Who: Jake Summers What: WHen Scott's kidnapped by Bowser's children, Jake makes a new friend. When: April 21/22 Where: Forest of Illusion
It didn't matter how many hours had been clocked in in Savage Land scenarios in the Danger Room. It was a truth universally acknowledged that X-men were kidnapped by dinosaurs. It was as certain as the fact that there didn't exist a timeline out there where they didn't ultimately destroy the moon or the presence of crippling daddy issues.
Which was how Jake Summers found himself toddling through the forest of illusion alone, blithely unaware of the logs battering from the ceilings or the rotating saws on round circuits that whirred just behind and above him or the bottomless abysses every few meters. Of the caterpillars and turtles and floating hallucinogenic cotton balls that made.
Anyone with a little more common sense might be apoplectic watching how near the child came to certain peril stumbling between motorized platforms moving over lava, Or missing enemies only due to fortunate falterings in his still unsteady footwork. But Jake was 21 months old. He wasn't bothered as he walked one half step ahead of certain doom. He had his father's instincts, or more likely the sort of luck his family could only dream of.
He could sometimes fall on a turtle, scaring its back in its shell. But the shells were too big or his small hands. The best he could do was slip on its shell sending it careening into a lit up and inviting box, smashing it to let whatever was inside pop out. Sometimes it was mushrooms (gross) sometimes flowers (pretty!), one time a star (wow!). But he could never quite stop the shell on its return, dropping his prize each time and stopping to cry. At the front of a vast field of lava, one of the boxes gave him an egg (icky) which contained a small green dinosaur. That Jake recognized.
"Woofwoof!" The brown eyed, red-haired boy lit up like he had caught a star and waved at the creature born with a saddle on its back. But it didn't dawn on Jake to ride the creature. Instead he started climbing up the boxes that were no longer pretty to move forward. When he got to the topmost one, Jake looked down at the lava and beamed.
There was no way Scott Summer's two year old could find the words to express how the heat invigorated and called to him, but the fire was deep, familiar, and inviting as he giggled leaning down over the edge to reach towards it.
Before he could, a long tongue shot out and wrapped around his waist, pulling him back to the ground in front of the boxes. Jake blinked as he hit the ground and looked up at the pony-sized dinosaur sitting in front of him.
"Up?" Jake puzzled pointing back towards the lava. The yoshi seemed just as confused by this new arrangement as the charge it seemed to have adopted.
"B W E P B O !" Yoshi asked as if the small human could understand it. Humans like this one generally rode Yoshis, not walked by them. It was an inborn and commensal relationship in the mushroom kingdom as smaller creatures were less apt to run away from an all consuming apex predator when it had a human riding it. And this one had to be the least threatening human of all. It seemed to be attratcting trouble. Perhaps too much danger. Because Yoshi could tell from the small human's shell that it had just hatched too, and humans didn't come out of their eggs ready to destoy.
"Bye Woofwoof!" Jake reached out and grasped one of the Yoshi's flippers to steady himself to stand up and start climbing the boxes once more.
Yoshi sniffed heavily and reached forward to grab the small human by his collar and position him on his back. The familiar weight of a human felt natural on its back. Even if it was only a small human. "Yoshi!" Jake for his part seemed amused for the ride, squealing with excitement. "Up!"
Yoshi was not going up. It prowled in a circle before starting the climb back up to the edge of the most dangerous and confusing forest in all of the Mushroom Kingdom. It was harder work than a human baby had found it because unlike Jake, Yoshi had a survival instinct--not even for itself, Yoshi were practically indestructable--but for its human.
Normally when a Yoshi was hit, their first instinct was to toss their rider and run away. But somehow the recently hatched human had imprinted something on the newly hatched Yoshi, awakening a maternal streak. When Yoshi found itself unable to eat a Wiggler and instead colliding with it, Jake went flying off of Yoshi's back, but instead of running, Yoshi formed a protective bubble around the child, keeping him off the ground.
But that wasn't to say it wasn't startling. Jake burst into tears at the sudden change. Yoshi kept its eye on Jake, but eliminated the threat before grabbing him back with his tongue. It couldn't have been 10 seconds even.
But this seemed to happen every damn time.
As Yoshi and Jake neared the edge of the forest of illusion looking up at the peak of Cookie Mountain, Yoshi paled and started to climb then stopped, rethinking its path. .
One thing was for certain. They needed to find where this baby human came from. Perhaps the Yoshi elders would know...