Why had it taken Donnie so long to realize just how awesome The Little Mermaid was?

"Damn, Ariel is hot," he drawled, his tongue feeling foreign and entirely too big in his dry mouth.

"Pssh. Of course you'd say that," Mikey remarked, sinking deeper into the couch's already well-established buttgroove. "You just think she's hot 'cause she looks like April."

"She doesn't look anything like April, dumbass! Since when does April have a fish tail!?" Donnie crossed his arms confidently across his plastron, pleased with this irrefutable bit of logic. "And anyway, Ariel is like, semi-naked. C'mon, look at those tits!"

"What tits? She's flat as a board!"

"No, she's not! She's at least a B-cup. Or should I say sea cup!? Get it, 'cause she's wearing a seashell top!?" Donnie collapsed to the couch amid a fit of giggles, for not the first time that night.

Mikey however, remained incredulous. The topic of boobs was a serious one, and he was ready to go to bat for his favorite subject. "If it's tits you want," he responded gravely, "Ursula is where it's at. She is stacked."

"Eww Mikey, are you serious!?"

"Oh what, too good for calimari?" he contested, flicking his tongue lasciviously at his horrified sibling. "Anyways, I've seen enough hentai to know how much fun you can have with tentacles."

"You're gross, dude," Donnie said, positively aghast. "You're gross."

"You know what's gross?" Mikey asked, cocking his head in the direction of the t.v. "This scene right here. Watch, the priest is gonna pop a boner right when Eric and Vanessa get married. Look!"

"Mikey, that's not a boner," Donny proclaimed, carefully watching the scene in question through squinted eyes. "It's just his knee."

"That's just what Disney wants you to think," Mikey pressed on resolutely. "Uncle Walt is a dirty old man, puttin' subliminal sexual images everywhere in his movies. There's a topless chick in The Rescuers, you see Jessica Rabbit's puss in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, and don't even get me started on how many dicks have been secretly inserted into scenes...Heh heh, dicks. Inserted."

"I think it's just your latent homosexuality seeing dicks where there aren't any," Donnie said with a giggle.

"Oh yeah? I'm looking at a dick right now," Mikey retorted, staring obnoxiously at his brother through red-rimmed eyes from the other end of the sofa.

Donnie clutched his sides and flopped back against the cushion, overcome with laughter. He couldn't help but note, as he flicked tears from his swollen, reddened eyes, how Mikey seemed far less insufferable than usual this night. He was, he had to admit, downright enjoyable to be around. In fact, Donnie was taking great pleasure in just about everything tonight. Watching a Disney film, dining on leftovers of dubious freshness, spending time with arguably the most annoying of his brothers...the mere suggestion of any one of these activities would've sent him scrambling to his lab, hastily slamming the door behind him and refusing to emerge till morning. Tonight was different, somehow.

Tonight, everything was just...awesome.

"Hey Mikey," he said in a ponderous tone when his laughter fit finally subsided. "D'you ever think about like, other lifeforms or alternate realities and stuff?"

"You mean like, aliens or whatever?" Mikey asked. "Don't we already know the answer to that question?"

"Well no, I mean like, ya know how we're sitting here on the couch watching this movie? Maybe there's someone out there sitting on their couch, watching us, and we don't even know it?" He pointed to the screen for emphasis. "Maybe somewhere out there in a whole other dimension, there's a mermaid named Ariel going about her business trying to reconcile her love of the human world with her life as a sea creature, and we're watching it happen. We think we're just passing the time watching some innocuous kid's movie, but in some other reality, theses events are really happening. Someone is really trading their voice for legs, someone is really being turned into a clump of seaweed with a face, someone is really being hypnotized to marry a hideous seawitch..."

"Hey!" Mikey interjected. "Don't talk that way about your future sister-in-law!"

"Yeah yeah yeah, whatever. What I'm trying to say is, all these things could be happening in a world we can't ever access, and to us it's just a fun diversion. And maybe we, in turn, are being watched by someone else and our exploits are deemed mere entertainment...you get what I'm saying?"

Mikey simply stared back at him, eyes glazed over and mouth agape. Fearing he may have finally broken the poor boy's brain with his unsolicited philosophizing, he gave him an experimental poke in the forehead.

"Uh, Mikey?" he asked. "You okay?"

"Yeah, I was just thinking," he said perkily. "Like, if we are being watched, what if whoever is watching us is making up these weird fan theories the way we do when we watch t.v? Like someone is watching us and they're all like, 'hey, I bet those turtle boys are all gay for eachother' or 'I bet Splinter wears lingerie under his robes' or whatever."

"Yeah, exactly!" Donnie exclaimed, shaking his head emphatically.

"Dude," Mikey continued. "What if we're being watched right now? What if we can talk to our viewers? What would we even say?"

It was a good question. What would he say to the seemingly omnipotent force watching his and his family's every move, presumably taking great pleasure in their strange exploits? Impart some bit of esoteric wisdom perhaps, or maybe start a dialogue on the nature of good vs. evil or free will vs. predestination? Or simply ask that they kindly divert their eyes while he was showering...?

"Are you not entertained!?" he eventually answered in the finest Russell Crowe he could muster, both middle fingers raised skyward.

"Is this not what you came for!?" Mikey responded in kind, before both brothers degenerated into yet another fit of hysterical laughter.

They lay there for a while afterwards, giggling like idiots and continuing to watch the movie in relative silence. As he watched the various seafolk caper about however, Donnie realized just how hungry he had grown.

"Hey, we got any more of those brownies?" he inquired.

Mikey begrudgingly pulled himself up from his supine position and reached for the container on the coffee table. He seemed to struggle a bit with the lid, before finally giving up and tossing it onto his brother's lap.

"Open it yourself," he said, slumping back into the couch. "I seem to have contracted a critical case of stupid fingers."

As he made to liberate the mouth-watering confections from their enclosure, Donnie noticed a torn piece of lined notebook paper taped to the lid. Upon it was the horribly misspelled and barely legible scrawl unique to Casey Jones.

hey bro, it began. u know how splinter is always telling u to eat ur greens? I figured u would like them in a tastier form haha. Sincerly, ur freind Chef Casey. P.S. enjoy ur trip!

Oh fuck.

And like a beam of light penetrating a dense fog, lucidity stubbornly wormed it's way into Donnie's (albeit unintentionally) drug-addled brain. It was so like Michelangelo to blatantly ignore any words of reproach, written or otherwise, and do exactly as he pleased heedless of the consequences. He knew too, that he was going to catch Hell right alongside Mikey when Raph found out they both partook of his stash.

"Mikey. You got these from Raph's room, didn't you?"

"Ummmm...that's a distinct possibility."

"Mikey," Donnie said, rubbing his temples. "When you offered me a brownie earlier and I asked you where they came from, you specifically said, 'the store.'"

"I consider Raph's room a store. A store for free stuff." He chuckled then, clearly tickled by his own joke. "Or maybe I should call it a bakery now? Heh."

Images of an enraged Raphael, pounding them both into the ground like a pair of tent pegs, rose to the forefront. This was not going to end well, and there was only one thing left to do. He began to shovel the remaining few pot-infused treats into his mouth like he was starving, globs of chocolately goodness smearing his face.

"What the hell are you doing, dude?" Mikey asked.

"Contingency plan, Mikey," he answered, spraying crumbs as he spoke. "I want to be high as a kite when Raph breaks every bone in my body."

"Wow dude, you're so smart! Let me have some!" He dove for the container, which was pulled stealthily out of reach by Donnie.

"Why don't you go back to the 'bakery' and see if they have any more?" he replied.