch a hole through a ship coming after us…”

“Or chase people down and sting ‘em, right? Right?”

“Yeah, that too. Anyway, we might be good at that, but only as good as we need to be.” He shook his head. “Mercs aren’t like that. They’re hired swords. Obviously, the better they are at fighting, the more money they can ask for. So, instead of being as good as they need to be, they’re as good as they can possibly become. Fighting is their way of life. Drives ‘em a little nutso, especially since they don’t get a lot of human contact. Well, for extended periods of time, at least.” He jerked his head towards Espio, who was coping by trying to hide from the sound. “Espio was kind of like that. Ninjas are hired to kill. Of course, he hasn’t gotten much work lately, so he’s sort of retired.”

“But he’s always trying to kill the captain.”

“Good point.” Mighty shrugged. “Anyway, why do you ask?”

“Well…If mercenaries are hardened, dangerous, half-mad killers…” Charmy pointed at the sad, sad spectacle that was The Shadow. “Then what’s up with that?”

“That would be a crony trying to curry favor after assaulting his boss.”

“…The rabbit?”

“Yep.”

On the other side of the island, Shadow was getting a good workout for his ‘oh humble servant’ routine. Generally, he scared his employers enough not to use it, but Princess Sheba was inconveniently good at ignoring things that stood a good chance of killing her, or at least looked like they might. “Is the shade to your liking, your majesty?”

She snapped her fingers. The chao, which had an almost ninja-like ability to be unnoticed when it wasn’t required, popped up in front of him and yanked on his nose. On the fairly accurate assumption that pulling its little head off would be bad for business, Shadow ignored it. She was currently giving him the coldest shoulder ever seen on something that wasn’t a polar bear.

He groaned inwardly. His business depended on potential clients thinking he was a competent, deadly servant that could be hired to hurt people you don’t like. Not a competent, deadly servant that could be hired to hurt people you do like, starting with the one handing out the money. Obviously, that meant his livelihood was in danger, and he really didn’t want to have to try and find a new job. Ex-Mercenaries don’t get particularly good references. And the interview is always a killer.

On an unrelated note, she was a few days behind on his salary. Now wouldn’t be a good time to remind her of that, though.

“Your highness, I was able to find another barrel of fresh water among the wreckage. It’s going to take a while until I’m able to warp us back to the mainland, so you should probably…” Just as he opened it, Sheba’s foot slammed into the barrel, dousing Shadow and his immediate proximity. “…Keep hydrated.” He growled, brushing his waterlogged hair back out of his face.

“I’m not thirsty.” She muttered, in a most uncharacteristic tone. “Now go away.”

Charmy watched intently as Shadow sulked his way over to the log he was sharing with Mighty, leaving a soggy, sad little trail in his wake. He sighed, put his chin in his hands and sat down next to the bee, sodden clothes making an amusing, squishy noise that Charmy was only barely able to refrain from laughing at.

After a moment, he looked at the pirates. “You know, if either of you could help me, I’d be most…”

“Don’t get your hopes up.” Mighty grunted, silencing Charmy before his enthusiasm broke through. “We’re pirates. The only thing we know about women is what they look like and what to do with them.” Charmy was silenced twice over, before the word ‘cooties’ could crawl out of his mouth. “Most of us, anyway.”

“So…nothing.”

“Nope. Nothing.”

“Damn.” He grunted, folding up. “This day just can’t get any worse.”

There was a shocked gasp from the captain. “Guys! Look! In the sky!”

“Clouds?” Espio remarked, in the middle of trying to assassinate him. Vector reached behind without looking at pointed Espio’s head upwards. “Oh. I’ve never seen that before.”

“What?” Charmy asked.

“A purple weasel falling like a feather.”

Shadow’s head snapped up so fast, he put a kink in his neck. There, almost within spitting distance, was The Fang, using his cloak as some kind of parachute. From here, you could even see the light gleaming off his lopsided fangs.

“Allah, why do you make me hate you so?”

After this minor blasphemy, he kicked over the log and stormed over to Sheba, who did a remarkably good job of ignoring him, even as he picked her up and slung her across the shoulder. He hadn’t recovered enough strength to warp them back to the mainland, but he could manage halfway, and sharks were more preferable to this toothy freak. His shadows disappeared into Chaos Control just as the Fang touched down. A shockwave tore up the sand where he’d been standing, but it was just a moment too late.