How The Shark Got It's Teeth

At the time of the Mesozoic Era, when dinosaurs ruled the world, there was a village of sharks called Luna, a village that surrounded a set of islands that would in the future be called Hawaii. The sharks there were not the scary type we know of today. No, they were much less dangerous. They were weak and frail and hungry and had the softest teeth on the planet. Their teeth were pillows to the seaweed they ate. Upon the schoolyard was a little child shark named Bashao. He wasn’t exactly the most popular shark at the schoolyard, but he had enough friends to have fun at school. He was very, very skinny. Yet his speed made up for his size. He could toss and turn, fiddle and foddle and swim and swam faster than any living creature in the ocean.
“I dare you to swim all the way around the main water road in one minute!" suggested Shashun, one of Bashao's closest friends. The water road is what we now call currents. Shashun was the type of guy who needed a lot of proof to believe in something. So he kept on daring Bashao crazy challenges to prove he was fast. He was always determined to prove himself right. When he met Bashao, he wouldn’t ever believe he was as quick as he says he is. And every time Bashao aces one of Shashun’s tests, he gives him another. Longer and harder.
"Yeah! That'll prove you're fast!" agreed Lei, another friend. She was the type of girl to float on the sidelines, watching the action from a distance. She’s always scared to meet new kids and didn’t make friends too easily. That’s why her only friends were Shashun and Bashao. Lei would never take leadership of even herself if she didn’t have to. If she had to make decisions, she’d freak. That’s why when she met Shashun and Bashao, her life became a lot more comfortable, since Shashun would make choices for people that didn’t even want him to.
"The main water road stretches all the way around Luna. I'll
do it!"
    At the end of the school day, they went to the ever-so-busy water road. It was always buzzing with turtles, sharks and other underwater animals. Even the occasional whale! Bashao got ready for the big track, and Lei said,
“On your mark, get set, go!” Bashao bolted away. He tossed and turned, fiddled and foddled and swim and swam away. He was quick as a harpoon, firing through the heavy current. The real challenge was to avoid falling into the eyes of one of the Hammerhead cops. They were always there to secure the water road, and to spoil children’s fun. As far as Bashao went in 15 seconds, there was no problem. There was a long empty line in the middle of the water road. And for the next 20, 25, even 30 seconds, swimming around the islands was as easy as finding water in the ocean. But Bashao’s ticket to winning the bet soon ended. The barrier soon came to a close, and Bashao had to start dodging, which can be quite a challenge in the middle of the busiest water road in the ocean. Bashao tossed and turned, fiddled and foddled, swim and swam as fast and as cautious as he could. This was usually the heaviest in traffic in the water road. This is where the water road conjoins with the shortcut parts that go between the islands. He kept tossing and turning, fiddling and foddling and swimming and swamming until he could no more.
He stopped behind a large boulder to rest.
“C’mon, Bashao.” he panted. “You’re halfway there.” He looked over the boulder and saw the leftover way. It was long and heavy of fish.
Back at the starting and ending point of Bashao’s race, Shashun grew a smile.
“He’s been gone a while. He’s got 15 seconds left,” pointed out Shashun.
“I hope he’s okay,” squeaked Lei.
“C’mon, Lei. He’s Bashao. What could happen to him?”
“Ok, here goes.” Bashao said to himself, but just as he was about to speed away, he was grabbed by two police officers.
“Hey! What do you think you’re-“ he broke off when he turned around and saw the officers. He recognized them. It was Ko and Redando.
“That’s the fourth time this week you’ve been caught speeding on the current highway, Bashao,” reported Ko. Current highway was the ‘adult’ way of saying “water road”.
“And enough is enough, we’ve given you warnings, tickets you never paid, and now, I’m afraid we’re going to have to arrest you, son.” Redando told Bashao.
“What?! But I’m too young to go to jail!”
The next thing he knew, he was locked up in a rock cell with a sand floor and a bed made of old seaweed. No court, no defiance, nothing. They just threw him in there. Bashao knew prison was bad, but when you go to it, it’s your new view of torture. All the prison food was was a strip of month old seaweed. All the prison base was was a giant hollow rock covered in sand with rock bars jammed in it. All life was now was sleeping in a box. Shashun and Lei went to the prison to see him.
“Sorry about that.” Apologized Lei.
“Well, sorry doesn’t get me out of this cold, hard, old, smelly, puny, blasted, heck of a rock box, now, doesn’t it!?”
“What am I supposed to do? Get some kind of crazy doo-hickey to break the bars and get you out of here?”
“Oh, and when you get out, you still got to finish off that race,” mocked Shashun. With that, Bashao got furious. He lunged at the bars and reached for Shashun, spitting growls and taunts at him.
“’I dare you to swim around the neighborhood in 30 seconds, I dare you to swim to the schoolyard and back in 45 seconds’ and now, it’s ‘I dare you to swim all the way around the main water road in one minute?!’ How about this, Shashun: I dare you to get me out of here so I can-“ Bashao was cut out of his tantrum when he heard Redando shout, “That’s enough out of you, Bashao! Kids, go home. We’ll be keeping an eye on him from now on.” The two left, with Bashao still in the cell.
Bashao swam over to the seaweed bed.
“Ok, I have got to get out of here.” he thought to himself. But what can a young, skinny, speedy shark with teeth as hard as a pillow do to get out of jail?
For the next two years, Bashao tried different ideas. He tried sliding out between the bars, but the guards just caught him and put him in a cell with even tighter bars. He tried digging a hole beneath the sand floor under and out the prison, but you can’t hide a hole in the ground. So the guards just put him in a cell with even tighter bars and made entirely out of rock. He even tried to punch through the wall, but that just put him in a cell with even tighter bars and made entirely out of rock and with a pillow in the corner to rest his broken fin on.
Up above the ocean, beyond the world of which the shark thrives, there is a world of 30ft. tall monsters, volcanoes too full for themselves, and glaciers. Lots and lots of glaciers. And one was moving down the Rocky Mountains and was just a few days away from dropping into the ocean. They moved quite slowly, yes, but when they hit something major, it wasn’t a slow night. It could affect the land creatures, it could affect the water creatures, but one thing is certain: there’s no stopping a glacier.
The prison was just below the point of the glacier. It was very far away from the islands of Hawaii. It was just under what is now California. And the glacier was right on what is now California. It was another typical day in the prison. Just sitting on the cold, hard, rock floor with a pillow. Bashao already ate the seaweed bed out of hunger. After all, everyone else also ate their bed, no matter how much it disgusted them. Bashao was just about to fall asleep when the alarm went off. The bars rose off the ground and were ready to let Bashao out. The point of the alarm was to signify that everyone needed to retreat from the prison immediately. Ko, posted at the hallway of cells that Bashao was in, said that “there was a prediction that the glacier on the mainland would fall directly onto the prison base. They had to get at least one mile away from the base or they would be killed or seriously injured.” Bashao knew that one mile wasn’t enough. Glaicers were huge, much wider than one mile. When they got out of the base, they saw the teeniest tip of the glacier. They rampaged away from the base, fearing that the glacier would topple over any second now. They all got a mile away from the base, and they could still see the box of sand and rocks that they all called prison nice and close. They looked up at the glacier again. It was nearly overboard the shore. The glacier began dropping residue into the ocean. Only the big chunks of gravel sunk to the ocean floor. It fell far away from the crowd, so they were safe. Until the glacier itself slipped off the shore. The splash was enormous. It was so thick that for a few seconds, they couldn’t see the glacier. It flew through the cloud of bubbles and was dropping at intense speed. Bashao was getting extremely nervous. He looked around and everyone thought they were a good distance away, or at least it said so by their expression. Bashao wondered if he swam away, the guards would see him “trying to escape the prison” and shoot him, when he was only trying to escape the wrath of the glacier, which was only about ten seconds away from destroying the prison base. Bashao couldn’t fight it. The urge was too strong. He turned around, putting all his might together trying to tell himself, “you’re safe”, but he gave it up. He instead put all his might into swimming the fastest he possibly could in his entire life.  He summoned every bit of strength he had and then, he burst out of the scene. He made a bit of a torpedo-like sound and a bit of bubbles floated up. He tossed and he turned, he fiddled and foddled, and he swim and he swam away from the crowd. One of the guards noticed him swim away. But just as the guard was about to shoot him, the glacier crashed into the base. A mile away definitely wasn’t enough, because the crowd disappeared in a flash of a bubble storm. And under the sound of the glacier hitting the ocean floor, Bashao could hear the puny sound of the shrieks and screams of sharks and whales and dolphins. He could almost feel the pain of their death.
Bashao still wasn’t out of the glacier’s clutches, but his weak and
frail body was about to give in. Bashao know that if he stopped, it would only be a matter of seconds before he would die, too. He looked back, and was astonished to see the wave of bubblestorm was right on his tail. It was weaker than it was at the prison base and the crowd, but it still looked powerful enough to injure him, and he couldn’t afford that in the middle of nowhere.
“Got to... keep... going!” He had to; he told it to himself over and over again, but it just took away from his strength. After a few more seconds of bolting, the bubblestorm overswept him. He was under the wave, tossing and turning, not while swimming, but while spinning in a wave of bubbles, not knowing up from down, left from right, whether he would die or not. He went unconscious. He would have been dead if the wave hadn’t stopped right there and then. It was over. He was over. The name Bashao would be forgotten.
When Bashao finally woke up, he was amazed to see he was still alive. In the middle of nowhere, but alive. Suddenly he felt a sudden stroke of pain in his teeth.
“Aaaggh!! Oh, gosh. What happened!?” He felt his teeth and poked himself. Hard. Painfully.
“Ow! Oh, man, I must’ve cut my teeth into some sharp shape when I
was in that wave.” There was a little guppy swimming in front of him. His
mouth watered and his stomach growled. The guppy heard it, and swam away.
“Oh, no, you don’t!” He flashed towards it and tried to see if his newly shaped teeth would actually have a good side to it. Sure enough, it instantly killed the guppy and Bashao gulped it down. The dead fish felt like heaven in his dry throat.
“Ooohh, ooh, so this is what I’ve been missing! What the whole species has been missing! Fish! Maybe I can live here after all.”
He lived there for the next five years, and became the most feared creature in the area. Schools of fish would call him the ‘Saber-Toothed Flash’, but just because no fish dared go ten miles near him, it wasn’t a problem for Bashao. He kept his speed ability and became a lot more threatening looking. He grew big, strong and happy. But he still missed his friends, Lei and Shashun. He missed his school, he missed his home, and he missed his old life.
One day, he decided to go on the search for the island colony. After all, he was definitely in the shape for it. And he had eaten nearly all the fish in the area. He spent a year looking for his colony. One day after another, until, after a long and tiring swim, he saw a little series of mountains, pointing up and out of the surface of the water. He swam to it, not sure what to do anyway. He thought he recognized the water road, he thought he recognized the schoolyard, but he did not think he recognized the expression of every living creature in the colony. They were all terrified of his size, strength and mostly, his teeth. He even recognized Lei and Shashun, no matter how different they were.
“Shashun, what is that?!” squeaked Lei.
“Lei, it’s me. Bashao.”
“Ok, who really are you and what have you to do with Bashao? He was killed by the glacier crash several years ago by the mainland.” protested Shashun.
“What? No I wasn’t! I swam away just in time! I scratched my teeth into this sharp form, and it lets me eat fish; you have to try fish, it’s so good! And I lived my life in the middle of nowhere!”
There was a silence. Finally, Shashun spoke,
“There’s only one way you can prove you’re Bashao. By proving you have the one characteristic only, and I mean only Bashao has.” Shashun and Lei said it together:
“You have to be able to toss and turn, fiddle and foddle, and swim and swam as fast as Bashao did.”
“No problem.” Bashao accepted the challenge.
They went to what used to be their favorite racing place.  It was a barren plain with only giant boulders sticking out of the ocean floor.
Bashao got ready and got set.
“It’s now or never.” nagged Shashun. Bashao said ‘I know’ in his head. Lei rasped “Go.” not sure what to think if this ‘creature’ turned out to be Bashao. He bolted away into the empty ocean floor. Bashao tossed and turned, fiddled and foddled, and swim and swam the best he could. It was a spectacular. Shashun and Lei were amazed at the ‘shark’, but still did not have the approval they needed. Bashao remembered that Shashun needs a lot of proof to believe in something. When Bashao came back, he asked,
“Well? Am I Bashao or what?” Their faces were expressionless. Even Bashao’s was. But inside, Bashao was filled to the top with nervousness. He was dreadfully hoping Shashun would accept him. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t know what to do. There was a long time of silence. Shashun had a thinking expression put on his face for a while, which gradually turned into a displeased emotion.  There wasn’t a sound of anything, even the ocean was blank of noise, which was very unusual. Finally, Shashun whispered,
“It’s good to see you again, Bashao.” They all grew a huge smile on their faces. They had a group hug, tighter than any other. They hadn’t seen each other for eight years, and they were finally reunited.
“I can’t believe it’s you!” shrieked Lei.
“Where have you been? How did you survive that glacier crash? How did you get so strong? You’re crushing me!” questioned Shashun, half choking.
“It’s a long story, I’ll tell you later.”
Bashao lived the rest of his life in peace. He got a new home, he got a new family, and his family was the only remaining species of shark on Earth, since the old sharks were so weak, and could only eat seaweed. These new sharks had teeth just like Bashao. They were sharp blades that cut through anything but rock. But hey, who’s going to eat rock? Bashao died with the name, ‘The First Shark’ and was buried where the glacier crashed. Sometimes, if anyone came by his grave, they could still see the image of Bashao tossing and turning, fiddling and foddling and swimming and swamming right in front of them, with his gleaming razor sharp blades for teeth scaring them away.



The End