Author's Note: Hi there and welcome to the fic! It's yet another external part of my Magnum Opus "Life could have been so different" but stands well on its own. Just a little tale of Shadow's and Maria's life aboard the ARK. Enjoy:)

Birthday Girl

by Taranea

"Shadow? Would you like to go the zoo?"

"What?" The young hedgehog raised his head and glanced at Maria, his wide-eyed questioning look forever at odds with the violent crimson of his eyes. Maria privately wondered how fierce her little companion would one day be able to glare if he was ever truly angered. For now, though, black eyelids merely closed over the innocent stare as Shadow blinked. "Go where?"

"The zoo, Shadow. Or rather, the lab where all the animals are kept." Maria replied, stepping into Professor Gerald Robotnik's private chambers where Shadow had been lying curled up in his unlocking cage, still sleeping as it was early morning. The blonde girl smiled and sat down beside him. "Today's my birthday, you know. It's one of grandpa's presents for me."

"Your birthday?" Shadow raised an eyebrow as if not entirely convinced. "But you were born ages ago."

Maria adopted a flat tone. "Are you trying to tell me I'm an old crone?" When that only provoked further confused glances, Shadow now worried he had offended his best friend somehow, the blonde girl finally had to laugh. "Oh, Shadow, I'm sorry. It's another one of those Earth traditions. Each year, we celebrate that we were born on a certain day many years before. Today on May fifth I'm turning fourteen!"

'Fourteen years. Wow." Shadow muttered, for a moment trying to imagine that timespan. He himself hadn't even lived for two years by now, even if his body had spent almost three years beforehand floating and growing in a tube. Although due to his altered genes he developed quickly, and was by now mentally the equivalent of a 12-year-old human child, a period even as long as a mere decade was unimaginable to him. Now, however, he had different things on his mind. "Wait a moment, did you say Earth tradition? Like that Easter thing last month?"

"A bit like that, yeah." Maria smiled, remembering the egg hunt she and Shadow had organized for her poor grandfather.

The hedgehog frowned. "Last time you told me that on Easter it's celebrated that some innocent got viciously killed by a mob. Now you're celebrating that someone is alive. Do any of your traditions actually make sense?"

The birthday girl ran an ever so slightly exasperated hand through her blond hair. "I already told you, it's not about someone getting killed. I had misunderstood something. And traditions aren't supposed to make sense, otherwise people wouldn't hang paper animals from the ceiling to bash them with baseball bats or dress as monsters to beg for sweets. Now can we please go to the zoo?"

"You humans are all mad," Shadow remarked casually, but got up from the floor nonetheless, dusting his black fur off while Maria joined him. He had long since given up on understanding any cultural stuff and preferred to focus on the science that Professor Gerald taught them both. "Shall we?"

Maria pulled him out of the door in an instant.

xxx

Shadow was standing still in a corner while Maria "got dressed" for the occasion. For other girls, this might have meant putting on a special pretty dress or other birthday clothes. In Maria's case it meant she was wearing a see-through plastic overall over her blue dress, disinfected gloves and Professor Gerald even insisted that she would wear a mask over her nose and mouth to prevent her from breathing in any germs that might be floating around in the proximity of animals other than Shadow. It wasn't anything new for the trio, since for Maria her immune deficiency illness NIDS that rendered her body helpless to any sicknesses was merely a fact of life, for Gerald to find the cure was a daily mission, and for Shadow it was his simple reason for existing.

"I can't wait! Anyone as excited as me?" Maria's eyes were shining when she was finally dressed appropriately and the three headed out to the laboratory for animal testing. It was as absurd an idea as ever, but Gerald really wanted to give his granddaughter as normal a life as possible, even on a space colony, and the lab was really the closest thing the ARK had to A Day At The Zoo. It had taken him a lot of administrating work to get everybody working on other projects today so that they would have the lab to themselves for fun and as he was watching his angel girl striding happily forwards, pulling the multi-billion dollar worth Ultimate Lifeform along as if he was her favourite toy (which he was), he wondered when exactly he had turned from world-reknowned scientist to private entertainer.

"And everyone celebrates their birthday on Earth?" Shadow asked, sliding along on his hover skates, looking up at Maria.

"Sure! It's because everyone's special."

Shadow's forehead creased. "Four billion humans on that planet. Three billion sapients. 365 days a year. That must be a hell of a lot of celebrating."

Maria chuckled. "Well, okay, not everybody celebrates all the time. Some sects like Jehova's witnesses forbid it because it's fun and I've heard once a woman gets past thirty they for some reason rarely want to have it celebrated, either."

Shadow once again marvelled at the extensive knowledge Maria seemed to possess of the blue planet below. Then he hesitated. "...wait a moment, did we celebrate mine?"

"Sure we did!" the girl nudged her friend. "That was when you got your powerskates, remember? We weren't quite sure when exactly grandpa had woken you up the year before, but it would have been about the same time. So now you're about a year and a half...what a baby."

"Hey!"

"Not that you lot would care about it, but we have now arrived at the lab," Gerald Robotnik made himself heard behind them, used to their little snide remarks that usually flew around in his classroom with the two each day. He was pretty sure that these two were the reason his impressive moustache was turning greyer by the day. Shaking his head, he entered the security code and the door slid open.

"Happy Birthday, Maria. Hope you like it." A rare smile stole over his face at that still, the old scientist not having had much to laugh about ever since his battle against NIDS and the difficulties with his other grandson Ivo had begun.

"I do, grandpa, thanks. Come on, Shadow, let's explore." Maria hugged the aging professor and then set off among the benches, rows of cages and tanks, Shadow in tow. Gerald had had the more pitiful-looking animals of...less humane experiments removed beforehand, not wishing to disturb Maria. What Shadow, an actual living and intelligent experiment that knew about his status, was thinking as he viewed his 'colleagues', he had no idea.

"Wow, Shadow, look at this!" Maria had her face pressed against an aquarium with goldfish in them, apparently not minding that most of them had three eyes.

"I don't get it. Why would you have something like a zoo?" Shadow asked, blood-red eyes following the silent fish. He had read about zoos in general and had had a picture book of one when he was still unable to read, but had never quite grasped the concept. He had understood about jails, though, and was wondering why anybody would think of a, say, cockatoo as so dangerous that you would have to lock it up.

"So people can learn about animals and see what they're really like," Maria explained. The fact that they were currently looking at a mouse with a human nose growing out of its back seemingly not issue for her to withdraw that statement.

They passed another container with some rather perky rats and a chimpanzee cryogenically frozen while Shadow nodded slowly. Then something else caught his eye. "Hey, what are those?" He pointed at a glass cage with leaves and earth on the ground. It didn't appear to contain anything apart from two strangely spiky lumps...

"Oh, that's hedgehogs!" Maria exclaimed, all of a sudden grinning. "Looks like you found your evolutionary ancestors, Shadow!"

"These are my parents?!" The Ultimate Lifeform had stood up on the balls of his feet and was now peering over the ledge of the glass cage. He didn't know much about procreation and having a family yet, but he was pretty sure that it somehow involved your parents being bigger than you.

Now Maria was downright giggling which was starting to annoy the black hedgehog. "No, Shadow. You...er, usually, the mother puts the baby together in her womb, but in your case that was grandpa doing that in a the petri dish." Suddenly her grin vanished, though, remembering Shadow's shock when he had first found out that he was an experiment. "That isn't a problem for you, though, is it? You know that grandpa and I love you like family."

"Er, yeah, yeah. Um. Does that mean that the professor is technically my mom, though?" Now Shadow looked just a tidbit concerned while Maria privately hoped her grandfather wasn't overhearing any of this.

"No...er, maybe you should just think of him as your creator. Right?"

"Yeah." Shadow nodded. "So, I'm somehow related to those, then?" The black-furred sapient pointed at the feral hedgehogs in the container again who had now started to unroll and were staring at Shadow suspisciously with their tiny eyes. They made weird noises and he had some difficulty feeling kinship with them.

"...only technically, I would say. Grandfather used mainly hedgehog gene blueprints to create you but us humans share more than 99 percent of our genes with chimpanzees and there's a lot of difference between us and them. " Shadow followed her hand gesture to the frozen ape in the cylinder-shaped tube. The animal was indeed a lot smaller and furrier than her, so he thought that was quite an apt comparison between him and the hedgehogs in the cage. " I think you're a lot more Ultimate Lifeform than simple hedgehog," she nodded.

"We also share about 93 percent of our genes with the common banana," Maria added helpfully, not knowing that it was only Shadow's young age that now saved him from mental imagery featering Gerald doing some indecent things to a fruitbowl.

"...okay..." the black hedgehog inwardly vowed never to eat one of those things again. "You really seem to like them..." He muttered while Maria was cooing over the little spikeballs in the cage.

"Yeah, aren't they so cute?" Maria asked while Shadow had already wandered off into the deadly lizards section, wondering why it was the largest of the lab, but seemed mostly deserted now. They passed some more of the blob-like things Shadow and Maria recognized as the professor's 'artificial Chaos' projects, wire cages containing birds and bats, and even an aquarium holding mostly shrieking starfish that they gave a wide berth. One of the scientists had managed to create some weird, fat yellow hamster with long ears and a jagged tail. Around its container were electricty warning signs and the two children wondered what kind of people exactly were working here.

"What are they doing with all of those animals here?" Shadow finally asked as they were both watching a sleeping sloth hanging from possibly the only tree in the lab.

Maria shrugged. "They must be experimenting with them, I guess. But on ARK there's over a hundred scientists with over a thousand projects, so I don't really know..."

Shadow appeared to be in deep thought. "They're experimented with, just like me. But there's noone really like me in this lab, right? Someone who can talk?"

The girl shook her head. "No. You're the only sapient aboard the colony." The weight of that statement suddenly seemed to sink in with her. "...I'm sorry for that."

Shadow smiled. "Hey, no need to be. I've got you and we've got a birthday to celebrate."

xxx

Gerald struggled with the heavy cake that he was lugging into his laboratory/living space where Shadow and Maria sat at the table waiting. The girl had requested it to be a black forest tart on the grounds that it was just as 'black, white, red and sweet as Shadow!', a statement that had almost made the hedgehog cross another item on his 'edible foods' list out forever. However, since the cake also contained Shadow's favourite fruit, cherries, all was well and the feast could continue.

The tart as such had fourteen candles burning atop it that took Maria three breaths to blow out completely, her frail chest heaving under the excertion. When she was finally done, she collapsed into her chair heavily, but with a smile.

"Huh. Next year I'm going to wish for a hairdryer so I don't have to do it myself anymore."

"But of course! Your presents!" Gerald snipped his fingers. "I almost had forgotten them. Now, just one minute..." He got up and lumbered out of the room, Shadow staring after him questionably.

"He's getting presents?"

Ther girl nodded with a wide grin. "Of course! That's the best thing about birthdays, you get loads of them!" Then, when she saw Shadow's suddenly panicked face, she added quickly: "But of course I know that you had no idea that my birthday was coming up, I had forgotten it myself until grandpa reminded me this morning. It's okay that you have no present, I'm just happy that you're here to celebrate it with me." At this, she hugged Shadow on the chair next to her, but the hedgehog was squirming and trying to break free.

"N-no! Of course I got you a present! I, uh, I just need to get it! Yeah!" He hopped off his chair with a confused glance of his friend and departed the lab as Gerald returned, watching the little black shape dart past him with raised eyebrows.

"Maria? Is his digestive system having trouble with the cake?"

They waited for about five minutes until Shadow zipped back into Gerald's main lab, hiding something behind his back but obviously reluctant to show it. He nodded his head towards the other presents from Maria's family. "Well? Aren't you gonna open them?"

Amused by the antics of her friend, Maria had to smile as she undid the first ribbon, a present from her mother. "If you insist..."

The first packet contained a set of four mostly black books with the appearance of novels. She read the back cover and had to give a silent snort. "Seems this book series is about a weak, frail girl that has somebody special and immortal to protect her, and they also seem determined to go through fire for each other. I don't know why Mom thought this 'Twilight' would be interesting for me, but she sure has no idea what's going on up here."

The next present was from her father - it contained another sky blue dress, just like the one she was wearing, just one size bigger and slightly less worn. "Poor dad. He never is as imaginative with presents as with patents..."

The next packet, a very large box that took up almost all of the table sent her whooping with joy, though. "Oh, grandpa! That's exactly what I wanted!"

There were a lot of kids that had received a crystal-growing set at one point in their lives, but only Maria's would have cost about a hundred thousand dollars wheedled out of research funds and happened to be capable of creating Chaos Crystals.

"I wouldn't want to stand in the scientific future of a Robotnik, my angel," Gerald muttered, kissing her hair almost embarrassed by his granddaughter's enthusiastic displays of joy and affectionate hug.

"C...can you open my present now?" Shadow asked, almost timidly, putting a round bundle on the table carefully and looking at the blonde girl expectantly. "Happy birthday, Maria."

"Wow, Shadow, thanks!" Maria exclaimed, even though Gerald was staring at the present rather dubiosly. His hedgehog had many talents, although present-wrapping was definitely not one of them. The yellow, polka-dotted paper had been wrapped around and around the thing and secured with duct-tape to the point of it being sealed for nuclear war. When the bundle started to rock and roll away out of its own accord, he was once again reminded that Shadow also never thought in conventional patterns, ever.

"Say, Shadow, what exactly-?"

"Oh, grandpa! It's a hedgehog!"

Gerald slowly placed a hand in front of his eyes. Maria, meanwhile, was more than delighted to remove the rest of the paper where the little spines were poking through, Shadow obviously happy that he had managed to please her. "You like me, right? So I thought you'd like two of us even more!"

It took a little more than two minutes to fully reveal a very befuddled spiny creature, traumatized beyond belief by what his evolutionary superior had just put it through.

"That's a fantastic present, Shadow!" Maria agreed happily, apparently ignoring Gerald in the background who wondered whether he was raising the Ultimate Lifeform or a petty thief, the feral hedgehog unquestionably being from the lab. "What should we call it?"

"How about 'Pointy'?" Shadow shrugged. The little hedgehog seemed to sweat-drop.

"Now, look, Shadow, Maria-" Gerald tried to get a word in, but was interrupted.

"That's a perfect name!" Maria, the girl who had almost named the most deadly creature aboard the ARK 'Project: Sugarsnout' if it hadn't been for Gerald, nodded quickly. The tiny hedgehog meanwhile looked up at her with something akin to a silent plea, begging to have the rosette taken off its nose. Gerald couldn't help but simply stare at the contraption that his 'celebrated Ultimate Lifeform' had produced and wordlessly pray that GUN never, ever saw this.

"Now look, Maria, in your condition you can't possibly have any pets-"

"I know, grandpa. I'm not a kid anymore and I know what NIDS entails. But that's just why you will have to take care of Pointy, of course. I can visit him."

"Is that so?" Gerald asked weakly. It was always in situations like these that he was reminded that he might be well equipped to deal with equations containing more than ten unknown variables but not with one teenaged girl.

"Of course it is!" Maria said, and then unleashed her brightest, most glowing look and smile at her grandfather, hands clasped in front of her chest like an angel - in appearance rather unlike the scheeming little extortionist that she was at the moment. "Isn't it, grandpa?"

"I...I suppose..."

"Oh, Shadow and grandpa, you are the best!"

Gerald had long since suspected that Maria probably had mental powers equal to those 300 IQ points he and his grandson Ivo commanded, but who actually needed to use their brain when they were irresistibly cute?

However, all of that mattered very little when it had been a cheerful birthday for his granddaughter which was what he had set out to achieve.

He watched now as Shadow and Maria fawned over "Pointy", trying to feed him a bit of cherry with the Ultimate Lifeform almost touching the little hedgehog with his nose so deeply had he bent over him. It took little to see that the two children were, for one brief period completely happy.

The strangest of friends, one dancing with Death come winter come spring, the other ageless and nearly impossible to kill.

Gerald sighed...others celebrated at their birthdays merely that they were special to their friends and family, and maybe some presents they received. Maria had to celebrate that she had lived another year at all.

Gerald silently wondered how many people took that on their birthdays for granted.

He shook his head. Maria, he thought while smiling, don't think that my crystal set or your new pet was your best present today. It is always the joy of life itself that is the greatest gift of birthdays.

Fin

Well, well, well, 'nother little tale done. I'm not actually sure about Maria's birthday, which is technically June 23rd as the release of Sa2b. But since already Sonic, Shadow and Dr. Robotnik are sharing that day I thought it was getting a bit crowded. So, Ta-daa, instant new birth date. And that today happens to be mine has nothing to with it at all. ;)

Happy hobbit birthday, everyone! :D