Standard Disclaimer: I don't own Yoshi. He belongs to Nintendo. Everything else in this chapter, including the Yoshi characters, SharpTail School, and excluding the name Volvagia, are owned by me (Toomai).

Chapter One

The Start Of A Legend

The yellow Yoshi roared with laughter. "MWAHAHAHAHA! You shall tremble under my power!"

His adversary, a black Yoshi, appeared undaunted. He simply sighed.

"I see that you have put your most important servant in danger of attack," he said.

And with that, he reached across the board and took the white queen with his bishop.

"Checkmate."

"WHAT! NO WAY! HOW'D YOU…THAT'S IMPOSSIBLE…!"

A red Yoshi restrained the rowdy yellow one. "That opportunity had been sitting there for ten moves, bub."

Meanwhile, a game of four-way, team battle checkers was underway. The competitors were blue and orange versus green and white.

The blue one hesitated. After a decision from the orange one, she moved one of her kings backwards, taking an opposing piece.

Then the green acted. With an impressive flair, he leaped his back-seat pawn across the board, taking pieces left and right.

"King me."

The jaws of the blue and orange Yoshis dropped.

On the table next to them, three Yoshis were playing cards: purple, pink, and light blue.

"Got any eights?" asked the purple one.

"What!" cried the light blue one. "How'd you know?" He handed over his eight.

"He knew because you asked me the same thing," said the pink one.

These ten Yoshis were a group of friends. They called themselves the Ultimate Ten after a show on the Discovery Channel. Each Yoshi in the group had a nickname so widely known and used, even their parents and teachers called them by it.

The red Yoshi was Flamoshi, named after his fiery temper and "act first, think later" disposition.

The yellow Yoshi was Shockoshi, named after his lightning-quick thinking speed and his energy.

The blue Yoshi was Watoshi, named after her calmness and attention to purity.

The green Yoshi was Windoshi, named after his turbulent sense of humour and his wildness.

The light blue Yoshi was Timoshi, named after his ability to always know exactly what time it is.

The pink Yoshi was Healthoshi, named after her "heal mistakes" disposition and resistance to pain.

The purple Yoshi was Poisoshi, named after his slightly "dark" attitude and his sense of sarcasm.

The black Yoshi was Earthoshi, named after his rock-hard steadiness, strength, and determination.

The white Yoshi was Iceoshi, named after her preference of isolation and resistance to cold.

The orange Yoshi was Emoshi, named after her extreme and long-lasting emotions.

"Look, man," said Shockoshi, "I gotta let it out somehow, right?"

Flamoshi continued to restrain his friend. "Quit complaining, or I'll give you something to really cry about!"

With the threat of Flamoshi's temper, the energetic one sat down. Not even his immense energy could block the powerful temper of the fire namesake.

"I have an idea." Earthoshi motioned towards the checkers game. "Let's go watch them for a while."

Flamoshi and Shockoshi glared at each other for a second, then shook on it and checked it out. Conflicts never lasted very long between the group's members.

When the three got to the game, it had become a power struggle between three pawns and a king versus two kings.

"My kings shall crush your pitiful infantry!" bellowed Windoshi.

"Maybe so," threw back Watoshi, "but this 'pitiful infantry' has mobility and the ability to cover the board!"

With that, Emoshi took the middle pawn and jumped into the back rank, capturing a king.

"King me!"

Iceoshi placed a piece on top of the successful pawn while Windoshi exaggeratingly slapped himself.

At about that moment, the three Yoshis who were playing cards came over.

"Hey, man," welcomed Windoshi. "Game over, eh? Who won?"

"No one." Poisoshi's voice had a slight drawl. "We had a pair of Jokers as well, so we had a three-way tie."

"Speaking of ties…" Iceoshi jumped three opposing pieces at once. "There's one right there." Two pieces were left, a king of each colour.

"NO CONTEST!" blurted Windoshi, imitating the Super Smash Brothers: Mêlée announcer.

"And who won the chess game?" inquired Healthoshi.

"I did," answered Earthoshi.

"GAME! THIS GAME'S WINNER IS…BLACK TEAM!"

"Shut up, Airhead." Shockoshi shoved Windoshi.

Timoshi interjected. "It's 12:20. We'd better get to class."

The ten friends collected their lunch bags and headed for their lockers.

SharpTail High School was a top-notch education facility. Along with a daunting sports record, the school had high-end technology at every corner. Cameras monitored every hallway and sounded alarms of their own accord, the height of chair and desk legs was fully adjustable, and lockers were unlocked by fingerprint identification.

Why was this school so good compared to other schools? Basically, the School Board is simply testing the equipment before making it standard in all schools. SharpTail simply won the lottery.

The group was split in two for the first class after lunch: Flamoshi, Earthoshi, Windoshi, Poisoshi, and Iceoshi went to General World History, while Shockoshi, Watoshi, Emoshi, Healthoshi, and Timoshi had Egg Education.

At this time in the semester (May), General World History was covering the Second World War. The class was creating a project in which each group was creating an escape plan for twenty British soldiers who were imprisoned by the Germans. The plan would be programmed into a computer, which would simulate the escape. The better the escape, the more points the team earned.

Of course, the groups fooled around sometimes.

"ARRRGGGHHH!" cried Windoshi. Faking a gunshot wound, he sank to the ground. "I guess this is it, men. When I die, gasp I want you to take… my teeth… and," here the comedian leaps erect and bellows, "nail them to the buttcheeks of them Nazi scumbags and mail them to the Russians!"

This eruption of humour caused Windoshi to get backhanded by his purple partner.

"Quiet!" Poisoshi snapped. "I'm trying to figure out how deep to make this tunnel and where to put it!"

The funny one looked over at Poisoshi's calculations. "Dude, you need to chill out. I don't think trigonometry was widely known in 1942."

The third Yoshi in the group, Earthoshi, agreed. "Unless you have a mathematician in your stockade, I doubt any normal Brit would care about correcting their path because of tree roots or dirt thickness or rock outcrops or…"

"Okay, Dirthead! I get it!"

Windoshi traced a line on the map with his finger. "The Brits can easily see that there's a patch of grass over here," he said. "Grass usually means soft earth, right, Mudears?"

"That's right."

"Well then, just have them dig in that direction!"

Across the room, a group consisting of Flamoshi, Iceoshi, and a classmate named Elshoshi was reviewing their final plans.

"So here's the dealio," said the brown Elshoshi, "we have the first group of five divert the attention of the Germans. The second group sneaks up behind them and pummels them, while groups three and four open the gates. Then everyone escapes."

"Sounds good to me," murmured Flamoshi, prodding miniature figures across a paper landscape. "But what about…"

"What about" was never heard. The bell had signaled, but class was not due to be over for twenty-five minutes.

In the class, general chaos ensued. It took several minutes for Mr. Timeback to regain control of the students.

"Please! Everyone remain calm!" he called once the noise level was down. "We must listen for the announcement."

If the bell rung unexpectedly, it meant there was a special alert. After the bell, the principal would come onto the PA system to let the school know what was going on.

Sure enough, the speaker crackled.

"Attention! Attention!" the speaker blared. "A very strange cloud of shadow is approaching the school. It is ten meters in spherical diameter and five meters above ground level. It appears to be invulnerable to sonar and magnetic deflection and identification and invisible to radar. Predicted time of arrival is five minutes. Must evacuate school immediately."

Mr. Timeback assumed Outbreak mode.

"Everyone to the shelters," he bellowed, "and take the western path."

The class abandoned their work and followed the rest of the school to the evacuation shelter.

Inside the fast moving cloud of darkness, the ten attendants of the shadow being hid.

"There's the building up ahead," growled Warpurion.

The other nine looked at the sight.

"Pshaw!" muffed Turbulak. "What kind of fatal enemy is still at school?"

"Size matters not," said Confuretak, "I am small in size yet impossible to defeat."

"Defeat indeed," cried Volvagia. "With my flame, I shall burn them to the bone!"

"And with my ice," declared Crystacily, "I will freeze them to the soul!"

"Not just you will do the destruction," claimed Solidiom. "All of us will destroy this future menace to the shadows!"

The dark cloud laughed as it shot towards the Yoshi school.

"Attention! Attention!"

The school principal, Mr. Laisher, was addressing the student body in the underground shelter.

"We have a situation here. There are only enough supplies of air, food and water for all of us less ten. We need to somehow pick ten students to take refuge outside of the shelter."

Nervous chatter filled the cavern. Then the vice principal, known only as Negger, spoke.

"We could leave the Yoshis that call themselves the Ultimate Ten. As they are inseparable friends, they should be able to withstand any threat."

After a vote from the staff, it was decided. The ten Yoshis were led back out of the shelter and into the backcourt of the school property.

"Estimated time of arrival: 1 minute, 15 seconds."

"C'mon, guys!" called Windoshi. "Let's put our heads…and luck…together to survive this!"

No one knows what happened when the shadow cloud covered the school. All that is known is the consequences. The cloud somehow captured all the Yoshis hiding in the shelter by using a quantum shadow beam. However, it did not look outside of the shelter for other Yoshis, so the Ultimate Ten were the only ones left, hiding in their eggs, when the shadow disappeared.

A full five minutes after the cloud left, Flamoshi, the bravest of the bunch, peeked out of his protective shell.

"Well," he thought, "there's nothing amiss here…school's intact, cloudless sky, that darn Frisbee is still on the roof…yeah! Hey guys! It's safe to come out!"

One by one, the other nine Yoshis shed their eggshells.

"I don't see anything wrong," commented Emoshi. Despite her sure voice, she was still shaking.

"That doesn't mean nothing IS wrong," mumbled Poisoshi.

"It's oddly quiet," said Earthoshi, leaning his ear to the ground. "I don't ear anyone speaking or yelling or blabbing away or farting or burping or…"

"We get it!"

"We'd better check the shelter," nodded Shockoshi.

Once the ten Yoshis found the shelter empty, they started to panic.

"How could that thing have taken everyone?" cried Watoshi. "And it never even seemed to see us!"

"Apparently, it searched the shelter only," said Healthoshi.

Windoshi's keen eye spotted a scrap of paper on the floor. As he picked it up, he immediately saw that it was a valuable clue.

"Hey guys!" he called. Once they were assembled, he read: "I found this note on the floor. Ahem. 'help us, shadows, need search volcano, find power, must…' and then it cuts off."

Shockoshi formed a hypothesis. "We need to go to whatever volcano and search it for some kind of power that will beat the shadow."

"The volcano must be Mount Vewaque," said Flamoshi. "It must have something hidden inside."

"What are we waiting for?" yelled Shockohsi. "Let's grab food and gear and let's go!"