Things had not gone well for the Turtles, like even remotely.
The Kraang were back, canisters of Mutagen had been spread out all over New York City which would lead to all sorts of chaos in the future, April's father had been turned into a hideous mutant bat, and April had blamed the Turtles for it and yelled at them that she never wanted to see them again.
Granted none of them were feeling 100% about what had happened, but one of them felt more to blame for it than the others, and that is what would set him on his new path.
The path to becoming the greatest and worthiest ninja of all.
This is where his story truly begins…
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Splinter frowned at what he was hearing after it had all been explained "This is all very grave news, very grave news indeed my sons."
"I can't believe this is happening." Donnie muttered "Poor April."
"You cannot dwell on the past my sons, in times such as these you can only look towards the future. But for now you must find every last lost canister of mutagen. You must search every street, every park and playground, every building and rooftop, every alley and corner before we have even more mutants on our hands." then he noticed something and looked over at one of them in particular "Michelangelo, you seemed more trouble than the rest of you. Is there something else bothering you?"
Mikey let out a long sigh, his voice soft "It's my fault."
"Mikey we all screwed up with the Mutagen spill." Leo told him "We're all to blame and we're all gonna fix it."
"No I get that, I mean the thing with April." this caused Donnie to cringe and shut the four of them up "You guys kept telling me to shut up but I didn't listen, words just kept pouring out of me and I ruined our friendship with her! If I had just kept my mouth shut then April wouldn't hate us right now! Face it, I screwed up again just like I always do! I'm not a ninja, I'm a total joke and an idiot for not realizing it until now!" and he stormed off.
"Mikey wait." Leo and the others prepared to go after him.
However, Splinter held out a hand in front of them and stopped them "Let him go, he needs to calm his mind."
"But sensei…"
"This is something that Michelangelo must figure out on his own in order to understand himself on a deeper level and grow both as a ninja and as a person."
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The streets of New York were as bustling as ever, even around midnight.
Mikey was racing across the rooftops, alone with his thoughts both in his head and out loud "It's always stuff like this, I'm fine until something serious comes up and then I botch it by being such a huge screw up!" he sat down on the ledge and sighed "And now even April is gone because of me, what am I supposed to do now?"
"What do you want from me?!"
Mikey looked down 'Oh great, these punks again.'
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As it turns out it was just Fong and the Purple Dragons robbing an old man "Hey check it out boys, we found ourselves a walking ATM." he pulled out a pocket knife "How about I go ahead and make a withdrawal." he took some money from the old man "Attaboy, now be sure to fork over the watch too." he heard a thud and looked back to see one of his guys on the ground and a figure standing over him "What the hell?"
As it turns out it was a figure in a dark blue shirt with black pants, one set of tegaki of each of his hands, with brown hair and a pair of shades, as well as a sword in its sheath strapped onto his back "You pieces of trash picked the wrong night, you're in my town now punks."
"Nice threads punk, and just who the hell are you supposed to be?"
"All you need to know is that I'm the last face you're gonna see before you wake up lying in a ditch somewhere."
"Oh is that right? Get him boys!" and the three of them charged forward.
The figure ducked under various attempted punches and flipped the big guy, Sid, into a nearby trash can "Choke on this one suckers!" he picked up the trash can with Sid in it and threw it into the other two before beating down on them a little bit more with his tegaki.
Mikey observed this from atop a nearby fire escape "No way this dude's out of his gourd, and I thought Raph was bad. I'd better stop this before he gets out of hand."
The figure blitzed in front of Fong and dealt him a critical uppercut to the jaw, knocking him out cold "He shoots and he scores, so who wants the next ass beating."
"Hey man enough, we give up." Fong muttered.
"Oh not a chance, I'm not done with you two punks yet." he raised his fist, only to feel something grab him from behind and throw him to the ground and noticed a figure in the shadowy corner of the alley "Alright show yourself, I know you're there."
"...Fine." so Mikey revealed emerged from the shadows and revealed himself "You didn't have to be so hard on them you know."
"Maybe not but I did so for two reasons: First, I had to get the point across, something that you and your friends never seemed to be able to do. Second, I used them as bait to get you down here so I could finally meet one of the famed talking ninja turtles who saved the world." this was followed by the Purple Dragons running away during their conversation.
"You know about me?"
"Well my uncle does, he's a journalist and I might have gotten into a few of his papers a couple of times and made some copies."
"And he knows about me and my bros?"
"...Tell you what, let's make a deal. You and I go one on one, if you can beat me then I'll tell you everything that you need to know."
"Do I have to?"
"Yep."
"...Fine." he pulled out his nunchucks "Alright, let's do this."
"Works for me." and so they charged, tegaki and bare fists against nunchucks.
Mikey quickly bound both of the figure's fists using his nunchucks "I need to know that you're not gonna hurt my brothers!" he kicked the figure into a dumpster.
The figure burst back up and quickly tackled Mikey into a wall "If you wanna know about me then you've gotta earn those details!" he swung at Mikey's head with a knife hand attack.
Mikey dodged the attack and leapt up into the air as he fired off some shuriken.
The figure suddenly materialized a shield on his left forearm and blocked the attack "Throwing stars huh? Not too shabby I've gotta admit." he de materialized the shield.
"Then let me see how you deal with this." Mikey put away his nunchucks and decided to resort to hand to hand combat.
"Let's do this." he pressed a button on the watch on his wrist and his arms and legs glowed blue for a moment "Let's go!" he blitzed out of existence.
'He's fast!' Mikey managed to block the first attack, which quickly resulted in the two of them trading blows, though Mikey was at a clear disadvantage, leaving a good number of bruises all over him as a result "How… the shell… are you… so fast?"
"Artificial gravity seals, I do a little bit of incenting in my spare time." the figure promptly leapt over Mikey and kicked him in the back of the shell, knocking him to the ground "So this is why most turtles are considered endangered."
"Yeah but the difference is that they can't do this!" Mike flipped over and dealt the figure a solid two legged kick to the jaw, sending him flying into the air.
However, the figure quickly rebounded and landed back on his feet "Okay, yeah I think that's enough. I've seen enough, you're the real deal alright."
"Yeah you've got that right." Mikey spat out some blood "Okay man a deal's a deal, we've gotta talk."
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It wasn't long before the two of them took their discussion to a nearby rooftop.
Mikey leaned up against a water tower "Alright man, start talking. What's with the moves, how do you know about me and my bros, who the shell are you?"
The figure too off his shades, revealing a pair of brown eyes, and he sighed "My name is Alex Williams, I'm only 16. Up until about a month ago, I was living with my parents in my home on Long Island. My mom is a therapist and my dad was a police officer, everything was fine up until about a month ago."
"What do you mean, what- Oh. Oh shell."
"Yeah, my dad was killed during the whole technodrome crisis last month. He died doing what he loved to do, helping people and saving lives."
"Wow, I never really thought about…"
"Whether or not anyone died that day? Well it's not like you could've done much, you can't be seen by the public. Anyway my mom and I moved here to Manhattan, well to Brooklyn to be more specific, since my uncle Jack on my mom's side lives here too. Once we were settled in for the most part he told me everything he was working in but swore me to secrecy. He's a journalist who's been investing the case of those missing scientists last year until he discovered something that goes way beyond that."
Mikey was quick to realize what he was talking about "You mean the Kraang."
"Yep that's right." Alex pulled out a notebook "This is just a copy that I made, my uncle Jack has the original. These guys infiltrating Earth is long lived, more ancient than you could ever imagine. The Kraang have been trying to use their mutagen to turn the Earth into their own screwed up playground for thousands upon thousands of years, but the problem is that they couldn't use the mutagen in our dimension without a certain specific chain of human DNA. They spent thousands of years capturing, shaping the genetic code of humankind until after all this time, they finally did it." he revealed a picture of an infant.
"Is that… April?"
"Her mother was taken by the Kraang before April was born and then they experimented on her with the mutagen. That's why April is so special and so important to the Kraang, her DNA is the key to perfecting the mutagen in this dimension. Anyway you already know that their goal is to mutate the Earth so that they can live on it and they need April to do that, but we need to let them know that the Earth isn't gonna go down without a fight."
"So about the sword, the tegaki, the gravity seals or whatever?"
"I've always had a knack for science and inventing stuff, after I found out about the stuff I just got some better resources. See a few days after the technodrome fiasco my uncle tried to find some useful info in the ruins of TCRI and kind of followed him. He went for the Kraang computers, I went for what was left of the tech they used for their weapons and stuff and reverse engineered the metal that they used for their weapons and Kraang droids to make these rings that I saw in some Bruce Lee movie, artificial gravity seals like stuff I saw in Naruto and Dragon Ball, all sorts of other inventions I keep in my lab at home, and my personal favorite: a sword that I had forged by combining the metal used to make the Kraang with various other materials to make it way stronger than any metal on Earth. I named it Ascalon."
"After that awesome sword in Ben 10?"
"Yep."
"Nice."
"I know right? Plus I took a few years of classes and now I'm a 7th degree black belt so that helps. So now that the serious stuff is out of the picture, why the hell are you out here all alone anyway?"
"...You know about that shipment of Mutagen in that Kraang stealth ship?"
"Yeah and how like 30 or so canisters dropped down over the city? I'm working on a tracker for the stuff right now so that oughta help."
"Well… April's dad was hit by one of the canisters and got turned into a psycho mutant bat, and now April blames us for it. It probably wouldn't have happened if I hadn't opened my big stupid mouth. I just needed to think about my approach to stuff like this."
"And what did you decide?"
"That I need a new shtick, a new approach. I'm gonna be a better ninja, a better me, starting now."
"I see, well I'm glad to hear it. Just in case anything happened where you had to amp up your arsenals I made some weapons for you and the others from the same metal as the Kraang exoskeletons." he pressed a button on his watch and a pair of weapons suddenly materialized in front of him "I made a pair of kama blades for you, the others are still a work in progress but I figured that now was as good a time as any."
Mikey tried out the kamas a little bit and stuck them in his belt next to his nunchucks "These are awesome, thanks man."
"Sure thing." Alex handed him a card "I know for a fact that you and the other Turtles are gonna need my expertise again so here's my number."
"Alex Williams: Part time inventor, part time journalist, part time vigilante, full time highschool student. Huh. Nice." he heard his phone ringing "You got Mikey."
"Mikey it's Leo, what happened back there?"
"Oh hey, sorry. I just needed to get my head together you know?"
"Mikey none of us would've blamed you for what happened with April, she probably would've just found out any other way. Just come on back, Master Splinter is gonna want us for training in a few hours anyway."
"Yeah I know. And Leo? I'm done being the screw up for the team, from now on I'm going full force with the training and I'm gonna be the best Mikey that I can."
"...Okay, glad to hear it."
"I'll be back at the lair in a few." he hung up and turned to Alex "So uh-"
"Go ahead man." Alex dealt him a fist bump "Give me a call in a few days and I'll show you the new mutagen tracker that I've been working on."
"Sure thing. And Alex… thanks, this is what I needed to hear to get myself back off the ground and running again. Take care man." and he took off 'This is it Mikey, the start of a new you from here on out.'
Alex watched him go before taking off in the opposite direction 'Dad, you once said that all anyone needs in life is a good friend. Maybe I can be that friend for him, and then this city will know what we can do.'
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Morning came, and training was in full swing.
As it turns out, Raph had been paired against Mikey in a one on one sparring match "You don't have to worry Mikey, I'm in a good mood today so I'll go easy on you."
"Yeah sure you will." Mikey whipped out his nunchucks 'I'd better not use those kamas that I got from Alex or else the guys and sensei will know about him. Don't do me any favors or anything Raph, I'll have you pinned down in 2 minutes tops."
"Pretty big talk coming from someone with the brain of an avocado, I'll wipe that smirk off your face soon."
"Hajime!" Splinter made the call.
"Good, now let's do this!" so Raph charged forward.
"I don't think so!" Mikey rolled underneath the attempted charged and blocked an fierce attack from Raph's sais and extended the chains on his nunchucks, allowing him to bind Raphael's legs, which gave him the chance to deal Raph a spin kick to the jaw, followed by one to the chest, knocking him to the ground.
"Ya Mae!" Splinter made the call and ended the match "Well done Michelangelo, I can see your outing last night was what you needed for today's training."
"Thank you sensei." Mikey got up and bowed "Last night I just decided that I needed to reevaluate how I'm doing my ninja thing."
"I see. That is enough for now, we will continue this training session later. Michelangelo, I wish to speak with you." this prompted Leonardo, Raphael and Donatello to leave the dojo, which left only Splinter and Mikey "Tell me my son, is there something that you would wish to tell me?"
"...I shell dialed you on the cheese phone again didn't you?"
"Yes, yes you did."
"Well… okay yeah, you know how I met this kid Alex fighting the Purple Dragons and he told me about how his dad died in the whole thing with the Technodrome a few months ago, and how his uncle has been spying on the Kraang and getting all sorts of crazy info and using scraps of their tech to make some tegaki and a sword and junk that he says are made out of the same metal used by the Kraang. Plus he gave me these." he pulled out the kamas that Alex gave him "Probably some kind of thing of good faith, you know to prove that we can trust him."
"I see. And do you think we can trust him?"
"...I think that now that April hates us it's a good idea to get another human on our side, so I think it's for the best that I at least see what his deal is."
"I see. Very well then, if you believe this to be the best course of action then you have my full support. Tell me, what else did he say?"
"That he's going to be spending the next few days building some kind of Mutagen Tracker to find the canisters that me and the guys lost."
"I see. Well then perhaps you should aid him in this quest, after all if the Kraang have returned then another ally would be invaluable. You are dismissed."
"Hai sensei." and so Mikey left, his thoughts on his new objective 'This is just the start, from now on Hamato Michelangelo has two goals: to protect the ones that he loves, and to become the greatest ninja of the modern age.'
A/N:
This is an idea that I've been stewing on for awhile but that involved it revolving around my own OC character, so instead I decided to take a different route and make Alex a supporting character to the real main character: Michelangelo. After all, he has the most potential out of all of the turtles.
In case you didn't figure it out, Alex's uncle is Jack Kurtzman, the journalist who's been spying on the Kraang in seasons 2 and 3, and later the benefactor of the Mighty Mutanimals.
The Kama weapons that Mikey starts using are based on the ones that he got in the season 3 episode Vision Quest, I thought it would be cool if he had something like that too.
Just for the record, the episodes I cover in season 2 will be out of order, at least in the first half and a couple of episodes from the second half. I'm planning to drag out the whole "April hating the Turtles thing" for awhile.