There was no raft.

He looked again. The sun was roughly somewhere in the midsky, making it approximately midday. Millie would never have let him sleep that long, she must have fallen asleep on her watch and was sleeping somewhere near him.

There was no Millie.

Maybe she took Bonaparte for a walk, he thought, using the logic that Bonaparte was a form of ChiaPet animal that needed to be watered regularly.

"Eep!"

The familiar noise struck him as he turned around and found the tiny groundhog, beady eyes and all, laying lathargically on the grass next to Millie's bags.

"Eep!" It exclaimed, bounding towards Sasuke and attaching itself to his head.

"Wha-!" Sasuke yelped as he fought to take the face-hugging creature off of him, "Get. Off. Of. My. Head."

"Eep! Eep!" It replied.

After about an hour, the groundhog released it's hold on Sasuke's scalp and bounded around more, leaving an exhausted boy-ninja laying on the grass.

"By the way, Bonaparte... do you have any idea where Millie is?" Sasuke turned his head to face the small animal.

A nod.

"Where is she?"

A nod.

"What do these noddings mean?"

A nod.

His expression soured. This was getting nowhere, the stupid groundhog couldn't even probably direct him to the raft.

Bonaparte jumped around for a while and began to look at the other side of the river, causing Sasuke to stray his gaze and find... the raft.

The Rokkaku ninja shot up immediately and studied the craft, his eyes falling upon the groundhog again as he asked rhetorically to himself, "What's it doing all the way there?"

A nod.

"Quit doing that! I'm trying to think and you're no help..." he snapped, scratching his head and ignoring the groundhog.

He moved towards the water and tested the temperature. Agh! This is as cold as... Pause. As it was yesterday.

Sasuke remembered the ill treatment he recieved from Millie the other day when he was pushed into the waters and made to paddle the raft manually by swimming.

"Why am I even looking for her?!" he yelled exasperatedly, looking to Bonaparte instinctively to fool himself into thinking he wasn't talking to himself.

A nod.

Sasuke knelt over and picked up the yellow groundhog, "Hmmm, we don't have to look for her, right?"

A nod.

"We can bring you to the zoo up in Toto and sell you then go home, right?"

Bonaparte stuck his tongue out.

"What do you mean, no?!"

A nod.

This is useless, I'm not talking to a groundhog! I'm going to go home!

"Yeah! I'm going to go home!" he thought out loud, quickly grabbing his bag and hoisting Bonaparte onto his shoulders, "And you're gonna help me find more runes, right?"

The groundhog stuck out his tongue again.

"Then what are we going to do?! Tell me that!"

"Look for Millie," a deep voice whispered, "Something has gone terribly wrong."

Sasuke stared at Bonaparte, "You didn't just say something, did you?"

"Of course not, you fool, I did." Upon inspection, and a quick dart of the head sidewards, Sasuke saw someone he did not expect to see out in the Jowston City States: Kage.

"Don't get me wrong, boy," the dark ninja assured, "This is strictly business."

His eyes, the same eyes that reminded Sasuke so much of Master Hanzo - together with the facial mask and headpiece, looked at Sasuke, piercing into him and seemingly reading his mind.

"I cannot say who sent me," came the answer to the boy-ninja's silent question, "But I can tell you that it is important and that you must come."

"Why me?" Sasuke asked, puzzled at the mercenary ninja's words.

"Because it is written, it shall be done."

"If you think I'll marry you, Napoleon, then you have a major ego problem!" Millie yelled, squirming around in the ropes she had been placed into.

"Is this really necessary, sir?" the ratly youth asked his companion, looking up at the tall, thin man.

The illuminati looked down, "You wished to get married, correct? Did it matter to you, as you were chasing her along the river bank, that to achieve that goal you would have to resort to methods such as this?"

Napoleon fought to turn the wheels in his head, lodged in place by a wooden plank that was rammed against the gears everytime he was in the presence of his goddess of loveliness. She was his sun, his moon, his starlit sky - he loved her more than life itself. His life was darkness without her.

"Buy a torch..." Millie muttered.

"I didn't say anything!" Napoleon protested.

"Does it matter?"

The Highland youth kept quiet, not willing to entice the fury that was Millie to awaken in full swing, and instead looked to his more reserved travel partner, "Where are we going to be wed?"

"There is a small town, miniscure, nothing much... probably doesn't even appear in the map of the world... a few miles ahead. I think that would be appropriate," came the reply, "And I think you should be able to return to your disheartened mother who has all but given up hope in your ability to be joined in marriage."

"Goodie!" Napoleon piped, looking at Millie again - or, consequently, her legs, "What do you say about that, my love?"

"A lot of things I doubt you'd like to hear," she spat, beginning her kicking anew, stilled only by a spell of sleep cast by the fustrated illuminati.

"So, explain to me again what we are doing exactly," Sasuke pressed the dark ninja, tagging along beside him, Bonaparte hanging on his scarf.

"We are going to save your friend from an incompetent," Kage stated, not even bothering to look down.

"Who? That guy who chased us and professed his love for Millie all day and night?"

"Make that two incompetents," was the dry responce.

Sasuke nodded, feeling the tone of words become icy. It was not unlike what he had heard before in the Sindar ruins... but it seemed more tempered now, perhaps due to the fact that he had witnessed the mercenary's weaker moments at the hands of Bonaparte, who was now intently eyeing Kage as if deciding whether or not he tasted like chicken or roast beef.

"Ka-Kage," the boy-ninja began nervously, "Why did you leave Rokkaku?"

"Because it was necessary."

"Yea-yeah but... why?" Sasuke had to find out, it had bothered him since he had first met the strange ninja.

"No reason of importance."

"Yeah, but what?"

The replies stopped coming, the dead silence, save for the crunch of grass beneath their feet, made Sasuke uneasy. Kage obviously did not want to be inquisited about his past, so he would leave him alone - for now. It was a good thing Millie wasn't here, from what the boy-ninja understood, she was still cross at him for rummaging through her things and taking the leather bound book in the ruins.

Is it a good thing she isn't here? he asked himself Is that really so? It's a strange feeling I have now, almost like the one when ma and pa died but not exactly, not to that point of grief.

Silence, grass, crunching.

A point of longing?

"There, I see where we are meant to go," Kage interrupted the thoughts of his companion, pointing forward towards a small hamlet village, "That is where they must have stopped."

Sasuke looked. It was a tiny establishment, smaller than Rokkaku was, surprisingly, and was endowed with small huts together with a shrine. A group of people were around the shrine, crowding around - more people than Sasuke would believe actually lived there. Also, as he found when the moved past a dirt road, the town was named 'Los Vegas' with the slogan beneath it 'Get married by an Elvis impersonator surrounded by people you don't know throwing raw rice at you!'.

"We can't afford to dig through the crowd," the mercenary said flatly, "We'll enter from the back."

Sasuke tagged along behind Kage, sneaking until they found a small shed.

"We enter here," the ninja said.

"How?!" the younger ninja asked, "It's not the back door of the temple!"

"It doesn't matter, it'll lead us to-"