Takeshi stood and stretched his long blue scaly neck as far as it would go. Since he was a middle-aged (and for dragons, middle-aged meant only five or six hundred years old) blue dragon, his neck stretched pretty far. His long curved claws kneaded the hard pavement and scritched icy sparks up along it as he rolled and flexed each long webbed finger.

He yawned then, a massive dragon-yawn. Clouds altered their course and three states away the weather changed for the rest of the week. Takeshi didn’t think about any of that though, he just yawned. It had been a long few weeks for the dragon, what with stopping the Fire Imps of Y’gottig and having to wash the socks of his baby brother.

“Tak! Tak!” The voice rang out along the street and acted as punctuation to the slip-slop-slap wet jelly on stone noises that slurped right up to Takeshi’s side. Wobbly, Squid-prince and Takeshi’s best friend, ran up to the dragon as best he could. His mechanical lungs (a gift from Professor Ozone, the clown engineer) heaved and puffed along his back and Wobbly slid to a wet and slime ridden stop.

“Wh-h-h-hat,” asked Takeshi, lowering his head to Wobbly’s side and looking at him through one bright blue eye.

“Tak! It’s Pomegranate! He’s in trouble! We gotta,” Wobbly huffed and reached one tentacle back to poke at his mechanical lungs, “help him. We gotta, gotta!”

“Wobbly,” Takeshi said slowly while he used a long nail to carefully adjust his friend’s mechanical lungs, “calm down. What happened?”

“Well Pom was in class, right?”

“Ninja school still?”

“Yeah,” Wobbly sighed deeply, “thanks, Tak, I can breathe better now. But he was in class when they all got attacked and it’s simply terrible.”

“The class is terrible?” Takeshi asked as he raised an eyebrow in question. Wobbly was his best friend, but sometimes he wished the Squid-prince would simply get to the point. Still, Old King Slither had entrusted Takeshi with the safety and worldly learning of his only son and Takeshi wasn’t going to toss him back for still being wet behind the gills.

“Noooo-o-o! It was terrible! IT! The zombies!”

Takeshi stopped cold for a moment. Zombies were back in the Seventeen Lands of Ancient Baskovia? That made no sense, he thought. Why, they had rid the Seventeen Lands of zombies hundreds of years ago, before Takeshi was even born. How could there be a zombie attack suddenly, much less in broad daylight at a ninja academy?

Things were, Takeshi realized, getting strange in the Seventeen Lands again. Strange things, on this scale, usually meant someone was causing them.

Takeshi shook his heavy head and ruffed his scales, throwing his shoulders back, “I suppose we should help poor Pomegranate. Though, truth be told, if he was as far along as he often claims, zombies shouldn’t give him a problem at all.”

“Tak! Don’t be mean! The other students are zombies now. Don’t you see? Zombie ninja!” Wobbly hopped up on Takeshi’s back and wrapped a few tentacles around various ridges and bits of dragon to hold on tightly.

“That does, I admit, complicate things some. Still. Between the two of us, we should prevail just fine.”

“I… Tak, I don’t want to fight ninja zombies.”

Takeshi laughed a deep grumbling laugh as he beat his heavy wings against the air, taking a running, leaping start to flight. “Well then why are you coming along, dear Wobbly? You try to act cowardly, I know, but within you beats a true and strong heart full of bravery and deeds not yet done.”

“M-maybe? But still,” Wobbly bent his head so the wind rushing by them wouldn’t dry him out too badly, “they can remain undone until after the ninja zombies are dealt with.”

“You said the same thing about the Sphinx of Rangoc Ten, Wobbly!”

“I meant it then too, events just conspired. You know, the way that they do.”

“Well then perhaps they will conspire again. The way that they do.”

“I do hope they learn not to do that.”

Takeshi rolled and dove and flexed his mighty muscles as they approached the place where Wobbly had seen Pomegranate last. Shaking his wide head in a ruhuff, Takeshi swooped down for a landing. As he did he spied a man wrapped all in black and carrying a sword in one hand, and a severed arm in the other, which he was trying to eat even though he still wore a ninja mask over his face.

“We shall see, my slimy friend. We shall see all too soon,” roared Takeshi as he dove into battle, Squid-prince on his back.