Disclaimer: I Don't own TMNT, I Don't own Multiplicity. I'm just the nut job that likes to write… don't sue me please!!
Author's Note: Have any of you seen Multiplicity?? I haven't. But I've seen snippets, and my little sis practically threw this plot bunny at my face!! I still have the bruise to prove it! Needless to say… I'm going to write it, and none of you can stop me!! buahhahahaha Here goes nothin! A Multiplicity parody!
Multi-Donity
Chapter One – What is This?
I walked back from the kitchen to my worktable, a refrigerated slice of pizza in my hands that I hadn't wanted to take the time to warm up. As I sat down, I realized that I had no place to put my snack, my worktable being completely buried underneath my current project: replenishing my supply of electric-shock shurikans. I was running low.
Shrugging, I shoved the entire slice of cold pizza in my mouth, trying to get back to work as soon as possible. I hated it when my stomach interrupted my projects with its grumblings. While I chewed, my eyes traveled to where Michelangelo sat, on a chair with his ipod headphones firmly snuggled around his ears, and a sour expression on his face.
One glance at the monolith television screen told me why. Casey Jones had come over, and he and Raph had turned the television onto a wrestling channel. Currently they were shouting at their favorite player, the Boulder. They looked like they wanted to wrestle the opponent themselves, and sometimes they would stand up and full-out yell at the TV screen. It was no wonder that Mikey had wanted to escape.
After I'd scarfed, I picked up the shurikan I had been hardwiring to shock upon impact, adding a few adjustments with my tweezers, underneath my hands-free magnifying glass. The minutes passed by, with me happily tinkering away. The shurikan would be ready for the soldering torch soon…
Suddenly a flash of orange cut through my thoughts; Michelangelo dodged behind me and underneath my worktable.
"Donnie, if anyone asks, I was not here, you didn't see me, and no I don't have the remote." He commanded.
"Uh… ok… what're you doing with the remote?" I asked, peering underneath the table. Michelangelo crouched underneath—watching for his adversaries with a wild eye—cradling the remote in his arms as gently as he would a newborn babe.
"Don't look at me!! Just… work on whatever it is that you were working on!"
I snapped my head back to its original position.
"Okaaay…" I asked, without looking underneath the table. "What's going on, Mikey?"
Michelangelo supplied, "That wrestling was driving me insane! Seriously, I think is totally disgusting to watch the way those two yell at the opponents. It's like they want to jump through the screen, and eat them alive."
I smiled, "Sort of like how it's totally disgusting to watch you eat pizza? You eat your opponents alive."
"Hardy har," Michelangelo retorted, "But I'm gonna let you off the hook for that one today, Donnie-boy, because you in your techno-geek wisdom made it so that the TV could only be worked by remote. That was the only way I could change the channel, and make it so that they couldn't change it back!"
I furrowed by eyebrow ridges. "You snuck the channel changer? How—?"
Michelangelo chuckled, "Because I am the stealth master!" When I sent an unimpressed look his way, he added, "Aaaaand Raphael is completely oblivious when he watches wrestling. I just slid my arm around the side of the couch and swiped it, and changed the channel behind the post. They were too busy trying to figure out what happened to even look around for me."
I looked over towards the 'living room' and chuckled as I noticed that Michelangelo had turned the channel to some how-to-knit program. Raphael and Casey both frantically looked underneath the couch and the couch cushions. I faintly heard, "It's gotta be around here somewhere." And "Case, you were sittin' on it. That's what happened. It's gotta be under here."
Soon the search spread to the entire living room area. I continued to work, suppressing a mischievous smile when I thought either Casey or Raphael was looking our way. I actually got four or five more shurikans completed before Michelangelo felt it safe to speak and start to complain about how his stomach was starting to growl at him. He obviously meant that he wanted me to get him some pizza.
I told him no way, and that he'd been the one to get himself in this problem in the first place. It was his problem to get himself out of it.
Really though, I think Michelangelo saved everyone's sanity from an early demise. The way those two watched wrestling… I gave an involuntary shudder. Michelangelo may be a goofball, but he's a smart goofball sometimes.
However, having the remote here in my lab while they vengefully looked for him was a recipe for disaster, and I knew it.
That's why I quietly gathered up my project. While Raphael and Casey searched for the clicker-thieving orange banded brother hiding quietly underneath the table, I carefully put away my breakable glass items, stored any liquids in my cupboards, hid any scatterable, yet extremely important paperwork, and quietly shielded my computer system with a blockade of boxes intended precisely for this job.
Then I walked out of my lab, just as a resounding "MIKEY!!" split across the room by two furious hot-heads, who made a lightning-fast beeline for my lab.
I sighed.
Now all I have to do is wait it out.
I headed toward the kitchen for some more pizza.
"Donnie!" Moaned a certain now black-and-blue brother. "It stings!"
I rolled my eyes, and persisted in wiping a gash on Michelangelo's arm with a gloved hand brandishing an alcohol wipe. "Can't you guys just rough-house somewhere where there aren't any hard, and breakable objects? Like… the ocean?"
Mikey narrowed his eyes. He must have been wondering whether or not I had actually just told him to go jump in the ocean. He flinched in pain as I neared a certain part of the gash that was deeper than the rest. As much as he hated to admit it, I could tell he knew that I was right about rough-housing with hard objects. The table hadn't much liked him running into it, apparently, and its sharp edge had gouged him one good.
Or maybe it was because he accidentally broke one of the legs off of it.
"Just be careful, Don!" He reproached, as my inquiring fingers prodded the underneath the skin for any splinters that might have become lodged underneath.
"Aw, stop bein' such a friggin' baby!" Came a harsh voice from the left. Raphael was next in line for 'Dr. Don,' holding a hand above his left eye. I knew it would probably discolor once this was over; I'm pretty sure he gave himself a concussion.
Needless to say, Splinter would not be pleased.
April hadn't been either. She'd taken Casey home pretty much by the scruff of the neck, muttering under her breath about how childish he had been behaving, and that he probably couldn't feel his cuts that needed taken care of because of his thick head, and more things that probably should not be mentioned.
"Yo Donnie!" Leonardo had just walked in the room, and he held a book in his hand: The Art of War by Sun Tsu. It had fallen out of its old leather cover, and the binding had just disintegrated as well, and the pages were scattering everywhere.
"Just a minute Leo…" I muttered. Currently both my hands were finishing the wrappings on Mikey's arm.
Raphael sighed, "Don all I did was run into a wall. Just show me where you keep the ice-packs, and I'll just—"
I grabbed him by the shoulder, and forcefully turned him around. "No you don't, I don't need you making things worse. Just sit down, and shush."
Raphael rolled his eyes, regretting it after feeling pain in his left eye. I knew what he was thinking, because he'd been saying it to me for as long as I could remember. 'For cryin' out loud, Don, just say 'shut up.'' He merely sighed, and let me shine a penlight in his eyes. It obviously bothered him when I softened something that I had 'obviously' meant to be harsh.
I didn't like what I was seeing.
"Are you dizzy?"
"No…"
I looked at him sternly.
He confessed. "A little…"
"Do you have blurred vision?"
"Maybe…"
"Raph, you've given yourself a concussion." Came my diagnosis.
"Not like it's the first time…" Raph muttered, angry all the same. He knew what I was going to say next.
"Okay, you've officially been couched for the next couple of hours. No falling asleep. Ice it for twenty-thirty minutes every couple of hours."
"Does it count as sleeping if I'm—"
"Yes." I shoved Raph in the direction of the couch, without having to hear the rest of it. 'Just resting my eyeballs' had never fooled anybody.
Leo was still standing there with the broken book. "Hey Don, you wouldn't happen to be able to put this together without tape, would you?"
I smirked, "Do you really have to ask that?"
Leo gave me a hearty slap on the back. "Thanks Don." He left the gutted book in a pile on my broken lab table.
Leaning back in my chair, I made a mental check-off list.
1. Fix my table
2. Bind Leo's book
3. Build a stun-gun for any miscreants that want to rough-house in my lab again.
I sighed, and told my broken table. "Sometimes I just wish I had two or three of me running around here to put out the fires so that I can focus on other things for a change."
My table just sat there.
I needed to seriously 'tech' out some of my frustrations, but first I knew I needed a relaxing visit to the web, just to surf. De-barricading my computer, I opened up the internet.
Then, just for fun, I typed the web address for Then I typed in the search engine 'cloning.'
Just for fun.
Shuffling through the items at the dump, I sighed. Yesterday had been a long day. I had several more fires to put out, which included un-bending the hinges to the bathroom door, because some big-foot who shall remain nameless broke the door down because a certain younger brother hid there with the door locked, after having drawn bushy eyebrows onto his older brother in 'punishment' for falling asleep when he'd been specifically told not to. Then it was off to the toaster, because Leo had stepped foot into the kitchen again. For some reason, and to his dismay, everything seems to always break on him whenever he tried to use it. Which reminded me that I had yet to fix his book. It didn't take long to come up with some metal binding, and re-attaching the cover to it. From there I worked on the Battle Shell's homing system, because Mikey tried to mess with it, then I fixed Sensei's door, because it wouldn't open correctly, and then we got a plumbing leak from Mikey's and Raph's battle in the bathroom, which resulted in more bruises and cuts—and some extra house-chores for two brothers who had way to much time on their hands, which made me happy—and…
Well, by then I found myself thinking desperately about that stun-gun idea.
This morning felt a little different to me. You know, when there was something in the air that made you feel excited, except you didn't know why, and so you spend the rest of the day in anticipation to find out what it is that you can't figure out why you are excited about. I had actually come into my lab after morning practice to find that my table had been repaired, and a whole pizza sitting on top of it. The pepperoni slices spelled out: 'I'm sorry.'
That must have been Michelangelo.
At least he appreciated all the work that I did. Even if he was the one that created most of it.
I decided that a trip to the dump was in order that evening. Besides being able to find some cool stuff sometimes, it was a good way to find some time alone. I did need to find another hard drive, so that I could use the extra space. I was running out.
As expected, I did find stuff that I could use: some good wires that I could use for pretty much do any hardwiring that I might need to do. Some glass bottles that I could use for beakers, once I had written some measurements on them. Someone had actually thrown out an old computer, and I smurfed the hardrive from it. That was lucky. I could hook it up as a slave to my hard-drive.
Then I spotted something very odd.
It was a brown leather briefcase. It stuck out like a sore thumb, because amidst all the old, battered, soiled, and mucky trash, it shone bright and new. I walked forward, and at a closer inspection, the leather didn't even appear to have any scratches on it of any kind. The gold latches gleamed in the dying sunlight. No tarnish. In fact, the thing looked brand new.
"Oh man, who would have thrown away something like this?" I questioned aloud, picking it up and feeling the leather with my fingers. It was real leather. Some people just bugged me. What kind of weirdo would send something this expensive—real leather—to the dump?
As I turned it over in my hand, I felt something shift slightly. Curious, I opened it up.
"What the…?" I said, unsure of what it was I saw inside.
Tucked inside foam padding was a round, smooth boulder-looking thing that had a black surface. Except it was lighter than an actual rock. It almost looked like the ridiculous 'flying saucers' you would see in those old black-and-white TV shows back in the sixties. I couldn't see any markings on the top of the rounded surface, and no imprints of any kind. It had a manufactured look, man-made. Electronic. It looked as though it hadn't seen any use whatsoever.
Of course, that didn't mean it hadn't been used at all. I had no clue what it could be, and I was almost afraid of touching it. What if I triggered something to activate without even realizing it?
Closing the briefcase once again, I looked around for any kind of identification that I could find. At the very bottom, I found it. A small identification number seared into the leather itself: SC236.
Rolling my eyes, I muttered, "You're going to make this difficult for me, aren't you?"
Well, I had my way around these sort of problems
Good ol' internet.
As the night progressed, I found myself more and more frustrated. There was no company in this area with the initials 'SC' that could have produced the strange item sitting in my lab. After a while, I also discovered that the ID tag was too ambiguous to even distinguish it between a small manufacturing company, to a large company. It would have to be expensive, so I ruled out the small company. However, any company indiscriminate of size could produce something like this if they had a financial backer. That's when a thought tickled my brain—a nasty little thought. What if this had nothing to do with a company at all? What if it were something more along the lines of research and science? If that were the case, my search area would have more than tripled. I couldn't count how many different groups in the science community there were.
Hmmmm…I thought, bringing my arms up around my head, and leaning back, staring at the briefcase with an accusing look. I want to know what you are… I want to find your secrets. Yet you mock me. Narrowing my eyes at my opponent, I began to think hard.
If I'm very careful, maybe I could take a peek inside, and figure out what it is that way… as long as I don't trigger anything.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, something tickled at me, telling me to quit while I was ahead. Someone threw it away for a reason, right? Somewhere, some part of my common sense also told me that the human world seemed to be more wasteful than anything. It could have been misplaced, and ended up in the dump without the owner even realizing it was gone.
Which would, argued my other half of my brain, be dangerous to us. What if the owner wanted it back, and they came looking for it?? If they found us here…
My other side argued back, What are the chances that they'd be able to find this place? Practically nil, with all the security I've set up.
Would you stake your family's lives on that claim?
I stood, thinking that if I could just quit arguing with myself, I'd get more accomplished.
"More is lost," I muttered aloud, "by indecision than a wrong decision."
To that end, I walked up to my table, and loomed over my victim.
It's time to party.
