So yeah, we do a lot of dimension travelling. Don't know if you noticed that.

Not, like, a lot, but we've done it. We've been there. Gone where no man has gone and not brought the t-shirt because human beings don't get involved with other dimensions and this might be because most dimensions outside of ours (universe 8491

apparently) don't have gift shops. Sometimes not even t-shirts.

Hey, if it's on a shirt, people will believe it.

But anyway, yeah, dimension travelling. Hopping. Whatever. Crisis on infinite Earths. Sometimes Mars. Yeah, there's more than one.

I'm going somewhere with this, trust me.

Sometimes it's Saturday morning stuff, like you get in the comics. Y'know, bad guys from our world find a way to team up with bad guys from another world, we run into the good guys and it's all very…pedestrian.

Sometimes it's Douglas Adams, and we're stuck in waking fever dreams and turned into penguins while Southend melts down all around us.

Sometimes I don't wanna know who the hell thought some of this stuff up. Most of the gods I've met? They've tried to kill me. I'm not an atheist but I'm not gonna call it Intelligent Design.

And sometimes…

…

Sometimes it's the holocaust.

It started by accident, some plot by Savanti Romeo, or Bebop and Rocksteady or I don't freaking know…but yeah, some people out there on the other side of the space time continuum have it pretty rough. We fought something or other and got booted into Universe AetaDamma:05.

There, New York doesn't exist anymore. Most of North America doesn't. What's left of the human race is huddled together in this new mini-Pangaea cobbled outta Canada and the Netherlands and held together by tectonic duck tape. Something totally poisonous and ugly called the Arachknights took over just six years ago, for want of a better word. Most guys take over a plant, you figure they'd leave something to take over, right?

Anyway, we team up with the survivors, who're naturally kinda suspicious about a bunch of ninjas that look like something outta some kids DeviantArt page falling out of a hole in the sky, and put together a plan to take them out after something out of every Terminator/Aliens movie you ever saw. And that was just to get to the front door. I'd have figured we'd be going underground. Instead we ride these giant combat platforms on simulate volcanic updrafts up into this Hellicarrier rip-off hidden in an artificial cloud bank.

Dunno when we landed exactly, but there was about thirty of the five hundred people left huddled up there. Looking around, most of the humans were celebrities. Couple of voice actors you'd only know if you were a geek (not a Don geek but…bleh), Bruce Campbell with an actual cyborg arm, Alan Alda, Peter Sellers, James Earl Jones…but we only really knew when we got to the war room. The actual leadership. You ready? Get this.

Churchill. Stalin. Truman. And the resistant leader?

Adolf.

Freaking.

Hitler.

The African American Adolf freaking Hitler.

Seems the Arachknights here built the planet to exact specifications, right down to the evolutionary scale, before heading off for a few millennia. By the time they get back, something's gone wrong. Horrifically, horribly, stupidly wrong. Something that was never meant to happen went ahead and happened anyway. The life forms evolving out of their custom made oceans mutated in the wrong direction.

Humanity.

So naturally the Arachknights are a little peeved about this, little mutant monkey things running around all over the world, and it's instant War of the Worlds. God, I remember when the first promo stuff for Beast Wars came out and everyone went ape shit over how their favourite Trukk was now a Munky-

(Optimus Primal. Ape shit. I made a funny)

-and it's terrifying to think if you handed over the resources these guys have to any pop culture fan you'd get roughly the same result every time Kevin Conroy didn't get cast as Batman.

We took the whole black Hitler fighting for human rights thing in stride. Like a two week old baby punching you in the face. With a brick. Eventually we came up with this cure thing that would stop a virus the Arachknights came up with, had Don cook up an interdimensional portal out of an old Dodge Corvette to ship them off to this uninhabited counter Earth and get us home, and fought our way through the final fight scene of Lord of the Rings as done by Steve Ditko.

Happy happy joy joy, yeah?

Kinda. But for a few seconds back when Leo and Raph were talking it over with Joe and Harry…

For a few frantic, undeniable and selfish seconds I could never take back I thought:

Good.

Now you know how it feels.