Disclaimer: I own TMNT (2007). No really I do. I bought the DVD last week!
Before I started writing this I watched the first episode of the new season of Avatar, which can be summed up as:
May: SMOOCH….walks away.
Zuko: Returns to angsting and pondering the mysteries of the universe.
Azula: Is evil.
Fire Lord: Is proud of the son he banished.
Sokka: Is comic relief.
Katara: Hugs everyone!
Aang: Has hair.
Anyway, moving onto TMNT. The new movie pretty much made me raise my hands and shout, "Mutate me!" This is my tribute the great, if anti-climactic fight at the end, and the Unknown Nodding Foot Soldier, also known as the Unknown Foot Soldier Who Stares in Karai's Eyes On Cue.
I deliberated much on putting yet another young woman in another high paying position, but decided if April O'Neill can own a cargo shipping company than Lillith can be an assistant to a head of department.
Thank you to my beta, Taluliaka, who didn't actually do anything with this story, except follow me around and make me relive an immature story I wrote YEARS ago. Shame on you!
New York Nights
Lillith Stone groaned and rubbed her smarting eyes. It was 2 o'clock in the morning and she was still parked in front of her computer at Winters Corp, trying to finish a report due in, her eyes flicked to the small, blurry numbers at the bottom of the screen, five hours. As assistant to the head of the finance department Lillith was often kept from her bed by such tedious, but crucial tasks. She was a perfectionist, of the firm belief that no one could write a report as well as her. Deciding that, despite her experience in the area, even she would make a mistake if she continued to write without a break, Lillith pushed back from the desk and rolled for half a metre.
She squinted at the dark room around her, the desk lamp providing almost no illumination, "Okay, just a few minutes."
The young woman pushed with her feet and attempted to get up from the chair. The simple task required more effort than she supposed; sitting in the same position for more than four hours had cramped her leg muscles. Eventually, Lillith was forced to lever herself out of the lumpy chair with her arms while urging her sore legs to straighten. As she rubbed feeling back into her thighs she glared at her boss' plush leather seat through the connecting door to their offices.
"What have you got to do to get a good chair around here?" she grumbled and limped to the window.
Lillith raised her arms above her head and yawned, twisting her body left and right, easing out knots in her back. As she stretched she looked over the great city of New York and its bright lights. She could see thousands of lights glowing merrily at her from all over the city.
"Nice to know someone's staying up with me."
In New York City you were never alone. Someone was always in the same place as you, or doing the same thing, or thinking the same thought. It was comforting most of the time, but when Lillith walked the dark streets at night, skirting around dark alleys with nervous eyes and quick movements, she found it downright scary. There was a reason she illegally carried a gun in the bottomless pit she called a handbag. Nervous she may be, but unprepared she was not.
Her movements caused her wrinkled suit jacket and the satin shirt underneath to ride up. Lillith glanced down with tired eyes and noticed tomato seeds from her lunch stuck to her collar.
She tutted, "God damn it…"
She also saw, with distaste, her stomach was spilling more than was comfortable over her skirt. She made a face and poked the roll of fat with an acrylic nail.
"I need to get to the gym," she remarked to her reflection, her heavily made up eyes rolling at the thought.
She'd never make it there for at least a week, until after the end of the financial year. Until then she'd be up to her eyes in reports and meetings, and may even end up sleeping in her office like the year before.
A small discrepancy in the view she normally enjoyed, the only thing she liked about her office in fact, caught her attention. In the sky, directly above Winters Corp skyscraper in fact, a storm was brewing. Thick green clouds bloomed, blocking out the stars, and began to swirl. She leaned out as far as she could, her face squishing up against the window.
"Is that…a vortex?" she whispered.
New York had its fair share of weird and wacky weather, but this was more than sun showers and gale winds. Green clouds and swirling vortexes signified something, only Lillith didn't have a clue what. She stared at the clouds for another minute before a niggling thought entered her mind.
What if the storm is electric?
Winters Corp had lightning rods at the top of the tower, but they could still, by some freak chance, lose power. All of her work would be lost! Lillith stumbled over her own feet and knocked into her chair in her rush to reach her computer, softly glowing on her wood veneer desk. With a sigh of relief she ordered the computer to save and it complied with a faint chime. Coming to a compromise with her desire for sleeping in her own home and her need to finish her work, Lillith also saved the report and the information she needed to complete it to one of her flash disks.
The flash disk still in her hand, Lillith went to the window to look at the storm again. Her eyes stopped before she'd gone past ground level and widened. On the expensive, expansive lawns in front of the building were hundreds of figures dressed in black running in precise, ordered lines into what she could only guess was a battle formation.
"Oh God," she whispered, "We're being attacked."
She fumbled for a moment, not knowing what to do.
"This isn't in the guidebook!" she exclaimed.
At a loss, no one was telling her what to do; she shut down her computer and grabbed her bag, flash disk clutched in her left hand. Her stockinged feet were halfway out the door when the cold stone underneath, so shockingly different to the soft carpet in her office, reminded Lillith of her state of undress.
"I'm not leaving my shoes!" Lillith informed the air around her, but having no free hands to hold them in, she was forced to wear them.
She clunked noisily, her lonely footsteps echoing to the elevator and stood frozen in front of the metal doors, hand unable to press the button. Once more, she didn't know what to do. Was this an evacuation? She thought that in evacuations you weren't supposed to use the elevators. If the power went out she'd be trapped. If the weirdos out front came in, she wouldn't know until they attacked her when the elevator doors opened.
"Stairs it is," she said, grimacing.
Lillith attempted to walk quietly, but quickly, down the marble steps and flinched at the hard clacking of her high heeled shoes with every step. The stress and confusion was causing her stomach to clench, and her mouth to purse and twist. In the thick silence of the near empty building, her every movement seemed to echo and in the distance she thought she heard a muted roaring, but couldn't be sure.
She was three floors closer to the ground floor and about to begin sneaking down another set of stairs, when she heard shouts, yells and what sounded suspiciously like metal hitting metal. The young woman abandoned her attempt to flee for the moment and rushed to a nearby window.
Her eyebrows came together and her jaw dropped open. On the front lawns, all hell had broken loose. The figures in black were engaged in some kind of fight or battle with what appeared to be a group of green men, someone in yellow and a guy in a hockey mask wielding a wooden bat. Later, she would try to forget the image of someone running through the hedges with a walking stick in nothing but a dressing gown.
She pressed a hand over her eyes, "This isn't happening. This can't be happening. It's a dream. I've fallen asleep at the computer and this is a dream," She peeked from behind her fingers.
Every one of them was still there. In fact, a small group of them were running towards the front door, chased by a very large group of black warriors.
The front door…
"Oh, fuck…" she cursed softly.
Lillith turned and ran as fast as she could down the stairs – she only had five more flights to go – and forgot about being quiet. She kept slipping in her shoes and had come perilously close to breaking her ankle, she was sure she had twisted it by now, twice. She clung to handrail with her left hand and ran; her gait was made uneven and awkward by the large bag swinging from her shoulder. Messy brown curls were jostled free of the elastic band and swatted her eyes. She attempted to push them away and the flash disk that she had held so tightly dropped from her fingers and fell into the abyss. Lillith heard it clatter when it hit the ground.
"Fuck! It better not be broken!" She threatened the universe between wheezes.
Lillith paused, gasping, on the landing of the second floor which overlooked the main parlour. She turned and began to rush down the stairs. Voices echoing in the hall made her about face; she was, for a moment, both transfixed by and afraid of the glowing, swirling light in the centre of what used to be the entrance hall. She steeled herself and dashed to the edge of the balcony.
"Dudes," one of them said, "What do we do?"
"I'm working on it!" replied a second voice.
It was the green men, the person in yellow, the guy in the dressing gown and the Hockey Mask Wacko. The milled around the front door and, bending her head slightly, Lillith could see the black guys running towards the front door. She bounced on her feet and looked around trying to see if she could somehow make the massive Winters Corp doors close.
Distantly she heard someone say, "You break it, you buy it."
Her eyes zeroed in on the source of the voice. It was Hockey Mask! He was holding a hockey stick and approaching a Grecian vase displayed near the door. She gasped.
Every morning when she came into work Lillith liked to take a few minutes to quickly observe the various pieces of art or history that littered Winters Corp. She cherished the time when he CEO of Winters Corp, Max Winters had actually approached her and commented her on how he admired her attention to detail in her work and in the historic pieces she examined.
She loved the Greece collection and the crazy Hockey Mask was threatening one of her favourite pieces with sporting equipment!
"Not," she choked; Hockey Mask swung the stick viciously and smashed not only the glass but the vase as well. Alarms blared, lights flashed and the heavy security doors activated when anything of value was moved fell quickly into place. Lillith's hands were outstretched as if she could save the defenceless vase from her position on the second floor. She stared in agony at the broken pieces, "the antiques."
Laughter reverberated from below and Lillith frowned heavily at them, hoping that they didn't see her, but sensed her resentment anyway. She stared at them in disbelief. They were giving each other high fives after destroying priceless art! Even the figure in yellow, who she realised now was a woman, complimented the guy.
"Jones," The name was nothing special, but with her links to a fellow accountant at the IRS she had no doubt she would be able to find something about the Joneses of New York City.
They walked towards the glowing light, and her, so she crouched down behind the balcony rail and peered over the edge.
"Cool," the first voice she had heard said, "I want one."
Idiot. It was glowing and swirling - clearly not of the natural order of things - and he wanted one! She made a mental note to keep sharp and shiny things away from the green guy with, she squinted, the orange mask.
There was no way she was getting out while the black men were outside and the crazy people were inside. So, while they poked around the strange cylindrical objects around the vortex, which she could have sworn were not there in the morning, she tilted her head and tried to get a better look at the group.
She could identify clearly a man, Hockey Mask, and a yellow woman about her age. The three green men she was confused about. They looked just like a group of guys, if you forgot about their strange shape and colour. Was it a costume? It looked too strange to be a costume. Then again, people will wear anything. Underneath the dressing gown of the seventh figure a tail swung lazily, and she shuddered.
"Did someone put LSD in my coffee?" she asked herself quite seriously. No, no one she knew of would just give away LSD. Maybe the water she used in her coffee was making her hallucinate. It was just contaminated and she was witnessing a group of highly detailed, strange looking hallucinations go about their daily business.
The three green hallucinations grouped around one of the cages. A few seconds later, it exploded open with a sudden bang and a cloud of acrid smoke! Lillith lurched, her heart beating crazily. This hallucination was going to increase her blood pressure to dangerous levels.
She watched warily as the Red one pulled out a fourth green man, in a blue mask and present him with two black sticks.
"What is going on?"
She heard someone screaming to her right, and jumped back from the balcony in reflex, though she didn't know what it would achieve. To her right, the owner of the voice, a strangely dressed man, flew through the air and landed on the main floor.
She heard the yellow woman exclaim softly, "Winters?"
"Winters?"
That couldn't be right. Max Winters didn't go around strangely dressed, flying through the air. No one could have survived the fall. If Max Winters was down there, he was dead.
What would happen to the company, and her job, if someone had tried to teach Max Winters to fly?
She lurched forward and clung off the railing, wishing she had better long distance eyesight, trying to see who was dead. Out of the corner of her eye she spotted a weird stone statue, one of the collection Winters favoured standing at the apex of the stairway. It hadn't been there a moment ago. Then, it turned and walked away.
"Shit…"
Lillith tried to forget about the weird stone hallucinations and focus on what could be the decider of her career future, but she couldn't help turning to get a better angle of both the main hall and the doorway.
Orange grabbed a hockey stick and poked the fallen corpse. Nothing happened. Dead. Dead as a doorknob. Dead as three day old road kill. Dead. Dead-
"Oh my God!" Lillith squeaked, "He's resurrected himself!"
The figure, wearing some kind of antique armour, stood up. The yellow woman called him "Winters", and he responded. He turned and from her position on the floor above Lillith recognised the strong profile of her boss', boss' boss – Max Winters.
"Miss O'Neil." He said. Lillith tried to memorise the name.
She heard metal scraping and searched for the sound. The front door! The police must have come to secure the building and rescue her!
"Oh, shit!"
Hordes of figures in black tight fitting clothing swarmed into the room. She looked around, wanting to run away as fast as she could. Large shadows grew on the wall and heavy footsteps came closer. Someone was walking towards her. Lillith crawled in absolute fear to the nearest alcove and pressed herself into it, hoping if she stayed still no one would find her.
She stayed there for a minute or two, barely breathing. From her spot on the floor Lillith watched four pairs of heavy stone feet plot past. Her heart thumped crazily, blood rushed in her ears and she was sure they could hear it.
She breathed a sigh of relief when they turned the corner onto the ground floor without finding her and grinding her bones into bread. She stayed there, hyperventilating, for what seemed a long time, trying to pluck up the dregs of courage she knew she had somewhere, deep inside of her and leave the alcove.
"It's the only way to get away," she told herself, "Only way, only way, only way-"
She clapped a hand over her mouth to stop herself from repeating the phrase aloud, lest the stone things hear her. Her eyes darted back and forth as she prepared to enter the proverbial fray. When she emerged she didn't think there would actually be a fray, but obviously the universe doesn't like being threatened.
She scurried from her safe little alcove and tried to crawl down the stairs. She just needed to make it to the front door. Her advance was hampered by a battle taking place in the Winters Corp foyer. The stone statues were fighting the green men. Closer to them now, she thought the looked a little like giant turtles.
Two metres from the bottom a stone statue sailed over the edge of the balcony and crashed into the wall. Pieces of marble fell around it. Lillith froze, contemplating running back to her rabbit hole but thought, considering it was made of stone, its sight might be linked to movement. She was never known for common sense during a crisis.
She stood perfectly still. One of the green men taunted the thing over the shouting and crashes of the battle. The statue shook its head, snarled and leapt back over the railing. When it was gone, Lillith melted to the floor and quickly crawled to the pillar. She peered around it.
Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of antiques was smashed from their protective glass cases, broken and torn on the floor. It was the fault of those stupid stone statues and their green friends. Well, they weren't friends exactly, she surmised. They fought each other viciously. The turtles, she noticed, were some kind of martial arts experts. She spied one of them across the room with as many antique swords as he could find strapped to his back. That was her second favourite exhibition. She used to stand in front of that case and think about maiming her boss with one of those swords! He was going to destroy them utterly! Antique swords don't stand up to giant walking statues! She made a mental note to keep anything sharp and shiny away from all of them. A turtle crashed into the pillar a few metres above her head. Lillith screamed and ducked into the shadows behind the pillar.
The desire to run and/or hide was becoming Lillith's new life goal.
The statues were slowly being pushed back towards the glowing vortex by the turtles. Lillith watched the battle and the front door carefully, waiting for the right moment to make her escape. The turtles kicked the statues into the swirling vortex and they disappeared.
She punched the air and exclaimed, "Yes!" and was knocked off her feet by a backlash from the vortex.
She hit her head hard on the floor and spent a moment rubbing it. She leaned on her forearms and slowly got to her knees, her head spinning.
"So did we win?" the Orange one asked.
Lillith raised an eyebrow and peered around the pole. The stone statues strode out of the swirling vortex, laughing.
"Foolish creatures!" one of them said, "We are immortal, made of stone. Without the final monster to break our curse, we will never be stopped!"
Immortal? Monster? Curse? Lillith's headache was making it hard for her to concentrate. What was he talking about?
A muted car horn sounded. Lillith blearily looked for it, wondering why a car was inside Winters Corp, when it burst through the main doors closely followed by a large, well, monster.
Her befuddled mind could only generate one word, "Fuck."
The van reared off to the side and crashed into a wall and various expensive antiques, wheels still spinning. The turtles fled to the side, cleverly deciding that standing in the path of the monster was a silly idea. The monster on the other hand, crashed into the statues, pushing all of them into the vortex. The whole building shook and Lillith held her aching head.
"Earthquake?" she mumbled.
The vortex shuddered and disappeared taking the statues and the monster with it. The building was in ruins, she surveyed. The amount of damage was three times the yearly budget of half of the company's departments put together. The intimidating figure of Max Winters sat near the main doors, to her right. He was laughing. Lillith blinked, she couldn't find anything funny in the situation whatsoever.
She had had the worst night of her life! Winters Corp had been attacked by black ninjas, turtles, walking statues and a giant monster! She had been trapped inside the building the entire time, watching a swirling vortex absorb the aforementioned statues and monster! Lazily she swiped at her face, covered in dust. She almost wasn't surprised to see Winters light up and glow, then disappear completely. The owner and CEO of Winters Corp disappearing was a walk in the park compared to what she had been through! And she hadn't finished the report!
"Wait," she whispered, "Screw the report! Winters is gone," she looked around to make sure, "He's gone. That's worse than dead, 'cause there's no body. There'll be an investigation. The building is in ruins. Repairing it will cost millions. Stock prices will fall…"
Lillith sat in the rubble trying to figure out what to do. The dust in the air tickled her nose and she sneezed three times in a row. Sniffling, she looked around wondering why none of the black or green men had found and accosted her. Her eyes were running, so she couldn't see very clearly, but it appeared her hallucinations had gone. Whatever it was that had caused her severe mental psychosis had obviously faded from her system. The ruins still felt real when she tripped and fell on them though.
"Well," she said thickly, her nose blocked, "I think I've had just about enough of this fun."
Shakily, she heaved herself up, trying not to imagine how bad she looked. She could see the scratches on her legs, the runs in her stocking and the dust on her suit. It was probably in her hair too. She carefully picked her way through the piles of rubble and glass, and stumbled out the door. She was alone except for a scattering of golden sparkles in the air. To the sparkles, she only had two words to say.
"I quit."
Slightly Obsessive
A/N: Thank you to my first reviewers "anon" and "Dragonfire79". I took your comments to heart, and this story is now labelled as humour.
Ok, so I've taken out a part of the ending and fixed up some minor grammatical errors.