Friday morning, and still Ness was sprawled on his bed. He was not sleeping, however. A squint at the clock had told him he had awoken a good ten minutes before the time at which Yoshi would barge through his door. He did not get up, but remained in bed, keeping his eyes shut and opening them only to steal occasional glances at the clock. Seven fifty-five, only five minutes left… Three more minutes… Two… One…

Eight a.m. Ness's eyes darted to the door before he hastily shut them again.

Silence, for ten more seconds.

"Oh come on," Ness said loudly and impatiently as he threw off his blanket and launched himself off the bed. In four quick strides he was at his door, and a thrust of his head out into the hallways told him Yoshi was nowhere to be seen.

Ness retreated into his room, slammed the door shut, and leaned against it with arms crossed over his chest and head bowed in pouting anger.

"Where the hell is he?" Ness growled out loud to himself. He was, all at once, furious, concerned, annoyed. He bit the knuckle of his index finger, scrunched his brow in exasperated impatience, darted his eyes back and forth to the face of the clock. "It's been four flippin' days!"

Ness threw himself on his bed and groaned. It was definitely the longest the dinosaur had gone without any notice of his absence – any past trip or event that would take Yoshi away from Ness's presence would at least involve Yoshi telling Ness about his disappearance. The first day, Monday, had been no problem; Tuesday was a little worrying but bearable enough. Wednesday was when Ness had trouble reassuring himself that he was going to call him, any second now. On Thursday, Ness was angry. He asked Smashers whether they had seen Yoshi and snapped back when they replied with a negative. He took out his baseball bat and smashed a framed picture of he and Yoshi (only to spend the next two hours taping the frame back and supergluing the shards of glass together). When he consulted the Leave Book and noticed that Yoshi's name was nowhere to be written in any of the recent pages, he slammed the book shut and sent it telepathically flying within the mansion until it hit someone, who just so happened to be Ryu, who just so happened to contemptuously walk past Ike.

And now, on Friday, Ness felt... He swallowed. He felt depressed. He felt actual sadness. He felt as though he was homesick, as though a lump of painful nostalgia and desire was feeding off all the sadness in his mind. Whenever he felt these raw negative emotions bear down upon him, a quick call to his mother would be all it took to drive the feeling away and restore him back to his cheery, mischievous self.

But this wasn't his mother. This was Yoshi, and at the moment the dinosaur might as well have been a literal dinosaur for all the means he was contactable, which was to say he wasn't contactable at all.

It was almost like Yoshi just didn't want to see him anymore…

Ness snapped his eyes open and shot up. Well, he didn't care. He didn't care whether Yoshi didn't want to see him anymore, or have anything to do with him. The fact of the matter was that he wanted to see Yoshi, right now, this instant, whether Yoshi wanted to or not.

Ness jumped off the bed and got into his outside wear. He was going to scrub the mansion clean with his all-seeing eyes, that's what he was going to do. No nook or cranny would go unsearched, no Geodude and Rock Mushroom left unturned. Yoshi had not signed in the Leave Book, which was necessary for him to do if he wanted to leave the mansion for an extended period of time. That meant he was still somewhere in here. Of course, there was always the possibility that he had simply not signed in it before taking his leave – there was no Master Hand around to enforce that rule, after all. But something told Ness that he was still inside this mansion, somewhere. The Smash Mansion was a big place, after all – plenty of places to hide in without anyone realizing for days. It would be a very un-Yoshilike thing to do, of course. But at the same time, so was disappearing without a word or a trace…

Nestling his cap on his head in determination, Ness wrenched the knob of his door and set out for the grand undertaking of saving private Yoshi.


"Yoshi?" Ness called out tentatively as he opened the door to Yoshi's empty, dark room. It smelled unused and dusty.

"Yoshi?" Ness yelled with his hands cupped over his mouth as he walked the first floor corridors of residence.

"Yoshi?" Ness again called as he poked his head through the bushes of the Courtyard.

"Yoshi?" Ness repeated as he opened the cupboards of the Kitchen.

"Yoshi?" Ness spoke with absolute disregard of his surroundings as he poked his head out of the showerhead of Samus's bathroom, earning him a scream and tight wet towel slap over his eyes.

"Yoshi?" echoed Ness's voice inside the pod of a Deku-Baba as he stretched open its carnivorous jaws to peer inside.

"Yoshi?" Ness said aloud as he sat in the cinemas watching Yoshi's Island: The Movie 3, which caused several other of his fellow moviegoers to lean forward in his general direction and furiously shush, "Sssshhh!"

"Yoshi?" Ness whispered in the exact same cinema.

"Yoshi?" Ness said effortlessly despite having to worm his head through the ball of punches and kicks and bites that were Ike's and Ryu's bodies.

"Yo, Shi!" Ness greeted cheerfully the resident boring Mii who lived quite close to the Smash Mansion; Shi simply responded with a wave of his hand. Ness continued to smile as he watched Shi walk away, before suddenly adopting a deathly expression and murmuring, "Man, I hate that bastard."

"Yoshi?" Ness was shouting as he walked into a generic, harmless-looking white room –

"You!" a voice thundered from inside.

Ness's head snapped to the direction of the noise, and felt a groan escape him upon seeing who it was.

"Oh! Uh. Hi, Peach! Uh… Lovely day, isn't –"

"If you think you can come in here and ruin my sewing tutorial videos like you did with my flower arrangement one –"

It was only then that Ness saw the spools of thread, the array of needles, and the lengths of fabric currently stacked before Peach and the Camera Toad.

"I didn't mean to –"

Peach would hear none of it. Out from her dress popped a frying pan, and mad chase throughout the mansion ensued – all just a day in the life of the Smash Mansion's regular prankster.


The door to Ness's room slammed open, revealing in its entrance Ness himself. He looked dead tired, the burden of exhaustion exerting its weight through the sag of his eyelids, the hunch of his back. There was absolutely no expression of triumph upon the worn face. The day had been a failure, simply put. He had not seen Yoshi, hadn't even heard of him from all the other Smashers, and all he had was a frying pan-shaped bruise on his back to show for it.

The clocked ticked eleven, and Ness looked down at the donation box by his feet. In exactly fifty-nine minutes he would have to have the box ready by the designated corner in the Atrium. The box that had mysteriously found its way into his room just four days prior. Previously he thought it was a gesture of kindness by the dinosaur. Now, he wasn't so sure.

He opened it again and took out the doll that was almost an exact spitting image of his best friend. Its head flopped over Ness's left hand for support, its cold, black button eyes staring lifelessly into Ness's chest. The strip of red velvet that dangled from its mouth incited just one more pull, and after a second of hesitance, that was exactly what Ness did.

Nnnnshiiiiii! Yoshi!

Another second, another pull.

Yoshi! Yonnnnsshii~

'One more time,' Ness thought dully to himself.

Nnn… Nnn… Nnnn…

Come to think of it, he had never seen this doll before, not even once in his several visits to Yoshi's room. Not that he had avidly looked through ever corner to actively sought out a doll in his friend's likeness, but… Well, wasn't it odd of Yoshi to not even mention it, at least once? A doll, in his likeness, that knew to talk and construct sentences using the names of those who held it. What story could it have for Yoshi to keep it a secret for so long?

And why now? Why, of all the time they had been together – why, when he was ready to just up and disappear, did he finally decide to reveal the doll to him, without a single note or word of explanation? Was it some kind of farewell gift, a felt substitute for his missing presence? Or was there something that he just wasn't getting here?

The clock ticked eleven-ten. He would have to make his decision soon.

"Can I be sappy, just for one minute?" Ness asked aloud.

There was, of course, no response, but Ness looked around in silly paranoia, as though to reaffirm that there really was no one to see his soft, what he deemed "weak" side that he so expertly covered up with the bold, brash nature of a young teenage boy. The only response he got was the unbroken stare of Super Duper Ultra Mega Mecha Monkeytron, who sat on his desk and gazed eerily into where Ness's heart would be.

Ness took a deep breath, and continued. "Listen, bud. I don't know where you are. I don't even know why you're gone. I wish you could have at least told me something before you just… Vanished like that, you know? It's a shit thing to do, and it's making me feel like shit. And making me feel like shit isn't the Yoshi I know and love." He squeezed the doll straight in its chest and belly, half out of resentment, half out of some strange fondness. "But if this is the best you could give me before you had to go, if this is the last thing I'll ever get from you to remember you by… Then buddy, there is no way I could ever just give you away like that. Ever."

And to prove it Ness concluded by crossing his arms over the doll's back and bringing it into a long, tight, warm embrace. It was quite comforting, if he had to be honest, feeling the plushy fur brush up against his skin and compress according to the will of his body, and in that moment Ness suddenly found himself wishing he had more dolls to play with when he was younger.

All of a sudden, out of the darkness, out of the silence –

"Wrong."